Firstbird promises to find more suitable candidates for job offerings than any other method. How does this work?
Think about what makes you happy at work. If you work with people that are on the same wavelength, if you work with a great team, chances are high that you’re happy with your job. And this is necessary to deliver great results. But unfortunately, you don’t have control over who you work with because hiring decisions are made by someone outside of your team. Firstbird changes this equation. We give team members a voice in the hiring process. There still is and always will be some sort of control and skills-based selection; no company wants to hire people whose sole merit is to be somebody’s cousin. But with Firstbird, we really also make human qualities count, not just CVs. And you can reach people that are not actively looking for a job, this is something a job advertisement can’t do.

Can you be more specific as to how this works?
Our software enables every employee to become a talent scout and recommend their employer to acquaintances. Firstbird’s approach forces employers to treat their employees well, otherwise, they won’t get recommended. With a positive work climate, our system is an amplifier. People activate their network to find those who fit well with the company values. This frees companies from the costly embrace of personnel consultants.

“With a positive work climate, our system is an amplifier.”

Do you have numbers that underpin if this works?
At one of our clients, a large consultancy, one in two employees has registered with Firstbird. In the first two weeks alone, the internal talent scouts shared job ads more than 2000 times on social media, resulting in 40 referrals. Now the consultancy hires one in three new employees through Firstbird.

How can employers retain some control over this scouting process?
They can, and most do, exclude relatives from the referral process. Other rules are possible. And they have complete control over the bonus scheme to incentivize people. To foster diversity, they could, for example, double the premium for female referrals.

Who are the people that usually get suggested to the employer?
Interestingly enough they usually aren’t close friends of the referrer. It is mostly professional contacts like former work colleagues or former fellow students.

Is money the main reason why employees participate?
No, it isn’t. Coming back to what I said in the beginning, it is in everybody’s own interest to have a say in who might join their team. Still, many firms establish reward systems and give out points for referrals that can be exchanged in a digital shop for various prizes. The rewards can range from a mousepad to a few days off. The most important point is not the monetary value, it is about getting some form of appreciation. Some prizes which aren’t even costly have a disproportionately large emotional effect. Take, for instance, the example of one company which has reserved its best parking spot for the “Talent Scout of the Month”. This prize is highly sought after because parking space is limited, and this reward confers instant and recognizable status to whoever gets it. The perceived value has nothing to do with the cost.

Let’s talk about Firstbird as a company and your progress since your last funding round in 2017. What is your goal with Firstbird?
Recruiting has already become a competitive factor for companies. And the pressure to hire the best talent is bound to increase. Globally, organizations spent almost USD 40 billion on external recruiting agencies to fill more than 40 million open positions in 2018. This is an enormous market. Our vision is to make social recruiting the most important recruitment channel for companies. We want to render job ads and headhunters obsolete.

Who are Firstbird’s clients?
When we started the company we were targeting small and medium-sized companies with our offering. We realized that the enterprise market, companies with more than 1000 employees, is much more profitable. Since 2017 we’re focusing on this market segment, and this has worked out well. Firstbird now counts Blue-chip companies such as McDonald’s, ABB or Deutsche Telekom among our clients. We focus our sales efforts on Europe for the moment, but we’re already serving clients on five continents and provide our Software in 15 languages from Chinese to Dutch.

How can you serve clients on 5 continents with just 40 people in a single office in Vienna?
This is the beauty of our digital business model (laughs). Our competitors need to drive around in their car and visit prospects to sell them something. We don’t need that. We were able to establish an advantage over our competitors in the business market with a softer sales approach. It must be the Wiener Schmäh, our characteristic Viennese humor! Honestly, I believe in an amicable working relationship with our clients it makes work so much more pleasant. This entails strong support if they need it, helping them with our know-how, but also being completely honest about what we can’t do for them. In this regard, our telesales team is very lean, yes, but also very effective.

How did you find customers on other continents?
Many customers find us because of our content marketing. We write blog posts about the disadvantages of headhunters and the alternatives to them, for example. But the usual way how we spread out to other continents is that we have established relations with a European company and later, subsidiaries in other countries begin to use our services as well.

From a country perspective, which ones are the most attractive targets for Firstbird?
A country needs to have many large companies and a low unemployment rate to be very attractive to us. Germany is an obvious example and our biggest market. The Nordic countries score high as well, whereas in the UK there is quite some uncertainty because of Brexit. One surprisingly attractive geography is Central and Eastern Europe. There are many shared service centers in the Czech Republic and Hungary, and in some regions, the unemployment rate is as low as 1%.

And your business model is direct sales, right?
This is true for enterprise clients, our largest and fastest-growing customer segment, and SME, which come second. But we also work with agencies which act as resellers for our software. These are mostly experienced HR consultants who want to escape their narrow consulting focus and want to offer their clients additional products. We just signed two new partnerships with resellers in in the Netherlands and the UK.

Let’s talk about your most important segment, the enterprise clients. They come from very different industries. Do they have something in common?
A prerequisite for using Firstbird successfully is to have a good corporate culture. After all, you want the employees to recommend your work environment. When our system is well established, it really gathers momentum. We were able to substantially grow the value of our existing customer base. We help these firms to become independent from expensive and ineffective traditional recruiting channels.

Investors care about growth rates. What can you tell about yours?
We doubled our sales every year in the past few years. Our goal is not just to keep this rate but to increase it. Because now that we have established Firstbird in the European enterprise market with 200 large corporate accounts, we’re ready to roll out our offering globally for them. There are 16’000 potential enterprise clients in the DACH region alone, so we still have room to grow. Our growth, this is clear, means that we’re constantly gaining market share to the detriment of personnel consulting companies.