From grill cleaning to college recruiting: Brooks Gammill

Transcription

Matt: He followed me on LinkedIn, and then I cold emailed him. He replied within 45 minutes and made a deal within five weeks. Over a million impressions just from a singular post. There's also a shift in terms of how the younger generation is using LinkedIn. We have almost a thousand incoming investment banking analysts currently on our platform. It might not be a great market, but for the top 1%, it'll always be a great market in any industry. So kind of a classic, hey, I feel like I don't have time, but it's like, that's always just like the founder's worst excuse ever. And you know why we're on the podcast today? I think it's an incredible idea. And it's all about evoking emotion. That's it at the end of the day. Welcome to Connection Accepted. Today, I'm super excited. We have a great guest on. We've got Brooks from Recruit U. Daniel: Brooks, thanks for joining us. Matt: Yeah, no, it's great to be here. I'm ready to get going. Daniel: Love it. All right, so for the audience's benefit, for those who don't know who you are, what you're working on, can you just give a quick background on where you're from, who you are, and what you're working on? Matt: Awesome. Yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of Recruit U. From Connecticut, went to school in Connecticut, Trinity College. I've been working on Recruit U coming up on four years, kind of since we really got started, but two years essentially out of school full time. Recruit U is an early career marketplace helping students navigate the high finance and consulting recruiting process. And where we are very different than other recruiting platforms out there is we are building this concept of like a club network across the country where students can discover clubs on campus and vice versa. Companies can discover those clubs for recruiting. Daniel: That's awesome. And, you know, investment banking, consulting, recruiting, that's something that gets very... I was at TCG. Daniel's currently also a consultant as well. So we are very, very much, we resonate with the mission that you guys have. How did you and your co-founder, Wes, even come up with the idea and then eventually start working together? Matt: Yeah, great question. So, and when I say four years, that's when Wes and I really teamed up on this. He had the original idea actually in his summer internship when he was at Macquarie. And roughly six to seven months later, he really wanted to kind of get this business off the ground, had kind of the idea of it. And at the time I was actually running and still own, but don't operate a grill cleaning marketplace. So a lot of my friends were like, ah, what are you doing? Like cleaning grills. And it's become an extremely successful business. But so I knew a thing or two about getting a business off the ground. And so he was actually mentoring me through my recruitment process, kind of doing the mock interviews, et cetera. I was like, Hey, got this idea to make this process easier. And I was, you know, I was feeling the pain and I was like, I'm in. Daniel: And so essentially moved every dollar from that grill cleaning bank account into the Recruit U account. And the whole concept really was if you could put each part of the recruitment process onto one singular platform, so finding networking contacts, organizing networking contacts, finding jobs, finding companies, practicing technicals, you'd get a lot of students who'd want to use that product, but in doing so they're uploading the resume, their location preferences, et cetera. And so we knew that generating a network of people who are going into banking would have some type of business model on the backside. But originally it was literally just like, Hey, let's make this easier for people. And something's going to come out of it. Matt: Have you always been sort of entrepreneurial because obviously you mentioned the grill cleaning business and I know that you also interned in investment banking, correct? And decided, Hey, instead of going back, I'm going to try to build my own business instead. Daniel: Yeah. So I actually never made it to the internship. Actually a month before we had raised a little bit of capital and so I bowed out of the internship. So I went through the process fully knowing that like, Hey, I want to go into investment banking. I was in, landed in the tech group at Wells Fargo, but ultimately before even going to the internship, my grill cleaning that that summer I was doing grill cleaning company was doing really well. And I was like, well, this is going to be, you know, a part-time job. I'm having to manage that. And then that's when really kind of RecruitU, we wanted to, you know, start really taking off with that. And so it just didn't really make sense to have three full-time jobs in the summer. Um, and so I was like, all right, I got it. I got to take down or not do one of these. So that's why I decided, uh, to not do the internship, but always have been very, you know, entrepreneurial starting when I was like 12 or 13, I was running like backyard sports camps. I was a big kind of athlete growing up. So that turned into making money to then start the grill cleaning company. The grill cleaning company then made me some money to then do a recruit you. So I'm more of a person who kind of like parlay is the last business into the next one. Matt: I love it. You were an athlete student. Daniel: Yes. Yep, exactly. Matt: For a lot of freshmen starting in college right now, recruiting is so intimidating. Can you run us through an example of a freshman in college and how RecruitU helps them throughout the process to when they land that job? Daniel: Yeah, great question. So I think there's two parts of this. You can be on RecruitU as just a like individual user. You sign up with your EDU email or you're a part of a club on the platform. So I'll speak from kind of a user perspective. So what you can do on RecruitU is you can go on and search, uh, say we're talking about a student at Michigan. They could go on, they could search in our network section. Matt: That's really comprehensive, Daniel. It's fascinating how you've streamlined what used to be such a fragmented process. I mean, when I was going through it, it was exactly as you said, just scrambling to keep track of all these different threads. So, with RecruitU, you're kind of wrapping it all into one neat package, right? That's pretty incredible. And the idea of those AI mock interviews—wow. It's like you're preparing these students on every front, so when they actually step into those real interviews, they're not going in blind. Daniel: Exactly, Matt. That's the goal. To make sure that anyone using the platform has those tools and feels a bit more prepared and confident going into those interviews or networking events. Honestly, it feels like the right step, especially in such competitive industries. It was important for us to cover everything they might need, from networking to job applications, and even interview preparation. So, hopefully, it gives them that competitive edge. Matt: And the whole concept is we view like the kind of traditional investment banking and management consulting, like the MBBs, like they're very linear pathways. And so it's like you can really understand each step and so you can build software around each step. Whereas a lot of other careers sometimes bounce off of that. Like if I didn't get my investment banking offer, I was going to do consulting. And if I didn't do consulting, like you're going down a lot of different routes. And so we view it as people gun after these two industries, but then it's not like they fall off. Maybe they're not interested. Maybe they aren't able to land the roles, but there's tons and tons of roles out there. Wealth managements, like equity. We take a bottom-up and top-down approach. So how we started off is we essentially looked at the club TAM across the country. We built essentially kind of half-baked profiles. Think of how the PitchBook model or the Crunchbase model is, they'll build some part of a profile, but then they go to you to validate it. And why would I want to validate it? It's because investors are looking at my profile. I want my profile to be full. And so that is essentially what we did is, we allow people, you come onto the platform, you put your EDU, so it's EDU-only to get onto the platform, and then once you put in your EDU, we show all the organizations at your school that you can self-select that you're a part of. Once we say we have 5 to 10 members in a club, we will then reach out to a couple of them and say, hey, who's your executive or president? Because we want to verify the members and also invite more members onto the platform. And so really what it is, it's essentially like a page where members can view other members, and then club executives and presidents can also upload all of their alumni from that organization, because why do people join organizations on campus? It's to learn, but it's also to really like get into a tighter-knit network on campus. And so we're building a lot of really cool products around the club aspect where club presidents can download, auto-download resume booklets. They can upload alumni lists so that all of their members can search their alumni essentially just within their club. And so there's a lot of cool features and tools that we're building into it. And what we're releasing, likely in kind of the beginning of January, is this concept of like a club marketplace where you can view other clubs on campus, but soon view other like organizations across the country. So say you're an investment banking club at a particular school, you run it a certain way. You have an application process. You have a training process, et cetera. And then you have 10 years of alumni data. So you're essentially showing off, hey, this is what my club does. But it would also be pretty cool to understand the data of how other clubs operate or how they have placed. Daniel: And so that's like the network that we are trying to build is around essentially clubs. It's what we view as like LinkedIn groups didn't necessarily like master, but everyone loves seeing people correlated with like outcomes or data. That's like kind of the prestige of being like, oh yeah, like we've placed here or our members have X GPA or this major distribution or are coming from these spots. So it's essentially just a data aggregation page. Matt: That's so interesting. What has been like the biggest challenge on the club user side of getting people actually on the platform? I imagine now you've picked up some steam, so it's easier to get more and more. But in the early days, right, when you're building this kind of a marketplace type business, it was probably a little bit more difficult to get people on. What was like the hardest thing about that? Daniel: Well, the hardest thing was when you go after these top schools and top clubs, they have relationships with a lot of these companies. And we were essentially pitching them and we had no enterprise companies on the other side at that point. And so it was really, you know, pitching the vision and just pitching, hey, this is what we are becoming. And also from an individual user perspective, why would you not want a curated job board and networking contacts? So even if the club didn't think there was utility for them to be on the network, it'd be a shame on them if they didn't pass this along to their members as a tool to use. Matt: So last, roughly a year ago, we had like one to two enterprise clients and like 7,000 to 8,000 students on the platform. Fast forward to today, we're sitting at like 16 enterprise clients, like coming in on 50,000 students on the platform. And so how we're really this recruitment cycle has become so different and kind of going back to what was so hard is when we did have enterprise clients, it's very hard to pitch the clubs being like, this is what we can provide you. But now we have enterprise clients like, you know, Solomon Partners, Point72, Carlyle, Warburg Pincus, Summit Partners. Like we have a lot of really unique firms across investment banking, private equity and consulting. And so even if that club has relationships with 12 of our partners, they might not have it with four. And so it really is like, we now have the ability to offer, hey, corporate relationships, but also offer like a really robust software that people would want to use even if there was no other platform around it. Like, why would you not want to have a really cool club page that you can just like show off to prospective members or even your sponsors. So we took a very calculated strategy of going after top logos in these industries, because if we got the top logos, you can then really solidify the relationships with all the top clubs at the top schools. And if you get that, it's way easier to go kind of down and across market. Daniel: It's kind of the classic, why do you start in sales? Like starting in like selling to small businesses and going up market into selling like massive enterprises. It's like, you usually need to hire out a sales team to like be like, all right, we're going to enter enterprise now. We were like, let's just start in enterprise. And then if we do that, there's a lot of like positives that come to it. Matt: Man, that's so cool. And I love the vision that you guys had of like, let's just go after the enterprise guys. And something that I think the audience would probably really benefit from that I'm also personally very curious about is how you approach those, like the B2B conversations, right? Because it's not easy to get in touch with, say, the COO of a large investment bank or a private equity firm. How do you approach that process? And then once you're in the room, how do you navigate those conversations or however many steps it takes to actually get them on board? Daniel: Yeah. So we took a very calculated approach when we were fundraising. So instead of going the traditional venture capital route where, you know, you're lining up with a firm or two and they have strategic connections, we knew if you were to break into like finance or consulting, you had to either go top down or like you had to really get into these organizations. And so a lot of our capital that we raised was from, you know, senior managing partners or CEOs or board members at a lot of these firms to have the ability to at least get a warm introduction. But it's kind of like going through the recruitment process. You can get a warm introduction, but you've got to be good enough to get the job. So it's like, even if we get in the room, we need to have a product that they view as differentiated and valuable. And so that is a lot of kind of in the inroads. But also, we've just had cold outbounds. One of, and this is kind of relates to this conversation. One of our top clients, a boutique investment bank out of California. I was posting a lot of content on LinkedIn, essentially like curated jobs and just looking like a thought leader. And so he followed me on LinkedIn. And then I cold emailed him. He replied within 45 minutes and we had a deal done in five weeks. And that was like our, you know, fifth or sixth client. And so it's like, while we do have like relationships, like we are building something, you know, very differentiated where we've had cold outbound that just hits because we have a discovery call. We really try to understand like, is there a pain point and do they believe that proactive recruiting and especially going through clubs on campus, it's emerging over the past like four to five years. Previously, it was a lot of like, Hey, career centers, but career centers are, you know, now viewed as they're great, but it's a slow way to move and to get students. You're going directly to clubs and students is like kind of that fast way to really get in front of highly curated talent. Daniel: And so where we position ourselves is like in the introductory call, do they believe in club recruiting as a strategy? Yes or no. If it's yes, we then go into all of kind of the anecdotal, like, Oh yeah. When I was talking to this president last week, or we've seen this club really perform well into these banks. Like maybe they like, and so you, you, it's like kind of a consultative sell of being like, we really know this industry. Like we are extremely deep here. We've spent years understanding like how all these different clubs operate. And so it's then sometimes it's still viewed as a bit kind of futuristic because when you're hiring for early career, it's often viewed as just like a catcher's mitt. There's just so much volume and you just sift through the volume on the backside. What we're trying to say is, why don't you be proactive and essentially go after these students because that top echelon of talent, that's what everyone's fighting for. It's kind of the classic, like what people are doing in software engineers right now. Like it's like, Oh, like might not be a great market, but for the top 1%, it'll always be a great market in any industry. And so that is really what we're trying to pitch of being like, there is incredibly top talent out there and you're going to have to win that top talent. And we're going to give you the tools and strategies to do that. And you know, if you, if you don't believe that's the way of the world, that's fine. We just have, we view the world differently. So that's kind of how we, you know, diagnose the problem. Matt: On the campus to then intro to clubs. And so there was a lot of like west early on made, you know, some really good relationships across 10 schools, two clubs at each school, and that was kind of the initial user base. That was one strategy. The other strategy that really got us a ton of users, not through the club perspective, was I had a LinkedIn post, which was essentially a curated list of job opportunities for investment banking. And I was like, comment on your email if you want access to it and I'll send it to you. So very kind of a value driven approach of like, Hey, like we're spending all this time. Like, all you need to do is just give me your information so I can email it to you. And posted this on LinkedIn. And the first like two weeks we got like no traction. And then I was, I clearly remember it. I was, I mean, this must have been two and a half, almost three years ago. Like I looked at my phone and there was like 10 comments in like 15 minute span. And then the next thing you know, there's just like tons of tons of comments. And I think I was out with some people and I was like, I got to go. And I hopped on the train to go home so I could email everyone the sheet that we had built. And it got like 500 comments over like a week. Matt: And that essentially gave us enough traction to get to our first thousand users through clubs and just individual users, which then allows us to, to raise our first little bit of money. So we were like, we had no idea how to like, it literally was LinkedIn and clubs at, at, at the start. So it's a, and that's kind of been a bit of the abstracted strategy since. How is that? So, okay. So you have this viral LinkedIn post. How are you thinking about LinkedIn after that? You're like, I've got to keep doing this every week or what's your strategy? Daniel: I'd say, and I have not been, you know, that consistent at all. It's kind of the classic, Hey, I feel like I don't have time, but it's like, that's always just like the founder's worst excuse ever. And you know why we're on the podcast today, how important it is. The LinkedIn strategy that I've done and I think will continue to really aggressively grow into is viewed as like a value added player, like in this niche market. So a lot of like my content has been like, who wants, you know, interview prep questions, who wants the early insight programs, the access to these consulting opportunities or investment banking. Like what I view I'm doing is I'm curating noise in one industry targeted towards more or less students. But when you're targeting students, you're viewed as like a thought leader also for companies to be like, he has a really good grasp of what this market wants in terms of like content or just information. Matt: And so like a recent deal actually that we're in later stages with, I got on with like an end user, kind of a technical user who would use the product. I'd already talked to kind of the economic buyer who'd like put the budget in and buy the product. And when I hopped on the conversation with her, he was like, Oh yeah, um, X name sent me your LinkedIn post the other day. It's great that you're, you know, doing stuff like this. And so it's just like a validation metric of being like, this person actually knows the industry and they're also trying to sell software on top of it from the enterprise perspective. But I think there's a lot of, you know, creative ways that this can go in terms of like visualizing the data on our platform, where are, you know, where are student athletes landing or where are target versus non-target schools like landing? Because there's no real data aggregation on other platforms that Handshake's massive, but like they're not gonna necessarily be like, All right, we're going to really focus on this like one niche and we're gonna understand like product first coverage group placements across like X, Y, that's not gonna happen. Daniel: So that's where we're, you know, want to be in the, our, our zone of genius is, is there. Matt: You hit on such a great point, which is the idea that every company probably has some sort of unique perspective on their customer base. Right. In your case, it's obviously students. Matt: And the level of granularity that you guys have is something that not many businesses have insight into. And people are naturally going to be super curious. And so like, you know, we were talking before we hit record about how, you know, you'll go into these conversations with like a head of HR or a COO and they'll be genuinely curious about, Hey, like what are you hearing in these conversations? And we've been seeing it with folks at other startups. Arasyan from Ramp, the chief economist creates some of the most fascinating analyses out there just using their spend data. And then, you know, Peter Walker from Carta as well doing the same thing with startup fundraising and things like that. Yeah. It's a, I think it's a definitely emerging field. I mean, more or less everything is storytelling at the, at the end of the day. If you're really good at telling a story, like you're going to captivate an audience. But if, like I was saying, if you can ground that story in like differentiated data that the market doesn't have. So it's like, well, this is the only place I have to go to understand something like this. And I know they're not just like blowing smoke because I'm looking at the charts right now. And so I think that's a, it's a broader thing. Why also a lot of these companies are going to be massive. Like you take Ramp, for example, they're just generating so much proprietary data. And then what is AI? Like to have a great AI product, you just have to have proprietary data. So it's like in, in that sense, it's just all about data and what can you do with the data to benefit like essentially every side of your, of your product or platform. So are you going to start publishing some of this data and doing a similar sort of insights function? Daniel: Yeah. So we just built two reports. One is a private equity report where essentially we took incoming investment banking analysts on our platform. Obviously we understood, you know, the groups they were in, the schools, et cetera. But we also sent out a survey to roughly, you know, 200 of them. We had 75 responses in terms of like, hey, this is what we're like. This is how people evaluate on-cycle or off-cycle recruiting. And then we built this really nice, you know, 10-page report. And it's been our, like essentially our lead gen for B2B. And so now what we want to do is break up a lot of that information and start kind of putting it into this, you know, narrative arc, um, story arc that we can put out, you know, on LinkedIn. Same thing with investment banking. We had the class of 2027 investment banking, uh, report that, that we had developed and the same sort of aspect. And so I'd say it's something we want to like push even deeper on. Daniel: And it's stuff that we're building internal tooling on within our, you know, within our product, just being like, because a lot of times when we pitch companies, it's like, Hey, can you pull X, Y, and Z report in terms of like what percentage of, you know, math or computer science? Because people are trending that way as well in terms of the type of candidate that they're wanting. Matt: So I think that's gonna be a big kind of strategy of ours is really trying to tell a story around this to both sides, students and employers, because students also need to be informed in terms of like, what should I be doing to land this job? I think that's so genius because you have this huge report and it's almost like clipping with podcasts nowadays. You take this report and you make it into 10 bite-sized LinkedIn posts, punchy little things. And then you use that to get your students. It's, I really think it's just like clipping it. It's hilarious. Yeah. And it's, it's just the repurposing of content. Make that kind of flywheel. Daniel: What else is, so are you doing anything else on LinkedIn? You got these reports and how are you thinking about it going forward now that you have a bigger user base and are targeting, you know, some more enterprise people too? Matt: Yeah, I think it's trying to keep it in a place where you, you know, you can essentially abstract like your content. Like I was saying before, in terms of like students or companies where it's like, you're essentially producing content that is valuable to both sides of the market. Um, and I think a lot of it for getting students is building, you know, resources or insights into when I talk to a student or when I talk to a club president and they give an anecdote, be able to, you know, amplify that in like, you know, non-target, you know, student from X, Y, and Z school. Like this is how they broke in. Daniel: Um, but then from kind of the company and enterprise perspective, uh, I think a lot more data driven in terms of, oh, like, you know, this is, if you look at a particular school, take like UPenn, for example, or another target school, like they have 20 clubs and here's the breakdown of all the clubs and here's essentially how they operate. Because a lot of times when we get asked from an enterprise perspective, they're like, yeah, there's so many clubs out there. It's like a lot of noise. Like how do I know what's a top club, what's not. Matt: That you saw on your feed where, I'm excited to announce my new position, and everyone's like, congrats, like, no exclamation point, capital C, like I got to be, I got to be polished. But now it's like, you know, I think people are looking for, you know, more content and stuff that is like, you know, makes you perk up a little and be like, wait, do they, do they actually post this? Or like, this is a really good insight or something that captures attention. I mean, we're in a, you know, it's an attention economy. Daniel: Everyone's just like, you know, scrolling TikTok and you get like three seconds to get a good hook in if you don't, you're onto the next video. So that's a lot of what needs to be translated over to LinkedIn as well. Matt and I love talking about this. How the use cases of LinkedIn are expanding. How do you think about LinkedIn versus Instagram? Because, I mean, you had Daniel Lin, who was running your social media for a while, grew it to a hundred thousand followers. Is that still a priority for you? Or are you like, do you think those Instagram videos generate as much business as the LinkedIn? Matt: I guess two separate questions. No. And, and the way we broke it down was we view like Instagram or TikTok or any of these essentially as top of the funnel, just brand awareness. It definitely, you know, when people talk about the brand, they can associate it with that. And then if you take it down a level, we view it as kind of the middle, middle of the funnel. And that's where we view like our high quality users that oftentimes are in clubs on campus. And so that is really where we're focusing on right now because top of the funnel and building your brand, you need to do it, but I think it's, you know, it takes a very unique person to do it extremely right. And I think the way that we are set up currently now as a company, like we're in the stage of let's convert all of these, you know, relate these really high quality relationships. And that's a lot of where, you know, LinkedIn is if people, that would actually fully sign up to our platform because they went on to LinkedIn to create the account as a freshman or a sophomore. Whereas sometimes our content at the top of the funnel might be hitting people who are their mid twenties or outside of the U.S. or interested in other industries. And right now it's like, we're pretty targeted in our audience. And so it's like, let's do something and do something really well. And then as we start expanding industries, that's where it's all right. You, you actually want to move back to the top of the funnel, which is right now deliver also on our clients. Like when our clients post a job or post an event, like they want the right users coming to that. So it's, you know, you don't necessarily need hundreds of thousands. You need the right ones active on the platform and engaging on it instead of just like mass volume. So it's, in an ideal world, you're doing both incredibly well, but in a world where you're, you know, you need to pick or you're resource constrained or I need to get something done really well for the next six months. That's where we view like, you know, us and LinkedIn and clubs and just converting high quality users from, you know, the right schools. Yeah. Daniel: The quality aspect of it, the quality versus quantity is really interesting to me because obviously the product that you guys have and the pitch that you're making to a lot of the enterprise clients is that the quality of candidates that they will find is going to be a lot higher ideally than, you know, if they were just to do traditional channels, right? So I can see why you guys would want to focus, not just on like purely top of funnel, like let's get as many people in, but really like, let's make sure the right people are getting onto the platform and staying there. Matt: Yep. And one of our metrics, how we think about it in terms of kind of KPIs is number of, you know, verified clubs on the platform. And that verified number is starting to evolve, but we believe we've created a relationship with the club president. They've sent an invite to their members. Their members have joined and their president has either uploaded their alumni list or not. And if those actions happen, like think of kind of like, you know, Facebook in the early days, like, all right, what are the exact things that we need to have happen for growth? We view that, like, we'd rather go like insanely deep on that one concept and like essentially pour all products and all thinking into that because you then have the ability to move in a lot of different directions. So that's one of them. Matt: And another one is percentage of the incoming investment banking class that is on our platform. So if say there's, you know, 2000 to 3000 people entering banking every single year, what percentage do we have on the platform? And we want that number to go up every year. And so, you know, and that is how our funnel looks right now. Like in terms of class of 2027 versus class of 2026 versus class of 2025, it's been growing essentially at least 10 to 15% like a year. Like right now we have almost a thousand incoming investment banking analysts currently on our platform right now. And so that's when you then can start talking about post-grad channels. Matt: Hey, you're looking at private equity firms being like, this would be a pretty good place to, you know, get in front of these people now, or if you want this information now, we have it. So it's, you know, some firms don't necessarily care. Like investment banking and private equity, it's very like, all right, you are in here or you are in MBB. And it's like, all right, we don't usually look at kind of firms outside of that. And so, you know, we could have 2 million people on the platform, but if we had 5% of the incoming investment banking analysts class, we can't sell into that entire industry because they don't, you know, they wouldn't necessarily care. It's just the, you know, the reality. Daniel: I think it's so smart you went this club route because if not, your users, I mean, now you're being able to gain more into private equity, but you would essentially have to re-recruit your users every four years as these cycles are changing. Matt: But if you have clubs, you have all the resumes and you're in there forever. Exactly. It's just, you know, it's any individual user could land a job on our platform. We view clubs as a very good proxy that we are entering the market at that school in the right zip code because, you know, again, you could enter in any of these industries, but maybe you're not in part of any single club, but you're probably a friend in one of these clubs or you probably know about these clubs, but you made a decision. Maybe you're an athlete or maybe, Hey, I'm a, you know, engineering student and I just happened to get in finance late and I recruited really well. But it's just a very efficient way to know that you're penetrating a certain university instead of just being like, Oh yeah, we got 2,000 users at this school. It's like, do we know if those are the right users? Like, I guess we could like crawl through their resumes and like, you know, their majors, but it's way easier to know that the top club that places a hundred percent out of Brown is on the platform. So they're probably in other clubs on that campus. It's a really good proxy for us to understand like, you know, the health and like the liquidity of what we have. Daniel: How do you think about the different universities that you want to expand Recruit You out to? Obviously investment banking consulting. There's like the target schools, right? And then maybe there's like the semi targets and then others below that. Yeah. Like as you guys, as you think out into like the next couple of years, how do you guys evaluate, Oh, this is a good university that we should reach out to, or we should, you know, try to find a contact at an on-campus club there because some, I think about like the example of maybe a school that might be considered a non-target or a semi target, like less, not like a Wharton University of Pennsylvania, but maybe there's a club on there that all the students that go in there are killing it. And they still have really high quality candidates. So yeah, I guess the question is how do you think about vetting different schools? Matt: Yep. That's your pitch in the thesis of Recruit You is essentially started on the fact that there's pockets of talent at every school across the country that are deserving of roles like this. So it's, it's like, Oh, did you know about this club at, you know, this particular school, like a hundred percent of placements are going into, into Wall Street because you also don't know why a student took a particular choice. It's like, all right, you know, maybe they were Ivy league quality, but they had to pay their entire way through school. So it made sense to just stay at their, you know, their state school, but they're, they kick ass, but it's just because of the school that they went to that they're just, you know, not traditionally recruited from, or they're not surrounded by the people who know recruiting so that they're late to the game and then they don't even get into it. Daniel: And so we like, we really view, like, I mean, right now we're across 800 schools on the platform, but we, that's what we really want to find is, you know, the schools and certain group on campus beyond just finance consulting. So that explodes our market like massively. But finance consulting, since clubs are like so relevant, and like if you can solve it for them, you could solve it for others. And that's been like kind of our strategy the whole time. Go after the hardest thing to solve. And if you can actually solve it or have some semblance of solving it, downstream is a lot easier to solve the problem rather than going upstream. You're so dialed and I'm so impressed because, I mean, you've got it. Like at brown, a lot of these sports teams are pretty much what you think of like clubs. Like that's how you do your networking. That's how you get your job. Like it just makes it so much easier. And if you had a report that could say, you know, we placed five people at Goldman or whatever the stat is, everyone would want to know that in the football team or in the soccer team, and that gets shared across LinkedIn and across just email everywhere. Yeah. It's people want to understand what other people are doing. It's just human nature. And so how can you then like then ground it in truth in terms of like data? So it's like kind of pairing that. And we took a lot of time trying to figure out like the club aspects. And what really sparked when was when we talked to people on campus, like, I'd like to see like other clubs. Like I'd like to see other what other people are doing. And so that was like, how can you create something that, you know, people would like, even if like they don't necessarily like, all right, we don't need any recruit use corporate clients or we don't need recruit use software for individual like members. It's like, Oh, like everyone else has a page. I want a page. Or it's like, wait, the information on my page is false. I need to correct that because that's also the biggest thing is like you might just throw false information and people are like, wait, no, no, no, that's not true. Matt: I want to shift gears a little bit back to LinkedIn specifically. DMs. So do you, I assume as a founder, you know, do you get a lot of DMs? Are there, yeah, let's just start there actually. Are you getting lots of DMs and from what types of people generally? Daniel: Yeah. So I'd say, um, a majority of the DMs will be, you know, from students either asking for, you know, 15 minutes to chat or like, I'd say really it's a lot around students, some inbound in terms of obviously like, Hey, like, you know, I've come across recruit you hiring perspective, but I'd say it's really, at least how I'm viewed also on LinkedIn. It's very consumer S. So I'd say that's a lot of where my LinkedIn DMs lie. It's just people being like, Hey, can we chat? And oftentimes I'm like, depends how creative they are with it. Matt: Or if, you know, they pair it with an email and they're like, they're very persistent, then that all, but if it's, you know, generic message just being like, Hey, love to learn about your journey. It's like, I need a little more than that. Daniel: Yeah. Any students listening right now, you got to do something a little bit different to stand out because, uh, Brooks is getting a lot of messages and as Daniel and I can also attest from our personal experience, a lot of these professionals working at investment banks, consulting firms are getting lots of emails, messages on a daily basis. Matt: And I feel like with like AI these days, there's even more, like, I'm sure there's lots of people who are now spamming out messages to people on LinkedIn over email and it just becomes like, I was going to say it becomes that much harder, but maybe it also becomes a little bit easier to stand out now if you just have like one thoughtful, very personalized note. What do you think though? Daniel: Yeah. I think this problem, if there's so much AI consumer tooling that starts to come out, um, in terms of like, Hey, we're helping you, you know, automated outreach with X, Y, and Z templates, X, Y, and Z audience. And it's, you know, at an affordable, affordable enough where a decent amount of people can like pay for it. It's, it's a bit scary in the fact that like, then what is being built on the other side to, you know, curate all this or like respond to this. And so I do actually agree with that. Like as volume increases, the ability to be very targeted and precise with your outreach with a certain messaging just becomes a way more important and way more obvious. Matt: So it's like, even if you, you know, say we're hiring for like a growth role, um, we have a ton of, you know, inbound, like, Oh, I'm super interested. And someone's like, sends a very thoughtful email with a one pager on exactly what they would want to do. And you can read it and be like, They are, that's them thinking on the paper. That's not them m-dashing through ChatGPT right now. And so it's like, I totally agree that as, like, all this, you know, I don't know if it's AI slop, but just like AI outbound, the personalization or the people who can hack personalization at scale is going to be very, very effective. Daniel: Yeah, on that point, the reason why I kind of brought up the whole mass outreach thing earlier was recently I was speaking with a student who goes to NYU, big investment banking feeder school, as you know. There's a company called Clay, which you're probably familiar with, but for those listening, if you're not familiar with it, it's a, you know, go-to-market tool. Very good. You can source leads, enrich lists, and then do the outbound. And essentially they, they came to campus, ran a workshop and talked about use cases for students. Daniel: One of those use cases is, Hey, you can find giant lists of professionals, feed it into the tool and then send it out to thousands. Back in the day when I was recruiting, I'm going to make myself sound kind of old fashioned here. But the most advanced thing that we could do is just like an Excel mail merge where you would have an Excel spreadsheet with maybe like 50 emails or however many, and then you would have Gmails or just like automatically send out a template. But now I imagine with the tools that are available, like Clay, someone could do that to a thousand bankers. I don't even know if there's that many active first-year investment banking analysts, but like theoretically, right, you could, you could do that. So again, I think, totally agree with you on that point where standing out, I think is going to take an element of personalization, uh, which is still kind of difficult to do at scale, uh, but also, yeah, doing something that demonstrates a higher level of effort, like the example you gave of, Hey, I've done this before or like, here's an example of like, almost like a lead magnet. Like, let me do some work for you to show you that this is what it would look like if you hired me. Like I would build this list for you or I would create this social media strategy for you. Matt: Yeah. I love a lot when people reach out with like, I would do this and this is what I've done in the past, or this is how I think about approaching it rather than just being like the idea laundry list. It's like, Oh, like I've, you know, any idea that you're saying, I've probably thought about it, but like, I'd like to hear your take on it or like why or how you'd implement it. Instead of just being like, you know, I'm going to help you do X, Y, and Z. It's like, all right, how would you actually do that? Like tactically, like what tools are you using? Like how are you stitching this together? That's where, you know, actually just show it. Don't just say it. Daniel: I totally agree. And I think LinkedIn is a great way to stand out too. Yeah. I want to get more dive on LinkedIn with you and hear some of your thoughts. So do you think the comment, you know, comment for a guide, is that dead or is that still working for you? Matt: It's not dead. Um, I don't, I, I mean, like definitely, like I've gotten, you know, on one of my posts, like over like over a million impressions just from a singular post. Because I mean, how the algorithm works is when you comment on something, it gets put into your network. And so I know a lot of people have been like, Hey, you know, comment guide, um, et cetera, or things like that. But like, I think I've also been viewed a little bit as like, you know, the comment on your email, but in a very like, not giving people like slop or crap. Like it's like a lot of times people just like try to do this at scale and they have like some guy that is just like really not great. Yeah. Daniel: And it's just like, so it's like what we do, we put a lot of work behind like the resources that we make, like a very curated, you know, job tracker is honestly like the biggest one across industries. And so I would say I really want to pair that with what we were kind of talking about before with like, you know, insightful things. Like I think there's a couple of different, you know, types of posts that could be good, you know, obviously, Hey, you know, comment your email for a guide or, Hey, just giving it out for free in general. Um, I mean every time problems you can't foresee. And so that has honestly been a big one. Matt: Really, it's been like, there's no real like, hey, like excuse, like, why aren't we like putting stuff out there? But it's just been like, ah, like, I have a feeling that this is gonna launch. And I think we're way, way closer now. It's like literally within the next week to 10 days. Um, but I think it's been a lot of around that. It's like you essentially have a launch in your mind, and then it keeps getting pushed off, so you push off the content associated with that. That makes sense. And you would find a lot of value. Have you heard of Lenny's podcast? Daniel: Uh, yes. He just had the Canva founder on. And I don't know if you've listened to it, but she went through a period for like a year where that exact thing you're describing. You think you're about there, you're about ready. Matt: I know. And it was like a perfect, like, it's just trying to have the stars align on everything. And that's where, you know, I'd say that's something that I like do a lot to a degree. It's like a perfectionist in a sense of just being like, you know, all of this is towards, you know, this new product, or this is why we're doing something. Because, you know, the product right now, we have works incredible. But I see the next product and I'm like, like, I wanna get this out there so that we can feed people to it. But yeah, I'd say it's just, you know, probably overanalyzing to a degree and being like, it doesn't really matter, like, if people are on that product and you launch the new product, you just let them know that they're gonna use the new product. So. Daniel: Yeah, I think it's such a classic founder mindset. Like the very tendencies that probably led you to build this company and to the level of success that you've had so far, the very same ones that sometimes you kind of need to get over when it comes to, you know, with, with content, Jen and I talk about this all the time. It's like mental warfare in a way, because you're the perfectionism that pushes you to have high standards is also sometimes in a way, like the, like a mental enemy to shipping faster. And whether it's a product or a piece of content, right? Matt: With content, you know, you probably can ship faster more frequently than like a product launch that takes time to get it right. But I find there are so many parallels with content creation and building a business. Daniel: Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I think both of you or one of you wrote a post about it, like kind of like the mental warfare, um, aspect. And I was like, that is so spot on because even as, like, you know, as we have this conversation, I could be brimming with ideas. I do have time, you know, in my day or on the weekend, but it's just like, all right, well, it's like, You're just battling a lot of fronts. But, you know, if we take it back in the conversation, what was one of the early things that led to initial growth was, you know, that initial LinkedIn post and how we think about, you know, strategy in general. So it's a, you know, that's a good, uh, that's a good soft jab. I like it. Well, we definitely hope to see you more. And I bet by the time this is aired, hopefully the new product will be out and all the audience will be able to see it and use it and see how good it is. Matt: Yeah, I hope as well too. So now, Brooks, we're going to transition into a section we call good idea, bad idea. I'm going to throw an idea at you and you're gonna rate it and give some commentary about it and how you think. And I just have one that I'm actually so happy I can pitch you. I actually pitched this one to Matt in the car when we were gonna interview Eric Wei. And I bought the domain for it. It's guessmyfirm.com. Okay. And here's, here's the thought. You have all the data on who's at Bain, who's at McKinsey, who's at BCG. And what you do is, so you have me sign in with Google. So, and then you ask me some stupid questions like, where did you go to high school? What, like do you like Diet Coke? And how many different kinds of cord sets do you own? And as you're doing this, in the background, you're scraping through the recruit U database. So you can find with like 90% accuracy who this person is if they work at Bain, McKinsey, BCG, or whatever, but it looks like you're, they're like all these questions are leading to the answer, almost like a BuzzFeed quiz back in the day. So you're like really getting the right answer, but it doesn't have to do with the questions. Cause if you sign in with Google, you have their name and the time. What do you think about that? Daniel: I think that's an incredible idea. I think that's an incredible idea because I think there was something in another product that went viral. This thing called Linked, which essentially was like pairing, um, cracked or not, like two people like, and essentially it was again, kind of uh person to person just kind of ranking the person. But it, I, I just think that's so like, people want to know that that information. And no, I, I love that concept. Okay, I'm going to say good idea and you should make it happen. I think that's, I think that's, I think that's really good. Um, the next one is listing a present on my attorney at the top of your resume. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Matt: Bad idea. Applying to 200 internships through easy apply. Daniel: Bad idea. Posting on LinkedIn while recruiting. Matt: Like, are you narrating your recruiting journey? Could be, could be doing that. Could be posting about your life as a student. Good idea. Giving an internship to somebody who posts and gets the most likes. So it's like, hey, we have some type of, We have an intern. We're going to pay you for three months to work here. Whoever gets the most likes on LinkedIn tagging us. Excellent idea. Excellent idea. That person knows how to grow a pack. Lying about your Excel skills in an interview. Bad idea. I mean, fine idea because you can just learn it if you don't know it. But bad idea is if, because I had this when I went through recruiting. I had some type of like modeling thing. And the guy was like, all right, could you actually build a model, like from scratch? When I was just like networking in. I was like, no. He's like, don't put it on your resume. I was like, okay. So it's, you know, it's just dangerous if they ask you a question. Sometimes it's, you just don't want to give as much. It's kind of the classic. Walk me through a DCF. Just stay really high level until if they want to ask the questions, they'll ask the questions. It's like the language thing, like, don't put Spanish on there. Daniel: No. Yeah. Because then you're going to be like, all right, this is, uh, you've said interviews in Spanish. Yeah. Okay. So the next one is adding incoming summer analysts to your LinkedIn title the second you sign. Like, are you saying I'm like excited to announce? And put it in your title, the whole shebang. I guess how cringe is this? That's really what it should have been. Yeah. I'd say give it a little bit of time. You know, let it breathe. Yeah, let it breathe a little bit. Putting your SAT and ACT score on your resume. Good idea if it's high. Triple majoring. Bad idea. Give yourself a little bit, a little bit more breathing room. Either of you triple majored? Matt: I know, I, I, I talked to, I've talked to some people. It's like, Oh, like I'm doing, it's like, you have no time. Like no time, like no time to even like think. Like you're just like, boom, boom, boom. I've got one final idea. I just had to, and I was writing a LinkedIn post about this on the train on the way over here. I think putting co-founder and CEO in your LinkedIn title has gotten too watered down. Because the reality is everyone, most people on LinkedIn don't know what recruiter is. And that title, for me, it's LinkedIn's the next thing. And so many people have messaged me. Daniel: Oh, so you're saying like the, like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So don't put co-founder. I'm trying to think what if I wish I had like an idea if you have the top of my head, but something like just literally say what we are doing or trying to solve. Or like just some hot take about recruiting. Never, like, never cold or like, it's easier to get a job now more than ever. Or don't cold apply to a job again. Matt: Yep. No, I, I totally. I agree. Yeah. A little more controversial, evoke some emotion. Daniel: Yeah, it's all about evoking emotion. Matt: That's it at the end of the day. So. Is there anything else that you want to say? Honestly, I think you guys navigated this extremely well in terms of, you know, you know, the company building aspects, each, you know, end person, student clubs, companies, and then the marketing strategies to get people into the hopper. Um, I feel like it's, you know, the business in a nutshell.