Souheil Zakkar, a Co-founder and the Head of Sales for GoRecruit: “The HRM market is huge and promising”

Souheil Zakkar has been working in the IT sphere for more than 18 years both in large companies and in startups. Among them is “Megaplan” — one of the most successful SaaS projects in Russia, CRM-system for business automation and customer management. In this company, Souheil created and developed the sales department, including working with foreign partners.

As part of the NKT company, he was engaged in the loyalty systems development and the introduction of non-cash payments at gas stations. Now, these developments are used in one of the grocery chains X5 Retail Group, in the largest oil companies like GazPromNeft and RosNeft. In «IT-Group» company he worked with the American companies Inrix and NewMarket, with the British company Holstein UK and worked with the services for collecting big data on GPS navigation, and also collaborated with the Amadeus service, engaged in analytics, data storage and transmission for the end user.

Currently, Souheil is the head of sales for GoRecruit. Acquaintance with the GoRecruit project began when Souheil was an expert in one of the state funds helping innovative startups. GoRecruit became one of the projects that the foundation considered promising, and Souheil became a co-founder and partner of the project.

• The global market for workforce automation systems is snowballing. Its average annual growth is about 8 percent; the volume is about $ 14 billion. Experts predict that by 2025 this market will amount to $ 25 billion. In your opinion, what are these rates and prospects associated with?
• The HR market is mostly conservative and is practically the last of the markets to introduce automation of management systems. The hiring process is still at the manual level, the human factor strongly influences it, and the result is often biased. This entails personnel and financial miscalculations and losses, and that’s why business is interested in finding new hiring technologies. They can help select candidates that will fit the company. Therefore, the recruitment market is huge and promising: any organization is interested in finding the most efficient and reliable employees. There are very few services like GoRecruit in the world, and this is also a benefit for the service.
• You have extensive experience in different countries. In your opinion, are HR departments conservative all around the world, or is there any specific behavior of recruiters in different countries?
• The recruitment market is conservative everywhere but in different ways. The most technologically advanced ones, of course, are the American and European markets, but even there it is lagging in the pace of development and automation. In the US market, there is something to be oriented on; there are services that are successful today. In Europe, everything depends heavily on the business sector: delivery companies, call centers, and other high-turnover enterprises have in one way or another automated the hiring process. As for other types of business, then it seems that recruiting automation seems to owners and top management a waste of resources because not all owners understand the value of choosing the right candidate at the entrance. However, now is the century of business automation, and I think that a lot will change in the next five years.
• What influences the development of HRM at the moment? What trends should be kept in mind?
• Many people today understand the necessity to automate this market. In words, they talk about the need for an ideal integrated product that would include a huge set of tools based on automation and artificial intelligence. To be honest, I think that if the market is fully and simultaneously automated, the business will not cope with such a drastic change, since it cannot be reorganized at once. After all, whatever the hiring process is now, it is embedded in other business processes. There are established approaches. It is necessary to take into account the psychological factor: when a new technology appears, people introduce it gradually, there is inertia.
• What could be the driver of changes in this market?
• The owner of the business decides on the introduction of a tool, and for him, the main thing is to optimize costs. Today it is considered that the personnel department is a costly department, just like the marketing service. However, the existence of the latter is understandable and justified: spent the money — got a client; however, this is not the case with HR, and it is not easy to calculate the profitability of personnel department costs. If we can help optimize input costs, business owners will see our system as an efficient one.
• What should be put on the stake in the development of GoRecruit as a product?
• One of the principal tasks for us is to build confidence in the candidate’s assessment. Now many people look at it as some toy and do not understand that a serious algorithm is behind the assessment. This is superimposed on the widespread distrust of the portrait of a person in social networks because many angle information about themselves. However, we rely on scientific research. Even “putting on a mask” a person remains himself in essential details. Moreover, we analyze more than 70 parameters. I think that with time, it is worthwhile to include an element of the analysis of a person’s behavior, his gestures, his voice timbre. This will significantly enhance the credibility of the system. However, at this stage, it is necessary to talk more about the structure of the rating system itself, to make it transparent and understandable so that people can trust it.
• What are the main sales channels for the project?
• Marketing must be done at the HR community level and the top management level. The professional community of recruiters should find out about the existence of this service, how it functions and what it is intended for. GoRecruit should be a buzz-word. It is necessary to work with top management because it decides on the introduction of the product into the company’s work. In other words, at this stage, it is necessary to widely inform all the community interested in hiring about the existence of the GoRecruit service. We take this into account in our marketing plans.