S1E6 - Talent marketplaces and the future of work - Sophie Adelman (WhiteHat/ex-Hired)

Two-Sided - The Marketplace Podcast

Sophie Adelman: [00:00:00] But I think people forget that all of these companies started off with humans going out into the streets and making that business work.
Speaker 2: [00:00:12] [music playing] Welcome to Two-Sided, the marketplace podcast, brought to you by Sharetribe.
Sjoerd: [00:00:24] Hi, I'm Sjoerd, CMO at Sharetribe, and I am your host. In today's episode, I speak to Sophie Adelman about talent marketplaces. Sophie has a lot of experiences with that. She was the first international hire at hired.com, a tech recruitment marketplace. There she led the expansion of Hired from the US into the UK, and after that, Sophie founded WhiteHat, which matches ambitious people with an apprenticeship at employers. We discuss how liquidity works in marketplaces like this, how all marketplaces basically start off as a managed marketplace, how important can be to educate one side of your marketplace, and the general importance of data; a terrific talk altogether, and again, filled with some real gems.
Uh, a quick note on the audio quality, so, Sophie sounds fantastic, but it turned out after the recording that there had been a small, uh, buzz on my side. Our amazing producer, Nemanja, was able to reduce it significantly, but at times, you might hear a strange light buzz when I'm talking. So, no worries, there's nothing wrong with your audio setup, and I apologize for any auditory inconveniences, but this just happens sometimes. Now, enough said, let's listen to Sophie discuss talent marketplaces. Enjoy.
[music playing]
Hi, Sophie, uh, welcome to the podcast.
Sophie Adelman: [00:01:47] Thank you for having me.
Sjoerd: [00:01:49] Hey, before we, uh, dive straight into all the marketplaces, maybe you can tell the people at home a little bit about your background, sort of, kind of up until Hired, because that's where I want to straight dive into a couple more questions.
Sophie Adelman: [00:02:00] Sure. So, I grew up in the UK, British born and bred, and I, I, I started my career, actually in conference production. I was a conference producer, was my first job, and which is a very entrepreneurial role. I did that for about a year, and then I went and worked in investment banking at Goldman for about 18 months. I have to be honest, I didn't really love that experience. It was in 2007/2008, so the financial crisis was a terrifying time to be starting your career, and lots of different ways, and I don't think it was the kind of opportunity that was the right fit for me and my skill set, but it was a great learning experience. And then from there, I went and worked at Egen Zehnder, which is an executive search firm, uh, doing so, searches, management appraisals, really understanding how companies are built, and how people think about talent and talent assessments, which has obviously been a thread throughout my career, and something that I, I feel very passionately about.
And then went off and did a, an MBA at Stanford. I can very happy to talk about my experience of an MBA. I think it's a very personal choice why people go and do that, but I, I had an amazing time, and I feel the lessons I learned from that are now coming into play, 10 years later. And then, before Hired, I actually worked in finance. So, I worked in investing for a family office/investment trust. So, quite an eclectic career in that regard.
Sjoerd: [00:03:21] Yeah. And then now, actually, with the addition of the MBA, I think somehow I missed that, because I was kind of surprised because I was doing some background research on you, and then, how did you get into hired, and I was checking and I said, "Well, that's quite a entrepreneurial position for someone who comes seemingly out of mostly investment banking, that's not a ..." It's usually the other way around that a entrepreneur goes somehow on the capital side, uh, rather than... So, maybe y- you could tell us a little bit more, like, how did you get across that opportunity?
Sophie Adelman: [00:03:50] Well, I think the Hired opportunity came from two fronts; one was, as you said, I was out in California for two years. I have a lot of friends who finished their MBA and went and worked at some of the most highly successful startups and scale ups that we've known over the last decade, so, the Ubers, these Lyfts of the world, and I saw them working in these very fast paced environments and just thought that sounds amazing, that sounds super cool. They're building companies. And that's what I've always wanted to do. I've wanted to build a company, I've always had that desire to be leading and developing people and building businesses. And, when I was at the investment trust that I was part of, I was actually helping build businesses within the business. So, I launched a headphone seeding business, I was involved in starting new businesses for the funds. And so, I got to scratch that itch a little bit, but not fully.
And then, the actual opportunity came about, because, before I went to Stanford, I actually did a summer internship for an organization called Atomico, which is a VC fund. Right back at the beginning, before Atomico was a really well known fund, there was, uh, five of us in a room, and, you know, got to, to see how startups worked, and both internally in a VC fund, but also in their portfolio companies. And so, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I knew I wanted to build businesses, work in a high growth environment. I reached out to th- the Atomico team, and they told me about the Hired opportunity, and it just felt like it fitted perfectly with both my aspirations, and my experience having worked in the talent space. And so, I wrote a cover letter.
I didn't know anyone at the company, I wrote a cover letter, say, "These are the three reasons why I understand the problem you're trying to solve, and these are the three reasons why I think I'm the person to do it." And I got a call within a couple of hours from the CEO, and the rest is history.
Sjoerd: [00:05:37] Oh, wow. Yeah, that's amazing. So, so you got that chance, and you were the first international hire. Well, okay, now we know a little bit, possibly some of the market, or some of the businesses that you interacted with during the earlier ones had some kind of marketplace component, but I was watching, uh, one of your talks at the B2B Rocks in Paris from 2016. Okay, the topic of that talk was slightly about different things, but you said something sort of besides that I would be very interested in, the saying like, "Oh, well, we could have done a lot better on some things," and some of those things you mentioned were like, particularly the things that I'm interested in, i- into marketplace businesses.
Sophie Adelman: [00:06:10] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Sjoerd: [00:06:11] So, how did that start? Like, did you go UK only, did it go Europe-wide straight?
Sophie Adelman: [00:06:16] No. So, UK only. And I think that's one of the important things with a marketplace business, that you need to be really focused. Building a marketplace is, is difficult. I think a lot of people think that, um, once you build a marketplace, it just sort of works, drives itself, and that's not the case at all. You have to drive that marketplace, and be looking at the supply/demand dynamics very closely all the time. So when I first started, I'd actually started as a client executive. So, I was running the UK market, but really, I was just boots on the ground. I was, you know, I was just hustling. I would be in Ubers all over London, I called it my mobile office. So, I'd get in an Uber, tethered my laptop to my phone, be doing my emails and calls in the back of an Uber going from meeting to meeting, and just hustling to get companies to start using this platform that nobody had ever heard of. So what was exciting to me was, when you look at my background, you can see I've got all these credentials for these brands, so it always worked...