A look into how PitchMe has adjusted to the Covid-19 crisis, with co-founder and CEO, Dina Bayasanova

I’m Dina, Founder of PitchMe, a skills-based marketplace where we help individuals identify their skills, get matched to jobs and create individual career development plans. 

Could we start with a quick day in the life of Dina and PitchMe?

My day starts early – I start by catching up on emails with a morning coffee and this is the one moment where I’m not disturbed. At 10am every single morning we have a stand-up call with our team with everyone present. We solve some urgent matters and also create a plan for the day. Then I have calls with investors, partners, stakeholders and everyone else until lunch. From lunch time on wards, I’m onto my daily routine – reporting numbers and other activities. At about 5pm, we have another stand up call with the team and we discuss daily progress and any problems. 

How have you and your team adapted to the lockdown? What have you learned in the process? 

Our core business activities and processes haven’t been affected too much because we’re already agile workers, and partially remote, so we had everything in place. All the processes needed some revision however. We couldn't meet in the office, which I think is terrible because you need to meet with your team! But we decided to have two calls a day to create the feeling that we were all present. We also included some fun during the calls because it’s important to make sure everyone in the team is relaxed. The other initiative we’re taking are online bar events every Friday to have some social activities where we order surprise meals to each other! It’s not so much about the work and the processes but more about how you adapt as a human and as a team of people - substituting the human interaction with Zoom. We also had a couple of team members who were living on their own and we thought that it might be challenging, so some of them moved in together. Data scientists moved in with sales people to make processes more efficient. Some of us co-founders are also co-living as a response to this challenging situation. 

What’s the origin story of PitchMe? What were the problems you set out to solve, and what solutions did you create? 

Long story short, the idea of PitchMe came as a spin-off of my previous career in investor management in the oil and gas sector. We’d been investing in projects and hiring lots of tech people for the assets we had invested in. Tech people in oil and gas are very rare so we needed a fresh talent pool which was difficult to identify. So I implemented a solution using a fund that I used to work for, which led me to think ‘why couldn’t this work for a bigger audience in other tech businesses?’.

I was also part of an energy institute, a young professional committee where I was chair. This gave me access to more than 6000 different members and this is where my first co-founder and I did our market research. We identified different stakeholders in the recruitment process, the employers and then employees and identified different problems. What stood out was that the speed of modern business is so fast that traditional processes for recruitment are not catching up. 

It's important to note that the modern candidate also has a non-linear story and a non-linear set of skills. It’s not just traditional employment and education but also online education, courses and even gaming. 

For SMEs – recruitment is one of the big challenges and the cost of a mistake is extremely high, so one thing we’re addressing with PitchMe is that we’re rethinking the way a professional needs to be represented. We’re representing a real time capture of human skills and we are doing this by analysing digital footprints. It’s not a CV as you would write it yourself, but prime sources of data which are more relevant and diverse. We created a talent ecosystem around this profiling where we help candidates to land jobs matching their overall skill set and personality. We help them navigate the ever-changing employment landscape. Our platform’s unique advantage is connecting education with employment and this is why we partner with online education providers. 

PitchMe has managed to thrive during C-19 but it’s obviously a tough time out there for a lot of startups. How have you as a founder, and PitchMe as a startup responded to the current C-19 situation? What has changed for you? 

The crisis actually sped up the processes of change in the employment market which was long overdue. Businesses now understand our value and our proposition way better than they did before – this is why we’re seeing an increase in demand from employers and candidates. From candidates, we see an increase in demand for many reason, one being the rise in unemployment. People have a need to understand where they fit in and this is what we have done as a platform. We have made it free for anyone responding to the Covid crisis to recruit for free - so med tech, healthtech, deliveries, food sector – anyone on the forefront. 

We partnered with more educational platforms than originally planned and negotiated 49 additional free courses for our users.  

We have also issued two free guidebooks – one about how to revise and build your digital footprint for IT professionals and the other is for designers – to build their skills profile for the job. This is useful for anyone who has re-entered the job market, in need of a new job or generally has lots to catch up on. There are free examples on how to build your CV, how to build your LinkedIn profile, how to structure your profile on GitHub etc – we’ve already had more than 20,000 downloads from candidates, so I think it was a really positive initiative.  

Competitors? Is it the same across the sector? 

We’ve seen that our competitors, (HRTech firms) have not really survived the crisis. A lot have announced that they’ve had to shut down their businesses – particularly HRtech firms supporting the traditional recruitment sector who relied on success fees, or had been quite expensive for the market. We also saw a lot of companies supporting people working remotely with video CVs, video interviewing etc – they’ve reduced the price for their services and they’re booming and growing. I think there have been some success cases and sadly some not so successful, but I think the market needed to be refreshed and disrupted, otherwise everything becomes a big bubble. The strongest will survive!

The current climate shows that the UK faces high unemployment and a difficult job market in a post-C19 world – how do you see this changing the future of recruitment? 

When the crisis hit, everyone who was directly responding to the crisis was in demand. Medical, supply chain, logistics etc. In a short amount of time, we saw the world adapt. We see food delivery, booming telemedicine, online fitness – those who are flexible, can adapt easily and are willing to upskill quickly will be able to adjust to the current market.

There are a lot of opportunity for upskilling in a crisis. Reports show that more than 50% of the workforce needed to upskill anyway, due to innovation, due to tech progress, change in traditional industry. There’s so many resources available for free, so many companies willing to hire people who don’t necessarily have the relevant background in their CV but fit due to their soft skills – I think this is a positive shakeup for the industry. There are obviously industries that are not able to adjust, but I think they will recover, for example: manufacturing, some consumer-facing services like hairdressers – those who can’t just go online.

PitchMe is all about skills - what skills do you think you have developed personally which you think have set you up to thrive in these current circumstances?  

I took courses which were long overdue on my list – project management, tech project management, agile project management. Personally, I have also developed my time management skills. It's not all about work, I have domestic responsibilities and a family to take care of. I think my resilience to stress has also improved. No one at the moment has control, or resources to change the crisis – so you need to think creatively about how to respond to the same problems with less resources, making you work more efficiently. 

I have also become a better manager because I started listening and I started to be more… human I think. In the past, we might have been more KPI-driven and results-driven – right now, I see the benefit in stepping back and giving someone a day off if I can see they’re burning out. So I think as a human being, I became more pleasant to work with. As a whole, people seem more human right now. Not just in the start-up sector – everyone is willing to step in and give you some extra support or advice, or simply talk to you because everyone is a bit lonely or stressed. In this crisis, people’s empathy is developing. 

Is there any advice you would give to other start-ups who face an uncertain future? 

First – you need to survive as a business, look at your costs and revise what you can cut and what you can’t cut. Think creatively about your network or your peers to see who can pitch in for help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Look after your team, check in and see if they’re okay. The crisis will be over eventually, and once you all meet in the office again, your team will be your success or your failure. If your staff are a frustrated, exhausted and depressed team, that is going to be a disaster. 

Stop rushing. There are no good answers for how to overcome this. This is a great moment to think about your business, to think about your model, your go-to-market strategy and maybe test some low-resource hypothesis that you’ve never had a chance to before. 

It’s important to look after your mental health and look after yourself. As a leader, everyone is looking to see how you’re dealing with the crisis. So it’s important to keep up a strong sense of security, have many different plans and be transparent. Talk to your team, stakeholders and clients about all your different plans so everyone is aware you have thought about everything and you know how to respond. 

The last one – sleep. Sleep well.