Josef Kadlec Interview Spotlight

Jonathan Kidder

5 years ago

I had the opportunity to interview Josef Kadlec. Without a doubt he is a wizard at the craft of talent sourcing! Josef is a former ethical hacker, digital forensic examiner and hardcore Linux engineer who went head over heels into the talent sourcing and recruitment industry utilizing his cross-field experience. Along with Milan Novak, the former board member of Grafton Recruitment, he co-founded the international recruitment agency, GoodCall, currently having 140+ employees and specializing in social recruitment for 5-person start-ups as well as 10,000 person Fortune 500 teams. Overall, I hope you enjoy reading about Josef and his background in the field of sourcing.

Tell us about your work experience in recruiting – how did you get your start, how did you progress, where are you at this point in time?

I was working as a software engineers and realized that the company I was working for is desperately looking for new techies. I also probably realized that I’m not the pure IT guy who would like to work 9 to 5 and I needed some sort of a business challenge. So I created a recruitment website, we can say a landing page, where I was attracting IT professionals to apply. No LinkedIn at this point. The revolutionary aspect of this website was that it looked like a website of a recruitment firm but you could see the names of the companies (at the very beginning just one company – the company I was working for). It was kind of TheMuse.com website of 2007. It was full of text rather than images or videos which had a great and positive impact for SEO. Finally some Bulgarian candidate applied. And believe or not, he was hired. So the very first applicant converted to a placed candidate. Beginner’s luck we would say. At that time I got a referral bonus for him. After this moment I said: “OK, let’s apply for a recruitment license”. And another few years I was doing a recruiter on the side to my job as an IT professional. Of course I started with LinkedIn as well even if it was by a coincidence. After I published the book People as Merchandise, I got together with my current business partner and we founded GoodCall, Recruitment Academy and Datacruit at the end of 2013, Now we have 140+ employees and 5,3+ mil. EUR of annual revenues.

What are the unique talents you bring to the field?

Definitely the IT background. I studied the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering with a focus on software engineering. When hiring IT people this is obviously a plus. With the current trend of how tech is involved in recruitment, IT is the skill which you can utilize pretty easily as a sourcer. It’s about doing exhaustive searches to increase your competitive advantage.

Share your biggest success story in recruiting so far

Definitely the foundation and growth of GoodCall over the first 5 years where we were able to scale it from 0 to 1200 mid and higher placements per year. I’m just checking the release of FT1000 – Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies 2020 by Financial Times and our company GoodCall got the 415th position! It is a lump sum over our 9 branches in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

What is the best advice you’ve received during your career path, and from whom?

I was probably influenced by many entrepreneurs and thought leaders such as Tim Ferriss, MJ DeMarco or Grant Cardone. I don’t know if I have the best advice but I would say that if you want to reach something, you have to do anything rather than plan and strategize forever. I knew that I want to be an entrepreneur since the beginning but I also knew that I will become an employee first to reach that status. By becoming an employee I discovered that there is some world of recruitment agencies and I could establish a business on that later on. When I would be thinking at home I would never think it up. The second thing is not to be afraid to have higher goals. For example I wanted to get some high calibre reviews into my book so I go after people such as Barbara Corcoran from the ABC’s show The Shark Tank or the best-selling author David Perry. We also closely work with the former president of Microsoft Europe Jan Muehlfeit who reported directly to Bill Gates before he started with us.

What’s your favorite recruiting tech tool?

I believe that nothing better has been invented since the foundation of LinkedIn. When I check our source of hire, we always had 60%+ from LinkedIn. Now it is a bit depreciated in favor of our internal database. One of my favorite sourcing tools is Phantombuster which you can use to automate various routines on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

As an recruiting professional, how do you handle recruiting to achieve the best results?

When you are not just a freelancer and you scale, you will realize that maybe more than about technical sourcing skills, it is about the overall complexity. The variables of your success are things such as leadership, recruitment process management, sourcing KPIs, management of millennial’s, marketing, etc. That’s why so many talented sourcers or recruiters actually fail in building their own business or managing a large-scale sourcing in a organization. To manage sourcers and recruiters we use various management tools such as sourcing checklist to be able to audit and help a specific sourcers with a specific roles. Then various weekly, quarterly and annual reports. We also do many events to educate and motivate our people such as GoodCall Sourcing Fusion. We also have our own GoodCall Sourcing Stack.

What do you hope to achieve in 2020?

2020 is about efficiency and integration. We want to achieve a higher productivity per a sourcer which means various fine-tunes of the process. It involves to automate some parts of the recruitment process. We also want to speed up the process which will probably lead us to use agile methodology in sourcing. By the integration I meant to integrate all three of our businesses altogether. Now you can for example find Recruitment Academy webinars in Datacruit ATS. Or when we rent recruiters or sourcers (we do that big time), we are able to rent you a recruiter with our HR technology Datacruit. Another unique selling proposition of ours. I also hope to open door to some new markets such as Georgia, Serbia and Russia.

What’s your favorite Boolean String?

Recently it was for example this one which I force our sourcers to get something from Facebook:

>site:facebook.com “mechanical engineer” OR “konstrukter” plzen OR pilsen “to present” -posts

What’s the difference between sourcing in Europe vs North America?

>I have never done a sourcing in the US even if I was speaking there and I have the experience from my fellow colleagues from the community. One variable is definitely how scattered the European market is – a lot of bigger and smaller countries where each of them has its own language, laws and culture. Another variable is definitely the willingness to travel which is not high as in the USA with the exception of some nations such as Lithuanians, Polish people and some others. Each European country is not a part of EU which leads to some problems with workforce movement. And this reflects also to the scheme of social networks – there are sources which are relevant only for a specific countries like XING (DACH region), Viadeo (France), Vkontakte (Russia, Ukraine, etc.), Goldenline (Poland) or Habr (Ukraine). LinkedIn is for instance banned in Russia.

How did you become a full time recruiting trainer?

I never wanted to do training. Imagine, I was an IT guy behind the computer who suddenly was asked by Randstad to do the first sourcing training in front of 30 mostly ladies: ) They asked me just because of my book. I realized that nobody is going to do this for me so I found the way to it and I do it since then. Anyway, I wouldn’t be doing training without the whole venture behind it. Trainings as a larger scale is not that lucrative business but it’s a great opener to a new markets and a great way to educate the market and get the position of industry experts. If you would ask me who I am, as the first thing I would say “recruitment entrepreneur”. That’s my main responsibility of a shareholder and business executive. All other things are subordinate to that – next year I might be more programming than speaking when that be the position to win.

Here’s a recent presentation that Josef did on LinkedIn Response Rates:

How will the Coronavirus Impact Recruiting in 2020

Breaking SourceCon Seattle Goes Digital

How to Write a Resume that Doesn’t Get Sent into a Black Hole

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