Catch Intro- take 2 feb 13

Chris and Burak met on a bus in 2017 and connected over a project idea. They founded Catch Jobs, a video hiring platform for the hospitality sector. The platform aims to address the high turnover rate and lack of training in the industry. It focuses on building a community and connecting job seekers and employers through videos. The platform allows candidates to showcase their skills and personality, giving them a better chance to stand out. The founders believe that videos provide a more comprehensive view of candidates compared to traditional paper CVs. The platform is currently working on growing its business and addressing the needs of the industry. So, here we are in Bailo Bar and Bistro in Baiolo. My name's Chris. I'm one of the founders of Catch Jobs. I'm joined today by my good friend and partner, Burak Burand. And also joining us today is Seval, a very precious investor and part of the Catch Jobs family. She's here to mediate, so we don't go off on any weird, weird tangents. And Pete's been relatively interesting. So, I think maybe Seval, I'll hand it over to you and you can ask her. Welcome, guys. What's your guys' names? Oswald Good. Thank you. So, thanks for the opening. I'm very happy to be here today with you. So, maybe we can start with your story. How did you guys meet? Okay. I can maybe jump in there, Burak. I think it's the same story. We actually met on a bus going from Milas Bodrum Airport into the center. In Bodrum? In Bodrum, yeah. I was sitting there minding my own business and I was tapped on the shoulder by a tall, good-looking chap behind me saying, are you Chris? Do I know you? And it turns out that we have a lot of mutual friends in common, especially around a little bar we used to go to in Topage. So, yeah, we started talking and, you know, first of all, we were talking about life in general and then I sort of was talking about a concept of a project I was working on, Catch Jobs. That name wasn't there at the time. And Burak, yeah, he had some really good ideas at the time about how we could work together. And it's, and it, that was, shit, when was that? It was like... Summer of 2017. Oh, my God. It's been a while now. Yes, so that was six, seven beautiful years ago. Wow, it sounds like a destiny then. Yeah, I think so, to a certain extent. I think we really connected on that fateful trip and, yeah, it's grown ever since. Did I miss anything there? No, no, absolutely. You just missed the part that you had a nice little Australian hat on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which caught, which, yeah, exactly, which caught my attention. Was the moment that you decided to partner with him because of the hat? I just wanted the hat to be honest with you. I know, I know. I know what partnership that is. Okay, well, I mean, it's a really beautiful story and it's good that you started actually a long time ago, but I think things kind of shaped you up until now. And, Burak, maybe you can tell us a bit about Catch Jobs. So, what is Catch Jobs? Yeah, Catch Jobs is a video hiring platform dedicated to the hospitality sector. So, we know that, you know, in hospitality, paper CVs don't really cut it. It's an industry where you need to show your skill set, your personality, your charisma. And there was a gap in the industry, to be honest, on the hiring side of things because it's not being done well with the current platforms and marketplaces or whatsoever. So, we decided to, you know, pretty much disrupt that industry and just come up with something for the community to help the, you know, job seekers and help the employers as well. Because our mutual experiences actually just add up to a good amount of years and a good amount of, you know, relevance to the industry. So, we started to shut the community, to be honest. It really came out of actual need, I guess, rather than, you know, sit down and come up with a business type of thing. It's really more like, you know, what Christian has been through over the years and what I've been through over my few years of hospitality. And it just came out of necessity. Yeah, it was more sort of finding a solution for an obvious pain point rather than sitting down, finding a problem or inventing a problem and then coming up with a solution. Yeah, the turnover rate must be huge in this sector. Yeah, I mean, we've had some crazy meetings with different employers here in Turkey and I don't suspect it's different anywhere else, but some of them are up 85% plus turnover rate in a year. So, you know, that's a real industry problem. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine how painful it is for the recruiting team at a hotel or a cafe restaurant. Just the stock keeps changing and you have to fill in, like, immediately. Yeah. Also for the guests, I mean, when you go to a restaurant, you want to see familiar faces. You go to a bar, you want that same bartender to be there. You can talk to them, you can chat about what happened last week, last week. Yeah, it's part of the reality. Exactly. And with the high turnover rate, you don't, it comes to the point where you stop getting that and it affects the guests and then, do I really want to go there? It's going to be completely new staff, completely new kitchen, et cetera. Yeah. So it's also a pain on the guests' side, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think also, I mean, what we've discovered is a lot of, because these HR teams or the, even for the smaller places, they're spending so much time on hiring staff that are leaving, very little time goes into training. Yeah. So, because actually HR isn't just about hiring. Yeah. There's a whole sort of scope of work that they should be doing, exactly. With that being sort of, you know, talking to people about their problems, personal, professional, also training. So as you mentioned about the guest thing, if you're hiring that many people, it's not going to be quality. So, and then they leave and... And then you lose them. And then you lose them. Yeah, yeah, I mean, totally understand. And how do you think CatJob addressed this problem? Like, how is it different than any other recruiting platform in the market? I think for our side of things, again, it's the community, building that community, trying to give more than just job posts and, you know, opportunities like that. But also, I've lost my train of thought. I think it's mostly about understanding the community and what their needs are. Because it's an extremely offline community. You know, when someone is looking for a job in a restaurant or cafe, they usually ask the existing waiters or the existing chefs, hey, do you know someone, do you have a friend that can just help out A lot of people do day extras or part-times or, you know, not really full-time. But if you can bring this, if you can gather that community online, you can digitalize that community and, you know, give them a platform where they can connect, they can talk to their peers, they can learn from their peers, et cetera, then it becomes something completely different. It becomes something much bigger than the offline, small community. It becomes a global community. There's a good example, you know, Chris always gives, if you're a barista or bartender living in Turkey, maybe you want to be connected to another bartender living in London, also part of the platform, and learn from their ways of making cocktail or their ways of making the coffee art, et cetera, et cetera. It's, you know, the... Okay, it's okay. I mean, that's what we're here for, isn't it? I mean, I think just to, there's another part of the platform obviously that's quite sort of integral is the video side of things, and what we find is, you know, it's very easy on the other platforms for people that are looking for work just to tap, apply, apply, apply, apply, apply, and their application goes off to the hotel or employer, generally with shady photos, very little information. But people that are actually taking the time to record a video are generally quite serious and are serious about looking for a job, and maybe about applying to that place in particular. So rather than just blanket sort of applying to every job post they see, they actually have to sort of think about, okay, do I want to make this video for this place? So the candidates apply to jobs with their video TV. Exactly, exactly. So it could be something as simple as, hi, my name is Chris, I'm a young chef, et cetera, or ideally it's that plus some skill-based videos also with the kitchen related, throwing a pizza, or making a coffee, or famous pizza throws. I think one thing that differentiates us most is, you know, when you want to work for a specific place, nothing goes well for the kitchen staff also. If you want to work in a big luxury hotel with a hundred people in the kitchen, or if you want to work in a small chef restaurant who's aiming to get his first Michelin star et cetera, you really want to differentiate yourself among other applicants, and you cannot do that on paper TV. There's a certain amount of points where you can only tweak your paper TV to look a tad bit related to the job you're applying to, but on the video you can actually say, and people are smart beings obviously, they can understand from the way you speak, do you really want that job, or is it just an 8 to 5 for you, or a 9 to 9 for you? It transfers the message, the personality probably. Absolutely, and I mean, even without the skills, you know, as a past employer of different places, I probably missed out on some really, hiring some really interesting good candidates, because as an employer you're trained just to look at experience on a TV, and there's plenty of people out there with maybe not experience, or very little, but full of personality, and you want to meet those people as an employer, and give them a chance. Give them a chance, yeah. Because, you know, especially these days, it is very, although the hospitality community is offline, they don't find their jobs offline. You know, it used to be a case of people walking around, knocking on doors, have you got a bar job, have you got a kitchen job, even if they didn't have a job for you, they would be able to see you in 3D, hand over word documents, you know, piece of paper with your experience, so they see the whole package. So essentially that's what we're trying to do, in a digital way. Yeah, I mean, sounds perfect. I think you're definitely addressing a valid problem, and with a really good solution. But, not in very detail, but like, how are things at the moment with your business? I know that the idea actually came back, kind of, and you restarted the journey together, in the beginning of this year, I guess? Beginning of last year, 2023. Last year, okay. Sorry, yeah, not 2024. Yeah, just to see myself. Thanks for the correction. But yeah, I mean, how is the business in general right now? I know you're growing. Yeah, it's definitely getting some traction. When we launched, you know, early last year, we had about maybe 2,000 or 1,500, 2,000 users, but they were really redundant users, perhaps. They were just people that have downloaded the app over the month, et cetera. They were not actually using it. We didn't have any active job posts, et cetera. But throughout the summer, with the little funding round that we made, and some more, you know, full-time hands-on action, now we're at a good point where we have, you know, close to 5,000 users, job seekers. We have 60, 70 active job posts. You know, people are finding jobs, applying, lots of applications are ongoing, lots of new videos being uploaded. Yeah, and some cool videos, too. Exactly. I mean, initially, you know, when we first started, we always had the scare that it would turn out to be something like Chef was like 10 years ago, you know. You would never know what type of video that a jobless person is going to send out. But recently, more and more, we're seeing people actually showcasing their skill sets, you know. You can see Chef actually chopping onions, you know. It was always like a, you know, not a dream, but like something to achieve. It was kind of a dream. It was kind of a dream, actually, yeah. Looking at the initial videos that we got. Some of them are shocking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, whoa! Very shady videos we got, you know. Okay. Thank God we didn't belittle them. I think over time, the word of mouth also happens to grow. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe in terms of the quality of the videos, quality of the applications. Yeah, absolutely. So, it's going to be in the right track over time. I mean, at the moment, you know, a few people find jobs with this. They keep telling their friends about it. It's okay, how did you get this job? Oh, I found this job. It's made for us, just by us, et cetera. So, people are liking the hospitality, dedication. We get a lot of job posts, for example, from retail shops, like Zara or Navi, et cetera. And we, you know, take those job posts down because that's not the point. We're not a general job-finding platform. If you move that focus, we will lose, you know, the community side of things. So, the idea is solely hospitality in Boracay, and I think we're on a good track for them. Wow, that's great. We're coming to the end of the podcast, but I really wonder what is expecting us in the future. Maybe, can you share a bit? Well, I mean, at the moment, we're focused, obviously, on growing the user base, both employers and job seekers. We're meeting with more and more five-star hotel groups, bigger restaurant chains. We're looking at future expansion plans into the MENA region and the UK, which will give our current and future job seekers a really good idea of what actually is out there in the world, you know, because there's no one in Turkey that is doing that. There's no platforms that are really promoting other regions or really helping people. I mean, let me, I guess the best way to say it is the other platforms are not overly concerned with the people that they're using as candidates. You know, they're just looking for the quick buck, I guess. And we, obviously, we're not a non-profit, but we are more focused on the user, so, or the job seeker. So, we're doing, we're going to be introducing trainings, both online, offline, events for the job seekers to come to and network, maybe video events, like hospitality nights. We're looking to do these same sort of nights with HR managers or, you know, employers, especially sort of pre and post-season in the summer regions and especially the winter places. We're looking at doing the Connect feature that's sort of in the pipeline. So, yeah, I would say for, I mean, Burak may, you know, sort of elaborate on that, but I mean, I think for us, building and solidifying the community is the main focus for us. And, you know, it's a numbers game, right? So, in the beginning, it's of course we're going to get pretty rubbish videos because there's low numbers. Now we're getting, you know, good growth and good numbers. The videos are getting better. So, our focus is also on that in the short and long term, I think, this year. I think the power comes from the community, like Chris said. And the more we expand to it and we care about them, with trainings or with Connecting features or with pop-up restaurants or this type of event. You know, as they get together, they bring their friends over. It's like a big party and everyone's invited. Retail, you're not invited. Retail, yeah, exactly. Retail's not invited. White collar's not invited. If you haven't worked on the floors of a kitchen, you're not invited. Let's not say big words, you know. It is for now. I think it's great to have this hospitality focus everywhere, in the product, in the business, in the market. Even when you're talking about your user behavior or overall experience, you always consider the hospitality needs and hospitality problems. And I think that's why Ketchup will be really a deep solution for all these recruiting or talent management problems within the industry. So, thank you guys. One last maybe comment from both of you about this journey, about this business or about your, I don't know, motivation in general? I think this is a project very close to both of our hearts. For me, it's something that I would have used as an up-and-coming job seeker and then later on as an employer. So, it's really for the peers within the industry. And maybe for the first ten people that hear this podcast, come and join us for a drink at Milo Bar later on in the month. Okay. If in fact we get ten people. Everyone, listen to this. The first ten. Yes, so our motivation is like, you know, we were talking earlier about people getting jobs. I mean, that's great. That's really what it's about. Without getting all sort of soft and furious, it's a nice feeling. You know, when you see a nice, a good video that they apply to a job and then they get the job, that's a good feeling. And I think Murat has a nice story. Maybe you can finish on that. Yeah, about the craft kitchen story. Exactly. I mean, during the pandemic, when I owned and operated a niche fine dining Mexican restaurant. Wow. I like to say. It's a great niche. Sounds right. Exactly. It was extremely hard for us to find the kitchen staff, actually. I mean, we had found the chef, but then he needed about three, four more people, you know, to work and a And during the pandemic, it was impossible. No job platform was any use to us. It took us maybe two and a half, three months just to get the kitchen staff going, just to get them going. Because, you know, obviously you can find the chef, but that's not enough. You cannot run the entirety of the operation. So we were in the kitchen at points, you know, with my partners, et cetera. But obviously that took away the fine dining aspect while we were in the kitchen. But, you know, just like Chris did over the years, I literally experienced that myself. And that really resonated with me, with this project. And on top of it, I think another aspect for me, my final comment would be that, you know, being born in Istanbul, living in Turkey, et cetera, I know there's huge talent, especially inside the kitchen. You know, we know, Turkish people know how to cook. I'm sure they know how to cook good food. And there's a great, you know, there are great opportunities globally for these Turkish chefs to go out and be a bit more nomadic, experience the world, you know, taste new spices, taste new kitchens, et cetera. So if we're going to be an enabler for that, you know, lucky us, because those people deserve to go out and about and experience this new taste and then bring them back over or set up a Turkish, maybe set up a Turkish restaurant in India, for example, or in Vietnam or, you know, in Latin America, you know. If we can give them this, you know, worldly experience, then lucky us. Yeah, it gives enormous opportunities to everyone actually. It's a springboard. I mean, that's what we're doing, you know, providing a springboard for them through our network and our team, so. Thank you, guys. It was a lovely chat. Thank you so much. So happy to be with you. And good luck with your journey. Thank you. Thank you very much. First 10. Barak's got a lovely story related to that. Tell them the Ego story, man. Yeah, I mean, it was lovely over the summer when we go to this coffee shop before we do our, you know, coastline walks with my girlfriend. I just hop into the cafe and the owner shows up and says, hey, Mr. Barak, how are you? I'm like, the usual, my guest, the Americano. He's like, let us have Begum Gibi, the Americano. I'm like, who's Begum? He's like, oh, we hired her through Capshaws, actually. I'm like, really? And then she shows up with a coffee in her hand, says thank you to me, found this lovely job. I've been here for two months. And that was just the feeling, you know, the accomplishment feeling, actually, that gets to you because you know that someone was able to find a job through this, and now they're happy and they've been working there for a few months. Yeah, that's a great story, man. Hi, sweet Barak. You've got a lovely story related to that, mate. Tell them, or tell us the Ego story again. Yeah, so there's this nice cafe in Anutka in Istanbul called A Bit of Ego, where I pick up my, you know, usual coffee before I do my morning walks. And then, you know, a few months ago when I went there, the owner shows up and says, hey, Mr. Barak, how are you? I'm like, I'm great, like the usual, I'm a guest. And then he says, you know, let us, let Begum serve you that coffee of yours. I'm like, oh, who's Begum? He's like, oh, she's one of the hires we made through Capshaws. I'm like, oh, really? And then he tells me that, you know, when they posted the barista job, they had about, you know, 15, 20 applicants. And he only watched about three of them and found Begum's video so interesting that ended up hiring her. And then she's been working there for two months now, which really shows that, you know, just with a few applicants, with the value proposition we have, you can find the right talent for the position you're looking for. Yeah, that's a great story, bro. Yeah.