Erik Simins | CEO & CoFounder | Workwolf
INTRODUCTION:
Globalization has opened up various career options for the world. No longer are medicine & engineering the most sought careers but there is a range of other careers that students are diverging into. There are institutions which are offering courses which are no longer the one size fits but a cafeteria approach.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION:
Workwolf® is a Toronto-based technology start-up solving two of the biggest problems experienced by the employment market when making new hires: applicant filtration and resume verification. It is the first company to use blockchain in a commercially viable technology platform. They call this technology ‘disruptive’, which means that it could potentially displace many of the systems and business processes that are commonly used today.
Our team is relatively small for our output but has accomplished a lot in our short time together, recognized globally with two international awards for innovation in both 2020 and 2021.
-Erik Simins –CEO & CoFounder
TO ACHIEVE A DREAM, WHAT MATTERS IS THE TEAM
The team at Workwolf® works extremely well together, even though the focus ranges from coding to marketing, to sales, to capital raising, and customer experience. While the office is based in Toronto, the company has team members around the globe with an incredibly diverse and highly effective combination of genders, ethnicities and experience levels.
In the words of the CEO:
‘We trust each other and can count on one another. Each team member is highly specialized in their function be it engineering, design, marketing, or sales. We also are extremely lean, meaning that we do more with less. All start-ups are under-resourced, so we have to be creative in how we solve problems and use our time and resources effectively. We all believe in our North Star wholeheartedly; by improving the truthfulness of the largest data source within the employment market (the resume), we’ll address and hopefully solve many of the biggest problems faced today when hiring talent; candidate misrepresentation, job dissatisfaction, poor productivity and lagging economic output. Workwolf® solves these employer problems by improving the match between employer and employee and by making the hiring process much easier by way of novel technology which increases transparency. Our teams also have a lot of fun together and recently I’ve invested deeply in our company culture by purchasing a building a workspace that is built exclusively for creative engagement. Our new offices will be designed in a way that is unique and will look more like a high-end hotel lobby or social club from the outside rather than a traditional office. People don’t have to come to work anymore, so I’m creating a space that they will love to come to because it’s beautiful, makes them feel amazing and valued and is built for productivity, but most importantly they know it’s built for them”.
We’re also very well aligned on what our goals are from quarter to quarter and what our longer-term goals are as an organization.
– Erik Simins –CEO & CoFounder
SERVICES OFFERED:
Workwolf® offers a technology platform for employers that simplifies and improves the recruiting process. Hiring good talent is extremely hard for two main reasons:
1. Resumes are not accurate data sources. More than 60% of resumes have embellished, inaccurate or false claims, yet this is the main data source used in filtering job applicants. This means that organizations are making critical filtration and hiring decisions based on data that is inaccurate more than half the time and this costs companies an outrageous half a trillion-dollars per year. That’s a very expensive mistake, a very big problem and an even tougher one to solve. But we’ve done it.
2. Social and professional networks such as LinkedIn have no authentication policy, so users can put anything they wish on their profiles and 0% of their profiles can be truthful. Believe me, it happens more than you realize.
Workwolf® technology does the following:
i. It deploys a DigitalWorkPassportTM to every applicant who applies to an employer’s job posting. As the employment-centric records of the DigitalWorkPassportTM get authenticated by the credential issuers trusted by enterprise employers today (RCMP, Equifax, TransUnion, Federal Governments, County Courts, previous employers and over 6,600 post-secondary educators), the traditional resume gets a serious upgrade to a new digital resume that is verifiable in real-time, cannot be falsified once authenticated by the verifier and now contains all of the data employers require when making new hires including credentials such as; government IDs, academic records, credit scores, references and confirmed job titles and start & end dates of from previous employers, motor vehicle licenses, licenses, and more.
ii. Then the platform also deploys the first credential to the applicants called the PackfinderTM. This technology is an AI that references 30,000,000 other profiles assessing the match of the applicant’s personality traits to the job function and once the assessment is completed by the applicant, the results are ready within seconds. The output accurately predicts how the applicant will perform in the job that is posted. As the applicants complete the psychometric profiling, their results populate the employer’s dashboard and they’re ranked by ‘fit’ to the requirements of the job. This reduces the recruitment resources required to filter through hundreds of applicant resumes and automates this process almost entirely. As this is the first credential in the DigitalWorkPassportTM, the applicants get to see their results and the report is theirs to keep and repurpose for future applications. It also provides both, the candidate and employer, with excellent insight into innate character traits that will make them successful, scoring their match from 1-5 in 60+ other jobs as well as the one they are applying for. If they’re not a match for the job that they’re applying for, the technology makes recommendations for a better fit, displaying what the ideal jobs are for their personality, where they will be happiest and where they’ll be most successful. Similar assessments to the PackfinderTM would normally cost employers $200-$300 for one applicant right before a job offer is extended. Workwolf® provides it to hundreds of applicants for every job as part of the platform and we do it for free.
iii. If employers have not received enough applicants for their job postings, they can “boost” their job posting through the platform and increase their applicant pool which is called a “pipeline”. This feature typically adds 50%- 100% more applicants to the employer’s pipeline of talent.
iv. As applicants make the shortlist, employers deploy DigitalWorkPassportTM credits to their finalist applicants and because of the patented technology, Workwolf®’s hybrid blockchain helps store and secure the verifiable credentials and queues the data records so that information is available for viewing immediately upon job offer. The way the system has been developed; the records are shared “peer-to-peer”, which means instead of having to wait for a traditional third-party verifier (background checker) to source and relay the credentials to the employers one by one, access to the secure digital repository of credentials can be granted to the employer directly from the candidate. The verifiable credentials maintain their integrity through a blockchain-based permission ledger and the innovative engineering removes the friction and wait time, saving an additional 1-3 weeks in the hiring process in addition to the time saved at the beginning of the process with Workwolf’s PackfinderTM filtering technology.
We’ve identified our ideal customers as organizations that are 30-70 employees deep, that do not have an HR function to manage the hiring process, do not have an Applicant Tracking System and require a constant stream of talent. This is why both Xerox and Desjardin Insurance agencies have found our technology second to none. It solves every one of the hiring challenges that they currently experience. As the Workwolf® ecosystem grows, larger enterprise customers will come on board and our team will continue to integrate our platform with leading HRIS’s and ATS’s expresses, Erik.
From beginning to end, Workwolf’s platform improves the match of the candidate to the job resulting in longer-lasting, better-performing employees, while reducing the time to hire by more than half.
– Erik Simins –CEO & CoFounder
REACHING THE PINNACLE OF SUCCESS:
Workwolf® is unlike any other HR technology in the market today. This is why we’re categorized as “disruptive”. The platform has the potential to change the business process of the entire employment market and hiring as we know it. The Intellectual Property Workwolf® owns, combines both AI and blockchain and uniquely solves all 5 of the employment market’s biggest challenges from the beginning to the end of a hiring cycle. These include reducing the time-to-hire, improving the overall efficiency of the screening process, verifying information, getting better quality data for decision making, and ensuring a positive candidate experience throughout. Ask any employer if they had a choice. Would they spend their time and resources filtering through hundreds of unverified resumes or would they prefer to have a platform that housed only resumes that were already confirmed as legitimate with the ability to verify any credential in real-time? Combine this with the ability to uncover hidden character traits of their applicants at the beginning of the hiring process versus the end, and I bet they would choose the second option, Workwolf®.
The biggest challenge for our company today is that employers don’t know that this technology is available to help them. Once this is recognized in the market, we’ll need to hold on tight!
– Erik Simins –CEO & CoFounder
KNOW THE CEO:
In his own words:
At this point in my career, you’d probably call me a serial entrepreneur. Workwolf® is my 4th company where I work as the co-founder and CEO. Traditional ‘relaxing’ has always been a challenge for me because my mind is always searching for solutions. Over time I realized that to “relax” I need to move “very” fast where I must be 100% present, like when I’m playing competitive sports, doing high-intensity training, boxing or driving very fast. I have a real passion for solving challenging problems and the more experience I have inmy career, the problems just seem to get bigger. I also really enjoy service work, where I can share my experience with others and help them, when all I get in return is to hopefully watch them grow and change for the better.
When I’m with my kids who are 2 and 4, the phone is OFF. I’ve found 15 minutes of dedicated time is better than 2 hours when my mind is somewhere else. I just purchased our first commercial property after one of my other companies, www.magnushrs.com had a very successful 2021. We’ll be moving into the new building in mid-summer 2022 after construction is finished. Until then, our offices are located at 866 The Queensway, Suite 200, Toronto Canada. The best place to reach me is on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/empoweryourpeople/ or our Workwolf® line at 1-888-402-2003.
I have a few principles that I live by when growing and leading my teams.
i. Lead by example; good leadership means the following: the team comes first, the rest will follow.
ii. Align everyone to the company’s business goals and consistently over-communicate these. If anyone on the team is asked at random what the company’s business goals are, she or he should be able to easily answer at any time.
iii. Scrap annual performance reviews and instead have managers provide real-time, ongoing feedback. Annual reviews are not effective. Problems can linger and by the time the year ends, those problems are too big to fix.
iv. Finally, leaders must share wisdom freely, care about others, and always come from a mindset of “how can I help?”. I started my first $1mm company with zero management or leadership experience so I learned through trial and lots of errors. As long as people remain coachable and want to get better at listening and serving others, they’ll find themselves in leadership positions soon enough. People can lead within an organization at any level, as long as they follow the above actions.
WORDS OF WISDOM FOR THE WORLD:
Ideally, I’d like people to feel as if they’ve learned something that they can apply to their lives to make them better, happier and more self-fulfilled. We don’t have a lot of time here, so when you make bad decisions (you’ll make many and you’ll make them often), learn from these mistakes and chart a new course. The best leaders have learned that falling is just as important as getting back up; that’s how you improve. However, only the best leaders get back up, no matter what.
My modus operandi is fairly consistent across the board and goes something like; the only thing stopping you from achieving what is possible is you. Anyone can achieve what I have or greater. It’s often thought that successful people have had opportunities handed to them, they came from a rich family or that they just got lucky. In my case, none of the above was true, well maybe some luck, but don’t we make our own luck by always being prepared? What I’ve accomplished today is because of grit, drive and an insatiable thirst to learn. Self-awareness is essential to know where you fall short. If you don’t look in the mirror, your Belief Systems that could be limiting your success will never come to the surface. Trust me, you have them and just like me, they never go away, so if you don’t deal with them, that “BS” will always show up and the most inopportune time. Maybe the difference is, is that I know what my belief systems are, I can see them coming and I have spent years adapting my behaviour to manage them. Finally, I’m big believer that there is infinite space between stimulus and reaction, this space is your power of choice. The difference between a champion and Mr. Ordinary is that champions know that this space exists, and they make the right choice even when it’s the hardest one to make.
