David Webb: Applicant Tracking Systems with BrightMove

Are you looking for a recruiting system that won't fail you?

David Webb is the Founder and CEO Of BrightMove, an innovative cloud-based recruiting software.

It is the leading ATS (Applicant Tracking System) in the country and is one of the fastest-growing hiring and recruiting software’s in the current employment industry.

David and his team built the BrightMove software from scratch in 2005 after discovering an opportunity in the business market and thus the company was born.

BrightMove has made business easier by relieving some of the stress off of the hiring process. With this program, you can search for talent from any site from a single web-based portal, send text messages to candidates and contacts directly from the database, directly view a candidate’s social profile information, and much more.

Learn more about how BrightMove can expand your company by listening to this episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur above and don’t forget to subscribe on  Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – Spotify –Google Play –Castbox – TuneIn – RSS.

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0:00
Welcome to the thoughtful entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, founder and CEO of up my influence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, where I'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go. Right, and David Webb, you are the CEO of BrightMove, which is just up the road for me in St. Augustine, which is probably one of the most fun places to visit. I love to go there. My kids get a little bored. But man I love walking up and down all the cool shops and stuff that they have their beautiful beaches. You've got history, lots of history there. A beautiful town oldest town in America. Is that right?

1:03
That's That's correct. Yeah, we love it. It's a it's a great place to visit if you haven't ever been there's, if you if you like American history or or even pre American history, there's lots for everybody here. It's great little place to be.

1:16
So you started bright move there in St. Augustine and bright move you guys are in the recruiting space and you've created a recruiting platform and can you kind of explain what it does generally,

1:32
yeah, BrightMove falls into a category of software called an applicant tracking system. And for for those of you guys that don't have five hours for the real detailed explanation on that specialize on when someone needs to find someone for a job. We publish that job to the world via the internet. And we manage the influx of hundreds or thousands of candidates that comment to that job to apply for it and then help the person doing the filtering down to the top candidates so that they can most effectively and efficiently hire the best person and retain the best person for that job. And there's a lot of technology behind the scenes that makes that makes that happen. But that's what we're really good at. And that's what we've, that's what we kind of love to do. So that's what BrightMove is about.

2:19
So when BrightMove was started, I mean, you were already a developer, right? So it's, so you're also the founder of pro wave consulting, and did tell me the kind of the quick origin story of BrightMove. I mean, this was basically just a solution to a problem. You guys were already just doing development and bright move kind of became a thing.

2:41
Yeah, it just it it. It was just kind of left standing at the end of the whole 2007-2008, you know, economic crisis that we all went through. But yeah, just the quick story is that I'm a software developer by trade. I went to the University North Florida and Jacksonville and have a degree in computer information systems. And I went from a consultant doing programming for Fortune 100 companies to starting my own staffing company. And bright move came as a way to kind of solve problems that we saw in the in the ATS space back in the early 2000s. When we are we're running our own staffing company.

3:24
Wow. So and- and just so folks understand, I mean, BrightMove. You guys have some pretty decent market penetration.

3:32
We do you know, it's- it's taken a long time and we've grown and organically but the good news is there's still just two of us that are in the company and we make all the decisions and we decide the cool features that go into it. But it wasn't always easy. We were persistent. We We We did what we said we were going to do we gain trust and we built trust with our customers and then we asked for references and and that was really kind of the the recipe to success for For us growing as a small company with no funding into the company that we are today,

4:03
yeah. So how did you get your first handful of clients day?

4:07
So, my business partner, Jimmy, his wife, had worked for the Shands hospital system up in Jacksonville. And they were still using folders and filing cabinets for their hiring effort. Oh, gosh. Yeah, they were they were really happy to see us when we rent when we pulled up, you know, with version one, a bright movement, you probably wouldn't even give it to your worst enemy today, if you'd have seen what it looked like. But they were happy to see it. And we naively thought that we had the next best big thing and it was just going to take off and it didn't take off. But it gave us some market validation and, and some great name recognition that we were able to slowly build off of overtime.

4:42
So you- you worked in work, you finally, finally landed a good client. And then so then once you had them, what was your next step?

4:54
We we hired one salesperson to try to help us you know, find more friends. clients, we focused on organic search engine optimization back in the day before SEO is had even been coined as a term. And we just did demos of our software, there's nobody we wouldn't talk to, there was no deal too small that we would entertain. And as, you know, other companies in our space just kind of discarded, you know, maybe startups kind of like ourselves, we picked them up and embrace them and and help them. Some of our customers from the early days that started off with one or two recruiters now have large, you know, probably eight-figure a year in revenue firms with 25 recruiters and they've been using bright move since day one. So I think amazing that kind of gives us some satisfaction at the end of the day that we're doing the right thing.

5:45
You know, we went to the Inc two Inc 5000 conference in 2017. I was pretty shocked and surprised like how many recruiting agencies are out there that it's apparently it's it's, it's can be if you do it right, apparently can be a good line of work.

6:04
Yeah, you know, there's, you know, humans are the, they're at the center of the economy, right? There's, there's jobs to do. And you know, people ask me, you know, well, you know, things are going to get automated people aren't going to need to be hired anymore. And that's just not true automation frees up you know, budget and positions for other skill sets, but it doesn't you know, negate the need for human capital human capital is, is here to stay for as long as you and I are going to be around

6:36
now was in terms of client acquisition when you hired your first salesperson, was it pretty much just cold calling was?

6:46
Yeah, you know, it's funny looking back now because I don't I don't think we paid him enough. And he's just, he's one he's a he's a friend to this day, even though he's not with the company anymore, but he His passion was umpiring high school baseball and he didn't care. We paid him as long as we let him leave two days a week to go to go to baseball games. Yeah. But yeah, Scott Scott would just dial the old fashioned way. Just remember, again, we're in the we're in the paint off the phone numbers. Yeah. How easy is it to sell to recruiters. It's a it's probably the hardest thing ever.

7:25
Everybody you're talking to is a negotiator. And

7:29
all they do all day long is, is sell. And if you think about recruiting, recruiting in itself is such a hard job because you have to sales to make every time you have to sell the candidate to take the job and then you have to sell the hiring manager to hire your candidate. That's right. Yeah, like twice as many variables. There's twice as many ways that can go wrong. So it's a tough crowd, but we love them and we understand them and when they when they really take the time to talk to some of our biz dev guys that we have today who all have staffing background They realized that we're an ATS company that understands what their day to day job looks like, and that we're there to help them be more productive. And at the end of the day, if we don't make their job easier, why? What tool Do you need to buy that doesn't make your job easier by using it. And that's minimum last be there.

8:16
I mean, that's a general idea. So So what makes bright move better than say, a, what might be perceived as a competitor?

8:26
For the most part, our market is pretty commodity. Right? Um, and we're okay with that. And we acknowledge it. And so we differentiate ourselves in the ways that we can, number one is customer service. We just want our third Stevie award we got another international silver for for customer support. And we're in the company of Intuit and and other companies like that, that are just you know, way bigger than ours. So now that we don't have bots, we don't have outsource customer service when you call us offices in St. Augustine or Denver. And then our software is fast, our average response time for request is about 25 milliseconds. And it takes 250 milliseconds about to blink. So to say that you're not going to spend time waiting on your resume search results to come back as an as an understatement because we love technology, and we love solving problems. And we also like winning and being fast. And that's kind of that's in our DNA when we write when we run. That's great.

9:28
That's great. So- So David, David Webb, you're the CEO of BrightMove. You're on the web at Bright Move.com. Serving the recruiting space with and what is at S stands for applicant tracking system. Terrific. Terrific. Yeah. Again over at bright move.com. David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

9:50
Appreciate it.

9:52
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