Hi, I’m Yaz, head of growth at Joveo. My journey has been driven by curiosity and the willingness to admit when I don’t know something – which is tougher than it sounds.
When Oracle hired me a decade ago to promote HR services in the “cloud,” I was excited to evangelize the new hot tech, but I had one problem: zero experience in enterprise technology. I had just spent the past five years running a recruitment advertising agency! Using only my background in talent attraction and experience delivering HR services, I needed to convince Fortune 500 companies to embrace a technology that was new to both them and me.
Curiosity Beats Expertise, Most of the Time
I had two choices: fake it till I made it, or get comfortable with not knowing.
I chose curiosity. But curiosity only works if you’re willing to admit ignorance. If you can’t handle saying “I don’t understand this, help me,” learning becomes almost impossible. Instead of faking it, I leaned into my curiosity. Acknowledging my ignorance became a superpower, helping me build trust and foster learning in environments where I was often the least technical person. Turns out that discomfort at Oracle taught me something I use every day at Joveo.
Where We Are In The Adoption Curve
At Joveo, growth has a clear meaning: it’s about where we are on our journey and what we’re creating.
We’ve had fantastic success with innovators and early adopters who recognized the transformative potential of AI and automation in talent acquisition. Now we’re trying to capture the early majority. That’s our current definition of growth – getting those next customers to believe in what we’re building, and doing it as quickly as possible.
This next wave of customers need proof and reassurance from their peers before taking the leap.
Our Customers Tell Our Story Better Than We Can
The best way to reach this early majority? Let our customers share their stories.
When Fortune 100 companies and global staffing firms explain how our platform transformed their hiring processes, it resonates far more than any marketing pitch. One of the driving factors behind my decision to join Joveo was a customer testimonial video where a client said, “Working with Joveo is a dream.”
Their success stories build credibility and foster a community of believers, propelling our growth.
Transparency Builds Trust, Trust Drives Growth
Why are our customers so willing to advocate for us? It’s all about transparency.
At Joveo, we believe that trust stems from truth. Our clients deserve better than sending their money into a black hole. We ensure they know exactly how their investments are performing, where their best candidates come from, and whether they are applying the most cutting-edge technology.
Lack of visibility breeds skepticism. We understand the frustration of not knowing the ROI on hiring efforts, and we’re committed to changing that.
What We’re Building
What gets me excited about Joveo’s future? That the tech we are building gives agency back to both candidates and recruiters.
For candidates, that means real visibility into their application status through conversational AI, answering their questions in real time.
For recruiters, we’re narrowing the gap dramatically between the right people and the right jobs, while automating repetitive tasks. This allows recruiters to focus on treating every candidate with the respect they deserve – whether for an hourly role or a senior executive position.
The Future is Creative and Human-Centric
People worry about AI replacing human jobs. I think they’re looking at it backwards.
The future of work is going to be about creativity, imagination, and all those uniquely human things machines struggle with. AI copies and reproduces – even when it creates art or music, it’s derivative of something that came before it. Originality and warmth are our superpowers.
As machines take over the repeatable tasks (and good riddance), more of us will migrate toward work that requires human ingenuity. That’s not a downgrade but the upgrade we’ve been waiting for.
Building the next stage
Right now, we’re focused on capturing that early majority through customer success stories and transparent partnerships. But ask me again in a year, and I’ll be talking about the next stage of the adoption curve.
This is the moment – our next wave of clients will benefit tremendously from a pace of innovation that accrues to them. We’re building what I call the new playbook for talent acquisition, showcasing how AI and automation can enhance the hiring experience for everyone. If we continue to get this right, it won’t be just our customers talking about us!
Curious what the rest of our leaders have to say? Explore the full series on YouTube.
Video Transcript
Jennifer: Here with Yaz, Head of Growth. You have 20+ years driving revenue, strategy, and operations. Global roles at orgs across North America, Asia, and Europe. Thought leadership in AI, in HR and the future of work. And roles at Accenture and Oracle. We’re going to talk a little bit about fueling growth, and expansion, and redefining what growth looks like in HR tech.
Yaz: I’m excited to do it.
Jennifer: Yeah, excited to have that conversation with you. You’ve had a remarkable career, from strategy at Oracle to innovation leadership at Accenture. What have been some of your defining moments in your journey that shaped how you approach growth and leadership today?
Yaz: I would say the first word that comes to mind is curiosity. I joined Oracle after having been in a recruitment marketing advertising agency for a number of years. Had never worked in enterprise software in my life. And my familiarity with technology was not terribly deep. So coming to a role where I not only have to learn fast, but also a huge part of my job was to evangelize, what at that time, was the hot new technology, cloud technology. So for me, curiosity was the driver. If I didn’t have that, I think I would have drowned. Its curiosity and also not being too embarrassed to admit that you have a deep level of ignorance, because they go hand in hand. If you can’t handle admitting that you don’t know something, it makes it even harder to learn.
Jennifer: Yeah, I would agree with that. I’m a definitely help person. “Help! I don’t understand this!” At Joveo, you’re leading strategic growth during a time of rapid change in talent acquisition. What does growth mean to you in this context, and how are you pursuing it?
Yaz: I think it means different things depending on the maturity of the organization that you’re in. But I also think it depends a lot on what it is that you’re building or making or trying to sell. And for us, because we’re now operating in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning and automation, a lot of what we’re talking about is new. And over the past several years, like in any natural adoption cycle, we’ve had tremendous success with early adopters, the innovators, the early adopters. And now on that famous chart, we’re looking for the early majority. And so I think for this moment, our definition of growth is capturing that early majority, doing it as quickly as possible. And the best way to do it, and in this sense, we’re very lucky. We’ve created our own luck, is we wanna do it not just by telling our story ourselves, but having our customers tell our story. And that’s what’s really exciting, that if we can get the huge Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, the giant global staffing firms with whom we work, to share how their success is being driven by the innovations that we are delivering for them, that’s gonna only help us drive that growth and capture that early majority. So for me, that’s the current definition of growth. You talk to me again in a year or two, and we’ll be talking about the next part of that graph.
Jennifer: All right, we’ll be, we’ll be doing that. Wanna see the next part of the graph. With your background in AI and HR, and your experience advising organizations on the future of work, how do you see technology transforming recruitment in the next few years?
Yaz: Well, I think the biggest two advances that I’m excited about, both as an employer who hires, but also as a job seeker, hopefully not too often in my career, but we’re all eventually job seekers, is delivering greater agency to candidates, giving them more empowerment through technology, deeper visibility. Hey, what happened to my application? What do I have to do next? And am I prepared? I think there’s a huge opportunity in technology to make the candidate experience a hundred times better, a hundred times more powerful, giving them that agency. That’s on the one hand. And doing that, by the way, through tools, having them be able to interact with an employer through a conversational AI agent that knows everything about their application. Why not just ask and get an answer? Hey, what’s happening next? The other area is on the employer side. I think recruiters for any role, whether it’s an hourly role, an entry-level role, all the way up to senior executive, eventually should be freed up time-wise that they can treat every candidate as if they worked in an executive search firm. Because all the mundane, repeatable tasks have been automated. All the things that are a time suck for them have been parsed out to an agent so that they can focus on treating a candidate like a human being who deserves dignity and deserves to be given all the same advantages that someone who makes several hundred thousand dollars a year gets when they are working with some of the, you know, famous executive search and selection firms. I think that’s an exciting thing for both candidates and for employers. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Joveo is focused on simplifying advertising and improving transparency for employers and agencies.
Jennifer: How does your global experience inform your approach to solving these universal challenges?
Yaz: When you think about transparency yourself, or when I do, I always think about if I know the truth, I can trust. That’s it. And there’s, you know, a thousand cliches that we all know that trustworthy systems, trustworthy businesses are more successful. So for me, what is very motivating about our ethos around transparency is we want all of our customers, all of our clients, anyone who interacts with us to know the truth. If they know the truth of how their money is being spent, if they know the truth about where their best candidates come from, if they know the truth that they have the best possible technology, that they have the most up-to-date automation, their trust goes up. And in any business, if you want to maintain customers for life, you have to maintain their trust. So to me, the transparency and trust go hand in hand.
Jennifer: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think sitting in the practitioner seat and trying to figure out where my dollars were going, where was the best ROI, what channel produced the best results based on an actual hire, butt on seat, right, having that transparency was hard to come by. So companies like Joveo, or Joveo, I think, is one of the only ones that has that transparency lever. So it’s pretty cool what we do every single day. I agree. You are deeply committed to nurturing talent and promoting diversity. What advice would you give to emerging leaders looking to make a meaningful impact in their careers and organizations?
Yaz: I think the first thing I can think of is to not be afraid to speak up, but also speak out. And what I mean by that is diversity comes in a thousand flavors. And I know there’s a lot of noise today, and especially in the US around what that means, but whether it’s diversity based on national origin or creed or sexuality or whatever, but there’s also diversity of thought, there’s diversity of experience, there’s economic diversity. There’s, people talk about, in the US, about diversity meaning non-white, non-male. There’s, within white males, a million different types of people. So there’s diversity even within that. And so my point is, speaking up means letting people know how you think. Speaking out means making sure that the voices of others are heard. And I think these two things together, no matter what role you’re in, what level you’re in, that if people know what you stand for and see you standing up for others, these two things together are the traits of a leader. Because anyone who is not confident enough to do that or not strong enough to do that, probably has some work to do in order to achieve that strength and confidence.
Jennifer: Yeah, I would completely agree with that. I love that answer. What’s next for Joveo’s growth journey? What are you most excited about?
Yaz: I, I think that the thing that’s most exciting for me about what we’re trying to do is build believership, build followership. A large part of my role and a lot of my colleagues is to create the new gospel around how to leverage the tools that are available to us in artificial intelligence and machine learning, in automation, in order to make work better, in order to make job search better and improve the experiences for both, like we talked about before. And the exciting part for me is if we can get that gospel right, we’ll start to create believers. And then like I said earlier, those believers, our customers, become the ones who are spreading the word, who are spreading that gospel, so that we can focus on building the amazing things that they’re leveraging while they’re out there telling our story. What you might call in marketing, social proof. To me, that’s really exciting. To get to a place where our work and the problems that we solve for our customers better than anyone else is speaking for us.
Jennifer: No, and the church say amen on that one.
Yaz: Amen.
Jennifer: All right, so before we get into our rapid fire, where can people reach you or contact you? LinkedIn, is that how it’s pronounced? LinkedIn. linkedin.com/in/yazad/ All right, perfect. So rapid fire Q and A, you ready?
Yaz: I’m ready.
Jennifer: Boardroom or classroom, where do you feel the most energized?
Yaz: They feel the same to me. Like for me, because I’m in historically a role of trying to evangelize things and tell our story, the boardroom for me is a classroom. But instead of being the student, hopefully my colleagues and I are busy educating and evangelizing and trying to help our customers solve their problems. So in that sense, I think the boardroom and the classroom kind of are the same thing.
Jennifer: All right, yeah, they are. I mean, you learn, right? You grow in each environment, do some teaching, you know or provide inputs. All right, a piece of tech changing the game right now.
Yaz: There’s a company that I’m fascinated by. It’s not in our space, but I think it’s in every space. It’s a pervasive model that they have, which is Palantir. So Palantir is a company that operates in artificial intelligence, and it has a product, I think it’s called Foundry. And when a company installs Foundry in their technology architecture, it’s basically looking at every single thing they do, seeking opportunities for efficiency and automation, providing insights based on what it has found, all the data, but also the activity that it identifies, and then makes recommendations on how to do that better, and is able to deploy that. To me, that’s extremely exciting because it’s exactly what we’re trying to do at Joveo for our clients, but within the realm of talent acquisition, that let us come in, identify, through our systems and our platform, everything that can be optimized, that can be automated, that can deliver a better recruiter experience, a better candidate experience. Let the data we discover, identify the right insights and the recommended actions, and let’s take those actions together with our customer. So to me, Palantir and Foundry are like a big inspiration because what they’re trying to do for the enterprise and for governments around the world is exactly what we are trying to do for talent acquisition.
Jennifer: Right, I’ve never heard of the company until you just said it, so yeah, I’m definitely gonna check it out. It’s a fascinating company.
Yaz: Governments around the world, some of the biggest companies in the world are using Palantir. It’s incredible, some of the stuff that they’re doing.
Jennifer: All right, I’m checking it out. Favorite global city to live or work?
Yaz: That’s a rhetorical question because it’s New York City.
Jennifer: New York City. All right, one word to describe the future of work.
Yaz: I think the future of work is going to be about creativity. I like creativity. I think people sometimes say if the future is going to be where humans don’t have to do anything anymore, are we gonna turn out to be like, do you remember the movie Wall E? Yeah. Okay, in the movie Wall E, everyone is gigantically obese and sits getting a sun tan all day on their cruise spaceship or whatever because everything’s done for them. I don’t think that’s the future of work. I think the future of work is that all of us will start to migrate into jobs that require high levels of creativity, human ingenuity. These two things so far, no one is saying will be run by AI. AI copies, it reproduces. Even whether you ask it to do a rendering of an art piece or a piece of music or a poem, it’s derivative every single time. Originality so far isn’t the hallmark of AI. That’s the hallmark of humans. So to me, the future of work is going to be about creativity.
Jennifer: I like that word and yeah, you’re so right. Love it, thank you, Yaz, for your time.
Yaz: Thank you, Jennifer. Appreciate it.
