An Interview with Jason Hutson

Jason Hutson is the CTO/Co-Founder of Fetch , a talent driven hiring platform. He's sporting over 15 years experience in the IT industry and 2 years in the staffing industry, which definitely came in handy.

In this interview with Startup Savant, Jason shares his experience when starting his talent hiring platform. He and his co-founder were finding ways to improve and disrupt the recruitment industry and enhance the hiring experience. So, they developed Fetch. Jason also shares his greatest fear as a business owner and what motivates him to keep going.

His advice to entrepreneurs starting a business:

Do it, try it, no matter what. The chances are, even if you can’t quit your day job to try it, you have hours free each day that you could dedicate to testing your idea.

Find out more about his entrepreneurial journey with Fetch in his interview below. You can get latest updates from Jason by following him on Twitter!

What ignited the spark in you to start a business? When did you know that you had a business on your hands and not just a ‘good idea’? (The ‘Aha!’ moment)

Fetch Founder, Chase Morrow, and myself were working in his second successful & traditional recruiting agency and continued to recognize that even though we were pushing the envelope and moving the needle a little bit by disrupting the flawed recruiting process, it’s still like the Wild Wild West with no accountability or policies around in finding good talent.

Around that same time, about May of 2015, we saw the pendulum swinging towards the talent and they were getting completely fed up with the recruiting process and being bombarded by agency recruiters that knew nothing about the positions or technologies they were recruiting for. We started researching and gathering data from talent & employers and knew the time was ripe to build our talent driven hiring platform.

How did you get Fetch off the ground and what is the biggest piece of advice you’d give our readers if they want to get on the show?

Because of the experience we had in the industry, we knew exactly what holes needed to be filled. From May 2015 through about October 2015, we started tweaking our manual processes to create a Proof of Concept to prove that our matching algorithm and talent driven process would be successful and we immediately started making revenue.

The biggest piece of advice I can give is that; REVENUE solves all problems. I would much rather invest my time and/or money in a business that was making revenue rather than just taking on investments.

As a business owner, what is your greatest fear and how do you keep it under control or harness it?

My greatest fear is failure but failure only exists if you give up, to keep this under control you have to learn how to pivot versus thinking a situation is a failure.

In your experience, what is the best way to find your ideal customer? Are there any mistakes that our readers can learn from?

Fetch has a unique customer acquisition and marketing strategy because our customers are split into Talent & Employers. This makes brand awareness and marketing a little more difficult because we have two separate messages to deliver whether they are Talent or Employer. What others could learn from our process is to find something that is a known pain point for your ideal customer and focus on marketing and they will find you.

In our scenario, because we’re TALENT DRIVEN and the talent knows we’re a safe place they can signup and no one knows they exist until they decide to make the next move. Basically, we’re Tinder for Talent. We deliver great jobs to talent that they’ve matched based off of our algorithm and they can choose whether or not they’re interested in “dating” your company.

Even though we’ve decided to focus on the talent, the employer is not getting left out because they get a better experience and results because of it. They are being delivered better talent than job boards and professional social networking sites.

Who has been your greatest influencer along your entrepreneurial journey? How did they shape Fetch?

Throughout our launch process we were lucky enough to have business/life coaches that have been involved in multi-million dollar mergers & acquisitions that wanted Fetch to be successful and offered priceless suggestions and direction. I would suggest that everyone have a business/life coach or a therapist and even look into meditation.

Have you faced any failures with Fetch? How did you overcome it?

Because of our past experience in the traditional recruitment industry when meeting with companies, they just continued to think we were just another recruiting agency with a pretty bow on it. So, they were slower to adopt our service than what we expected.

The way we battled against this is we hired an HR Ambassador, Concetta Lewis, that has many years experience at the HR level and is a trusted advisor in that industry. Because of that, she’s able to go into a company at a different level and tell them about a cool new hiring tool that will ENHANCE their hiring process.

Where do you see Fetch in the next 5 years? Any new products in development?

We already have Fetch 2.0 in the works and then enough new features queued up to move on to a Fetch 3.0 version. We hope to have partnerships that would add features for employer to make them more attractive to talent and help with their employment brand as well as disrupt the recruiting process and be influential in creating global processes and policies for the recruiting industry as a whole.

Your days no doubt can be pretty crazy. What one thing would you say motivates you to keep pushing forward?

Obviously now that our system is working seamlessly sending matches to talent. The biggest motivation is when either a talent profile is created or an employer posted a new job, the matches will be made. When talent shows interest, he will be connected directly to the hiring manager. They can chat, schedule an interview or make a hire. All within 24 hours!

It’s motivating to see someone's life be changed for the better without involving a long drawn-out process and biased. Outside of Fetch, my motivating factors are all to do for my family.

What was the best piece of advice you have ever gotten from another business owner or someone you admired?

Always stay FOCUSED and BALANCED (those mean different things for different people). Some call it life/work balance. I honor this so much that I got these words tattooed on my forearms. Gary Vaynerchuk also speaks a lot about this balance and how it means different things for different folks.

For me, it means hustle as much as it takes, work as much as possible, sleep later.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who have a business idea but don’t know where to get started?

Do it, try it, no matter what. The chances are, even if you can’t quit your day job to try it, you have hours free each day that you could dedicate to testing your idea out. Instead of watching movies, college football or whatever other hobbies you have, make your idea your hobby if you really are passionate about it.

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