Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program. The accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we wouldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the show, we have the Co-founder and CEO with Juvo Jobs, Mark Emery, welcome.

Mark Emery: Hey, thank you very much, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Jeuveau jobs. How are you serving folks?

Mark Emery: Sure. And thanks a lot for having us. We’re excited. So Juvo Jobs is a mobile application that when you are in the throes of looking for work or not happy with the current job that you have, you download the Juvo Job app, create a profile, and we’ll actually show you jobs in your immediate vicinity. Or if you’re traversing through town, if you’re on your way to work and you’ve got a long commute, you’re having, you know, commute issues, you just open the app and you can see work right around you. So it’s it’s geography first. And then once you tell us what type of work that you’re looking for, pay rates, so on and so forth, we help connect you with work in your immediate vicinities.

Lee Kantor: And what’s an example of the kind of work that you all have on your platform?

Mark Emery: So we have hundreds of thousands of of jobs all across the country. Primarily, I would say they’re all under $80,000 a year, although we do have some in the healthcare world, nursing and so on and so forth. That might be above that. But I would say, you know, under $100,000 a year jobs.

Lee Kantor: And are these jobs that person could kind of go in and learn pretty quickly, like it doesn’t require a lot of training.

Mark Emery: Yes. Obviously, if there’s, you know, the higher the pay range, typically there’s more specific information necessary, whether it’s education or training or some type of experience. But we do have all kinds of different types of jobs, ranging from restaurants, hotels through healthcare, leasing for apartment complexes, specialty HVAC, all the above.

Lee Kantor: And then when a person like, how are you doing? It’s a two sided marketplace, right? You have the employers on one side and the potential employees, the workers on the other side. So how does it work? If I’m a worker, if I just click on a job and I got the job, or is this a now I have an interview for the job.

Mark Emery: Yeah. Juvo connects you with the employer. So one of the things that we realize is geography especially we’ll use Atlanta. We’re both here in Atlanta is is very important. You can you can work five miles away, but it could take you an hour to get there depending on on the commute. So what jumbo does is really try to identify work within your immediate location. And then we encourage you to do a video introduction, which the employer will see. That gives you an opportunity to kind of showcase your personality and talk a little bit about how you’re different, more than just a typical application and or resume. However, we do capture all that profile information, if you will, and share that with the employer as well as your video.

Lee Kantor: So is that something? If I go on and there’s three opportunities, I have to do that three times. And then the next day I go on. Or next week I go on. I have to do it again three times.

Mark Emery: Nope. You create one profile. Um, and or one video. And through that video, you’re actually you can scroll through and look at multiple questions and decide which two questions you want to answer. And you’ve got about 15 to 20s to answer each one of those questions. But no, it’s it’s one profile. And we’ll share that with, uh, the multiple employers that you ask us to connect you with.

Lee Kantor: And then how how are you like, what’s the difference between this and, say, a job board or something where you, you know, put your name in the hat and you’re in a portal and then it sends it out to a bunch of places.

Mark Emery: Yeah. I appreciate you asking. So number one, we just don’t send your information out. You request to be connected. Now. We will push those jobs to you. So one of the things that Juvo did very differently was we do not expect our job seekers to come to our website or come to the app all the time and look for work. You can come there once. Create your profile one time and then tell us what type of work that you’re looking for, or how far away you want us to look for jobs for you. And then we’ll push notifications to you about the opportunities that you pass that day, or earlier that week, or what’s in your immediate vicinity. Now, obviously, you can go on and look at it. Um, but it’s it’s very, very different. Um, we don’t like I said, we don’t expect you to fill out an application or a resume per connection request. Inevitably, our job and we feel very passionate about this is to give you the best opportunity to get an interview. You do not work for jeuveau. We do show you their W2 jobs, um, from all these different employers. It’s not like you’re trying to find a gig, um, job or anything like that, but it’s W2 work both full time and part time, and our job is to try to help you get the best opportunity to show your personality and tell that employer why they should interview you.

Lee Kantor: Now, since it’s a two sided marketplace, is there a fee for both sides or is it just the employer pays?

Mark Emery: Yeah. No no no no there’s no fees for job seekers at all. At any point in time. There’s no ads in the app. We’re not trying to upsell any of those kind of things. That is not uh, no, our our business is just to help connect you with work opportunities in your immediate vicinity.

Lee Kantor: So now, what advice do you have for job seekers out there right now that are kind of struggling to find the right opportunity? Like, what’s the best way to leverage Jeuveau?

Mark Emery: Well, first thing I always tell people is it’s always easier to find a job when you have a job. Um, so and there’s a lot of people who are not happy in their current roles, um, or looking for a higher paying work opportunity or, you know, in a lot of cases with us, something that they don’t have such a long commute for. So, um, we always say, first of all, get a job. Uh, second of all, try to find a better job at whatever point that it’s necessary for you. We also have a lot of our job seekers who work multiple jobs. Uh, because they may have, you know, pick up for hours here. Um, on a weekly basis. I work for this company. That’s my primary, that I work 15 hours a week. You know, you mentioned your sponsor, Kennesaw State. We have, um, hundreds and hundreds. And I don’t know what the numbers are of, um, students who look for work around campus during, you know, whatever days that they’re on campus and are in class, and they may live 15 miles away and want to work when they’re not having to go to campus, find a job close to where they currently live. So, um, again, we’re all about trying to be convenient and helpful to the job seeker.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, as you probably know, I interview a lot of business owners all over Atlanta and all over the country. And, um, and, you know, talent acquisition and reliable talent is usually on the top of their to do list. And the things that keep, uh, typical business person up at night. Um, what would you say to maybe a franchisor or a franchisee in a local market? Um, how should they at least consider leveraging, um, jeuveau? Because I would imagine this solves one of their biggest headaches. Yeah.

Mark Emery: So there’s a couple of components to it. And I’ve been around the block and in the business for, uh, many decades. Uh, and I’ve had millions of people get hired through our technology. Um, you know, I would say to employers, first of all, be human. Um, in today’s world, with AI and everything else, it’s easy to throw yet another tool, um, in front of job seekers when the reality is a resume or an application does not meet your customer service needs, it does not ring the register, uh, in terms of servicing your customers. So I would I would always encourage employers to really try to, um, understand the people and be flexible with the people that they want to hire because there is a tremendous amount of good willing talent out there. You just have to be able to be flexible with it and run your business around it. You know, a lot of people all the time are saying, well, this is the way I do things. Well that’s fine. Um, the workforce today requires a little bit more flexibility. And, you know, we should strongly suggest you do that now with jumbo and employers A lot of times commute creates a lot of problems. People showing up late. Uh, I got stuck in traffic. So we really take proximity very seriously. And that’s one of the primary things on our app that we utilize is finding talent local to your business. If you got to be there, they need to be there.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, you’ve mentioned several times proximity and the importance of proximity. Um, when looking for employers, looking for workers and for workers looking for opportunities, how did you kind of land on that as being really a key point of differentiating a key point of differentiation for Jeuveau, and you’re really emphasizing it in your, um, kind of value proposition.

Mark Emery: So the reality is, my last technology company, we had millions of people get hired through it all around the country from thousands and tens of thousands of employers and in my own household. My youngest daughter was driving almost 14 miles to go to work on a Sunday morning, and she would get home early because she worked in a breakfast place and it wasn’t busy. And I said to her, I said, you put more money into your gas tank than you going to and from work for that two hours that you were there. And we got in the car and we drove between here and her employer, and there were like 13 different restaurants that were closer to where, where she lived to home, where she would have spent less money, less time on gas, getting there and then working with hundreds of thousands of employers. We always hear, oh, well, I’ve got a I’ve got these screening tools and I have all these things and keyword search and now AI in place. And I always say to someone, well, let’s assume that you used all those screening tools. Let’s say that you’ve gotten through that whole process. You’ve actually got that person on the phone, you did an interview and you love them. It’s a $18 an hour job, $17 an hour job, and you think they’re a perfect fit. I have one more piece of information for you. So first of all, would you hire them? And 90% of the time they say, absolutely. You know, barring a bad background check or something, I say, here’s one more piece of information. They live 15 miles from your place of employment, and almost 100% of the time there’s this long pause and they go, no, that’s not going to work. So in reality, that is the most important thing. Almost every time when you talk to an employer, it’s location first. So that’s where we decided to focus first. Secondly, it was the video personality matters. The what we’re looking for in people matters, and we’ve tried to bring that human element back to the back to the process.

Lee Kantor: So when you’re talking to your. So let’s get into kind of the ideal fit for you when you’re looking for, um, the people to use jeuveau and I’m sure, you know, getting all the individual mom and pops that, that makes a lot of sense. But if you’re going for, uh, franchisees or groups or organizations have multiple units, how who who is kind of your ideal client in regards to that when it comes to somebody who is a multi unit, um, company or has a has multiple offices, what what’s the avatar for you for an ideal client.

Mark Emery: So really any location based business, um, is an ideal client for us. We go to market primarily through partnerships, where we’re integrated into a lot of technologies that that those employers already use, for example, payroll systems. Um, but when an employer is looking to come to us directly, obviously the more locations they have, the more we can be helpful. Um, our typical employer isn’t somebody who’s got 3000 employees in one location only. Um, you know, we work with organizations. You had mentioned the franchisors or franchisees that have tens, hundreds, thousands of locations around the country. That’s really where we’re able to be extremely effective, not just for the employer, but for the for the job seekers and the people in those communities who might not know that the that a particular employer or job opportunity is one block off of Main Street, because when you go to a job board, you start searching, you. Scroll page after page after page. And they’ll show you. They’ll tell you, hey, this job is five miles away. Five miles or within the zip code. Well, in Atlanta, the zip code of Dunwoody is the same as the same zip code as Stone mountain. In some instances, that could be two hours in the car.

Lee Kantor: Now, you talk about the importance of partners. Um, who are the ideal partners for you?

Mark Emery: So we work a lot, um, on the the job seeker side. We work a lot with organizations like Kennesaw State, um, for profit universities, uh, community schools. We work a lot within, um, the counties like City of Atlanta is a great example. We do a lot of work with, um, the school system there as well as, um, apartment complexes. The number one reason that somebody leaves one apartment and goes and rents from another apartment across town is because of work. It’s almost 50% of the reason that there’s apartment turnover. So we work a tremendous amount with apartments to say, look, keep your people local, help them pay rent. And we’ve had we’ve got story after story after story of success stories on helping those apartment ownership groups lower the late rent notices and increase the retention on their apartments.

Lee Kantor: So buy the apartment then can offer like, hey, here’s a heads up, here’s these places are hiring just that are nearby.

Mark Emery: Yep.

Lee Kantor: That’s a that’s a super clever way of, um, being sticky in your brand, in their, in their business making keeping their client the clients client happy.

Mark Emery: Well. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: Um.

Mark Emery: And then we try to be. We’re very much a common sense. Um, which obviously is.

Lee Kantor: It’s not always common. That’s right. Well, I think that you’re you’re really kind of looking at it through the lens of, you know, through the people using your service rather than what’s best for my service. So you’re, you’re looking at it through what’s going to be most useful and helpful for them, and then we’ll figure it out.

Mark Emery: Yeah. Another quick example is, uh, you asked about, you know, how are we different than a job board? So we heard all the time employers talking about how nobody reads my job descriptions. I’m wasting my time interviewing people and all these other things. And I realized, okay, well, with video, we help the job seekers. And if nobody reads the job description on a job board, how do you fix that? And they would say, well, I put it in bold and put it at the top that nobody reads. So we just implemented video for the employer side where they can actually tell the person what they’re looking for. Hi, this is Mark. You know, I work here. It’s we’re excited to to to talk with you. You have to work Fridays. You gotta work Saturdays. We work hard. We have a lot of fun. But we’re, you know, we’re a great environment. Now, the job description can be a part of my, for lack of a better term, posting. But what we have found is now employers. Nobody has to read the job description. You can tell them what they have to do.

Lee Kantor: Now how is your company? Um, kind of leveraging AI. I’ve seen some people in the, uh, out there using AI as maybe the first interview where the first interviews with an AI kind of chatbot or an AI avatar, that’s, that’s kind of doing that first pass.

Mark Emery: Yeah. So we use AI more, not as a, for lack of a better term, our service. We use it to be more communicative within our own organization to help us scale. I mean, we’re closing in on over 12 million job seekers on our on our network. Um, so we’re using it internally. We don’t feel that pushing it out in front of the employer or the job seeker today truly adds value. What we’re trying to do is make sure that that employer and that job seeker are able to communicate back and forth to each other in the most efficient way. So AI has a place right now. We don’t feel that it’s in a in a position to truly add value to either side, necessarily, without impeding the process of getting to talk to each other.

Lee Kantor: So now, um, in your growth, you you mentioned kind of, um, launching from Atlanta. Are you in all 50 states or are you nationwide at this point?

Mark Emery: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And have been for for quite a few years.

Lee Kantor: So you’ve been doing this a while and you’re already serving a kind of a lot of, uh, a lot of the United States. And then are you at the point, um, like, where are you kind of in the growth of the company? Obviously it’s not a startup, but are you looking for more funding? Are you like, what are you looking for? And how can we help you?

Mark Emery: Well, to help support the growth we are actually doing, um, an additional, um, capital infusion to the business. Um, you know, our goal, we have a roadmap of micro learnings, you know, with having millions and millions of people on the platform, we know that we can help these individuals with micro learnings by knowing what type of jobs that they’re looking for, knowing what areas that they live in geographically and knowing what employers look for. So we’re going to be building within our ecosystem, of which I mentioned to you, the the apartment stuff, where we’re able to help deliver micro Learnings to say, hey, you know what, Lee? You’ve been on the network, here’s some jobs that you if you take these five, five minute video courses and take a little test, you might get a certification that helps you make 2 or 3 more dollars an hour. Um, you know, Lee, you love your job. Here is daycare options that are available between where you live and the job that you go to. So we’re expanding our ecosystem, if you will, and being able to find additional partners, uh, to help us do that is always, always, um, something on our horizon and something we’re looking for.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned kind of, uh, Kennesaw State University and college students. Um, are you also making this available to high school students? I’ve seen a lot of employers now targeting high school students and giving them a path to employment.

Mark Emery: Uh, without a doubt. You know, the blessing of what we do is that we’re able to help at whatever age or state of life that you’re in. Um, you know, we look at it and go, there’s age, there’s state, and there’s status. You and I might be 25 years difference in age. We might work at the same organization doing somewhat of the same thing. But I might be a young parent with five kids. You might be a single person who’s never been married and is living the dream. So we’re always, um, enjoying the opportunity to go to the high schools, go to the colleges. Uh, demographic we have is the over 60 year olds retirees who want to get back into the market. And when we go to those high schools, a lot of times we’re there at night. And we’ve had high school students bring their parents over because their parents either need another job or a better paying job, or a job that’s closer to to where they live. So they don’t, you know, the kids aren’t home by themselves as much because of the commute. So it is we are blessed to be able to help regardless of age, state, or stage of life.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Mark Emery: So they can go to Juvo Jobs.com. And we have, uh, you know, a contact us button there. Um, on the app, we have multiple ways to communicate, whether it’s through the intercom system within the app or, um, go on ratings. We reply to all ratings. We are always, you know, our email address of support at juvojobs.com, juvo360 is our corporate email address, so we would we’d love to hear from anyone with ideas, specific things. We have a whole department. That’s our what we call seeker support. If we don’t have an employer that you want to work for, you can reach out to us and we have a team who will actually reach out to that employer on your behalf to try to help you get an interview.

Lee Kantor: And that’s juvojobs.com.

Mark Emery: That’s us Juvo Jobs.

Lee Kantor: All right, Mark, well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Mark Emery: Lee. Thank you for taking the time. And we appreciate the efforts that you bring for both the the local community and the business community.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.