IAM2458 – Co-founder Builds Recruiting Agency to Match Clients’ with the Right Fit of Job Seekers

Kevin Brown

00:00 - 00:24

Sure, well HR Innovate, what we do is we match people looking for jobs with companies. Companies are clients and they call us, they're the ones who pay us. The candidates, people looking for jobs, they don't pay anything. We give them advice, we help them with their digital profile, and we fit them with the best job for them. I think it ends up serving all three parties, the client, the candidate, and HR Innovate.

Intro

00:25 - 00:52

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Grush values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless

00:55 - 01:22

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Kevin Brown of hrinnovate.org. Kevin, it's awesome to have you on the show. It's great to be here, Gresh. No problem, super excited to have you on. And what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Kevin so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And born in the Washington DC metropolitan area with roots in Kentucky and El Salvador, Kevin loves to travel, is drawn to technology and music in his downtime.

Gresham Harkless

01:22 - 02:01

Between 2010 and 2015, Kevin worked as the Associate Peace Corps Director of Peace Corps Costa Rica, where he built a project focused on improving the pedagogical practice of public school teachers in conjunction with the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica. Kevin twice received a scholarship from Georgetown University, Hoya Saxa, in conjunction with the United States Department of State to live and work in Lomi, Togo, West Africa, where he built various projects with the University of Lom, with the assistance of the United States Embassy in Togo. Kevin received a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from Trinity University in Washington, DC in 2006.

Intro

02:02 - 02:03

In his

Gresham Harkless

02:03 - 02:28

next chapter of his adventures, Kevin partnered with his wife to found HR Innovate, a recruiting agency based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Kevin, I appreciate you. I appreciate the bio and everything, but I wanted to kick everything off and ask you if you're ready to speak to the I am CEO community. I'm excited to speak to everyone. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Kevin Brown

02:28 - 02:37

Well, let me say my background is in education and I'm from Washington, D.C. I'm excited to speak to you for that reason, for the DMV. I was born in PG County.

Gresham Harkless

02:38 - 02:38

Okay.

Kevin Brown

02:39 - 03:13

And as such, Salvadoran American, a lot of Salvadorans there. Yeah. So anyway, I've been, I studied at Trinity and I got my degree in education, taught public school in Columbia Heights. And I've just been traveling the world, teaching, building curriculum, Then I got married to this wonderful lady, Katerina Andrea, and I came to Cyprus, which is really off of my life plan, if you know what I mean. I was looking forward to actually working with the Ministry of Education of El Salvador before I came. I don't know if that was going to work out or not, but that's what I was looking at, but I'm in love.

Kevin Brown

03:14 - 03:26

So I came to Cyprus and she had started up her own recruiting agency here. And I joined the team and in the last year we have taken off and it's been an exciting ride.

Gresham Harkless

03:26 - 03:42

Nice. It's funny. Life kind of takes you in different routes and you always plan to do X, Y, and Z, but it'll take you to A, B, and C. Yeah. Yeah. So could you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with HR Innovate? Can you tell us exactly how you're serving the clients you're working with?

Kevin Brown

03:42 - 04:20

Sure, well HR Innovate, what we do is we match people looking for jobs with companies. Companies are clients and they call us, they're the ones who pay us. The candidates, people looking for jobs, they don't pay anything. We give them advice, we help them with their digital profile, and we fit them with the best job for them if we have it, and if we don't, we don't. I think things that we do differently here at HR Innovate is we're very human centered. Me with my background in education and my wife with a background in psychology and human services from the UK, really look at people and try to help them move to the next level of their career, wherever they want to be.

Kevin Brown

04:20 - 04:28

We try to make a really nice fit there. I think it ends up serving all three parties, the client, the candidate and HR Innovate.

Gresham Harkless

04:28 - 04:40

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like anytime you're able to have those kind of win, win, win, environment or win-win-win situations, that's always good. And I feel like that's always when, you know, things really start to move forward and really start to kind of, you know, break ground.

Kevin Brown

04:41 - 04:41

Yeah. Yeah.

Gresham Harkless

04:42 - 04:42

Yeah.

Kevin Brown

04:43 - 05:18

And then my role here at HR Innovate is specifically all around digital media. Uh, I, I call myself the chief of operations, uh, given that it's a small business and we own it, I guess I could call myself anything. And that's, and that said, I've played with the title chief digital officer because I like that. But truly as chief of operations, because I do everything from the Facebook to going to get the coffee and getting the water, facilities management, you name it. We're a small team. And so I got my hands, my sleeves rolled up and my hands into everything around here.

Gresham Harkless

05:19 - 05:43

Well, no, that makes sense. And a lot of times you have to do that. You know, when you're in it, whenever you're kind of building something, I also have my sleeves rolled up as well, too. That was not planned. necessary, you know, in every form, shape or fashion, whenever you're going to work doing your thing. So do you find like there's a lot of kind of, I guess, how has the digital industry kind of affected, you know, your industry specifically?

Kevin Brown

05:44 - 06:16

Well, let me tell you, coming out of Washington, a lot of my friends work in politics, obviously, and a lot of them work in digital media politics, running campaigns. And we used to hang out and have dinner and have drinks or whatever and talk about that. So I've taken some of those strategies with me and put them in my back pocket and applied them to the recruiting agency here in Cyprus. I think, honestly, we've really changed the conversation in Cyprus. I won't call them our competition. I've actually written it down. Our sector colleagues, I

Gresham Harkless

06:16 - 06:16

believe.

Kevin Brown

06:19 - 06:49

I see them kind of following what we do. So I feel like, okay, I'm on the right track. Like if I'm doing this and then our sector colleagues are like, hey, that's a great idea. We should do that too. So when I came to Cypress, people were posting maybe 50, 60 times a week of just the same thing over and over and over. And I came in and just said, you know what, let's get real. Let's get authentic. Let's engage our audience. And we have grown over the last nine, 10 months by on some platforms up to 400, 500%, yeah.

Gresham Harkless

06:50 - 07:16

That's awesome, that's awesome. And I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, I usually ask for what I call your secret sauce, and this might be your secret sauce, but definitely let me know. But I find that when you have kind of like a strong mission or a strong differentiator that you kind of touched on, that human-centered kind of focus, do you feel that kind of, I guess, manifests itself in so many different ways? Like you mentioned the digital media, where you're able to build and engage on maybe a better level because you have such a strong base related to that.

Kevin Brown

07:17 - 07:50

Yeah, that's really it. And when you look at the reviews, for example, on Google reviews, everyone is saying, wow, these people took time to listen to me. And that goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, me coming from education and my wife from psychology. We're not here to make a million dollars. We're not here to be the biggest agency in Cyprus or Europe, although I wouldn't be mad about that. But we're not here to do that. What we're here to do is to be the best. And really, the reason is because this is how we want to participate in society.

Kevin Brown

07:51 - 08:20

We could go to the United Kingdom. We could go back to D.C. We could get jobs with the government. We can do that and we can make plenty of money and pay the rent. That's no problem. But this is what we want to do with life. So we wake up excited and we want to talk to people. And it comes through in the business. And people are very appreciative because we're not doing a hard sales at everyone. We're not pushing people into jobs that they don't want to do to make a quick buck. It doesn't matter if they want it or if they don't want it.

Kevin Brown

08:21 - 08:25

What does matter is if they make the right decision for them at that time in their life.

Gresham Harkless

08:26 - 08:36

That makes perfect sense. And let me ask you this. So people that use the service that you provide, does it matter where they're located? Do they have to be in Cyprus?

Kevin Brown

08:37 - 09:12

They do not have to be in Cyprus. And our clients are not necessarily all in Cyprus. We work mostly within the framework of the European Union. It's easy for people to move back and forth between countries as far as work visas go. I find it interesting with, and I have no idea what's going to happen with Brexit, but there's a lot of just general chatter movement around Brexit because if they leave the European Union, this poses issues that I'm not even certain that I know what they might be. But that being said, we just launched our London number.

Kevin Brown

09:12 - 09:31

We have clients in London. One of our clients, and I won't name them because we like to be very discreet, but they work with the National Health System and they're doing health tech in London. And so we do London recruitment as well as Cyprus recruitment and look forward to hearing from the rest of Europe.

Gresham Harkless

09:31 - 09:39

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Kevin Brown

09:39 - 10:01

I think the biggest thing when my wife and I decided to join forces was to become data driven. So we stopped making emotional decisions, you know, while I love to design personally. And then when I look at something, I innately know if it's pretty or not. but that's not really how we make our core business decisions. Everything we do is data driven.

Gresham Harkless

10:01 - 10:25

No, I love that because a lot of times, you know, you get kind of lost in like the emotional part of sometimes business where you are making decisions based off of that. And I think there always is, of course, like you even mentioned you with your core of your business, there is a place for that, but you also want to make sure that you do and are looking at what actually is moving the needle because that's kind of like what you're in business to do. Now I wanted to ask you, you might have already touched on this for what I call a CEO nugget.

Gresham Harkless

10:25 - 10:31

And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Kevin Brown

10:33 - 11:16

Wow. My CEO advice. Well, I tell you it's, you know, I was thinking this morning and I, and my first words early this morning was, what have you asked me about my competition? And I said to myself, well, they're not really, my competition, right? Because if it's a competition, it's some sort of race, there's a finish line, a prize. There's no finish line here, right? There's no prize. That's where my wife said sector colleagues. But in that, the question becomes, you know, how to stay focused. And that, it's every day. And as a small business, it's not like when I worked for, let's say, the U.S.

Kevin Brown

11:16 - 11:51

Department of Labor, and I got up, I teleworked twice a week, I got up, took the train, went to work, smoked a cigarette, had lunch. It's not like that. This is six, four, five, six in the morning, I'm coding, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 at night, I'm still coding, and this is seven days a week. So how do you stay energized and focused? My wife, Kat, the founder, she just wrote an article about staying healthy, about nutrition, about running. And so it's a great article and you can check that one out. So that's her strategy.

Kevin Brown

11:51 - 12:26

For me, I listened to how I built this on NPR with Guy Raz. It's just what does it for me, right? And I listened to these people, people that I admire, who talk about when they were struggling, when they were just getting started, And that's how I stay focused. So I mean, I think earlier when we set this up, there was a question there, my nugget, and I said, stay authentic, stay focused, it shows. And so for me, that's really what it is. It's just trying to be real, not trying to put on airs about who we are.

Kevin Brown

12:26 - 12:36

We are who we are. You don't have to like us. It'd be awesome if you did. But we're gonna stay us, and we're gonna stay focused, stay the course, and keep going.

Gresham Harkless

12:37 - 12:56

Absolutely. And when you stay, I always say, when you stay your course and you were running your own race, there is no competition, just like you touched on. Cause nobody can run your race like you can. So I love that nugget. And, um, now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have quote unquote, uh, different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So I wanted to ask you, Kevin, what does it mean to you?

Kevin Brown

12:58 - 13:45

What does it mean to me to be a CEO? Well, life really it's for me, it's life. You know, to me, it's everything. I grew up with a family of, I said on Twitter the other day, hustlers. And people thought that was a bad word. But where I'm from, it's not a bad word. It's just who we are. We're hustlers. We work hard. We're not trying to con anybody. We just keep going. So, you know, 43 years in now, it's just who I am. So to me being a CEO and working in this business, I pulled up in front this morning at eight 30 and thought, yeah, this is exactly it.

Kevin Brown

13:45 - 13:52

This is what I want to do. If we can, as long as we can pay the rent and maybe have a baloney sandwich, this is amazing. I'll keep doing it.

Gresham Harkless

13:52 - 14:02

Absolutely. And then I appreciate your time. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know. And then of course, how best they can find you and hear about all the things you're doing.

Kevin Brown

14:03 - 14:40

Okay, great. Yeah. Well, first off, I'd like to say please come visit us at hrinnovate.org. That's hrinnovate.org. I wish it was .com, but it's not, and I didn't set it up, so there we have it, right? But we are extremely content-heavy. We have a lot of videos coming out. We have a lot of blogs coming out. We're active on Twitter and Facebook and just across all the channels. So I really love to, we love to engage people, talk to them, give them advice, take advice, however it may be. So that's, you know, we're a people centered business.

Kevin Brown

14:40 - 14:47

We like people, we want to talk to people. And so, and that's what I'm here for. If you see us online, that's me and hello.

Gresham Harkless

14:48 - 14:54

I appreciate you for taking some time out again, Kevin. We'll have those links in the show notes as well, but I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Kevin Brown

14:54 - 14:55

Okay, thank you very much guys.

Intro

14:56 - 15:24

Thank you for listening to the IMCEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at imceo.co. IMCEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at bluesixtymedia.com. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.