Very well thanks – take a seat.
(We’re in the coffee lounge in the Novotel in Euston. Wise Man Say is pleased to report that Dave Martin, MD of Allthetopbananas, sports stubble, wears a hoodie and is in ripped jeans. FINALLY, someone in recruitment scruffier than me)

Dave, I think everyone’s heard of Allthetopbananas, but I’m struggling to summarize what you guys do. Can you put it into a nutshell for us?
(laughs) I know what you mean. 12 months ago that would have been a much easier question to answer. Then, I would have said that we were a job board aggregator….

…what, kind of like, Indeed?
Indeed. SimplyHired. Those types of companies. Though we do a lot of things they don’t. The big US aggregators generally stop at the presentation of the vacancies – they don’t do anything else on the candidate journey. We at Allthetopbananas have a very simple philosophy – ‘Be Helpful’. How to be helpful? (Dave’s an interview all to himself at this stage – bonus). We’ve got loads of features to help the job seeker, from CV authoring, jobs by email and so on. One of our best features is ‘Recommended Adverts’ – a function where we can intelligently interpret the job seeker’s browsing behaviour and present job vacancies based on search history – adverts for similar roles, in similar market sectors, in similar geographical locations. Takes the pain out of scrolling through endless lists of adverts if you can get the technology working for you.

How did the UK job board market deal with the arrival of Allthetopbananas?
Listen.
(I do)
I come from publishing. And not only publishing, but digital within publishing. So I’ve spent years in companies being hated by hundreds of people who thought I was going to threaten their livelihood. It’s the same with the recruitment industry when we launched Allthetopbananas. We had to do a lot of meeting, greeting, communicating the message. But the bottom line is you are always going to get hostiles. But by and large you are also going to get the majority who know that they have to offer more to stay relevant.

Alright Dave. Let’s change tack. Social Recruiting – what’s your take?
There are two issues with Social Recruiting. Firstly, it’s never going to fit every business culture. You can have all the best intentions, all the best ideas, all the logic and reason, but sometimes you are just going to get company cultures that are resistant to change……

….not everyone can be an Electronic Arts, or have a Matthew Jeffrey in there, making them into an Electronic Arts…
Exactly. This is especially the case with SME’s who often don’t have the resources or time to conduct a full on Social Recruiting approach. What about the butcher, baker and candlestick maker? How does it work for them? We see a lot of evangelism about Social Recruiting – there’s plenty of consultants out there selling the story and making five hundred quid a day doing so. And, to be honest, good luck to them – social has a massive role to play and the word does need to be out. But it isn’t for everyone, and we often lose sight of that.

I think we agree on that. Social is important, but maybe a little overplayed in terms of utility for every company. What about Mobile – what’s your take on that?
Mobile Internet is growing rapidly. It’s estimated by Morgan Stanley that Mobile will overtake Laptop in 2014 as the number one way in which online will be consumed. It’s not going to replace laptop – we still need to look at a larger screen, type stuff in, that type of thing, but it will be different. How we interface with mobile is differs from device to device…

(there follows an impromptu experiment where we act out checking various mobile devices to see how it ‘feels’ whilst still engaging in face to face conversation. The scientific findings are as follows: checking the phone or tablet when it’s flat on the table is…. somehow OK; lifting it up or looking at a laptop screen, whilst talking face to face, is absolutely rude)

I think it was ITV who recently released some research they conducted on mobile usage during TV broadcast. They found that 70% of the time TV was being watched, mobile was also being accessed at the same time. That doesn’t mean people were divided their time equally or not paying attention or pretending to watch TV when they weren’t. it meant that most of us watch the telly, and then check and engage on the mobile device, in small snippets. Kind of like when X-Factor is on and you’re not that interested, but not so disinterested that you have to leave the room. So we’re consuming mobile all the time. We’re right at the front of this. 2011 is going to be massive for mobile, and we’re working a number of companies developing apps that are going to get their brands on the mobile platforms.

What was the driver that took you guys from Job Board Aggregator to Mobile App Developer?
Listen. We’ve got a lot of interesting tech. We built a system and realised that we were capable of delivering top end mobile services. We thought, ‘OK, we’ve got the assets already, can we box that and sell it? The answer was obviously, ‘yes’. We’ve got the live launch for a number of corporate clients in 2011, including PepsiCo. Let me show you a demo

(Dave demo’s the app. It’s very good)

OK Dave. Another change-of-pace question for you. Everything we see online is geared to graduate, white collar types. What the hell are Allthetopbananas doing for the working man?
(No hesitation. It’s clear by now that Dave Martin doesn’t ‘do’ hesitation)
Firstly, we are an aggregator and have all kinds of jobs – not just white collar work. We got drivers, warehousing, retail, nursing and everything.

Secondly, all our jobs are geo-coded – some of our partner Job Boards do this themselves, but we automatically do so for those who do not when the jobs come on. Ask any working class job seeker, and proximity to work is a very important criteria. It’s always irritated me when travel and transport is dismissed as some kind of trivial consideration. You know, it’s important to know whether a car is part of the package, because if it isn’t, you might have to buy a car – second biggest capital investment after a house. It’s important to know where the job is – so we provide that as a standard part of what we do.

Thirdly, we provide a CV Builder. Writing a CV is difficult for many people to do, never mind those who don’t, work at a computer as part of their job. We provide a function on our site which allows the job seeker to input the raw data, and we’ll put it into a template for you.

Finally, we have a one stop registration system. So that a Job Seeker simply has to log on to Allthetopbananas, register once and will be registered as a candidate on all the Job Boards will are partnered with – this is a massive saving of time and investment.

Bottom line is, we understand job seekers. Job seekers are pragmatic. They need a job. They need to pay the mortgage, save for the kids school fees, have a nice holday. 20% of people move to find a job because they want to progress their career; the other 80% move because they have to find work. For many, a job is unfortunate disruption of the weekend. (Dave Martin puts down an early marker for the recruitment quote of the year).

So, back to the job seekers journey – it’s a pragmatic journey. You search what’s available, have a look/see and apply for a few roles that look interesting and see what comes in. You might get invited to interview. You go. And throughout that process you change or amend your attitude as to what you are looking for. Maybe you become a little more or a little less flexible on the salary you are looking for. Maybe you expand the job search to a wider geographical area. Maybe you have a rethink about what it is you want to do. But what you don’t ever do is go back to registration page.

I’m willing to bet that’s true
With Allthetopbananas, we can track historical activity of the individual job seeker, honed down over the past 3 years, and we can adapt the jobs you see according to the searches, click throughs and applications you make. And we can alert you by a variety of means by email or through the mobile app.

Sounds intelligent. Like artificial intelligence…
Very. It’s something that Iprofile tried to do a long time ago – keeping track of a job seekers changing interests and habits. However, they relied on the updates from the job seeker. Now the job seeker may do that – once when he’s announcing he’s on the market, and again when he’s coming off it, but in reality, he doesn’t do it when he’s actually on the search. The tech we’ve got means he doesn’t have to.

Very impressive Dave – I should ask you how long until world conquest?
Goals are the next 2 years. We’re riding the wave at the moment – we’ve got to keep position and grow the audience. 2011 is big for us, especially on the mobile space.

Thanks Dave, I think that’s about as much as the readers of Wise Man Say’s blog can take in one sitting.
Thank you Wise Man Say. Look forward to seeing the interview