Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
JDs as-a-service
Foreign Nurses on Demand
Gifting Using Email Addresses
1. JDs as-a-service
For some reason, writing job descriptions seems to be both a huge burden and an extreme challenge for pretty much every startup I’ve ever come across. After a company raises money (or if they are bootstrapped and have cash flow to enable growth), the most pressing need is hiring the right people and skill sets to grow the business. If you’ve never done a specific role before (which will be 90% of the roles you need to hire for) it’s hard to know exactly what qualifications and skills you’re looking for. It’s also incredibly challenging to figure out what the correct level and title should be, let alone salary and equity compensation. Hiring is a never ending process for a growing company, which is why many early startups end up hiring both in-house recruiters as well as working with agencies to help fill open roles. While most recruiting software today focuses on the candidate experience, for any open position, before you can even start finding, vetting, and interviewing candidates, you need to first solidify what you’re looking for and distill it into a coherent and succinct job description.
For most startups, and quite frankly even large companies, the hiring manager typically goes on LinkedIn, AngelList, or other hiring platform, does a search for the title they’re looking to hire, finds an existing post from a different company, and uses that as a template that they slightly modify for their own role. This means that every JD looks essentially the same and most of them are absolutely horrible and do not accurately represent either their company or who they are really looking for. The idea is to create a tech-enabled services business where each hiring manager is guided through an automated intake process that asks questions about the company, industry, org structure, business challenges, and personnel needs. After inputting the company URL, the software can scan the site for things like the “About” page, company mission/values, etc to automatically generate the relevant sections of the JD. From there, based off of the answers around challenges and needs, the product would create a highly accurate job description by asking the hiring manager a series of simple, mostly yes/no questions. Once the initial software-generated JD is complete, a human recruiter would go through it, making small improvements and additions until it is ready to post. The software could also handle listing across a variety of job board platforms and can integrate with a company’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to make the end-to-end hiring process as seamless as possible.
2. Foreign Nurses on Demand
Nurses are an absolutely critical component of the US healthcare system. They’re quintessential in ensuring successful patient outcomes and efficient care within hospitals, clinics, and home health situations and have been lauded as heroes during the Covid-19 pandemic. The last 18 months have put a tremendous strain on the nursing profession which had already been experiencing a shortage of skilled labor for the past decade. It is estimated that the US will have a shortage of over 1 million nurses by 2030. As the 71 million Baby Boomers, who are currently between 57 and 75, continue to age and as more people get insurance under the Affordable Care Act, the need for all kinds of nurses (Registered Nurses, Licensed Practical Nurses, Nurse Anesthetists, Nurse Practitioners, and Nurse Midwives) will continue to grow.
At the same time demand for nurses is surging, nurses are experiencing more burnout than ever before. On top of that, around 50% of all nurses in the US are 50 years or older and will hit retirement soon. As the gap between demand and supply continues to widen, the healthcare system will be stretched thinner and thinner resulting in even more nurse burnout, longer patient wait times, and increases in medical errors. While doctors from foreign countries cannot legally practice in the US without essentially repeating medical school and residency, the requirements for nurses are much less punitive. If you are a registered nurse in your home country (meaning you’ve completed the required nursing training and are licensed), have practiced for 2 or more years and are proficient in English, you’re eligible to work in the US after passing the state’s exam. The other requirement is getting a visa. A company can recruit nurses from foreign countries (Canada and Mexico are good first places given their special treatment through TN visas) and act as the intermediary between the supply and demand in the US. They can facilitate visas, job placements, housing, community, and more. Given the rise in telemedicine companies who leverage RNs for the majority of the labor, there is also an opportunity (potentially a bigger one??) to match these foreign nurses with digital health companies in need of nurses and looking for a slightly cheaper labor. There is also the added benefit of varying time zones to cover off hours.
3. Gifting Using Email Addresses
I’m truly dumbfounded why it is still so complicated to give people gifts. Almost nobody has my physical address, and quite frankly, that is probably a good thing. Also, as we learned in last week’s newsletter, ~10% of the US population moves each year. Whenever someone wants to give you a gift, they have to ask for your address which puts everyone in a slightly awkward situation. It feels weird offering it and essentially saying, “yes, please send me a gift” and equally weird saying “no” or avoiding the question. Many people revert to digital gift certificates to places like Amazon or Doordash because that is the easiest thing to give without an address and allows the recipient to select whatever they want
In the corporate world, companies like Sendoso or Loop & Tie help facilitate easy and seamless gifting to prospects and customers and newer startups like Goody enable consumers to send gifts using only a person’s phone or email. When you send the gift, the recipient receives a notification and can enter their own address, removing a lot of the friction and weirdness. While the Goody model is interesting, I think the larger opportunity is to create a widget that enables any e-commerce company to do gifts without a physical address. Imagine being able to go through any checkout flow and, just like you now see the ubiquitous buy-now-pay-later options, you can select “This Item is a Gift” and enter either a phone number or email address and the company handles the personalized gift message, collects the physical address, and fulfills the order for delivery. While this could be applicable to any e-commerce site or store, a natural place to sell this would be through the Shopify App Store as there are over 1 million Shopify sellers who rely on 3rd party apps to create their e-commerce experience. This is definitely more feature than full product but charging a few dollars a month plus a small % of each order that uses the functionality (or heck, make it free and only charge when its used) can add up quickly given the market size and would make for a nice business.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine
We are working on solving this, but instead If using email address. A user would create a shipping handle ( username) https://www.shipto.me/