After a few years in digital recruitment, Riku Malkki saw a need to speed up the recruitment process. RecRight, a video recruitment platform makes interviews more effective.
What’s your story?
I jumped to the field of digital recruitment in 2016 as a software engineer. The first 7 years helped me to understand the biggest pain points recruiters have around talent acquisition, and how to tackle them with technology. For the past 5 years, I’ve helped organizations to find the most suitable candidates through On Demand video interviews.
What excites you most about your industry?
We all know how hard it is to find great colleagues from the piles of CVs. Paper CV is dying and new ways to do recruitment are needed. Traditional recruitment systems are rigid, hard and expensive to tweak, that’s where we come in with RecRight, offering an intuitive, user-friendly and cost-effective ATS and video interviews.
What’s your connection to Asia?
My first business trip to Asia was to Singapore in 2017. I learned that South-East Asian companies are quite far away from the modern recruitment techniques, so we decided to introduce RecRight to some of the forward-thinking organizations in Singapore. Since then we’ve managed to convince a handful of companies and these days we have a local representative in Singapore.
Favourite city in Asia for business and why?
It must be Singapore. Being the innovation and business hub for SE Asia, it’s a perfect launchpad for us to start expanding in the region. I personally love the city for its cleanliness, safety and open-minded atmosphere.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Fail fast and learn. The one thing that bothers me the most is not to make a decision at all.
Who inspires you?
If I can pick two, it’s Gary Vaynerchuk and Simon Sinek. These thought leaders represent two different personalities and articulations. I like Gary’s directness and oversimplification, it leaves room for further innovation. Simon, on the other hand, is a highly inspirational and positive influencer.
What have you just learnt recently that blew you away?
Apple’s retina displays are manufactured by Samsung!
If you had your time again, what would you do differently?
I would put more effort into studying. Today life’s fiercely hectic, and it takes a lot of mental capacity to study and run a business simultaneously. Luckily there are tons of great audiobooks that are easy to consume while running.
How do you unwind?
I love traveling, diving and experiencing new things. Luckily these can be combined, so I spend all my vacations abroad, the more exotic, the better. When traveling is out of the question, I read, run and spend time with my close ones.
Favourite Asian destination for relaxation? Why?
So far Indonesia and Philippines. Every culture in Asia is different and intriguing, but these countries have the best diving spots in the whole world.
Everyone in business should read this book:
If I could only pick one, it’s The Challenger Sale by Nixon & Adamson. You might think that a relationship-building is the best way to make business, but the book introduces a more competent role, the Challenger.
Shameless plug for your business:
It’s not exactly shameless and is 100% true: There might be perfect candidates in your “maybe” pile of CVs, can you afford losing them just because you didn’t have the time to check them out accordingly?”
How can people connect with you?
I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so feel free to click Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rikumalkki/
Twitter handle?
@rikumalkki
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This interview is part of the ‘Callum Connect’ series of more than 500 interviews
Callum Laing is an entrepreneur and investor based in Singapore. He has previously started, built and sold half a dozen businesses and is now a Partner at Unity-Group Private Equity and Co-Founder of The Marketing Group PLC. He is the author two best selling books ‘Progressive Partnerships’ and ‘Agglomerate’.
Connect with Callum here:
twitter.com/laingcallum
linkedin.com/in/callumlaing
Download free copies of his books here: www.callumlaing.com
