David is the CEO of Green Running which produces the Verv, a smart home energy monitoring product. Our conversation explored how the application of high speed data cards to energy has enabled him to develop signatures that monitor the behavior and energy usage of homes down to the individual machine level and even create predictive maintenance capabilities for consumers. We discuss how AI has been integral from the beginning of the company and how he is using the blockchain based VLUX token to enable peer to peer energy trading for consumers.
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Peter Davies CEO |
Can you share a bit about your background?
Sure, I am based in Paris and spent most of my career in Accenture in tech ecosystems and innovation. I was a Global Managing Director for the last 8 years running the ecosystem business in Europe. I managed fulfillment managing $1.5bn in sales and almost 2,000 people focusing on strategy around partners and ecosystem around IoT and AI – to find new streams of revenues. Ecosystems are key in almost any different industry. I left about a year ago and met people in blockchain, which is opening up a lot of new business opportunities.
I connected with Strategic Coin, a family office, to help with their ICO delivery organization and was supporting Job.com. I met the co-founders in January and was drawn in by their background and leadership. I joined because I believe there is promise and vision- they offered me the CEO and we’ve worked together for the last 6 months through the relationship wit Strategy Coin.
How do you see the current state of recruitment?
Recruitment is an old fashioned industry but there’s an opportunity to change. The first thing is to recognize that recruitment is becoming a critical part of company success. The booming economy is creating challenges to recruit and retain talent. This is changing the whole context. The second challenge is less about specific roles but about talent. Because of technology, we need to look at the soft skills – finding people who can adapt, change and build teams. A lot of the Fortune 500 will disappear over the next few years, so companies need to review how they operate.
When I started in business, HR was viewed as a way to please people and improve productivity. Today recruitment is an integral part of the company. Recruitment is part of the culture, an essential part of success, and the way they treat candidates is how they treat employees. Companies need to change the way they attract candidates.
How do you see the market changing?
There is a now a shift in power. Candidates speak with each other on social media about bad experiences. Companies need to understand that their candidates are their clients. Hilton offers candidates a voucher. The way a company expends recruitment is part of the business.
Algorithms are proving often more effective in recruiting people. People are very subjective, but in reality, it’s not up to a recruiter to judge. One person who used to recruit for the military realized after data analysis they identified leadership skills that were hard for people to identify. Specific correlations of data prove to lead to efficient leadership identifications. I think technology will change how we recruit. Facial recognition, certification of skills and other technologies will change how companies find talent.
What are some of the challenges for companies adopting new technologies for recruiting?
Most of the time in my experience, the main issue of change is people – they are reluctant to change. When people were implementing ERP to improve efficiencies, or outsourcing processes, those in charge will push back because their role is threatened. This is the main challenge in the recruitment space. There needs to be education so that workers can adapt their skills and change the mentality and perception.
What are some ways that recruiting can change?
The key thing we want to change is the reward to candidates. Usually a company will post a job to a third party site, it goes through a syndicator or profile and the candidate comes back to the company. In our view the money is not being spent in the right way. The company should spend money to reward candidates to come to them.
With this new generation of social media and technology – these relationships are changing. Candidates are very valuable – they are the future of their success. Companies need to be able to attract the right talent. We want to convince companies to reward candidates for engagement.
Recruitment needs to integrate mission, values and people. This is a new idea and we need to change the message, the role of the company and the sense of the business to have an ethical role, to have a positive impact on society, to have a diverse workforce.
How can blockchain enable new methods of talent acquisition?
The first thing is to understand conceptually what change it can generate. The way I see blockchain in the work environment is about peer to peer relationships, how to integrate in a broader community. We are creating a job token that will allow people to interact. Can we create a long-term community of people around the concept of work where people who contribute will receive something, and others can spend for what they need. The idea of a decentralized network for jobs is about transforming how people interact.
Near term there’s a good use of blockchain for skills verification – so this can leverage a public ledger to verify and test skills and recorded so they can be verified forever. In the mid term these will be about aggregating additional services like smart contracts for employment, and ultimately about building a community for people around work.
What is amazing is that you can rethink how people do business and how they get paid. With a work community, we could use this for mentoring where the mentor could receive something of value in exchange for helping to build skills and talent. Everything can be reinvented in terms of the value chain. We are interacting with a lot of blockchain companies that will start working on certifications in the space.
Blockchain is in the same stage as Internet 25 years ago. Those that stay around through this phase, will create a new center of gravity for a lot of new innovations to be created.
Could you share any recommendations?
I would recommend great books by authors like Dostoyevsky. I like to see people read about humanity to understand what is common across all people. Technology can be both good and bad – it’s how you use it.
Blockchain represents amazing potential like TV or planes – if we use the tools for the better we will have a better society. If we use to make profits for a few, we will have problems. Blockchain represents an opportunity to create a new type of positive change. Let’s see what we all have in common and dream big.
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