Oleksii Rabosh on Strategies for Staying Ahead
Oleksii Rabosh is the Customer Success Lead of Jooble and took some time out to speak with Rob Barratt from The Industry Leaders about how they stay ahead of the game in their industry.
Can you introduce yourself and share a little about your background?
I’m Oleksii, and I have been working at Jooble for almost 6 years now. Over the last 2 years, I have been working as Customer Success Team Lead of Jooble Aggregator business unit. I used to work as a Full-stack Sales Manager with a focus on DACH markets for around 5 years, which helped me gain valuable experience in a very dynamic environment. As a job aggregator, we offer our customers relevant jobseeker traffic for their openings. This also includes creating, monitoring and optimizing Pay-for-Performance campaigns, as well as close communication both inside and outside the organization to make sure our customers get the most from our service. My client portfolio included some world-known industry players such as Adecco, Randstad, Just Eat Takeaway and many others. This experience helped me to understand key business processes better and create a vision of how a highly effective Customer Success Team should work to drive company growth. Now I am managing a team of 10 passionate and talented people, who support and develop more than 1000 customer accounts all over the world. It is a tremendous, ongoing journey that strongly contributes to maintaining the customer-centric culture across the whole organization. This journey is full of challenges, but we managed to foster a data-driven sales approach as a team and change the way we work with the customers dramatically.
As a forward-thinking professional, how do you identify ways to stay ahead in your industry?
In general, I believe that customer-centric organizations are the most capable of staying ahead in any industry. For me, a customer-centric culture must have the following principles embedded into their daily routine.
1. Know your customers. It might sound too obvious, but any business succeeds when it brings maximal value to its customers. But how do you know what and how to offer to your customers to stand out among competitors? The only way to do so is to communicate closely with your customers to let them speak about their goals and pains. As a result, you get some actionable insights on how to maximize the value you create for the customers. As a team, we defined the key characteristics of every customer profile and record them into our CRM system. It helps us make this knowledge available across the company and differentiate our customers to align our value proposition based on their specifics. Moreover, last year we started to actively involve the members of our partner teams to communicate with the customers alongside their dedicated managers. For example, it is now a new norm for us to invite the colleagues from Product team to a demo of our product update or to let the colleagues from Data Science team present the important changes in search algorithms. As a result, we see a higher engagement of our customers and a more in-depth understanding of customer’s needs within our company.
2. Define opportunities and growth points Insights are rather tricky pieces of information, since misinterpreting them will probably cause serious problems for your business in the long run. Therefore, it is essential to have a standard process of turning insights into opportunities and possible solutions. Otherwise, you will end up trying to change everything by the end of the week, which just does not work. From my practice, I usually assess any opportunity in terms of its impact on our customers: which pain points are covered, how many customers are impacted and what opportunities it opens to business. Once you are clear about which opportunity is the most promising for your customers and your business, you will be able to focus on the most important growth points.
3. Expand your value proposition The job search industry is very competitive and dynamic, with numerous innovations appearing every month. To stay competitive in this industry, you have to make sure that all types of customers you intend to attract do get the expected value from your offer. Knowing your customers (both existing and potential) will definitely help you understand where your value proposition lacks width and variety. The proven best way to start is defining your ideal customer profiles by using a combination of customer interviews, surveys, and the knowledge of your customer-facing teams. Once it is ready, you can compare the needs and pain points of your customers with your existing value proposition to determine the opportunities for expansion. Such an approach already helped us to launch a major update of our key product by providing more insights and tools for campaign optimizations to our customers. As another example of using this approach, we tested a new ad format for our customers who run the platforms for gig-workers. Although the initial test results were controversial, and we have to rework it before applying as a regular offer, this experience is now helping us to create a better value proposition for this customer profile.
How often do you reassess your competitive landscape and, as I know you're very busy, I'd love for you to share any tips you have on carving out the time to do this?
In fact, I can claim myself lucky enough to not having to carve out extra time for this crucial activity. Reassessing our competitive landscape already works as a part of our processes, so I just know when I can expect some new information about our competition and take some time for analyzing it regularly once I get it. As for now, there are processes within our organization that provide competitive analysis to drive our further development. For example, every 6 months, we analyze the pricing and offers available on the market to update our proposition. Every week, a unit from our Business Development Team shares an overview of industry news that typically includes different updates from our competitors. Finally, my team regularly requests client’s comparison of Jooble and our competitors to understand what we can do better and shares this knowledge within the organization. All in all, these sources of information are now providing the best quality of insights to me. In the past, I used to rely solely on the leading industry resources by using Medium, newsletters, and LinkedIn groups, but now most of these sources are covered with our internal processes.
What have been the most significant challenges you've faced when striving to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world, and how have you overcome them?
1. Apply market trends to your organization. As I can judge from my journey, any significant change always comes alongside doubt and uncertainty. On most occasions, you just cannot prove if it works as expected without testing it. From my experience, the best way to check the market fit is to test a minimum viable product and gather feedback from the people affected by the potentially major change. However, to stay focused and use the available resources effectively, I recommend beginning with the problem you want to solve in the first row. Otherwise, you may end up trying to apply a nice-to-have change instead of focusing on the must-have ones.
2. Implement new technologies to change an outdated process. From my experience, any process or solution has its lifetime and maximal efficiency. At the same time, the market reality in our industry is so dynamic that you cannot expect to achieve better results by doing the same things. That is why we try to immediately react once any process struggles to deliver the expected result. For example, we occasionally conduct activity logging within our team to define the most time-consuming activities and check whether these actually bring a corresponding output. Such an approach already helped us to automatize some of our financial processes, as well as improve our system of monitoring tech issues within our product.
3. Remember that you can’t change everything at once. Taking in work more tasks than your capacity allows will inevitably lead to poor results, frustration and, in the worst case, to a burnout. From my experience, the first best thing to do here is to accept that your team has a limited capacity, thus can complete X activities during Y time. But how to understand, what capacity is available? This is yet another point where periodical activity logging might help to get valuable insights. Last time we measured our team capacity, we noticed that we spend around 70% of the overall team’s time for communicating with our customers. The rest of the time is dedicated mostly to the internal processes: e.g. working on in-house initiatives that will affect customers, participating in team meetings etc. Therefore, if I see from the weekly agenda that the communication with the customers will be more intense than usually, I might postpone the participation of my team in internal projects until the next week and vice versa. This approach is not applicable for the crucial processes, such as upselling and billing, but it works pretty well in all other cases.
Can you pinpoint a defining moment or experience where your innovative strategies led to success or a competitive advantage in your business or career?
My favorite moment is when I strongly contributed to let the team work on the initiatives. In the past, most of the decisions were inspired by senior management, whilst my team just had to accept it and start working in the new reality. Ever since my team started proactively working on own or cross-team initiatives, we managed to wipe out the issues that remained unsolved for years (though being important): created transparent pricing plans, customer’s starter pack, contributed to creating tools that help make accurate recommendations for our customers.
What’s more significant, this Leader-Leader culture was crucial to maintaining close collaboration in- and outside the team, as well as letting people grow as professionals. Of course, you cannot exclude senior management and team leaders from the decision-making process, especially when it comes to strategic decisions. Nevertheless, engaging people to take ownership and collaborate to solve problems they highlight as influential, was probably my best experience as a manager so far.
In your opinion, what are the key ingredients of an effective strategy for staying ahead in 2023?
If we speak about 2023, plenty of industries slowed down due to the global economic situation. In our case, it means an ever stronger competition on the market: when clients decide to spend less, some vendors might find themselves out of the game. Therefore, I would highlight the following 3 key ingredients to stay ahead in 2023:
1. Hear your customers. Important in normal market conditions, even more important in uncertain market conditions. It’s just impossible to remain the first choice for your customers if you don’t pay attention to their needs and what you can do better to help them succeed.
2. Stay up-to-date with the market trends to react on time. Not all market innovations are a good fit for every company. However, being aware of them, recognizing trends and reacting with solutions makes the difference between market leaders and the rest of the market.
3. Trust your employees I believe that people are the most valuable asset of any organization. If you care about them, keep them involved and let them grow, you will be definitely pleased by the passion and dedication shown in their work, which definitely positively impacts the result.
In your opinion, what role does continuous learning and personal development play in staying ahead, and how do you incorporate these practices into your own professional journey?
As for me, learning and personal development are one of the best ways to lead by example. If your team sees you find some time to strengthen your skills, it will give them even bigger inspiration to keep learning and developing, which is a good addition to their internal motivation. Even more important is to define personal growth points by using the combination of employee’s and your observations. Once you get them enlisted, it is easier to find some ways to acquire new skills and knowledge. As next, I define a realistic period to learn and try something new. Yes, it’s significant to practice a new skill or approach as soon as you gain it before moving on to the next one. In my team, we actively use a combination of team courses, individual development plan and company-level webinars and workshops.
Looking ahead, what emerging trends or technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on businesses or ambitious professionals, and how are you preparing to leverage them for future success?
I believe the emergence and advancement of artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT and similar technologies, will have a profound impact on businesses and ambitious professionals. AI will increasingly help eliminate routine and repetitive tasks, allowing professionals to focus on more critical and strategic work. By leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT, professionals can efficiently update knowledge bases, automate customer support, and streamline various workflows. This will lead to increased productivity, better decision-making, and enhanced customer experiences. To prepare using AI for increasing productivity, my team already defined the processes that might be automated to save some more capacity for our key activities. For example, in a close cooperation with our Product and Data Science Teams, we are testing a new tool for better campaign recommendations. It works thanks to AI-powered categorisation of all jobs on our websites by profession and industry. As a result, Customer Success Managers can easily recommend a proper optimization to our customers without requesting data from our Analytics team or viewing numerous reports. I believe this is only the beginning for AI to show a bigger impact on businesses and professionals.
