Connecting Christian Job Seekers with Christ-Centered Employers (w/ Andrew Crapuchettes)
On this episode, we’re joined by Andrew Crapuchettes.
Andrew Crapuchettes is the founder and CEO of RedBalloon and a pioneering leader in labor market data analytics. With roots in Silicon Valley, he has built multiple successful tech companies and previously served as founding CEO of Emsi, now Lightcast. Andrew has spent over two decades helping shape how businesses, governments, and educators understand the workforce. Today, through RedBalloon, he’s leading a movement to connect values-driven employers and employees who prioritize positive workplace culture. He’s also a sought-after speaker and frequent voice in business and tech media.
Christian Business Leader is the podcast for marketplace Christians seeking to explore and apply God’s will for business for the purpose of cultivating Christ-Centered Companies.
Full Episode Transcript
Heads up: This transcript was created with AI, so you might notice a few typos or small mistakes. We recommend listening to the episode for the best experience!
SPEAKER_01 0:02
Welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast, where Christ following business leaders explore God’s will and ways for business. This show is a ministry of the Center for Christianity and Business at Houston Christian University and features conversations with today’s Christ-centered business leaders who are representing Christ faithfully in the business world. I’m your host, Darren Scheer, and if you want to make your work, leadership, and company culture more Christ-centered, you’ve come to the right place. On this episode, we’re joined by Andrew Kraftouchet. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Red Balloon and a pioneering leader in labor market data analytics. With roots in Silicon Valley, he has built multiple successful tech companies and previously served as founding CEO of MC, now Lightcast. He has spent over two decades helping shape how businesses, governments, and educators understand the workforce. Today, through Red Balloon, he’s leading a movement to connect values-driven employers and employees who prioritize positive workplace culture. He’s a sought-after speaker and frequent voice in business and tech media. Andrew, welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast.SPEAKER_00 1:16
Thanks for having me, Darren. Really nice to be here and nice to have this conversation.SPEAKER_01 1:20
When did you first realize God wants to be involved in your work and business?SPEAKER_00 1:25
Yeah, it’s a great question. Um so growing up in the Bay Area, that wasn’t really around Christian business people. I was around wonderful Christian men and women, uh, really plugged into my church. I helped lead Nawana’s um program at our church, uh, really loved being involved with our with our church, but then I went off and I did the business thing. And there I knew Christians in business, but it was almost like an afterthought of um of who am I and what and what am I doing? And so as I moved up to Idaho, and I and I kind of moved up here because I got burned out from working my 80-hour weeks in the Bay Area and realizing there’s more to life than just making money. So move up here, start a variety of businesses. Um, and I actually remember I was I was on an elevator at a customer going up to meet with the board, and this is a publicly traded company, and they had in the elevator on their wall what their mission statement was. What was the thing that they woke up every day? This is what we’re doing. I’m like, oh, interesting. So I read it, and it’s maximize value to shareholders. I’m like, well, how boring is that? Like, like, really, is that all that we’re doing? And then we’re gonna die, like we’re gonna maximize value to shareholders and then we’re out. Um, and so I’m like, okay, so I really need to have a why. I need to have something that’s driving what I’m doing in my business. Um, and and it strikes me that if God made the world, the heavens and the earth, if he sent his son into the world to save us from our sins and fundamentally change the world, that should have an impact, you would think, on how you run your business. So that’s really, and this is probably 20 years ago, that’s really when I kind of started on this journey of like, I wonder what the Bible has to say. And Proverbs is chalked full of business wisdom, right? It doesn’t, you know, use net present value or evida or those type of terms, but it is so chalked full of business wisdom that um, you know, I just threw myself into Proverbs, like, okay, what does God have to say about running a business, about loving people, about growing it? Um, and really came to this conviction that look, business is a tool to bless people at scale. And let me explain that a little bit. So if you’re um in in our church community here in uh Moscow, Idaho, if somebody, if there’s a young family and they have a baby, someone will sign up to bring them a meal every day for a week, right? Different families will be like, hey, we’re gonna bring you a meal so you don’t have to think about cooking, we’re just gonna bring you food because you’re dealing with lack of sleep and a brand new baby pooping everywhere, right? Okay, cool. That’s fantastic. And you’re like, oh, hey, what if I wanted to not just bring one meal a night? What if I wanted to bring 10 meals a night? Well, that would probably break your budget and it’d be hard, but maybe you could pull it off. But if you’re like, okay, cool, now I want to bring a thousand meals a night. Well, okay, that’s physically impossible for one family to do, probably, unless they start hiring employees and all these things, and then you just go broke anyway. So, okay, so how do you solve that problem? Well, if you bring in the friction of commerce and of price and business, then you actually have an opportunity to bless people at scale. And you have things like DoorDash, where they bring meals to millions of people at night because those people are paying and there’s they’ve built a whole infrastructure. And business is really hard, but it’s this opportunity to bless people at scale, to bring them something that they didn’t have before that’s gonna make their life better. Um, and yes, you get paid for it, that’s how the world works. Um, God doesn’t God likes capitalism. Um, he invented capitalism. Okay, that’s great. But it needs to be distinctly Christian in the way that you do it. And then once you kind of get like, okay, business can be redeeming for my community, for my customers. I want to bless my customers. I’m gonna bless them at scale. Cool. Now what do I need to do? Well, now I need to actually think about my employees. I have these everlasting souls, these people who are working for me, and they may not be working for me forever. I might just be a stop in their career, but I want to be a deep blessing to them while they’re there. And so then it was kind of this okay, how do I actually bless employees when they’re part of the business? How do I make them better people because they work here? And sometimes that’s hard words. That’s uh giving a tough employee review that’s saying, hey, you have an anger problem and you need to stop that right now, or gonna, or I’m gonna fire you. But I really like that mindset shift of these aren’t just people that are working for me to make me money. I want to bless them. And in doing that, I’m gonna make money. Um, so I kind of went that journey of like, okay, so first I want to bless customers. That’s how what business is for. Then I want to bless employees, and it needs to be in that order. We need to take care of our customers first. But then I also understand in the world we live in, the world that God built, there is authority structures. It’s inevitable, right? There are bosses, there are uh, you know, presidents, there are uh, you know, policemen, whatever it is, right? So so there is authority, and I have an authority. I have a board or I have investors in my business, and I can’t expect all the employees that I’m trying to bless in this middle category to be okay, kind of uh following my orders if I’m unwilling to follow the orders of those above me. If I’m unwilling to um understand and submit to an authority structure, why should I expect other people to do that for me? So I want to actually bless my shareholders, but I want to make sure it’s in that order. So it’s this kind of bless the customer, bless the employee, bless the shareholders. And as long as you keep those customers and employees first, I think the shareholders are gonna do just fine. Um and you need to understand they’re on the continuum because it is capitalism, there is authority. Um, and so anyway, that’s kind of how I’m like, okay, this is how I need to frame my businesses. And um, and it’s funny when you spend all your time trying to bless other people, right? It’s an external thing. It’s not, you notice I wasn’t anywhere on the list. Um, and um, I have been incredibly blessed by years and years of trying to bless customers, bless employees, and bless shareholders. And have I I’ve done it imperfectly, right? I’ve you strive, you do your best. Um, but anyway, that’s kind of the framework that I use of like, okay, as a Christian, this is the way that I should think about business. Um, and that took years of kind of grappling and reading Proverbs and thinking about it. But anyway, there’s a long answer to a short question, but I hope that was helpful.SPEAKER_01 7:26
Yeah, excellent. And so Red Balloon is now your context for doing that. Tell us what Red Balloon is, and then as part of your explanation, tell us one of your favorite stories that illustrates the impact being made by Red Balloon.SPEAKER_00 7:41
Yeah, absolutely. So, Red Balloon, we’re almost five years old now. Um, so we’re a business that was kind of born out of what called the COVID era um and kind of the disruption that happened, the economy, the cancel culture, et cetera. Um, and so we started as just a job board. I wanted to connect pro-freedom job seekers with pro-freedom um companies, people who cared more about hard work and merit than the latest political correctness. Um, and that comes from my story. Uh, my board sat me down in 2020 and said, Look, you’re a conservative Christian CEO, and that’s just not allowed anymore. So um you can kind of walk away from some of the uh um who you are um or you and particularly. Is that what they said? They did. We said, We see you as a Christian conservative Christian CEO, and that’s um that’s not what we want. Um, and I’m like, first of all, take the compliment that you see me as a Christian CEO. So I’m doing something right. But but no, I’m not going to walk away from my deeply held belief. Um, I feel like many Christians over the years have been offered this same like deny Christ and you get all these rewards. And it’s like, well, actually, um, I’ll stick with stick with my gun, stick with my savior. So um, and it’s not like they’re throwing me the lions, like they’re just offering to, you know, fire me. Um, worse things have happened to people. So anyway, so um, so I I had to kind of deal with that cancel culture. And so now I’m in this moment where like, well, can I help people find each other? Um, and so we started as a job board, we kind of careened into doing uh recruitment services because that’s what a lot of our customers are asking for. Um and we didn’t want to do it like everyone else, and there’s great people in recruiting, but the structure is kind of um difficult. Basically, in the world we live in, you can post and pray, right? Job post might cost you a hundred dollars, right? It’s not gonna cost you very much money, or you can go to a recruiter and spend sixty thousand dollars or whatever it is, something in that range, for a headhunter to find you a key specific person, right? But there’s not a lot in the middle. If you’re like, okay, well, I can’t afford that, and I and I’m and I don’t want to post and pray because I have no time to sort through a thousand resumes. So what’s in the middle? And that’s where Red Balloon was like, hmm, this seems like a market opportunity to bring pro-freedom patriotic employees to employers for a full white glove recruiting service for around$10,000. Um so saving businesses tens of thousands of dollars, but also bringing culture first employees. And so anyway, so we kind of introduced that to the market about two and a half, three years ago, and we’ve now done almost 700 engagements um with uh that kind of full white glove recruiting engagement. So it’s been a real blessing and it’s been really fun, right? When you I remember I I we landed someone for Family Radio, they really needed um an executive assistant of all things, and they kind of came to me and said, Look, this person is gonna be the hub of so much that’s going on here. And if family radio gets the wrong person there who’s a you know, uh uh someone who’s going to um be a spy, someone who’s gonna be a traitor, um, that’s gonna be problematic. And so I’m like, no problem, we’ll run this process. So we did, and you know, when you get a check from a customer, which we did um when we place the person, and they’re like, you guys are such an answer to prayer. Like, cool, I like that a lot. So um, so anyway, so we do that. We’ve got a bunch of hiring automation software. Um, we uh acquired militaryhire.com um about nine months ago because we’ve grown so much, we’ve been able to um acquire them, and we really want to be a blessing to veterans. So, anyway, we’re doing a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day, if you want culture-first employees who are going to help grow your business, that’s what Red Balloon does. And we have a bunch of different ways to do that. Um, one of the cooler stories is um, you know, I’ve run a lot of businesses over the years. I’ve been very blessed on that front. And um, I have never had a business where I get unsolicited thank you notes from perfect strangers all the time. Um, and I have uh probably about a dozen notes now of people saying, You save my marriage because the job that I got, or I’m going to church again because the job that I got, which, you know, at the surface, you’re like, really? But a job is such a defining feature of who a person is. And if you’re swimming in waters for eight to ten hours a day with a worldview that is um antithetical to your worldview, getting jammed down your throat, it’s gonna have an impact on every other relationship in your life. So the the really cool story is a couple months ago, I got this note out of the blue from this lady, and she says, Um, hey, I’m a single mom. I just got a job three weeks ago with through Red Balloon. Um, love the job. Really great, great company, good coworkers. I just came home last night and one of my two sons says to me, Mom, you’re not angry anymore. And she’s like, first of all, I was angry mommy, right? You don’t want to, you don’t want to be that person. But she’s like, I had no idea that the job I was in was having such an impact on every other aspect of my life to the point that my kids saw me as angry mommy, right? And so I think a lot of people were like, Well, I’m just gonna keep my heads down my head down in this, you know, left-leaning job. Um, and I’m and I’m all for being salt and light, but you need to understand it is affecting you, it is having an impact on all your other relationships. So being part of that story for individuals where they’re finding a job that’s fulfilling, where they’re free and where they can love their family better, that’s a win for me. I’ll die happy if I can pull that off.SPEAKER_01 13:02
Yeah, yeah. You know, so much of our faith and work conversations have revolved around the business owners and the executives that have most of the control in the organization. And then people that are, you know, maybe mid-level management or you know, somewhere in there feel like they just don’t have a voice. They don’t have they don’t have any freedom. It’s like, oh, well, yeah, that’s nice if you’re the owner of the company, but I’m I’m in mid-level management. And and if I if I do that or say that or act like that, they’re gonna they’re gonna fire me uh because of the the way our our culture is now. But you’ve created uh a pathway uh for them to to go become a part of workplace cultures that not only tolerate, but even in a lot of cases celebrate their Christian faith, right?SPEAKER_00 13:58
That’s right. That’s right. We want employees who can live their values out loud, right? We don’t, you know, yeah, uh I had someone work for me and you know he was a great guy, but he was like trying to witness people all the time because you know we had a variety of Christians, non-Christians at work during work hours. I’m like, dude, here’s the thing, Adam. Um we’re not we’re not gonna do that. Um and we are here to focus on work. You can live your Christian values out loud. Um, you can be joyful when it’s a hard situation. Um, you can, you know, pray with someone if it’s like, oh man, this is hard, and I want to be a blessing to this person. You can celebrate with other people. You can not, you know, I I I defined for a lot of my employees what does it look like to be a Christian at work? Um and and some of that is things like we don’t gossip at work. Uh we celebrate with people, but we have straightforward conversations, we don’t talk behind people’s back. Um, we have uh, you know, this might uh concern some of my Baptist friends. We would have a uh a kegerator in the office, um, but I’d be like, you’re welcome to have a beer after work, it’s great, but don’t get drunk at work. That’s just not, you know, the Bible talks about drunkenness a lot. So so basically I would have all these like these are the ramifications of a Christian workplace, um, and and and live your values out loud. Like just be the salt and light in the way that you live. You don’t have to try and hand out tracks at work. I don’t think that’s a good and productive thing to do, and you’re just gonna annoy the boss and your cut fellow employees. But if it you know, if something comes up that’s hard and you’re the one who’s like, okay, well, let’s let’s pray about this, or uh, we can be joyful in the midst of trial, like Christians do that better than anybody. Um, and when you can, you know, think differently because you know the creator of the universe and you’re like, okay, well, God made the world in such a way that this should be true. Um, those kind of things, um, those are way more powerful than just like, hey, I’m gonna, you know, again, hand out tracks at work. And I’ve I’ve been able to leave dozens of people to the Lord um in my work environment because uh, you know, usually the conversation goes something like, So, Andrew, why are you so joyful? That was a bad situation. I’m like, well, God is still in heaven and um and I’m we’re gonna be okay. And they’re like, okay, so I want that. And I’m like, okay, great, let’s go grab a beer after work and let’s talk about it. Um, let’s talk about the joy that was in that is within me, right? And I think we want Christians to be able to live that out loud and not be afraid of it. Um, you don’t have to jam your worldview down everybody else’s throat, but I do want them in workplaces where they’re not being stifled um by the worldview of people who hate Christ.SPEAKER_01 16:29
Yeah. So these clients of yours, do they do they typically um have an exclusive contract with you to do the hiring for that position, or are you kind of one of several, like they’re gonna put the posting out on Indeed or you know, whatever else?SPEAKER_00 16:47
Yeah, so um they’re gonna post it all over the place. Um, but you know, it’s interesting during the kind of height of cancel culture, Answers in Genesis was told by indeed.com that they were not allowed to post jobs there anymore because their you know belief that God made the heavens and the earth was a violation of the community standards, and so they were not allowed to post there anymore. So a lot of these companies have been kind of kicked out of that mainstream, um, and so we’ve been able to help them. Um and then on the recruiting side, you know, kind of a cool recruiting story. So um we are not exclusive with anybody. We believe the free market should do its thing, and if we are doing great service for you, you should continue to use us, and if not, um we should know why, and we’ll try and make it better. So uh National Religious Broadcasters, I don’t know if you know them, NRB, they are basically they have an awesome mission statement. It’s you know, how do you keep the airways free so the gospel can spread? So, really good organization. And Troy Miller is a good friend of mine, and he came to me and said, Andrew, I need a CFO. Um, I have kind of, you know, I don’t know if you know the story of NRB, but Troy came in and it was kind of on the rocks. It was not doing well, and he did a good job of turning it around. But he’s like, it’s time I need somebody who can actually be a sophisticated financial um officer for our company. Like, okay. He’s like, so I went to a recruiter and they said it’s gonna cost$50,000 to$70,000 to fill this position, right? This is back to the job postings or$60,000 headhunter, right? And he’s like, like, we’re a nonprofit, I can’t even afford that. I’m like, Troy, no problem, we got this. Um, and so for around$10,000, Red Balloon came in and was able to um find source, interview, screen, um, call references for three awesome CFOs. Um, he interviewed all three and picked the one that he thought was going to be the best. And this is over two years ago now. She’s still there. And he wrote me probably six months ago and said, Andrew, I just want you to know, like, you probably saved the organization because A, we could not have afforded that recruiter fee. And B, you brought us someone who was so deeply committed to the mission of our organization that she has just fundamentally changed the way that we run our business and we’re now on stable footing. Um, and NRB’s awesome. Um, and so that’s those are the kind of stories we get to be part of, right? Which is amazing. Get to come alongside those businesses. But we’ve also come alongside, you know, businesses where they’re hiring their first employee and be like, you know, I don’t, you know that if you get the the first employee wrong, that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars. And so for you know, around ten thousand dollars, red balloon can come in and run the whole process and just bring you someone who is gonna be such a strong culture fit that they’re gonna build your culture and not tear it down. So um, yeah, there you go.SPEAKER_01 19:33
Have you run into any issues or or your clients have they run into any issues where they’re being accused of, well, you’re if you’re using red balloon, that means you’re just trying to hire a conservative Christian and that’s against the law. Um, have you run into any of that?SPEAKER_00 19:50
We have, you know, it’s funny. Uh during the I’ll call it COVID COVID era, where we were like, look, we believe in freedom. Um, and so we were not huge fans of call it the vaccine mandate. Um, we um I got a lot of death threats. So people would um get on social media, send me letters saying they’re gonna come and kill me because you know, freedom is such a terrible thing for America. Um, and and we’ve got lots of insulting things from uh the left media, CNN, and um all the usual suspects. Um, that being said, um, I don’t know that any of our customers have had any pushback about using this. In fact, you know, at this point, now that we have military hire, we have um, you know, uh companies like DHL and General Dynamics and Mentum who are using our services to find great people. Um I remember I was talking to, you know, this recruiter’s product that we end up doing a lot of. I was talking to a marketing firm in New York, and he’s like, Look, I believe in merit and I believe in free speech. And we probably disagree on a lot of other social issues. But as long as I uh protect the freedom of the people you bring me so that they can live their values out loud and no one’s gonna give them a hard time. Um, if I can do that, can I use your service? Because I love the type of people you have in your database and that you work with. Um, he he loves, you know, conservative Christians who work hard. And um he’s like, and I really like your pricing as well, because um you’re gonna save me$30,000 a hire, which would be also kind of cool. So um, so it really is. We we we work with businesses all over the place, and I have not heard from them that there’s been a lot of pushback. I’ve gotten plenty of pushback, but not too much to the businesses.SPEAKER_01 21:33
Yeah. Well, there’s some organizations like uh um I interviewed the president of Sight and Sound Theater, and they have like 600 employees, you probably know them. They might even be a client of yours, where the in their in their founding documents they are a Christian company, and so they can hire Christians exclusively, even though they’re not a non non profit. Um is is is that um so So we would assume that companies like you mentioned, American Family Radio, um, national national religious broadcasters, that they would be hiring Christians. Can you just give us kind of a just a laundry list of some of the other industries that are represented among your clients? Just because I I think maybe some of our listeners might be thinking, oh, well, yeah, that’s that’s that’s Christian themed companies, but that’s that’s probably not all that you’re serving.SPEAKER_00 22:31
No, it’s all over the map. Um, so and and and first on that kind of issue of like, are you allowed to we’ll call it discriminate, which is a word that scares people, but um you discriminate and hire Christians. Look, if you’re a nonprofit, so we hire for a lot of classical Christian schools, a lot of Catholic schools, um, and they can just say, look, you have to sign the sign the statement of faith or Christian organization, just deal with it, right? That’s fine. But then you have companies who maybe haven’t established their founding documents like you were talking about, um, but would like to preference at the very least conservatives. Um, although I would argue that you don’t want to have exclusively hiring Christians, if, you know, depending on the organization, because it is good to get different perspective and get to, you know, interact with those folks and share the gospel with them. But um, but we do have companies that are like, look, we’re a small company, we need to be careful about how we’re doing our hiring. So um we’ll be quick to tell people you cannot discriminate based on um based on religious preference. That’s just not that’s a protected category. EEOC will get you in trouble for that kind of thing. But what you can do is you can talk about your values all day long. Um and so, you know, I was talking about these three blessings before, right? So when we’re interviewing people, I can say, look, we believe in blessing customers, blessing employees, and blessing shareholders. Can you give me an example of of how you have blessed people above and beyond what you um you know, what your job description was? Um we could we can say, look, our CEO deeply believes that you know God made the world, the heavens and the earth, and that impacts the way we do business. It’s not a prerequisite, it’s not a weird thing, but you need to understand what you’re getting into. You’re allowed to do that. You can talk about yourself all the time, and it turns out that is an interesting filtering mechanism and a legal protection because it’s kind of like you know, the contents of this cup, you know, you go to McDonald’s, it says the contents of this cup are are hot. Well, basically what they’re saying is if you burned yourself with this coffee, don’t sue us because we already told you it might be hot. Well, same thing on uh, you know, the the CEO of this business might be Christian and might pray at a meal. So it’s gonna be okay. Now they can’t sue you for that because you warned them about that before they took the job, right? So um, so there’s a lot that you can do, and there’s a lot that we do and come alongside businesses. Um, the businesses that we work with range um, they’re all over the map. So, you know, Valor Atomics is one that we are working on in a lot of positions for right now. They’re trying to build small nuclear reactors so that cities can have kind of decentralized power generation, which I think is super cool, right? Can you make it so that lots of cities have their ability to generate power so that a power grid is not the same risk for the country? Um, so Valor Atomics is a good example of this. We’ve filled for lots of software companies, you know, obviously for things like Daily Wire, um, uh some of the media companies out there. Um we have a plumber, uh a big plumbing company in New York City. And they’re like, look, we just want to hire people who want to show up and work and don’t have huge drug problems. So if you can help us with hiring, that’d be amazing. Uh so we’ve done a lot in manufacturing and construction, um, a lot of technology. So we’ve helped fill software positions, marketing positions, um, a lot of folks in like social media managers. Um, I actually was looking at a report yesterday of the last 300 positions we filled. Um, a lot of salespeople. Um, it’s hard to find good salespeople who are going to be productive today. Um, and so we’ve got a good little method to go in, identify people who are gonna be a good fit, help drive the revenue for our customers. Um, and it’s been great. So um, but yes, businesses all over the map, all over the sizes. Um, probably Daily Wire is the biggest business we’ve worked with. We generally are not working with businesses well over a thousand employees. Um, but um yeah, but it’s it’s fun to bless these businesses.SPEAKER_01 26:27
Yeah. I mean, this this must have just been a nightmare before you guys came along to try to find qualified people that uh you know they weren’t just you know, there’s like church job boards and you know, places like maybe that’s where some of these nonprofits were looking, but like where where would you go to because I mean we we have a very small publishing company and and um I I would put a post out on indeed and I would have to put in a statement like um has has a um can demonstrate uh um something along the lines of demonstrate competence in Christian faith in the Bible, some something like that. I’m not saying you have to be a Christian, I’m just saying Christian books. Yeah, yeah. We publish Christian books. That is part of part of the job. That’s right. Um, but but you also got brought up another great point about the coffee, the hot coffee example. We just had um, I don’t know if you know Todd Stewart from Gulf Winds, um, we interviewed him a couple episodes back. He was saying the same thing that you are you’re setting yourself up to get sued if you’re not bold, if you’re not faith forward, because as soon as they are surprised when they come to work there, uh they’re gonna react. And especially if they got you know some kind of disciplinary action or something like that, that they’re they’re upset with your company. Oh, it’s because you’re because you’re you’re Christian all of a sudden. Um but if you tell them that at the outset, hey, you burn yourself, that’s on you.SPEAKER_00 28:05
Absolutely. Um that’s and that’s um I that is that is such good wisdom because and uh but but that’s I mean that’s clearly that’s what God tells us to do, right? We’re told to be bold. Um, and then we find out later sometimes that there was a huge benefit to being bold, but we’re told to just be faithful, right? You told you know the Bible talks about be obedient, and then we find out when you are obedient, you have these huge blessings that come from that, but you don’t always see them instantly, right? You don’t realize that, okay, I’ve been bold, um, I’ve been obedient, and later you find out it’s been a huge legal protection for my business, um, and now we’re not getting labor-based lawsuits. Amazing, right? Um, and so uh I just think that’s how God builds the world is just be obedient, you’ll be surprised with how God’s gonna bless you later.SPEAKER_01 28:52
Yeah. So where do you see this all going? Do you do you see this becoming more mainstream or you know, more direct competitors with Indeed and you know, the some of the bigger bigger companies, or do you see it kind of being more niche for a while?SPEAKER_00 29:11
It’s a good question. So um first, so the the job board industry, just pure job board industry, is struggling right now. Um, and I think for good reason. Uh people are tired of what they call the post and pray method, right? You post a job, it’s really an online advertisement for employment, right? And so when you post it out there, you’re just hoping the right people see it. And if you’re indeed, you have a lot of people, so there’s a higher probability that the right people are gonna see it. But at the end of the day, you’re just praying that the right person sees it and applies the job, right? But the problem is what’s happening in the job board market right now is you have AI causing a lot of disruption. So you have Robo Apply and AI apply and tools like that that allow people to apply to a hundred jobs a day without getting off their couch, right? They’re sitting there watching Netflix, and their little AI agent is customizing their resume, customizing their cover letter, and applying to jobs. Well, that sounds magical, except now employers have hundreds or sometimes thousands of applicants for their job, and most of them are not qualified, and several of them, maybe most of them, don’t even know they applied to the job, right? They just um they’re sitting on their couch watching Netflix. Well, that causes a lot of disruption because um this is part of the reason we acquired military hire. Um, you know, if you’re a I was talking to a veteran, he’s like, I applied to a job at 6 p.m. and by 2 a.m. I got my rejection letter. Well, he’s like, I don’t think the HR department was pulling all night or rejecting people. I think something else is going on here. I’m like, yeah, you’ve got an electronic gatekeeper. You have AI on the employer side basically weeding out the resumes that it thinks are not a good fit. The problem is AI really likes AI resumes. And so all of a sudden, those people who are watching Netflix, their resume is coming to the top because it was written by AI, it’s being read by AI, they’re all happy. But it turns out there’s a big difference between a perfect resume and a perfect employee, right? And so that person who is hustling and applying, but then getting auto-DQ’d or auto-rejected by the ATS gatekeeper, um, you know, they might be a great employee, whereas the person who’s just using AI apply or Roboply is probably not a great employee. So uh there’s actually an interesting article in Sherm recently that everybody is effectively using AI in the job market and nobody’s getting hired because of these dynamics, right? So it’s causing so much noise, it’s really hard to find the signal in the job market right now. And so, you know, if you look at, you know, the big the biggest job board out there today is Indeed. And um, and then the number two is probably ZipRecruiter. Um, a lot of people have heard of ZipRecruiter. The ZipRecruiter’s revenue has gone in half since 2022. So they went from 900 million a year to 450 million a year in a very short period of time. And last year in 2025, they lost$33 million. And this is publicly traded companies, so this is all public knowledge, right? So you have this job board industry that’s really being disrupted by AI. And job seekers are they have a lot of fatigue, right? Because they apply to jobs, they get ghosted, employers get a thousand candidates, and they’re like, I don’t have time to go through a thousand candidates, and the AI is not actually servicing the right people, so I don’t know what to do, right? So, um, anyway, long story boring. Um, the job board world is always going to exist because you know, just like Google Ads exist, you’re gonna, you know, advertise for job postings. But back to my you know earlier point, you have job postings that are super cheap, right? You can go to ZipRecruiter or an Indeed or Red Balloon or Military Hire uh for fairly inexpensive, you can post jobs and put it in front of people. Um, but that post and pray method is kind of going away, or you can go spend fifty, sixty thousand dollars on a headhunter. And so what we’re seeing right now is this huge surge of demand for this, call it around$10,000 recruitment process. Um, and so we’re taking on you know dozens of new engagements every week right now with companies around the uh around the country, and it’s only accelerating. We’re seeing more and more. We’re having customers come back and say, honestly, that was an amazing service, and for you know, nine to twelve thousand dollars, I am now in a position where I know that this person has the skills, they have the culture fit, and it didn’t take any of my time. It was the easy button that they could just hit. Well, that’s a really cool service. So I see that accelerating. Um, and I have the, you know, and then I get to hire more people because then we’re actually doing this kind of white glove service to bless employers, um, which I’m all for. Um, I don’t need to have everything automated and only sell SaaS. Um, I want to bless employers. Um, and sometimes that’s the way that looks. Um, and so I see that part of the business significantly growing. Um, and you know, long-term, where do I want to see Red Balloon? Well, the HR tech industry is kind of the most left-leaning industry in the world right now. Um, you have, you know, technology people that are already kind of bent that way, and then HR people push them even farther, right? And so um, by the grace of God, I want to build a billion-dollar business that redeems the world of work in the HR tech space. Um, because if you have an employer who is using software that is potentially pushing its worldview on you and you don’t even know it, and I’ll tell you so uh one of our customers who will remain nameless was using greenhouse, and greenhouse is one of the big ATSs out there, they’re you know, big HR tech company. And they realized that greenhouse had decided that their DEI scores were not as high as they should have been, and so they were kind of downvoting um conservative Christians, and and they knew this because they would like they were actually scraping information from social media, they were downvoting those people, and they were downvoting white people because they’re like, you need a higher DEI score. And this was pretty frustrating to this business because they’re like, look, we’re paying for this software to judge our worldview and decide what kind of people we want. The best people for the job, regardless of skin color, regardless, right? We want the best people, period. Um, and uh don’t, you know, just be aware that if the industry is way left-leaning, it’s probably going to try and um impact your worldview with its worldview. So that’s what we want to do. We want to build a billion-dollar business, redeem the world of work. Um, how hard can that be?unknown 35:27
Right.SPEAKER_01 35:29
Well, so for our listeners, as we’re as we’re getting ready to wrap it up here and getting people to take action, what is the most common echelon of the organization that you’re typically hiring for? Is it kind of all stripes, primarily mid-level executive? Who are we looking for?SPEAKER_00 35:47
Yeah. Um, you know, it’s it you’d be surprised. You know, we have placed everything from CFOs and and presidents to forklift operators. Because if you just want you to think about what’s the cost of a bad hire, um, of someone who’s gonna cause a lot of disruption in the business, you’re gonna have to let them go. Maybe they’re gonna sue you, hopefully they don’t sue you. But like, what’s the cost of that? It’s way more than$10,000 on average, right? Um, some people say it’s like the first, you know, it’s the cost of the salary of that employee. I think that’s probably extravagant, but uh regardless, it’s a lot of money. And so, you know, we’re working, you know, I mentioned Valor Atomics, we’re working on 17 positions from them, uh, warehouse supervisor, um, nuclear engineer, uh, software engineer. So you’ve got just this wide variety of positions that we’re filling for them, executive down to, you know, probably not doing a lot of laborers. Um, but honestly, we filled a lot of position supervisors on construction companies because they’re like, I need someone who’s gonna set the cultural direction of the guys out in the field who are doing the work. So it really is the broad gamut. Um, and we’re finding that there’s just customers are finding this uh this recruitment product um affordable to know that you with blessed assurance that you’re gonna get a culturally aligned employee who’s gonna be able to do the job and build your business.SPEAKER_01 37:07
Yes. And and it’s redballoon.com, correct?SPEAKER_00 37:11
Redballoon.work. Uh we just red balloon.work. We decided that comm sounded too much like communism. And so we wanted to uh we wanted we wanted work. Work is a good thing. So yeah, redballoon.work. Um, I would also encourage people to follow me on LinkedIn. Um, I’ve got a bunch of people following me there, and I try and put out good content that is both entertaining and helpful for business leaders and employees who want to build their career.SPEAKER_01 37:36
All right. Well, we pray all the best on you and Red Balloon, and thank you for the courageous, important work that you’re doing, Andrew.SPEAKER_00 37:44
Appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me and um enjoyed the conversation.SPEAKER_01 37:50
All right, redballoon.work, everybody. See ya. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Christian Business Leader Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and tune in for the next episode as we continue exploring God’s will and ways for business.
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