Alexander Farr Podcast Transcript
Alexander Farr joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Alexander Farr. Alexander Farr is the co-founder and COO of Clera, where he built and leads the system that transforms passive professionals into active candidates at scale. Under his leadership, Clera has grown to represent more than 100,000 tech professionals.
Alex designed the company’s sourcing engine, outreach infrastructure, and engagement model from the ground up, centered on a key insight. Instead of requiring talent to join yet another platform, Clera meets candidates where they already are. Today, he oversees qualification flows, candidate life cycle management, and the ongoing career relationships that make Klara’s matching improve over time.
Well, good afternoon, Alex. Welcome to the show.
Alexander Farr: Thanks, Brian. Good to, good to chat.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. Been looking forward to this, honestly. You’re doing some great stuff, and wanna jump right into that. But again, just to highlight, you’re hailing out of the great state of California there in San Francisco.
I’m in Kansas City, so appreciate you making the time and traversing the globe and calendars. So, Alex, let’s jump into your first question. Let’s start with your journey. You grew up watching Berlin’s startup scene produce unicorns, studied at TUM, Cambridge, and Berkeley, and have traveled to more than 70 countries, which is awesome.
How did that path lead you to co-found Clera?
Alexander Farr: I’ve been lucky to be in a couple of entrepreneurial environments and always saw how startups are such a fast-paced environment and also you can have such a big impact in a small team. So that was one of my favorite career options from a very early age when I started my university degree.
So I studied business and computer science. Went to like d-different universities abroad also. And w– I had the, the clear goal of, of starting my own path in entrepreneurship at some point. But I started my career on the venture capital side early-stage investing with, with Flash Ventures because I was thinking to, like, be able to understand different business models from a high-level perspective and really being able to, like, also talk to many other amazing founders.
It was a really good education. Moved on to become then chief of staff at a, at a startup called Superchat. We did basically building an WhatsApp messaging platform, and as a chief of staff, I had a lot of different responsibilities, one of them also being recruiting. So I did over eight hundred interviews, thirty hires for the team.
And that was a big, big challenge because as anyone would tell you, done any recruiting so far has been a manual hassle. So I tried every tool out there, also using some of the early versions of AI recruiting tools, and basically saw that they don’t solve the fundamental core issue in terms of connecting the right people with the right opportunity without a lot of manual work.
So, this was kind of the, the pain point, top of mind when Sebastian, Daniel and I started exploring what we wanted to do next and, and looked into that early twenty twenty-five in Berlin. Like launched like a very early, very scrappy version of that and saw a lot of demand. So, this is when we quit our existing jobs and were, like, working full-time on, on making this happen.
From the beginning, it was clear to us that the US market would be way more attractive than like the German or European market where we were from originally. And this is why we were thinking, “Okay, how can we best work on the market?” After doing a lot of late night shifts, we decided, okay, let’s actually try to get to the time zone.
We didn’t have the visa at the point. We didn’t have the, the funding, and we’re still like in the, I guess, idea gathering phase. So this is when we decided to move to Latin America to be on like the same time zone as the US. It was also cheaper, which was good for our run rate pre-fundraise. So eventually we actually worked out of six countries like Peru, Colombia, Brazil like seven, seven days a week.
Very intense times, but also very– a lot of adventures we had during that time as we were starting out.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. There’s a lot that goes into that, and I just love the fact that that exposure and that startup community in Berlin was really influential in what you did.
And what you said earlier is you saw this potential for a big impact with a small business or team, and and it tru- it truly is. I think entrepreneurship can, can make a huge change on the world. But you did get, get into study. You b- studied business, computer science but with all this startup experience leadership responsibilities, various vertical responsibilities you were able to help successfully start this startup Clera, and recognize that US is a good market to start in and a large market.
It would probably make the most sense. So again, I appreciate your insights and, and backstory. Alex, a core insight behind Clera is meeting candidates where they already are through email, iMessage, and WhatsApp instead of asking them to join yet another platform without being intrusive. Why was that decision so central, and how does it change the candidate experience?
Alexander Farr: Yeah. We fundamentally noticed that there’s, like, two main like, use cases or, like, platforms used by, by job seekers, but both are, like, fundamentally failing providing a stellar experience. On the one hand, there’s existing recruiters and headhunters who provide an okay experience, but only accessible to the top talents and can only provide access to so many candidates at a time to the company side.
And also there’s existing job platforms, but especially with more and more applications being auto-generated, there’s more and more competition, and many of the good candidates are not even applying anymore because they’re not seeing results. So we noticed there’s a way for good candidates to actually get interviews with the hiring managers without applying to thousands of jobs.
And thus we thought, okay, there needs to be, like, a way how we can democratize access to what we call the talent agent or like to kind of experience that the best headhunters would provide but to, to kind of everyone who’s, like, actively looking for a job. And we noticed that with like form factors like email, iMessage and WhatsApp, those are like the channels already used by candidates and it’s where candidates would often already build a relationship with existing, like, human recruiters.
There’s the, the form factor common in place for job boards would often be just their own landing page where jobs are posted, which means that many of, like, the good candidates might not come back to the platform and thus for like many of existing job platforms it’s actually hard to be able to to keep getting good candidates coming back to the site.
So we built our talent agent in those media email, iMessage and WhatsApp, where on the one hand, we can proactively ping the candidate and also the candidate can at any time easily find the our agent again and, and be able to continue the conversation there. And basically it comes down to for good talents, you want to provide the best experience.
People are busy. They they might not have, like, time to like think about the name of your website and come back to a job board, but they will always have time to answer to like a high quality email or message which pitches them a job that they’re interested in. And that’s, that’s the experience that we’re building by– And we’re sending the talent in detail and we’re sending a company in detail.
We can make sure that we are providing high quality matches and then ultimately pinging in the, in the right moment through these channels.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. And the gap you saw in the market and we’ve all been there, right? There’s great sites, top recruiters, top jobs, but they can’t manage all the candidates, and that’s where a lot of candidates get frustrated.
They kind of get ghosted by their recruiter. They never get responses. And of course, every platform, they’ve got their pro- pro- proprietary platform, and it’s has their own set of requirements, very much different, very cumbersome. But I liked, again, part of this gap is meeting the candidates where they are and using their favorite platforms, as you mentioned which provides a much better customer experience, but also starting to match really the best jobs to the best cl- candidates whatever that experience is.
So that’s awesome. Thank you. Alex, Clera frames itself as an AI talent agent that represents the candidate’s interest, not the company’s. How do you earn trust on both sides of that marketplace at once and avoid the perception problems that have dogged recruiting tools?
Alexander Farr: I guess our two biggest advantages and also ways how we’ve been building fast is actually providing the right fit in terms of providing high-fitting job opportunities to candidates and then being able to make intros.
And also on the other way around for the company side, showing them people that are relevant to the jobs they’re hiring for and then being able to, to get them interviewing. So this is, I guess, fundamentally just delivering on the promise that most of the players are doing is what earns us trust and also has been getting us a lot of referrals.
And why we can actually deliver on this is that we are not like a human recruiter working with quite a limited network of companies and candidates, but rather have marketplace liquidity. We just hit a hundred thousand candidates that have been using us last week. And also on the company side have a few thousand jobs with direct relationships where we can…
where our agent is making introductions to. And this is just helping us facilitate more and more of matches on, on both sides. And I think this is like very much at the high level. Obviously, there’s tons of problems in the recruiting industry and the… and looking into the details, for example, in terms of ghosting, in terms of bias and rejections.
And those are all things we’re, like, very actively working on. For example, we have a policy that companies like hire to give candidates feedback within two weeks, and otherwise they will get an automated decline so that at least, candidates are kept in the loop. Also in terms of bias, this is something where we’re regularly reviewing the outputs of our system and, and also adjusting it so that whenever we see biases or anything that should not have happened in that way, we at least have this feedback loop going and also then can jump in and, and help in the individual cases.
Ultimately, I think from a, from a mindset perspective, we are working very hard to actually think of this as a long-term game because there’s, F- f- like obviously first from a mindset perspective, I think it, it helps to prioritize the candidate and company experience. But even with a business mindset the placement fees or the success of actually introducing a company and candidate is such a lucrative transaction.
And so we’re earning more than $20,000 per successful hire. That does make sense to also prioritize how often can we help a candidate find a new job in the longer term. Because if you, over their career, you might end up to like $100,000 per candidate which, which means that it does make sense to prioritize the experience of someone s- sticking to our platform versus making like a one-off hire or like trying to push something too hard, which in the end limits candidate or company experience
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s interesting. What I really like and I took away from y-your response there was that trust, right? You’re– First of all, you’re creating interest for the candidates, but you’re providing relevant candidates to the employers, delivering on your promise again, building trust. And then from there, as the best type of compliment to your business is all these referrals, and that shows up now.
You talked about having just last week over a hundred thousand candidates already using your platform. That is amazing. Really do appreciate what you guys are doing there. Thank you. And Alex, the last question that I have for you today as we look ahead to the future, you described a future where AI knows people well enough to make introductions that used to take years of relationship building.
How do you see AI reshaping careers and hiring over the next few years, and what role do you want Clera to play in that role?
Alexander Farr: Yeah. So I think AI will, like, fundamentally change most of the careers and industries. We’re already seeing the impact in, in tech right now with a lot of layoffs happening, and I think unfortunately that will only continue and, and speed up.
And we have the, the hard belief that in many vertical industries, this might mean that work might become more optional than mandatory given that AI and robots will be better able to work on, on many things that we are doing which fundamentally also puts our business at risk to some extent. At the same time, I think it also provides the biggest opportunity for us given that this is a longer transition period where people will need to find new things they work on.
They need to con-continue developing themselves. And also companies are actually very actively hiring for the right fit that is, like having the right skill set to be super effective with AI in, in the job openings they have. So we are actually seeing more demand than ever for engineers and then specifically obviously for AI native talent.
And this is providing like an opportunity where we are stepping in to help candidates share what they’re looking for, the skill set, and provide the high quality match that in terms of jobs that the companies are hiring for. So I think it’s shaping a lot. Still like, a bit unclear how it will unfold exactly.
But what we do know is that there is more change, more uncertainty, people needing more this kind of talent agent on their side that is helping them connect to the right jobs.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, AI is totally changing the employment and career landscape as we know it. And you mentioned some of the news we’re seeing out there.
Some, some jobs are being replaced with AI, but on the positive side, we, a- as you mentioned, more human jobs with those AI skills we know that is expanding and growing, so there’s, there’s potential there. But again, we need to leverage AI to be more efficient in finding the right matches, and I know we you’re absolutely leveraging that technology to fit the perfect candidate with the perfect job.
And, to do that at scale, you definitely need to leverage AI, so appreciate the insights. And Alex, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Alexander Farr: Likewise. Thanks so much, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Alexander Farr Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
