ZipRecruiter’s new CFO on the labor market and her first CFO job

First-time CFOs looking for a how-to guide might want to take a page out of Carmen Chan’s playbook.

Chan, who most recently served as managing director of Barclays, technically started her new gig as the CFO of online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter on August 17, but the work really kicked off weeks before that. Her ZipRecruiter role marks Chan’s first CFO job: Before Barclays, Chan served as VP of corporate development and investor relations at digital health company Noom.

The personal upskilling required for the public-facing aspects of the CFO gig happened as soon as she joined the team at ZipRecruiter. “My first week was basically earnings,” she told CFO Brew, and she credits ZipRecruiter president and interim CFO David Travers for her relative ease transitioning into that environment.

“It really helps to have someone who is a current CFO show you the baseline, because then you’re not trying to assess where the baseline is,” she said of her upskilling process. “You can see what is status quo and you can make your own determination as to, what are the highest ROI projects for you to really drive in your first three months, six months, a year from now?”

30 ’til infinity. Now that her first day has actually passed, she’s focused on those next 30, 60, and 90.

She’s coming to the company at an interesting time, to say the least. “We’re at an inflection point in terms of what the future of work looks like,” Chan said. “There has never been a better time to think about how we drive continued innovation and disruption for job seekers.”

Her first 30 days will be focused on “assessing where things are at, rather than going in and instantly applying a playbook or coming to a conclusion,” Chan said.

For the next month or so, she’s prioritizing meeting “with all of the key business heads here at Zip that either drive the product or drive revenue in some other way, or drive costs in some other way,” she said. “It’s very much a learning tour right now, pulling the data, understanding not just the data, but also the qualitative dynamics of…how everyone works together and what the metrics are saying.”

At the end of her listening tour, that’s when she’ll feel ready to present her own plan “around how I want to tackle our core business processes,” Chan explained.

Quits driven. There is one topic Chan already has a clear POV on: the state of the labor market.

“Our view of the hiring market right now is that it’s stabilized, but it’s still subdued,” she said. “What I mean by that is it’s a little bit more nuanced, because if you look at all the macroeconomic indicators, things are actually fairly healthy.”

That’s not necessarily a bright spot for a hiring marketplace.

“Our business here at ZipRecruiter isn’t a function of a healthy economy. It’s actually much more driven by the number of quits that we see within the labor market, i.e., are people quitting their jobs and moving on to do something else, and then are those jobs being backfilled?” Chan explained. “If that isn’t at a healthy level, you don’t see as many job postings, and that translates very directly to revenue for us.”

And right now, “the economy’s working…but workers are “staying in their jobs for longer, and…not necessarily finding that they have a ton of other jobs or options out there.”

“Until I see the quits rate start to tick up, it’s hard for me to say the macro is very beneficial for us right now,” she said. “It is not a headwind, but it hasn’t turned into a tailwind yet.”

Future of work. Then, there’s the AI of it all. “The core of what we’re solving for is changing,” Chan said. “What is it changing to become? It’s not an AI jobs apocalypse.”

Currently, Chan has observed “the majority of jobs on our platform are still jobs that cannot be replaced by AI.” You need an actual human manning the store. You need an actual human driving the truck.”

ZipRecruiter is itself using AI in its efforts to make the matching process between job seekers and employers “more accurate, but to also drive people to connect faster,” Chan noted. “At the heart of it, we have found that, at least in employment, you cannot completely automate the process. [Job seekers and employers] have to meet and talk to decide, ‘Hey, is this employer a right fit? Is this the right job seeker for this posting?’”

ZipRecruiter aims to do that rather than “putting employers through a deep, heavily automated process [and] as opposed to putting job seekers through to some AI chatbot that then directs them to someone else,” she continued. “At the heart of it, people still actually need to interact with each other.”