Frank Bardelli knew right away that his recent job hunt was going to be different.
After the software engineer posted on LinkedIn a couple of months ago that he was looking for a role, he didn’t hear from former colleagues with offers to come work with them again, as he had during past searches.
“It was very different, and definitely drier than I’ve seen it be in many years,” Bardelli told Business Insider.
So, when he heard from a recruiter at Fonzi, which matches engineers with startups and tech companies, Bardelli was intrigued.
He completed a profile and applied to what Fonzi calls Match Day, the process through which employers can meet with candidates. Three of the 14 participating companies offered Bardelli interviews. That allowed him to sidestep a protracted job search and many of the headaches that go along with it, he said.
For many in tech, layoffs and sluggish hiring have translated to job searches marked by seemingly endless rounds of applying. Letting an employer come to you likely offers an appealing alternative.
That’s the hope of Yang Mou, Fonzi’s cofounder and CEO. He told Business Insider that the existing traditional recruiting process is inefficient and “broken for both sides.”
Mou said this results in candidates spending a lot of time trying to determine whether a company is a good fit. When candidates do land interviews, he said, they often repeat themselves in similar conversations with multiple employers.
Employers, for their part, are “getting flooded with applicants,” Mou said. “You put up a job post, you get 1,000 applicants in 24 hours.”
To try to make the whole process more palatable, Mou said, Fonzi takes candidates who know what they want in a new role and connects them with employers that have real jobs and “sane hiring processes.”
“They’re not going to drag it out for three months,” he said, referring to employers.
Companies seeking talent through Fonzi are required to commit to minimum salaries upfront so that candidates don’t have to go through rounds of interviews only to learn that the pay won’t cut it.
Mou said engineers must complete a “very selective” application process before being matched with an employer. Part of that involves a brief exchange with Fonzi’s AI interviewer. The agent can handle complex conversations, including understanding the candidate’s technical work.
Talking to an AI agent, Mou said, can be helpful for busy engineers who might want to wait until after the workday to complete that part of an application.
“It has infinite patience,” he said. “You can ramble for 15 minutes and it won’t cut you off.”
Fonzi combines the AI interview with candidates’ résumés, additional details on their work histories, and personal preferences such as where they want to work and for what type of company. A Fonzi recruiter then talks by phone with those who appear to be a good fit. From there, Fonzi invites top candidates to take part in Match Day and assigns each candidate a recruiter to work with during the job search.
The conversations with the recruiter help to identify important attributes, Mou said.
“Are they a capable communicator?” he said. “Would you want to work with this person?”
The discussions also help reveal more than what’s on someone’s résumé, said Bec Bliss, a recruiter who is Fonzi’s head of talent.
“Getting folks to talk about what they love, what they’re good at, what they want to be doing turns them into the full, 3D candidate instead of a sheet of paper,” she told Business Insider.
Each month, Fonzi AI has Match Day for engineers seeking in-person and hybrid roles in the New York area and for remote roles in the US. The company plans to offer in-person and hybrid roles in San Fransicso in October and other cities after that.
Fonzi is free for job seekers and charges a fee of 18% of the base salary if a company makes a hire. Because the business model is only about three months old, the company hasn’t released stats on how many workers employers have hired.
For Bardelli, the lackluster job market meant that after leaving a prior role, he expected to have to brush up on his interviewing and networking skills instead of relying on the network he’d built up over about 20 years in tech.
“I was hitting the market cold,” Bardelli said.
Networking, many recruiters insist, is still one of the best ways to find a job and get past the screening software that so many job seekers hate. Yet, if there’s not much hiring going on, the search can be tough even when you’re plugged in, as Bardelli is.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Yeah, hiring has kind of dried up at our company,’” he said, referring to comments he heard from industry colleagues.
Ultimately, Bardelli settled on an employer he connected with through Fonzi and started his new role this month.
He said that going into the process with Fonzi, he wondered whether employers would like what he had to offer, though he was optimistic.
“I thought my skills were relevant enough that maybe I’d get a match or two,” Bardelli said. “I was very happy to have any matches at all.”
Do you have a story to share about your job search? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.
This year might as well be a game of whack-a-mole for investors in Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA): When one problem disappears, another one — or two — pop right up in its stead.
Tesla is dealing with mounting lawsuits, an executive talent exodus, an aging vehicle lineup, declining sales, loss of revenue from zero-emission credit sales, and increased competition, among other developments. Another problem is China, where it is embroiled in a brutal price war against relentlessly price-competitive domestic brands.
But Tesla might have one trick up its sleeve to help boost its sales in the region: the Model Y L.
Before we get to the Model Y L, let’s look at exactly how dire things appear in China. During the second quarter, Tesla sold 128,803 electric vehicles (EVs) in China, which was a 4.3% decline from the first quarter and down 11.7% from the prior year.
To complicate matters further, after making a marketing push with discounts and incentives, Tesla sales had a minor resurgence in June before falling lower again in July.
Worse still is the fact that the sales declines came after a refreshed Model Y lineup was available. Weaker-than-anticipated production during the first quarter led to disappointing sales, but once production was up to speed, deliveries still failed to rebound.
Weakness in China helped drive Tesla’s global deliveries down 13.5% during the second quarter, the worst quarterly decline in more than a decade. The environment isn’t getting better, with China’s domestic brands continuing to unleash price cuts. One recent example was Nio, with an across-the-board price cut on its vehicles equipped with long-range batteries by lowering the price of its optional 100-kWh battery.
Tesla is facing a slowdown in one of its most crucial markets, with the previously mentioned price war and slowing economy. One way the electric vehicle (EV) maker thinks it can make up some sales ground is with the newly launched Model Y L. The new version of the Model Y is a stretched six-seat version of the popular SUV made for Chinese buyers.
The reason is pretty basic: Chinese customers prefer larger family cars with more seating capacity, and that’s where the Model Y L comes in – the “L” standing for long wheelbase, meaning a six-seat layout and more legroom.
On this episode of The Long View, Lawrence Lam, author, investor, and managing director and founder of Lumenary Investment Management, breaks down the differences in founder-led companies, what red flags to look out for, and three key pillars to assess whether founders are motivated to build their companies for the long term from his new book The Founder Effect.
Here are a few highlights from Lam’s conversation with Morningstar’s Dan Lefkovitz.
Dan Lefkovitz: What do you make of the common criticism of founders that sometimes the visionary, the entrepreneur, isn’t the right person to manage the company or to take the company to the next level?
Lawrence Lam: I’d say it’s not about whether they can make an assumption between them being a visionary and them not being able to take it to the next level. It’s not so much about that. It’s more about motivation. It’s about distinguishing the different types of motivation, the ones who want to truly build a company for a very long period of time, or the ones who are interested in flipping the company. So, I call them flippers or the builders. And for investors, you need to stay vigilant—motivations can change over time because it’s human nature, and to watch very closely what’s happening with companies.
I would argue a good recent example is Elon Musk moving into government. One could look at that as a sign that, “Hey, he’s putting his personal ambitions ahead of the companies that he’s involved in, and that motivation has changed.” No doubt that when he first joined DOGE that he would dedicate a significant effort to that and therefore take away the effort with his existing companies. The best founders can replicate their operating system, but they’re not so much of an app, they’re actually the operating system, and they design it. And that’s how they structure the organization. A lot of them have this flexibility to do things differently. They own a significant share, so they can problem-solve in a unique way.
There, of course, are red flags that you want to look for, and in particular, large equity sell-downs; that’s a red flag. And all those Palantir investors out there, keep your eyes open and stay vigilant. And then looking at that changing person versus company motivation, or one that has an org structure that is bottlenecked by the founder. All these considerations are red flags to look for. But of course, as investors, you can mitigate against that. You can rotate companies; you can trim some profits and move capital to another company. Founders are good at hyping up their business, so you don’t want anything that’s too overhyped, and maintain a deep bench of founder-led companies that you switch between. And then, of course, monitor the portfolio closely, monitor the equity movements closely.
Lefkovitz: How do you look through hype? I imagine a lot of these guys are very charismatic. How do you avoid being lured by their charisma?
Lam: They’ve started their business because of their ability to influence the market. And I outline some objective key things that investors can look for. I have a framework that’s based on three pillars that I’ve observed in a lot of successful founder-led companies and their objective. Because the question of things like motivation, cognitive biases, and alignment with investors are very subjective types of topics. But if you have some objective things to look for, you can really solve that in a scientific way.
So, I think that in terms of looking for founders that are genuinely there to build for the long term, you really want to look at not just the hype, but all the underlying facts that even an outsider can see and identify. In the book, I identify three key pillars. One is judgment and decision-making and being able to make bold decisions. The second is being aligned with investors. Their motivations are in line with what investors want over the long term. And the third thing is to be able to influence internally their staff, the organization, and therefore influence externally the media, shareholders, and customers to actually want their product. And the best of the best can do that.
Lefkovitz: You mentioned some metrics earlier that you look for and how you quantify these things. It would be interesting to hear a little bit more about the types of indicators that you use to assess each of these pillars of the framework.
Lam: The evolution of my process has always started with the quantitative side of things first. I’m always looking for companies that produce those continual growth in earnings, the conservative balance sheet, all those traits that we mentioned that are prevalent with founder-led companies that show up actually in the financial statements. And then once you identify those, and you may have thousands of those companies, you can very quickly see through the share register if they are founder-led quite quickly. And from the couple of thousand that you see, you narrow down quickly. I narrow down to thousands, 2,000 stocks very quickly on a global level out of, say, 40,000 to 50,000 global companies. And then next comes a qualitative analysis that any investor would do and have their own checklist and process for monitoring.
For me, what’s important is that the founder and the management team definitely need to follow the framework that I’ve written about in the book and score very highly in that. I want them to have a strong market position, and a very diversified customer base and supply base. And to really capture that essence of the founder effect to really be involved in new products and services. What I’ve seen in the past happen is some companies that I’ve invested in are fantastic companies growing, but then they’re in some old-generation businesses like producing caliper brakes for cars, producing petrochemical products, and producing fertilizers. And that can be a trap too, because then some of these companies are just content with doing what they’ve always been doing and almost a bit too stagnant. That’s why you want the new products and the new services, and trying to find the companies with that pricing power and that opportunity where they can compound and fully achieve their potential under the founder.
Lefkovitz: I’m reminded of that famous Peter Lynch quote, “You should invest in a company that’s so good, even an idiot could run it because sooner or later, one will.” I think Warren Buffett has quoted it as well. So, the idea is you should look at the structural features of the company and maybe its competitive advantage. We use the economic moat framework here at Morningstar. What do you make of that, that it’s less about the people and more about these structural features of the company?
Lam: I love Peter Lynch’s quotes, especially the one about not watering the weeds and pulling out your flowers. Love that.
Lefkovitz: I don’t know that one.
Lam: For me, it’s about these businesses—get them before an idiot starts running them. Someone started that business. Someone founded that company. Get in at that time while they’re still running it, before the idiot gets in, and invest early when they’re still running it. That is the essence of The Founder Effect, and really spotting when that motivation changes, if it does, then get out and then let the idiots take over.
Jerome Powell arrives for a dinner during the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Moran, Wyoming, on Aug. 21.
(Bloomberg) — Jerome Powell sent the US bond market up on Friday by telegraphing his Federal Reserve will resume reducing interest rates as soon as next month.
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Beyond September, it’s up to the economy how much further he cuts — and how much more Treasuries can rally.
The central bank chief on Friday delivered his strongest signal yet that he’s ready to end an eight-month pause, saying the downside risks to the labor market may “warrant adjusting our policy stance.” Treasury bonds jumped, widening the gap between short- and long-term yields by the most in four years — a typical reaction to a more dovish Fed.
Yet for all the sense of the relief, there are some lingering doubts about how much rates will come down. Futures traders don’t see a quarter-point cut at the Sept. 17 meeting as a sure thing, pricing in the odds at around 80%. And even with Friday’s gains, bond yields still haven’t pushed below lows from earlier this month as investors wait for employment and inflation data that come in before the next meeting.
The restrained response reflects the vexing cross-currents that are facing the Fed, which is balancing a softening labor market against the risk that inflation will rise from still elevated levels as President Donald Trump’s tariffs ripple through the economy.
A case in point: this week, the Fed’s favored inflation gauge may show price pressures remain strong. The auctions of two-，five- and seven-year bonds will test investors’ demand. And even with Powell’s pivot, there’s the possibility of a repeat of last year, when the Fed started easing policy, only to stop in January when the economy kept exhibiting surprising strength.
Powell “solidifies market expectations of a cut in September,” but “it’s less about whether the move comes in September or October,” said Gregory Peters, co-chief investment officer at PGIM Fixed Income. “We don’t know what the next six months will look like. It’s still going to be an environment of mixed data, keeping the bond market on edge.”
The policy-sensitive two-year yield tumbled 10 basis points Friday to 3.7%, near its early August low – which was set after the employment report showed job growth was far weaker than expected. Interest-rate swaps showed traders started pricing in two quarter-point reductions by year-end, with a small chance given to a third such move.
Sharon Chuter, the founder of the inclusive makeup brand Uoma Beauty died on Aug. 14 according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s officer at the age of 38. Representatives for Chuter confirmed her death toThe Business of Beauty on Friday; the news was first reported by Kirbie Johnson’s Ahead of The Kirb newsletter.
Chuter founded Uoma Beauty in 2019, and the line was carried in the likes of Selfridges in the UK and Ulta Beauty in the US. The brand was known for its broad range of foundation, offering more than 50 shades, as well as Chuter’s activism for women of colour in the beauty industry. She started the “Pull Up or Shut Up” movement in 2020, calling on retailers and other beauty companies to publicly release the amount of Black employees they had in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
The brand’s assets were acquired by private equity firm MacArthur Beauty and the investor BrainTrust in late 2023. In February, she initiated a lawsuit against the two companies, alleging that its sale was unauthorised and had been below market value.
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(Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve’s annual gathering in the Rocky Mountains is usually a time for central bankers and their wonky friends to kick back, discuss a few complicated economic topics and then go for a hike in the shadow of Grand Teton.
This year, the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium, which wrapped up Saturday, was at times a tense affair and drove home how difficult the path ahead is for the US central bank.
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On Friday, Chair Jerome Powell used his keynote speech to signal the Fed is headed for an interest-rate cut as soon as its next policy meeting in September. Yet there are clear divisions among policymakers over whether that’s the right call. Powell, himself, noted the economy has handed Fed officials a “challenging situation.”
Policymakers are grappling with inflation that’s still above their 2% goal — and rising — and a labor market that’s showing signs of weakness. That unnerving reality, which pulls policy in opposite directions, is made worse by a high degree of uncertainty about how each of those factors will evolve over the coming months.
“We’re getting some cross-currents and it’s in a difficult environment,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “I always say the hardest job the central bank has is to get the timing right at moments of transition.”
The conference also highlighted the political pressures weighing on the Fed. Those are likely to intensify in coming months as President Donald Trump looks to put his stamp on what may be the most prominent federal institution to have so far escaped his overhaul attempts.
As Powell delivered his speech Friday morning, Trump said he would fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook if she didn’t resign over recent allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. It’s the latest attempt by the administration to pressure the Fed from multiple angles as Trump relentlessly pushes for lower interest rates.
Security for the event was noticeably heightened compared to recent years, adding to the tension at the gathering. Officers from the Fed Police, US Park Police and Teton County Sheriff’s Office, some in military-style fatigues and carrying weapons, were a constant presence.
Earlier Friday morning, officers had to remove one person, the Trump-backer and Fed gadfly James Fishback, after he confronted Cook in the lobby of the lodge and shouted questions about the mortgage controversy.
(Reuters) -HSBC’s Swiss private bank has launched a cull of more than 1,000 wealthy Middle Eastern clients, as it faces scrutiny from regulators over high-risk customers, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
The bank will terminate its relationships with several customers from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon and Egypt, many of whom have assets of more than $100 million, the FT said, citing people familiar with the matter.
In a statement to Reuters, HSBC referred to plans announced in October last year to reshape the group and added: “As part of this, we are evolving the strategic focus of our Swiss Private Bank.” It gave no further detail about any client accounts being closed.
In a separate emailed statement to Reuters, Barry O’Byrne, CEO of International Wealth and Premier Banking at HSBC, said the bank continued to have an “absolute commitment” to both its Middle East and Swiss Wealth businesses.
He said Switzerland plays a key role in how it supports clients globally – “it’s one of our core wealth hubs”.
The FT said HSBC’s Swiss private bank had informed the affected clients they will no longer be able to use its services, and will send out letters advising them to move their accounts elsewhere in the coming months.
Bloomberg News had on Saturday reported that HSBC’s Swiss private bank would cut 1,000 Middle East clients.
Swiss financial watchdog FINMA said in 2024 that the HSBC unit had breached its obligations in the prevention of money laundering in connection with two politically exposed persons.
The regulator found that suspicious transactions were carried out involving prominent personalities between 2002 and 2015 with a total value of $300 million.
HSBC had said last month that law enforcement authorities in Switzerland and France were in the early stages of investigating its Private Bank (Suisse) SA unit in connection with alleged money laundering offences in respect of two historical banking relationships.
(Reporting by Gursimran Kaur and Dave Graham; Editing by Jan Harvey and David Holmes)
A jump in the share of foreign-born workers after the pandemic helped Europe bring inflation down without sharply slower growth, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said Saturday.
A key factor “has been the rise in both the number and participation rate of foreign workers,” Lagarde said in a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a Federal Reserve economic symposium. “In Germany, for example, GDP would be around 6% lower than in 2019 without the contribution of foreign workers.”
Spain’s strong post-pandemic economic growth “also owes much to the contribution of foreign labor,” she said.
Lagarde’s comments echoed a common view among economists that an influx of foreign workers helped companies expand their output and meet a spike in demand after the pandemic that followed stimulus benefits. The increased supply helped bring down inflation in Europe and the United States. Yet the rise in immigration also sparked a political backlash in both economies.
“Migration could, in principle, play a crucial role in easing” labor shortages as native populations age, Lagarde said. But “political economy pressures may increasingly limit inflows.”
Lagarde also said that a drop in inflation-adjusted wages, greater hoarding of workers by companies, and an influx of elderly people into the labor force also contributed to steady economic growth even as the ECB lifted interest rates.
Historically, Lagarde emphasized, higher borrowing costs have dragged down economic growth, often causing recessions and leading to higher unemployment. Yet that didn’t happen as the ECB raised its key rate in 2022 and 2023.
While foreign born workers accounted for just 9% of the EU’s labor force in 2022, they have made up half of the bloc’s labor force growth in the past three years, Lagarde said.
More elderly people also joined the workforce, Lagarde noted. Without that increase, the unemployment rate in the 20 countries that use the euro currency would be elevated — 6.6%, rather than the current rate of 6.3%, she said.
Kazuo Ueda, governor of the Bank of Japan, spoke on the same panel at Jackson Hole and noted a similar trend in Japan since the pandemic. While the foreign-born make up just 3% of the workforce, they have made up half of recent workforce growth.