Erik Simins, the CEO of WORKWOLF, started MAGNUS, a medical staffing service, in 2011 and it continues to develop financially with less than 2 hours of his attention each week. His most recent company is WORKWOLF, a digital platform designed to address his clients’ most pressing hiring concerns.
Erik is ready to grow the firm for an international transaction with a Global Recruiting Powerhouse after earning first place at both the 2020 Enterprise Blockchain Awards and the 2021 VivaTech Breakthrough Awards for his innovation in recruiting technology. Reading, problem solving, leadership concepts, high performance, and team building are some of his passions.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between the World’s Leaders and Erik Simins:
Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader? Tell us about your background and what you did before you started/joined Workwolf?
Erik Simins had no idea when he started his career as a business leader that he would be asked to present to audiences in Japan, Korea, Switzerland, France, or Dubai, or that he would be meeting with country Premiers about his technology innovation for government applications. What he did know was that he loved to solve problems, had an insatiable thirst for learning, and ever since he was a young kid, enjoyed pushing the limits of what was “acceptable” or possible.
Simins began his first entrepreneurial venture at the age of 19. He founded Fitness 101 and quickly gained credibility in the fitness market by training celebrities like Trish Stratus (WWE) and Shaun Davis (Mr. Universe). This provided him with plenty of income to put himself through school, and he graduated with a degree that specialised in physiology, anatomy, and metabolism, and allowed him to purchase his first property at 21 years old. After graduation, he began his career as a product development specialist for a Toronto based nutrition company and led the formulation of their supplement line. Today, that company, AllMax Nutrition, is a globally recognised brand in sports nutrition and a leader in the nutraceutical space. Enjoying the perks of the job, which included all the free supplements you could safely consume and being the head judge for fitness competitions, wasn’t enough for him, so he transitioned into the pharmaceutical industry, working for Belgium based Solvay Pharmaceuticals.
Leveraging many of the contacts he had made in the industry, at 25, he founded his second company, Health Network Communications, a medical advertising firm that connected physician office wall space with pharmaceutical-sponsored content. His first large deal was with MCI medical clinics, spanning 26 locations and over 100 offices. Simins was learning what he needed to grow a team and successful business, but the advertising business wasn’t the right environment.
Simins stayed true to the medical industry but switched gears and began recruiting in the medical industry in 2006 after one recruiter showed him his T4 (Canada’s government statement of income) and how much money that recruiter had earned in the previous year. It showed $300,000+. That’s all Simins needed to see to give the business a shot. It turned out that recruiting was the perfect fit for his personality type. After four years of individual success, he wanted to share his insights with a team that he would build for the partners within the company, but the firm had other plans. So, he started MAGNUS Personnel Corporation in 2011.
His first $1,000,000+ start-up success: MAGNUS HRS
MAGNUS was, and still is, a huge success. In its first year, the company reached over $1,000,000 of revenue and doubled that in year two. Today, after recruiting thousands of candidates and working with hundreds of life science and healthcare companies, MAGNUS is the trusted talent acquisition resource for many of the world’s leading medical organizations.
The Idea behind Starting Workwolf?
Owning a staffing business provided Simins with the exposure and oversight to witness the inefficiencies in how his clients’ recruited and hired new employees. He discovered quickly that neither the existing technology nor the automation solutions addressed what he calls “the root problem of all hiring inefficiencies”. The resume used to filter and hire employees is inaccurate more than half the time. The question was, how do you improve the truthfulness and accuracy of millions of resumes that go out to employers? It seemed like an unsolvable problem, but if it could be done, it would change hiring practises forever.
The Tech that Changed it All
Simins believes that you make your own luck and that you are only as strong as the circle of people you surround yourself with. So, shortly after founding MAGNUS, he joined an entrepreneur forum that, to this day, he is still a loyal member of. Here, he could share ideas and challenges in a safe, confidential environment and he could connect with peers to discuss the difficult road of entrepreneurship. In 2016, one of his forum mates, Dmitry Buterin (entrepreneurial genius behind three multi-million-dollar companies and father of cryptocurrency giant Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum), suggested “you guys should really have a deeper look at blockchain, it’s going to change how data is managed”. When Erik finished his research, it turned out that blockchain was the perfect use case for resume credential verification and it would indeed change how authenticated data was accessed, stored, and managed.
For the employment market, it meant that a new gold standard of resume could be developed; one that was authenticated and then immutable or (tamper-proof) but still verifiable in real-time. In September of 2017, Workwolf was born and, after four years of development, customer feedback, several prototypes, and two rounds of investor financing, Simins commercialised the technology in 2021, bringing to market the Digital Work Passport (real-time verifiable profiling for professionals) and the Packfinder (a predictive analytic software that employers use to automate applicant filtration). Combining these two technologies into one platform, Simins hopes to optimise the hiring process for his clients at MAGNUS and also to help professionals “skip the applicant line” by having a profile that has been authenticated by the 100,000+ credential issuers that are now part of Workwolf’s growing network of validators.
As Workwolf prepares for its next round of financing to support its growth and international expansion after winning the 2021 Vivatechnology Start-Up Challenge in Europe, Simins lets data drive the decisions and future path of the company. In the world of technology start up, you have to start with some assumptions, but the sooner you realise those assumptions are wrong, the sooner you can iterate. Only customer feedback and user data can tell you this. If anyone is thinking about starting a technology company, Simins would recommend that you “fail fast”. The idea that you started with will probably be entirely different by the time your product is ready for commercialization. Don’t fall in love with any path, because it WILL change. However, believing in your idea is critical to enduring the agony of people calling you “crazy,” “it will never happen,” or simply getting through the tough days.
Simins believes that balance is unachievable in a traditional sense. His approach to working through competing responsibilities is to give whatever he’s doing 100% of his attention. Instead of being with his two children and working on his phone, he’ll shut off his phone for 15 or 30 minutes and do nothing other than fully engage with his kids and play with them. Vacations are also something he loves (especially Europe), but Covid-19, put this ‘escape’ on hold for him, making it more difficult to “shut off” and dedicate all his attention to his amazing wife and family.
