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How Reejig is helping everyone realise their true potential
“For us to build a global-first culture, everyone has to feel they have access to the culture,” Siobhan says. “Many people don’t know each other, and building connections and culture takes time. I have a really open culture. I’m very transparent with my team. I’m not going to always get it right, but when I don’t, I will fix it.”
People are often described as an organistion’s greatest asset, but good people can be expensive, and hard to find. This means leaders must be absolutely focused on making sure they have the right people, and that those people can bring their full selves to work.
Siobhan Savage had seen firsthand the challenge of unfulfilled potential, having worked for many years in some of Australia’s largest human resources companies. Many times, she saw that employers simply did not understand what skills they really needed, or could not readily see the capabilities they already had.
Having seen the problem, Siobhan became obsessed with solving it. But she quickly found there was no single solution that drew together all of the information needed to paint a complete picture of a person’s skills, or that could help them develop skills that would improve their value.
“I thought, why has no one else done this?” she says. “C-suite executives often have no idea who works for them, and no idea about the potential already in their workforce.”
With this in mind, she decided to do something about it. And so, in 2019, Reejig was born.
Taking a skilful leap
Like many founders, Siobhan was hesitant about whether she could make the switch from corporate roles to building her own startup. Her hesitation was compounded by having recently given birth to her second child.
“I was feeding my baby at 2:00am and obsessing over this,” Siobhan says. “I was singing lullabies and trying to work on the business.”
Another concern was that she had never gained the technology skills she knew would be needed.
What helped her fill the gaps was the interest she attracted from others in the startup community, including the two people who would become her co-founders – data scientist Dr Shujia Zhang and chief technology officer (CTO) Mike Reed. She has also had support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which connected her to technological help. “I don’t come from a network of technologists, right?” she says. “But what AWS has done well is it’s created a community where we have access to folks who are on the same journey as us. So that’s been incredible.”
“People were really generous and would give me time because I understood the issues,” she says. “We came together really quickly, and it felt good.”
Shujia and Mike used their technology expertise to translate Siobhan’s human resources expertise into a cloud-based tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to collect and interpret information about a person’s skills to deliver the deepest possible profile of their capabilities and potential, and to nudge them to new career opportunities.
Building a company for humans
Reejig soon had a core team of 12, and after six months a prototype was ready for demonstration. This proved compelling enough for the business to be rewarded with $2.2 million in seed funding.
“That was when it became real,” Siobhan says. “Taking money from people means you have to deliver.”
That funding provided the boost needed to grow Reejig into a 100-person organistion with customers around the world, one which in 2022 was honoured as a Technology Pioneer at the World Economic Forum.
While much of the team has focused on developing the company’s AI-based tools, Siobhan has also had to ensure that the company itself can support its own rapid growth, which she has done with the help of AWS. “We had to work out how we take the knowledge in my head and share it with the masses,” Siobhan says. “We want to turn this into a multibillion-dollar company, so we can’t have bespoke ways of doing things. With AWS, we were able to optimise our tech stack. So, when we were designing for scale, they helped put the right technology strategy in place, which has been incredibly helpful for us in building Reejig to go global.”
Riding the rocket ship
Another critical area of focus for Siobhan has been on developing a strong culture within Reejig – a difficult challenge in a fast-growing organistion where people are rarely in the same place at the same time.
“For us to build a global-first culture, everyone has to feel they have access to the culture,” Siobhan says. “Many people don’t know each other, and building connections and culture takes time. I have a really open culture. I’m very transparent with my team. I’m not going to always get it right, but when I don’t, I will fix it.”
Maintaining that strong culture will also be critical to ensuring that Reejig can fulfil its goal of helping HR and talent teams retain, recruit, and mobilize talent around the world. Siobhan says Reejig is now on course to employ 250 people as it expands to be truly global in scope.
“We are building something from nothing,” she says. “You know when a rocket ship starts to shake aggressively? Well, the rocket hasn’t even taken off. The people who are attracted to this genuinely understand that.”
Finding balance
As successful as Reejig has become, Siobhan says there are still times when she struggles to balance juggling her fast-growing business and her fast-growing family.
But now that her own experience has proven what’s possible, she hopes to prove it to thousands of other founders also.
“I try not to be labelled as a female CEO – I feel like my gender is irrelevant,” she says. “I just want to be a good CEO, but I would like to use this moment to normalise having babies and building billion-dollar companies.”
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Amazon OpenSearch
Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more.
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