How Roy Baladi Scaled Jobs For Humanity to 674,000 Users (and Counting)

Introduction

When it comes to building a mission-driven job board with real traction, few have done it quite like Roy Baladi, founder of Jobs for Humanity. In this episode of the JBoard Interview Series, we sat down with Roy to dive deep into how he’s built one of the most impactful and widely-used job boards in the space — and what job board founders can learn from his journey.

From using storytelling to break through corporate indifference, to training recruiters on inclusive hiring practices, Roy shares the exact strategies that helped him scale Jobs for Humanity to 674,000 users and 75,000+ job postings. Whether you're early in your job board journey or looking to scale with purpose, this episode is a goldmine.

Watch the Full Interview

5 Key Takeaways for Job Board Builders

1. Go Narrow to Go Wide

Roy’s team didn’t try to “boil the ocean” by targeting everyone. Instead, Jobs for Humanity focused on underserved communities — the blind, the neurodivergent, the formerly incarcerated, single parents, refugees, and ethnic minorities. Each vertical had its own entry point, messaging, and partnerships. This hyper-focus allowed the brand to build real momentum before scaling across communities.

“We realized companies want to do the right thing but often don’t know how — so we created dedicated hiring verticals to make it easy.”

Takeaway: Niche down hard. Then scale thoughtfully once your niche gains traction.

2. Don’t Just Build a Job Board — Build an Ecosystem

What set Jobs for Humanity apart wasn’t just job listings. It was a platform + education + partnerships. Roy’s team built training programs, onboarding flows, recruiter workshops, and allyship sessions that made inclusive hiring more actionable.

Takeaway: Complement your job board with services or resources that solve your users’ real problems. This builds loyalty, value — and revenue.

3. Brand Is a Trust Multiplier

By focusing on a powerful mission and strong design, Jobs for Humanity became a trusted brand. Their storytelling — both for job seekers and employers — was emotional and values-driven, and it paid off in brand equity and referrals.

“We had to look and feel trustworthy. We weren’t trying to do it for optics — we were solving a real, systemic problem.”

Takeaway: Mission matters. And how you communicate it matters even more.

4. Work With Companies Willing to Do the Work

Roy doesn’t let just any company post on Jobs for Humanity. Employers are vetted and often required to go through training before listings go live. This filters out virtue signaling and ensures the job board is truly aligned with job seeker interests.

Takeaway: Gatekeeping your platform to ensure quality and alignment pays off in trust, brand value, and conversion rates.

5. Play the Long Game — But Measure Aggressively

Jobs for Humanity didn’t go viral overnight. It grew through relationships, partnerships, and operational excellence. But Roy’s team was data-driven every step of the way — measuring user growth, job applications, and DEI impact metrics.

Takeaway: Growth takes time, but it doesn’t have to be random. Measure what matters and optimize constantly.

Conclusion

Roy’s story is a masterclass in building a purpose-driven job board that scales. He’s proof that combining mission with marketing, technology with trust, and operations with empathy can lead to not just growth, but real-world impact.

Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01.511)

So Roy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Roy Baladi (00:04.354)

Thanks for having me.

Martyn Redstone (00:06.272)

An absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure. So why don't you give me a bit of a background, your professional background and what led you to to creating and starting jobs for humanity.

Roy Baladi (00:19.778)

Professional background is in computer science and finance and math at Virginia Tech. I worked on Wall Street for four years at Citigroup in New York. Then I didn't find much meaning and that was during the financial crash and I wanted to try something new. So I got into entrepreneurship. I started a company that answers the questions, what is it that you want to do with your life? It's called Fresh Grad.

aimed to fresh graduates and it's a psychometric assessment on the right career paths for them. So this is how I stumbled upon talent acquisition without really realizing what these two words meant. After a failed attempt four years later and a lot of blood, sweat and tears, I had to shut it down. And so I used that product to help me find my next jobs. It took me to learn best.

So I just showed up at LearnVest, knocked on the door.

interviewed, got the job on day one without even having applied. The algorithm had done such a good job at recommending the right position for me that was a product and operations manager. Then one year later after LearnVest then got acquired and it became a big thing. I landed a job at a small unknown startup that was still pre-revenue called Smart Recruiters. That was in 2014.

Martyn Redstone (01:29.656)

Fantastic.

Roy Baladi (01:52.494)

I just absolutely fell in love with the team, moved to San Francisco from New York and, started to work there as a product manager. Six years later, smart recruiters became a huge success story. I grew there to lead their marketplace, look after, their conferences and the hiring success, event. And, and it was super happy.

employed there. I absolutely loved it, every second of it. I was really learning how to build excellent product. I was learning about the inner workings of recruitment tech. By managing the marketplace, I managed our relationship with all job boards, with all talent databases, with the background checks, reference checks, but also the assessment vendors, cognitive assessments, technical assessments, video interviews. And so

All of that put me in a place where I got to understand the plumbing of the recruitment system.

Martyn Redstone (02:53.742)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (02:55.212)

At the same time, while I was organizing its conferences, I was volunteering at a prison called Pelican Bay State Prison. I just went out of curiosity and I started to return time and time again, even inviting Jerome, the CEO, and we started to go together and were quite influenced by it. And that shaped our vision of what equality and equity means, what diversity can also mean. And so we...

Martyn Redstone (03:24.078)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (03:24.748)

hosted a whole bunch of events around the theme to try to help people from underrepresented communities land jobs. Then one day in December of 2019, I got a call from a friend that, and at that time, the entire country of Lebanon went to the streets was

protesting against the government tax that was one too many. And at that time, the government, least all the banking, the banks failed. And as a result, all the banks shut down. And when they shut down, that means that every human being was left out of the bank account and every corporation could not access their bank account just like that. So they couldn't go physically to the bank. couldn't...

log online and withdraw anything. You couldn't go to the ATM. You couldn't purchase. That's it. You were wiped out financially. So friends of mine and I started an initiative called Jobs for Lebanon. And the idea was to call on to the Lebanese diaspora to hire Lebanese in Lebanon because they still had access to their banks. They still had jobs and they all felt with what was happening, but they needed an outlet to be able to help them. If they got a job, hire them.

So my foray into building a job board was completely out of accident and out of the necessary solution for the problem of today. That started jobs for Lebanon. Three months later, we started it. We launched it. Because I worked at Smart Recruiters, I was able to, and I was offered the access to the platform. So I won't have to spend years of R &D. Instead, I could just build a skin on top.

Martyn Redstone (05:01.592)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (05:21.398)

and use smart recruiters in the backend. So all I needed to do is launch a campaign for the diaspora. And that was done through a creative director who helped us put together that video, which included 20, 30 faces of Lebanese in the diaspora from all regions, all job functions, talking about how they're hiring Lebanese in Lebanon and showing faces of Lebanese in Lebanon across all job functions and how this is the right thing to do.

Martyn Redstone (05:50.574)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (05:50.69)

This matters because for a job board to succeed, you want to have a good niche and you also want to have relevance. And so that's how I got into Jobs for Lebanon and it became a smashing success. From then on out, I decided to help and that was COVID during 2020.

Martyn Redstone (06:11.63)

So so so let's just kind of um Get back to the the the jobs for lebanon because it's fantastic. Um initiative and it was a great um, I say accident that got you into the kind of job board space But but gave you that niche and that purpose just like you said so you said it was a smashing success. What were the um, you know, what were what were those success metrics? I know it was a while ago now, um, but how How much did it you know did it do in terms of helping?

the people of Lebanon connect with the Lebanese diaspora.

Roy Baladi (06:45.88)

So the metrics are how many employers you have, how many jobs get posted, how many candidates apply, and how many people get hired. If you want to go more granular than how many interviews you landed, then really that's the heart of it. If you still want to go further granular, then what is the correlation of the candidate's job functions with the job's job functions? Or the candidate's years of experience with the jobs required years of experience? And then you go a bit deeper into

Are both sides good or do need to calibrate one or the other?

Martyn Redstone (07:20.142)

So I suppose you were trying to kind of, your ultimate aim was to give people employment. So I suppose how many, what did that look like? How many people did you end up employing or get employment through the platform?

Roy Baladi (07:35.502)

We had over 4,000 employers from around the world across the Lebanese diaspora published jobs. They've published around 10,000 jobs so far. We've had 42,000 job seekers sign up and apply. And about 1,200 people land the jobs.

Martyn Redstone (07:52.942)

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, incredible. So you started kind of the whole jobs for humanity thing really kind of focused on jobs for Lebanon. So what happened from there? How did you decide to kind of turn this niche and this purpose into something that was wider scale? And actually probably, you know, worthwhile now.

kind of talking more around jobs for humanity and exactly what is jobs for humanity, who does it serve? And yeah, and if you could kind of explain how you went from jobs for Lebanon to jobs for humanity, that would be fantastic.

Roy Baladi (08:34.318)

Yeah, of course. While we were building jobs for Lebanon, I went back to Lebanon and that was still early 2020. And while I was driving one day, I was engulfed in a humongous explosion. Everything around me turned yellow and I heard this huge deafening thunder. And I didn't know what it was, but I thought that was like an ultimate war happening between Israel and Hezbollah.

Martyn Redstone (08:43.758)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (09:04.97)

So I just got out of the way and while trying to get back to this city, I found some people who were bloodied along the way. So I took them with me to a hospital. That experience without going too much into the details was my f**k it moment. I am in the bonus round of life. I could have easily disappeared.

Many have who are much further away from the explosion. I was just barely a thousand yards away.

Martyn Redstone (09:35.246)

And this was the port explosion, is that right?

Roy Baladi (09:37.16)

That was the port explosion on August 4th. And so the very next day I just became a full-on activist. Went with a few friends, we cleaned up people's homes. The following day we started, we organized a WhatsApp group to bring all the NGOs together in order to ordinate relief efforts. And as we were doing this, I told myself, now that I built Jobs for Lebanon, it's growing and it's just literally on autopilot.

and we've got a whole team of volunteers. I really would love to be able to see if I can replicate this for the justice impacted. And while I was doing this, I said, hey, well, we've built a factory of job boards. Why don't we do one for refugees? Why don't we do one for the blind? Because I was also volunteering with Lighthouse for the Blind, and then for the deaf, and then for the neurodivergent, because I was partners with the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University. And then

As we started to build one community after another, really expanding the meaning of what diversity is well beyond gender, fluidity, and race, we, and in every case, I would call friends within that community and tell them, hey, you want to collaborate on this thing. They invariably say yes, that sounds grandiose, that sounds absolutely extraordinary. mean, how do we do this?

And so I would organize Zoom calls and you would have the most diverse Zoom call in the world with two, three representatives from each one of these communities. And I was talking about how we had built jobs for Lebanon, how we're cloning this for each community, but that there are major barriers beyond getting a job. For the blind, there's accessibility. There is a lot of employer

unknowns of how they could hire a blind person. And there are a lot of job seeker support and preparations that are needed for them to be able to apply well. And same thing literally for every one of these communities that I mentioned. And so in doing so, we started to build a training program. We started to a job platform. And here we didn't have the luxury of a launch campaign like we did the jobs for Lebanon in order to

Roy Baladi (11:57.528)

grow and get it known. So what we did is we started to partner with organic community organizations. We started to publish a lot of the content that we were creating, like who is a refugee? What does justice impacted mean? What is the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker for the justice impacted? Where does that come from? Like what is the link between poverty and incarceration?

Martyn Redstone (12:23.598)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (12:26.606)

And then we go into the stigmas that employers have, the barriers that they face, getting your ID, getting a house and housing apartment if you have a criminal background check, getting a job. And same thing for refugees. And then how do employers break that stigma? How do they get through the interview process? And how do you create an inclusive interview process, onboarding process, reasonable accommodations that they may need? And as we started to build that very rich content,

Martyn Redstone (12:47.854)

Okay.

Roy Baladi (12:56.328)

We started to get invited to so many podcasts. Shurm wrote articles on us. The New York Post wrote about us. We started to be invited to every Unleashed conference. And every single time the content was there, because all we do is to take a sliver of that content, like reasonable accommodations across communities, and giving this one checklist on how to be accessible. All of a sudden, that's really cool content that wasn't available. So that fueled our growth.

Martyn Redstone (13:25.89)

Mm-hmm. Okay.

Roy Baladi (13:26.03)

SEO helped us a lot. Community partnerships helped us a lot. that led to a lot of growth and a lot of employers in a chicken and egg problem. You need to be able to supercharge one side. having such extensive relationships in the talent acquisition space, I called all my friendlies and told them, hey, I've got these job sites, interested in posting, free for you. They said, yeah, why not?

Martyn Redstone (13:41.805)

Yes.

Roy Baladi (13:55.8)

Who do I need to put on this? Just one person. And don't worry, you don't need to post any jobs. We will pull them from your ATS or we'll pull them from your career page. We'll put them up there. But my request from you is to be able to review the candidates. can not necessarily prioritize them, but just give them feedback. At the same time, we started a Discord channel with a lot of our colleagues. And then we started to offer coaching to anybody who needs it. And within that Discord channel, we offer support.

to job seekers on how to get a job and all kinds of questions they may have. We had the toughest cases, I think. You know, you'd have a person in Afghanistan. The war broke out, went to Iran. Is in Iran, is looking for a job and is trying to move. And by the way, they're blind. Wow. How do you get a job for someone outside of Iran when their nationality is Afghani? And then you start to find creative ways.

Martyn Redstone (14:32.725)

Martyn Redstone (14:46.67)

Hmm.

Roy Baladi (14:55.022)

You realize that you've got organizations like Talent Beyond Boundaries, HIAS, and others, and they're all our partners. So we started to partner with them and create more content with them and show that pathway, not just for this job seeking, but through an article. And that's how it started to pick up from one site to another. And then we ended up having jobsforhumanity.com being the catch all across all job sites. And they...

it's expanded to 674,000 job seekers worldwide from all underrepresented communities from all regions.

Martyn Redstone (15:32.822)

Amazing amazing. So 674,000 people registered from from different walks of life different underrepresented groups That's really incredible. And that's what in in five years. I would say yeah In four years. Wow, that's incredible and and so You talked a little bit about You know the fact that you're able to take advantage of your talent acquisition connections to really get some

to accelerate the growth on the employer side, like you said, that whole chicken and egg situation that all job board owners find when they first launch. So have you, what's the, dare I ask the commercial model behind jobs for humanity? Is it monetized now? it a commercial business? How does that work?

Roy Baladi (16:26.466)

Yeah, so we started jobs for humanity originally as a non-for-profit. That was the mission and we thought that maybe we can grow with grants. And then we started to realize that grants are hard to come by when your focus is the globe and when the underrepresented communities are all. And so we realized that we had to do it on our own. so without any funding, just me seeding it at the very beginning.

we started to reach out to employers who actually wanted to access that talent. And so we built two programs. One is as an employee here's talent database access you can access as long as we vet you to be a legit employer. Welcome. Two is here are some job slots. We charge low rate. It's $80 per month per job slot. So if you have it for one year, that's about a thousand dollars. You can have about 12 jobs in there.

for a thousand dollars or as many as you want, but that's the number of live jobs you can have. And so employers would buy packs of three, five, 10. And then third is all that training that we built, we put it into an interactive session for employers where we not just give that training, but we do it over an eight week program. And I borrowed this concept that was seated at smart recruiters called reverse recruiting, whereby

oftentimes, and especially at conferences that we'd organize, we would invite job seekers of equal amounts to the employers. And we'd, because we realized that having a room full of recruiters is of no good to job seekers if they're learning about digital transformation, if they're learning about the candidate experience, well, there are no candidates in the room. If you're learning about equity and inclusion, well, whoop-de-doo if you heard a blind person speak on stage.

But are you more inclusive? Have you ever interviewed a blind person? So smart recruiters smash that concept by inviting people from each community to actually meet them right then and there. And then you can build a friendship. And if you are going to move forward with them and help them, excellent. If not, no worries. But at least you've given them something. And you've gained something.

Roy Baladi (18:40.31)

It actually goes back even to some of the experiences that Jerome and I had in prison. And so what I did with companies is I expanded this into an eight week program where you get the training day one and hours worth of training on empathy across all these underrepresented communities and with all their intersectionalities. White male is not.

Martyn Redstone (18:44.408)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (18:50.935)

Okay.

Roy Baladi (19:05.55)

pushed against, you've got blind white males. Now also, the site accepts everybody, so nobody is ever excluded. And the matching happens with no regard to anything beyond what's in the confines of that resume, excluding the personal information. However, as an employer, there is a huge talent community that you don't access. 70 % of blind people are.

Martyn Redstone (19:13.742)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (19:34.198)

unemployed, 50 % of the deaf are unemployed, 50 % of refugees, same thing. And so if you get to learn their skill sets, then you can be a bit more inclusive. And if we seed you with the first introduction, then that opens the door. So every employer would get training for an hour, meet two job seekers the very next day online, a couple of calls over two weeks. Then we give a second training on how to interview effectively and onboard and everything.

and then two more calls with them over the following two, three weeks, and then a celebration meetings. And we start to measure successes on people who landed interviews, on people who landed jobs. Through that program, we've recorded at least 400 interviews and 100 people landing job opportunities, landing job offers around the world. And so that was the last program where we give that training for $280 per employee for the program.

Martyn Redstone (20:32.718)

That's superb. So not only have you got the traditional kind of job board monetization of charging for access to your candidate database and also charging for job slots, but you've also taken what you do and turned it into an education piece, which is helping organizations get better at hiring underrepresented groups as well. And yeah, that's a superb.

commercial strategy because it's taking your experience and your niche and turning it into something really, really valuable for employers. And so I suppose after the last, over the last four years, what have been, what have been your kind of your, your biggest success metrics that you've seen? What are you, what are you proudest of? And also, you know, what are, what are the numbers look like over, you know, from, from the last four years onwards?

Roy Baladi (21:28.066)

proudest of the fact that we can confidently say that at least 1,500 people land the jobs and they've come in tough, they really come from far. And on top of it, everybody in Lebanon also comes from poverty when your bank is gone. So that is what I'm proudest of. If I were to walk away today and get a corporate job, which I'm not planning to at all, but if I were to do that.

Martyn Redstone (21:47.662)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (21:55.521)

You

Roy Baladi (21:57.614)

Then I can look back and say, wow, social impact, absolutely check. And in terms of metrics, we bootstrapped it. So we had to hire and spend as we earned. And so over the last couple of years, we started to monetize, generated about $600,000 and spent about $600,000. And now we're raising a seed round.

Martyn Redstone (22:03.95)

Amazing.

Roy Baladi (22:27.53)

in order to actually take that to the next level.

Martyn Redstone (22:32.686)

Superb, excellent. That's fantastic. And also great that a lot of job boards don't even get to that point of thinking about raising something like a seed round. So that's fantastic testament to the story of Jobs for Humanity. I wonder what, over recent months, there's been a bit of a, dare I say, a pushback against

things like equity and D &I and all those kind of things that we're unfortunately seeing permeating across the world at the minute. How has that impacted jobs for humanity? Has there been any kind of pushback, any reduction in corporations' budget on hiring from underrepresented groups? What's happening there?

Roy Baladi (23:24.088)

There's been a certain pushback. Well, sorry, let me rephrase this. There has certainly been a pushback and a reduction in DEI programs. There's no question about it. And then when you dig a bit deeper, a lot of people are afraid to even mention the word DEI. It's been so sadly stigmatized and so unfairly stigmatized because even the proponents of it, let's go back to the Biden administration.

Martyn Redstone (23:48.302)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (23:53.068)

and talk about the Trump administration. In the Biden administration, you had a crazy support for DEI. But if you actually read the White House executive order like that decree, it talks mostly about race and gender.

Martyn Redstone (24:10.094)

Mm-hmm.

Roy Baladi (24:11.682)

And then when you look at the Trump administration, its definition of DEI, it also talks about race and gender, except that he also attacks people with disabilities, blaming just stupid things, like you'd see by plane crashes on that. So all of a sudden that fear-mongering and lack of understanding of what diversity, equity, inclusion means has of course hurt the industry. For me, I have always advocated that

DEI is first of all about a whole host of communities where the unemployment rate is higher than the national average by a certain margin. So in the case of someone who's justice impacted, that affects all races and genders. But at the same time, the unemployment rate is 70%.

That's when the national unemployment rate is 3%, 4%, that's 5%. That's a good 20x, right? And so there is something broken in the system that needs to be addressed. That's point number one. Then point number two, I don't think that having quotas at the higher stage makes any sense. I'm against it. I don't think that if you've got

Like every country needs to be the United Nations of the unrepresented communities whereby X percentage should be black, X percentage should be white and Hispanic and Asian and native or indigenous. And then X percentage should be male, X percentage should be female, X percent non-binary. And then you go X percent non-blind, X percent blind. All of a sudden, you're not going to be hiring the best person.

However, I think that it is quite valuable for a company, and it is quite important for a company that takes advantage of taxpayers for a lot of the infrastructure that they have and the ability to set up a company to be able to source talent from all these communities. And if they don't know where to source them, then they can ask us. They can go to these underrepresented communities. They can go to any of the diversity job boards.

Roy Baladi (26:33.036)

and then source. So if you have an equal opportunity at the entrance, then may the best person win. Sure.

Martyn Redstone (26:46.082)

Yeah, no, I totally get where you're coming from on that and something that I've always been keen on as well is opening up opportunity for all at the very early stages. And like you said, the best person wins from there, but it's about giving everyone the same opportunity. So I totally agree. final thought really is, if you were to go back four or five years right to the beginning of this,

Is there anything that you do different? What advice would you give Roy four or five years ago?

Roy Baladi (27:21.11)

Niche. So when building jobs for Lebanon, we had an incredible niche. Jerome loved it. But then when I started to expand on the jobs for humanity level, he always advised me to focus on a particular community in a particular sector, nurses. He's like, pick a sector. But when you work on one specific problem, you can dig deep. Then you can succeed more. Now I've taken that advice to heart and I have moved to Saudi Arabia.

And in partnership with an organization called Humanity, we launched a job site for Saudi women in jobs. And I started to go deeper into the niche with a focus on Riyadh as one city and with a focus on HR sales predominantly and then some additional job functions as well. However, that ability to be niche and understand the labor laws of an area, understand the barriers that companies have.

understand the barriers that job seekers have. And I can go much deeper on this in Saudi Arabian, in the Saudi Arabian context, and I can talk to you about the market and I can go and visit these people if I want to. And I can do some user research if I'd like to. On both employers and jobseeker sites, that is the key to success.

Martyn Redstone (28:43.534)

Excellent. Excellent. Well, that is a fantastic place to finish our conversation today. And what a great piece of advice for people that are thinking about building their own job board or career site is niche, but go deep. Go absolutely deep into that niche. Roy, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you today and learn more about jobs for humanity.

First of all, I hope it goes from strength to strength because it's a great initiative and great organization. But I'd like to thank you so much for sharing the wisdom of your experience with me today.

Roy Baladi (29:25.122)

Thank you so much, Martin, anytime.

Martyn Redstone (29:27.96)

Thanks, Roy. Take care.