We talked with Juven CEO Edmond Chan about how difficult it is to find quality tech talent in Hong Kong and how our graduate was one of their top hires of last year.

Tell us about Juven and what you are aiming to achieve

Juven builds and empowers the membership ecosystem for organizations of all types and sizes through technology and design. Here, idea exchange is seamless and intuitive, transactions fast and cost-effective, and engagement easy and creative.

We have a lot of verticals, so we can meet the needs of different types of organizations. It’s not, however, easy to meet all of their needs at once, so our strategy is to focus on one vertical at a time.

Our current focus is on Sports and Fitness verticals. We currently have 5 out of 30 sports associations in Hong Kong that are using Juven & our aim is to have 1/3 of national sport organizations in Hong Kong Kong on our platform as our goal in the short term. This will give us a strong ground in going deep into sports & fitness and as well will allow us to develop into other verticals as well.

Our talent is our product— it’s the core because great talent allows us to make great products and great products sell themselves. We are adding more budget for talent in the current restructure.

Previous methods of finding talent and Pain points:

Previously we were going through friends, word of mouth and media outreach using “traditional channels” like AngelList, Whub, LinkedIn and so on.

We were getting a lot of applicants but the quality was very inconsistent. Very few were actually qualified enough for us to feel comfortable bringing on.

We tried every possible way. We even started cold-messaging on people on LinkedIn to see if we could find suitable candidates that were interested in joining the team. Each channel had different levels of effectiveness.

Xccelerate is effective in presenting capable candidates.

How did you hear about Xccelerate?

I think Xccelerate and Juven were founded around the same time. During that time I met Lavine/Xccelerate CEO and we had amazing chat about his vision for the company and what he was trying to achieve.

You hired one of our Software Engineering graduates, Didier. How did you meet him?

We went to Demo Day and were introduced to Didier he was very qualified and knew what he was doing. We thought there was a natural click… he is a very good engineer I would say. He is definitely one of our hardest working team members! We are very happy with him.

Would you continue to work with Xccelerate to fulfill your talent needs in the future?

Yes, definitely. Xccelerate is quite selective in their quality leads and they present capable candidates, whom we can then have an in-depth conversation with, and this targeted approach allows us to avoid sifting through a whole mess when finding talent.

Do you think, in general, that Hong Kong has the talent necessary for what you are building?

We are quite skeptical about this. We are building our development hubs in Shenzhen or Taipei. There are quite a number of people who have the right skill set and are at the right age group who would consider working with a tech company like us. We would have our HQ in Hong Kong and we would love to stay and spend as much time & budget here but in fact, we are not quite sure about the availability of talent in the current market.