Growing A Remote Candidate Sourcing And Assessment Platform – with Isidora Mayer – Head of Operations at FlatWorld

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Isidora (Izi) Mayer, talk about how to run a remote-focused talent vetting firm that wins tech clients.

FlatWorld helps companies find high-quality, interview-ready talent fast—without the usual noise, delays, or agency headaches.

Using a global network of vetted recruiters and their own hiring platforms, FlatWorld delivers shortlists of real, human candidates who are a strong technical and cultural fit. From cross-border developers to long-term remote roles, everything is designed with engineering managers in mind: less time screening, better matches, and faster hires.

You’ll hear practical strategies for attracting HR consulting clients, using AI in consulting, and standing out as a talent solutions provider in the crowded recruitment space. Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How to attract and win consulting clients in the tech sector, even in a global, remote-first landscape
• Unique ways to use technology and psychology to vet senior candidates and match them with employers
• Isidora Mayer’s journey from candidate rejection to FlatWorld CEO—and her lessons on client selection, human-centric business, and building lasting relationships

• FlatWorld website: www.flatworld.co
• Izi’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/izimayer

Scroll down for the audio version and the transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Interview – Growing A Remote Candidate Sourcing And Assessment Platform – with Isidora Mayer – Head of Operations at FlatWorld

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

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Episode Transcript

Episode 302: Growing A Remote Candidate Sourcing And Assessment Platform – with Isidora Mayer – Head of Operations at FlatWorld

Ben [00:00:20]:
Hello. Welcome back to the show, great to have you along. And I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Izi Mayer. Izi is a fascinating person. She is the CEO of a very cool company called FlatWorld. FlatWorld helps hiring teams that get flooded with AI produced job applications by using a 12 minute pre employment job and company fit assessment by fusing psychology, AI and video. And it helps identify the true candidate in that sea of AI enhanced profiles that we’ve all heard about. And they’ve helped companies across the US across the EU, across the world, and have successfully vetted over 70,000 candidates and that’s just only increasing every day. So fabulous stuff.

Izi, thank you very much for joining me today.

Isidora Mayer [00:01:03]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Ben [00:01:06]:
Good to have you. And I know you’re international and you’ve got an international team. You are kind of a bit like me from one place in another. And tell us about that.

Isidora Mayer [00:01:16]:
So, as you’ll very soon find out, I have a very American accent. My mom’s from California, but I was raised in Greece and studied abroad and came back, so I’m currently spitting distance from the Acropolis.

Ben [00:01:32]:
Oh, fabulous. Very good, very good. So, yeah, I’m so impressed with FlatWorld. I kind of gave the overview of it just briefly, but in your words, tell us about FlatWorld, what it does and how it helps employers.

Isidora Mayer [00:01:45]:
So FlatWorld started before the pandemic happened. So it was one of the few companies that thought about remote and looked at remote work as a whole before it became “cool”. So we figured out a lot of the issues concerning remote work before the pandemic kind of hit and everybody was looking for remote candidates. So we were positioned in a great place right when the pandemic hit and everyone was looking for candidates all over the world to provide that to a whole bunch of companies. So during COVID we grew quite a lot as a company and we ended up finding kind of a solution that is high touch pre vetted candidates. So I have a psychology degree. I am a true advocate of the humanity of it all, especially in this AI world. So I really want hiring to be human.

You’re looking for a job and this is the right company for you both technically, but also for your long term health and happiness. Because not every candidate is good for every company, not every company is a good for a candidate. So we have found kind of a great way to vet candidates who are looking for jobs and also vet companies who are looking for candidates. It’s a two sided way thing to match in the middle and we are kind of the glue that sits in between those.

Ben [00:03:24]:
I love it. So how do you actually do that? I love that you’re thinking about the remote workforce or hiring from different locations because previous to the global pandemic we had the global…. Well I’m from Australia, we had the oil and gas boom. So we were trying to hire people from all over all sorts of different countries and for many companies it was a bit scary to hire talent from a CV, maybe a couple of zoom calls and back then it was probably a Skype call. So yeah, you’re taking some of that fear out and giving some more data to the process. So tell us how it works.

Isidora Mayer [00:04:01]:
I also the other part of that is hand holding the company. So because there is a lot of fear of hiring someone across the world. I have, I myself have felt that I have employees who are in completely different time zones and sometimes you don’t know it’s a holiday. So you don’t know the candidate is not working today. So we handhold them. The companies and are and provide a lot of support in what it looks like to hire someone and what it looks like to support a candidate who wants to end up working remotely for you.

As far as the vetting for the candidates goes, we have kind of a three step attack to it. Notable to say that 70% of the original candidates that apply to any of our roles don’t pass our first step. So the first technical bar because we do tend to work on senior profiles, we tend to work on technical profiles, there has to be a level of technical understanding. So the first step is just a very easy for most developers multiple choice test. So we assess their technical assessment, their technical knowledge, their technical know how, etc. And from there we do a self recording. So we prompt them with six questions and they answer over a video recording so we’re not there. Which means they can do it on their own time and they don’t have the stress of being on camera like I do now. And generally speaking it’s a much smoother process for the candidate so they can sit in front of the six questions for six minutes and answer the questions naturally. And that’s where we can assess a lot of things.

First of all we assess how they’re speaking to the camera, how lit up the room is, how prepared they are to be in a remote setting. Because being a remote worker, I would say it’s 60% technical, know how, being able to do the job and 40% communication and preparedness, being able to work from across the world for a company, align with their values, align with their needs and wants and desires for the future and make that possible and feel like you’re part of the team. It’s a two way kind of street. So once they finish the multiple questions, the video self recording part, we send them to a personality assessment where we assess their fit to that specific company. Not just generally, but we actually look at the nitty gritty. Will you be a good personality fit for this CEO, for this manager, for this team, for this time zone, etc? So in a long winded answer that’s it.

Ben [00:07:05]:
No, it’s good, it’s good deep dive. And I think it’s so important because I’ve seen, we’ve all seen candidates who’ve become new colleagues and I’ve got one person in mind where I realized pretty quickly they realized that they’d made a mistake, that Oh gosh, this is not the right role, this is not the right place for me. And maybe it was a placeholder until they found the next one.

Isidora Mayer [00:07:29]:
It’s the worst feeling for everyone. And I really want to prevent that from happening because there are enough roles out there and there are enough candidates to make that great match.

Ben [00:07:43]:
So what kind of companies are using, what kind of employers would be using FlatWorld to fill these roles and get the alignment.

Isidora Mayer [00:07:52]:
We’ve worked with kind of giant companies when they weren’t so giant. So we worked with Deel for the first couple of years before they became kind of huge and have their whole HR kind of department now. We filled about 80% of their engineering team back when back. Yeah, it was a very fruitful relationship because they are a tech company. They were growing rapidly and they needed pre vetted candidates. So that’s kind of my profile on the surface level. On a deeper level, as a person, I really want to be candidate forward. I know how hard it is to find a job and I know how kind of grating and horrible and self deprecating and all of it it can be.

And I don’t want to be an additive to that scene. I want to take away from that. So I won’t work with companies that won’t treat their employees well, that’s one of my core values. Because of that I get to represent super cool products and super cool managers and teams and I don’t have to protect the candidates from the potential company. I get to shine a light on what all the things they’re doing.

Ben [00:09:15]:
Yeah, that’s nice way to be. And are there any particular industries or types of companies that will use this more over time? Like it’s a growing area or sector.

Isidora Mayer [00:09:29]:
We are in the tech industry generally. So yeah, anything that has to do with development as well as AI of course, but especially senior developers, product managers, anything that kind of is required to make a product run and to make a product work. Especially large companies, large teams that require an offshore branch to their company. That’s where we fit in.

Ben [00:09:56]:
It’s a pretty crowded space, a very busy area that the tech sector and hiring, recruitment, assessment and so on. What are you doing to get the word out and help grow FlatWorld from a marketing perspective.

Isidora Mayer [00:10:10]:
We have found that because it is such a crowded space, it is very hard to kind of rise above the noise as something that’s quality over quantity. So I’m very, very invested in the relationships that we have and that has seemed to keep, first of all keep us going, but also bring us new business. So every new company that comes and every old relationship that I have, I maintain and we make a very, very hard effort to keep a very good relationship between us. And that’s why we’re very selective when we choose a company to work with originally, to be able to provide you that really high touch and they end up telling their friends, they end up telling their families, they end up telling the companies they work with.

We’ve had so many companies come to us telling us “X, Y, Z, told us about us, raved about you and we’re here to see it for ourselves.” And they’ve become long term partners and companies that we work with. So I’d love to offer a solution to someone who’s listened to this and kind of say “Go to LinkedIn and make a post every three days and make it sound this way and this will work for you and it’ll increase your marketing immediately.”

Isidora Mayer [00:11:26]:
But unfortunately it’s not that easy and it’s not that straightforward. And I find being really human and humanizing in this experience and understanding you’re speaking with another person, not a robot who has their own life and their own ups and downs. And once you add that into the conversation, you can really kind of understand that we’re all trying to achieve the same thing. So, for example, very shortly, I have a meeting tomorrow with a client that we used to work with that is no longer hiring anymore. But they like us so much. We meet for coffee every couple of weeks, just because they want to touch base. They want to see what’s going.

It’s great. And honestly, if I have the time, I will absolutely give it to you.

Ben [00:12:32]:
We have worked at Get More HR clients through the HR business Accelerator process. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies around the world, and particularly with consultants, but also tech firms. And one of the questions we ask on the onboarding process is what makes you different and what makes you special? And a lot of them would say quality service and we care for our clients, customers, that kind of stuff.

I guess I’m just trying to say learn what sort of things do you do that gets that very close relationship that helps get that referral, that word of mouth, because everyone says, “Oh, we want to look after our customers and make them happy.” You know, what does that really mean in detail?

Isidora Mayer [00:13:30]:
I’ll flip side it for a second. One of the things we do do is say no. That’s a big one. And I feel like a lot of companies, especially newer companies, are afraid of that. But it’ll end up doing more harm to your business and your name than it will to just say no. So I have refused to work with companies that mistreated candidates poorly or had mistreated me poorly or had a very different experience with me than they had with my male co-owner, for example. So things like that for me matter, and I will not brush them under the table as business. For me, it’s personal.

And I know a lot of people say that’s not the way to do it, but in hiring, it is personal. You’re feeding someone, you’re putting food on someone’s table. So for me, it’s a hundred percent personal. So it starts with that. And as far as the companies are concerned, I hand hold probably more than I should. I am available for them 24/7 for the first three, four weeks, basically, until we get the first person that they interview and they’re like, “Oh, interesting person, you know, let’s go to the second interview or let’s send them a technical assessment or whatever.” Until that happens, I am there and I am there for any questions you have., I’m there for calls and I think the best thing I can do is provide results.

When a new client comes, I’m immediately thinking, okay, what kind of profile am I looking at? Let’s have a call with you. Let me understand exactly what you need. If the first call doesn’t yield my understanding of what you need, so then I can explain it to our recruiters and our candidates. I will have another call with you and ask you hard questions like: what do you not want to work with? Who is your profile that is a no go. You know, what irks you, what’s a pet peeve of yours, you know, and start getting down to the personality of the candidate because it’s easy to vet for technical ability. My short answer is I become their personal assistant in their hiring needs for that moment until I can prove to them that we are doing our jobs and we’re doing it well. And then basically from the moment they get the first and the second candidate that are good quality candidates and they’re not getting 20 every second, they’re getting one or two every day, they immediately kind of, I mean, quite honestly get off my case and trust us to do our job.

And when it comes from a client that already has vouched for you, there’s that added trust in you.

Ben [00:16:34]:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Do you find that candidates and or employers look at Glassdoor much in this process?

Isidora Mayer [00:16:43]:
Yes. I mean, look, they look at everything. They look at Reddit posts, they look at, you know, anything and everything. And I get it. When you’re trying to look for a job and you’re trying to look at the culture of a company, it’s hard to kind of read it through all the BS that’s on their website. And I have also said no to candidates. A candidate wants to apply to this company, they pass all the steps, they’re ready to be applied, and I explain to them that the culture won’t be a good fit for them. On the candidate side.

The company will be fine with you, but you will not be happy. Now, it’s your choice. Obviously you’re the candidate, but I will give you that extra information that maybe is hidden behind marketing jargon about the culture about the nitty gritty of actually working. What’s your day to day going to be like?

Ben [00:17:37]:
Nice. And for employers using FlatWorld, how does the fee structure work? Not, not the actual numbers, but is it a percentage subscription or.

Isidora Mayer [00:17:50]:
That’s also another benefit to FlatWorld and a benefit for the client. You do not pay until you hire the candidate. So we will do a whole bunch of work for you and basically prove to you that we are worth the work. And once we do prove to you and you’re ready to hire a candidate, then we will take a percentage and that’s it. It’s a one time fee and you’re done. And if you want to continue with us, you continue with us and the structure continues.

I don’t want to bankrupt a company and in search of a candidate profile that maybe doesn’t work, for example, or maybe doesn’t exist.

Ben [00:18:36]:
Can I ask you something completely different? It’s. It was something listed on your LinkedIn profile and I’m gonna read. It says: I stepped into leading FlatWorld during a downscale and kept the platform, the people in the service moving. I managed everything from user flows and product description, internal operations, client communications and the overall hiring experience. I like understanding how all the pieces fit together and then finding the simplest way to work them better. What was behind that?

Isidora Mayer [00:19:08]:
What a statement. When you share it read back to you, you’re like, what the hell? So I’ll start from the beginning, which was when I applied, FlatWorld was founded by two founders that aren’t me. Before the pandemic started and about six months after they started the company, I applied to one of their job positions and was rejected.

Ben [00:19:36]:
Oh, I’m sorry.

Isidora Mayer [00:19:38]:
To work at FlatWorld and was rejected from FlatWorld. And I emailed the CEO at the time and I said, hey, you’re making a giant mistake. I really did. I don’t know, it was quite ballsy of me, to be honest with you, but I emailed him and said, you know, you’re making a giant mistake. This is my dream job. And you know, five years later, truly was my dream job. And thankfully he listened to me and gave me the time of the day and we had a call and he gave me a chance. And five years later, I’m kind of the CEO now of FlatWorld.

Originally I was rejected. I fought tooth and nail because I really believed in the company and the product and the offering, because I was one of those candidates that was desperate and due to basically Covid ending and remote work kind of going through this: “Is it cool, is it not? Is it appropriate? Is it not? Are we going to do it? Are we not?” There was a lot of kind of imbalance in the kind of financial industry as a whole. We had a lot of financial difficulties during that time.

Ben [00:20:54]:
So companies did.

Isidora Mayer [00:20:55]:
Yes. So we had to downscale quite significantly. And during that time, one of our co founders stepped away. She ended up doing her own project as she had a kind of side gig that she was really into. And our now, my co founder, the person who runs this with me, ended up getting an offer from quite a large tech company that you kind of can’t say no to when they knock on your door. So he ended up basically asking me to have a zoom call and handing me the company. Yes, I was running a large portion of it for about eight months prior to that. But that was the moment where he basically presented me the platter.

It was a crazy moment. And it took me months to kind of even step into the position of “Okay, this is mine, I own it and I run it and I have to maintain it.” And then it was also the fact that it was a failing company at the time or it was a struggling company. It was not failing. That’s a wrong term.

But it was the fact that I was. I stepped into this CEO position with very little experience other than my own personal experience. I’m 30 years old. Like, I’ve. I’ve got two degrees, you know, I’ve got life experience. And I also stepped into this company that has debt that needs to be downgraded. And it’s been about a year and a half now.

I’m very proud and happy to say that we are now net positive. It’s been a really chaotic process. I cannot describe it as anything but, but I have learned so much about not only myself, the business, how things work, how people run their companies. It’s been so such a learning experience. And my main value was not to lose who I am and what I believe in. So I have made FlatWorld adhere to what I believe in, which is fair hiring and fair processes and feedback at every single step for the candidate and companies getting the right talent and not having to spend obscene amount of money to fix a mistake they made.

Ben [00:23:42]:
Yeah, love that. I I’ve been a long, long time in HR and your company went through difficult times and comes out. But in my career I’ve seen global companies shut down entire divisions and business operating units. I’ve seen small companies do downsizing. It’s the roller coaster of business. So wonderful that you’ve learned so much, that’s for sure. I’m curious, the job you applied for is that, that was probably recruitment related, I’m guessing.

Isidora Mayer [00:24:14]:
Yes. I have a psychology degree. I, I participated in kind of group therapy setting and did a little bit of training in that. So I have a lot of background.

Ben [00:24:34]:
It’s a natural.

Isidora Mayer [00:24:35]:
Yes, it is. It is. And it isn’t kind of actually funny.

Ben [00:24:39]:
A lot of people have got the site background.

Isidora Mayer [00:24:41]:
It should be, but it’s not. That’s what I’ve had. It should be more. Yes. So the role that I was originally kind of not rejected for was a recruiter role because I had no recruiter experience, which completely valid. But the role they actually needed hiring for was an operations role, which I was perfect for.

Ben [00:25:03]:
My question is if you were applying for a recruitment role and then operations was actually what you ended up doing and so on. To becoming a CEO. So some people listening to this are going I’m stepping into a CEO role or something like that. How do you bridge that gap? Because that’s a really, even if it’s a small company, it’s still a really big job. You’ve got all the different functions.

Isidora Mayer [00:25:27]:
Absolutely. And it didn’t happen so quickly. It wasn’t one day to the other.

Ben [00:25:32]:
How do you bridge that gap or what have you done so far and what will you do next?

Isidora Mayer [00:25:35]:
It was, it was four years in the process as well. So when I stepped into FlatWorld, I ended up leading all of the communications between the customers, the candidates and the recruiters. So I ended up becoming kind of a hub and I ended up training all of our employees. So I ended up creating the training manuals. I stepped into the ownership of FlatWorld pretty early on because I loved what we did and I believed in the message and quite honestly, I believed in the CEO at the time. And he was incredible at delegating and he was incredible at allowing me to step into that role naturally and teach me and mentor me through the years and add another layer every time. So the most recent layer was the handling of new clients. And how to kind of present the company as your own and be that representation.

The CEO still in the picture, but silently. And he’s incredible at being able to mentor me through this process. So it hasn’t been as I woke one day up and I was the CEO. It wasn’t as simple as that. It was an evolution and I am exceptionally lucky to have such an incredible CEO who was willing to mentor me and step away. That doesn’t happen very often and it was a very trusting relationship and he has trusted me incredibly. I worked for him for three years before meeting him in person.

And it’s been a very interesting evolution of our relationship and it’s been really great to be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them and then go back and have this mentorship and be able to improve and continue.

Ben [00:27:41]:
It’s the best way to be. Just to start to wrap things up. Combined question really, what do you see the future being for FlatWorld and then also for people listening to this and they think “Oh, I could refer some business in or something like that or I know some companies that would be ideal.” Who are those ideal companies? What kind? So what does the future hold for FlatWorld? And then who are the ideal clients for people listening to this?

Isidora Mayer [00:28:08]:
So future for FlatWorld holds, kind of cutting through the AI noise at the moment. That’s our big one right now. It’s everywhere and it’s getting more and more. It’s getting less and less easy to see what is AI and what isn’t and what CV is written with AI and what isn’t. So our future is about real candidates and providing real concrete evidence that this is a real person who really looked at your company and really wants to be there. And as far as companies are concerned and what kind of companies we work with and we’d be happy to hear from any tech company that is looking to hire remotely. So we work with a lot of US companies, especially in East coast and West coast looking for Latin American developers. We work with a lot of German companies looking for European developers.

We work with basically any tech company that is looking to hire long term remote candidates. We don’t do part time roles, we don’t do contract roles. We do long term relationships. So if you’re looking to have a team member or team members in a different country, that is where you come to us. Because we will find the candidates, we will show you all of the requirements to be legal in hiring them from that country, provide you references for any tools that you may need and any support you may need. So, yeah, we’re kind of a one stop shop.

Ben [00:29:51]:
Excellent. Excellent. Very good. So if people want to learn more about FlatWorld, what should they do next?

Isidora Mayer [00:29:56]:
They should go to www.flatworld.co. That’s our website. Or you can, of course, message me on LinkedIn. We’ll have maybe a link somewhere. But my name is Isidora Mayer, and, yeah, I’m everywhere. And anywhere you search for FlatWorld, you can contact us there.

Ben [00:30:15]:
Perfect. Excellent. Well, Izi, congratulations. You’ve had quite the journey and you’ve already had success, but I’m sure there’s many more successes coming, so thank you for sharing them today with us on the show. Thank you.

Isidora Mayer [00:30:27]:
Thank you so much.

Topics covered: how to attract HR consulting clients, using AI in consulting, recruitment & talent consultants, how to stand out as a consultant, business growth strategies for consultants, remote hiring, FlatWorld

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