Founder of RefNow. refnow.com

Automate reference checking. Get references in 36 hours (not 1 week). No more chasing. No more bottlenecks. Fraud detection included. Push completed references to your ATS.

500,000+ references processed. 350+ customers. $1M ARR. Zero funding.

Sign up today at refnow.com.

DM me with any questions.

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Bootstrapped to $1M ARR as Founder.

We help hiring teams eliminate manual reference chasing, speed up hiring by 80%, and catch fraudulent references before they become bad hires.

Before RefNow, I was a Senior Software Engineer at Gamesys and Bally's. Built an automation tool used company-wide that eliminated hours of manual work. Saw firsthand how removing boring tasks transforms people's work lives.

Built community features used by thousands of players daily. Learned that great UX beats powerful features every time.

Started RefNow in 2020 with my co-founders. We're a lean 3-person team building a profitable, bootstrapped SaaS that solves real problems.

I write content for LinkedIn about SaaS growth, automation, and bootstrapping.

Follow me to watch us build a profitable SaaS in public.

Ben Adams

They hired tens of thousands of police officers.

Without checking a single reference.

Let that sink in.

For six years, forces including the Met, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside and Cumbria simply switched off pre-employment reference checks.

The result?

130+ officers and staff went on to commit crimes or misconduct. Including David Carrick, now serving 37 life sentences. And Cliff Mitchell, a serial rapist.

These aren't admin roles. These are officers with powers of arrest. Access to sensitive data. Public trust.

All because someone decided references were optional.

Here's what frustrates me:

Reference checking isn't complicated. It's not expensive. It doesn't take weeks.
But when you're under pressure to hit recruitment targets, corners get cut. And the "boring admin stuff" is always first to go.

Except references aren't boring admin. They're the last line of defence before someone enters your organisation.

If a nursery or care home skipped references, Ofsted would shut them down. But somehow police forces got away with it for years.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a priorities problem.

And until organisations treat pre-employment checks as non-negotiable, we'll keep reading headlines like this.

Founder @ RefNow | Stop Chasing References | Get Them Back in 36 Hours, Automatically

Work experience is cool and all.

But tell me what you do for fun.

As a candidate, I thought the hobby section of my CV was filler. Who cares that I like football, padel, or reading business books?

How does that make me any better at my job?

Turns out, it does.

Hiring is one of the most critical decisions any business makes. Get it wrong, and it costs you months.

Here's what I've learned from the other side of the table:

Skills get you the interview. Culture fit gets you the job.

When I'm reviewing a CV, I read the hobby section carefully.

Team sports? Probably works well with others.

Marathons or triathlons? Likely disciplined and self-motivated.

Reads business books? Curious, invests in themselves, and probably thinks about growth when no one's watching.

None of this is a guarantee. But it's signal.

And when you're a small team where one bad hire can derail everything, signals matter.

If you're a candidate, don't treat your hobbies as filler. Use them to show who you are beyond the job title.

If you're hiring, don't skip this section. It might tell you more than experience ever could.

HR teams spend 6+ hours chasing references every week.

In 2026, that's embarrassing.

I've spent the last few years talking to hundreds of HR teams about their reference process.

Here's what I keep hearing:

"It's all manual."
"I'm constantly chasing people."
"I have no idea where we're at with any candidate."

Sound familiar?

The problem isn't that reference checking is hard. It's that most teams are still doing it like it's 2010.

Emails. Phone calls. Spreadsheets. WhatsApp messages to candidates asking them to chase their own referees.

Meanwhile, time-to-hire stretches out. Candidates get frustrated. And sometimes you lose great people to competitors who moved faster.

Here's what we've learned building RefNow:

Automation isn't about removing the human element. It's about removing the admin so humans can focus on what matters.

When you cut collection time from 2 weeks to 32 hours, three things happen:

Candidates feel valued (not stuck in limbo)
HR teams stop playing inbox tennis
You actually spot fraud before it becomes your problem

The shift from manual to automated reference checking isn't about technology. It's about respecting everyone's time.

Yours. Your candidates'. Your referees'.

Cindy Gallop

I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.

I'm an advertising, marketing, brandbuilding and business innovation keynote speaker, a business consultant and cultural impact strategist, a personal coach, and the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn. 

Cindy Gallop is a globally recognized advertising, business innovation and cultural impact speaker whose work spans three decades at the top of brand building, industry leadership, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique. As the former head of the New York office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty — one of the world’s most creative agencies — Cindy helped shape global brands and won Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003.

Today, she brings that experience to bear on the deeper questions no one else is asking:

What does advertising do — not just how it sells, but what it normalizes, excuses, and reinforces in culture, gender, sex, and power?

Cindy’s talks challenge leaders, creatives, and organizations to confront advertising’s real-world influence and take responsibility for the stories they help amplify.

🎤 Signature Topics

❯ Advertising & Cultural Power
How the narratives brands create shape behavior, expectations, gender norms, intimacy, and social values — and why accountability matters.

❯ Creativity with Consequence
Why traditional notions of “creative excellence” must evolve to include ethical impact, inclusion, and cultural sustainability.

❯ The Future of Advertising
Actionable insights on what advertising must become — not just what it has traditionally done — to stay relevant, trusted, and socially responsible.

❯ Gender, Power & Media Narratives
How advertising reflects and perpetuates concepts of sex, gender, and power — and how we can rewrite those script lines for positive change.

In a broader business context, Cindy has an especial focus on redesigning business models and business structures to own the future of any industry.

Unlike many speakers who deliver 'off the shelf' talks, Cindy takes a brief from each speaking client on what they want their event/conference/board retreat/employee town hall to achieve, and then crafts each talk specifically to deliver that outcome. 

Cindy researches your industry in-depth and comes up with new insights and perspectives that inspire employees and drive better business. 

To book Cindy as a speaker, contact her speaking agent James Robinson of Robinson Speakers, at james@robinsonspeakers.com.

Founder & CEO

MakeLoveNotPorn https://www.makelovenotporn.com/ is the world's first user-generated crowdsourced social sex videosharing platform - 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.' We celebrate #realworldsex as a counterpoint to porn, in order to socialize sex, making it easier for everyone in the world to talk about openly and honestly, in order to promote good sexual values and good sexual behavior. We're spearheading the Social Sex Revolution - the revolutionary part isn't the sex: it's the social. 


'The backlash was swift. 

“Really disappointing that a man who wants to ‘help others improve their lives’ would make such an inconsiderate and ignorant statement about women choosing to not have children so they can have a better life,” one listener commented on the YouTube episode. 

“They’re so angry at women for not having kids, yet do absolutely nothing to address WHY women aren’t having kids,” another wrote. “Diary of a CEO is right-wing manosphere cosplaying as liberals.”  .....

As Bartlett’s conversation with Williamson makes the rounds on social media, it’s sparked something of a Diary of a CEO reckoning. Many listeners are angry not just about this one episode, but about how far the podcast has veered from its original premise and how comparatively few women Bartlett has on the show. 

It’s also not the first time that one of Bartlett’s guests has seemed to blame women for men’s loneliness. In a July episode that has since gone viral, a psychiatrist named Alok Kanojia refers to men who can’t find partners and procreate as a “mass extinction event,” a phenomenon that he and Bartlett then compare to genocide and cancer. “Does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct this?” Bartlett asked Kanojia. “Should we put systems in place to make sure those men meet partners?

That question is enraging viewers. “Steven Bartlett serves as a Trojan horse for the manosphere,” YouTuber Therese Lee says in a video, where she calls Bartlett “the most dangerous man” on the internet. 

“I was actually invited to this show to ‘debate’ feminism, and every time I see a clip of this show, I’m reminded how glad I am that I said no, because it was clear to me then, and it’s certainly clear to me now, that they don’t see women as people,” the writer Jessica Valenti said in a video about the July episode, which she said was “incel propaganda dressed up as intellectual debate.” 

One woman made a video with a filter that makes it look like she’s dressed in a handmaid’s uniform: “Diary of a CEO’s plan to put systems in place for incels to get partners,” she wrote. 

For many, it’s been a long time coming. “I love how many people are on to him now,” one commenter wrote. “Fucking finally.” ....

Over time, Meredith Graham noticed Bartlett began to focus heavily on men’s frustrations and dissatisfaction, while women “started to appear more like a problem to be worked around,” she said. “That’s why so many men are drawn toward red-pill rhetoric: It often begins by validating their experiences, but slowly starts to redirect that frustration outward, shifting blame rather than encouraging deeper reflection.”'


Bindu B. New York Magazine
https://lnkd.in/e7C36ZXH (pay-walled - I've dropped a non-paywalled link in the comments)

Open article: Did The Diary of a CEO Take the Red Pill? by thecut.com

Did The Diary of a CEO Take the Red Pill?

This post has been up for 22 hours.

It has just 3,167 impressions.

I have over 143,000 followers on here. 

I've hit my limit of 30,000 connections, and I currently have over 2,100 connection requests on my waitlist. 

This post is about a topic that many men post on here about, and get hundreds of thousands of impressions. 

Scott Galloway, Steven Bartlett and the like posting about how concerned they are about boys and men, all the problems boys and men face, and that the rest of us don't care/are abandoning boys and men, get millions of impressions and huge engagement.

My post, demonstrating how much I care about boys and men, and, importantly, providing female-lens SOLUTIONS for boys and men to find the happiness and human connection they seek, is deliberately algorithmically suppressed.

That's bad for me - because my work that is focused on solving the 'male loneliness epidemic' and bringing love, intimacy and human connection to everyone, doesn't get exposure, and doesn't get me the support I need to be able to keep that work going.

(Hello, Steven Bartlett, where's my invitation on to The Diary Of A CEO podcast to talk about the solutions to your deeply ill-advised conversation of the other day?)

Algorithmic suppression = economic oppression.

It's also bad for boys and men - because they don't get to benefit from my work and my solutions.

Algorithmic suppression = societal oppression. 

This is why we demand #FairnessInTheFeed.

Everyone on here, especially MEN, concerned about boys and men today: 

Please watch my just-published Blackweek keynote from last fall on 'Boys, Men, Positive Masculinity And Why It Matters To Marketers', which Chase Campbell kindly called his favorite session of the conference 💖 

I cover:

- how to reinvent aspirational masculinity

- how to reinvent sexual aspiration in a way that helps end rape culture, and guides boys and men to what they (and all of us) are looking for - love, intimacy, human connection

- what I learnt talking to high-school boys of the National League Of Young Men, Inc. (NLYM)

- what I learnt teaching classes on 'How to make love, not porn' as a professor at Kai Cenat's Streamer University

- the unique opportunity streaming offers as a very specific medium, to promote positive masculinity messaging

- why 'men written by women' is the future.

cc Scott Galloway Lee Chambers Keir Starmer Steven Bartlett

https://lnkd.in/ets7TcTQ

Open video: Boys, Men, Positive Masculinity, And Why It Matters To Marketers on youtube.com

Boys, Men, Positive Masculinity, And Why It Matters To Marketers

So yesterday, THIS happened 😍

Thank you Samantha Niblett MP for bringing up MakeLoveNotPorn and MakeLoveNotPorn Academy in UK Parliament as key to helping educate for and address the serious digital harms impacting women and children right now  ❤

MLNP Academy is in early stage bare-bones beta right now as we real world test it - it's free for all to use, but please support us by becoming a member 🙏  https://lnkd.in/e3jbrak6

Public Service Announcement: I am available for your PAID International Women's Day speaking opportunity 🙋 

Please do NOT, as happens every year, bombard me with speaking requests and then tell me 'we don't have a budget for this' - for a day that is meant to uplift women, champion women's value across every industry sector and sphere of life, and close the gender pay gap. 

Dropping link in the comments to my Dear Cindy response to, 'On International Women's Day, How Much Should You Get Paid To Speak?'

Everybody - Anu Duggal Female Founders Fund has JOBS for you!

483 open roles, across 41 companies 💥 

Find those jobs and apply here: https://lnkd.in/ey98m6sD

Also, Female Founders Fund is looking itself for a Platform Operations Associate to support their Head of Platform across events, community and content.

This would suit someone early in their career (~1-3 years experience) who is execution-oriented and has a strong attention to detail. The deadline to apply is February 15, 2026 - apply here: https://lnkd.in/ea7wrySt

I have over 143,000 followers on here, but the algorithm suppresses my posts to average a few hundred impressions each.

This post is about something hundreds of thousands of people on LinkedIn are desperate for - JOB OPPORTUNITIES.

Please, everybody who actually sees this, like, comment and re-post, so this can reach as many people looking for employment as possible.

Algorithmic suppression = economic oppression.

#FairnessInTheFeed

LinkedIn decided yesterday that my completely innocuous post about me being interviewed about marketing (which by the way is a year and a half old, so had been up on this platform for all that time with no issues) went against their Professional Community Policies, and removed it. 

The same day, LinkedIn told Charlsie Niemiec that her report of a man on this platform commenting 'I'd human traffic you' on a post she wrote about AI-generated violence against women, did NOT go against their Professional Community Policies.

See Charlsie's post about this here: https://lnkd.in/eFkZMimJ

This is why we demand #FairnessInTheFeed.

On May 28 2024, Memorial Day weekend, William Charnock interviewed me about ageism in marketing, illustrated with a photo of my sunbathing patch at DeJoux house that weekend.

You can read the interview here: 
https://lnkd.in/eJXwC9jJ

LinkedIn in their infinite wisdom have decided that my post of that interview, and presumably that visual, feature, well, what they say below.

And have removed my post.

😮 😮 😮 

We demand #FairnessInTheFeed

Female AI founders looking for pre-seed/seed funding, whose startups fall into the 15 areas below: 

Shruti Gandhi Array Ventures are ready to write you checks of $250k-$3million, and will review pitches within 48 hours 💥  Just email deals@array.vc.

I have over 143,000 followers on here, but because of this platform's algorithmic proxy bias, my posts average only a few hundred impressions each - even, when, as with this one, they are a huge value-add for LinkedIn and the thousands of members who would be desperate to see this news.

Especially female founders who struggle to raise funding (only 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders).

Please, everybody, like, comment, re-post, and share this with founders you know who would welcome this opportunity for funding 🙏 

Algorithmic suppression = economic oppression.

#FairnessInTheFeed

For everybody, especially the Reply Guys, on here going, "Where's the data?", 
HERE YOU GO 💥 

'A key finding is that unequal visibility outcomes for women and other protected groups can emerge as structural properties of multi-model, engagement-optimised systems - even in the absence of intentional discrimination.'

Martyn Redstone's deep tech dive into the LinkedIn algorithm below is a MUST-READ 🙏

On-Call Head of AI Governance for HR | Ethical AI • Responsible AI • AI Risk Assessment • AI Policy • EU AI Act Readiness • Workforce AI Literacy | UK • Europe • Middle East • Asia • ANZ • USA

I’m proud to announce my first published paper - and independent research report titled:

Structural Properties and Systemic Risks in LinkedIn’s Modern Recommendation Stack

This is a systems-level reconstruction of LinkedIn’s feed architecture, derived exclusively from LinkedIn-authored technical publications (2023–2025).

The report integrates research on foundation models, graph neural networks, neural retrieval, ranking, notifications, and attribution into a single end-to-end model of how visibility is created, amplified, and valued on the platform.

A key finding is that unequal visibility outcomes for women and other protected groups can emerge as structural properties of multi-model, engagement-optimised systems - even in the absence of intentional discrimination.

The analysis is descriptive, evidence-based, and non-speculative. It does not rely on user anecdotes or access to proprietary systems.

The full report (open access, CC BY 4.0):
👉 https://lnkd.in/eHQ9zi9u

I hope this is useful for researchers, regulators, journalists, and anyone interested in how large-scale recommender systems actually work.

Comments and critiques welcome.

Tagging team #fairnessinthefeed - Robert Baker, Cindy Gallop, Jane Evans, Dorothy Dalton, Ruth M. Dasary Sierra Ph.D., Samantha Katz, Samantha Niblett MP

Open article: Structural Properties and Systemic Risks in LinkedIn's Modern Recommendation Stack by doi.org

Structural Properties and Systemic Risks in LinkedIn's Modern Recommendation Stack

This is a MUST-READ interview with former Global Client Executive at LinkedIn, Alicia Teltz, by Meike Kirsch for brand eins (use google translate):

'For 96% of LinkedIn users, reach declined drastically. An average post that garnered 10,000 views in January 2025 often didn't even reach 3,000 by autumn. Virtually no visibility remained. For many, this was a shock. ..

Within the community, talk quickly turned to decline, to the biggest turning point ever. One thing is certain: LinkedIn, now the world's largest professional network with 1.3 billion members, is undergoing a fundamental restructuring. 

Visibility is now determined by new rules – and these are harder to understand than ever before.

Alicia Teltz says that as an employee, she repeatedly tried to understand the algorithms behind LinkedIn. Even in her position, it wasn't possible. 

There are official statements and isolated investigations. But why one post goes viral and another fizzles out remains a black box, even for the company's employees. Anyone who claims otherwise, says Teltz, "is guessing, bluffing – or dating an engineer."   .....

Since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2016—one of the most significant deals in tech history—LinkedIn has been under constant pressure to grow. For its customers, this means that visibility is primarily driven by the strategic interests of this megacorporation.'

https://lnkd.in/e5xkN3XR

taplio

The Battle

Ben Adams

Cindy Gallop

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreBen Adams's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreCindy Gallop's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Ben Adams

Cindy Gallop

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ben Adams's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreCindy Gallop's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreBen Adams's LinkedIn Performance