Last week, I attended The HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. The event was full of energy and optimism for the future as hundreds of vendors showcased new AI products and AI integrations. Everyone was playing up the new heights of efficiency and effectiveness AI can take us as an industry.
However, there was much debate about the level of genuine innovation on offer and a sense that rather than thinking radically and reinventing what we do, we were just looking at faster ways of solving old problems that don’t live up to AI”s potential to challenge the status quo.
Here are three interviews I recorded at the show to help you make up your own minds about the levels of innovation we are currently seeing.
First up is Allyn Bailey from SmartRecruiters who predicted the rise of recruiterless recruiting on the show last year. I was interested to see how far she thought we had come on that journey and what was going to happen next.
The second interview was with Josh Sklüt, co-founder of MyStandard, who was undoubtedly the vendor trying to be the most disruptive, with a very different way of looking at the relationship between employers and potential employers.
The final interview is a conversation with David Nason, founder and CEO of HireBrain, who seeks to better align hiring managers and recruiters and who were winners of the Pitchfest competition at the conference.
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is your all in one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. Smart Recruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the ui. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 644 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Last week I attended the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. The event was full of energy and optimism for the future as hundreds of vendors showcased their new AI products and AI integrations. Everyone was playing up the new heights of efficiency and effectiveness that AI can take us to as an industry. However, there was much debate about the level of genuine innovation on offer and a sense that rather than thinking radically and reinventing what we do, we’re just looking at faster ways of solving old problems that don’t live up to AI’s potential to challenge the status quo. Here are three interviews I recorded at the show to help you make up your own minds about the levels of innovation that we’re currently seeing. First up is Elyn Bailey from Smart Recruiters, who predicted the rise of recruiterless recruiting on the show last year. I was interested to see how far she thought we’d come on that journey and what was going to happen next. The second interview was with Josh Joshua Sklüt co founder of My Standard, who is undoubtedly the vendor trying to be the most disruptive with a very different way of looking at the relationship between employers and potential employees. The final interview is a conversation with David Nason, founder and CEO of HireBrain, who are seeking to better align hiring managers and recruiters. They were also the winners of the PitchFest competition at the conference.
Matt Alder [00:02:46]:
Hi Allyn, welcome back to the podcast.
Allyn Bailey [00:02:48]:
I am so excited to be here. I feel like this is becoming like an annual tradition now.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
Absolutely, absolutely. We did this exactly the same time last year and we are right at the back end of this conference now. They’re going to start stacking chairs around us.
Allyn Bailey [00:03:01]:
They probably are. We’re probably going to get that like call over the intercom that says we are closing the floor.
Matt Alder [00:03:06]:
It probably seems appropriate to start by asking you of, you know, what are your impressions of what you’ve seen over the last couple of days?
Allyn Bailey [00:03:13]:
Okay, so one on the good news side of the house, I think HR tech is back in business. So it was a very energized, I would say almost call it kind of phonetic energy. The floor was hopping. I saw a lot, I mean, just a lot of movement, a lot of action, a lot of traction and a lot of conversations happening. I think that’s all good stuff. And I. And we really. I haven’t seen that for the last few years.
Matt Alder [00:03:42]:
I know. I feel exactly the same. It’s kind of. There’s a real sort of energy and optimism about the place, which is fantastic to see. So this time last year we recorded the interview where you were talking about recruiterless recruiting, which at the time was considered extremely controversial. 12, 18 months later, not so controversial.
Allyn Bailey [00:04:03]:
I know. Now everybody’s saying it like they came up with the idea.
Matt Alder [00:04:06]:
From your perspective, how have you seen things evolve over the last year?
Allyn Bailey [00:04:09]:
So listen, I think that it is clear now, right, that statement that there will never be as many recruiters as there were 24, 36 months ago is absolutely accurate. We all know it’s true. The second thing I would say is the reality is companies have cut and shifted under a belief system that somehow they were going to be able to make up for that either kind of with efficiencies around technology and kind of that, that kind of technology promise, which by the way is part of the reason for my saying that in the first place, because the capabilities were there, right? I think all the money people heard the capabilities are there and ran perhaps faster than they were ready to go for two levels. One, actually three. One, you have to, you have to redefine your process for. You can’t just. It’s not just like a copy and repeat. Take the old manual process, half automated process, suddenly make it an AI driven process. There was a lot of process design work which was completely lost. And two, all of these wonderful money people in the part of the business, right, misunderstood that in order to get yourself set up to move forward, you’re going to have to invest before you get the return. So they just went to disinvest without the invest. And so that caused friction. Right. And then the third piece was for all the promise of what technology can do. And we’re seeing it on the floor here today and we saw it for the last three days for what technology can do. It’s not doing it yet because, no, nobody’s having the honest conversation that you can’t do it the same way. It’s not. You have to reinvent and redesign. And either the tech wasn’t on the right rails to pivot fast enough or people just weren’t ballsy enough to say TA leader, love you, love what you’re doing, but you’re going to have to take a deep breath and we’re going to have to do it a different way to do it under this model. And it’s, by the way, it’s going to be cool and we’re going to figure it out together.
Matt Alder [00:06:30]:
No, I think that’s a really good point. And a lot of the conversation now to me is kind of shifting from just talking about AI on its own and actually contextualizing it in this TA transformation. And as you said there, without going through the process change, without having the vision about what it looks like, then you know that that’s just kind of impossible. What would your advice be and what.
Matt Alder [00:06:54]:
Is your advice to the sort of.
Matt Alder [00:06:55]:
The TA leaders that you work with when it comes to this transformational process that they have to go to go through, even if they’re just playing catch up to get back to where we are now.
Allyn Bailey [00:07:06]:
So I think listen at a, at a base level, you’re, you’re gonna have to open up your mind a little bit and allow yourself good to meet you as well. And it’s a scary space for us to be in. We are TA leaders by nature, have an edge of angst around us for what we’re going to be measured on, how fast our metrics are all around transactions. Right. We, we live in this kind of that space and it doesn’t necessarily position us as TA leaders to be open minded and to imagine without boundaries. So but to be able to do that, you have to do two things. One, have the willingness to do it, give yourself the space to do it, the kind of the permission to do it. And then you have to equip yourself with new ideas to let yourself do. And those new ideas are not going to come. Okay. The new ideas are not going to come from the HR Tech floor. Rebecca Carr, our CEO, got up on the stage here at the HR Tech Talks theater and she said something that for me, I was really excited to hear her say and resonated deeply with me. And she said, we have in the TA space have never moved fast enough. We have always been the followers and there’s a million reasons why that is. But listen, we let sales leaders, marketing leaders, fintech, right? They’re moving at lightning speed compared to where we’re going and how fast we’re going. And it’s not because we don’t have access to the same technology concepts or ideas or couldn’t benefit from them. We’re just the last movers. And in the world that we’re in today, whether it be because of the politics of the world that we’re in today, the culture shifts that are happening, the reimagining of work that is happening, all these things that are happening to the core of what we’re about, which is people and talent and how talent think and operate and et cetera, is so massive that we can’t afford to be the last mover because companies that aren’t figuring out a new way to do this talent thing and then we’re supporting them with it, they’re going to fall off the cliff and it’s going to be our fault because we sat around on our butts and waited till somebody else showed us how to do it. We went, okay, maybe we’ll try that too. That’ll be cool, right?
Matt Alder [00:09:41]:
Completely agree. And I think the, you know, the bit about, you know, having that vision, having those ideas is sort of, it’s such an important part of this. And I think, you know, giving people permission to do that is a key, is a key, is a key factor, definitely. So talking about visions and, and moving towards something. So last year it was recruiterless recruiting. What is it this year? So if we did this again in a year’s time, what would we be, what would be analyzing in terms of what’s happening or where we’re going?
Allyn Bailey [00:10:11]:
So we talked about the ramifications of reducing the TA envelope, right? Within, within a company. Well, here’s the deal. You still have to hire people. So who’s going to be responsible for like, who’s actually going to have to navigate that now, right? If the technology isn’t fully there yet, or as we start to build and then, and then eventually they’ll build around it. It’s going to be the people who are on the direct front lines. I think there’s a conversation around the democratization of the hiring process, that we’re going to have to be open to you and figure out what that means for us. So as somebody who lives on the talent acquisition technology side, huge opportunities for us to Start thinking about how we provide the right level of decision support, automation, agent based support tools directly into the hands of decentralized hiring teams, hiring managers, the frontline, the frontline manager of a franchise who’s the person who’s actually hiring and doesn’t have a recruiting team behind them. I think they’re going to become more of the common face of hiring and there’s going to be less and less big corporate recruiting teams supporting them. So what does that mean? There’s a big. I don’t know what the answer is going to look like and I don’t know what the blend is going to look like yet. But I think that’s what we’re going to start seeing is more and more companies trying to figure out how do you do this in the flow of work without causing additional burden, without having everybody throw their hands up and get the quality and level of talent that you need to be able to transform your business? This is not going to be an easy question, but the move’s already happening. You’re not going to turn back the dial and suddenly start reinvesting on the people side of talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:12:09]:
And I suppose as a final question that maybe to put you a bit on the spot with this. So there’s obviously lots of things that need to happen around that it’s not like you can just get rid of, you know, all of your kind of recruiting knowledge and all of your TA strategy and just like press a button and it kind of runs. So bearing in mind everything that we’ve said and everything that’s happened, what does the TA team of the future look like in terms of the type of skills that it has? I mean, it may be called something different, but what, you know, what are those strategic skills that you know will still be required?
Allyn Bailey [00:12:45]:
Yeah. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna double down on something I’ve been saying forever and maybe it’s because it’s a bias of mine, but a strong TA team has to have a strong, strong fundamental understanding of experience, design. They need to understand that. They’re going to have to understand how to navigate that because the technology solutions aren’t going to be like one and done. They’re going to continue to evolve. So it means you’re going to have to constantly be assessing new ways to get it done in the right way, leveraging a variety of different types of tools and capabilities that we can’t even imagine today. And that means understanding what that experience, experience now looks like on a constant, evolving basis. Any way that your candidates are still willing to participate in a way that you can keep those hiring managers engaged, et cetera. That’s a very specific skill set that is not going to go away and we need to double down on. The second thing is every TA team at the end of the day is going to be a data team. The data, the data, the data, all this new tech. We start talking about AI, we start talking about generative AI, we start talking about real in the flow of work automation capabilities, the ability to have multiple agents communicating and operating across each other. It’s all built on the infrastructure of data. And what is the biggest challenge we have in TA and we’ve had forever is none of our systems talk to each other and the data doesn’t connect and we don’t collect data and leverage data data in a way that allows us to use it for smart, intelligent decision making. So it’s only going to get worse when you start putting these systems on top of it. So you have to have really strong data analytics inventors. Data analytics inventors, not executors. And then you’re going to need people who are amazing at next level standard stakeholder engagement. So these are people who can understand when they’re working with hiring managers or business leaders, not just what they say, but what they mean and can help direct them to something they didn’t realize they could have. And that’s a different level of stakeholder management. That’s not being really good at being responsive or being really good, even being really good at creating a compelling business case. All those things are good. But somebody who’s really good at saying, I heard you, I see your problem statement. You’re translating it this way. I have this really interesting lens and background of knowledge and I’m now going to recommend to you what we should be doing. And it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before. And come with me on the ride and trust me, that’s a different level of collaboration and skill building within our teams. So there you go. I don’t know what that team looks like. It’s this really weird a team. Now that I’ve just constructed it, I’m starting to imagine this really weird a team. I’m probably giving aging myself as I say that.
Matt Alder [00:15:52]:
Oh, that kind of A-team.
Allyn Bailey [00:15:53]:
Yeah, I don’t. Yeah, right, exactly. That kind of a team. I’m like, who’s the Mr. T in that scenario? I don’t know, but think it’s the analytics person.
Matt Alder [00:16:01]:
Allyn, thank you very much for talking to me.
Allyn Bailey [00:16:04]:
It’s been great. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:16:39]:
Hi, Josh, and welcome to the podcast.
Joshua Sklüt [00:16:41]:
Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:16:42]:
Well, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Joshua Sklüt [00:16:47]:
Absolutely. Matt, I am Josh Sklüt. I am the COO and co founder of a Web3 alternative to LinkedIn called My Standard.
Matt Alder [00:16:55]:
That sounds intriguing. I want to know all about it. But before we do though, give us a bit of an insight into your background.
Joshua Sklüt [00:17:00]:
I’ve been in recruiting and talent acquisition for 20 plus years, pretty much every format you can imagine. I’ve had my own recruiting agency, so I’ve done contingency search, I’ve done retained search. I’ve built talent acquisition teams from the ground up internally at both large companies and small startups. I’ve recruited everything from, from admin receptionist to CEO, cto. I’ve really kind of run the gamut of everything possible in TA prior to this current iteration with MyStandard.
Matt Alder [00:17:29]:
Bit of an industry veteran in terms of understanding how it all kind of works and everything. Tell us about MyStandard.
Joshua Sklüt [00:17:35]:
So my standard is, like I mentioned, it’s a Web3 alternative to LinkedIn. We believe that the talent acquisition structure as it stands right now may very well be broken. It doesn’t work very well. What I mean by that is if you look at LinkedIn, a typical LinkedIn profile or post put up by a company, if they’re placing, you know, running a job advert will have 9,000 applicants. That is untenable, even with the best in AIs. If you’re going to cut 90% of those people off of the list, you’re probably cutting some good people out. But your recruiting team is still going to be dealing with inordinate amount of people. With our product. You download the apps, which are right now available in both the Android Play Store and the iPhone store. You put all of your professional data in that in your profile. It goes behind a wall that is encrypted. No one can see anything about you. There’s no identity markers or anything. Company X, IBM, for example, who’s on our board of directors? They need a software engineer. New York makes $150,000 a year. You happen to be one of those people, you Get a notification on your phone. Here’s IBM would like to talk to you about this opportunity. Here’s the job description. Would you be interested in sharing your profile, your data with IBM? Yeah, you know what, I never thought about working IBM, but why not? You swipe right, IBM receives that data. IBM then pays you for access to that data. So instead of going through, continuing to go through a third party abuser like LinkedIn who is basically constantly using your data. I don’t know if you noticed this, but the new thing is they have a toggle button about their AI where they’re basically toggled on and you have to toggle out of it in order to remove yourself from their abusive data. Instead of paying them, why not pay the people who actually own the data, the people who are the owners of their own identity, and give them some money for access to that data. What you’re creating is a much stronger relationship between the company and the user. Company is happy because they’re getting a fully packaged, fully vetted candidate. They have a much smaller number of applicants as opposed to an obscene amount. All of those people are genuinely interested because they just said yes. So you know that they’re going to, they’re going to be responsive. And since you’ve paid for it directly, as opposed to just an amorphic subscription model, you’re going to treat it with a different level of respect.
Matt Alder [00:19:47]:
Okay, that can all make sense at a conceptual level. Yeah. When you say pay them, what does that actually mean?
Joshua Sklüt [00:19:54]:
So we have a cryptocurrency token called the MyStandard token. So there’s a dollar amount that’s yet to be determined for each person’s value proposition in terms of what their resume is worth. They get the coin from us, the tokens. Those tokens can then instantaneously be turned into fiat currency or dollars and offloaded and put in their bank account. Okay, so you’re paying them in a middleman form format with the coins, but they can offload that or they can continue to hold onto the tokens and if they accrue in value, they potentially can use them for other things or you know, make a bigger purchase or pull them off all at once.
Matt Alder [00:20:29]:
Do you think that using people’s data and those kind of things like that, do you think that people would see that as a big enough problem to want to use your system?
Joshua Sklüt [00:20:38]:
I think that’s the one piece that keeps me up at night. That is. The thing that I think about the most is adoption. I think because we’ve been doing it this way for so long because we’ve been giving away our data and being having it abused for 20 plus years by all of the different social media sites. People are just accustomed to it. So it’s the devil you know premise. Once we get past that line, once we get to the point where people are like, I have, my data has value and this can be at any level. Matt, I’m talking one of the areas we are looking to get into in a big way are people who are we call underserved. Who’s that? Fast food workers, construction workers, retail workers. Why? Those people don’t necessarily have LinkedIn profiles or resumes. They all work, they all need jobs and they all have a phone. No one has ever focused on them, no one’s ever looked at them and said this is an addressable market. You people can, you know, people with your background could use our help. Right. Those people also have a tendency to change jobs often. And we get paid. Our business model, our monetization is we get paid on the transaction. So If IBM sends $10 to person X, we take a $2, a 20% SPEF. So we are targeting a market, a much more adjustable market where the hardest amount of people, it’s hardest to find people. And those people have a tendency and will love $5 for something they’ve never been ever paid for before. So we’re looking at the big picture and saying not only can the software engineer use this or the C level executive, but everybody has the opportunity to monetize their data. And if we can get over that hump and get people to understand the value proposition that their data offers to these companies and how they’ve been basically been taken advantage for all those years, then we’re going to get the higher level of adoption that we, that we think we can get.
Matt Alder [00:22:15]:
I suppose there’s two aspects to this. And you know, correct me if I’ve, if I’m getting this wrong, but at kind of face value it sounds like something that people will be like, I just don’t really get this or why.
Matt Alder [00:22:24]:
I’d want to do it.
Matt Alder [00:22:25]:
But I’m guessing that you, you are basing this on sort of two. I suppose the first thing is the continuing kind of adoption and growth of crypto and that and that kind of mindset, would that be yes and no?
Joshua Sklüt [00:22:37]:
Yes. We look at blockchain as a much larger value proposition than just crypto per se. The ability to control your information, the ability to prevent people from abusing it, the ability to decide who gets it and who doesn’t is the big play here, right? The crypto is literally, I guess we, I call it like the Chuck E. Cheese model. You familiar with Chuck E. Cheese?
Matt Alder [00:22:57]:
Just about. I’m British, but I’m just about familiar with it.
Joshua Sklüt [00:23:00]:
Chuck E. Cheese, you go to Chuck E. Cheese, you buy tokens, you buy a card, you go and play the games, they give you tickets and at the end you trade it in for prizes. Right? That’s what this is. Our token is that it’s just a vehicle, right? So that people are getting something for their value. But what they’re really getting and the real, the real value play here is they’re getting to build a one on one relationship with a recruiter that’s interested in them, that they are interested in. They each have something at stake. There’s no stake right now with LinkedIn. I talked to a gentleman the other day, I was at an event and I pitched it to him and I explained him what we were doing and he was like, why would I care? I get LinkedIn for free. I’m like, you are absolutely incorrect. We all know you aren’t getting LinkedIn for free. LinkedIn is a subscription model. They want to keep turning you over and turning you over. LinkedIn doesn’t care how many placements you make in a year. As a recruiter, LinkedIn doesn’t care if IBM hires a thousand people or one person. All they care about is that the next year you’re going to pay 8% more for the same exact service because of our tokens. The way the structure is set up, you only pay for candidates that say yes. So it’s an a la carte system. So if you have $10,000 worth of data searches and you send out $10,000 worth of reach outs to candidates and only 5,000, say yes, you still have a budget of $5,000. You see what I’m saying? So there’s.
Matt Alder [00:24:15]:
I do.
Joshua Sklüt [00:24:16]:
They never expire. It’s a perpetual motion situation. So you’re never wasting money. We feel if we can pull 2 to 3 to 4% of LinkedIn spend away from LinkedIn and giving it to my standard, you’re going to get a better result because there’s no bias. Because you don’t know anything about these candidates until you’ve already paid for it, you’re gonna have a more diverse workforce, which everybody wants, regardless of your company. And you’re gonna get more value for your dollar because you’re gonna have a controlled amount of candidates. You can decide when you’re setting up the search. If you’re getting too many responses, you can tweak your search so that it’s more refined. So if you have 200 responses instead of 200 and you want it down to 50, you’re like, well maybe I’ll make it 10 to 15 years of experience or maybe I’ll make it just this location or this particular skill.
Matt Alder [00:25:02]:
I think that’s interesting because I was going to say the other part of my sort of question about the future of crypto and people getting used to this kind of thing is that piece around blockchain. Because you know, blockchain has the potential to unlock lots of things when it comes to recruiting and hiring in terms of people owning their data and their verifications. Give me kind of your vision for the future of hiring with kind of blockchain sitting there.
Joshua Sklüt [00:25:25]:
Great question. So one of the pieces of the puzzle that we offer, that no one else is offering, offering, that blockchain can offer, are what’s called zero knowledge proofs of people’s professional credentialing. Where’d you go to college?
Matt Alder [00:25:36]:
Me? Yeah, I went to the University of Winchester.
Joshua Sklüt [00:25:39]:
You went to the University of Winchester. For your whole life you will have gone to the University of Winchester. Every job.
Matt Alder [00:25:43]:
Well, it changed its name actually. Okay, but yeah, but yes, absolutely.
Joshua Sklüt [00:25:47]:
Premise, right? You understand the premise?
Joshua Sklüt [00:25:48]:
So every job you’ve ever applied for, they go through the process of interviewing you. They get to the end of the interview, they want to make you an offer, they say, okay, we need to a background check. So they’re going to call the University of Winchester. There’s some 23 year old kid on the other end of that call who has to say yes, he went here. Yes, that’s all he does. It is the most inefficient system of all time. Why not have it so that when you set up your my standard profile, you can reach out to the University of Winchester and say, can you send me a proof, a copy of my degree, my diploma, whatever, your any credential and it’s in your profile. So that when IBM reaches out to you, they’re getting a fully packaged verified candidate before the interview even starts. So think about that in a bigger picture, one of our investors is the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. They lose 60% of the candidates for nursing who interview after the interview. Why? Their license is out of date, it’s out of state, it’s in the wrong discipline. They spent all this time and effort, all these man hours driving this process, only to find out it falls off if at the very beginning of the process, they had this person’s fully vetted profile in front of them, and this is something that Blockchain offers because of the verification process, they would then interview the candidate fully confident that this person, if they like them, is ready to go. You’re saving hours and thousands and thousands of man hours and therefore dollars in a vetting process that should take place at the beginning of the process as opposed to the end.
Matt Alder [00:27:09]:
Josh, thank you very much for talking to me.
Joshua Sklüt [00:27:11]:
Thanks for your time, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:27:12]:
Hi, David, and welcome to podcast.
David Nason [00:27:14]:
Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.
Matt Alder [00:27:16]:
Well, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
David Nason [00:27:20]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My name is David Nason. I’m the CEO and founder of HireBrain. And we are a hiring enablement platform. And we focus on. We’ve built a suite of applications for hiring managers to use before, during and after a hiring cycle to ensure the highest probability of success.
Matt Alder [00:27:36]:
Now you’ve just won pitchfest.
David Nason [00:27:38]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:27:38]:
So how does that feel?
David Nason [00:27:41]:
It feels amazing. Honestly. It was a surprise. Some ways feels validating, you know, when you get out there and work really hard to build something and create something, you know, from scratch and to see it recognized as. As the value that we see it as, I guess really. Right.
Matt Alder [00:27:57]:
Tell us a bit more about what it does, you know, what’s innovative about it. How is it meeting the sort of the demands of a very changing industry?
David Nason [00:28:06]:
Yeah, thank you for that. I think a couple things. So I grew up in talent acquisition. I started as a recruiter a million years ago, ran a recruiting search firm. I went to Oracle, ran go to market, recruiting there global organizations at Cisco and Infor as well. So in a lot of ways, sometimes I describe it as the product or the solution or the platform that I always wish that I had when I was running ta. So change in corporate organizations is super hard. Right. And the only way that we have ever been able to really do that with a hiring organization changing or influencing or helping them to hire well. Right. Especially in changing business conditions, was to do it effectively manually. Right. We fly around, we build PowerPoint presentations and so on. Right. And so the idea here was that there’s not really anything for them to use during the hiring cycle. It’s all manual, Excel, spreadsheets, Google dots and so on. So to have a platform that, that they can use to complete anything that they need to complete, like during a hiring cycle to help and also to influence the way that they think about hiring. Right. So that fundamentally the idea is and what we are accomplishing is we’re shifting the way that people think about hiring from a traditional laundry list of things that you want to see in a candidate to a future facing view of a job with a tool. The first one is called role design where they can actually design a job. And we’ve discovered that hiring managers, they love designing jobs. They don’t like writing job descriptions.
Matt Alder [00:29:38]:
That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And talk us through the rest of it. What’s the rest of it?
David Nason [00:29:42]:
So literally from the beginning, right. Whether they start in role design, there’s three journeys. The other thing that we built, one of our original idea and strategy is that we’ve infused knowledge, leadership and learning inside of the business application to do the job. So, you know, God love you guys, but Salesforce doesn’t train anybody how to be a great salesperson. Right. But our software does. We train business leaders on the fundamentals on how to execute a hiring cycle, the science of decision making, how we make decisions about other human beings, how to design a job, how to decide as opposed to thinking about things again as something you want to see in a candidate. You know, we always say though, what are you looking for? Well, what we talk about or what we ask for is what are the objectives of the position, what are the business challenges that you’re solving for by hiring, what are the new things you’re trying to create by hiring and then create a 30, 60, 90 day, 6 months, 12 months and beyond 12 months role and through that process. And the third journey, if you will, is our intake technology. So our assistant joins intake meetings. It guides recruiters on all beautiful business specific questions to ask a hiring manager. That’s recorded, transcribed, and we have highly intelligent business classification software that turns that into analysis, drafts of job descriptions, role designs, anything else that they can use. And especially today where recruiting organizations are so constrained by, I mean we’re talking to companies that 70% layoffs in recruiting. So yesterday I was accounting and finance recruiter, today I’m a sales recruiter. Well, I don’t know that functional that well or I don’t know that business group. So having that in app guidance for the recruiter. Right. Gives them the opportunity to uplevel what it is that they, you know, their business value to the customer. To their customer. Right. Which is the hiring manager.
Matt Alder [00:31:39]:
No, absolutely. And it’s just such a, it’s such a crazy time at the moment with all the sort of different forces driving change and ob. Obviously AI and technology is sitting right in the middle of this. What do you think the future’s going to look like? So if we were having this conversation in sort of two or three years time, how do you think this is all going to pan out?
David Nason [00:32:03]:
Yeah, thanks for that. Well, that’s an interesting question where I think that there is going to be a bifurcation. I think that the simplest uses of AI are going to drive one kind of stream, if you will, of business activities. And then there are going to be other organizations who take this opportunity to drive true business transformation. Right. To use tools and technology to up level their business advisory opportunities with the organizations that they support. And we’re in that category. We don’t believe that we’ll be the only ones or are the only ones necessarily who are doing that kind of thing or providing those kinds of services. But we are absolutely committed to that. Right. I hear, and at the, at this conference and not going to name any names, but a lot of cynicism about hiring managers. Oh, they’re this and they’re that. I’m like, have you, when’s the last time you talked to one? Right. It’s the same thing about recruiters. And our attitude is it’s not their fault. Maybe they’ve never had the opportunity to learn and grow. Maybe they’ve never had the opportunity to think about their function as a business, as the opportunity to drive business. Right. And from a hiring manager’s perspective, I mean, 90% of hiring managers have never been trained on how to hire. 50%. Over the next two to four years, 50% of people making hiring decisions at corporations will be making the first hires of their career. 70%. Some companies 60, some companies 80. They only hire once a year. But we expect them to be experts at this. Right? Well, that’s just ridiculous. If you do something once a year and when you go, you move up in the, in your career every time you get promoted, guess what, you’re doing it for the first time again, Right? You’re hiring people you can. I used to hire Frontline, you know, right. Individual contributors. And then I became a director and I had to hire managers. Right. It’s the first time I’ve ever doing it. So to provide. That’s literally, that’s the, that is the strategy of this platform. And again, like, you know, what will purely transactional type of recruiting organizations look like in the future? We see some of those, we see some applications in that space. I think that it’s probably okay and maybe even helpful to have a pure automated 100% digital experience for hiring for certain types of organizations or certain types of roles. And I’m not going to fight that. But I do see that some organizations, the recruiting organization and the hiring managers in that organization, if they take that strategy and apply it to, you know, just try to reduce cost per hire as much as possible. Right? I mean, where’s it going to go?
Matt Alder [00:34:39]:
David, thank you very much for talking to me.
David Nason [00:34:41]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:34:43]:
My thanks to Elin, Josh and David. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com or on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
