Technology is evolving quickly, and advances in AI are likely to change Talent Acquisition forever. If you are a regular listener to this podcast, you will know that I firmly believe there is an opportunity here to make recruiting better for everyone, with the potential for AI to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and experience exponentially. I call this Recruiting Nirvana. However, other less favorable future scenarios still exist, and there is only a short window of time for TA’s future to be in its own hands.
It is critical; then, that TA Leaders keep up to date with the art of the possible when it comes to AI and technology and have a clear vision of the future, they are moving towards.
At the recent HR Technology Conference, I sat down with six practitioners and analysts to find out what they thought the biggest challenges are in TA at the moment, which of the current use cases of AI they feel are most valuable, and, most importantly, what their own vision of Recruiting Nirvana looks like.
In this episode, you will hear from:
• Lindsey Sailors, Head of TA Insights & Enablement at Dropbox
• Matt Couret, Director of Client Delivery at Hudson RPO
• Sarah White, Founder of Aspect 43
• Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer at Cielo Talent
• Maureen Clough, Creator and Host of the “It Gets Late Early” podcast
• Matt Charney, Editor in Chief at Recruiter.com
A huge thank you to Gem for hosting me at their booth at HR Tech so that I could have these conversations.
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from gem. Gem is the AI powered recruiting platform that TA teams love. It helps you maximize productivity, hire faster and save money, all while giving recruiters a solution that they find easy to use. Use Gem as your all in one recruiting platform or enhance your ats with integrated products for CRM, sourcing, scheduling, analytics, career sites, events and more. Over a thousand companies, from startups to industry leaders like Airbnb, wayfair, Cintas, Carmax, DoorDash and Zillow, trust Gem to hire with speed and ease. See why Gem is the recruiting industry’s most beloved solution with a 4.8 out of 5 rating on G2 by going to gem.com that’s Gem.com
Matt Alder [00:01:15]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 645 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Technology is evolving quickly and advances in AI are likely to change talent acquisition forever. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I firmly believe there’s an opportunity here to make recruiting better for everyone, with the potential for AI to increase effectiveness, efficiency and experience exponentially. I call this Recruiting Nirvana. However, other less favorable future scenarios still exist, and there’s only a short window of time that TA’s future will be in its own hands. It’s critical then that TA leaders keep up to date with the art of the possible when it comes to AI and technology, and also have a clear vision of the future that they’re moving towards. At the recent HR Technology Conference, I sat down with six practitioners and analysts to find out what they thought the biggest challenges are in TA at the moment, which of the current use cases of AI they think are most useful, and most importantly, what their own vision of recruiting Nirvana looks like. In this episode, you’re going to hear from Lindsay Sailors, Head of TA Insights and Enablement at Dropbox, Matt Couret, Director of Client Delivery at Hudson RPO, Sarah White, founder of Aspect 43 Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer at Cielo Talent, Maureen Clough, Creator and Host of the It Gets Late Early podcast, and Matt Charney, Editor in chief at Recruiter.com. A huge thank you to Gem for hosting me on their booth at HR Tech so I could have these conversations.
Matt Alder [00:03:04]:
Hi Lindsey and welcome to the podcast.
Lindsey Sailors [00:03:06]:
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:07]:
Well, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Lindsey Sailors [00:03:12]:
Yes, I am the head of TA Insights Enablement and coordination at Dropbox.
Matt Alder [00:03:18]:
Awesome. Tell us a bit more about what that, what that job entails.
Lindsey Sailors [00:03:21]:
Yes, it’s a funny job. It is. You can think of it more as like strategy and operations. We work really closely with our operations and programs. Team Insights and Enablement is founded on this belief that recruiting and sales are actually like quite similar in a lot of ways. And sales enablement is this like foundational piece of any good sales organization. But very rarely recruiting enablement is something that people invest in. So Insights and Enablement is essentially we own all of our TA data and we use that data and all of the insights from that data to train our team up, level our team with a five pronged enablement solution. And then I also manage our talent coordinators, which as you probably know those roles are. They’re evolving so quickly. And so there’s a lot of like enablement within that. And like a big factor of my work has been putting in more automation and AI into our process.
Matt Alder [00:04:27]:
And we’ll get to that in a minute because that’s kind of really what I want to talk about. Before we do, tell us about some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the market. I mean both your organization and in general.
Lindsey Sailors [00:04:36]:
Yes, I think the biggest, honestly, like the biggest challenge that I have, I mean there’s always been the challenge of we are trying to get the best and the brightest AI engineers into our organization, which is hard because not a lot of people are experts. There are only a few. Like, it’s hard to stay current with. But from a, like when I think about kind of up leveling our organization, it’s so hard to wrap my arms around this ever changing market because new tools are coming down the pike all the time and new features for those tools and suddenly something else is an all in one solution that just a couple of months ago only kind of like was more boutique. And so that’s really difficult. I think there’s also a little bit, I find some challenge in like identifying the really exciting players who are really flashy and really good at sales and like the fact that they’re unproven products. They are, they’re unproven yet. And so how do I make it so that my org it’s, we have to strike this balance of like, we’re not guinea pigs, but we’re not the last to the market. And like, how do you do that? And it really means like we need to kind of be more partners with these vendors rather than a traditional like buyer, seller relationship.
Matt Alder [00:05:59]:
Is that how you work with Gem.
Lindsey Sailors [00:06:00]:
It is very much, yes.
Matt Alder [00:06:02]:
Awesome. So in terms of the kind of AI and automation, I’m kind of asking people about what use cases are they actually sort of using this for rather than all the hype and the kind of feature focusing things. So tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing with AI, automation, those kind of things.
Lindsey Sailors [00:06:19]:
The biggest use cases that we currently have for AI are sourcing and being able to kind of across the entirety of our funnel, whether it’s applicants, people in our CRM, ATS or just like external in the market. How do we surface them really quickly so we have AI that’s helping us with that. And then I think that the next kind of like lowest hanging fruit is around talent coordination and the calendaring, even complex loops. There’s stuff that AI can do there to bring all of it together. Those are like the real world scenarios of what we’re actually like truly using AI for.
Matt Alder [00:06:59]:
And you mentioned as part of that the talent coordinator role is evolving. How is it evolving?
Lindsey Sailors [00:07:03]:
I think that talent coordination, they are really the, they’re on the front lines of candidate experience. And I think candidate experience is going to be where companies win or lose. It’s going to be that like the highest currency in this next stage, the stage really that we’re in. And so the way that it’s evolving at Dropbox is that we want to enable talent coordinators to like, let’s automate the bottom 40, 40% of your job and allow you to like dive into the art of candid experience, which people in other industries have been doing for years. This is like hospitality and like five star dining. And you know, the way that you feel going into a very high end restaurant is the way that you should feel applying to Dropbox and like going through the process. And so that’s where, that’s where they’re going.
Matt Alder [00:07:54]:
Awesome. I mean that makes, that makes, that makes perfect sense. And I suppose that that kind of leads nicely onto the final question which is, you know, where’s this, where do you hope this is all going in the future? You know, if you had a recruiting nirvana, what would that look like?
Lindsey Sailors [00:08:08]:
I definitely think that that cross pollination of hospitality and candidate experience needs to become, they need to become closer. But I also think, and so much of what I’ve seen here is really telling me that talent acquisition and talent management are really converging.
Matt Alder [00:08:30]:
Yes.
Lindsey Sailors [00:08:30]:
And that there needs to be this strong feedback loop and that it’s almost in the feedback future. I don’t know if this is a nirvana, but I think that it is actually because we’re all doing more with less, and we’re all taking, you know, we’re upskilling. I would love to have recruiters have that kind of like, really holistic feedback loop of how hires are doing and be involved in more of that life cycle of the employee. And I think that there’s also my vision, my hope is that we also begin to focus more on the recruiting experience as much as we do the candidate experience. I think recruiters are so important to a company’s revenue. They’re so important to the growth of the company. And, like, the people that you bring in are just. Talent is only getting more important. And so I’m thinking a lot about that.
Matt Alder [00:09:23]:
Lindsey, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lindsey Sailors [00:09:25]:
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Matt Couret [00:09:27]:
So my name is Matt Korett. I’m the director of client delivery for Hudson RPO over our projects technology business.
Matt Alder [00:09:33]:
Now, obviously, you’re dealing with a number of clients. What are you seeing as the main challenges at the moment? What is it that’s tricky for your clients? What are they. What are they really focusing on?
Matt Couret [00:09:43]:
Across our business, Right. We work with a number of different customers. So I think there are, you know, some similar themes across those challenges. But I think the. The biggest one that we face today, no matter what level of industry, is just, you know, the, you know, the responsiveness. Right. So kind of separation between opportunities in the marketplace, even in what some might say is a softened market, there’s still plenty of opportunities for top talent. And so distinguishing, you know, a customer for them to be able to distinguish themselves from another opportunity in the marketplace is really where they’re finding, you know, large challenge.
Matt Alder [00:10:20]:
We’re sitting at the HR tech show. We’re right at the back of the expo floor, floor, and I can just see in front of me a sea of technologies. You know, it’s like a living, breathing. A living, breathing tech stack, basically. You obviously deal with a lot of technology in terms of what you do. What are you seeing so far in terms of the benefits of AI and how do you think people should sort of simplify the tech stacks that they’re working with?
Matt Couret [00:10:46]:
I love that. You know, the idea of kind of looking into the sea of technology out there. And I think these companies are all faced with a very similar challenge to kind of differentiate. But I think from an AI perspective, where I think we’re going to start to see the most impact around talent acquisition and recruiting is, you know, the expansion of scale and by that I mean how much more can a recruiter take on and how much more breadth and width do they have across the market as they leverage that not only from a task perspective, but being able to engage, engage more candidates across the market and then move them across the funnel for their customers?
Matt Alder [00:11:20]:
You obviously do quite a lot of work with gem. How do you find that in terms of.
Matt Couret [00:11:27]:
Yeah, I think from a Gem perspective, one of the things I love about it is it’s unbelievably intuitive, right. It’s not really click heavy. It’s very straightforward. The data accuracy of their platform is incredible compared to others that I’ve worked with. And I think again, it’s a multi, multiplier of capability. Because when we talk about the campaign outreach feature, that’s where recruiters are seeing the most benefit from, you know, from a sourcing perspective, is being able to easily pull in targets and then increase outreach tenfold.
Matt Alder [00:11:56]:
We’re moving to a world where we’re seeing kind of more automation of these, of these tasks. And, you know, there were some question marks about the role of talent acquisition as we kind of move forward. But from a kind of purely sort of consistent conceptual level, if we’re looking at talent acquisition as suddenly having a lot of capacity to do other things because a lot of the work that they do is being, is kind of being automated and simplified, how do you think we can change recruiting? How can we make it better for everyone? And what’s the role of recruiters in that in the future?
Matt Couret [00:12:32]:
So I’ve always talked about this and it’s been especially, especially prescient during, you know, what we’ve looked at as kind of a, either a softened market or down market, right? When, when things are, things are going well, recruiters are expected to wear every single hat in the, in the company, right? You know, you’re the marketer, you’re the salesperson, you’re the recruiter, you know, bringing on, you know, highly competitive talent, you know, when the market moves in another direction, sometimes that that role is reduced. And I think for, to answer your question about, you know, how does AI, I think in some ways strengthen the role of a recruiter and what does the expansion of that role look like? I think it actually provides them the capabilities to act in all those other capacities. I think it complements all these things that, you know, the business has always asked of them but maybe never given them the resources to achieve. And now they’re way more, you know, ready to be, to be pointed in those directions and take on Those tasks.
Matt Alder [00:13:25]:
And as a final question for you, what does your own, like, personal recruiting nirvana look like? So if we looked sort of five years into the future, what would recruiting look and feel like, you know, to candidates and hiring managers and recruiters, if you could kind of design the perfect way for it to operate?
Matt Couret [00:13:42]:
Yeah, I think the perfect way for it to operate is for recruiters to be able to focus in on, you know, their key strengths, which is the relationship piece, you know, the qualification piece, in terms of really sussing out, you know, someone’s capabilities based on fit of project and experience, you know, and allow the pieces of technology. Right. To complement their efforts. But again, by offering more people more opportunity, by evil, being able to cast a wider net that qualifies at the top of the funnel. Right. And I think where we sometimes fall short, you know, in a ta, you know, function today is that sometimes we can’t reach out to everybody that. That we want to consider. Right. We don’t have, you know, we don’t have the luxury of time, and I think technology is giving us some of that back.
Matt Alder [00:14:23]:
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Couret [00:14:25]:
You got it. Pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:14:27]:
Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the podcast.
Sarah White [00:14:29]:
Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:14:31]:
It’s always a pleasure. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Sarah White [00:14:34]:
Sure. My name is Sarah White. I am the founder of Aspect 43. We are a research and strategy firm focused on bringing the voice of the recruiter and HR into all of the vendors. So we work on product strategy, marketing. We help them understand, really, like, stop cold calling. Like, recruiters don’t want to hear it. And so we work with a lot of the vendors to like, improve what they’re doing and really make sure that HR and recruiting and employees in general, especially in the recruitment, recruiting candidates are having a voice in a way they’ve never had before within all of the different technology partners.
Matt Alder [00:15:17]:
No, absolutely. And you’ve had an exceptionally busy couple of days.
Sarah White [00:15:21]:
I have. Our team has met with about 77 different vendors this week.
Matt Alder [00:15:26]:
So obviously, you know, you’re looking very carefully at the market and what’s going on? What’s going on at the moment? What do you think the big kind of challenges are in ta or what are you seeing? You know, what do you think the tech companies should be addressing?
Sarah White [00:15:38]:
Yeah, I think some of the challenges that are happening is we are having a functional shift in the organizational design of recruiting departments. And so how things were set up pre pandemic are not going to be the same as they are now because not only has hiring changed and what we are doing around hiring changed, the technology available has advanced so rapidly in six years. You know, I’ve been in TA Tech since 1999. I would say we haven’t seen this fast of an advancement in my entire career. Like what has happened in the last 36 to 48 months is what used to take us seven to 10 years to achieve. And so we’re half lifing and then it’s going to just continue to have life. So what’s going to happen over the next 24 months is really. I’m so excited to be able to see this, but I think that’s really the biggest challenge. The, the number of roles and how those roles are going to be are just never going to be the same.
Matt Alder [00:16:44]:
No, I kind of agree with you 100%. And I think with the, you know, the AI piece that’s driving a lot of this, there’s. I just think, you know, we’re kind of like sort of hype max at the moment. You know, looking at AI is kind of everywhere. And all the kind of the vendor presentations I’ve sat through in the last few days have actually had what they call the AI section because they feel they have to talk about. So stripping through all of that.
Sarah White [00:17:08]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:17:08]:
What are you actually seeing that is genuinely useful and being adopted right now? That is, that is kind of driven by AI.
Sarah White [00:17:15]:
I think where AI is actually having the biggest benefit in recruiting is around the impact it’s having on automation. And not the overall automation, but automation of the parts of what we did. I used to be a recruiter, obviously I’m not a recruiter anymore. But what we did that we didn’t like to do. And I think with as much as I’m excited about what we are seeing coming, I think the biggest risk that we all need to be aware of from a technical perspective and a product perspective is not automating out those little moments that we love. Right. There’s a lot of like stupid stuff, right, that we can do as recruiters that could easily be automated. But there are little things that we personally like to do in the day and as almost like a mental break to everything else we’re doing. And we have to be really cautious with how we are doing the automation and where we are rolling in AI that it maybe supports or augments some of those little mini moments without removing them in a way that takes that personalized. And I don’t mean AI personalization, which is another big hype cycle conversation here. But those genuine personal moments that we have as recruiters with that candidate, with that hiring manager, with whoever else is involved in that process that we enjoy, like it’s okay to enjoy work. And I want to make sure that as we are bringing AI into roadmaps and we are bringing AI into conversations on how we’re selling it and how we’re marketing it and how we’re thinking about it from a strategy, we’re also thinking about it from a very human perspective about the little things people actually like to do.
Matt Alder [00:19:10]:
That’s an incredible point because ultimately all of this is about making humans making work better.
Sarah White [00:19:18]:
Yeah.
Matt Alder [00:19:19]:
You know, obviously a big part of that is driving value for organizations, but ultimately it’s, it’s the humans that, that kind of do this. Yeah, I think that’s a big consideration. I think it’s also going to be a battleground over the next few years in terms of how it, how it pans out.
Sarah White [00:19:32]:
One of the things that I was really encouraged by. So we run State of HR Tech Research every year where we actually do large scale research of HR leaders, business leaders, employees, candidates, as well as recruiting teams. And we ask, you know, a whole series of questions. But one of the things, things we ask is, why are you buying technology? What is the goal? What are you hoping to get out of new recruiting software? What are you hoping to get out of new HR software? And number one is efficiency. Everybody was sure it was going to be cost effectiveness and it’s just not. It’s efficiency. How do we do things, which is what we always focus on with AI. And that’s what it is. The number two thing was improving the employee experience and it had increased 10 percentage points since last year. And so there seems to be, not like, oh, let’s bring in employee experience software, but how do we make sure whatever we do bring in is going to impact, for instance, that recruiter in a way that makes it easier for them to do the job, but also doesn’t take away the part of the job they love the most.
Matt Alder [00:20:43]:
So building on that then, as a final question, what would recruiting nirvana look like to you?
Sarah White [00:20:50]:
I think really, if we’re thinking about like what I can envision, recruiting nirvana, I mean, we’re so close compared to what we were 20 years ago when I was having to smile and dial to get candidates. I think what I really hope that we get to a point and see is technology that is really able to engage and be easy for a candidate and is respectful to that employee. And the employee lifecycle starts at the moment we first engage and talk to that person, but it also continues the whole way through. And so the candidate perspective is taken into play, that recruiter perspective is taken into play. Some of those automated moments that are menial tasks that nobody wants to do are done in a way where they don’t feel like it’s AI doing feels very much like what we’re doing on the other side of HR in the flow of work. It’s done not because I have to log into a system, not because I have to go here. I can do my job as a recruiter, as a hiring manager, as an interview participant, or as a candidate from wherever I want to work. Maybe that is my slack, maybe that is my email, maybe that is my text. And I don’t have some piece of technology telling me how I have to do it. It’s just enabling me to get it done, to support everybody’s experience in the process.
Matt Alder [00:22:19]:
Sarah, thank you very much for talking to me.
Sarah White [00:22:21]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Jones [00:22:23]:
Hi, Matt Jones. I’m the Chief Product Officer at Cielo. I lead our product and solutions organization. My main focus is thinking about the future of talent acquisition and talent and how we respond as a talent acquisition partner to that, to meet our customers in the future.
Matt Alder [00:22:39]:
It’s obviously a very interesting, disruptive, unique time at the moment with everything that’s kind of happening. What are you seeing as the biggest challenges that talent acquisition teams have kind of in the market at the moment?
Matt Jones [00:22:52]:
I think there’s two or three. We should probably like sunset the word disruption as well, or at least just claim it back like. Like this is the new normal. That’s another one of those phrases, the new normal. Exactly. I think, you know, prioritization of spend, like, what is the important space to go and invest time, energy, effort, dollars, pounds, euros. That’s kind of one. And this show is a great example of that. There are many, many, many great partners you could choose from. Which one is going to help you deliver against the biggest priority you have right now? The second one is, I think we’re approaching a really interesting moment from a. I would call it peak risk hype moment. Specifically thinking about AI feels a bit like pre GDPR to me. And if you think about Most of the AI legislation has kind of enforcement timelines of summer 25 to summer 26. I think as a HR professional or a TA professional, you get a lot of focus from your legal team, your infosec team and your CISO over the next six to 12 months. And being equipped to Work through that while not giving up on, you know, the great experiences that this technology can drive is going to be a big challenge for people.
Matt Alder [00:24:01]:
So obviously, you know, the talk around AI is almost deafening in terms of, you know, hype and all that sort of stuff. What are you actually seeing as genuine use cases that are, that are sort of changing the game at the moment?
Matt Jones [00:24:13]:
Yeah, I mean, yes, there’s a lot of, I mean literally every booth here has AI written on it. So that’s, that’s, it’s the year of AI. Last year I think was the year of analytics. I think it’s again, it’s a couple of different categories really. So the idea of kind of recruiting copilot I think is one real interesting use case. So how do you use generative AI to do some of the things, and by the way, old fashioned AI and RPA to do some of the things that can free up recruiters time or TA professionals time or even hire managers time to invest in more human kind of experiences, talking to candidates, interviewing those kind of things. So that could include creating better job descriptions that are on brands that have compliant tone of voice, that have the right EEO regulations and so on and so forth. It could be helping with summarization. So hey, we’ve got all these great candidates, we’ve had all these great notes. How do we summarize that? Turn it into a package. So that’s one area. The second one I think is hyper personalization in everything. We were running a roundtable last week in London and I was telling the group that I think 25 is going to be the year of hyper personalization of everything, which will create a new bar or a new level for kind of recruiting outreach or employee engagement. If you’re not hyper personalizing, you’re going to actually fall behind and see lower response rates. So I think those are the two that we’re seeing kind of the best experiences in. And if you think about it, it’s relevant for other parts of the enterprise. The copilot is great in engineering, is great in other areas of the enterprise. That’s why that’s going to be useful in HR and TA and hyper personalization. Consumer marketing, consumer experiences that’ll flow into HR and ta.
Matt Alder [00:25:50]:
The hyper personalization thing is fascinating and so important and we could probably have a whole half an hour just talking, just talking about that. But as a, as a final question, so you know, you kind of sort of indicated there what’s happening, what the direction of travel kind of looks like when we kind of get to a phase where, you know, everything that’s automated can be automated. You know, we have this kind of hyper personalization. What would you like recruiting to look like? What’s your, what’s your recruiting nirvana?
Matt Jones [00:26:17]:
Yeah, I think I’d like it to look a little bit more like a consumer experience. We’ve been shortening the gap sort of B2C, B2E. We’ve been narrowing the gap a lot over the last few years, but there’s still a gap. So the experiences I have in my everyday life are not the same experiences I have if I’m in a recruiting process. And so I’d like to see that that sort of shortened or closed entirely. The other thing as well is we label talent a lot in recruiting. You’re an FTE, you’re a 1099, you’re a. I’d like to see that disappear and just be talking about humans and getting work done, which is the human work we need to get done. Which work can we be automated? And then how do we have a great conversation and drive a great experience for those human beings as well? I think that’ll be a super rewarding recruiting career, actually.
Matt Alder [00:27:00]:
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Jones [00:27:02]:
Thank you very much.
Matt Alder [00:27:03]:
Can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Maureen Clough [00:27:06]:
Sure. I’m Maureen Wiley Clough. I host a podcast that’s all about the experience of getting older in the youth obsessed and dominated tech industry. And so we are talking about age, which is something that should be a part of including conversation and for some reason has been left off the table in 92% of cases.
Matt Alder [00:27:21]:
Why do you think that is? In an environment where in many cases people are struggling to find the talent that they need.
Maureen Clough [00:27:29]:
Right. That’s the reality. It’s interesting to see people say we can’t fill these roles when in fact there are so many people who are very qualified and experienced who could in fact do so well. The population is aging at a rapid climate clip. By 2030, it’s going to be some massive percentage of the workforce that will be over 50. So we have a society that is insanely ageist. One in two people, according to the World Health Organization, are ageist. I think half of those people are lying to themselves and to the WHO because we have been given these messages from such a young age that to get older is the worst thing that you can possibly do. And so we, we marginalize people over a certain age and it starts early in the tech industry and, you know, people over age 40, believe it or not, are part of what’s called a protected class. So I’m now a part of it as well. Good times. But. So we are federally protected in the United States against age discrimination, nominally at least, but yet it is quite rampant. And there are these deep seated stereotypes that abound. The thought that, for example, as you age, you are set and entrenched in your ways and you don’t care to learn or grow, which is lunacy to think right now we have a talent shortage, right. And people can’t fill the roles that they need filled. And we’re overlooking some incredible value in the possibility of having experienced workers come to the table.
Matt Alder [00:28:53]:
So now do you think that as we kind of walk around the exhibition, everything’s about AI, you know, we’re very much sort of talking about AI is doing to talent acquisition, you know, on this, on this particular episode, do you think that there is optimism in terms of technology being able to solve some of these problems and remove some of the challenge, some of the entrenched thinking?
Maureen Clough [00:29:16]:
I do, I like to be slightly optimistic in life, generally speaking, I think, you know, you put biased data in, you’re going to get biased data out with an AI situation. But I do think that there is the possibility of it being really an equalizer of sorts if it’s done correctly. Right. And when I think about even AI as a new tool, I actually, I had a guest on my show who was in his 60s and he was trying to get a tech job and he explained exactly how much it sucked to interview in your 60s for tech jobs. But what he said that really struck me was that he sees AI as a very hopeful thing, as the great equalizer. Because the fact is, even though of course he’s. Things have been worked on for ages now and they’re just coming to the forefront in our collective mind now. It’s really relatively early on. And so anyone of any age doesn’t matter, you can go and you can harness the skills that, you know, you can bring to the AI arena and really make a name for yourself. So that’s something that really has nothing to do with age since it is such a new thing. So anybody, anybody can get in there and do it.
Matt Alder [00:30:13]:
And I suppose also the, you know, most employers are talking about skills based hiring now and the sort of technology like Gem that really helps advance that. And I suppose if we’re in a world where we’re just looking at people’s skills, their potential to keep learning, that should help, shouldn’t it?
Maureen Clough [00:30:31]:
I would think so. I would think So I mean it’s a very intriguing thing. Like we just have these very deep seated biases within us and we don’t even know we’re doing them right. But if you start nerding out on this stuff as I have, you see that these messages are everywhere. And my own children are 7 and 9 and they have been like, hey mom, you’re old. Like it’s like it’s a dis. Who taught you this? And the research actually supports that kids as young as age 4 spout off harmful age of stereotypes. So this is being embedded in our young minds and it’s continuing and it’s a self fulfilling prophecy if we don’t stop it. Right? When did each go from, you know, agent experience, go from the asset to liability? It’s like, why are we here? It blows my mind. And I can tell you from my own personal experience, I went from receiving an abundance of inbound, unsolicited recruiter interest for companies who had open roles in tech. And that happened. I was very fortunate. Happened often. I turned 40, those fell off a cliff. I’m not kidding. And nothing else changed. And granted you could say, of course it hasn’t been, been a particularly great, great job market. So there’s, you know, a correlative factor there. But I mean, now I’m getting those like, can we buy a couple hours of your time for your valuable expertise? Getting those all the time. Those, you know, those little companies that ask, you know, on behalf of their client, they want all this consulting and yet, you know, suddenly I’m like, not valuable as an FTE potentially. It’s bizarre. But it overnight and I’m like, it has to be the age, it has.
Matt Alder [00:32:02]:
To be as a final question for you. So I’m asking everyone what their recruiting nirvana looks like. So we’ve got the, you know, we have these tools that are coming in that from a recruiter’s perspective are providing lots of automation. We’ve talked about the optimistic side of them potentially removing bias. There’s a whole dark side to that as well. But let’s focus on the optimistic side. What does recruiting nirvana look like for you? Where would you love recruiting to be in a few years time?
Maureen Clough [00:32:29]:
I would love recruiting to anonymize enough people’s data as they’re going into the initial application process so as to prevent bias from taking place. Like I, for example, the Colorado state government actually enacted a law in July of this year called the Job Application Fairness act. And you’re no longer allowed to ask for any age Identification markers. So graduation date, year of birth, that’s gone, that’s scrapped. So that, to me, is a great way to level the playing field a little bit. But obviously there are all these other sorts of bias. But to the extent possible, I think if you can anonymize that data, you’re going to give everybody a better shot at actually getting in the door. But, you know, this is more than just recruiting. You have to actually influence at the hiring manager level throughout the organization to make an impactful, lasting change. But I believe that we can just help people get a shot. Right. Get a shot at that, because people are biased. It’s just we stereotype people. We suck. We do it.
Matt Alder [00:33:26]:
Maureen, thank you very much for talking to me.
Maureen Clough [00:33:28]:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:33:30]:
So. Hey. Hi, Matt. Welcome to the podcast.
Matt Charney [00:33:32]:
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:33:33]:
What are you seeing from the work that you do and the conversations that you have? What do you think the kind of the biggest challenges are for talent acquisition at the moment?
Matt Charney [00:33:42]:
Well, according to the surveying that I’ve done, we do a monthly kind of pulse survey. The number two challenges that recruiters say are actually things that recruiters don’t have control over, which is having enough diversity, candidates and compensation, not being market competitive. So I think what I’m seeing are the challenges are ones that aren’t actually sitting in the department and have very little do with software. The other challenge, though, is technical complexity and process inefficiencies. And so what I’m seeing is a lot of vendors calling themselves AI, which in fact are process automation tools. And there is a lot of utility in that.
Matt Alder [00:34:24]:
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. There. There isn’t a differentiation between that. It’s almost like AI kind of means automation for many people, but there’s just so much more potential and things around that aren’t there.
Matt Charney [00:34:34]:
Yeah, it’s. I would call it algorithmic automation.
Matt Alder [00:34:36]:
How do you think that’s kind of panning out at the moment? What are you seeing that’s useful? What are people using? How can we help people make sense of just the craziness around this topic?
Matt Charney [00:34:45]:
So, first off, I think that people need to take a step back and figure out what problem it is they’re trying to solve. And from my experience, 90% of the time, that is a process problem that can be corrected without applying any sort of automation technology. But when it comes to AI, certainly where I think I have a little bit of concern looking at the market is that every vendor is trying to bolt on some sort of A I offering because it’s hot, rather than invest in their core product and core market fit. So I think it may be actually distracting many vendors from producing a product that’s going to help recruiters hire better talent faster.
Matt Alder [00:35:30]:
Yeah, I kind of agree. I mean, I’ve been in the analyst room for a lot of this conference and in almost every presentation you get the, this is the AI section about what we’re doing with AI, and I think that the company’s doing it well. I’ve contextualized it, as you say, in kind of what their, what their offering is. What’s the, what’s the most interesting, like use case you’ve seen so far?
Matt Charney [00:35:51]:
So I think it, for me, one of the most interesting applications of it is actually the peo and payroll vendors, which sounds really boring, I know, but they have a lot of variables that go into making sure they have enough float for different customers, pay periods, currencies, and all that. So being able to essentially automate that and be able to predict both foreign exchange rates and liquidity as a giant nerd, that has a tremendous amount of utility.
Matt Alder [00:36:24]:
Absolutely. That’s really interesting. That’s a really interesting point actually. And there does appear to be a lot of innovation in that, in that particular, in that particular space. Coming back to recruiting, we’re sort of asking people about what their recruitment nirvana would look like. So kind of in a world where it’s pretty clear that a lot of kind of activity that recruiters do is going to be, is going to be automated, what fills that gap? If you could design, you know, the perfect recruiting scenario, what would it look like?
Matt Charney [00:36:51]:
So here’s the thing is that it is, it remains incredibly inefficient. And I think you’re seeing a lot of doubling down on inefficiencies, which is adding tools, adding complexity. For me, the interesting thing I think people overlook is if you look at NPS scores of individual categories, ATS rank as number one. And so the way that companies have approached recruiting is they have an ats, which works fine for purpose, and they have been basically hoovering up candidates and data for years. So for me, nirvana looks like being able to do more ABM or like, you know, lead targeting and scoring, moving down funnel as opposed to continually reopening the funnel. So I think it’s using your system of record as a system of engagement.
Matt Alder [00:37:45]:
So just finish, give us a little bit of a prediction. What do you think? So if we had this conversation at HR Tech this time next year, what would be talking about? What’s going to change what’s going to happen in the next 12 months.
Matt Charney [00:37:56]:
I think we are going to be talking a lot about the changing role of talent acquisition and how it is sort of moving away from an HR function and much more into an operations and essentially a procurement function. So I think we’re really starting because of the technology to see a shift in orientation and just overall thought framing away from hr, which thank goodness because it is the least interesting function in a company.
Matt Alder [00:38:25]:
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Charney [00:38:26]:
No, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:38:28]:
My thanks to Lindsay, to Matt Corette, to Sarah White, to Matt Jones, to Maureen Clough, and to Matt Charney. And a huge thank you to everyone at Jem for making this episode possible. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruiting future.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on 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.
