AI has profoundly impacted talent acquisition in 2024, but its influence has been far from uniform. In some areas, little has changed, while in others—such as high-volume hiring—there has been nothing short of a revolution. Automation has dramatically accelerated recruiting processes, improving the candidate and hiring manager experience in ways previously unimaginable. These advancements are signals of what’s to come, with sweeping changes across talent acquisition potentially just months away.
With technology increasingly automating processes, the role of recruiters is evolving, raising urgent questions about what TA teams must do to stay relevant and strategic. Those who fail to adapt risk being left behind as automation reshapes our industry.
So, how can TA leaders and recruiters navigate this transformation, address challenges like bias, and embrace the opportunities AI presents to redefine their roles?
My guest this week is John Vlastelica, CEO of Recruiting Toolbox and a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most innovative companies. John shares his insights on the key shifts happening in recruiting, the evolving role of recruiters, and how leaders can future-proof their teams in an AI-driven world.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How AI is impacting recruiting right now
• How does it change the jobs we recruit for?
• Unchecked human bias in traditional recruiting process
• Automation in high-volume and front-line hiring
• Segmentation of roles between automated and high-touch recruiting processes
• Inefficiency by design
• From talent acquisition to talent advisor, breaking the silos in HR
• Insights, Influence, and Impact
• Candidate “cheating”
• TA Tech vendors selling directly to the C-Suite
• The importance of having a plan to rationalize TA
• What is going to happen in 2025?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
You know, I’ve recently heard some crazy success stories when it comes to hiring with AI. FedEx is sending offers to candidates within 10 minutes, General Motors saved $2 million in recruiting costs in a year, Chipotle reduced time to hire by 75%, and Nestle’s global recruiting team is saving 8,000 hours annually. The craziest thing? All of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology. Paradox Paradox is the leader in conversational hiring. Powered by conversational AI, Paradox can be your ats, CRM and careers site or can help automate parts of the hiring process on top of workday. UKG and SAP. Their product suite is driven by a 24/7 AI assistant who can handle up to 95% of the hiring process for deskless hiring teams or just automate specific time consuming tasks like screening, interview scheduling and onboarding to allow recruiters to focus on recruiting. Paradox has helped hundreds of the world’s top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences in the process. Spend more time with people, not software With Paradox, you can find out more by going to Paradox AI.
Matt Alder [00:01:40]:
AI has profoundly impacted talent acquisition in 2024, but its influence has been far from uniform. In some areas, little has changed, while in others, such as high volume hiring, there’s been nothing short of a revolution. Automation has dramatically accelerated recruiting processes, improving the candidate and hiring manager experience in ways previously unimaginable. These advancements are signals of what’s to come with sweeping changes across talent acquisition potentially just months away. With technology increasingly automating processes, the role of recruiters is evolving, raising urgent questions about what TA teams must do to stay relevant and strategic. Those who fail to adapt risk being left behind as automation reshapes our industry. So how can TA leaders and recruiters navigate this transformation, address challenges like bias, and embrace the opportunities AI presents to redefine their roles? My guest this week is John Vlastelica, CEO of Recruiting Toolbox and a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most innovative companies. John shares his insights on the key shifts happening in recruiting, the evolving role of recruiters, and how leaders can future proof their teams in an AI driven world. Hi John and welcome back to the podcast.
John Vlastelica [00:03:09]:
Hey Matt, so glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:11]:
Pleasure to have you back on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone who doesn’t know you what you do?
John Vlastelica [00:03:18]:
Sure. My name is JJohn Vlastelica and I am the CEO of a consulting and training firm called Recruiting Toolbox. Been doing work to help companies improve, kind of who they hire and how they hire for about 15 years. Prior to that, I was the head of tech recruiting for Amazon and I was the head of global TA for Expedia. And our team does a lot of work coaching heads of TA consulting with heads of TA who are in the middle of big transformation. So a lot of my conversations are all about helping TA teams win in the middle of just all kinds of change. And we’ve done work for all kinds of interesting companies from Disney and Google and Nike and LinkedIn and Walmart and PepsiCo and Adobe and Uber and all kinds of companies. About 350 companies in 30 countries. So I get a lot of exposure to what’s actually happening in the world of corporate ta and very, very happy that we get to my team and I get to play a small role in helping organizations, you know, elevate recruiters to talent advisors, help TA leaders more effectively engage and help hiring managers better, you know, assess and close talent. So that’s me in a nutshell.
Matt Alder [00:04:27]:
Fantastic. And just before I press record, we were having a sort of a chat about what interesting, fascinating and crazy time it is in TA at the moment. So let’s talk about AI straight away. So from what you’re seeing, from the conversations you’re having, the people that you’re working with, how is AI impacting TA right now?
John Vlastelica [00:04:46]:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think there’s, there’s three things going on. I think the first, the tech itself is just like, I am so happy to be alive right now because the tech isn’t just a slightly less crappy ats, right? There’s, there’s real change going on. It’s not just derivative technology, a slightly better sourcing tool. It’s fundamentally shifting. And we’ll get into some of that. And I know you’ve talked about a lot of the tech on, you know, with other guests you’ve had on your podcast, but that’s one of the big shifts, is the tech is actually significantly different. The second thing I think is that there’s a fundamental shift in tools that are, that are helping with productivity in ta. So things like conversational AI are having a huge impact on candidate facing work, engaging, sourcing, screening, scheduling, even candidates being able to interview the job in quotes about the job. So, you know, kind of interviewing the job description versus a live person. And I think there’s going to be a future in TA where, you know, most of the admin work, you know, things like scheduling, job posting, capturing interview feedback, chasing people for feedback, candidate communications, that’s going to be heavily automated. And then I think the third thing that’s going to have an impact or is having an impact is a lot of the jobs that we recruit for are changing in a big way. So something like 75% of what a salesperson does today is non selling activities. What happens to that role, the sales role that we hire for, when that 75% is automated? How does the profile change, the number of salespeople we need, the seniority we need or in engineering, you know, you and I probably read a lot of articles that say, you know, AI can do the work of a junior engineer. So are we going to need junior engineers? Do we want to be producing a bunch of computer scientists out of universities? A skill set and a role that’s been, you know, hyper competitive for my whole career. But One of the CTOs I was interviewing recently, he said, you know, John, I think there’s some truth in that. But I’d also ask you to think, how do we get senior engineers if we don’t have junior engineers first?
Matt Alder [00:06:51]:
Well, yeah, exactly.
John Vlastelica [00:06:52]:
So, so we have to have plans around that. So I think we’re going to see as part of the shift when the jobs change, that we recruit for much more holistic thinking around build buy bots. We’re going to just see a real shift in that. Those are three big things that I see as changes.
Matt Alder [00:07:06]:
No, absolutely. And I want to kind of get into this a little bit more and talk about how this might move forward in the future. Just before we do though, just a kind of a question about risk and bias and all these kind of things because everything seems to be sort of moving at a million miles an hour. And I know that there is concern out there about what AI is doing and how it’s working and what are you sort of getting from your clients about that aspect of things?
John Vlastelica [00:07:31]:
Here’s what I would say. Most organizations, not just that we work with, but most organizations are very early in the maturity kind of evolution of their kind of AI adoption, even assessment adoption. There’s very basic things in place and there’s a very kind of, let’s get the core stuff figured out. So organizations are still doing a lot of live human phone screens. There are certainly some, you know, technology that’s aiding and there’s assessments that are, that are helping especially for high volume jobs. But I would say, you know, that, let me just start by baselining and Say the traditional interview process is ridiculously biased. And I hesitate to say this out loud because, you know, as a company we have trained tens of thousands of interviewers and hiring managers, you know, through online and live in person training. And I would tell you know, every manager to check their bias and watch out for, you know, confirmation bias. I assume you’re not going to be good at, you know, our fast paced tech company because you worked at a bank or, you know, similarity bias. I want to hire you because you’re like me or affinity bias, you know, you remind me of myself kind of stuff. Those biases are very much alive. And so when we talk about AI and the risk of bias, it’s huge, for sure. But I also want to acknowledge that today we have ridiculous unchecked bias everywhere. And if I were coaching, this is the part I hesitant, I hesitate to share. If I were coaching a candidate, a friend who said, hey, John, what’s the best advice you have? I have an interview coming up for a job I’m really interested in. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I would say lean in on affinity bias. Find whatever you can that you have in common with the interviewer because 50% of their decision is going to be, do I like them, do they remind me of myself, do we have something in common? And that is terrible. That is terrible, Matt. But, but it’s probably true. And so when I think about the potential for AI to help with assessment and bias, I think we can at least tune it a little better and not have 50 hiring managers with their own individual preferences making decisions, hires that are for the company, not just for their team. At least with AI, if we can figure out to make sure we don’t have racial discrimination, gender discrimination in there, we hopefully can tune things so that we can eliminate some things like similarity bias and confirmation bias and move to more of a skills and capability focus. Does that make sense?
Matt Alder [00:09:56]:
I think that makes perfect sense. It kind of really illustrates what a massive opportunity this is, an opportunity with risks. But as you say, it’s an opportunity to massively sort of improve the status quo. And with that in mind, you know, let’s sort of project a little bit further forward. You know, you mentioned sales jobs are going to change. Software engineering jobs are already changing. How’s the role of the recruiter going to change? What do you think that’s going to look like in the future?
John Vlastelica [00:10:22]:
So I think, you know, I’ll answer that question. But let me start by saying I think there needs to be a Refocus on segmentation. So I think TA leaders, the ones I coach and work with, need to be thinking about those roles that are going to be, you know, well defined, that we can heavily automate with AI and we will put fewer senior recruiters, maybe no recruiters at all. Maybe AI will do the bulk of that work. I think you and I both know some of the examples that exist out there, like Federal Express, FedEx, the shipping company, hired 300,000 people last year without a recruiter involved. Those are well defined hourly roles, you know, package handlers, drivers, there’s background checks involved, but there’s no kind of human touch point in there until after the person has kind of accepted the offer and completed their background check. There’s going to be some set of jobs that don’t require much of a recruiter. The ones that, if we think about segmenting into kind of two categories, those that don’t require high touch, that can be largely automated. The jobs that are remaining are going to require high touch. And that’s where we’re going to need, you know, the, the recruiter who, frankly, it’s not that different from great recruiters all the time, but, but the recruiter who is much better at, you know, stakeholder engagement on the hiring manager side, the HR side, and, and a great influencer. I think there’s going to be a real shift in how those recruiters are identified and hired. So for example, I think there’s going to be a lot more focus on is this recruiter not just transactionally good at sourcing, screening and closing, but are they a great influencer? Are they analytical? Do they have a ton of business acumen? Are they really quick to pick up new technology, leverage the tools, can they lead and guide and bring change management skills to the business? And I think those recruiters that have the more holistic mindset that understand that it’s not just about external hiring to get great talent into the org, but that are familiar with, maybe even kind of have great insights and leading around internal mobility, onboarding, thinking about retention a little more. I think those are the kinds of recruiters, those talent advisor recruiters, those strategic recruiters, Those are the ones that when the music stops and there’s only, you know, so many chairs left, I think those are the recruiters that are going to have seats that can demonstrate those skills.
Matt Alder [00:12:49]:
Oh, absolutely. But you are working under the assumption that the music is going to stop as well.
John Vlastelica [00:12:55]:
That’s a question. Yeah, it’s really interesting and you know, I wrote about this earlier this Year, this idea that AI may actually, you know, there’s no, I was at LinkedIn Talent Connect know a few weeks ago and LinkedIn rolled out some new AI tools and everybody’s rolling out AI tools and there’s a lot of technology. I see that, I look ahead and I say that’s interesting right now. This, this tech that, that companies are building is built to help recruiters, right? It’s, it’s largely recruiter productivity focused and then some candidate facing stuff. And when I see this put together, I ask myself, you know, why do we need a recruiter in some of this? If a hiring manager can ask its, you know, it’s siri equivalent to, you know, here’s, here’s my need. Articulate my need really well and go out and find people and screen them and present me a slate of qualified, interested, available, affordable, diverse candidates. What is the role of the recruiter in that world? Right? As the tools get better and I think we’re gonna see hiring manager self service or as Matt Grove on my team likes to reframe it, you know, hiring manager on demand. So it doesn’t sound like we’re shifting the work to the hiring manager, but yeah, they can kind of get, get talent when they need it. I think that’s going to be a real, a real shift. And your point around, you know, what if the music doesn’t stop or what if the chairs keep getting smaller and smaller? I think that’s going to, it’s really going to have an impact on the evolution of the role of the recruiter.
Matt Alder [00:14:24]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose let’s kind of broaden this out a bit because you know, you mentioned there about that kind of role of talent advisor, looking holistically through organizations in terms and onboarding and how does TA sit in the future? I think we talked about this before actually on the podcast maybe sort of a year or so ago, but just that coming together of those different parts of the talent function that is perhaps being supercharged by technology and common data platforms and those kind of things. What does TA as a concept look like?
John Vlastelica [00:14:59]:
That’s a great question. And of course I don’t know for sure, but I’ll tell you that, you know, I talk to heads of TA every week as part of my job when I earlier this year and last year I started to write about, talk about, interview a lot more leaders in TA and ask them about how their jobs are evolving. And you know, the too long didn’t read version is I think the future of talent acquisition is talent Management. And I think, you know, when I talk to TA leaders who are successfully engaging with execs who are seen as strategic partners to the business, they don’t just come in with a traditional my job is to fill Rex with external candidates orientation. They are thinking more holistically. And if you google around and find on LinkedIn’s talent blog, I interviewed a bunch of TA leaders from around the world that had expanded the scope of their roles to take on things like diversity, onboarding, internal mobility, you know, much more focus on kind of more talent management topics, some even compensation, some broadening their roles, are getting promoted into the role above talent acquisition and now having TA reported to them. And when I talk to them, kind of what’s the. So what, like did you do this just for the status? Did you do this just because it felt like a promotion because you were bored? Like what, what does this mean for you and your role? Why does the business want you or need you in this bigger scoped role? And the feedback I got was I’m able to have so much more strategic conversations with the business and dig into so many more root issues. So can I give you a quick example Matt, of what happens when TA and onboarding is brought together? So one of the things that recruiting teams have struggled with my whole career, my 30 years now in talent acquisition, you have hiring managers that are just absolutely convinced that there’s one ideal candidate profile, right? There’s this perfect candidate that exists. They have to come out of this company or these two companies, these schools, they have this job title, this many years of experience and there’s a big push the last few years. I don’t want to dig into all the skills first stuff, but I’m sure you’ve talked about that on your podcast. But there’s a lot of this kind of skills focus and that’s, that’s, that’s great. The reality though is that if onboarding sucks, and I don’t mean welcome to the company HR culture, don’t harass people, fill out these forms. Onboarding, I don’t mean that onboarding, I mean you’re onboarding in the sales function for your sales role or engineering or you know, your manufacturing line role, if that onboarding sucks and it’s terrible, you can appreciate why a hiring manager would tell a recruiter they need to come from this very predictable background. They need to have these, these kind of proxies for, for performance that I need because I know these people can quote, hit the ground running. And if you’ve never heard Hit the ground running. I don’t believe you’ve worked in recruiting a day in your life because every hiring manager has some version of that that they tell recruiters now, what happens if onboarding doesn’t suck? What happens if onboarding is actually fantastic and the business has the ability to bring people into their organization and create learning opportunities so that they get better, so they can come in with the core skills needed, but we can teach them pieces of the job and that’s where you start to shift to more of a, you know, some of some of the requirements for the hire we’re going to make. Yeah, we need some hit the ground running skills, but you can also have some hit the ground learning skills. And what that does, if you have candidates where you’re hiring by design, not because you’ve lowered the bar, but by design, because you want to get people that are affordable, that are engaged in the work, that have this kind of learning agility and this ability to kind of pick up new skills quickly that allows you upstream in the recruiter, hiring manager conversation. If onboarding is good to widen the aperture, right, to look outside of just those perfect ideal candidate profiles and consider talent that would be motivated, excited, available, maybe more affordable that you could bring in and have more of a conversation around. Where does this person need to have hit the ground running skills? And where does this person just need to have a demonstrated track record of picking up new things quickly? So when TA looks after kind of the recruitment part, but onboarding sucks and they have the victim mindset of onboarding is not my job. I don’t touch onboarding. That’s the business. I think there’s a big miss there. And when you bring those things together a little more, not that TA has to own it, but at least influence it, help fix it, maybe. My suggestion is have recruiters during their kickoff meeting for a new rec, have a templated. Let’s build the onboarding plan. And the more I understand the onboarding plan, hiring manager, the better I can guide you on the target candidate profiles we should pursue. If TA has more insights and influence and impact over onboarding, I think we can actually widen the top of the funnel and bring in better talent, bring in better diversity.
Matt Alder [00:19:52]:
Introducing Invisible Choir, a true crime podcast that explores the most heinous murders through investigative storytelling, Primary source audio and exclusive interviews. He walked to his car, he pulled out the sword, and then he followed her. They found chunks of her hair in the grass because he was swinging at her. New episodes air every other Sunday. I think that’s a great example of what happens if you kind of bring things that were previously sort of silos together. One of the things that kind of struck me is in some sense we can kind of see the future here. So we can see the technology that the big platforms are bringing on, you know, the linkedins of the world. We see the kind of stuff that’s coming out of the startup arena and as you say in some sectors of the, of the market, some of this is already happening in the deskless workers, hourly workers, that, that kind of thing. We’re seeing a lot of kind of automation and other things going on. So we can kind of see that and it’s kind of easy to kind of extrapolate what that might look like. But I guess there’s a journey to get there. And I was in a conversation with a number of TA operations professionals a few weeks ago and it was really interesting in terms of all the things that kind of have to happen around a process and choosing the right technology to really get us to that point. Is it something you think that organizations are thinking of? Is that a TA Ops thing? You know, what’s kind of happening out there?
John Vlastelica [00:21:22]:
There’s definitely, you know, there’s so many products that are mind blowingly different. Not all of them have achieved scale, not all of them will pass compliance and the attorneys but, but they’re, there’s so much innovation and interesting stuff happening in the world of ta. I would say most organizations are kind of between level one and level two though. You know, on the maturity model, if there’s four or five levels, they’re just getting started. You know, the good news is for a lot of the automation, if you already have, you know, workday or you know, you might have DocuSign in your company for scheduling, you’re going to have things that are probably already have AI embedded in them or at least some kind of machine learning and automation tech in there. There’s going to be kind of this, this phase where I think you go from kind of augmentation to automation and I think most people are still in augmentation. How do we, how do we streamline, get admin work off the recruiter’s plate, focus on productivity tools like you know, a seekout to help with sourcing or you have calendly with scheduling or I mentioned DocuSign and then I think where it’s heading is to more of a paradox Eightfold bright hire these tools that are doing fundamentally different things around automating things that we used to do that might even Replace what a human did completely. Not just supercharge a recruiter and free them up to do more strategic talent advising work, but actually replace the work of a recruiter. And I would say most organizations are dipping their toes and are doing RFPs and are looking at simplifying their tech stacks and you know, starting to have conversations with legal about, you know, even things like, you know, scheduling, self scheduling. There’s real, you know, security concerns with certain companies depending on the work they do and what’s on their calendars. So there’s, there’s, there’s companies that are making progress. Where I see automation really kick in right now. If companies are heavily invested in that, it’s not at the corporate jobs. It’s really more for those well defined hourly roles where you’re not doing, you know, four person behavioral interviews with, with a hiring manager. You’re hiring kind of on behalf of the company and usually there’s more volume involved there. And we’re seeing a lot of companies, our clients and future clients of ours where we’re having conversations and that’s what they’re doing is they’re, they’re, they’re kind of an evaluation stage and they’re, they’re taking kind of the, they’re in the crawling to walk phase, not in the kind of walking to run phase quite yet. Is that what you’re seeing, Matt?
Matt Alder [00:23:50]:
Yeah, I think so. I think the, the interesting factor here is what you said. It’s, there’s a, all this discussion around what speed will ta adopt AI? And you know, all these sort of very valid questions around that. But actually it’s just kind of happening around everyone. You know, AI, these tools are just cropping up in the stuff that we use every day.
John Vlastelica [00:24:10]:
Yeah, I mean, I use Zoom every day. There’s AI in Zoom, there’s AI and in my Google Docs and My Word and you know, Apple, my iPhone is now summarizing my text and my emails and it’s just, it’s here.
Matt Alder [00:24:22]:
Yeah, no, exactly.
John Vlastelica [00:24:23]:
Yeah, yeah, right. You’re not having to choose it necessarily, or you could turn some of it off, but, but you’re not having to buy something new. For a lot of folks. It’s, it’s just there and it’s, it’s wild. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Alder [00:24:33]:
No, it kind of feels like the tide’s coming in around us while we’re kind of arguing about which way it’s going. And I suppose that nicely sets up the next question really, which is what should ta leaders be doing? How should they be preparing what would your advice be in terms of what people should be thinking about, you know, right now?
John Vlastelica [00:24:48]:
Yeah, it’s a great question, you know, so I’ve got a few things in mind. So one, I think we, we absolutely have to be thinking about a segmentation strategy. And this, this is a talk I gave at LinkedIn Talent Connect this year last month, talking about the, the opportunities we have to not, not just think about, you know, executive versus, you know, corporate professional versus hourly or something like that, but segment based on what candidates want. There are times when I go into a fast food restaurant and I am extremely disappointed that I, that I can’t use a kiosk and I have to go talk to a human because that’s a ridiculously transactional high risk of them forgetting to hold the pickles. I hate pickles. You know, there’s, there’s things that I may want. Even though I can afford to shop at a fancy restaurant for that kind of transaction, I actually prefer a kiosk. And we need to get really smart around segmenting kind of our approach to tech based on what candidates want and what candidates need. There’s going to be a certain set of candidates that are just not going to engage with your AI chatbot. They’re going to want to talk to a person. You’re going to have to have a live person talk to them. And in that circumstance, you’re going to have to think about. When I as a TA leader think about structuring my TA org, when I think about the rewards and metrics to measure recruiters, we have traditionally been very focused on speed and time to fill. I think we’re going to actually have much more inefficient by design processes and very inefficient recruiter conversations because they’re going to need to be high touch based on what candidates want. So I think that’s one big thing is kind of segmentation. Does that make sense?
Matt Alder [00:26:30]:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. So we’re coming up to the end of 2024. We’re recording this November time. What do you think 2025 is going to look like as a stage on this journey? What are the kind of the big themes that the talking points? What are we going to be discussing in terms of ta?
John Vlastelica [00:26:47]:
I think there’s a few things. One, I think candidate cheating is going to be a hot topic. So I wrote about this earlier this year. Glenn Cathy wrote a little bit about this as well on LinkedIn’s talent blog. I think we’re going to Have a possibly go backwards, move away from some, some, you know, trust that comes from, you know, zoom interviews or, or you know, asynchronous kind of, you know, complete this test kind of thing. I think we’re going to see a lot more focus on actually verifying skills, verifying identity. I think it’s never been easier to cheat, but I think what I think of cheating and what you think of cheating, Matt, and what our hiring managers think of cheating can be so across the board. The article I wrote on this and my thinking on this is, you know, maybe it’s not cheating, you know, maybe it’s, it’s stupidity. If you’re not using spell check or you’re not using ChatGPT to, to, you know, help you write better, maybe that’s not cheating, maybe that’s just using the tools. Either way, we need to have a company wide point of view on what is and what isn’t cheating. We need to align our hiring managers on this and we need to make sure we share with candidates what we consider cheating and not because there are teleprompter tools, listening tools. There are things that just. I’m really concerned about the whole interviewing and assessment process. So I think that’s going to be a big thing to think about. I think the talent Advisor, the Recruiter 2.0, I think a lot of leaders are going to be thinking about what does my team look like. A lot of the conversations we’re having now with heads of TA is really focused on that is on the kind of I need to be thinking about what headcount I should have, what is the focus of those roles and what does that look like over the next couple years so that I can, to be really frank, justify the headcount that I’m going to have. One of the things that I say, and I say this when I talk to leaders about AI’s impact on their org is you need to have a point of view and a plan and a strategy and a way to rationalize your TA org and if you don’t have a design and you’re not socializing that with your boss, the chro, your cfo, your key business leaders. If you don’t have a plan, someone else will build a plan for you. Someone else will tell you what your org is going to look like. The third thing I would say is that there’s going to be a lot of focus on tech vendors. I don’t know if it’s going to start next year or the year after, but if I were Leading an AI tech vendor and I was leading the sales organization, there’s some point in the next couple years where folks in sales are going to stop selling to us and TA and they’re going to sell directly to the cfo. They’re going to, they’re going to say, you know, we saved 7 11, $30 million in recruiting by introducing this automation and eliminating 400 recruiters, which is true, by the way, for 7 11. You know, imagine the TA person who is, who’s got a, you know, 100 person team or a 50 person team and they don’t have a design, they don’t have like their tech is, you know, low utilization rates. They’re, they’re burning through a lot of cash from the perspective of the business and you know, they’re not improving speed, quality, diversity, reducing cost. That salesperson is going to talk to the CFO and have a pretty compelling message. And in the same way that RPO was popularized a while ago as kind of a cost savings and you’d see the business get much more involved in selecting an RPO and benefiting, you know, from an rpo, I think we’re going to see more and more of the tech vendors skip TA and they’re going to want you along for the ride. But you might be seen as a bit of a blocker if you’re not actively engaging around this stuff. And salespeople have an incentive to sell and they’re going to go direct to the business, especially because they’re going to have these case studies for hourly hiring that are just so compelling, Matt, you’re not going to be able to ignore it. So those are some things I’m thinking a lot about is those are the kind of things I think TA leaders need to be thinking about and preparing for for next year. How does, how does that list of kind of three things resonate with you? Does that, does that sound in line with what you’re seeing?
Matt Alder [00:30:54]:
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think they’re themes that have come up all year. I think that there has been this revolution going on in kind of hourly hiring that lots of people are aware of. The candidate cheating or not cheating issue I think is a conversation that has not been discussed enough. And yeah, I think I’ve always said that automation is inevitable and if TA doesn’t do it, then it becomes out of their control. And I think there is a, there is a small window of opportunity for TA to do amazing things and really kind of create a recruiting future in the image they want to, but it’s a window that’s, that’s not going to be open for very long.
John Vlastelica [00:31:36]:
I think you’re right. And I think that’s, that’s really where, you know, when, when we do a lot of training for TA leaders. So we train, you know, heads of TA and their directs. And one of the things that while we don’t, we don’t make it a conference presentation, we talk about AI specifically. You know, we are trying to help TA leaders win in their jobs. And a big part of winning is, you know, lifting our heads up from the last few years, which have been, you know, 2020 to 2022 was, you know, just massive hiring, very rec focused. How many hires did we make? Speed, speed, speed. The last couple years has been a little more quality focused, a lot less diversity focused. And now I think there needs to be much more of a, like an org focus, much more of that holistic kind of business acumen. Talking to the business about the things we talked about at the start with how AI is impacting ta. Not just kind of our own org, looking at our ta, Org, the role of the recruiter, the tech stack, the admin work on their plates, but looking at how the business is going to change and you know, are we going to need as many of this kind of talent and not just, you know, remote work, but, but how, how are those jobs going to evolve given automation in, in engineering and sales and manufacturing and you know, in service jobs? I, I think that there is, there is such an opportunity for us to play a bigger, I hate to call it, workforce, you know, management, because sometimes that feels like a bunch of spreadsheets that I’m talking about, more, more strategic stuff, but really getting into role design and org design and not that the TA leader has to be a guru at that, but engaging the right HR partners, the right OD partners, leading a conversation around that. Because so many hiring managers at the rec level just copy paste the job ad from last year or from 1997 that’s been copy pasted 30 times. Right. They just copy paste that stuff into the future. And somewhere at the recruiter level, at the rec level, in that kickoff meeting and all the way up to the head of ta, we need to be having conversations around how automation is going to impact the departments we recruit for just as much as how much it’s going to impact us in ta.
Matt Alder [00:33:42]:
Absolutely. John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Vlastelica [00:33:46]:
Thanks, Matt. This was great. Love the conversation.
Matt Alder [00:33:49]:
My thanks to John. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.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.
