Budgeting has long been challenging for talent acquisition teams, but the stakes have never been higher in today’s volatile economic environment. Many TA leaders find themselves stuck in a cycle of defending past decisions, managing cuts, and struggling to align budgets with business strategy. Meanwhile, CFOs expect data-driven proposals, ROI insights, and long-term planning that TA teams often aren’t equipped to deliver.
So, how can talent acquisition leaders transform their approach to budgeting, build trust with the C-suite, and position themselves as strategic business partners
My guests this week are Madeline Laurano, founder of Aptitude Research, and Joshua Secrest, VP of Client Advocacy at Paradox. We discuss Aptitude’s new report, The Talent Acquisition Budget Playbook, which contains actionable strategies to move beyond reactive spending, harness automation for efficiency, and demonstrate clear ROI to unlock longer-term investment.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The background behind the report
• Some shocking stats about impending budget cuts, budget confidence, and wasted spend
• Getting maximum return and building credibility
• Thinking 3-5 years out
• How to demonstrate ROI
• Operations benefits versus financial benefits
• Speaking the language of the CFO
• The importance of automation and the results it delivers
• What does the future of TA look like?
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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 career site or can help automate parts of the hiring process on top of workday. UKG and SAP. Their product suite is driven by a 24.7ai 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]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 668 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Budgeting has long been a challenge for talent acquisition teams, but in today’s volatile economic environments, the stakes have never been higher. Many TA leaders find themselves stuck in a cycle of defending past decisions, managing cuts, and struggling to align budgets with business strategy. Meanwhile, CFOs expect data driven proposals, ROI insights and long term planning that TA teams often aren’t equipped to deliver. So how can TA leaders transform their approach to budgeting, build trust with the C suite and position themselves as strategic business partners? My guests this week are Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research, and Jos Secrest, VP of Client Advocacy. At Paradox, we discuss Aptitude’s new report, the Talent Acquisition Budget Playbook, which contains actionable strategies to move beyond reactive spending, harness automation for efficiency, and demonstrate clear ROI to unlock longer term investment.
Matt Alder [00:02:55]:
Hi Madeleine.
Matt Alder [00:02:56]:
Hi Josh.
Matt Alder [00:02:57]:
Welcome back to the podcast. It is fantastic to have you both back on the show again. For people who may not have come across your work before, please could you both introduce yourself and tell us what you do. And Madeleine, do you want to go first?
Madeline Laurano [00:03:10]:
Sure. Thanks Matt. Thanks for having us back. We were just talking before we started the podcast about the last time we were both on the podcast and for me it was when we Were all together in Scottsdale at the client advisory event. So it’s exciting to kind of be here again and see what’s changed. I’m an analyst, so my name’s Madeline Larano. I’m an analyst and the founder of a company called Aptitude Research and.
Joshua Secrest [00:03:35]:
Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me back. I’m Joshua and I’m just thrilled to be here with the two of you. Madeline’s one of my favorite analysts and thought partners, and Matt just have loved your work and kind of grown up on it through my career. So I’m the vice president of client advocacy and marketing out at Paradox. Get to partner with a lot of our clients on building business cases and telling their stories and picking their brains on how to kind of develop our roadmap for the future so that it’s. It’s solving the problems that TA leaders really need. And. And I’ve had a long career within HR before joining Paradox. So I was head of global talent acquisition and got to dabble as a HR BP and lead culture and philanthropy out at Abercrombie and Fitch and then joined McDonald’s as the global head of talent acquisition and got to lead talent management and talent strategy, where we got to really dig into using new and interesting technologies before joining Paradox. So, really excited about our topic today. It’s one that’s been near and dear to my heart around budgeting and building business cases and just find it as kind of like a key backbone for success in the kind of new TA role.
Matt Alder [00:04:41]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:04:41]:
And, you know, you’ve both just collaborated on a fascinating report about budgeting and helping TA to budget in a much more strategic way. And really, there’s not much stuff out there about this. It’s not conversation that seems to happen certainly in public very often. So definitely a very useful and timely report. Give us a bit about the background to it. How did you do it? Why now? And as you were putting together and working through it, what was it that surprised you the most about this topic?
Madeline Laurano [00:05:09]:
It’s a great question, and it’s actually a conversation that started years ago that Josh and I started having when he was working at McDonald’s. The pandemic was well underway and companies were spending a lot on technology. Budgets seemed to be never ending. They expanded more than they ever had before. And then we continue this conversation because things kept changing and the dust had settled and companies were adjusting. Hiring for a lot of companies slowed down or hiring stayed the same, but budgets were changing and the whole budgeting process was changing. So, you know, this became something that seemed very reactionary in talent acquisition and hr. And if you look at other parts of the business, budgeting is very strategic. It’s something that’s done at a certain time during the year. It’s very collaborative with the cfo. We almost approach it from a very defensive standpoint where we’re defending things we bought and maybe trying to get new budget. And it feels like it’s not collaborative. So we really wanted to see what we could find from a research perspective. And it was surprising to me. Two things were very surprising to me, but I’m very curious to hear what Josh thinks. The first thing was how popular the topic was. And we like to nerd out to this topic, Josh and I. So we love talking about this, but we didn’t really know. I didn’t really know if this was going to resonate with talent acquisition and HR leaders, and it absolutely did. I did a panel at HR Tech this year and I thought going into it we’d be talking about AI, but all the TA leaders on the panel wanted to talk about this budgeting topic in this report. So this was definitely top of mind. It’s still, still is for organizations. It’s very timely. So that was very surprising. The other thing that was very surprising to me was how far behind we are in budgeting and how it’s not being talked about. So what we found in our research was only 38% of companies are confident in their budgeting in HR. And we found that 64% of HR leaders believe their budgets are going to get cut for 20, 25. And one in three companies believe that their HR budgets are being wasted. So we’ve got this almost crisis situation where this is one of the most important functions within an organization. It’s managing people, hiring people, thinking about the employee experience. The budgets are an important exercise in this process. And we’re not confident that our budgets are going to be there. And we don’t necessarily know how to be able to have those conversations internally with our cfo. So it was surprising to me.
Joshua Secrest [00:07:42]:
Yeah, it’s been, it’s been interesting to be able to. To see leaders really trying to attack this topic because it’s something that probably. I think the reoccurring theme is this, do more with less. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a new topic. It’s something we’ve always kind of been balancing. But how that looks for a TA leader is typically we go into the budgeting cycle, we’re a little bit behind, and we get Told that our budget’s going to probably decrease 3 to 5%, and that keeps happening year over year. And if we don’t have a strategy in place, it’s going to be really hard to be able to hit some of our productivity goals with less and less budget. And so for. For me, what I got to see as I started to kind of run this P and L is like, you know, dollars and budget are fuel. And my. My success, my team success, my company success is going to be ultimately on how strategic we can get, on how we’re going to invest these dollars to have the most impact. And I think that starts to sound like kind of how it. Madeline said, like how the rest of the business starts to treat this. I have a limited number of investment dollars. Where I put those dollars should have the maximum return. The more return that I have on the dollars that I’m investing, the more credibility I’m going to get with my cfo. The more trust I build with my cfo, the more dollars I could potentially go and get for the coming years. And so as we were talking to a lot of our peers within TA leadership roles, some of those who maybe sat in other seats within their businesses, maybe they sat in finance, maybe they sat as an hrvp. That’s. That’s where I, I got some of my business acumen, seemed to have a strategic advantage over those who were recruiters, moved up to a manager of recruiting, director of recruiting, and then all of a sudden, you’re running this P and L, you’re running this big budget, and you’re expected to know how to do that. And so we wanted to be able to share some of that because it’s just such an important skill set. And it’s not just thinking about it one year out and how to make do with a 3% cut. It’s about thinking three to five years out and making big strategic decisions that can provide great return for your company and make sure that your team is healthy and happy and not just kind of keep getting more and more work piled on their plate with less funds or fuel to help them be successful.
Matt Alder [00:09:51]:
And you talk about building trust with the CFO as a kind of a critical part of this. And it really brings up one of the things that has been the biggest issue amongst all of the TA leaders I’ve spoken to on the podcast. And, you know, when I’ve been out and about during sort of 2024, which is. Which is the whole thing about value and roi, you know, explaining the value of TA and ROI in ROI terms that a business and a CFO can understand. What are the most effective ways? Do you think that TA leaders can demonstrate that ROI and build that trust with CFOs and unlock those, those longer term budgets?
Madeline Laurano [00:10:27]:
Yeah, I mean, I think, and Josh Ross and I had like a long conversation on this, so I’m going to go off of a lot of Ross’s notes too here. But it’s, I think figuring out that the ROI that we might be tracking in HR isn’t necessarily what the CFO is tracking. So that’s kind of the first step is, okay, what does the CFO view as valuable? How can we translate some of the ROI that we might be thinking through to the cfo? The scary thing about HR tech right now is a lot of companies aren’t even tracking ROI in HR terms. So we have got to do that first and then we’ve got to be able to translate that to understand what the CFO cares about. There seems to be a real breakdown in conversation between the CFO and HR in general. And I think that’s probably the biggest problem. One thing that Ross talked a lot about was wasted spend. Like we found that stat from the research about companies feel that their spend is being wasted and HR leaders feel that their spend is being wasted, I think is actually low for what we found. I think it’s probably much higher. If you look at what companies were buying during the pandemic, what’s not integrated, what has not been implemented properly, what’s not working, there’s a lot of wasted spend and that’s just technology. There’s agencies, there’s other areas, advertising that’s just not working too. So to be able to go to a CFO and say, this is what I’ve identified as wasted spend and this is what I want to change for the budget next year, this is what I want to buy and invest in goes a long way. And it’s a much better approach than pretending that we didn’t buy these 10 things or pretending those 10 things actually do work when they don’t. To be able to go there and say, I want to work with you together. I don’t know how to end these contracts or to kind of navigate some of these vendors. Let’s work on this together. And you know that that goes a long way. And I think so often we’re on the defensive versus saying, you know, that we want to make some changes. I think one other thing that’s important to validate too for a lot of HR leaders is There’s a lot of technology, especially technology, a lot of services bought during the pandemic too. Consulting services, RPO services, advertising services. There’s a lot of money being spent. Budgets had changed quite a bit. And to look back and say that those were bad decisions, those are wasted spend might not even be a valuable exercise for yourself. Those decisions were made at a time when the world changed overnight. And those decisions made sense at that time. And it’s perfectly okay four years, five years later to say those decisions do not make sense anymore. There’s nothing wrong with having made those decisions then. It was the right decision at the time. But it’s okay to look back or look forward. And then to Josh’s point, look ahead three to five years and say, what do we need to change?
Joshua Secrest [00:13:18]:
One of the, I think key starting points is I’m not sure TA leaders always know the full extent of their budget. And I think that is because it’s sometimes kept from us. And so I think asking these questions to make sure that we know and build credibility with our CFO of truly our payroll costs, yourself included, even if you’re at the top, your payroll costs. So that’s going to be salary plus benefits. If you need a shorthand, usually do a multiplication of 0.43 to add benefits on, right. You need to know all of your fixed costs, which are probably your contracts and agreements. You need to know your variable costs. Okay? So to go and approach your cfo, if you’re looking for more, right. Or some change, you need to at least have those kind of like foundational pieces. Otherwise you lose credibility going in. Because one of the most effective strategies, if you’re looking for more, looking for changes, is then focusing on some of the hard cost savings or revenue driving things that you can do through your actions. So I’ll give you a couple examples of that. One would be, hey, we’re looking to bring in technology. We think that technology is going to increase our candidate flow. That candidate flow is going to reduce our reliance by 50% on our job advertising budget. So that’s a line I can say, but it’s only credible if I then actually, within my budget line item, take my job advertising spend down 50%. I’ve instantly showed how I can pay for this actually what’s going to be happening. And so I’m then being able to prove that, hey, I’ve got hard cost savings that I’m going to actually be able to pay for this thing that I’m coming and asking for, whether that’s maybe Technology, maybe that’s new, additional headcount. But you’re now speaking their language. You know your budget, you know all facets of it. You’re making trades that actually make logical sense. You’re, you’re considering all the different costs. I think a lot of times, as we’ve kind of started and brainstormed with prospects or clients, sometimes they start with operational benefits. Operational benefits are great, but sometimes they don’t catch the attention of your cfo. So an operational benefit may be it’s a better candidate experience. We have a lot of our customers who are applying to X restaurant or Y retail location. We want to give them a better candidate experience. The problem is it’s harder to measure that. It’s harder for a CFO who has a limited pot of money to invest across the total company to say, this operational benefit is worth these limited dollars to be able to invest. Whereas if you can say, hey, I can actually prove and show you that some of these hard cost savings are going to come your way, you’re going to get their attention faster and then they’re going to pay attention to some of the other operational benefits that come with it. Hey, we’re going to save time, we’re going to improve the candidate experience. We’re going to be able to dedicate more time to customers as a result of this. So I think it is just this. We’re starting to get ta leaders in the mindset of speaking kind of the CFO’s language. So they’re getting kind of more green lights and fewer red lights.
Matt Alder [00:16:15]:
One of the things you mentioned there was technology and in the research it mentions that a key strategy is shifting towards automation, integrating UTA technologies, AI, those kind of things. What should organizations be prioritizing as they sort of looking at their tech stack for 20, 25? What are the sort of the key things to bear in mind?
Madeline Laurano [00:16:37]:
Yeah, the automation. I mean, we found like significant time savings for companies that are investing in autom across all areas of talent acquisition compared to companies that are not. And you know, automation is, it’s so interesting because there’s so many buzzwords in HR right now. Automation is not a buzzword. This is like the realest thing we’ve got going on right now. It’s when you’re automating these processes that take so much time, you’re able to not only improve the entire experience for candidates, for recruiters, for hr, whatever employee experience, but you’re also saving money, saving costs, doing everything that Josh was just talking about in terms of like, what The CFO is looking for. The interesting thing right now is a lot of the systems. And it’s not just legacy systems. It’s a lot of the technology today requires so much manual work. And when you hear the theme that Josh started off with, which is doing more with less, which is what everyone’s facing, it’s not necessarily just less budgets, it’s less teams. I mean, I was talking to. Josh knows the story because I’ve told him a million times. But a company, a tech company, that went from having, you know, 300 recruiters during. Before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and then they just got a new CEO and the new CEO was making cuts in different departments, and they have 27 individuals focused on recruiting right now. That’s a huge shift. So that’s doing more with less. It’s not going to necessarily change. So how do we use automation to save time? I just had a call with Quick Serve Restaurant, not through Paradox. He was talking more about payroll, but their whole issue was the technology they had required too much manual work. They don’t have time to do that. So automation, it’s the realest thing we have going on in HR technology right now. It’s driving roi and it’s not a buzzword.
Joshua Secrest [00:18:24]:
Yeah, I think that’s a piece. I mean, Matt, you have so many great guests on and that we’re talking about a lot of AI and a lot of innovations within our space. But. But when it comes to budgeting and doing more with less, I mean, automation is the key piece. And it’s so fascinating how over just maybe the last four or five years, how dramatically that’s shifted kind of within our space. And I think you have to really look at this almost segmented to like, really understand it, which would be, you know, let’s look at that frontline space first. And like, how has automation really disrupted that? And like, has it moved the needle 10%? Has it moved the needle? I’d argue it’s moved the needle like 90%. So we have companies, and I know you’ve talked about them, but FedEx, who’s a client, is now going from apply to contingent offer in 10 minutes. And we’re starting to see more in kind of that distribution center type space going to that. So almost an entirely automated process in QSR in retail. What we started to see, and this is just over the last four years, I was fortunate enough to be one of the first to roll out the conversational ATS from Paradox at McDonald’s. And we were basically able to at McDonald’s automate 95% of that process. So the way to think about that is, you know, everything from the apply to the screen to the schedule was automated. Our manager and restaurant would then interview and then the onboarding process would then be automated. So 95% we’re hiring in two to three days. That was down from 21 days. So massive change, changes and shifts. You get into the corporate environment and that’s a little bit different. It’s probably some screening, some scheduling, some onboarding, 40% of the work. But if you were to say to any of our corporate recruiters or our executive recruiters, our university recruiters, hey, I can get you 30 to 40% of your time back. What are you going to be able to do with that? Oh, I can take on more recs. Oh I can, I can give an even better candidate experience. Oh, I can woo that finalist, director candidate even more and be able to spend the time and answer the questions. That’s really big. But I think that’s fascinating to see.
Matt Alder [00:20:33]:
Wow.
Joshua Secrest [00:20:34]:
In five years that is almost 100% in this super high volume distribution center space. 90 to 95% in some of these big manufacturing retail restaurant spaces and then in this corporate space at least a 30 to 40% kind of like automation. Humans still super important within that, but they’re being supplemented so that they’re out of the admin work. Massive, massive shifts that I don’t think we’ve really seen. It’s unprecedented in terms of how fast that’s happened, how quickly it’s been adopted. And maybe that’s my last piece is the adoption level. You know, we did a report with Harvard a few years ago and it was talking about, you know, what’s the adoption level at? And it was, it was still in kind of the teens in terms of how many companies had adopted. That’s starting to radically change because the amount of large companies, right. Some of the biggest volume hirers in the world have needed to adopt this the fastest. Right. Because they are the ones who are incentivized to do more with less. They see millions of dollars in returns. I mean you saw case studies coming out from General Motors where they saved $2 million in a year. The case study that came out from 711 where they saved close to $30 million a year. I mean they’re big dollars on the line. That kind of, just to bring this all the way back, these big companies are, their TA leaders are partnering with their CFOs because they’re able to see this Just massive opportunity that’s been presented in front of them because of this like, shift that’s really been driven by automation. I think AI is enabling that, but really automation is the key, the key word there. Yeah.
Matt Alder [00:22:12]:
And I think that is the key thing as well, because with all the conversations that go on about AI, sometimes there isn’t a kind of delineation between what’s aspirational and future focus and what’s possible right now. And automation has been with us for quite some time and as you illustrate, there brilliantly is delivering some amazing results. So I think it’s really important to understand that one of the other issues that comes up time and time again talking to TA leaders is the pressure they’re under and the balance of having to deal with the short term hiring needs of the business. And as we know, everyone’s got fewer resources, the market is very volatile, so there may be not much notice in terms of these hiring needs, you being there, you know, balancing that with planning for the long term, strategic goals. So how can they make sure that they kind of, them and their teams sort of stay aligned with both of those priorities at the same time, rather than one over the other?
Madeline Laurano [00:23:06]:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, it’s definitely a balancing act of thinking about, you know, what’s important for HR talent acquisition and then thinking more broadly about what’s important for the company. And I think there’s, there’s no right answer, but I think the, the collaboration that hasn’t existed with other areas of the business needs to start. You know, as we look to 2025, there needs to be more collaboration, more conversations, you know, and I think that balancing those two priorities has always been challenging for hr. But, you know, I, I think I’m hopeful. I mean, I even think the remote world that we’re all in, even if, you know, companies are returning back to the office or hybrid, allows for more collaboration between, you know, other areas of the business.
Joshua Secrest [00:23:51]:
So I tie this back too, to that relationship with, with finance. And, and I don’t think the guidance is just like, oh, have a great relationship. It’s like, of course they’re a key partner. And why they’re a key partner isn’t just at the budget cycle. As we all know, that’s a key, key place for you to potentially get some more of those funds so that you can enact those in the short term and you’re ready for the long term. It’s your key point to be able to get some dollars into your fund. But what I always liked doing was saying like, hey, I get it, we have to cut 3 to 5%. Here’s some of the shifts. Here’s some of the things that I’m going to be getting rid of and how I’m going to now be investing those dollars. Hey, I want to call out a couple things because I also noticed in our last earnings call, we said that we’re projecting 20% growth. My budget is decreasing 3%. But the. We’re planning 20% growth. If that ends up taking place, we’ll probably know by Q1 and we’ll probably see that come through from a TA perspective by seeing, you know, a 20% growth in, in hiring because we’re seeing it coming out of X or Y department. We’re going to need to be able to, to fuel that. Would you be in agreement there? That’s probably where we’ll start to see that. Yeah, that’s where I’m going to. We’ll see it. Great. Well, I’m going to flag it to you. My commitment as a, as a head of TA and being a successful head of TA for you is we won’t scale dollar for dollar as the business grows. My goal is to be able to be more and more efficient as we scale. So every 10%, maybe my budget only increases 2%. But what I do need is a commitment from you that if we’re going to be scaling, I’m going to need some sort of further investment. Right. But I’m acknowledging within that that, hey, I’m going to come back. I’m going to have specific stats and data to be able to bring to you before I ask for a specific investment. And you’re actually kind of seeing then what the cost of not doing something would be.
Matt Alder [00:25:44]:
So as a final question, what do we think the future might look like here? Obviously, TA is going to evolve. Organizations continue to sort of transform and evolve. How am I budgeting change as things move forward?
Madeline Laurano [00:26:00]:
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think it really does need to become an exercise that we do on a regular basis. And we did. Josh and I talked about this too. Like, budgeting could happen in June for a lot of organizations, but the budgeting conversations don’t need to just happen in June if that’s when they’re, you know, budgeting happens like it needs to happen all year round. And so it needs, it’s like an exercise that needs to happen more frequently. I think that is what I see the future hopefully bringing. And then I think that collaboration that we’ve been talking about, I Mean, a great place to start is the wasted spend. Because I do feel that there’s a lot of feelings around that right now for a lot of HR leaders. Like, okay, we’re using something we wish we didn’t use. We don’t like how it was implemented. There’s been a lot of movement within organizations. There’s new leadership entering in and they’re kind of inheriting a lot of systems or decisions that were made. And there’s a feeling of, okay, we have to make this work or we don’t. I think when I look at the future, it’s doing exactly what Josh said, which is like, can we identify our fixed costs, can we identify our variable costs? And then what do we need to change and make that an exciting conversation versus we need to cover this up.
Matt Alder [00:27:15]:
Yeah, absolutely. Josh, what do you think?
Joshua Secrest [00:27:18]:
I think we all are very pro TA leader and that that role and position and in its importance in the, in a company, I would say that impact is going to triple in the coming years. And a couple reasons why. One, I think it’s going to be one of the key positions on your path to being a Chro is to sit in that seat. So I think we’re going to see a lot more competition kind of within that position for who within HR sits there. And one of the big reasons why is because you have P and L ownership, which is not the case in a lot of other areas within hr. So being able to have at some point in your career these dollars to spend with very clear, driven kind of metrics and goals that are tied to them, I think is key for kind of the new rank of Chro to have like done at some point layered on to that is if you’re in a high volume or frontline oriented position, even if you have corporate and frontline, we’ve never seen before a moment in time where TA and hiring and staffing has been so tied directly to revenue. So we now have more and more people in TA leadership positions that have revenue driving seats. So let’s double click on that for two seconds. One would be in like the services industry where every hire you’re making, you’re then actually taking that hire and being able to kind of recharge back for that hire, usually making 50% profit for the organization, you’re actually driving revenue. In my example, seeing kind of QSR organizations where if we’re understaffed by, you know, even one or two on the floor at a given time, we can directly see that drive through times, shorten up that Our tickets decrease that are ultimately our revenue can decrease by on average $500 a day. So you can multiply that out. Hey, there’s, there’s actually revenue that, that’s going on there. So I think it’s really interesting of this. You’ve got this TA role that is uniquely running a P and L and that’s great practice and great muscle to be able to build. You’ve got more of this like revenue driving capability that’s coming up in more and more industries that I think is going to value that skill set. And then I think the last piece is just kind of a very simple way to think about this which would be if you had to hire as a chro ahead of global talent acquisition and you had one profile who is a great recruiter but has never run a P and L before, right. Hasn’t, doesn’t know kind of how to make some of those, those trades or swaps or strategic decisions or you have somebody that’s a great recruiter, great strategist, but knows how to run a P and L, has metrics in place to be able to showcase how there’s going to be hard cost savings and where there’s going to be revenue driving. You know that that second profile is going to probably win that seat in that position every single time. Because they talk like the business, they understand what’s, what’s motivating, you know, ultimately long term growth for that business and they’re going to be able to trickle that down into their teams to make, you know, better and better decisions. They’re going to, they are going to be able to be doing more with less because their strategy is dictating that versus being dictated that by the business.
Matt Alder [00:30:31]:
So I’ll put a link to the report in the show notes, but just for people listening right now, where can they find it and download it?
Madeline Laurano [00:30:36]:
You can find it on the Aptitude site or the Paradox site. So we’ve been promoting it, we’ve been talking about it. It’s definitely getting a lot of traction right now. So either site or you can reach out to either of us on LinkedIn.
Joshua Secrest [00:30:46]:
And to compliment Madeline’s report, what we focused a lot on through the help of a lot of our clients is a lot of our clients are actually sharing a lot of their business cases. Specific data, specific roi, not just through the use case of Paradox, but through the use case of AI and transformation. So that’s all available at Paradox AI. They’re really fun reads. What I love about them is just the transparency that so many of our clients are giving in terms of, hey, here’s our hiring speed, here’s where we stubbed our toe, here’s what we were trying to solve for. Here are the ways that we’re automating, and here’s where we’re using our people. I think all of those are really neat because you’re kind of not alone in terms of lots of people are trying to figure this out right now, and I think we haven’t seen the amount of sharing that we’re starting to now see. It’s really cool where people are willing to kind of like pull back the curtains a little bit.
Madeline Laurano [00:31:40]:
One thing I’ll just add before we kind of wrap up here is we were at an event together in Scottsdale, and Josh ran this event. It was amazing and it was very collaborative, very engaging. But the coolest thing that he did was he had booths like an expo hall. But it was for a lot of these clients that were sharing their ROI stories so openly and publicly. And anyone that was attending, all of the clients that wanted to learn more about these success stories could go from booth to booth to learn. And it was so cool. And the amount of engagement and learning that I, I got from it. But to his point, like, people want to share these success stories. And the other cool thing about it was you’re not waiting three to five years to see the ROI on this investment like some of these companies that just invested in the past year. And we’re already seeing tremendous cost savings and hours saved.
Matt Alder [00:32:29]:
Madeline, Josh, thank you so much for joining me.
Joshua Secrest [00:32:32]:
Thanks, Matt.
Madeline Laurano [00:32:33]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:32:35]:
My thanks to Madeline and Josh. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. 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.
