It feels like Recruiting has come a long way since the days of help-wanted ads in newspapers, but are we genuinely innovating or just consistently repackaging outdated ways of doing things? For well over a century, versions of the resume and job ad have been the foundation of hiring, but as technology and work itself move on at an ever-increasing pace, it’s clear these tools weren’t designed for the world we are now in. So, can we finally move beyond them to build a solid foundation for an AI-powered approach?
My guest on Episode 670 is one of the original pioneers of online recruiting, Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, or the MonsterBoard as it was known back in 1994. Jeff built Monster during the infancy of the internet when the rest of the industry was still faxing resumes and placing ever more expensive ads in the newspapers. He introduced the world to online job postings and the resume database, which, very much to his surprise and increasing alarm, are still core tenets of recruiting 30 years later.
Jeff is now back in the industry and is launching a new business later in the year. In our conversation, we discuss the need for innovation and reinvention in recruiting to harness AI and address complex challenges employers now face.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Jeff and Monster’s back story and what recruiting was like in 1994
• The early days of the internet and what helped Monster to scale to 100 million registered resumes
• Resumes and job postings have barely changed in over 100 years, and why this is now a big problem.
• How AI is reshaping recruitment without addressing its foundational inadequacies
• How employers are losing control of their own job postings
• Looking at the whole person and the growing importance of the personal brand
• What the future of hiring looks like when we put people, not processes, at the centre
• What’s next for Jeff
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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 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]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 670 of Recruiting Future with me. Matt Alder it feels like recruiting has come a long way since the days of help wanted ads in newspapers. But are we genuinely innovating or just consistently repackaging outdated ways of doing things? For well over a century, versions of the resume and the job ad have been the foundation of hiring. But as technology and work itself move on at an ever increasing pace, it’s clear that these tools weren’t designed for the world we’re now in. So can we finally move beyond them to build a solid foundation for an AI powered approach? My guest this week is one of the original pioneers of online recruiting, Jeff Taylor. The founder of Monster.com, or the Monster Board as it was known back in 1994. Jeff built Monster during the infancy of the Internet, when the rest of the industry was still faxing resumes and placing ever more expensive ads in the newspapers. He introduced the world to online job postings and the resume database, which, very much to his surprise and increasing alarm, are still core tenants of recruiting. Thirty years later, Jeff is now back in the industry and launching a new business later in the year. In our conversation, we discuss the need for innovation and reinvention in recruiting to harness AI and address the complex challenges that employers now face.
Matt Alder [00:03:17]:
Hi Jeff. And welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Taylor [00:03:20]:
Hey Matt, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
I’m doing very well, thank you. And it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:03:28]:
Please could you introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:03:31]:
On what you do and what you did.
Jeff Taylor [00:03:34]:
My name is Jeff Taylor and I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve started 15 companies. Probably the most well known company is Monster.com, originally the Monster Board. But I have worked in a series of companies and I’ve also done a stint with Ray Dalio who runs the biggest hedge fund in the world. And I worked as a, you know, chief of staff, executive in residence, working right with Ray. I helped him with his principles book which is something that’s well known work for him in his environment, which is a human capital experiment, among many other things, getting to understand what you like and had a great experience there. I’m also, I don’t know, I run a theme camp at Burning man that’s called Root Society. I have a whole kind of village there, a group and then I have I volunte and restoring an old cemetery in a town in Connecticut and I have a tribe there. And so I have my mainline interests. I just am starting a new company which we’ve talked about called Boom Band and that’s going to be a large talent brand and with a lot of that experience to come next spring and summer.
Matt Alder [00:04:50]:
Fantastic stuff. So let’s start with the Monster Board. So take us back to 1990 for which doesn’t seem that long ago, but it is a really long time ago. And I know there are lots of people listening who certainly were in the workforce in 1994 who may not have been born in 1994 either. So paint us a picture of 1994. How did people find jobs? How did companies find people? And also, you know, the Internet had just appeared. What were the early days of the Internet like?
Jeff Taylor [00:05:18]:
Sure. So, you know, maybe you take it in a couple different pieces. I owned a ad agency, had about 30 employees and my agency specialized in human resource communications. The main thing we did was recruitment advertising. And this is a business that has, you know, greatly evolved over the last 30 years. But what I did was place help wanted ads in newspapers, maybe three to five hundred ads a week. I worked with the top health care, biotech and high technology companies in the greater Boston, New England area. And so a typical thing that would happen is a company would call and say we’re having a big hiring push, we have 12 openings and we’re thinking about doing a half page ad in the Boston Globe. And they would, between phone and fax, like hello, they would fax over those job descriptions which we would retype and we would then do the creative to be part of a campaign that maybe we had working with that company. I’ll give you an example. We had a company called Wellfleet Communications and there was a headline called Birds of a Feather Flock Together. And it was talking about the type of people that work at Wellfleet. And we would tie that into our recruitment. Advertising is a big push. Thirty employees, most of which were admin account management in nature. And we would receive those ads, we would drive those ads to the Boston Globe in the middle of the night on Thursday and they would show up in a big help wanted section on Sunday. And I think it’s important to juxtapose where we are today to that because there was no, there was no Internet and thus there was no kind of searching in this brand new way. One of my biggest clients was placing full page ads in the Globe, which at that point were like $35,000 ads. It’s actually a lot of money today. If you think about a company that would say, I’ve got a recruiting campaign, I have 35,000 to spend. Where are we going to place it? So the equivalent of the CPO VPHR at that point came to me and said, the ads aren’t working and I don’t know what you’re going to do about it, but you’re going to have to do something and bear with me here because there’s some base here. My dad worked at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Austin, and he had gotten his first email address in 1992. And he said, jeff, you need to get an email address because this is going to make the fax technology obsolete. And we were emailing back and forth. And then I started talking to a couple of my bigger clients about could we use email as a way to communicate? Because that way we didn’t have to replicate all of the data for the ads. And I started reading about these things called bulletin board systems. And they were early threaded conversations between engineers. And the engineers were talking about their work. In these threaded conversations, my client said, the newspaper’s not working. And I said, you know what, let’s get an email address connected and let’s see if we can figure that out. And let me think about this bulletin board system as a way to recruit. And so I started looking into it. There were a handful of bulletin boards. The engineers were, were talking, they were programmer analysts at that point is what they were called. And we started developing this idea of building a bulletin board that would introduce recruiting into this process. It was not being received very well. I joined some of these threaded conversations and asked about it, and they just said that that’s not really what it’ and so I had a concept in my ad agency that what our clients paid us for was a big idea. And that evolved into a monster idea when we would do pitches to land new clients. And so I had a dream that I built a bulletin board called the Monster Board.
Matt Alder [00:09:40]:
So literally a dream.
Jeff Taylor [00:09:42]:
Literally a dream. And I have a pad next to my bed, and when I dream and as I come up with an idea, I write it down. And I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to read my pad on this. This idea. So I got up and went to a coffee shop and I drew out this bulletin board, which was called the Monster Board, which was going to be our recruiting site. And so that evolved very quickly into seeing if I could build it. I really didn’t know how to build it. Somebody said, you need to go to Bolt, Berniak and Newman, which is bbn, which is a big technology company in Boston, Cambridge, because they knew a lot about what was called darpanet and arpanet, and this new Internet way of communicating between a series of colleges, universities, and some major government buildings. And it was really a defense communication vehicle. And that’s the way it was couched. And I said, I’d like to build a bulletin board, but I’m very interested in learning about this Internet thing that I read about. And so that is the beginning of me hiring a firm that helped me build a bulletin board using Perl scripts. And Marc Andreessen was at the University of Illinois. He was a grad student, and he developed the first browser. It was called Mozilla. And all of a sudden there was this little buzz about being able to communicate over the Internet and using this Mozilla. And the thing I liked about it was that it had graphics. And my bulletin board, I couldn’t put any graphics. And I had drawn this monster. And so the name, the Monster Board survived. But I started then building one of the first Mozilla sites, one of the first sites on the Internet. And when I started that process, There were only 200 websites in the world. And somebody said, you have to register your website. And I was like, where? And there’s a MIT crawler that you needed to register. And I was the 4, 454th com.
Matt Alder [00:12:00]:
Amazing, amazing.
Jeff Taylor [00:12:01]:
So that was the beginning.
Matt Alder [00:12:03]:
Yes, it’s yeah, it’s nostalgia, hearing all of that, because I can kind of remember when things used to be, used.
Matt Alder [00:12:10]:
To be like this.
Matt Alder [00:12:10]:
And just I’ve got some questions about some of the decisions that perhaps you made at that point and what they’ve influenced since. But I think before we get into that, just give us a sense of how it scaled, how, how to do it. Big, big did it get.
Jeff Taylor [00:12:25]:
The first decision was what am I going to put on this, on this monster board, right? And so I was like, I wanted to put jobs. And so I looked, I, I was an expert at job postings. I, I been replacing them in the newspaper for nine years. And so the first decision I made is I wanted to make a job posting look just like a job posting, but make it online. But then I was very interested in the user and I wanted to create a buyer seller marketplace where the users could come in and they could find jobs and companies could come and post to find applicants. So I put the first job posting on the World Wide Web. I also put the first resume effectively on the World Wide Web. And Marc Andreessen’s form on his Mozilla was an inch long. And I said, look, I can’t use a form that’s an inch long. It needs to be long enough to, and be able to load a whole resume. So he, our team worked with his team, got the code. And so it wasn’t just about ordering a pizza online with yes or no. And we got the first resume online. And then we also created effectively the patent for what I called the piazza, the marketplace where the buyers and sellers could get together. It was called Monster. Our address was monster.com but we went by the Monster board as we went about the process of promoting. I remember we gave it to 40 customers and they each posted 20 jobs. So that was my entire job posting network. When I started, a few of those clients immediately started getting. The postings were all in Boston, but the applicants were from all over the world. And you started getting these 10 page resumes from Peru. And so a few of the clients that, okay, this is a terrible experience. I don’t, I don’t want the responsibility of this. But most of the clients stayed with me. I remember one Friday going home. We had 399 job postings on this on site. And we actually had five orders for new job postings. And talking to the person that was working with me, her name was Jill, on Monday morning saying, you know, we could have gotten over 400 jobs. And then Adweek called some of the other ad publications that were covering the Internet, I think USA Today did something relatively early. And I can remember I had a thousand things happening and I wasn’t sure, was it a thousand visitors, was it a thousand sessions? And my reporting was terrible. And I remember awkwardly talking about, we have a thousand people circling, coming in, and I’m just telling you how small this was at the beginning. Right. But the decisions, one of the important decisions was calling it Monster. You know, just if I step back for a second, I had called my ad agency Adion instead of Taylor Advertising because I wanted to have more salespeople. I wanted it to be a broader focus. And then when I started Monster, I can remember my. My wife at the time said she wouldn’t leave the house if I called the business Monster. And my employee said, it’s a terrible name. It’s like the Monster under your bed. And the clients didn’t like it. And I had this kind of resolve that if we were going to build this marketplace, it needed to have strength, it needed to have the ability to brand it. So I was using my ad agency experience and I was using my new innovation and actually exploring that kind of palette of ideas. I would say naming the company Monster was probably the most important decision that I made. The second important decision that I made was actually having a buyer, seller, marketplace and going to the difficulty of attracting the companies which I had relationship with, but just in Boston, and also going after the job seekers and building that marketplace. And to today, that’s a model, you know, LinkedIn effectively has a pretty big share of that model today. And so those were very important decisions. The third thing was deciding right out of the blocks that I was going to be for job seekers. You know, it’s half about a better job, it’s half about a better life. There’s a better job out there. Knowing that those, those taglines would. Might upset companies. And the other decision I made with that was to give it away to Seekers and that employers would pay the freight. And my idea was if I brought the people that the companies would want that. And so that was the beginning. So the promotion and the articles that I got written about it originally were an incredible help in kind of boosting us. And we started to have interest from other areas. Okay, now there’s just a small side story. I had five angel investors in my ad agency and they told me that I needed to shut this down because it was starting to take more of my time. It had no revenue, really. You know, we were charging, I think, $50 a job. And we’d given away the first few hundred jobs. We were starting to charge $50 a job. But there was, you know, it’s just the math didn’t work right. I was buying. I had a Spark 5, which was a Sun Box that was running this thing. And it was creaking under the pressure. And we. My investors said, you need to shut this down. And I was like, this is a much bigger idea than the ad agency. And so they said, well, what do you propose we do? And I said, why don’t I see if I can sell half of it to the Boston Globe? Because I had a good relationship with them, and we were starting to get some traction. Now, let’s say we were getting up to 2,000 jobs, and we were starting to get some traffic coming into the site. And so I had five meetings with the Boston Globe, and they ultimately came back and said our great grandfathers would roll over in their graves if they found out that we were giving away, you know, the. The. The most interesting pot in the kitchen, right? You know, the. The most interesting section, most profitable section of the newspaper. The. I went back to my investors and I said, I think we need to sell the business. There was a company called TMP Worldwide. It’s based in New York City. A guy named Andy McKelvey. And Andy had made overtures to buy my recruitment advertising agency because he was rolling up agencies, and I had said no. And he came back around, and I said, okay, maybe there’s a possibility, but I have to share with you what I’m doing. And he spent a day and basically said, look, I’ll buy the agency, but I. I don’t want the Monster thing. And my. So my investors didn’t want the Monster thing, and the guy buying my agency didn’t want it. And in the end, I was able to sit Andy down, take him through what we were doing. And then he said, okay, I’ll throw it in the mix. I’ll give you a good valuation for your recruitment agency. And I basically said, but he said, we’re going to change the name. And I said, we’re not going to sell the business unless you keep the name Monster. And ultimately, he said, okay, keep the name. He said, buy two Spark 20s, which were much bigger machines. And I felt the resource. But I’m known for making a mistake in my career, for selling Monster too early. Now, one of the interesting things is there were no Internet millionaires at that point. I founded Monster before Yahoo, before Amazon, before there were any exits. Mark Cuban and his Broadcast.com, whatever, those things didn’t even exist yet. And so I sold Monster for less than a million dollars. And I basically said, if you go public, I would like to contractually have you give me a million dollars. Everything was so small, both in my own experience and also in the experience of the Internet. And if I had held that business. Well, let’s talk about TMP for a minute. They bought recruitment advertising agencies all over the country. So they had agencies in 13 cities. One of the things we were able to do is to introduce Monster as the back end. So place your ads in the newspaper, but also place them on Monster. And not only in Boston now, the way I was doing it, but in all 13 of those cities. And that was probably another decision that I made by selling to tmp. I said, I want to run your Internet division. So I ran Monster. And if I fast forward, you know, 10 years, the company got renamed Monster Worldwide, and the Monster business became the entire business really well, with a small TMP sector that really still survives today. And so that was the early stage. And then we grew and grew and grew for the next, I would say, three years with really no competitors. There were a few things. I call them career this and job that that that popped up. There was something called Career Mosaic, which was very focused on employer, you know, I don’t know, kind of like portfolios. And there was another one was called Career Taxi that was very small. There was a company called Online Career center that we actually liked. We were friendly with them, and we really secretly purchased the online Career center. And in 1999, we had been doing a little bit of advertising, but a lot of it was word of mouth because there weren’t very many websites. And so we got traction as a job site. And what you think about, like, Google today, almost like a verb, Monster became kind of the verb of job job search. And I think it’s a real tribute to the branding. And then we made a decision in 1999. I’m kind of advancing ahead fairly quickly to advertise on the Super Bowl. We did a commercial. When I grow up, I want to file all day. I want to be a yes man. Yes, sir. No, sir. Anything for a raise, sir. I think the last. A young kid said, when I grow up, I want to be forced into early retirement. We ran that commercial. I had spent about $2 million on marketing, and we spent $4 million in 90 seconds in 1999. And so these are obviously the risks you take, but I was one of just a Couple of dot com advertisers that were on the super bowl for the first time in 1999. And that commercial was a flop. It was the fourth worst rated commercial because it didn’t make you laugh. It was ironic. And I confused every football guy in the country. You know, just kind of the way a dog watches TV is like, what? But within the next three to six months, I actually got a lot of coverage around that commercial. It was on the Today show. It was on Good Morning America. It did exactly what a Super bowl commercial is supposed to do. But our traffic was 70 times greater than it had ever been in the couple days really while the super bowl was going on. We 10 XED our traffic and we continued to grow. And within about five months of running that commercial, it is now considered one of the top 20 Super bowl commercials of all time.
Matt Alder [00:25:11]:
I was going to say, because that’s, you know, when you look back, that’s kind of how it’s listed. So interesting that it was a bit of a, kind of a slow burner. And also as an aside, all the kids in it have now grown up, so I wonder what they ended up doing.
Jeff Taylor [00:25:24]:
But yeah, I actually watched the, you know, average age on our site was, you know, 30, 32, 28 when we started. And then I watched over the course of 15 years running Monster, you know that that group grow up. It was actually one of the reasons why I started an additional business in the baby boomer space. But there were a couple things that I want to share that I think they relate. If you just fuzz your eyes just a little bit and you can see. I made a decision to put a resume as it was on the Internet. I did research. I found a resume from 1907 from Harvard where it looked just like a resume that I was loading. The only difference was at the bottom it’s, the guy said he was happily married, which I’m not sure you would typically put on your resume today. That’s a nice thing. And it said that, that you, that he enjoyed fox hunting. And you probably wouldn’t, you probably wouldn’t put something in your resume said that you were going to hurt an animal. And other than that, it looked like a resume. And what I decided was the distribution was going to be so innovative, very. I was moving the cheese from the newspaper, you know, effectively onto a digital footprint. So I decided to make the resume the same. The only change I made was I made a form based resume. So you had to actually fill out your resume by section. And that would be Hard to do today, But I got 100 million people to do it that way, which gave us the best resume, the first and the best resume database in the world almost all the way through the cycle because of how accurate the data was in the database. The other decision that I talked about was the job posting was meant to be the same. If I fast forward 30 years, I actually got a call from the head of marketing and said, you do know that it’s the 30 year anniversary of Monster? And I didn’t. And that was back in April. And she said, would you like to say something? And I said, yeah. And I think the woman, her name is Leslie, she runs the product at Monster today. And she started as an entry level worker with me at Adeon. And so I’ve known her well. But there was an interesting reflection for me as I went and looked at, I hadn’t looked as I looked at the competitive marketplace. They’re still using post and pray, still using a job posting, which is not a very good representation of the job requirement. It’s a summary. Still using the resume and pay for behind a paywall. And the resume by and large still looks exactly the same. You know, even if you look at a resume on LinkedIn, it’s still, it’s a commercial version, it’s a zip file of your past life experience and it does not reflect the whole person. It doesn’t reflect, if you think about how much has changed since 1907, basically that’s when the automobile was invented and the resume has been the same all that time. So it’s my fault. I, you know, I put the first resume and the first job posting on. But, but folks, that was 30 years ago and I’m, I’m actually pretty excited about the fact that it stayed the same. If you, you know, maybe that’s a part of the future conversation.
Matt Alder [00:29:00]:
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book recently, which is called Revenge the Ticking Tipping Point, and he talks about something called an overstory. So this sense that there’s an overstory over kind of industries and ways that people behave that people don’t notice and people don’t challenge. And I think that with recruitment there is this overstory about CVS and job postings which came from job adverts and resumes and all that sort of stuff, that remains unchallenged. And it’s interesting that that’s the case. And I think perhaps we can get into the future in a second in terms of how that might change. But no one really ever challenges it, which is why I’m so interested in having this conversation with you. Because we’re looking at the genesis of how that moved to the Internet and it’s kind of rumbled on. LinkedIn has job postings. Everyone still uses resumes in the recruiting process. And when you kind of take a step back, it doesn’t make any sense where then, you know, we have this, all these different sort of technologies and ways of thinking about people and people and talent. But that’s the kind of, the strength of that sort of, that kind of frame that it sits in, I suppose.
Jeff Taylor [00:30:04]:
There is a unbelievable business model that sits in the middle of what we figured out, you know, postings kind of by dma, by designated marketing area. So you buy a posting in Boston. If you want to buy a posting in Boston and New Hampshire, you’re buying two, two regions of dma. So you buy two postings. And the idea that you’re paying something for that, it was a good business model. And then once we had the resume database and you could sell the resume database. Remind me to tell you a story about that. The idea of if you are lucky enough, if you’ve built your business so that you can actually store resumes and you’re able to sell those resumes, one of the beautiful things was you’re basically selling that database, the same database over and over and over again. Beautiful business model. And that’s why, in my opinion, it hasn’t changed. And I think, I think somewhere in the product protectionism of. That’s probably not a word in the, in the, in the. Trying to hold the moat around the, this, this beautiful buyer seller revenue model that I think there’s both a, like a frog in the boiling water type of thing happening where, you know, the frog is just kind of bouncing around the water and it’s getting warmer and there’s just no, there’s no sensory reaction to that. But it’s also protecting a lack of creativity and the fact that if you’re just printing money and you have shareholders and you’re kind of beholden to the revenue model. And so I’m extremely excited about that. And you know, I think that there’s different aspects of this. And one of the problems is if you think about betting on a football game, you know, soccer game on the weekend or whatever, your bet, your activity is all about this coming weekend, right? When you think about a career, it has a slower pace to it. It doesn’t feel slow when you’re in it. But if you think about your change through time, it goes slowly. I think it’s one of the reasons why a resume is a reasonable artifact, because your evolution, it’s almost like you could write a bullet point in a sentence every three months and you’re capturing what feels exciting in person, but on paper isn’t changing very much. So I think there’s also a problem when the job posting side. Right. Because the job posting is. A hiring manager wants a job posting. They go to HR and say, you know, do you have a job posting? Yeah, I have one from last year. Okay, we’ll just use that. And then what happens is it’s like, okay, we’re using the job posting from 2019. And it’s like, yeah, yeah, but just use that. It’s fine. It hasn’t changed very much. It is. Everything has changed. The. I’m not saying that you’re not adding new technologies, but there’s no culture, there’s no progression of the excitement of what’s happening in an area with a job posting. And so I think it’s failing. And I think the new large learning model, I’ve got a slide that talks about the perfect storm, and there’s an image on the slide that says the crisis ahead. And I think the large learning models are a bit of a fanciful creative playground right now for almost everyone that’s in it, and there’s lots of new businesses in it. But what I think there isn’t is that real reflection that this is going to change everything. And I’m not even up to current because I listen to your podcast. I’m hearing all the people talking about all the impact, But I think you have this. This kind of malaise. AI machine learning malaise. 10 years old. Any HR person worth their salt would basically avoid an entire room of this malaise. Like, I don’t want to hear any more about it because it’s doing nothing for me. It wasn’t until ChatGPT that y’all said like, oh, oh, damn. That this is actually, I. I can see what’s happening here. And I think. I think what’s going on now is a lot of the innovation is in little pieces. And the reason why I share it is because, well, let’s make the resume an AI resume. Let’s make the job posting an AI job posting. Let’s. Let’s adjust the applicant tracking system so that it’s able to build a smart job posting. And then what I’m. What I’m seeing, I’m actually going to get a prop. Sorry. I’ve been using this Prop, which I think is funny. Okay, so here’s a job posting. You know, actually I want one more prop. Here’s the actual job posting, right. And so the LLM and everybody is turning it into this. Like they say, like it’s. It’s way more interesting now. But it’s still that job posting.
Matt Alder [00:35:22]:
It’s still the same thing. Yeah. For those who are just listening to this, it’s two bits of fruit. One’s very smaller, one’s a little bit.
Jeff Taylor [00:35:27]:
Bigger, but yeah, I’ve got a tangerine and an orange.
Matt Alder [00:35:30]:
And they’re still the same.
Jeff Taylor [00:35:31]:
Same. You know, they look like the same thing, but they’re not the same thing. And then, and then I have this orange coffee cup. So the applicant is this orange coffee cup. And, and so overcomes the orange that is built up with the, the large model, you know, kind of creative layer, which is really very rudimentary, by the way, that that makes it sound better. And then what the applicant is doing is saying, oh, I can make my resume look just like that pumped up job and ingests that into their LLM, takes their resume, which is not very good, and changes the words and adjusts the dials. And then what comes across back to the company looks just like the pumped up job post thing.
Matt Alder [00:36:25]:
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s really interesting because effectively what you’re saying is we have this new technology and the same thing is happening again. People are taking existing structures and existing ways of working and just kind of injecting AI into them. And recruitment kind of ends up eating itself in that process. You end up in this kind of battle of technology.
Jeff Taylor [00:36:44]:
Well, I just did a LinkedIn post and I basically, I have an image of leaves backing up at a fence. You know, it’s like a fall picture and there’s a watch out for in. I did a search of leaves backing up at a fence and it said, be careful of the moisture that develops underneath. And I kind of feel like the reason why I’m saying there’s a crisis ahead is you basically have nitrous on a model T. And. And you have a resume is French. Do you know what it means? It means summary. Okay. And so you have a job posting summary which is now getting like steroids, and you have a resume which is a summary which is now actually trying to match up with the same, you know, kind of muscle job description. And I think what’s going to happen is, is it’s just gonna break. I was talking to a CTO in Boston and she was saying, We’ve received 8,000 resumes over the last three weeks. I look at her, she is, there is terror and it’s the same terror. It’s not the same terror, but it is a similar terror to a, to a person who’s been out of work for too many weeks, who is sending another resume in, into the black hole, not having confidence about what to do next. And what she said is, I’m sure there are qualified people in this 8,000. I actually don’t know how to get to them. And she also said every one of these people wants to work at our company because we’re growing and many of these people are our customers. So the brand impact combined with the leaves backing up at the fence is, and then you also have this, the, the pendulum is shifting where it’s, we’ve been in a like a 20 year run of talent shortage is dominant which basically means that the seeker is the seller and all of a sudden the pendulum is shifting the other direction. You have more balance, you still have shortages in certain areas. There’s new job descriptions, new positions being created right now in lots of cool areas. But the massive middle, those positions are all of a sudden, are we putting these positions on hold? Are we retooling our company? Are we revamping because of AI and thinking about new ways to do things and this, this crampiness, I won’t go so far as paralysis because all companies have to do business. You can’t stop doing business. But HR in the priority, you know this as much as well as anybody. It is, is many times barely at the table and the prioritizing new ways of doing things and then kind of surprising HR with all new strategies. And it’s not true at every company by any means. There are different characteristics of chief people, officers and HR areas. And some are at the table and dynamic and really making moves in their companies, which I’m very excited about. But many are still sitting just outside the circle, begging to get into the circle but then finding things out a little bit too late. And the third order consequence of that is the leads are backing up at the gate. And what I mean by that is the applicant tracking system is maybe ingesting these things, but it’s almost too much to ingest. And I’m not seeing that the resumes are all going into the correct buckets now. They may be getting the, the, the Dear Jill letter, you know, thank you for applying. But then can I, can I, can I do a non sequitur here for a minute? I, I, I Am excited about this stuff.
Matt Alder [00:41:06]:
Yeah, of course.
Jeff Taylor [00:41:07]:
So a non sequitur is let’s, let’s talk about the life of a job posting. I do a posting and I stick it at my company website, which is then crawled by about 12 different companies that are crawling company career websites. I posted on Indeed and I posted on LinkedIn and there are scrapers of Indeed and LinkedIn. And the job is actually getting purchased and posted@ABCjobs.com and so you’re getting the initial response, which if you looked at a good LinkedIn post right now, you know it’s getting 300 responses. If you look at, at a, a more gentle job requirement job posting, it’s getting a thousand responses. And LinkedIn is so nice to actually show you how many people have applied. I talk to, I talk to job seekers at least one every day. That’s struggling. That’s my job right now. And what they’re saying is, I don’t even want to apply for a job that 600 people have applied to. My resume is not good enough. I’m not going to get there. Right. And what’s happening is the job posting. Everyone’s talking about ghost jobs and they’re talking about bad actors in companies. I think the main ghost job problem is that the company has lost the connector to the job posting.
Matt Alder [00:42:34]:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Jeff Taylor [00:42:36]:
So the job posting is now in the wild and it never gets retired. And some posting companies are good at putting the date of the posting on it. But in the scraping process, sometimes that goes away because the excitement of just having the job. So you may be applying for a job that was posted eight months ago. Now think about those leaves at the fence. You got 500 people applying for the job right now, but there’s also 1500 people applying for older jobs that don’t even exist anymore. And all the leaves against the fence, all the applicants against the, the applicant tracking system are, are all based, basically building up. Let me pause. I want to, I want to make sure that, that we cover where you want to cover. But what I’m talking about is the systemic challenges, the, the, the failure to communicate the, the failure of these tools and ultimately the crisis ahead. Because the nitrous of AI doesn’t have a good foundation to work off of in the HR tools or in the individual tools.
Matt Alder [00:43:45]:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that is the problem and it’s something that has been coming for years because as I say, we’re kind of working under these assumptions, this overstory, this framework, whatever you want to call it that, as you say, has been in place since 1907 in some ways. And that’s exactly what is happening at the moment. People are still using that kind of resume, job posting kind of model to try and create the future. I suppose the question is, how do we change that story?
Matt Alder [00:44:16]:
How do we.
Matt Alder [00:44:17]:
Because I think that anyone looking at this strategically can see that this is going to happen. It’s already a problem. Employers are already dealing with these increase in applications. Job seekers are very unhappy. How do we solve it? How do we think differently?
Matt Alder [00:44:32]:
What does the future look like?
Matt Alder [00:44:34]:
What do the tools that we now have actually enable rather than us trying to use them to just rejig something that we’ve always done?
Jeff Taylor [00:44:42]:
In the past we talked about machine learning and the malaise of that. And there’s been a fabulous moment. I describe it as a career changing, life changing moment around having AI kind of introduced into our lives at this next level. And if you look at ChatGPT and OpenAI as a anchor point and you look at some of the interesting dynamics, like you take a perplexity that gives you a little bit more of the sourcing that’s behind it. So you, you don’t just have the creativity, but you also have the, the source. And then if you look at what Met has done with the llama model, having different size models and having the ability to more inexpensively train, or I guess I would say fine tune, that big model is giving companies ideas about how to do this. And, and so I think one of the challenges that we’re going to have is AI is also going through its malaise stage a little bit right now in talking to HR people, they’re saying, you know, I have a chance. Boom band. We own boomband.com and we own Boomband AI. And in doing a little AB testing, you come into an HR group with Boomband AI, they’re like, ugh, here we go. And it’s not far from what I just did. You know, it’s like, okay, is this, are you actually gonna do something or are you just giving me some other befangled technology that I’m gonna have to figure out how to deal with and you’re gonna create more mess for me, right? And so I think you’re gonna have this moment of, I don’t know, Renaissance or this moment of where exhaustion turns back into. I’m so comfortable with Mac and cheese. You know, I’ve tried all these foods. Just go back to Mac and cheese. Cheese. The problem is that the Mac and cheese. Is this analogy okay?
Matt Alder [00:46:46]:
Like I. Yeah, that was great.
Jeff Taylor [00:46:49]:
Right? Mac, Mac and cheese is not going to solve the, the leads at the fence. Right? So this is going to move from being an HR problem to being a CEO problem. And people’s personal brands. Yeah. Let me, let me just back up for one second, right? The pandemic changed us. And that’s like so obvious, right? But when we were shaken out of the pandemic malaise, we’re different. We wear shorts and, and T shirts when we work and we walk our dog and we work out at 2 in the afternoon and we’re okay to go to the parent teacher conference at 5:00. And all of a sudden we have shifted, but our personal brand has become more important. We have a side hustle. My hobby is actually something that fulfills me. My job is not giving me my whole self needs. And so I think I need to evolve my job. Somebody was talking about working at one of the huge companies and that people in their Mid to late 30s are leaving this company. And the question is, why would you ever leave a company that’s this big and this, this bold and growing? It’s because I feel no connection at all to what, what I do with this company. And I think we have a new generation. I don’t care. Zx, Millennials, whatever. Like we, we, we all got shaken out of the same pandemic bucket, right? And four years later, our personal brand and, and this is a clue that is almost the same in the same pacing. I don’t know what you call that overlay of the tipping point. It harkens back. I know I have a resume, I know I have a job. But my corporate brand, the T shirt I wear, the jersey I wear for my corporate brand is only one of my jerseys. Now. Now. And so I don’t think the corporate brand has gone to the back seat. I think it’s gone to the passenger seat. And in the driver’s seat is me holding up my side hustle, where all of a sudden I’m making a couple thousand dollars a month and I’m doing something that’s creative and I’m loving it and working out again. And I’m wearing something that’s telling me that sitting here on zooms is not good for me. And I want to talk about the fact that I like to run. In fact, I’d like to talk about the fact that I’m a runner. I’m not, by the way. But one of my employees is a huge runner. I want to Talk about that in the interview. I don’t want to talk about C. Right. Okay. Just look at my resume. I do C, I do Python. I want to do less Mongo. I like to work in react, but I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the fact that I’m a whole person. So I think my prediction predictions are meant for the bold and for the action oriented people. Right. And so I’m working on this. Right. But I think your personal brand is more important than your commercial resume. And so I think the resume is going to evolve. If I had a nickel for every time somebody said to me while I was running Monster.com, oh, I’m going to reinvent the resume, I’m going to put you out of business. And I was like, just have attitude. Right? And because of the way we did it, right. And I think the commercial zip file of your past experiences being 85% of how you’re represented is already over. And we’re just having Mac and cheese right now, Right. You know, we’re, we’re just still using it because you’re supposed to use it. I always start an interview at the bottom of someone’s resume. Like, what do you like? You like to kayak? And I always ask them, you know, like, and they’re like, oh yeah, I’ve kayaked 32 rivers. Let me tell you about just my New Hampshire experience. I’m like, tell me, tell me. Right? You know, 40 minutes into the interview, I’m finding out that this person is so passionate about kayaking that I’m trying to learn how to barrel roll roll in a kayak from him armchair experience. And I’m like, if that person could bring half of what they bring to that passion to my company, I would love to have you come and work here. Right? And so that’s me, right? That’s always the way I’ve interviewed. Right. Whereas your resume coming through the ats, getting gobbled up by bullion, search and index service and evaluated by keywords is it kind of forgot that it’s actually a person. And I just saw somebody that said I got turned down for the job. And then I just applied and applied and applied and I finally got an interview and then I got an in person interview and I got the job. And so the traditional way of doing it failed so miserably that actually the person that would get hired for the job was cut out first just screened by an applicant tracking system and then screened by a recruiter. And it was like the fourth time going through that, the person actually got to someone that said, you know what? Your experience is really interesting. I think the resume is going to change. The job posting is going to change. The job posting is a summary. The LLM will ingest that summary in a nanosecond. And all it’s doing then is hallucinating on top of no information. Right? And I’m sure technically someone would say, no, that’s not what happens. But the reality is it doesn’t have anything to work with. So if you’re going and looking at 135 million people and saying who’s right for this job and you basically have a tangerine, it’s just not. Not. It’s not exciting. I think the job posting is going to change. I think TA is going to have to stop relying. Like, you’ve had seven podcasts on this. It’s going to have to stop relying on the administrative flow to be kind of 70% of their role. And, you know, going to have to go back. I was a recruiter, right? That’s how I started out in this business. You know, I was a technical recruiter. I placed program hours. And that experience was a great experience because I learned about talking to people and finding out what they really like. Right. And I think recruiters, the whole talent acquisition area is going to have to go. Go old school. You know, I just saw somebody’s post, how do I get to this company? I said, send a pizza and stick your resume in the bottom of the pizza. That’s what we did in. In 1992. You know, like, you’re gonna have to go back on both sides to being human beings, talking to human beings. And I think this is a C suite issue. My challenge to HR is you’re gonna have to make these moves before it becomes a C suite issue because it’ll. It’ll basically realign the whole thing.
Matt Alder [00:54:20]:
Absolutely. So as a kind of a final question, what’s kind of next for you? What are you planning? What can you tell us about your new business? How. What part are you intending to kind of play in in this moving forward? You know, as much as you kind of want to share at this, at this point in time, so I can’t tell you.
Jeff Taylor [00:54:39]:
I got to kill you, man. But boom. Band. It comes from the Dr. Seuss book. Oh, the places you’ll go. And this book says, don’t go down the windy place. You know, it basically talks about all the career challenges. Near the end of this book, it says, don’t go to the waiting place. Go where the boom bands are playing. This is what I’m like. And I think we got to get back to it. And so I’m going to build a consumer brand. To the dismay of any large VC right now, D2C is dead. And so that’s the first thing, is that there really hasn’t been a good destination site built in over 20 years. I think there’s an inefficiency in the marketplace. I’ve been talking about it for an hour. I am going to work on that, and I’m going to take the pieces apart. There’s three pieces. There is a profile of a person, there is a job requirement, and there’s a company profile. And I think behind that are human beings. There’s a hiring manager that desperately needs a great person, and there’s a person that needs a job. Because at least I hope in my lifetime, every person needs something. I have it written on my wall. Everyone, no matter who you are, for all time, will want to have a good job. And so one of the beauties of this is that it has built in, you know, longevity. This is a. You and I are both working in our job. Right. You know, and. And so. But it’s got to be better. It’s got to be better than it is right now. I think there’s probably another component, and I. I think that component is that the company is going to have to look at new ways that employees will contribute. This is not my area of expertise. I think we’re talking about leaves at the gate when the company on the other side of the gate is going to look different than it looks right now. And that’s going to change the kinds of employees that we have, and it’s going to change the kind of work that’s being done. And I’m excited about that. It’s funny, some of my life’s work, in thinking about this and thinking about how to build, build some efficiencies in the marketplace and invent some new tools. I don’t mean to be cagey. I’d like to come back on in the summer and play the boom band game. But there’s a new generation of seekers out there that deserves to have the magic of their career be reflected in the relationship that they build with companies. And I think everyone needs to make money and everyone needs. Is going to want to fulfill their goals and dreams, and we’re going to keep working on new ways to do that. And that’s happening every day right now. So there’s nothing wrong it’s just Mac and cheese.
Matt Alder [00:58:03]:
Jeff, thank you very much for joining me.
Matt Alder [00:58:06]:
My thanks to Jeff. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. 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.
