Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about technology and foresight.
AI terminology is getting confusing, which is compounded by vast amounts of marketing focusing on future promises rather than the current reality. Beyond the jargon and hype, how can AI agents be used to tackle today’s recruiting problems?
My guest this week is Shiran Yaroslavsky, SVP Product at SmartRecruiters. Shiran shares the importance of using customer research to build AI solutions for genuine recruiting challenges and to create the right vision for the future
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In the interview, we discuss:
• Building products in disruptive times
• The difference between AI co-pilots and AI agents
• Using AI to Solve real TA productivity problems with AI
• Why customer research is critical for meaningful AI innovation
• The importance of building agents that collaborate across platforms
• How TA leaders should be evaluating AI vendors
• The importance of visionary innovation
• What is the ultimate future vision for TA?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Agents, operators, co pilots, agentic. There’s a lot of hype and a lot of jargon out there about AI agents at the moment. In this episode, we cut through the noise and look at what agents can do in TA right now and how we can better understand their impact on the future. Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiter’s AI Powered Companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant handling all the time consuming admin work so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions. From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective.
01:00
Matt Alder
Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there. Welcome to episode 707 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast designed to help talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. This episode is about technology and foresight and AI terminology is getting very confusing, which is compounded by vast amounts of marketing focusing on future promises rather than the current reality. Beyond the jargon and hype, how can AI agents be used to tackle today’s recruiting problems? My guest this week is Shiran Yaroslavsky, SVP Product at Smart Recruiters. Shiran shares the importance of using customer research to build AI solutions for genuine recruiting challenges and to create the right vision for the future. Hi Shiran and welcome to the podcast.
02:28
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Hi Matt, thank you for having me.
02:30
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do for sure.
02:37
Shiran Yaroslavsky
My name is Shiran. I’m SVP Product at Smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is an AI powered hiring platform serving large global enterprises and my background is in product leadership and future of work. I’m a former entrepreneur and a CEO. I founded my company in the HR tech space a few years ago and then later it got acquired by another unicorn space called hi Bob and after the acquisition I joined the acquiring team as VP of Product and since then this is what I do. I lead product teams and department in the space of Future of work. Very passionate about this space as you can see and about a year and A half ago I joined Smart Recruiters to lead our product department here.
03:22
Matt Alder
Fantastic stuff. Now it’s obviously a very disruptive time in work, in talent acquisition, well in the world in general really. But lots of things have kind of happened over the last few years. It looks like things are going to evolve considerably in TA over the next few years. What are you seeing and what’s your kind of approach to that as a product leader?
03:43
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Yeah, I think it’s something that we all, you know, it’s top of mind for all of us. Right. I think AI is disrupting not only recruitment tech, but every area today. Right. I think what is really important to understand is that the way users will interact with product will be completely different in the next few years. And so it’s important also as a me, for me as a product leader to understand where the market is heading, what kind of trends we see, how AI can help us to solve meaningful problems that we tried to solve for so many years in recruitment tech that now it’s actually possible. So Matt, I think it’s a big, very exciting time for product leaders these days.
04:25
Shiran Yaroslavsky
I’m very joyful and happy of everything that we are building these days because it’s also allowing us to solve problems that have been there for many years.
04:36
Matt Alder
That kind of makes perfect sense. I think that everyone listening will know that the AI revolution is happening. Well, at least I hope everyone who’s listening would know it was happening. But I know that there is some confusion sometimes around specific aspect of it. What’s possible some people will call, will use sort of terminology interchangeably or in different ways and it can be quite confusing. So just kind of really wanted to sort of clarify where we are right now. So there’s a huge amount of talk about AI agents and what’s the difference between an agent and an AI copilot? What’s the, you know, what’s the kind of difference there?
05:17
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Yeah, for sure. So as you mentioned, we all using AI tools and features and so many of the interactions that we have with AI based products today are more product like copilots and assistant. So an AI copilot is a real time, more context specific, typically requires more user input to function. Think about it as you ask a question, you’re getting output from your product and then you need to ask a follow up question and so forth. While an agent on the other hand can be more autonomous. It runs in the background, it’s proactively perform tasks for you and understand what you’re trying to Achieve. So at Smart Recruiters, we’re building an AI agent kind of LED platform. Not just adding more AI onto existing platform and workflows, but redesigning the experience around proactive digital workers.
06:15
Shiran Yaroslavsky
And the shift toward agent allows to, you know, just to have a greater automation, less manual work, more intelligence, task orchestration. So for example, Matt, I don’t know if you know how much you’re using ChatGPT these days. I love this product, right? And so if, let’s say if I want to order a restaurant, a table at a restaurant in New York, right? I’m, I’m based in New York these days and so I can go to ChatGPT and ask for a list of recommended restaurant, maybe in a specific cuisine that I like, something like that.
06:51
Shiran Yaroslavsky
And then you would be able to see, you know, ChatGPT will provide a list of recommended restaurants for me and then maybe I’ll ask another question about, you know, now help me and provide also the links for me to kind of book a table and so forth and I can ask more questions and get more output as well. While OpenAI just recently launched the Operator, right, Which is the agent that can perform tasks through web browser, which is really exciting product. I don’t know if you got the chance to see the demo that they released. I think it was fascinating and kind of mind blowing about what we can achieve with AI these days.
07:31
Shiran Yaroslavsky
And so if I want to book a table through Operator, I just ask for it and then the agent basically go into the web browser and use Open Table with very minimum involvement on my end to just book a table for me, just end to end, just execute the task. So think about it in the recruitment space, you know, when we need to hire people, how much more impact it will be if we will have an agent like that, someone that can get the context, the goal, what we’re trying to achieve and just do it for us.
08:06
Matt Alder
I mean, it’s absolutely incredible what’s already possible. But I think what’s more incredible is what could be possible quite soon or could be easier for everyone to do in the very near future. And you mentioned that the chat GTP operator is going through the OpenTable web. You know, it’s basically going through a web kind of interface to this for you. We’re moving to a world where OpenTable will have its own agent, won’t it? So the agents can talk to each other and it’s going to be a much more smooth kind of process. I mean, how do agents collaborate together and why is Openness so important when it comes to all of this.
08:45
Shiran Yaroslavsky
I think it’s a terrific question, Matt. I can say that internally within Smart Recorders, we are designing Winston’s our own agent as well to be part of a system of agent because really no agent should work alone, right? Like people, we have this internal joke saying Winston need friends, right? To be successful agent must collaborate with one another. And so agents that share context and tasks can operate like if you would like a very high performing sports team. We each playing a different role but working toward a common goal, right? This is how you provide the most impact. And so openness here in this case is a key. An agent should be able to integrate with others to drive more seamless intelligence hiring process. And so we are talking about here about recruitment, right? So just as an example, think about your recruiting agent.
09:47
Shiran Yaroslavsky
If your recruiting agent can work with your, let’s say LinkedIn for example, LinkedIn got their own agent, right? And, and so the LinkedIn agent can identify prospect, maybe and then your recruiting agent can screen them and help you to find the right candidate all the way through sending the offer. And then your agent, your recruiting agent can use your HRIS or HCM agent like your workday or SAP agent when you need to onboard them so they can move tasks to one another. Context information to help you to execute end to end.
10:23
Matt Alder
I mean it’s incredible stuff. And the possibilities of where this might go in talent acquisition are kind of almost endless. And I think that one of the issues that I know people have is almost how they can imagine what the future is actually going to look like in terms of how they plan for it. Now you’re actually building the products that shape this future. How do you decide what to build and where does the vision come from for it?
10:53
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Yeah, I think it’s important question for every product leader really. And I think that the challenging part is also that there is a lot of buzz around AI these days. And despite the buzz, we need to focus on solving real customer problems and delivering meaningful impact. Right. And so I can share that what we’ve done at SmartRecorders last year in Q3, we ran over 70 customer interviews to understand key pain points for our customers today. And the biggest opportunities for productivity gains based on our research were in scheduling and screening. This is where customers were spending most of their time. They felt less productive. They identify the best opportunities to streamline more efficiency. And so we started building Winston capabilities in those areas first, leveraging conversational AI also to drive innovation impact in those areas. As well.
11:54
Shiran Yaroslavsky
And so this is how it need to be focused on the customer and what they’re trying to solve, what we’re trying to, what the impact would look in their business. In general, our vision and roadmap planning is grounded in deep user research, not hype. And so Smart Recruiters as a program which I’m very proud of, we call it a design partner program where customers can partner closely with our product teams and we assign them to different product team based on their interest and their passion and together we help them to just. We are sharing the future of our product. We are sharing some early prototypes and design and concept. We’re getting their feedback and they helping us to ensure that we are building the right things to make them successful.
12:45
Shiran Yaroslavsky
So building products that are very customer centric, driving clear impact for our users is key.
12:56
Matt Alder
You mentioned there’s a huge amount of noise out there about AI. There’s a huge amounts of kind of products and services that have come onto the market. How do TA leaders know what to look for? How do they, what should they look for? How should they evaluate AI recruitment tools as they come across them?
13:17
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Absolutely. And I think there is a, you know, every 21 years old, you know, can just start another product in part by AI and you know, there are so many tools out there. So it’s a, it’s a terrific question. You know, how we, what kind of question we need to ask ourselves when we’re evaluating and looking into the different tools, how we make sure that we are creating the best ecosystem and really product orchestration for our users. I would say there are three things you need to ask. First one is about trust and safety. We are serving large enterprises and so this is really top of mind for them. So I would encourage you to ask, is the AI being built responsibly? What safeguards are in place to reduce bias and prevent hallucinations? Right.
14:12
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Are privacy and regulation standards building at Smart Vocoders I can share. We know the challenges of privacy and compliance for large global enterprises very well. We’ve been here in the industry for many years and so we design with compliance in mind, making sure that we’re addressing the customer challenges as we know them very well as we’re building our products. So this is I think the first topic I would ask my potential vendor about. Right. The second piece I would say is more about tech Stack fit I would say. So I would ask about does the tool integrate with your existing systems? Right. Can it collaborate? Not only with other tools, but also their agent. Right. So how I would encourage you to ask how it will work with my maybe my successfactor agent and my salesforce agent and so forth.
15:09
Shiran Yaroslavsky
What kind of how you’re building your infrastructure structure to making sure it can do that, it can collaborate very well with other agents out there. And so this is the second piece and then I would say the last factor to consider is how visionary they are and ask them about their future vision for their product. I would ask vendors how they see the hiring experience evolving in the next two, three, four, five years from now. Are they billing for that future? And you probably want a partner who is not just solving for today’s problems, but innovating for what’s next. Right. So how you making sure that they set you up for success with.
15:53
Shiran Yaroslavsky
I think you mentioned that Matt, with all this giant leap in technology that we see how they’re building their product, that you will keep staying ahead and be able to innovate also in the next few years.
16:06
Matt Alder
And I think that leads nicely onto my sort of final question which is, you know, what is the ultimate vision for AI in acquisition? What’s the ultimate vision that you’re working towards?
16:17
Shiran Yaroslavsky
I think as you mentioned, AI is, you know, and the tech is evolving so fast that I think what we can do with how we are thinking about it today will change and will evolve also in the next few years. But I would say in high level AI will make hiring easier, it will make it more intuitive, it will make it faster. Today’s process is pretty complex if I’m being honest. There are so many tools, many steps, many users, a lot of configurations. And with agents, hiring will become more conversational, more seamless across devices, different platforms. I’m always sharing with my customers and they all agree that no one really likes to log into hiring platform or an ats. Right.
17:05
Shiran Yaroslavsky
So how you’re bringing all this great product experience to the users where they are, engage them with their own, you know, software or product they are using. So you would be able to maybe screen and set up an interview from your WhatsApp or your SMS. So this is something that I think will be much more achievable with the new technology. And digital workers will automate admin work like scheduling, interviews, resumes, reviews and writing job descriptions. So I think digital workers will become key. And how you mentioned about agent orchestration, this is exactly what will help to build a very strong digital worker for us that will be able to just free recruiters to focus on more strategic work, connecting with people, advising teams, building great companies. This is what it’s all about.
18:01
Shiran Yaroslavsky
So taking away all this admin work that is not really necessary to help hiring teams be more successful.
18:09
Matt Alder
Shiran, thank you very much for talking to me.
18:12
Shiran Yaroslavsky
Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me.
18:15
Matt Alder
My thanks to Shiran. 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. This is my show.
