AI offers a genuine opportunity to reinvent talent acquisition, but not many employers have gone beyond targeting incremental improvements in speed and efficiency. The ones who are truly using AI to be transformational are doing something fundamentally different. It takes a real commitment to experimentation, a clear definition of what AI fluency means, and a willingness to redesign hiring from scratch.
So what does that shift actually look like in practice?
My guest this week is Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, where going AI-native is a company-wide mission. In our conversation, Tracy shares how Zapier is redefining AI fluency, redesigning the hiring process from the ground up, and rethinking what the recruiter role looks like in an AI native world.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What is an AI Native company?
• The difference between AI adoption and AI transformation
• What is AI fluency?
• A mindset of experimentation, curiosity, and discernment
• Upskilling the TA Team
• Psychological safety and protected time
• The impact of implementing an AI interviewer and the diminishing importance of the resume
• Fraud versus cheating versus just using the available tools
• What is true transformation in recruiting, and what does the future look like
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00:00
Matt Alder
Most employers who are adopting AI in recruiting are targeting faster, more efficient versions of what they already do. AI native recruiting is very different. It means going back to the fundamentals of hiring and rebuilding from there. What does that look like and why does it matter? Keep listening to find out.
00:24
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from Paradox. 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 from 12 days to 4 and 7. Eleven is saving their store leaders 40,000 hours per week. The craziest thing is all of these companies did it, but by leveraging the same technology. Paradox Acquired by Workday in 2025, Paradox pioneered conversational hiring. Whether acting as your ATS or automating the hiring process on top of your existing hcm, Paradox streamlines the entire experience. And if you’re a workday customer, Paradox now operates seamlessly within their talent acquisition suite as the Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent.
01:24
Matt Alder
Driven by a 24/7 ai assistant, Paradox 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 continues to help hundreds of the world’s top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences. Spend more time with people, not software. You can find out more by going to Paradox.ai. That’s Paradox.ai.
02:24
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 803 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. AI offers a genuine opportunity to reinvent talent acquisition, but not many employers have got beyond just targeting incremental improvements in speed and efficiency. The ones who are truly using AI to be transformational are doing something fundamentally different. It takes a real commitment to experimentation, a clear definition of what AI fluency means, and a willingness to redesign hiring from scratch. So what does this actually look like in practice? My guest this week is Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, where going AI native is a company wide mission. In our conversation, Tracy shares how Zapier is redefining AI fluency with redesigning the hiring process from the ground up and rethinking what the recruiter role looks like in an AI native world.
03:27
Matt Alder
Hi Tracy, and welcome to the podcast.
03:29
Tracy St. Dic
Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here, Matt.
03:32
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Can you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:38
Tracy St. Dic
Sure, absolutely. My name is Tracy St. Dic. I’m the global head of talent at Zapier. Zapier is a fully remote AI native company of just under a thousand people. But before I was at Zapier and I’ve been here for about four years, I spent more than a decade at Teach for America, leading national recruitment for an education nonprofit. And before that, I actually started as a kindergarten teacher in East New York, Brooklyn. So I’ve spent years in recruitment. I’ve led scale, I’ve led really niche roles, but I’m really focused right now on helping Zapier become an AI native company and shape the future of work.
04:14
Matt Alder
How does being a kindergarten teacher compared to working with recruitment? Are there any similarities?
04:19
Tracy St. Dic
I will say being a kindergarten teacher is still the hardest job I’ve ever had. And it is so much easier to work with recruiter, I can imagine. I’ll definitely say that, but not super dissimilar. I think there’s a lot of really great lessons around talent and ensuring people thrive and ensuring they have the right motivation and the right environment. That honestly carries a lot into how I think about talent today.
04:41
Matt Alder
As you said, Zapier is a AI first AI native company. And I kind of want to talk about what that. What that kind of actually means.
04:48
Matt Alder
And I suppose maybe the best place.
04:49
Matt Alder
To start is at the moment lots of employers are trying to implement AI in their recruiting or their talent process. And I think the. The overwhelming narrative seems to be about speed and efficiency. What. What are people getting wrong there?
05:05
Tracy St. Dic
I think that if you’re just thinking about speed and efficiency, then you are very surface level thinking about what an AI trans really mean. I think a lot of companies are stopping at efficiency and looking at hours saved and calling it done. Great. We’re using AI to get faster. That seems so elementary, based on where I think the technology is going and where it can go in the future. And so at Zapier, we think about working with AI in kind of two different ways. Adoptive versus real transformation. And adoptive is exactly what I think people are doing now. They’re saying, how do I just save a few hours here and there based on what I already used to do? And I just make that faster, which, to be fair, could better for quality of life. Like people could enjoy it more.
05:49
Tracy St. Dic
Like that’s not a bad thing. I just think that it’s not enough that’s where you’re starting to talk about, I’m 10% faster, I’m 20% faster. When you get to real transformation, I think that’s when you can start to think in multiples, I’m two times faster, 10 times faster. Even so, even if you’re just looking at efficiency, transformation is different. And the reason why is because I think adoptive AI is really just popping AI on top of what you already have. Transformation is saying, if I were to start from scratch, if I were to go back to the core of what this process or what this work really means, I’m going to rebuild it, knowing what I know now about AI in an AI native way. And so we call it Zapier Redesigning the factory.
06:30
Tracy St. Dic
It’s not just making things faster, it’s actually redesigning how the work gets done, which may include redesigning roles, what people do, titles, org charts, all of that. That’s when you really see, I think, real transformation. And I can tell you Zapier is not there yet. We are aspiring to that. We’re moving towards that. I don’t see a lot of companies or I haven’t really seen any companies who have made that full leap to transformation, personally.
06:53
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s interesting because we’ve had some good case studies on the podcast where people have transformed something, a particular bit of recruiting or something, and they’ve always been the most interesting, valuable and effective uses of AI as opposed to, we’ve applied to AI to what we already do, or even worse, we’ve applied AI to a process that’s already broken, so it can be broken quicker and more efficiently. So. So, yeah, it’s a really interesting. It’s a really interesting time.
07:22
Matt Alder
I want to dive back into a.
07:24
Matt Alder
Little bit more into what’s going on in Zapier as a whole. So AI first business. And also you’ve got a big emphasis on AI fluency. Tell us about that, what that means from a talent perspective.
07:35
Tracy St. Dic
When we think about AI fluenc, we don’t think about it as just tooling. I also think this is maybe where companies who are kind of just sitting at the surface level, where they think AI fluent means. You can use cloud code or codecs or cursor or things like that. And that’s kind of where they stop. We think about AI fluency a lot more holistically, which I also think is more durable. So when we assess AI fluency in our hiring process and also for our current team members and our performance reviews and how we think about rewards and recognition, stuff like that. We think about four components, mindset, strategy, the technical builder skills also, and then accountability and discernment. And that’s really purposeful because the tools are always going to change.
08:17
Tracy St. Dic
In fact, when you apply to Zapier and we are testing your AI fluency, even the technical skills, we’re tool agnostic because in six months that’s going to be outdated.
08:25
Speaker 4
Right?
08:26
Tracy St. Dic
But mindset really means how are you leaning into AI? How are you able to be adaptable, dynamic, keep experimenting, keep pushing, getting really curious about where the technology is going and what it means for you. Strategy or strategic acumen is more function specific. It’s like saying as a recruiter, where do I think the function of recruiting is going? Where do I think the work is moving? How is that going to change my work in the future? So it’s really actually putting a more reflective, forward facing lens, which honestly I think it makes it easier for change management and adapting to the future later. I think then builder skills are the more technical skills. We lean on Anthropic’s AI fluency index for some of those. How do you iterate with AI? How do you thought partner with AI?
09:11
Tracy St. Dic
And then accountability and discernment is a durable skill because it’s really about, you know, what is good and what is not good, how can you use AI and how shouldn’t you? What needs to be human? So when we think about. Just go back to your original question. We think about AI fluency at Zapier. It’s not just the tooling, it is how you work with AI in your context and how you’re thinking about moving towards a more AI future in the future. And so that’s really what we look at when we say we mean AI fluency.
09:37
Matt Alder
And it’s really interesting because I think I speak to a lot of employers who want to recruit people with AI fluency and AI skills. And when you dig below the surface, they don’t actually know what that means. So it’s interesting to hear about the kind of things that you’ve been doing. I’m sure it must have evolved as well as you’ve kind of moved forward with it. I mean, how much has it changed? How much, how much has it evolved?
09:57
Tracy St. Dic
So it has changed quite a bit. So the first time we put out our AI fluency rubric for hiring was in like May, June 2025. And I honestly think Zapier was one of the first companies to define what AI fluency was and to say we are going to start looking for that. And then we did our second version more recently at the end of March, beginning of April, our V2, and we did take nine months of data from that. And what did that look like in terms of real impact on the company? Because it’s one thing to say we want people with AI skills, but if you’re not seeing it pay off in how they on ramp how they perform as an employee, then it’s just a nice to have. We wanted to ensure that was really grounded in data.
10:38
Tracy St. Dic
The things that we changed in V2, one, we added accountability and discernment. Two, we raised the bar significantly for what our minimum bar of capable is. Three, we decided to put a real focus on what our CTO calls the slope and not the snapshot. So we care less about where you’re using AI today and we’re really more interested in how were you using AI 6 months ago and then what was that journey like to get to where we are today? And then also, how have you continued to grow in your AI fluency throughout the hiring process as sort of a meta signal of how fast can they learn and grow? It’s kind of going into growth mindset. Right.
11:15
Tracy St. Dic
And then the last thing that we really changed was thinking about managers because I think managers play such a responsibility, managers in leadership in this world. And so when we are hiring a manager at Zapier, part of our fluency rubric is also to look at how did you create psychological safety for your team around AI? How did you encourage them to iterate and experiment? Did you upskill them? How did you apply tenets of change management? So we want to ensure that managers coming in have that greater responsibility to be the leader of their team. When it comes to AI fluency, you’re.
11:49
Matt Alder
Quite an established company. You’ve been around for a while, you’re not a startup. So it’s interesting how that works from a hiring perspective. But what about the people that you already have within the business? What does that journey look like? I suppose particularly in your team, how have you been able to build that capability as you move forward?
12:06
Tracy St. Dic
I think this is where leadership and management has to put their money where their mouth is. If you want people to be using AI and upskilling, you have to protect the time, you have to make those wins visible, you have to incentivize it, you have to reward it, you have to do all of those things. And so just a couple of concrete things that we did. First of all, we started building AI experimentation into all of Our normal rituals, we brought this into team meetings. Our hackathons that we do at Zapier were very AI focused. We repurposed team time to have people work in small groups to tackle problems and build on things that they wanted to solve within their own work. And so we’ve been doing that over the past few years.
12:47
Tracy St. Dic
What we’ve done more recently that our team so far has really loved is carving out time every three weeks for about five hours of protected builder time. And as a team, as a talent team, we come together, we have a kickoff, we talk about, like what we’re going to experiment with today. And we give people time and space to actually experiment and to do things. Then we come back, we share, we learn from each other. You know, it’s a really nice cycle, but my team would tell you if we didn’t have that time blocked off, they would feel the pressures of day to day of core recruiting more screens. That’s not so, you know, as a leader, I also, we tell our hiring teams, hey, our team is going to take this five hour protected time to grow and to learn.
13:27
Tracy St. Dic
We are very transparent why we’re doing it and how it’s going to help accelerate our progress in the future.
13:32
Matt Alder
I think that’s so important because this is such an experiential thing. I think it’s something you can’t really learn about in theory. You kind of have to be hands on with it and you have to have those moments where you’re like, I had no idea that this was even possible. So it’s just really important, isn’t it, to actually just be hands on?
13:49
Tracy St. Dic
I think, you know, I’m not always a big fan of saying if you just put more time into something, you’ll get better. But I think that’s true with AI. Like you need at bats, you need to practice. It builds not only your creativity on what you see AI can do, but it also builds your confidence that you know when it’s a good product and it’s not a good product and you know how to navigate around that. So I think that’s important and I think making those gains visible really early. Like there’s a reason why we said with our sourcers and recruiters or our whole team, we said start to think about how you use AI for the things that feel the most, like toil in your work.
14:20
Tracy St. Dic
And I use that word really specifically, toil, because everyone has an image of what toil they have to do in their job, the admin work, the tedious stuff. Like, let’s start there and let’s make your lives better by getting rid of that. And so whenever we think about any AI experiment, we look at efficiency for sure, but is it better quality or is it better quality decision making, better quality insights, better quality conversations that it’s leading to? And then the third one, employee experience, is it making their lives as an employee even better? And you can even say stakeholder experience too. Like, is it better for candidates, is it better for hiring managers? But is it making them enjoy their jobs more because they’re able to use their unique skills for the human stuff? So we start there.
15:00
Tracy St. Dic
And I think when people start to see what I call magical moments, Matt, like these magical moments where you’re like, wow, AI can do that. For me, that’s what really builds the momentum, and I think you have to make time for that.
15:11
Matt Alder
From a transformation perspective, what are you seeing in recruiting that’s true transformation, as opposed to just people getting used to the tools and doing things faster? How’s that emerging?
15:21
Tracy St. Dic
I will say that this is the question I’m obsessed with, so I don’t have the answer. I am seeing bits and pieces of potential transformation happening. I think, honestly, I think the use of AI interviewers is a really interesting technology. Not just because I don’t believe it’s necessarily for replacing recruiters at all. I don’t believe that it just makes recruiters faster. I actually think there’s a lot of other benefits for the candidate and for TA teams. So that’s one thing that could potentially push us into transformation. I don’t think we are clear yet, but when I think about transformation, two things that I would want to see is one, a big piece of this is AI orchestration. So everybody has HR tools and platforms that have AI features. Everybody has that.
16:08
Tracy St. Dic
It’s like they’re selling you that they’re like this AI feature, this AI feature,. Right. And you can use those AI features separately. I’m sure that helps. I’m sure that makes you more efficient. But until you’re really thinking about how you’re designing entire workflows with AI, which we call AI orchestration, across all of your platforms, whatever they are, that’s when you’re really unlocking true efficiency and quality. So that’s one. The second thing is I really believe hiring has three main parts. If you break it down, it’s talent identification, it is talent evaluation, both actual skills and fit with the company, and then it’s the candidate’s evaluation of us. And that’s Only those three things. There’s nothing in there that says you have to have a resume, an application, even an interview. There’s nothing that says that if you think about the core part.
16:57
Tracy St. Dic
So I am really obsessed with this question of how do you get at those core parts in a completely different way, in how we’re thinking about AI and thinking about the landscape of fraud and high volume and all of this stuff. So I don’t know the answer. I have not yet met other TA leaders who have figured it out, but I am actively seeking TA leaders to brainstorm with me to figure that out, because I think that’s where we’re going to start to see TA move from legacy processes to real transformation.
17:25
Matt Alder
It’s such an interesting question as well, because I think when you kind of dig into those things, there are ways that we’ve been doing recruiting that have been the same for 200 years, 400 years in some cases, and those questions have never been asked before. So it’s such an interesting time from that perspective and a real unique opportunity as well for people to really change recruiting for the. For the better. For the better.
17:47
Tracy St. Dic
I think it’s an exciting time, I mean, personally, so I’m. We’re, we’re having a lot of fun with it, I think right now.
17:52
Matt Alder
So just to dive into that example that you talked about there, the AI interviewer, because you’ve implemented one in kind of recent months, so why did you do it, what did you do and how’s it been working?
18:05
Tracy St. Dic
So I’ll start with the problem statement, the why. Basically, our top of the funnel was just really broken. We were getting thousands of applications in the first day or two of a role. At the time, about 20 to 30% were getting flagged by our different sort of free fraud alert systems, specifically on the tech side. And recruiters were spending so much time just trying to like wade through the volume while genuinely strong candidates were kind of getting lost in the noise. Because when everyone’s AI enabled, everyone kind of looks the same and you’re not sure exactly, you know, so they would get on screens and then like within the first five minutes they’re like, that was not a good use of my time. And so about, you know, six, eight. Oh gosh, it was longer than that. Maybe like nine months ago now.
18:48
Tracy St. Dic
I honestly wasn’t interested in AI screens at all. But the volume and the fraud piece has really changed my mind. So we partnered with AI Ezra AI Labs and we started to implement agentic recruiter screens at the top of the funnel. So candidates were told up front they’re talking to an AI, they can opt out, all of those sort of things. But we started to see some really interesting stuff. So I thought it was just going to help with the volume. But what it really started to do was help with quality for two reasons. One, we sort of tracked like, here are the people based on their resume and application that we would have talked to regardless. We would have asked them to come to a recruiter screen, but. And that’s maybe like 5%.
19:25
Tracy St. Dic
But then here’s like 50% of more people that we would not have talked to based on their resume and application because we would never have had capacity. But let’s see how they do. And in our first test, about 30% of those folks, we ended up moving to the hiring process because they were kind of what I call hidden gems. We would not have screened them otherwise, or we would not have met with them otherwise. But they showed something in the Ezra screen that showed us like, ooh, they have more potential than we originally thought. So to me, that’s very important. That means we’re actually strengthening our talent pools and we’re getting the best people to actually meet with a human in the next stage. So that was really important.
20:01
Tracy St. Dic
The second thing that we noticed is that even if it maybe didn’t change the decision of the folks that we would have met with are the top folks, we would have met with them anyway, et cetera. What we found even in that case is that it didn’t necessarily make us faster, but the quality was there. Because by the time the candidates got to meet with the recruiter, we knew so much more about them. They had their questions answered by the AI about Zapier, like all their low level questions. So were able to jump right in and have like high quality conversations with them in their very first touch point. So that, to me speaks to not just efficiency.
20:32
Tracy St. Dic
I mean, were able to screen five times as many candidates and were able to really shrink the time that candidates moved to the next step from like eight days to almost just under three days. So all of that was more efficient. But the quality piece is what I care deeply about. And that was very exciting to see and why we decided to keep going with this experiment.
20:51
Matt Alder
And to clarify it. Green does not just text. It’s voice as well, isn’t it?
20:55
Tracy St. Dic
Yeah. So it’s voice, it’s complete voice, and it asks really great probing questions. So there’s also the benefit of consistent. It asks all the same consistent questions, but it Also asks really nice, probing questions to ensure that we get to the answers that we need. And of course, candidates can take it, you know, anytime they want, when they’re ready, which has been also incredible for our global hiring. So when we think about hiring in places like India, where we are doing a lot of hiring, you know, this allows candidates to, at their own time, in their own time zone, take this and give us more information instead of waiting two to three weeks for that small window of time when a recruiter or someone from the US can meet with them.
21:33
Tracy St. Dic
And so, again, I could go on, but there’s lots of really interesting, exciting things that we’re seeing here as this technology improves.
21:40
Matt Alder
You mentioned the sort of the higher quality of conversations that the recruiters are having. How has it changed the role of the recruiters? How are you redesigning the role of the recruiters to kind of incorporate this new way of working?
21:51
Tracy St. Dic
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of buzz around the TA industry around turning our recruiters into talent advisors, and it has a lot of different names, but I think that is still the direction we’re going. If you again, break down the core of what is a recruiter’s most unique human value, it is the building relationships. It’s being compelling and cultivating and sharing the story of the company. It is like understanding the market and bringing in people who will be the right fit. And so for me, I think the recruiter role of the future, and even if we call them recruiters, I don’t know, it’s more of the emphasis on the human elements. I would even say advising hiring managers, training interviewers, ensuring that calibration and strength of our process is really strong.
22:35
Tracy St. Dic
So I think there’s a lot from the research and the insights and the kind of admin things that will go away very quickly. And what will be left is the core of what I think recruiters enjoy doing the most, which is the more nuanced offer negotiations and things like. Like that. So that’s where I’m excited to see it go. I also think recruiters should start to lean in more towards workforce management and planning alongside people, business partners and comp. Like having a bigger view of not just the market of talent, but also the organization and be able to advise on, you know, the intersection of those things. And so I think it’s going to be exciting for recruiters when we move more toward that and. And it could be even different.
23:13
Tracy St. Dic
But I think that’s at least the next immediate shift in the next year or two.
23:16
Matt Alder
Flipping to the candidates and the candidates using AI in the recruiting process.
23:20
Matt Alder
It just seems to be so many.
23:23
Matt Alder
Conversations about this just seem to be muddled up. Fraud, cheating, new ways of working. It’s a very sort of confusing space. Is this an arms race? Is it an important part of hiring? What’s Zapier’s take on it all?
23:35
Tracy St. Dic
I love the analogy of an arms race. I would say it’s not an arms race for the honest stuff. Like we assume candidates use AI. We actually encourage candidates to use AI. On our website we have like a here’s how you should use it, here’s how some prompts you should use, here’s how you should not use it. You know, here’s a red line. And so I think like there is, there’s definitely an encouragement for us for people to use AI in smart and responsible ways. And that’s sort of what our process tests for too, and our AI fluency process. But that’s because we expect them to use it here when they get here at Zapier. So I don’t understand, honestly, when companies are like, we want to use AI, but we don’t want our candidates to use AI, it’s cheating.
24:09
Tracy St. Dic
And I’m like, well, how is that then indicative of how they’re going to perform in your business? Does not make sense to me. I hope less companies are doing that now. But on the fraud piece, I think there’s such a spectrum of fraud. There’s like fraud, capital F, like foreign mal intent, you know, malicious actors. There’s like complete fabrication of experience. Right? But then you also have fraud, little F, which is more embellishment tale as old as time. Like I, you know, I, my resume seems better than I would have done it, but it’s like perfectly aligned to the job description. But all of that information is actually true. So I think there’s such a spectrum.
24:45
Tracy St. Dic
I’m not as much worried about the fraud little F, because I think that honest people, you know, they’re not going to have an AI in their ear during their skills test telling them what to do. Right? They, they genuinely want to work here at Zapier and they just need a leg up in the hiring process because it’s tough out there. Right? But I do think it’s an arms race with frog, big fraud, big F because the technology is getting better, it’s getting more sophisticated. You know, it was over a year ago we spotted our first deep fake. Now when I look back at those clips, it is laughably so low tech than the deep Fakes we’re catching now, like so different.
25:20
Tracy St. Dic
I heard from somewhere at a conference that like fraud is like the biggest growing industry in ta, like those who are like actually doing the fraud and also the companies that are trying to prevent it. But right now you see a mismatch, which is why it feels like an arms race is fraud can be agentic and automated. Like they can spin up bots and new people applying easily. On our side, it still feels a bit manual because even when you have fraud prevention, you still need to go and do some due diligence, right. So you don’t unintentionally knock someone out. Right. So it feels like a mismatch. It is a huge problem, especially for a global remote company like us. And I just think it’s going to continue to get more and more sophisticated.
26:02
Tracy St. Dic
So most TA leaders I talk to say it’s not a matter of if but when that’s going to happen and how do we catch it as soon as possible and how do we ensure that we do as minimal damage as possible.
26:12
Matt Alder
I think what’s interesting about all of these things, what they have in common, you know, fraud with a big F, fraud with a small F, people embellishing people just using AI as part of the process naturally, is I think they really shine a light on how inadequate the tools of recruiting are in terms of resumes and some of the ways that interviews are done. And it just really says to me that we kind of need to rethink the whole thing rather than trying to shore up what’s there already.
26:36
Tracy St. Dic
I completely agree. I am ready to be done with resumes. We’ve actually, with our AI screeners, we started to do another experiment that we’re kicking off. We’re in the middle of where we actually make the AI screen a part of the application. So rather than making it sort of like the next piece, it’s like you fill out your application and the second piece of that is doing an AI screen. Because one, we think it will prevent some fraudulent actors from doing the screen, especially if it’s bots, like they can’t necessarily do that. And then two, it will also allow us to get that in depth information sooner. So we want that information before a recruiter even looks and assesses their candidate pool.
27:12
Tracy St. Dic
So by making it part of the application, it already can help kind of cut out some of that noise, or so we hope. We are experimenting with it and I can let you know how it goes. But it is something that we have to absolutely rethink. I think a resume is basically worthless except where you worked and how long you worked there. That’s all I really care about.
27:29
Matt Alder
I couldn’t agree with you more on that. Definitely the case. We talked about transformation and defining what that is and what that looks like, but, you know, to put you on the spot a bit.
27:37
Matt Alder
What’s your vision?
27:38
Matt Alder
Where do you think recruiting or where would you like recruiting to kind of go in the next two to three years? What does the end game look like?
27:45
Tracy St. Dic
I don’t want to say I know what the end game looks like because I think every few months I’m constantly also surprised and impressed about how technology has changed. Like again, a year ago, I would not have thought AI screeners were gonna be any part of that calculation, but here we are. And now I’m one of probably the biggest proponents of them, so I’m not gonna say I have the key to the future. But what I will say is more on a high level is I think all the administrative core of recruiting is largely automated scheduling, drafting, status updates, first pass screening even. Not because they don’t matter, but because AI can handle them well enough that it won’t make sense for. For a human to spend their precious time there.
28:24
Tracy St. Dic
And then what I think is left is the judgment work and the human work of, you know, that always made the actual job. So I think the skills that differentiate won’t necessarily be, you know, expertise in any one tool or even any one part of the process. Like, I don’t think you’ll have sourcers and recruiters and coordinators as like separate jobs in the future. I think it will become a lot more fluid. It’ll be probably become a lot more fluid with the people team as a whole. Whole. I don’t think TA will necessarily be siloed as just a full team, but I think that we’ll start to really see more business sense, business judgment and strategic acumen as it relates to the entire talent market and how personalized that can be to a company.
29:07
Tracy St. Dic
And I think recruiters will be able to solve their own problems. They’ll be so fluent and able to build that they’ll say, wow, I’m a subject matter expert and I can build on cloud code and I’m going to like, solve my own problem to make this easier. So I think there’s going to be a lot of that. I don’t know where that ends in terms of an end state, but I also really think the three things that any TA leader needs to be focused on now is one, how Are we evolving the future of the hiring process, which we talked about earlier? How are we evolving the future of the TA operating model, how you operate as a team, who has what roles, et cetera, and then I think how you figure out the future of a recruiter.
29:46
Tracy St. Dic
Those are the three questions that my team is trying to figure out. And I think there might be a sequence there, it might be in parallel, but those are the pieces that I think will drastically change in the next two years.
29:57
Matt Alder
As a final question, what have you changed your mind about when it comes to AI recruiting? Where is your opinion? Very different from where it was a year ago.
30:03
Tracy St. Dic
Oh, gosh. Well, I think AI screens is an obvious one. Before, I was definitely in the camp of, like, no, like, that’s the human part of talking to candidates. And now I’m like, but not if 80% of those are fraud. So I’ve definitely changed my mind about. I think the second thing I’ve changed my mind about is how critical it is to really redesign recruiting, that it is not enough to just say, we can make screening faster. We can make, you know, have a better skills test. We can have even a better interview. I think. And I just want to be clear. I got this from another TA leader I admire, Scott, who leads Scott Bono, who leads th Shopify.
30:45
Tracy St. Dic
This analogy that’s really been sticking with me is like, you know, when you are in a band and you want to bring on a new guitarist, you don’t sit and talk to the guitarist. Hey, how do you play guitar? Like, tell me about your technical skills in guitar. You. You ask the guitarist to come play with your band. You play together, you jam. It’s an audition. And this idea has really stuck with me of how do we move from interview to audition because of fraud, because of trying to understand best cultural ad to the company because you want to understand how they’re going to thrive in your environment. This is something that’s really stuck with me. And I think, just in general, we have to refigure out the entire process.
31:25
Tracy St. Dic
And I’ve become obsessed with this idea of how do we move from interview to audition? And does that give us a better signal for talent evaluation and for the candidate to evaluate us? So, again, breaking it down to those questions, core components. What can look differently about that?
31:38
Matt Alder
Tracy, thank you very much for talking to me.
31:40
Tracy St. Dic
This was fun. Yeah, I could talk about this forever. So this is great.
31:45
Matt Alder
My thanks to Tracy. You can follow this podcast on Apple, podcasts on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
