This is the final episode of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.
Three years into the AI boom, the marketing noise has never been louder. Everything is AI-powered and every vendor makes the same claims. In the final episode, Steve Hardy, who leads marketing at SmartRecruiters, is unusually candid about all of it: why he tells his own sales team to stop demoing, what he calls AI washing, why buyers should start with business priorities rather than features, and what actually builds trust with buyers and candidates alike. The series closes with the question that ran through every conversation: what does good leadership look like in an AI-driven world?
Key Takeaways
- Three years into the AI boom, "AI washing" has become the new greenwashing; buyers now want to see real business outcomes.
- The AI conversation should start with C-suite business priorities like growth and operating costs, not features and specs.
- Innovation is moving so fast that feature comparisons are pointless; no buyer will ever keep up, which is exactly why business priorities have to lead.
- Trust is now the marketing metric that matters, and it's built on facts, data and evidence rather than attention-grabbing claims.
- The fastest way to succeed with AI is not a total system overhaul; start in one place, prove it, and scale from there.
- Vendors have a responsibility to build AI trust with candidates, not just buyers, and there's more work for the industry to do there.
- Good leadership doesn't fundamentally change in an AI-driven world, but making time for everyone to become AI literate is now a core leadership job.
Transcript
Matt Alder: [0:17] Hi there, and welcome to Decoding the C-Suite, a five-part mini-series from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI. Over the series, I've been talking to five senior leaders at SmartRecruiters, seven months on from their acquisition by SAP, decoding how each function around the leadership table thinks about AI. We've covered the thesis, the people, the money, and the product, which brings us to the final lens. Today, we look at the market.
Matt Alder: [0:49] We're three years into the AI boom, and the marketing noise has never been louder. Everything is AI-powered, every vendor makes the same claims, and buyers are struggling to tell substance from hype. Steve Hardy leads marketing at SmartRecruiters, and he's unusually candid about all of it. From why he tells his own sales team to stop demoing, to what he calls AI washing, and why the real conversation should start with business priorities rather than features. Whether you're buying technology or just trying to get your organisation to see through the noise, this last episode in the series will really sharpen your thinking. This is Decoding the C-Suite, Episode 5, The Market.
Matt Alder: [1:33] Hi, Steve. Great to be talking to you.
Steve Hardy: [1:34] Yeah, likewise. Looking forward to this conversation, Matt.
Matt Alder: [1:37] Let's talk about the market. What's going on in the market at the moment? Where do you see the gap between the challenges that your customers have and some of the ways that AI has perhaps been being marketed?
Steve Hardy: [1:50] Yeah, interesting. So what's going on in the market? Have you heard about this thing called AI? I was laughing just the other day. It feels like ten years ago, do you remember when everything was green? We were greenwashing everything. Now we're kind of AI washing everything. We're about three years into this AI bubble, if you like, and buyers are now really starting to wrestle with what the very practical applications are, and most importantly, what the real business outcomes of AI are. We've gone past the experimentation, we've gone past the trials, we've gone past the pilots, and people are starting to say, okay, well, what's the real payoff here?
Steve Hardy: [2:45] So I think the gap that we're certainly seeing is that we have to shift our go-to-market motion, how we market, how we sell, how we support, how we enable our partner ecosystem, to be able to really focus on reality rather than hype. What is the change management that we need to put in place to really drive AI adoption in an organisation? What are the different processes and workflows that have to either change or be adopted to really drive AI in the organisation? So we're really focusing now on moving beyond the hype and proving the real value, versus just getting attention, let's say.
Matt Alder: [3:43] If you're setting yourself in the buyer position here, what would your advice be to people about cutting through all of the noise? Because it is absolutely overwhelming in terms of the marketing noise that's out there. How would you cut through it?
Steve Hardy: [3:56] It's interesting, because so many of our conversations with buyers, they want to start with a demo. Show me the product. Show me what you can do. Show me the features. Can you do this? And my advice often to our sellers and to our reps is stop. Really pare back. Understand what the business priorities are. Understand what the challenges are. What are we trying to address? What are we trying to fix? And I'm not even talking about hiring business problems. I'm not talking about how we accelerate time to hire or how we improve the candidate experience. I'm talking about the big business issues that the C-suite is really motivated by. How do we grow our business? How do we expand into new territories? How do we take opportunities into new markets? How do we reduce operating expenses? If we can align investments with some of those big mission-critical priorities, then I think that we can be much, much more successful.
Steve Hardy: [5:03] So my advice to any buyer is don't get hung up on features and specs and seeing the demo. Really go back and inspect what your business priorities are first, and start there. Then we can have a much more meaningful conversation about how we can help address some of those priorities.
Matt Alder: [5:23] That's really useful advice, because it has always been the tradition in this market that you look at the demo, you look at what it does, does it do everything that we need it to? But with everything moving so quickly, including the features and the products that the vendors have, it just becomes, not irrelevant, but just so much less important.
Steve Hardy: [5:43] Yeah, it's funny. I'll talk about marketing speak for a second. One of our most popular calls to action is get a demo. People come to our website just to click the demo button. But at SmartRecruiters, we're literally an innovation machine. We release new capabilities every single month. Over the past year, we've had 126 new features, capabilities and new products that we've launched into the marketplace, which is 170% more than we did in the prior year. So we're just accelerating the pace of innovation.
Steve Hardy: [6:21] So you're absolutely right, and that's almost why buyers really need to focus on what their business issues are, because you'll never keep up with all of the different features. It's been really interesting to see how our customers have responded to that pace of innovation. It was only 18 months ago that we shifted from a quarterly release cycle to a monthly release cycle, and a lot of our customers were saying, no, that's too fast, slow down. We need time to look at the new capabilities and understand what changes we need to make internally. Every month is just going to be too fast. Now, hundreds of them are showing up on our webinar every single month for our new feature releases, and our release emails are the most opened emails that we send, because people are excited about the new capabilities that we deliver. So I think innovation spurs curiosity and intrigue, and people become very excited about what is possible.
Matt Alder: [7:35] Drilling into what you were saying there about get a demo, because that's always been the big marketing metric in this sector, in fact any part of the tech sector, we're moving to a place where it's all about trust, isn't it? How much do I trust that this vendor is going to be able to work with me to do the things that I need to do, and develop with me? How do you deal with that as a marketing challenge, in terms of how you build that trust through the marketing strategy that you have?
Steve Hardy: [8:02] Yeah. I describe myself as a marketer with a capital M. It's less about the tactics and the actions and data sheets and websites. Marketing is really about every single thing that we touch that faces off into the market. That is a lot of those traditional marketing tactics. It's also about making sure that our sales team have the right messages and the right tools and the right sales pitch, if you like. It's about making sure that our now massively expanded partner network is enabled to sell and to implement, and about making sure that they have the trust and the resources ready to make them successful and our product successful as well.
Steve Hardy: [8:54] The bottom line is, from a marketing responsibility perspective, it's really important that all of those things are working together, are really aligned, and that we're telling a transparent, honest story that's relevant to our buyers. A lot of that is go-to-market focused, how we show up in front of a customer, but it all fundamentally comes back to, do we have a really great product that does what it says, that we deliver on time, and that we fix issues? I feel really confident that SmartRecruiters, now backed by the resources and scale of SAP, is in a good place to be able to support that. If we do all those things, then I think that goes a good way to helping establish trust with the market and with our customers.
Matt Alder: [9:56] How does the integration with SAP differentiate you from the rest of the market?
Steve Hardy: [10:02] Well, we've gone from being a best of breed leading hiring platform to being a critical part of a much broader suite. Not just an HCM suite, but a broader ERP business suite that has finance and supply chain and all kinds of capabilities, and that really does provide us now with a one-stop shop. And there are some very specific benefits that SAP have already brought, even just in the past seven months. Almost immediately after the acquisition, we took responsibility for more than 150, 160 engineers from the SAP HCM team, so we literally doubled our engineering resources overnight. As a private company, we couldn't possibly have done that. So suddenly we have the scale and the resource to be able to do more.
Steve Hardy: [11:13] I talked a little bit about partners and the partner network. At SmartRecruiters, we had a couple of hundred partners of various different types. Now we have more than 4,000 partners in the SAP network, and a thousand of those have already become accredited to sell SmartRecruiters. So there's just scale on a level that, as a relatively small private company, we could never really imagine. Plus, on a cultural level, SAP people are just really great people to work with. We've found that coming together as two teams has been really powerful. We're just out there trying to solve the biggest problems, working to help our customers be more successful.
Matt Alder: [12:02] What sort of challenges has that thrown up? Because a marketing function going through change, what does that throw up?
Steve Hardy: [12:12] Good question. I'll go back 18 months, nearly two years. When I joined SmartRecruiters, my initial priorities were around really rebuilding the brand. We had a great brand, lots of trust in the marketplace, but we needed to be bolder and more visible. Launching Winston, which is our AI companion, and then really driving the team to build pipeline specifically, which had become a little bit anaemic. All of those things were with the goal of a successful exit, selling the business, or driving towards an IPO, which we didn't really think was going to be on the cards. Frankly, if you look back two years, we've achieved all of those things. Our brand is incredibly well respected in the marketplace, and now with SAP, it has even more power. Candidly, we've built more pipeline, and we continue to build more pipeline every single week, than I could ever imagine. The team are really excited about the opportunity that SAP provides for them, including at a personal level, to develop their careers.
Steve Hardy: [13:25] So what we're working on now is how we take what we've built and then amplify that within SAP, and there are lots of opportunities for us to do that. SAP have an amazing event platform, for example, between SAP Sapphire and SAP Connect, where literally thousands of practitioners and leaders come together to learn best practices and the vision and roadmap of the entire portfolio. We're now part of that, which, again, we couldn't possibly have done on our own. SAP have a tremendous brand. We're here in New York, and SAP sponsor some of the greatest teams around the world. We could never have had access to that as well, which, again, provides a great experience for our customers. So for me, it all just comes down to scale and opportunity, which has been opened up by the acquisition.
Matt Alder: [14:26] How does that affect focus? Because as you said, over the last two years you've had a very strong story to tell, with a product launch and everything, and it's being told very, very loudly. Then there was the acquisition, and now we're at the next stage. Where does your focus go to keep that continuity, I guess, but move things forward?
Steve Hardy: [14:46] Well, as a leader of the function, my number one priority is always pipeline. My number one goal is to create opportunities for our sales team. Whether my team are in brand or in demand generation, whether they're in enablement or in customer success, I just try and keep them focused on making sure that everything they're doing on a daily basis contributes to us driving new opportunities for our customers. And I think it's going pretty well. I think we're doing a good job of keeping the team focused and on track.
Matt Alder: [15:30] I want to expand a bit to talk about marketing in this space in general, because what I'm noticing is there is a big focus on features and use cases and things that can be done. But people aren't standing up on stage at conferences or plastering it all over exhibition booths and saying, by the way, this is really complicated, and it takes time, and it takes a lot of integration. Do you think that marketing is being honest about the size of the challenge, and how do you approach that from a SmartRecruiters perspective?
Steve Hardy: [16:09] Good question. I would like to say that the SmartRecruiters and SAP teams are grounded in truth and reality in everything that we put out into the marketplace, and I think that's super important for buyers to understand. We spend a lot of time with our customers to try and understand the material value and the material benefit that our technology is bringing to their businesses. Since we launched Winston 18 months ago, Winston is now used in nearly 60% of hiring processes with our customers. Just adoption alone shows that it is valued by customers. What that means is that we're cutting out about 95% of the manual tasks involved in key parts of the recruiting stage. So what I'm encouraging my teams to do is to really focus on facts, data, evidence that we can share with our prospects, and then the tools and resources and playbooks for how they can get the same results in their businesses too.
Matt Alder: [17:27] What have the customer stories coming back been like? Is there anything in there that surprised you about how people are using the system or the value that they've got from it?
Steve Hardy: [17:35] I'm always surprised, or maybe more in awe, of what customers are doing and how they're using our products and the benefits that they're getting. One particular customer that we'd been working with was trying to roll out a much more intuitive conversational experience on their career site. Candidly, they had been working with a competitor of ours for a number of years, and had really grand plans of rolling this out worldwide on every single career site in every single location that they had. Frankly, it had taken a long time, and they had not made as much progress as they wanted to, with challenges on integrations with multiple different platforms. So we scaled that back and basically said, okay, let's start with just one location. We managed to get Winston chat available and up and running in literally four hours in one location. As a result of that successful test, they started to roll out more aggressively. For me, that is just a perfect example of how you can be really successful with AI without totally overhauling the entire system, but just taking it step by step and making small incremental progress.
Matt Alder: [18:51] I think that's really interesting as well, because that kind of flies against the way people think about technology, particularly in the HR space. It's deconstructing beliefs that have been there for a really long time, which have probably been learned through horrendous processes and things like that. I want to talk about the educational side of things, because there are things that AI makes possible in HR and talent acquisition that I'm not sure people even realise yet, and I'm sure that your products are not being used to their full potential. How do you fill that gap? How do you really help people appreciate what AI can do and the real value that it can bring?
Steve Hardy: [19:33] It has to happen on so many different levels, Matt, candidly. At our events, we try to spend less time on big keynotes and thought leadership, and more time doing tabletop exercises and workshops and actually whiteboarding solutions with customers. On our website, we put a lot of effort and energy into calculators and toolkits and playbooks that are much more focused on the how, versus just higher thought leadership type content. We spend a significant amount of time and energy and resources on enablement, taking subject matter experts within our organisation and making sure that our sales teams, our SEs, our solution consultants are up to date and have accurate information that they can then pass on to their customers as well. We have communities. It's an all-in, integrated set of activities to really help and support customers through their buying journey, through their onboarding journey, as well as afterwards. Plus we've got in-product capabilities as well, which are helping guide users through the solution. There's always more that we can do, and we've got lots of feedback loops to ensure that we've got our pulse on what our customers are telling us, but I'm feeling pretty good about how we're responding to customer needs to help them get the best out of our products.
Matt Alder: [21:16] A bit that we haven't actually talked about yet when it comes to trust. From a talent acquisition perspective, these systems are being used by job seekers, and employers are fundamentally changing the way that their recruitment process works and what it looks like to the people that they're trying to hire. Do you think there's a responsibility for the vendors, through marketing, to actually build trust with candidates and job seekers and the people using the system from that side?
Steve Hardy: [21:47] I absolutely do. Building transparent systems, making sure that we're compliant with things like the EU AI Act, making sure that we're providing information literally at the point of hire, so that as a candidate is in the process of hiring they understand what's happening, is going to be really important. The world of hiring is changing beyond recognition. So we're doing all of those things and more. We have an AI council which brings together individuals across the organisation, legal, product, as well as experts from SAP, and is really on top of all of the changes that have happened from a legislative perspective, and then making sure that we're putting that out there in front of our candidates. I do think there's probably more to do from vendors to educate candidates, and that's certainly something that, in partnership with SAP, we will be looking at.
Matt Alder: [22:59] Final question for you. What does good leadership look like in an AI-driven world?
Steve Hardy: [23:04] Oh, that's a good question. Does it really change in an AI-driven world? Does good leadership really change? I'm not sure. I think good leadership is all about setting the right priorities, making sure that you're really focused on the most impactful activities that relate to business success. Being human, being humane, having the interests of your people at heart. In the world of AI, I think what changes is that it's critically important that everybody is using AI, is familiar with the tools, is AI competent and AI literate. It has, I believe, fundamentally changed the way that business operates and the way that we work, and the very nature of work. So it's important as leaders to be on top of that, and that means taking time, clearing time, for your people to be able to learn new skills and capabilities. But I'm not so sure that good leadership really does change. I think good leadership is good leadership, period.
Matt Alder: [24:23] Steve, thank you very much for talking to me.
Steve Hardy: [24:25] Thanks, Matt. That was great.
Matt Alder: [24:26] That was Steve Hardy, and that brings Decoding the C-Suite to a close. Five leaders, five lenses, and one company navigating enormous change in real time. If there's a single thread running through every conversation, it's the one I started the series with. The organisations getting this right are the ones where the whole leadership team is aligned, curious and honest about the discomfort of change. My thanks to everyone at SmartRecruiters for their time and for their candour.
Matt Alder: [24:58] If you enjoyed this mini-series, there's a lot more where it came from. Recruiting Future publishes twice a week, with conversations exploring the future of talent from every angle. Subscribe or follow wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Matt Alder. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Recruiting Future.
