Something fundamental has shifted in how people find work. Job boards that dominated for decades are losing their effectiveness. Candidates are overwhelmed and skeptical. Employers are drowning in applications that are all the same. The old playbook simply isn’t working anymore.
Meanwhile, the TikTokification of communication and the rise of the creator economy are reshaping the marketing landscape. People trust other people more than corporate messaging and want to hear authentic voices, not polished PR. So could this approach work for hiring?
My guests this week are Tracey Parsons, CEO of Flockity, and J.T. O’Donnell, founder of Work It Daily. In our conversation, they explain how the influencer model not only has the potential to transform talent attraction but could also fundamentally change the way recruiting works.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What’s gone wrong with job boards and the job search
• The loss of trust
• The reality of interest-based algorithms
• The growth of the knowledge creator economy
• Using influencers to promote jobs
• How job seekers and employers feel about influencer marketing
• Why the recruiting process needs radical updating
• Inserting the right friction points in a seamless experience
• What does the future look like?
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Transcript
00:00
Matt Alder
Micro influencer may be an unfamiliar term to many TA leaders, but could tapping into the creator economy solve recruiting’s trust problem, revolutionize recruitment marketing, and change the way people find jobs forever? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from appcast. Appcast is changing the game when it comes to hiring. Using powerful tech, data driven insights and deep recruiting expertise, appcast helps employers find qualified candidates quickly and efficiently. In fact, companies using Appcast see a 50% drop in cost per hire and fill roles faster. Whether you’re building a brand or filling mission critical roles, appcast delivers results that move the needle. To learn more, go to Appcast IE. That’s Appcast IO.
01:04
JT O’Donnell
There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine than in all the ages of history.
01:18
Matt Alder
Hi there.
01:19
Matt Alder
Welcome to episode 736 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. If you’re interested in finding out how your TA function measures up in these four critical areas, I’ve created the free Fit for the Future assessment. It’ll give you personalized insights to help you build strategic clarity and drive greater impact immediate. Just head over to Matulder Me podcast to complete the assessment. It only takes a few minutes. This episode is about talent and influence. Something fundamental has shifted in how people find work. Job boards that dominated for decades are losing their effectiveness. Candidates are overwhelmed and sceptical. Employers are drowning in applications that all look the same. The old playbook simply isn’t working.
02:26
Matt Alder
Meanwhile, the TikTok iFoodation of Communication and the rise of the creator economy are reshaping the marketing landscape. People trust other people more than corporate messages and want to hear authentic voices, not polished pr. So could this approach work for hiring? My guests this week are Tracey Parsons, CEO of Flockity, and J.T. O’, Donnell, founder of Work It Daily. In our conversation, they explain how the influencer model not only has the potential to transform talent attraction, but could also fundamentally change the way recruiting works.
03:05
Matt Alder
Hi Tracey. Hi JT and welcome to the podcast. It is a pleasure to have you both on the show. For a few people out there who might not be familiar with you and your work, could you both introduce yourselves and tell us what you do? And Tracey, you can go first.
03:20
Tracey Parsons
Awesome. Well, I’m Tracy Parsons and as I like to tell people, I’ve been in the recruitment marketing space since the late 1900s. I am the CEO and co founder of Flockity, so Like all this nonsense that we see around job advertising, applicant tracking systems, social media. I was kind of there in the front seat watching all of this and driving all of this. So, yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today, Matt.
03:41
Matt Alder
Absolutely.
03:42
JT O’Donnell
And I’m JT O’ Donnell and for the last 20 years I’ve been the founder and CEO of Workit Daily, which is a job searching career advisory platform. But most recently I became the author of the book Pro Voice Turn what yout Know into what yout Earn and the founder of the very first white collar talent agency, which is helping professional workers monetize what they know.
04:00
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Let’s just kind of dig into those things a little bit before we kind of get started. So, Tracy, tell us a little bit more about what Flockity does because it’s such an interesting concept.
04:10
Tracey Parsons
Well, it’s essentially really easy to understand because it’s influencer marketing for jobs. Right. So if you think about how the landscape is shifting, you think about the work that JT and her team at work at Daily and Provoice are doing. People are out there creating content all the time. They’re talking about their jobs, they’re talking about the work that they do. They’re helping other job seekers be smarter. And we saw this a couple years ago. We were like, wait, people are already posting jobs for their friends and companies are already paying for. Why don’t we, why don’t we make those two things a marriage and put together Flockity? So essentially with Flockity, our creators, like JT and her team, pick up jobs from our platform and our customers and post them to their public social profiles.
04:52
Tracey Parsons
Sometimes they make videos about them, sometimes they don’t. But it’s about generating awareness at the very top of the funnel. Right? How do we, how do we stop somebody from scrolling TikTok watching bird videos and horse videos to go, oh wait, here’s somebody that’s got a great tip for me as a job seeker.
05:07
Matt Alder
Fantastic. JT White Collar Talent Agency. Tell us more about that.
05:11
JT O’Donnell
As somebody who’s been training people on how to find work and trying to help them understand it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. The real power play these days is visibility. If you aren’t visible, you’re not going to be found. And I think we’ll get a lot more into that today, especially as job boards go away. For me it was how do I help people understand how to do this? Once it started to work, the system and the process worked, people said, gee, can I make money outside of just a normal job. There’s no more job security, which means there’s no income security anymore if I stay with one job. I said, absolutely. We started down the path of figuring out how can people monetize? And can white collar workers monetize? And lo and behold, they could.
05:49
JT O’Donnell
And when that came into play, we said, you don’t need a trade your time for money paycheck. We call it the trad paycheck. You need a knowledge paycheck. If you can do something and it’s worth $10,000 to somebody, but you get paid in 10 minutes, why wouldn’t you do it? And that really was what came out of it. The other thing I’ll be quite honest with is the fact that Gartner came up with research that said this is a $400 billion, $480 billion knowledge creator economy coming to us by 2027, we’re hitting a renaissance there. You can make money off of anything that you nerd out on, professional or not.
06:19
JT O’Donnell
And to not take advantage of that, when we see what’s happening in the marketplace right now where traditional jobs are just being wiped out left and right, we have got to give people a voice, a pro voice, and teach them how to monetize. Otherwise, what are they gonna do? And so that was really the foundation for it was to help people make this transition.
06:33
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Really interesting. Two businesses there, million percent. So let’s go back to the late 1900s and.
06:41
Tracey Parsons
Yes, the late 1900s.
06:42
JT O’Donnell
Let’s go.
06:43
Matt Alder
Creation of job boards. We kind of, you know, we can all kind of remember when they all kind sprung up.
06:47
Matt Alder
So what’s gone wrong with job boards?
06:49
Matt Alder
What’s the problem with them now? And how’s the job search changing for people out there? What’s it like out there and where is it job boards are failing?
06:57
Tracey Parsons
I think it all comes to that. Like, if you think about how job boards came to pass, it was at this moment and this moment of time where the Internet was where we started to find information. And I remember working back at an agency in the late 1900s, talking to customers saying, hey, you can place your line ad in the newspaper, right? And that’s going to be like $2,200. Or you can go put it on this Internet thing for $200. And they’re like, yes, give me the $200. And now we have all of this breadth of access to talent. But if you think about that sole function, it was just taking what we used to do in print media and applying it to digital media. What we’re experiencing now is a complete shift in the world that we work.
07:46
Tracey Parsons
If you ask me, it is like coming full circle. Right. So when in the 1700s and the 1500s, if I needed a blacksmith apprentice, how did I get a blacksmith apprentice? I talked to the people that I went to church with. I talked to the people at the mercantile, I talked to the people I would talk to people. We have come back to this full circle moment. It is about trust. Job boards in my mind’s eye have completely annihilated trust with job seekers. Trust is at an all time low. They feel like this is a data play. They feel like, oh, if I have to submit my information to this job board, they’re just gonna resell it. And they are. And so they don’t trust that you know who they trust.
08:29
JT O’Donnell
I agree. I think AI also put the nail in the coffin for job boards this year, if I’m perfectly honest. If we just think about how it works. Right. So job boards were a way to get more candidates. Great. Now we don’t want more candidates. Especially when candidates are making fake resumes and submitting true story line. Manager posts a job at 9am 11am HR is messaging postings coming down. Manager says why we got 5,000 applicants. This is a true story from a week ago. 5,000 applicants in two hours. They know that the most of them are bogus. We don’t want everyone applying anymore. I get that it served its purpose, but like everything, time comes for it to retire and we have to do something smarter. Especially with the technology.
09:08
JT O’Donnell
We now live in a world where if I give you enough information about myself as a candidate, we can talk more about that. There’s ways to go beyond the resume, right? How many times have people wanted to do something different and they can’t because they’re pigeonholed by this historic resume, this static document. How do I give more of myself to a tool that then recruiters can listen to, analyze and understand and say, hey, I’m interested in you so I can choose the candidates that I want to interview. That’s where the power of, you know, provoice and flockity coming together has really played out nicely. Because when you have provoicers talking about real jobs in their industry, only the people that are in it are seeing it, they’re evaluating it and they’re self selecting to then reach out and apply.
09:51
JT O’Donnell
It’s a better quality candidate coming from a more reliable source in a platform that everybody’s used to. I’m sorry TikTok ification of everything. Job seekers expect the next job to discover them. They literally expect it in their social feed. They don’t want to go to a job board anymore and get blurry eyed looking at jobs that aren’t fit. They know if they play that algorithm well enough the right job is going to come across my stream, which it is, we’ve proven it with Flockity and they’re going to apply and these are net new hires. Right? These are net new visits to your site. This is stuff that no other platform can offer right now. And that’s what has had the two of us so excited, right. Is that we knew it all along is just not enough people were realizing it and adopting it.
10:31
Matt Alder
It’s really interesting. I used to sell classified advertising in newspapers in the absolute peak of the market and it was the easiest job I’ve ever had and also the least accountable job I’ve ever had because you didn’t even know who was reading the paper, let alone what was happening. And it’s almost been such a shame that model just transferred over to the Internet and hasn’t evolved in all of this time. And I think it’s also interesting about what you were saying about going back to the 17th century and how trust and jobs and all kind of things work. Because I’m from an area of England that In the late 19th century I think it was, had a dysphoria of skilled miners leaving to go to South America.
11:14
Matt Alder
And I’ve always been fascinated about how that works and how they were recruited and it was kind of word of mouth and people coming over and doing things face to face. And that’s how recruiting work for hundreds of years.
11:25
Tracey Parsons
Well, and it goes back to what JC was saying and what you were just saying, Matt. It is about job discovery right now. Right? Job search is not a thing. Right. Because I love that and I don’t love this. I’m being very sarcastic. 28% of the job seeking market is active. They’re actively looking. That’s 28%. Okay. Which is the biggest it’s been in a long time, which is fueling a lot of these fake AI resumes and all of these things. Like we’re drowning in resumes because the job market is tough for job seekers. We’re at this inflection point with AI and layoffs and all the things that we’ve been talking about. But what’s fascinating to me is that this is not about ignoring 72% of people who aren’t actively looking. Right. We have put so many eggs in the 28% basket that it’s overflowing.
12:22
Tracey Parsons
And now we have the worst egg salad you’ve ever seen. Right. So. Because we’re not weak. Because as marketers, and I am, I come from consumer. If a marketer ignored 72% of their available market, they would be fired in a day. But what we’re trying to do, what we’re trying to elevate with Flockity, with Provoice, with these new AI tools that are going to be matching people, it is about job discovery, not job search.
12:47
JT O’Donnell
Yeah. And can I build one more thing on that, please? Because the number one thing we’ve heard in pushback that maybe was what delayed the adoption of this mindset, Matt, is companies will say, well, I don’t have anybody in my company that could be on video. I don’t have anybody that could be on social media. I don’t want my employees on there. I don’t know how they’re going to. Great. You don’t need them. That’s why we built a platform of white collar workers who would be happy to do that job for you and quite frankly, provide third party credibility, which is way more trustworthy than you, the CEO getting on there and saying, yeah, it’s a great job, come work for me. You know, so it only made sense.
13:17
Tracey Parsons
It only made sense. And building on that, JT, like, I recently was scrolling TikTok, because JT and I, we love TikTok.
13:26
JT O’Donnell
Sorry, guilty pleasure.
13:27
Tracey Parsons
I am, I am the one that gets the lady that says, please go to bed. And I was like, no, I hate you. So I was scrolling and I saw an employer in Quick Serve Restaurant had an employee featured in a video that was very highly produced. And I was like, okay, this is a move. And I opened up the comments section and it was like, are you okay, sir? We’re worried about you. And so then I saw another post from this same brand and I was like, oh, what are the comments on this one? They turned comments off. Right. So this is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s great if you have employee ambassadors. We love employee ambassadors. They’re your internal influencers. But that third party credibility makes a huge difference in their industry. Right.
14:16
Tracey Parsons
And if you’re thinking about that third party credibility, because we do have employers who are like, well, they don’t work for us. Why would they say anything about us? I was like, they’re not going to make a video pretending that they work for you. They’re going to say something to the effect of, hey, you guys, I want you to build your career too. I’ve come across some jobs, go check them out. Right. It’s not like we’re faking this.
14:37
Matt Alder
No, absolutely. And there’s a couple of things I just want to dig into a little bit further before we kind of move forward. Because I’m very aware that not everyone who is listening to this or watching this is on TikTok. I think a lot of people that I know in our industry are still trying to get their heads around what on earth’s happened to the LinkedIn algorithm, let alone the TikTok of the cation of social media. But I think it’s just kind of worth sort of talking about how it now works, because we’ve moved away from this sort of, you know, who are you following? Who are you connected to? To algorithms serving things to you by your interest. Which is. Which is really the engine that drives this, isn’t it?
15:12
JT O’Donnell
Yeah. I mean, so you just have to look at someone who works a lot with LinkedIn. Full disclosure.
15:17
Tracey Parsons
Right.
15:17
JT O’Donnell
They’re a very large client of mine. They told me two years ago they were all in a video. And that was one of the things that really pushed me to go in this direction. They said the level of engagement we are getting in video, the amount that we can absorb and understand about our users. Right. When you have 1.1 billion users on a platform, how do you make your algorithm work for recruiters? Right. You’ve got to make sure that people are active and relevant. And so video was their way of rewarding people in that direction. Quite frankly, it’s better. Nobody wants to read anything anymore. There’s just so much garbage and junk in their feed. But then a video comes along and if it’s properly tagged and you know what you’re looking at, you get incredible engagement from it.
15:51
JT O’Donnell
And so I saw that and thought, wow, this is just a huge opportunity. So we joke about TikTok and I think you really should be there. Every employer listening to this, you are missing out if you are not on TikTok right now. Missing out. But if you’re afraid of that or you have issues around that, it’s a sin to not be on LinkedIn doing this because the fact that they are rewarding video and algorithm. And if it’s okay, I’ll give you a great example. So when we started having our provoice folks doing Flockity, we came up with real jobs Friday. If you go check the hashtag realjobs Friday. It’s on LinkedIn and every Friday I start the trend and it just says it’s here. It’s realjobs Friday.
16:26
JT O’Donnell
And as they all post their flock of you jobs, I repost them for reach with, here’s another Real Jobs Friday. Guess what? Views through the roof on a Friday. Would any employer out there like to grab the people that are trying to wrap up their week and on a high note, discover a cool job about them and apply? Of course you would. Of course you would. Right. But that’s the kind of control we have with social media that we can do for you that other platforms just can’t. They don’t have the capacity to do that. And that’s what gets me excited.
16:52
Tracey Parsons
And I will tell you, Friday is a huge day for Flockity. Like, and even late in the day on Friday, we see posts from some of our creators. Absolutely. Take off from LinkedIn. Whether it’s reposts, whether it’s comments. Like, we see. And that shocked us to jt. Like, I’m sure it’s the real Jobs Friday, I’m sure. Like, but it’s also the habit that we’re creating with job seekers. And there was research decades ago that was like, oh, the best day to post a job is on Monday. And I’m like, no, that’s because you’re posting jobs on Monday.
17:28
Matt Alder
Yeah, no, it’s always interesting. It’s always like, we can’t post jobs in August because everyone’s on holiday. It’s just seriously. But I think the other thing that’s worth just sort of clarifying a little bit is just the kind of, the extent of the creator economy. So we’re talking about the creator economy. We’re meaning like influencers, micro influencers. You know, all of these people who are creating content in their niche for their specific audience. Talk us through, you know, the scale of that. Because I think that if you’re not sort of noticing it, if you’re not in those particular niches, you might not appreciate just how powerful some of these voices are.
18:01
Tracey Parsons
I mean, it’s a $350 billion industry and it’s going to be over 525 in three years. That’s, that’s an enormous industry and there are creators who are, who don’t even have the following of JT that will charge you $50,000 for a reel. So it’s an enormous, like, it’s the future opportunity. A year ago, every, the one of the marketing publications surveyed, chief marketing officers across the US and they said, what is your number one channel? They said, influencer and affiliate. And the reason that this works so well is all the things that we’ve been talking about. And because it is from awareness to consideration to conversion in the consumer marketing space, why doesn’t that exist? And it does now exist in our space. Right. So the creator economy is enormous. We’re just starting to tap into it because companies realize that people believe people.
18:59
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And I was watching TikTok before we started actually, just to get myself in the mood for this conversation. And I’m kind of being hounded by Job day in the life videos because I’m interested in them. So that’s why I’m getting them, you know, And I had a day in the life of a stage manager in a theater, someone on an oil rig, just who is actually pushing opportunities in our oil rig, talking about all the jobs you can do. You know, all of this kind of different content is out there. So yeah, it’s kind of a really massive, massive thing.
19:30
JT O’Donnell
People, they kind of turn off when they hear the word creator economy. And if we took that word out for a minute and said we’re about to build a knowledge economy or a knowledge creator economy and emphasize the word economy, meaning it feeds itself, we can start to think about the real potential here. TikTok in China is not like TikTok in America. TikTok in China is not people shaking a booty. It is people teaching each other things. And so These big companies, LinkedIn for example, are starting to realize, whoa, wait a minute. If we can show people how to make money teaching things, we could be tapping into that market. That’s what’s about to happen. And the reason I get excited about this, quite frankly, is because there’s a huge executive wasteland right now.
20:10
JT O’Donnell
For the first time in 45 years of recording it, Bloomberg has said that the unemployment rate of college educated workers is higher right now than non college educated. You’re talking about a large group of people who have been golden, handcuffed to traditional corporate jobs with all this institutional knowledge now being tossed out of the workforce and not being able to get back at that financial level. I tell people it’s the glass cliff they go off of because they assume they’ll keep making the money. But the reality is there’s always people younger and cheaper, like it or not, that are capable to come up. And companies say, why would I hire the BMW and pay for the BMW, when the same job will be done with a Hyundai. Right. Like, we just never wrap our heads around that.
20:46
JT O’Donnell
At some point in time, if you’re on a really strong career track trajectory, you should be thinking about the day that you have to stop trading time for money and start trading your knowledge for money, because this model isn’t going to keep you employed. And a large number of people are now realizing that for the very first time. And so how do we take that knowledge and show them how to monetize it? That’s what’s happening right now. People want you in their back pocket. They’re used to it, especially the younger generations. Right. I don’t even want to read a book or anything anymore.
21:12
JT O’Donnell
If I want to understand how to run a really exceptional recruiting podcast, I’ll pay $8 a month to have Matt Alder in my back pocket so I can quickly message him on a private platform and he can give me, you know, a one line answer back. That exists right now. Matt, you can have a thousand subscribers at $8 a month. Probably takes you two hours a day not even to answer people as they ask you stuff. And they’ve got a little piece of access to Matt.
21:35
Tracey Parsons
Right?
21:35
JT O’Donnell
And they know they’re getting the right answer by somebody they trust because you’ve built a following of this platform. That is what I’m talking about to everybody here. And once I start to show people that, their mind is blown. Because what do we want to do when we reach that knowledge level? We want to serve others, we want to teach others. We want to share what we’ve learned. We want to save them from the mistakes we made. And that’s what I’m talking about right now. A world full of teachers who are making money anywhere they want, anywhere in the world they want to.
22:00
Tracey Parsons
Right?
22:00
JT O’Donnell
It’s amazing. And then you have these students, and through them, you learn more because they inspire you. So you just get smarter and more engaged because you’ve got this audience. It’s just a beautiful ecosystem. And that’s what we’re talking about.
22:13
Tracey Parsons
And that’s so exciting. Like, when you think about this, how many times in our collective careers have we fielded messages from everybody and their brother, can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain? This is monetizing, the pick your brain moment. Okay? And you know what? I’ve joked about this. And when I first started talking to JT about this, I was like, oh, my God, if I could have charged to $8 of somebody to Give them a one line answer. Because I know the answer. That’s the thing. This is where we are going in the future. Everybody who’s like wringing their hands, AI is going to take all of our jobs. Cool. There are other jobs, there are other ways to monetize your brilliance. And that is the future, my friends.
23:04
Tracey Parsons
Like, this is what we’re talking about and this is how jobs are going to be discovered. This is how people are going to monetize their own knowledge. This is the way forward. Are we probably a little early? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter because we’re here and it’s happening.
23:20
JT O’Donnell
That’s my point is we might feel early for a hot minute, but you know, these layoffs aren’t going away. You know when you’ve got Marc Benioff from Salesforce saying, oh, I was able to cut, you know, 4,000 heads, not humans heads, use the words in a podcast last week, cut heads. You know, like, this is coming at massive scale. We’re just in the infancy of it. So people are going to have to find a different way to get work and to monetize.
23:45
Matt Alder
Focusing on the trust aspect of this. From what you’re seeing, how are the audiences of the people that you’re working with? What do they feel about having paid for promotion, pushed to them, jobs to push to them? There was sort of, a few years ago there was a thing around creators sort of taking money and just pushing things that weren’t relevant to their audience and all that kind of stuff. How is that shaken out and what kind of reaction are you getting to marketing jobs this way through these kind of platforms?
24:14
JT O’Donnell
So my provost is all that sign with the agency, they have to go through some very serious training and they have to essentially sit for an exam in order to be signed. And then when they signed, they were eligible for our different partnership deals, one of which is with Locketty. They have all chosen to work with Flockity. They all get to choose which jobs they want to feature. And here’s the feedback they consistently get. It is so kind of you to be doing this in your LinkedIn feed, to be sharing this on your social channels, you know, helping people find jobs. Right now they haven’t got a single negative comment. And even if they’re posting jobs that are not related to their field, all they’re getting is compliments because they are serving an audience and that has been the difference.
24:53
JT O’Donnell
They’re not hyping, they’re not saying this is the greatest company in the world to work for they’re saying, look, this job is available. Here’s what this company is about. Here’s something I can identify with in this company. Just thought I’d pass it along. And, you know, we train them to do this authentically. Right. Like, that’s part of the process so that they felt comfortable being able to share these things. But they enjoy it so much, it’s crazy. They look forward to it every week, especially, you know, our Real Jobs Friday campaign that we’ve been doing. And no downside, like. Like, I haven’t had a single one come to me, say anything, but I get so many compliments. And they’re getting more follows. More follows. Because people like that they’re doing it.
25:27
Tracey Parsons
Yeah. It’s content that their audience wants. Right. Like people need jobs in this day and age, and this is somebody that they trust and they follow. And it’s mostly everything we see. And we keep tabs on all of our creators. Like, we know what they’re sharing and we see the comments and all the comments are like, oh, my God, thank you, or I applied, or do you know the hiring manager? I really want this one. Like, on that employer side.
25:53
Matt Alder
What concerns do employers have about this when you speak to them? I think you sort of mentioned a few. As we’ve been sort of going through, what are the kind of, the main things that. That come up that people are worried about in terms of marketing in this kind of way?
26:04
Tracey Parsons
Yeah, they want control. And I bless their hearts, they don’t have that and they’re never going to get it. And they didn’t have it yesterday and they want it today and they’re never going to get it. And I tell people all the time, I’m like, you guys, I need you to just take one step back and channel your inner Elsa and just let that go. Right. Control is an illusion. First, second, it’s 11pm do you know where your jobs are? Because I can tell you, I’ve seen companies with your company’s logo on their website saying that they have their jobs and they’re advertising your jobs. Or they’re making TikToks about like, hey, XYZ company is hiring. And I was like, I know they’re not working with you because we work with them. Right? Like, it’s.
26:51
Tracey Parsons
There’s this illusion that, well, can we script it for them? I’m like, do you want it to be authentic? Also, that’s a completely different pricing model. Right. Which is coming, so we can talk about that later. But it’s very strange. They want control now. In our first year were unable for a variety of reasons to really go creator forward. And now that we have gotten past those reasons, we are going creator forward. And they’re losing all sense of risk. Right, because they’re seeing that these are real people sharing real jobs that are, you know, they’re micro influencers, they’re macro influencers, but they’re authentic. Like, you want to watch it.
27:32
JT O’Donnell
I just want to build on that and say that the influencer industry in beauty and fashion has already gotten to the point where they literally get out of the way for the creator. They’ve, they’ve quickly gone through this cycle and now understand we don’t need like just do you. Okay. That will come with employers when they just start to see the incredible results of getting out of the way. That will come. I’m not worried about that. Besides authenticity though, authentication like you just talked about, this is authentication. They aren’t going to post a video if it isn’t from a trusted source. This, this is why this works so well. Right? They can go into Flockity and if the job is no longer available, Flockity can make the link dead, which means it’s now automatically dead on the video.
28:08
JT O’Donnell
And now that content creator is not having to think about, oh, you know, having somebody come to them and say it’s not posting well, it’s been filled, that’s okay. Take a, take a post date at the video. The video was two weeks ago, you know, but hey, I’ll produce something new for you. I’ll, you know, get something new out there. So the authentication of real jobs and being available is what I think has been very powerful as well.
28:29
Matt Alder
So we’re moving recruitment, marketing the 1900s to the 2025 and beyond. But that’s only half the story. I mean, we’ve still got a very antiquated recruitment process that comes after this with resumes and all of that kind of stuff. Still debates going on about resumes and whether they’re useful or not, which I thought had passed, but people are still sticking up for them. What happens next? What happens with the next part of the recruitment process? Because it just seems to be very disjointed that you have this very elegant way of finding jobs from trusted sources. But then you have to go through a very kind of old fashioned and not very effective recruitment process at the end of it.
29:07
JT O’Donnell
I have my vision of it, which I put out on social media last week on the future of getting a job and I met with a lot of controversial comments because I think people don’t want to hear it. But here’s my take, which is companies will be able to start to put out videos. Hey, this is what’s available. By the same token, job seekers will be able to put out context. I don’t call it content creation, I call it context creation as a way to authenticate what they know and create what I would call a career library on themselves. So resumes are too static. You can’t put everything on there and who wants to read them, but you can put together an incredible set of videos or audio answers that are all there for you.
29:43
JT O’Donnell
And now the AI will be able to listen to that. So when an employer says, I’m looking for somebody with a skill set, instead of just a single page of their experience and trying to match the key words, they’re going to be able to listen to an entire career library of that person and say, hey, they said all the right things and they explained it the right way. This is a viable candidate for you. Let’s bring the two together. That’s where we’re going with the sophistication of this. And I’m already seeing it, right? So there are technology companies out there right now that allow the candidate to literally take a job description, compare it to their Resume and their LinkedIn profile, say, these are the videos you should create for this employer. Here are some, here’s some scripts based on your experience.
30:24
JT O’Donnell
Here’s a teleprompter recorded here right in the app. Put it together in a URL and ship it to the hiring manager. Guess what? They’re going to open that. They’re going to, you’re going to get notified that they. And they’re going to see and hear you and know that you can do the job authentication, authenticity, real that is coming. And for the people that say to me, I don’t want to be camera, I don’t want to do video, this is just the pre screen. Remember that pre screen you have to do with every recruiter to even get a shot at the hiring manager. Well, guess what? That’s all that this is. So you either do it just like you had to do the pre screen in order to get the interview. So this is the way it will change.
30:54
JT O’Donnell
In the same way we’re going to make employers change, right? And provide this and create this discovery model. We can then also ask the candidates to provide the authentication and the evidence that is really required to know they can do the job. And this will Open up worlds for people to who don’t have the degree, who don’t have this, who don’t have that, but can prove through what they say that they can do the job. And this excites me because this is where it should have been by now, you know.
31:17
Matt Alder
Yeah. And it’s really interesting because I’ve seen people try and create models like this for decades, visual cv, video cvs, all that kind of stuff. But it’s never been able to scale because look at it and go. Recruiters can’t look through all of that. They haven’t got time to even look at resumes properly. But now we have a technology that can do that. I just think is tremendously exciting because I think that unlocks all of those possibilities.
31:40
Tracey Parsons
What you’re talking about is layering exactly what you were saying, that great flockity and provoice are driving all these great candidates. All this, all these top tier NET New. Because 98% of the traffic that we drive to our customers career sites are net new. So they’ve never been there before. So this is new eyeballs. But then we drive them into a crap ats. What is going to happen is that we’re going to be driving them to an experience that is going to be performance based and then it’s going to be matching and then there will be just like we’re creating job discovery over here, they’re going to create candidate discovery over here and it’s just going to be this amazing marriage that will push things forward. There is going to be pain, there are going to be bumps, there are going to be naysayers.
32:31
Tracey Parsons
But that is all very normal because this is where we’re going.
32:34
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And I think that, you know, my final question is where is this all going? Where is this going next? So let me frame it this way. If were having this conversation again in two years time, how would we be talking? What would things look like? What would we be talking about?
32:51
Tracey Parsons
I personally think we’re going to figure out how to insert the right friction points into a seamless experience. Because this is. This, this should never. I actually did a talk on this seven or eight years ago that’s like the recruiting experience should be friction free. And a year later I was like, that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. But this was the dumb one. And because here’s the thing, unlike consumer marketing, unlike purchasing products, we are trading time for money with people. This is a bigger decision. There has to be insertion of friction in the Right places.
33:30
Tracey Parsons
So what we’re going to get to is we’re going to have a process and an experience versus a process that is inserting friction in the right places to ensure that we are saving time, money and energy and putting the right people in the right jobs so that they can continue to really push forward with their purpose as humans.
33:51
JT O’Donnell
I agree. I mean, I know we’re in the pain of it now, but in two years, I think we’re going to be loving what’s been built in terms of companies being able to get the exact right candidates that they want and that candidates that get contacted know they’re not going to get ghosted, that they’re really going to get through a process and, you know, get answer one way or another about where they. They are.
34:10
Tracey Parsons
Right.
34:10
JT O’Donnell
I mean, we’ve got these bumps, but it’s exciting to me. And I, I’ll be honest, I get excited for the candidates because they really, they always say, if I can just talk, if I could just talk to the employer and show them what I can do.
34:23
Tracey Parsons
Right.
34:24
JT O’Donnell
So there’s going to be so much that comes down the pike that allows them to do that finally kills that static resume that’s all about your past and not about your future.
34:31
Tracey Parsons
Right.
34:32
JT O’Donnell
There’s going to be so much that they can do to authentically authenticate themselves and their knowledge in order to be found. And that’s exciting to me because it means both sides are finally going to win. We’ve been so far behind in this, but I really believe these AI revolutions that are coming around right now are going to make this so much better in two years. It’s going to be good.
34:48
Tracey Parsons
Yeah, absolutely. And whoever coined the war for talent, I don’t love you, but that will be like, that has never sat right with me because to JT’s point, this is a symbiosis, you guys. We oftentimes forget that there is no power position. We need them as much as they need us, and we constantly ignore that fact. They need us to really execute their purpose and do what their life’s work is about. We need them to make our companies functional and profitable. Like, we have to stop treating this as some sort of battle. Nobody wants a war. We just want a great job that pays well.
35:26
Matt Alder
Tracey, jt, thank you so much for joining me.
35:29
Tracey Parsons
Thank you.
35:30
JT O’Donnell
Thank you so much, Matt.
35:32
Matt Alder
My thanks to Tracey and jt. Don’t forget, if you haven’t already, you can benchmark your talent acquisition capability quickly and easily by completing the free fit for the future assessment, just head over to Mataulder Me Podcast. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll receive valuable insights right away. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com where 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.
36:26
JT O’Donnell
This is my show, Sa.
