We’ve been talking about automation in recruiting for a long time. The AI developments of the last two years have significantly shifted the landscape of what is possible with automation, making it a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have. However, the current situation is pretty problematic. Some recruiters and TA teams are doing it poorly, particularly in outreach, inundating candidates with generic, obviously AI-generated messages that all sound the same. Meanwhile, many recruiting teams are resisting automation entirely, concerned about losing the human connection that actually fills roles.
At the same time, in a world of AI sameness, brand, reputation, and genuine relationships with a talent pool are becoming the real competitive advantage and the key factor that actually drives response.
So how do recruiters balance automation with authenticity while building the credibility that cuts through the noise?
My guest this week is Mark Whitby, host of The Resilient Recruiter podcast. In our conversation, he discusses what should be automated, what must remain human, why investing in your brand now will determine your future success, and the role external recruiters can play in rebuilding trust in the hiring process.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current situation with automation in recruiting
• Reticence, bad strategies, and poor implementations
• The importance of the personal touch
• What are the essentially human parts of the hiring process?
• Multi-touch and multi-channel outreach
• How external agencies can help build trust with candidates
•
• How will AI change the agency market?
• The vital importance of brand and relationship building
• What will the future look like?
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Transcript:
Matt Alder 00:00
AI has shifted automation from a nice to have to a strategic imperative. But there is a problem. Some recruiting teams are implementing automation poorly and destroying candidate trust, while others won’t touch it at all, worried about losing the personal connection that actually fills roles. So what should be automated and what must stay human? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from talent pilot, the first end to end, AI, native platform for recruiting. Let’s be honest, no one becomes a recruiter to copy and paste CVS, Chase feedback or write interview notes. Talent pilot is helping the role of the recruiter to quickly evolve from a junior admin heavy one to one of the most strategic roles in the entire organization. With talent pilot, recruiters can build their own hiring workflows by deploying AI agents at different touch points of the recruiting process to source, screen and select the best talent. They’re offering a free demo for everyone who listens to recruiting future. So head over to talent pilot.com/matt to experience the new era of recruiting. That’s talent pilot.com/matt and it’s Matt, M, A, T, T
Matt Alder 01:45
Hi there. Welcome to Episode 755 a recruiting future with me. Matt Alder, we’ve been talking about automation in recruiting for a really long time. The AI developments of the last two years, though, have really shifted the needle on what’s possible with automation, making it a strategic imperative rather than a nice to have. However, the current situation is pretty problematic. Some recruiters and TA teams are doing automation poorly, particularly in outreach, inundating candidates with generic, obviously AI generated messages that all sound the same. Meanwhile, a significant number of recruiting teams are resisting automation, entirely, worried about losing the human connection that actually fills roles at the same time in a world of AI, sameness, brand reputation and genuine relationships with the talent pool are becoming the real competitive advantage and the key factor that actually gets candidates to respond. So how do recruiters balance automation with authenticity while building the credibility that cuts through the noise? My guest this week is Mark Whitby, host of the resilient recruiter podcast. In our conversation, he shares what should be automated, what must stay human, why investing in your brand right now will determine your success in the future and the role external recruiters can play in rebuilding trust in the hiring process. Hi Mark, and welcome to the podcast.
Mark Whitby 03:23
I’m Matt. It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, it’s an
Matt Alder 03:28
absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Just to start off with, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Sure.
Mark Whitby 03:35
So I’m Mark Whitby. I am the founder of recruitment coach. For the last 25 years, I’ve trained over 10,000 recruiters in 34 countries. Now I mainly coach owners of boutique search firms and small staffing companies. I was an agency recruiter for five years before that, and I also host a podcast called the resilient recruiter.
Matt Alder 03:55
Fantastic. Tell us a little bit more about the bit more about the podcast. Yeah.
Mark Whitby 03:59
So this is actually the favorite thing I do, and it’s quite strange being on the other side of the of the mic today. But look, I have always sought out people who are excellent at what they do, and that’s been really my journey of personal development has been finding smart people who are, you know, high performers, and asking them lots of questions. And so I’ve been doing that, you know, in my whole professional career, and in the course of my business, I meet so many incredible people, you know, top billing recruiters, as well as owners of fast growing companies, and I’m having these really interesting conversations. And I thought, You know what, why don’t I just record these conversations and share them with a wider audience? Because I feel like a lot of other people could could benefit from this, and it’s just absolutely taken off. I started in 2019, we’re coming up for a 300th episode, and it. Is a real as you know, like I would do it, even if there was no business benefit, because it is. It’s such a enjoyable way to to learn and grow. So, yeah, so that’s why I did it, but it’s, it’s turned into quite a big thing, yeah?
Matt Alder 05:20
So, I mean, it’s very similar to my podcast story. You know, same thing was having conversations. Thought it’d be great to turn into a podcast. And you know, I’ve been aware of your podcast for for quite some time. And we recently found out that we only live a few miles away from each other, which was the spectacular coincidence. East Lothian has got two recruitment podcasters in it. And you know, it was great to kind of meet up with you face to face in a world that is increasingly digital and and online.
Mark Whitby 05:47
Effectively, absolutely, yeah, it’s crazy that we live in the same neck of the hoods, really.
Matt Alder 05:53
So let’s kind of talk about what’s going on out there. So I want to start with AI, because it’s illegal to have any kind of podcast to not mention AI, so let’s sort of mention it right at the start. So I suppose the biggest use case that we’ve seen AI kind of applied to in the last two or three years has been automation. What’s happening in the agency sector in terms of in terms of automation? What are you seeing? How has it been evolving?
Mark Whitby 06:21
Yeah, so automation is obviously not new, but is gaining so much traction. But the challenge, I think Matt, is a lot of people are doing it badly, and the risk to that is number one, it just results in candidates being inundated with generic AI sounding, you know, messaging which is ineffective but also just dilutes, you know, the channel for it for everyone. So I’m a big advocate for automation, by the way, in terms of saving time, provided it’s done correctly. And we can maybe get into that in a minute. But the there, I actually get a lot of resistance still, from people who don’t want to be automated, because they’re worried they’re going to lose the personal touch. And my argument is actually that by automating as many things in your business your job as possible, you actually free up more time to do the human stuff and to connect with people in person or over zoom or over teams, which is ultimately it’s those relationships that are going to help us to fill jobs and find the best candidates, right?
Matt Alder 07:45
Yeah, I mean, 100% I think there’s, there’s two things you kind of really, really sort of nailed there. I think that there’s that bad use of, you know, sales or marketing automation, you know, those very generic kind of LinkedIn messages that go out there. It’s kind of like a modern day version of the dear first name mistake people used to make with the original kind of marketing automation systems. And you know, nothing is going to sort of disengage a candidate more than than sort of those poorly, poorly thought out mass communications. But yeah, at the same time, I think that we’ve got to remember the key thing about recruiting is it’s about humans and building relationship. And to me, this offers a spectacular opportunity for people to kind of really, really sort of focus, you know, focus on that. What do you think? What are those kind of essential human parts of the process? What is it that we need to sort of defend, at all costs, from from automation? And, you know, AI ing, as it were, well.
Mark Whitby 08:43
So one part that I think could be interesting to zoom in on in the overall hiring process is the actual Canada engagement and outreach. Piece of it, because, and here I see, you know, it’s no longer a challenge to identify talent, right? That data is available to everybody. The challenge is getting them to actually pay attention and to care about what you’re trying to offer them and to respond. I guess ultimately, right is what we’re trying to achieve when we’re we’ve got a job that we need filled, and we know who we want. We know what the profile is, but getting them to actually respond and start a conversation so they can get them into the hiring process, that is a major challenge. So where automation fits in versus the human stuff? I think it needs to be a blend. So a lot of recruiters, and I think this applies to both internal and external recruiters, they rely on, you know, they’ve got their LinkedIn recruiter license, and they rely on sending in mails, and that seems to be the primary channel for, you know, getting communication with candidates. And I think that’s fair. Be rudimentary, and there’s so many other opportunities. So what we teach is a multi touch, multi channel outreach campaign across email LinkedIn as well as telephone voice notes and personalized video messages supported by a content strategy as well. Okay, so in terms of what can be automated there, so the the email and the LinkedIn messages can be automated, you know, if we have time, we can get into like the do’s and don’ts, and how to make that not feel automated. But then the actual parts of the outreach that, when you and I started in, recruiting Matt, were standard like just picking up the phone and calling someone that rarely happens anymore, right? And I think there is still a place for that where we can introduce the personal touch. Is with, for example, voice notes on LinkedIn, as well as personalized video. A lot of our clients are finding that is an extremely effective way of cutting through the noise and getting the attention of a of a candidate. It stands out in their LinkedIn inbox as well as their email inbox, and it’s becoming more common, but it is still rare enough that it does get people’s attention, it shows that you are making more effort to reach them. They get to hear your voice. They get your personality across better than just, you know, the text of a short email message, which you can’t really do justice to a job opportunity in a short email, right? It can only really tease, or it’s the bait that gets people to want to book a call to have a further conversation with you. Now, believe it or not, you can AI. You can scale those video messages with AI, but in my opinion, that’s a mistake, because it doesn’t quite work in the sense that now the voice is uncanny like it is uncanny. You and I can clone our voices and it will sound just like Mark Whitby and Matt alder. But the problem is, when you try and clone the video and make it personalized. There’s like a lips it’s like a badly lip sync, a badly dubbed movie where the the mouth doesn’t move, you know, in in time with the words. And there’s just something off about it. So in my opinion, the video messages should still be recorded one at a time, but you can have a process where you batch record those and, yeah, so I think it’s got to be a combination of automation, AI, and the personal outreach.
Matt Alder 12:52
It’s funny, actually, because I just got a video yesterday, nothing to do with recruiting. It was something that I kind of this sort of furniture that we’d ordered, and I got exactly that kind of email. So it was kind of like, here we are. Thank you very much for your order. With a dodgy, the dodgy lip syncing. And it was a bit like, well, you know, I wish they kind of hadn’t bothered if they showed a picture, you know, they were packing my actual order or something like that. It might have resonated a bit more, but it just as you said, I felt a little bit like, dear first name,
Mark Whitby 13:21
the whole, like, if you’re going to personalize something, but then people know that it’s automated, it sort of undermines the whole. Like, why bother
Matt Alder 13:32
digging into you know what you said earlier, about very clear on what sort of what’s personalized and bespoke and all that sort of stuff, but you said there is kind of mass automation here. What are the things that you tell people they should think about when they’re when they’re doing that to make sure that it doesn’t put people off or just just sound like everyone else?
Mark Whitby 13:50
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of things. First of all, the copy has to be good. And that’s a very overlooked I know you come from a marketing and advertising background and and it is a copywriting is a skill in and of itself, and it’s not one that talent, talent acquisition folks probably spend much time thinking about or honing right? It is the ability to communicate effectively in text like in print, that’s a whole skill set. And I think that the risk of AI here is it gives people the sense that they’re now using chat GPT or Claude to compose these messages, and they’re still not very good, is the problem. So that’s a whole we could do a whole podcast just about copywriting. So the message has to be good, because if you scale a bad message, it’s like it that’s not going to help anybody. The next thing to consider is the the segmentation. Recommendation. I think actually segmentation Trumps personalization. What I mean by that is we need to be very clear on the persona that we’re reaching out to, and so the messaging like we need to think about who is the target candidate, what’s the profile, and then really get inside that candidate’s mind and think, Okay, what are the challenges? What are the frustrations they’re likely dealing with? What are the things they’re dissatisfied in our current job situation? What are the things that like? What are the reasons that they might be tempted to consider a new opportunity and make it very specific to that industry, that job function, because if we can write for that person uniquely, rather than you know about this industry in general, then that’s really going to resonate with the recipient. And that is, if anything, more important than the personalization now, then, if you want to add the personalization in, what we can do is use, you know, Claude or chat GPT to with very careful prompting to try and Look at their background, their career history, their LinkedIn profile, and pull out a few key things that you could say about that individual to show that this is them, specifically, that we’re interested in talking to and that we have done our homework and we’ve done our due diligence here to make it feel much more like it’s a it’s a well thought out personalized approach, but the personalization is really just a layer that we’re putting on top the core message itself has to be solid to begin with.
Matt Alder 16:54
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great point about segmentation there. And I think if we sort of zoom out for this. All of this is really about trust. And so many kind of things have happened to really undermine trust in the recruitment process. And badly targeted spam messages is one of them. Candidate experience is another employer behavior. There’s just so much going on. What’s your take on the sort of the current state of trust in hiring,
Mark Whitby 17:21
yeah, I think we are in a low trust, you know, environment in the world in general, right? If you think of politics and, and you think of the the media, the mass media, and, you know, people have lost faith in institutions and and media, and with AI, that’s accelerated, so now you don’t know what to believe anymore, right? And so going back to our outreach example, often who the message is from is more important than the subject line or the content right itself. And do I trust the person who is sending me this message? And so that’s why I think we talk a lot about Employer Branding. I think every like leader in businesses and every Talent Acquisition Professional needs to also, also really think about building their personal brand, because that is going to be a significant factor as to whether or not the candidate responds. Is not just how good is the message and how personalized and targeted is, but who is this? Who is sending me this, and are they credible, right? And if we can actually build a relationship with our market, and by market, I mean that, let’s say the talent pool in advance, before we approach them about a specific opportunity, then that’s going to significantly increase the response rate that we get when we do tap them on the shoulder and, you know, invite them to apply for a position. So I think trust is crucial, and that needs to be built over time by showing that you’re a a real human being and B, you’re a credible expert in whatever domain that you’re recruiting, and
Matt Alder 19:21
I think that’s I think it’s really interesting. And also what I think is interesting is the role that agencies can play in this as agencies evolve. So how are agencies evolving? What is their kind of role in this trust puzzle? Where do they fit in with employers? You know, what? How do you see this sort of panning out?
Mark Whitby 19:44
Yeah, it’s a great, great question. So one of the key things that we teach and encourage all of our clients to do is become more and more specialized. And so I think it fits in with what we were talking about earlier, about how the message. Just have to be super targeted, but also the sender needs to be positioned as an expert in that domain, whether it’s a functional area or a specific industry sector, or even a combination of both, so specializing in a function within an industry. So I think one of the challenges for talent acquisition is that you have so many jobs across all parts of the business that we need to we need to fill and having a specialist recruiter who really understands that market, but then also has the relationship already with those candidates and has a brand within that space, means that they’re going to get a much higher response potentially than somebody who doesn’t already have a reputation in that space, if that makes sense. So I think that’s one way where internal and external and external agencies can partner in a mutually beneficial way.
Matt Alder 21:04
I think that makes a lot of sense, and is that shake up for the agency industry, because what you’re kind of describing, I’ve had lots of experience over the years working with some great agency recruiters and headhunters who do exactly that kind of stuff. And that, that, to me, is almost like, that’s what when people talk about old school recruiting, before technology and the internet, that, to me, is what that is. It’s that, that expertise, that specialism, that building, building relationships. But across the whole agency market, there obviously lots of agencies that aren’t like that, and there’s volume recruitment and all these and all these kind of things. How do you see, you know, the kind of market as a whole, sort of being effective, or evolving as we have more more kind of automation. And, you know, the thing, the process changes.
Mark Whitby 21:50
Yeah, I think that all recruiters, internal and external, going to need to evolve in order to, you know, stay relevant to clients and candidates, because expectations, like of everybody, including candidates, is just so much higher now. But to your point, it’s interesting. I think it has sort of come full circle in that what agency recruiters now have to offer is reputation relationships with a talent pool within a specific industry, and therefore greater access to getting the ear of those candidates and getting them to pay attention. So we’ve kind of gone full circle, because now everybody can automate outreach at scale and use AI to personalize so I think we’re going to get to a point in the next couple of years where candidates just receive perfect messages in their inbox that are, you know, researched and written by AI that it’s almost going to become noise again. So I think there is a window of time right now where this kind of thing, automation and personalization at scale, is still a competitive advantage, but we’re quickly getting to a place where it’s going to come back to personal relationships and having a reputation and a brand in the specific industry you serve, those are the people who are going to be able to get candidates interested in jobs.
Matt Alder 23:27
Yeah, it’s interesting, because sort of a few weeks back, I saw Professor Scott Galloway talking at unleash world in Paris. And, you know, he does a lot of stuff around AI and trust and all those kind of things. And the three things that he really zeroed on, on, in on that people, he felt that people needed for, you know, their future careers were, first of all, understanding the tools, how they work, but the other two were a network and storytelling to build relationships and build trust. And I think that’s exactly what you’ve just you said exactly the same thing. So I think it’s some I think they’re really the things that everyone needs to focus on. So just kind of finally, I suppose, you know, wrap this up for us. Where do you think recruiting is going? What might we be looking at the recruiting process been like in a few years time? Where’s the where’s the revolution, where’s the evolution?
Mark Whitby 24:16
So I think that recruiting actually has a bright future in a couple of respects. Number one, I think there’s going to be a huge skills shortage in the emerging areas that, like we’ve both heard the stat that a lot of the jobs that people are going to be doing in 510, years haven’t been invented yet, right? And so there is going to be an incredible demand for people with the right sorts of skills. And so I think that’s going to keep internal and external recruiters very, very busy. I do think the future is exactly, is an evolution of what we’ve what we’ve described today, right? Which is humans, you. Humans want to deal with humans, and that element of trust is going to become increasingly important. So our listeners should really think about starting now, if you haven’t already, sort of started building that personal brand through posting content on LinkedIn, attending industry conferences, putting yourself out there on video. You know, start doing that now, because you know the expression, when’s the best time to plant a tree 100 years ago? When’s the second best time is right now. So I think the people who invest in building their reputation and their brand now are going to be the ones who capture the lion’s share of the business and the talent in the future,
Matt Alder 25:44
I could not agree with you more, Mark, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks, Matt. That was fun. My thanks to Mark. 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 recruiting future.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our 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
