The constant noise around AI has created a strange situation in talent acquisition. On one side, relentless hype has made many TA leaders deeply skeptical, reluctant to invest in technology that feels oversold. On the other side, some employers have pushed through the fog and are getting genuine, measurable results from AI agents in their hiring processes. The gap between these two groups is widening fast.
So how do you separate what actually works from what’s just marketing? What does effective AI agent implementation really look like in practice, and what value is it driving for the employers embracing it
My guest this week is Max Legardez Coquin, Founder and CEO at Maki. I saw Maki’s technology in action at UNLEASH last year and was genuinely impressed by what they’re delivering for a variety of enterprise employers. In our conversation, Max explains how using AI to develop a scientific approach to hiring is driving tangible value in terms of quality, speed, efficiency, and a vastly improved candidate experience.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Making recruiting a science
• Capturing signals to make better hiring decisions
• AI agents, the case studies that show they are working
• What do candidates think about this level of automation?
• Using compound intelligence to drive predictive hiring
• Advice to TA Leaders on recruiting transformation
• Will adoption rates increase this year?
• What does the future look like?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
Trascript:
00:00
Matt Alder
AI hype has created a fog over recruiting technology. Some employers are too sceptical to act, while others are quietly getting real value from AI implementation.
00:12
Matt Alder
So what’s actually working?
00:14
Matt Alder
Keep listening to find out.
00:18
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from Maki. Maki enables businesses to build intelligent, science backed hiring strategies that predict on the job performance and adapt as roles and markets change. Companies today face a surge of undifferentiated AI, inflated CVs and often rely on manual screening or inconsistent processes. This leads to missed talent, weaker performance and a poor candidate experience. Mace combines science based assessments, behavioral signals and autonomous AI agents into one integrated engine. It evaluates every candidate, predicts who will succeed, and continuously improves hiring outcomes. Teams hire faster, more fairly and at a lower cost while delivering stronger on the job performance and a better experience for candidates and customers. To find out more you can go to mackypeople.com and Macchi is spelt M A K I and that’s Makipeople.com.
01:30
Speaker 3
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.
01:44
Matt Alder
Hi there.
01:52
Matt Alder
The constant noise around AI has created a strange situation in talent acquisition. On the one side, relentless hype has made many TA leaders deeply skeptical and reluctant to invest in technology that feels oversold. On the other, some employers have pushed through the fog and are getting genuine, measurable results from AI agents in their hiring processes. The gap between these two groups is widening fast. So how do you separate what actually works from what’s just marketing? What does effective AI agent implementation really look like in practice? And what value is it driving for the employers who embrace it? My guest this week is Max Lagarde, Konkwan Founder and CEO at Maki. I saw Maki’s technology in action at Unleashed last year and was genuinely impressed by what they’re developing for a variety of enterprise employers.
02:48
Matt Alder
In our conversation, Max explains how using AI to develop a scientific approach to hiring is driving tangible value in terms of quality, speed and efficiency and a vastly improved candidate experience.
03:04
Matt Alder
Hi Max and welcome to the podcast.
03:07
Max Legardez Coquin
Hi Mats, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
03:11
Matt Alder
Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:16
Max Legardez Coquin
Sure, sure. Thanks for the invite. My name is Max. I’m co founder and CEO of mackypeople, a company I started three years ago between London and Paris and now settle in the US in New York.
03:32
Matt Alder
Fantastic. And tell us a little bit about what mackypeople does.
03:36
Max Legardez Coquin
We are tackling I believe one of the honestly biggest problem which is how we can help organization make recruiting a science and at the end how we can help organization to better handle human capital by building better team. By doing so, we are building AI agents that can help the talent acquisition and recruiting function. And this for large enterprise across very different vertical.
04:06
Matt Alder
Fantastic.
04:07
Matt Alder
So tell us a bit more about.
04:09
Matt Alder
That problem that you’re solving. What is it that companies are experiencing with their recruiting that they should.
04:17
Matt Alder
Be doing differently or that you can fix?
04:19
Max Legardez Coquin
Yeah, why I believe it’s a huge problem is because I still believe we handle the number one resource in an organization which is human the wrong way. We still, you know, recruit and use people in organization in a way that, you know, belongs to the past. I explained myself hr all this conversation of candidates applying to a job or all this conversation of employees inside the organization, they are all signals that are not captured, are not used in order to take better decision. If you look at the hiring process, how it is today, it’s still, you know, we ask candidates to go on the website to send a CV which you know, has been created by Leonardo da Vinci seven centuries ago, full of subjectivity, not relying on skills, unstructured interviews.
05:21
Max Legardez Coquin
And you handle being picked, you know, to an organization with the wrong signal data point. And this is the start of a huge problem because you know, you have one side candidates that don’t have the right job and you have organizations that don’t build the best team.
05:42
Matt Alder
Yeah.
05:43
Matt Alder
So why is it do you think companies still rely so much on resumes and the way that they’ve always recruited? What is it that kind of makes them so resilient and makes them stick?
05:52
Max Legardez Coquin
I think that current system, you know, is there since decades and it’s hard to change. And that’s also why with my two co founder we decided to build MAKI is how we can build technology and AI with science psychometry to create a product that can help organization take better human decision based on objective criteria. And for us the best criteria is not a keyword on the cv is not an intuition or get is that candidate has the right skills, the right potential in order to get that role in that job. And it’s a tough change when we speak with organization. But where we are very lucky is that the statute code today does not work. If you look, you know, at the current hiring process applying to organization, the process are super long. Candidates don’t get any reply when they apply.
06:50
Max Legardez Coquin
The process in some organization takes four Five, six months with multiple steps, with no feedback and follow up. And when you look basically after when organization made the decision, the level of attrition, et cetera, create also a lot of big problems that as a human and a financial cost.
07:12
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And you’re using AI or AI as part of the solution to fix this. What is it that AI does that kind of frees us from this problem, takes us to a new way of recruiting.
07:25
Max Legardez Coquin
So we have created different agents. One is called Mochi, which is a voice AI agents that will be trained to handle human like conversation. When you apply to a job and I don’t know, you take one of our clients, H and M, you apply for a role of sales advisor, you will click and you will be having a conversation with Maria which is the interviewer AI from H& M. Maria will be fitted with all the H and M culture, branding. She will be able to answer all your questions and in 5, 10 minutes conversation, Maria will discuss with you and assess your potential capabilities and skills in order to become that sales advisor. So she will be able to assess different skills like your, I don’t know, Spanish language proficiency, but also your resilience.
08:22
Max Legardez Coquin
You will handle a stressful situation if you will be good in basic problem solving and also some eligibility criteria. And all of this with a very, you know, scientific engine on the back because we leverage, you know, AI, as I mentioned, with a high level of scientificity. So we can assess up to 300, 350 competencies from personality trades, cognitive, language and even art skills. And that agents mostly would focus, you know, on engaging and screening the candidates. We have another agent called Shiro that would be more immersive and visual. We have embedded avatar like Synthesia and you will be basically, you know, living an immersive experience inside an H and M store. Like if it was your first day. And during this 10, 15 minutes same you will answer to some question either on your mobile, on your desktop.
09:17
Max Legardez Coquin
We have another agent called Kumi that will help for interview scheduling and we have one of the agents called Ken that will go more later stage in the process to help hiring manager assess in depth some skins.
09:31
Matt Alder
I think the interesting thing is the, you know, you’re obviously having, you know, a lot of success with your platform, with the clients that you’ve got on there. There’s still a real kind of narrative in the industry that agents don’t work, candidates don’t like them, AI is all hype, no one’s getting kind of any results from it. What would you say? What would you kind of say to that? I mean, what are the sort of the tangible benefits and results that your clients are seeing?
09:54
Max Legardez Coquin
So very good question. You know, last year was a bit buzz about AI. Everyone is speaking about agents. You know, if you go to a big conference you see AI and agents everywhere. It was very interesting because at the end of the year you get a report from MIT and McKinsey that says 95% of the AI pilot ends nowhere with no ROI. So what we are doing is we are using technology in order to solve human problem. And what matters for us is the problem we solve in the roi. We deliver to organization what we have done good at MACHE and why I believe there’s been a recipe of success to sign that much of Fortune 500 organization in a short period of time is how we can make our product a safe one.
10:41
Max Legardez Coquin
You know, it’s not about just using AN LLM and ChatGPT to create basically an agents and give it to a Fortune 500. Doesn’t work like this. I always made the same reference. You know, 30 years ago were saying, you will not be fired by buying IBM. I use that sentence every day with my team. You will not get fired by buying mache and you will get promoted. So first, how we can build a safe product with scientific rigor that goes through different audits. You know, we have been audited by EA and the US by the state of New York showing that our product has less buyers than human on gender, on ethnicity, on age code. So being safe and enterprise ready is something I believe makes a huge difference. The second one, how we make sure that the technology again solves problems.
11:33
Max Legardez Coquin
Four metrics that are very key for us. So number one, how we make sure we deliver a five stars candidate experience. How we make sure the candidates loves the experience. Here I give you one example. One of the largest retailer in the world gets 1.6 million applications. 98% of the rejected candidates love the experience and still promote the brand. This is something we are very proud of, taking care of the rejected candidates. Second one, how we make sure we become the best friend of the recruiter. Everyone is saying, you know, we will replace human, et cetera, all that narrative at the end here we want human and recruiters to focus on human resource task, not admin task.
12:20
Max Legardez Coquin
How we can make sure that when they arrive on Monday morning at the office, they don’t spend time dealing with CV on the ATS or spending the same question over the phone to candidates. So here we manage sometimes to bring 80% efficiency, which is a huge savings in terms of time. And sometimes fte third one, how we can make sure we can accelerate the process. If I take that same retailer, went from 45 days of time to fill time to hire to 15 days divided by 3x, you know, the number of days needed to hire candidate. And last one, which is a main one, how we increase the bar, how we increase the hiring quality, in some cases we manage basically to show 20% decrease in attrition of employees because we use science and skills in order to make hiring decision.
13:18
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And from that, you know, from that science, I mean, are you able to predict performance? What is it that the science is identifying that really kind of makes a difference to the companies that you work with?
13:32
Max Legardez Coquin
Yeah, I think what is key is to understand, you know, for each role what skills are needed by the organization. And we start now across all our vertical to also have an opinion to see what works, what doesn’t work, and to make sure that the hiring decision are made based on the scoring of the skills. And this is very key to, you know, to build. And that’s why we say, you know, we want to make hiring a science, is to make sure that we give to the hiring manager and to the recruiters the best tool on the market in order to decide if that candidate will fit that role or not. And the second key point, the huge chance and opportunity we have with AI is all this conversation now that we do with our clients are not lost anymore in the old world.
14:23
Max Legardez Coquin
When you ask clients, what did you do with your 1 million conversation from last year? I don’t know. It’s the mind of my recruiter. But some retired, they left the company. Now that million of conversation is signals that helps improving the next conversation. Because we work with our clients to capture post hiring outcome. We see our candidates that become employees evolve in the organization and we use these elements in order to feedback our model. We call it learning reinforcement loop. So basically, day after day, our models get better to predict performance of employees for our clients. And this is what we call moving from efficiency to a new type of intelligence that we call compound intelligence, where things get better over time.
15:13
Matt Alder
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We talked about the experience for the candidates and how it’s kind of revolutionized, you know, revolutionized that. What about the experience for hiring managers and recruiters when they’ve moved to, you know, not just this kind of technology, but this whole way of thinking about recruiting? What, what kind of impact have you seen for you know, for both of those, you know, both of those kind.
15:36
Max Legardez Coquin
Of stakeholders, the number one, you know, elements we see is like efficiency and saving times. And I came back to what I said before. You know, we want human to handle HR and human resource task, not admin task. Every time I have the opportunity to speak with clients or potential clients, I ask to the recruiting team, what is the percentage of real HR vs admin HR you do? If you deep dive behind that question, you realize that the vast majority of the tasks are still going into my email, into my ats, download the cv, try to look around the cv, you know, try to schedule an interview, try to compare basically the skills in a conversation, et cetera.
16:23
Max Legardez Coquin
So here we want basically AI to handle that part so the human can save big portion of time with better result and focus and, you know, stand up on their role. And I prefer human to build interaction with final stage candidates, to build connection basically with employees, to better work basically on what should be the next strategy in the organization, et cetera. So this is clearly how we see ourselves on that debate. But AI will replace or not? For me, the question is like recruiters and humans can leverage technology in order to create a new type of intelligence and save time in order to do a better job.
17:11
Matt Alder
Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s interesting stuff. It makes a lot of sense. I get to talk to, you know, tier leaders who are implementing this kind of technology, this kind of approach. And I also talk to tier leaders who haven’t, you know, got to that point yet. And one of the things that really.
17:25
Matt Alder
Comes across is obviously to do this.
17:28
Matt Alder
Properly is not just sort of putting some technology in. It’s kind of completely rethinking recruiting and the process and everything that kind of goes around it. And that can seem quite intimidating for, you know, for quite a few organizations. Your advice be to someone who’s looking at changing things up, you know, using AI agents, moving to a more kind of skills based thinking, you know, all of those things.
17:52
Matt Alder
What should they be doing first? What should they be thinking about?
17:56
Max Legardez Coquin
Yeah, I will try to be very objective, but no first. And today in all my commission, I have every day with HR leaders. I think they do their homework because they look at all the markets, the vendors, they know what’s happening. So it’s cool. I think the number one advice is it’s trivial to say this, but pick, try to spend time to pick the safest and best choice. Because if you look at the EU AI act, HR is touchy. It’s a very Touchy use case because we deal with human with decision. I’m sure you heard about the workday location, the US all the legal department also freaked output, you know what could happen. So that’s this. Come back to my point. You know, we are able to build a safe ethical AI solution for large organization.
18:49
Max Legardez Coquin
So pick, you know, the safest and the best option, number one. Number two, we are very lucky in talent acquisition and IRIC because it’s a domain where AI can show ROI in weeks and months. There is some domain of application where when you use AI you need years to calculate the roi. Or sometimes it’s even too difficult to calculate the roi. Here. If you come back to the metrics I gave before time saved by recruiters, easily doable. You Understand you receive 1.5 million applications, you have 200 people dealing with a CV. If you implement a solution like Maki, you know how many hours, weeks you know do you saved. You were recruiting people in two months, you recruit them in two weeks.
19:36
Max Legardez Coquin
Attrition, you look at the first, you know, one, two, three months and you can start building basically business case regarding drop of attrition and turnover. So I would say pick a domain in HR where you can show roi. Because you will have to justify internally to your X core that you spend money on AI that deliver value and you want to be in the top 5% of the products that deliver value and not in the 95% that fail. Because if you fail, it will be much difficult for you in the next 12 months to go back to budget and to ask for money.
20:11
Max Legardez Coquin
And third one, take a partner that will be working very closely with you in the implementation AI, you know, it’s something that is new because this type of compared to the previous world where you buy a software and it’s a software and you use it today. AI solution, they have one advantage. They can be, you know, embedded to your workflow, customized to your need to your branding, etc. But it requires at the beginning some work. That’s why also we speak about new type of role. We call it forward deployed engineers. You know, that go to the clients, you know, we send people to the clients to spend basically the number of days and weeks needed in order to set everything fine during the first weeks. So this will be the three advice.
20:59
Max Legardez Coquin
Pick the best and safest option, number one, Number two, you know, choose the area where you can show in months, weeks or months an ROI internally. And third one, focus on the implementation because it will be key.
21:16
Matt Alder
One final question for you. So Everything that we’ve been talking about in this conversation is happening right now. So this is what’s possible right now with the kind of the speed of.
21:27
Matt Alder
Progress that we’re seeing.
21:28
Matt Alder
Where do you think we’re going to be in two or three years time when it comes to recruiting and hiring? Where is the technology going to take us?
21:36
Max Legardez Coquin
It’s a good question. To be honest, I’m not 1% sure because the velocity is very fast. What I can perceive first I think the adoption will continue go super fast. Three years ago everything was new. Last year was a bit of buzz and some larger institutions starting to scale. You know if you look at other vertical like customer care, customer service, now you have companies like Sierra decagon that reached 100 million IRR in two years. You know that work with the largest Fortune 500. So in also the article you see champion that start to arrive a bit slower. The adoption in HR also because bit more risky. But I think in 2026 the adoption will go super fast.
22:19
Max Legardez Coquin
Now where we will stand in two, three years, I think we will really see two type of organization to be honest because this technology will create a new competitive advantage. Some companies, I call them the linear organization will become outdated if they still take decision like were used to. Meaning I have millions of CVS that I receive that are now all faked by AI and multiplied by 10 in volume and I still buy humans that looking at it. And I have still a five month process to recruit et cetera. I’m not sure they will be the most competitive one. And you will have the compound basically intelligence organization that will be, you know, using technology machine and AI in order to take much better and faster decision. So I really believe the candidate application process will be 10x better.
23:11
Max Legardez Coquin
You will arrive on H&M.com Maria’s agents will say hey Matt, nice to see you. I know you are looking for a job in Mumbai and this is a three role we have for you at H and M. Would you be able for a five minutes call and we can come back to you tonight so you can meet someone in our Mumbai office in order to start. You know we will get closer to reinverse, you know, way of applying where the client experience will be much faster. And on the organization side we will have you know all this accumulation of data that will create engine to better recruit and better handle the human inside the organization.
23:53
Max Legardez Coquin
And I think this would be a win because it will be much more easy for employees to evolve in the organization and for organization it will be much better to have highest performing team, more diverse team and better understand how to use this human capital in the different stage of the company.
24:16
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Max, thank you very much for talking to me.
24:19
Max Legardez Coquin
Thank you Matt for the invitation. It was nice to chat with you.
24:23
Matt Alder
My thanks to Max. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@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.
