Ep 129: Modeling Transparency and Earning Trust in Recruiting with Gerry Crispin

[00:00:09] Hey everyone, it's Bob. Welcome back to Elevate Your AIQ, your go-to source for insightful conversations on human-centric AI readiness, talent transformation, responsible innovation, and the future of work. Today, I'm excited to share my recent conversation with my friend Gerry Crispin. He's the founder of Career Crossroads and a fixture in the talent community for close to five decades.

[00:00:30] Gerry takes us from the earliest days of pre-internet recruiting to today's AI-driven hiring landscape. He makes the case that the real opportunity isn't just more efficient hiring, but a fairer, more transparent hiring experience for every candidate. Music to my ears, of course, as my regular listeners know. Gerry and I dig into what it means to build genuine community and trust across the ecosystem and what standards employers owe candidates as AI agents take on a bigger role in the process.

[00:00:57] This one's full of stories from someone who's actually lived through every era of this industry and has a clear-eyed, optimistic view of where this is all headed, including what agentic hiring might look like in the future. Thanks, as always, for listening to the show. Let's go talk to Gerry. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Elevate Your AIQ. I am your host, Bob Pulver, and with me today, I have the man, the myth, the legend, Gerry Crispin. How are you doing today, Gerry?

[00:01:24] Fabulous. It's a good day. It's raining outside, but if I got up on this side of the grass, I'm good. That is absolutely true. Yeah, I have the same weather. I mean, I'm just on the other side of the Long Island town from you. Yeah, it's been very strange weather around here.

[00:01:47] So, Gerry, I know everyone in the talent space knows who you are, but I've got a lot of listeners who are not in that space, so I thought you could just give a little bit about your background in recruiting and all the great things that you've done for the talent ecosystem, for your community, which is celebrating 30 years, I believe, right? Career Crossroads. 30 years with Career Crossroads, yeah. Amazing. And about 55 years in recruiting.

[00:02:16] That is insane. I wonder what that was like way back in the day. It is. I avoid talking about some of those stories, except over maybe a glass of wine or something, because it's different, and yet people go, what? What? You know, that kind of thing. But, you know, the elevator pitch really is, I believe, I've always believed that the expertise is in learning.

[00:02:47] And so my tagline really is, you know, lifelong learner. I constantly am looking for different ways to understand what's going on and listening to other people about what they do, and I'm always surprised. So I always try to find a place where I can do that. And I've tried to do that in a lot of different places.

[00:03:11] So I spent six years in graduate school studying industrial organizational psychology after a degree in engineering. And so the way I would describe that is a switch from mechanical systems to human systems. And so I was fascinated by recruiting at a fairly early stage in my life, because to pay for my graduate education, I worked in career services during a recession.

[00:03:39] And so I not only was responsible for helping, you know, 400 kids get their first job, which wasn't hard in an engineering school. You know, the average kid got six offers kind of thing. So it was a matter of making good decisions, not just, you know, how much money can you make. But I was seeing, you know, alumni come back in some cases and the worst case after 19 years.

[00:04:07] And in 1972, you don't vest for your pension until you've been working for the company 20 years.

[00:04:17] And so I had the biggest, you know, light bulb blow up in my head with that alumnus because I suddenly realized that corporations don't pay much attention to you as a human being, that they would let you go after 19 years and you have nothing. Nothing. Laws changed, really, as a result of that recession.

[00:04:44] But I spent a lot of time, you know, studying and learning about, you know, recruiting and decisions that people make in relation to that and started rethinking, oh, what, who's responsible for the next, you know, 40 or 50 years of my career? And it wasn't the employer. It was me.

[00:05:06] And so I spent a good deal of time managing kind of the values that I'm trying to aspire to, to the employers that I work for. So I worked for Johnson & Johnson for about 10 years, did a whole host of other kinds of things from contract recruiting and executive search.

[00:05:27] And for, for a few years, I worked for a couple companies that I shouldn't have worked for and learned, learned what it was like to do that. And then, and I went to work for a recruitment advertising firm that I was connected to and spent over 10 years building an operation that in the old days, you know, you put ads in newspapers. So a weird shit like that.

[00:05:54] And in the middle of that, this thing called the internet started and I'm going, holy cow, how weird is this? And, and, and the light bulb moment for me with that kind of thing was I, I had gotten as a client, my college, Stevens Institute of Technology. And I went over to the head of the library who had been there when I was a student.

[00:06:19] And I'm, you know, proud to tell him that, you know, my, my college is now one of my clients. And, and, and he says, oh yeah, I just, I just put a, an ad for a research librarian on, on the Usenet. I said, oh, what? And, and as, as he did, I said, yeah, but you know, I, I have you as a client.

[00:06:44] I, I, so, you know, the head of recruiting will probably give me a call about that, you know, job requisition. And I'll get an ad together that would go into a New York times for the weekend. He says, I don't, I don't think that's going to be needed. And just then his, his six minute fax machine started, started clacking and he goes,

[00:07:13] and, and you can see the, the first resume comes out. He said, see, he says, I'll have 20 of these in, in the next hour and a half or something. I said, holy shit. I said, I just lost a commission. My company lost, you know, their piece of the action. The newspaper lost their piece of the action. Oh, something's going on here.

[00:07:43] I need to, I need to learn more. So I, I was writing books by 1996 about the internet and how that would change everything. And, and some of those books are still on, on, on Amazon. You know, they're old, but they're kind of funny. So it's, it's, it's, it's one way of looking at what existed in the 1990s when we were, you know, trying to figure out what the hell does this mean?

[00:08:12] And fascinating stuff because here's what was happening. People were, were creating these things or taking on these things called ATSs, but, but, but candidates were still sending the employer their resume in an, in a letter. So you had, you had an ATS.

[00:08:34] ATS, you might've even had a website, but you had 300 envelopes a day coming in that had to be opened, had to be scanned. And you didn't want to deal, you didn't have the scanning capability. So you'd send all of these things out. They would be scanned out. Then they'd have to be checked because they have about a 1% error rate, which is actually bad. It has to be checked.

[00:09:02] And then a disc comes back that you have to upload into your ATS a week later. So, so I just love that stuff. It was, you know, that's, that just, you know, it just loved it. So that, you know, that takes you through, you know, the early stages. And what was happening in the early stages is people were actually getting fired for, for being an employee, let's say of Microsoft.

[00:09:30] Well, maybe not Microsoft, a couple of the others though. You'd be an employee of a company. You would write a post with your name and your company on it. And your company would be worried about people who were losing control of their employees talking about stuff. So they'd automatically fire you. So, so people who posted notes in the early 2000, 2001 took on fake names like recruiter

[00:10:00] guy or whatever. Yeah. So I learned something then because I was, I was speaking for four or five years and I realized that there wasn't a safe place where people could talk about and share what they were doing with the internet, how they were re-imagining recruiting. Their companies didn't want them to be public about it. They thought maybe it was proprietary in those days.

[00:10:27] So, so I said, well, maybe we can get a bunch of TA leaders to come together and talk to each other, but not, you know, not publish that to the world. But, but, but, you know, in, in, in the, in the show of silence, everybody can learn from one another because peers are talking about what they're doing right now, as opposed to experts who are talking about what they learned from those people a year ago.

[00:10:57] And at conferences, people were, were, were losing the real data because they didn't want everybody to know. And their communications people were saying, well, it was a pilot, but don't talk about that, you know, that kind of thing. So I wasn't sure what was going on in conferences at the time. So, so that's how career crossroads morphed from books to a community of people who by

[00:11:27] and large agreed to have conversations between each other and to be openly sharing, but not expecting that it, that what they said would show up in the wall street journal the next day. And, and that started. And so, you know, today, 20 some odd years later, there's about a hundred companies that make up career crossroads. We also have a foundation of 501c that's doing some work in a variety of ways to hopefully

[00:11:55] improve the industry from a positive point of view. And a lot of our members like to participate in that. It gets them out of their, their headset of their nose to the grindstone and their employer, you know, company role and, and thinking a little bit broader in terms of what would benefit the industry and, and the profession that we're in. Well, community is so incredibly important.

[00:12:21] I feel like even more so than before. I mean, the rationale for, for starting it is, is sound. I mean, it's very logical because I remember the days when I was at IBM at the time, we actually crowdsourced the, what they called the social computing guidelines, right? To say, listen, you need, you can be on social media.

[00:12:46] We're trusting you to, you know, put in your profile that, you know, these opinions are your own. Only designated representatives of the company can actually, you know, basically express or speak on behalf of, of the company. But it was, it was about trust, which of course is a huge theme today. And so I guess I was the beneficiary of some of the sort of movements that were happening, you know, prior to that.

[00:13:16] Certainly there were internal communities, communities of, of interest, not just communities of excellence and practice or whatever. And so that you did have that sort of cross pollination of, of ideas across organizational silos. But to your point, you know, what career Crossroads enabled people to do and to have that sort of open forum, you know, behind closed doors, you know, to Chatham House rules, I think is one of the terms people use when things don't leave, leave the room, the virtual room or the

[00:13:46] physical room. It is. The key, the key to that though, is encouraging folks who are doing good work to go beyond, if you will, their community to, to in, you know, ensure that they share beyond that. So, you know, when we would have somebody make a presentation about something really unique and they weren't even, they weren't even aware that what they were doing is unique, but their peers are telling them, no, no one's doing this.

[00:14:15] We're learning, we're thinking now thinking, what does that look like in our company? We can't do what you do, but we can have a version that, that relates to our culture. And we need to rethink that in terms of that principle that you're dealing with. Those are the ones that you want to go, okay, you know, I know somebody at SHRM that would, you know, pay attention to your call for presentations, but you gotta, you gotta send the call for, you know, your, your, your information in and ask to speak.

[00:14:46] And, and so we pushed an awful lot of folks to get involved beyond, well beyond our community. But, but obviously that's part of how you build a long-term community is the, is that balance of sharing, you know, and having common values that, that, that are there.

[00:15:09] And so I, I'm just a fan of, of the fact that community is something that can, can be had in our, in our space in a variety of ways. And I see it as beyond a network. A network is a whole group of people that you, you're on LinkedIn as a first order connection or something to that. A community is someone that if you call them, they'll call you back.

[00:15:37] If you know, if you say, Hey, you know, I'm, I need to pick your brain about X, Y, and Z. And they know that you're not going to abuse the time, the energy, whatever, but their sharing is critical. They'll call you back or they'll tell you they can't call you back or they, whatever. Yeah. There's, you're not going to be ghosted. If you are, then that I, I'll, I'll play a role in that. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like there's some inherent sort of reciprocity when you've joined that

[00:16:07] community. I also think about some of the things, you know, I guess it was, you know, 20 or so years ago, you know, cause at IBM, we were fortunate to have internal social networks, internal communities. You had a big, big, you were actually a member for a short time at the beginning of that. So a couple of the things that I remember back then was one is, yeah, you don't realize that what you're doing is novel or, or valuable to others.

[00:16:33] And some of that was, you know, back then it was almost like you, you felt like your value was the knowledge that you had and the expertise that you had. And you weren't, people weren't necessarily in the habit of sharing. And there was a term that one of the social business sort of leaders was used all the time called working out loud, like starting to blog, starting to share, you know, your learnings and start. And then people started to say, oh, I'm so glad you shared that because. You're right.

[00:17:03] It is a, it is a tension. And a lot of people from a competition point of view think in terms of zero sum games. So the more I share, the less of the pie I'm going to have, as opposed to the bigger pie we both create for all of us. And, and, you know, and any, anybody who's spent time either in graduate school or in some kind

[00:17:31] of class on decision-making goes through a number of those, you know, zero sum games, different kinds of collaboration and so on and so forth. And, and legitimately there are situations that, you know, that are very competitive. You don't, you don't talk about your company's plan to, you know, build facilities in a given

[00:17:55] part of the world to competitors who, you know, could, could go faster than you or something to that effect. But, but the practice of how you hire people is it's bullshit that there's something proprietary here. It's, it is, it, we're, we're all struggling to figure out what it, what it is, you know,

[00:18:20] in its framework that allows for us to think about the uniqueness of how we execute on that to enhance our brand, to ensure that we get the best of those folks who are interested at a given point in time and so on and so forth. So we're still, we still struggle with that because we don't, we don't have a, a true body

[00:18:44] of knowledge that has been, you know, sourced and vetted and, you know, supported by the data. And we're still struggling to get there. I think one of the other things that sort of came out of people working out loud and sharing their expertise, you know, broadly, publicly, you know, people like sort of citizen, part of it is like citizen journalism in a way. And part of it is just, look, this is, I'm sharing and sort of narrating my own, you know,

[00:19:14] journey with, you know, technology adoption or with, you know, how, you know, improving and, you know, in, in sales or, you know, whatever it is that your pursuits are. And I think one of the things that came out of that was this, at least to me, I mean, you may have studied this, you know, long before I was exposed to it, but this concept of, of social capital and that my value, I'm actually exposing all this, this value and I'm having

[00:19:43] this sort of ripple effect across, you know, communities of interest, across online, you know, forums and other places where people are, you know, the value, your value is knowledge shared, not knowledge hoarded. And, and what does that mean? And I think about that a lot today as everyone and their sister is, you know, claiming to be an expert in AI. And it's like, who says who? Like, what do you, what do you mean?

[00:20:10] Where are you on a scale of whatever and who's grading you and who's whatever? And so part of this has to do with the speed with which things change. And for many years, there was a pretty, you know, from the 1950s, probably to, to the mid seventies, at least if not eighties, the, the structure of how you would, you would hire was, did not change a hell of a lot.

[00:20:37] And so, and so you could have a set of X, you could have experts who basically have learned as much as there is to learn and could call themselves experts because, you know, they knew everything. And if something was new, it was easy for them to identify that today. If you're an expert, because you've learned everything there is to know at this moment, just wait 10 minutes and minutes.

[00:21:04] And there's, you know, something happening with anthropic that just changed something in how you would build an agent, you know, or that's going to do some matching or whatever it might be. So there is no, you know, the expertise is, is I think, uh, an illusion. It's, it's a learning issue. And I do think that the, the real value is what people are actually doing to create outcomes

[00:21:33] right now. And if I can see what somebody did that impacted an outcome in a way that, that hasn't been done before and can share that one, it's satisfying, but, and, and part of the social capital issue is what does it mean for you over time? You know, if you acquire, you know, a billion dollars, you can become a philanthropist, et cetera.

[00:22:01] But if you're like most of us who, you know, make a living, put food on the table, put a little bit away, if you're lucky, it's, it's more than that as to what you do is, has, has value and impact in a way that satisfies you. And for a lot of people, it satisfies me if, if I see that I've had a impact on somebody

[00:22:26] else's life, you know, and, or career success or ability to find a job or whatever it might be. And I think for recruiters, the ability to help people find jobs. And even, even when, if they're not going to be able to help them find a job, being kind to them to say, Hey, I'm sorry, I appreciate all that you put into this, the interviews

[00:22:51] that you took, but we have made, we, we've gone on and here's some suggestions for you in terms of competing for the future. And, and the best recruiters do that. They, you know, at least for the finalists, they'll spend some time with them because they appreciate the fact that they, you know, that they contributed to this competition that led to the decision.

[00:23:15] And there's a lot of satisfaction on their, for their career in being able to add value. I would like to go a step further. Everybody who expresses interest should in fact receive something from a corporation, given the, given the technologies that we have now. So we need to reimagine the top of the funnel so that we, we give every person who's expressed

[00:23:43] interest, the opportunity to fairly compete for that role. And I think we're still a couple of years away from that. Yeah. I know you and the community are working on that and I'm happy to, you know, contribute and support those efforts as much as possible because I totally agree. I mean, we're dipping now into, you know, the, the human centricity, you know, aspects of this and, you know, exhibiting, you know, empathy.

[00:24:09] I mean, this is someone's, you know, life and livelihood and, you know, yes, we have candidate fraud. So not every, not everyone who submits an application is a real human. All these little things, nuance, right? Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't change the fact that you want to help the majority of these people who are very qualified. I mean, let's, let's face it, there are tons of very qualified people applying to these jobs and they're, to your point, they're, they're not even getting a response.

[00:24:38] I mean, I've gotten so much, you know, so much ghosting and where they'll send me, you know, a rejection email after like, you know, months and months. It's like, well, I don't even remember applying to this job. Like what, like what is going on here? I would love, one of the things I want to brainstorm at some point in the future is

[00:25:01] how do we measure a baseline for our industry on that issue of candidate ghosting, for example, just take candidate ghosting. We, I mean, there's many other things, but some 62 million people get a job in the United States over the course of the year. And each one of them on average, probably as a job seeker, some, some were reached out to.

[00:25:28] And so they only saw one person or whatever, one company, but many of them, you know, literally applied to a hundred or 200 or 300 places in order to get that job. And I would love to find a way to get a legitimate, defensible answer to the question of what percentage

[00:25:49] of the jobs that you applied to do you get ghosted and I, and, and get away from anecdotes. Certainly from my perspective, I would, I would say more than 50% of the employers in the United States intentionally ghost candidates, but I, I've had pushback on that.

[00:26:12] And it's usually from companies that are doing their best to, to comply with, with trying to get something communication to every single candidate and they, they're assuming that their, their counterparts are doing the same. And I questioned that.

[00:26:34] And I've got some data from ATS founders that, that 50% of their clients don't turn on the feature that allows for communicating with the candidate because, because it's too, it's too nuanced for them. They can't train their recruiters properly or whatever it might be. So I'm, I'm fascinated by this. I would love at some point to think about that.

[00:27:03] And certainly any of your folks who listen to this, if they, they'd be happy to, to listen to ideas on how I can get a metric, because if I got that metric then, and we were able to move the needle, you have to measure the change. You have to know that, you know, what you're doing is improving that. So, yeah, no, I definitely want to help with that because I'm already thinking through the

[00:27:31] extenuating, you know, circumstances and why someone would choose to do that. The, are you saying that the people that don't turn that on, if they have any candidate, when they find candidates that they want to move forward, it's just a manual, you know, someone typing in an email as a, as a follow-up we want to talk to? Even though they got an ATS that you could say, okay, everyone that we haven't indicated

[00:27:56] at this point to be interviewed is someone we want to tell thank you, but no, thank you at the very least. Right. And then have the system actually do that. Or you close as a, as a part of closing a rec, you know, there is, there is all of the people who applied to that job. And, and you say to the system, find all the people that applied to the job, send them

[00:28:25] all this message, et cetera. So those kinds of features that are built into ATSs are not always turned on. And sometimes it's because it's a, it's a set of nuanced things. Maybe they don't have a solution for evergreen jobs. Maybe they wanted to just do high volume that way. And they didn't want to do another area because they wanted to be more personable or something to that effect.

[00:28:54] So there's a variety of reasons why the systems may not be sufficiently robust to be able to support what they're trying to accomplish. But I, I think, I think when you install an ATS, I think they turn a lot of features off just to, just to get this thing up and running with the idea that we're going to turn some of those features back on at some point in the future after proper training and so on and so forth.

[00:29:21] So I'm, I'm, I think that's one of the things. And the other, you know, is if you're a small company, you're hiring five people a year. And, and the point is, you know, how many people applied? Did you capture the people who applied on an Excel spreadsheet or, or, or some mechanism that allows for you to search your emails or whatever it might be so that you can do it?

[00:29:50] I mean, the point is there's no excuse given the technologies we have, whether you're a large company or small company, you should be in a position that everyone who expresses interest in the way that you required fills out an application, sends you the resume, whatever it might be that you said, deserves, deserves to get some kind of notification that we filled

[00:30:14] the position as opposed to, as opposed to what we tend to do, which is we'll be in touch if we were interested in you. Thank you for applying. We'll be in touch if we're interested in going forward. So I thought, Gerry, my, you know, my background is not in recruiting. I pivoted into the space of five, five and a half years ago. So, you know, obviously I sometimes find myself doing a little bit of, you know, Monday morning

[00:30:44] quarterbacking or armchair quarterbacking, but I, I thought a lot of times they didn't want to, so it's one thing, your baseline standard, right? Just getting them something absolutely bare, bare minimum. It's absolutely bare minimum. Yeah. I mean, you can't, you can't go any lower than, well, can't go any lower. No, the only thing lower is ghosting them. Yeah. Yeah. So, but my thought was, so if you go a step further saying, give the, giving a candidate

[00:31:12] a reason for the actual rejection, this is why we're not moving forward. I thought that maybe that's a separate issue, but I thought that was, was a, they didn't want to incur any like legal risk. Yes. Most employers do not provide feedback. Most employers have lawyers that tell recruiters, do not give feedback.

[00:31:39] Most experienced recruiters who are, let's say working at the, you know, hiring directors and, you know, managers, et cetera, et cetera. Typically though, if you, if you've got 10, 15 years of experience doing recruiting and you're that good that you're at that level doing that. I will tell you that if I interviewed them, they, they not only, they not only celebrate

[00:32:05] with the person they helped to select, but they will give feedback to the, to folks who didn't get the job. They, because, because they've gotten to know them. They've gotten to know them. They, they actually care about the fact that these are good people. They got this far and either they, they lacked a competitive piece or, you know, the, it's,

[00:32:31] it, it was a, you know, coin flip, you know, and, and if this person turns it down, maybe, you know, I can come back to you, you know, kind of thing. You have some folks who by and large would, would keep warm. Those folks who we would hire, if this one turns us down for weeks while, while negotiating and ensuring that the person shows up on time.

[00:33:00] And so we end up abusing some of the best silver medalists simply because of that. And in some cases ghost them, you know, because we forgot, we forgot them by them. But I think the best recruiters get to a point where they don't tell their bosses that they're going to give some feedback because, because, you know, they don't want to get in any trouble. But, but the fact is they're capable of doing it in a way that's positive, focused in on

[00:33:29] the job, focused in on helping them. And they know the person is going to appreciate that. And it's part of their satisfaction in the role that they're playing. So I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated by the, by all of those kinds of things. But I, but, you know, there is, there is an ability with, even with the fraud, the need for

[00:33:51] authentication, the, the number of AI bots that are, that are automatically applying for candidates. And the candidates don't even know that the AI bot did apply for a job in, you know, in something like that. Even Indeed start getting into this by, by telling candidates, why don't you sign up for apply for me and we'll figure out who to apply for.

[00:34:18] I'm not even sure Indeed is telling them what they applied for, but I hope they are. Anyhow, I think we, even with all of those things, there is an ability with the technologies and tools that we have today for anyone to be able to at least tell those who has expressed interest that we're not going forward with you. So there's, there's just no excuse not to do that.

[00:34:44] Well, I think you're sort of hitting on some of the things that I think about. So when we think about in the future, you know, candidates have a lot of technology available to them. Talent acquisition teams have a lot of technology available to them. We're already seeing, you know, an AI enhanced resume, an AI at least co-authored or ghostwritten

[00:35:08] job description that matches, is sort of graded or ranked by a third, you know, AI. So at some point you can imagine that there's, there's a, you know, your agent talking to my agent. Let me know if this is a match or whatever. So, so. Absolutely. So we've got a, to your point earlier, you know, this re-imagination of what this is supposed to look like. But I think.

[00:35:34] I want to imagine an agent, if you will, that can at least express a little bit more humanity than some of, some of us do on occasion. But basically saying, hey, Bob, I see you're looking at that job or that you just applied to that job. I want to, I want to have a conversation with you quickly just to say that in the next 96 hours, we've, we've closed the job.

[00:36:02] There's 250 people who applied, including you. But, but I promise that you will get up to bat fairly because I'm going to, even though I'm not human, I'm going to ask you the same question I'm going to ask everyone that focus in on the job itself. And I have the capability of probing your answers to ensure that we understand, you know, your role and outcomes that, that are important for this job.

[00:36:30] And then I'm going to hang out with some of those, you know, humans that I work for to organize the data so that they can choose who to go forward with. And once that's done, if we don't go forward with you, I'm happy to come back and chat with you about how you could be competitive in the future if we didn't, if we didn't go forward with you or other jobs that perhaps you'd be competitive for now, whether we have them or perhaps some others.

[00:36:59] So thank you for, you know, expressing interest in the job. And here's the link to, you know, scheduling a fuller conversation with me. And, and now we're, we're thinking about how do we, if we could defend the quality of the data that we collect from all of the candidates versus each of them self-promoting themselves, if you will, with the application resume.

[00:37:29] We are then in a position to defend how we give them feedback. And so I'm, I, I imagine a, a world that's not too far in the future. I think the tools are, are they almost there? I think there's, there's examples of how we need to be more transparent about what your choice is because a candidate says, no, no, I want to, I want a human to talk to.

[00:37:57] And I'm going, you know, Hey, you know, it's not a choice between a human or a non-human. It's a choice between a non-human or nothing. I said, there's 250 people. Don't imagine a recruiter who's handling 25 different jobs simultaneously. Each of them have 250 folks who've responded. There's no way they're going to interview every single person.

[00:38:22] And if you ask them to try to figure out who they should go forward with in all of those 25 things, they're going to, they're going to be searching data that, that is discombobulated across all of these different cultures, people, levels, experiences, et cetera. And, and it's garbage in is equal garbage out. It's a random, it's a random game.

[00:38:50] So, you know, here choices, I, I am non-human and I, I'm pretty damn good at helping to collect data that's consistent across those 250 people. I think that the attitudes towards AI screeners or AI interviewers is, is already shifting, right? And the people that have gone through that. Yes. We're seeing it improve.

[00:39:18] And they, and they've got a face, you know, you get to a point where they have a face, they have expressions that are, yeah, they're, they're, they're built into an algorithm, but you know, it, there's no reason for them to do anything, but, but act in a kind way, as opposed to some recruiters or hiring managers who are going to interview you, whose eyes roll when they first see you or listen to you.

[00:39:45] And they go, you know, and they're giving you all kinds of bad messages that aren't, aren't good for you. It's funny. I was thinking back to your sort of opening, you know, statement around the engineering shift, right? From like mechanical to, to sort of human engineering, if you will. And this is one of those areas where it's like, you know, a lot of recruiters, I'm not saying

[00:40:11] the good and great recruiters, but a lot of recruiters are, especially when they're doing the screening calls. It's, it's very, you're following a script. It's very cookie cutter, very robotic. What's the difference? I would tell you that, you know, I, if you, if you job shadowed, someone is starting to do that, right? They, they, they've taken, they, they've gotten training.

[00:40:36] They've there, but they, but they, in the past, you know, it's not, you got to follow a script. You got to focus in on these questions and so on and so forth. It is definitely very robotic. The first few times you do that. But if you make a living at that, and you've been doing that for 10 years and, and you get the importance of how you, how you project yourself, you start seeing mastery that is extraordinary.

[00:41:05] The problem is what percentage of the interviewers have that level of mastery. And, and if we can copy that level of mastery from an algorithm point of view, then we can consistently do it for every single person, every single way. There is no way I could do 10 interviews in a row and act exactly the same. Yeah, no, that's, that's a really important point.

[00:41:34] And, and an algorithm can, an agent can do that. I feel like we need people. I think this ties into your efforts with, with the community and these standards, because I think it's important for just, you know, respect and empathy and, and again, tying into the human centricity aspect, which for me in recruiting, the first human I think of in recruiting is the candidate, right?

[00:41:59] So I know most of the money, you know, companies, vendors need investors and, and the companies, you know, pay the bills and whatever. But candidate technology is starting to crop up, whether that's grassroots or some vendors that are actually recognizing that this is where everyone's looking for this win-win relationship. And so you need to bolster, you know, both sides of this equation.

[00:42:25] So, so as this matures and as we talk about agents talking to agents, yes, there's going to be even more potential where people could be trying to manipulate you or there's more types of fraud, but going back to your point about, about trust and transparency, that's a two way, those are two way streets, right? And so I just feel like if you can head off, you can, you know, if you can get past the legal

[00:42:50] stuff with some things that say, listen, we're going to consider you, but here's our expectations and we're going to share some things that are going to help you, but you can't come back and bite us after we, you know, feed you this constructive, you know, information. We're just trying to make you more effective, you know, next time or whatever. We're trying to have you as part of our talent community so that we can come back to you and see that you are a stronger candidate next time. I think that's a, that's a possibility, but you said something that I think is really important

[00:43:19] and it really takes both sides having equal levels of technology, if you will. I would love to have a digital twin so that, you know, you couldn't tell the difference between me and me, my digital twin who could look exactly like me could, could be, but has a better memory and has been with me for a while and is, is mine.

[00:43:46] You know, it is a representation of me, but one with a better handle on all the things that I've done over the course of years. So if you were talking about agility or if you wanted to talk about, you know, execution on whatever and, you know, what is the outcome for these kinds of things, I might forget or come up with some oddball, whatever, because that's all that comes up for me in the interview.

[00:44:16] But my, my, my digital twin has the ability of telling the truth about me, but also some of, with some of the best information possible of, of what, what you could choose between. And, and so when we talk about an agent talking to an agent, that could be an interesting outcome for, for, for some point in the future.

[00:44:44] I don't know when, but, but I, I, I would love for someone to say, Jerry, you know, for $20 a month, we'll give you a digital twin and the digital twin will, we'll just watch and observe and be part of you. And increasingly we'll know more and more about you and be able to, you know, comment, but, but no one will have access to that other than you, you, you own that representation. Yes. We're not there yet.

[00:45:14] No, we're not. But, you know, even, I don't know if you read George LaRock posted something recently about the evolution of some of these technologies and where this could go. And some of that was definitely on the candidate side. Like, shouldn't you, same thing that, well, I shouldn't say same thing, but it's analogous to some of the things that Doc Searles, who's coming up with this, these, my terms and, and trying to kind of basically flip the model of the internet completely and say, listen, you want my data.

[00:45:43] You want to interact with me. These are my, literally, these are my terms. This is how I operate. I want to hear from these types of companies. I want to share this type of information and you could selectively share. So on the candidate side, it seems like that, if you have that, you also have trust from the employer side that these, this is not, that the digital twin is not making shit up and is not saying things

[00:46:09] that are not part of your corpus of knowledge in the way that you think or whatever. I mean, there's, there's going to be some rough, you know, patches here, but we've got to recognize that technology is not going away and we can't go back. Like Martin Redstone just posted something about, I think it was the new PM who was, new British prime minister who was saying, oh, we need to go back to, you know, paper resumes and in-person interviews and all this stuff. It's like, you can't go, you can't do that. That's not constructive, right?

[00:46:38] I understand the concerns, but. It's just not going to happen. We continue to move forward. And the question is whether we're doing the wrong things with new technology or are we re-imagining how we could do things more effectively for, for outcomes, for, for all of the stakeholders? And I think that's, that to me is the key. And I, I do agree.

[00:47:05] There's going to be some interesting rough patches before we get to that point. But I, I, I'm, you know, I'm an optimist from that perspective. It's eventually going to be there. And I think it'll be faster than most people think. I think, I think within the next five to 10 years, there is, there's no, no way we can avoid it. Yeah. No, I agree. I just, I think we just need to think more holistically.

[00:47:30] About what the actors did in, in basically striking to make sure that no one stole their representation of who they are. Because, you know, once you have the actors' voice and, and visuals, and you can represent them that way, then you can make them do almost anything you want. And the actors basically said, no, no, no. I own who I am. You can't use me. You can't use my representation.

[00:47:58] And I think digitally, we all should, should have the same responsibility. Imagine that, you know, you get this as a kid graduating from high school or something, or, you know, even before as part of, you know, you're maturing to a man or a woman kind of thing. And, and over time, that digital twin, you know, is, is really representative of you.

[00:48:28] And at some point could operate on its own for you because you own it. You could be leasing it out. So, so someone wants Bob's capability of consulting on a, on, you know, a, an organization, whatever, but you're, you're in Majorca enjoying life. And your digital twin is, is, is asking interesting questions.

[00:48:56] The same kinds of questions you'd be asking if you were doing a consulting assignment. Yeah. I mean, I'm working on that now. And I know people who have, who have built that. They can also join other digital twins and have a, get the collective intelligence of, of multiple people. You've got a great future ahead of us. Yeah. Well, the benefit, you know, I had, you know, I do have to look into Majorca now, but, but the, the key for me was, look, you could have me on retainer, but don't call me after 6 PM.

[00:49:26] Go here. Here's a link. And you can talk till six in the morning if you want. But these are my hours and this is my availability, but you do have, you know, my proxy, which isn't going to give you any, you know, false information. I am the human. I am still accountable, but this has been thoroughly evaluated, meaning tested. And it's not going to go rogue and tell you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Gotta love it. Yeah.

[00:49:55] So Jerry, we could talk for hours, but I'll be respectful of your time and we're going to, we're going to put a pin in it. But I definitely want to help you and the community with these, you know, baseline standards, respect for the individual, I think is long overdue. And yeah, however else I can help you, love to hear it. And I'll drop your, your contact information in the show notes so people can get in touch with you if they want to help out. Thanks for taking some time. And yeah, always great to talk to you, Jerry. You got it. Thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time. We will see you next time.