Ep 33: Why Structured and Inclusive Hiring is Essential for Talent Transformation and Growth with Jon Stross

[00:00:00] Welcome to Elevate Your AIQ, the podcast focused on the AI-powered yet human-centric future of work. Are you and your organization prepared? If not, let's get there together. The show is open to sponsorships from forward-thinking brands who are fellow advocates for responsible AI literacy and AI skills development to help ensure no individuals or organizations are left behind. I also facilitate expert panels, interviews, and offer advisory services to help shape your responsible AI journey. Go to ElevateYourAIQ.com to find out more.

[00:00:28] Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Elevate Your AIQ. Today I have the good fortune to speak with Jon Stross, co-founder and president of Greenhouse. Jon talks about his journey into entrepreneurship where he left his comfort zone and quickly learned to embrace uncertainty and risk. He spoke to me about his mindset for learning and growth, which are a big part of his career success. Other success factors, the ability to build a cohesive team of talented and passionate people, and a vision for Greenhouse that is grounded in sustainability and ethical decision making.

[00:01:09] Certainly, Greenhouse has become an incredibly successful business in the talent technology space, which we talk about as well, of course.

[00:01:15] Jon and I get into the weeds regarding the current and future state of talent acquisition, including the importance of responsible AI in all talent-related decisions.

[00:01:23] Lots of great insight from Jon, whether you're in the HR tech space or a budding entrepreneur. Let's get into it.

[00:01:30] Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Elevate Your AIQ. I'm your host, Bob Pulver.

[00:01:35] Today I have the absolute pleasure of speaking with Mr. Jon Stross, president and co-founder of Greenhouse.

[00:01:42] How are you doing this morning, Jon?

[00:01:43] Good, thanks. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:45] Absolutely. Really appreciate you taking some time to talk to me and share your insights with my listeners.

[00:01:51] Why don't you give a little bit about you and your background?

[00:01:54] So I've 25, 30 years now building software and internet products across a range of different types of things.

[00:02:03] Just previous to Greenhouse, I was at a company called Baby Center.

[00:02:07] It's a website for new and expectant parents.

[00:02:08] And I was launching the international version of that.

[00:02:12] And so I traveled the world building a baby website, which actually had me figure out,

[00:02:17] how do you hire local editors in 30 countries or 20 countries around the world?

[00:02:21] And that actually is kind of what led to Greenhouse is the whole exploration of like,

[00:02:26] how do you get great at hiring?

[00:02:28] Yeah, it's certainly not easy at all as we'll get into.

[00:02:33] I can only imagine what that might have been like in dealing with different cultures and different systems and attitudes,

[00:02:40] things like that.

[00:02:41] So it sounds like a great sort of proving ground for what you've built today.

[00:02:46] So just for those who aren't familiar with talent acquisition and applicant tracking systems

[00:02:52] and some of the tools and gadgets that critters and sourcers use in talent acquisition and recruiting operations,

[00:02:59] just a little bit about Greenhouse.

[00:03:02] So Greenhouse is a hiring software platform that companies use to manage everything from

[00:03:06] the way they source candidates on the front end,

[00:03:09] all the different strategies they're using to find candidates,

[00:03:11] to the application process.

[00:03:14] So usually when you go to a company's career site, kind of under the hood,

[00:03:16] that whole form that you're filling out is actually ATS.

[00:03:19] And then in the case of Greenhouse, we manage a whole interview process.

[00:03:22] So we help people run a structured interviewing process where they have a really clear rubric for what they're looking for

[00:03:28] and then do a bunch of interviews that explicitly line up to that rubric

[00:03:31] and fill out scorecards and make decisions,

[00:03:33] all the way through then the offer process of executing the offer and getting approvals in the org

[00:03:38] and then usually handing it off.

[00:03:39] We also have an onboarding product where people manage the onboarding process

[00:03:42] and eventually hand it off to the HR system down the line.

[00:03:45] And so it ends up being kind of the central platform of collaboration,

[00:03:49] not just for the recruiters, but for every stakeholder in the process.

[00:03:52] So interviewers, hiring managers, and approvers are all going to be kind of doing their recruiting work inside the tool.

[00:03:59] Wow. Awesome. So obviously the talent acquisition technology landscape is pretty broad.

[00:04:06] There's a lot of niche players, many of which are partners of yours.

[00:04:11] How do you sort of think about the relationships that you've built with some of these providers

[00:04:17] where they're trying to, I guess, in some ways create a better mousetrap?

[00:04:21] Yeah.

[00:04:22] But certainly, I guess there's a push and pull when you think about your prospects and your clients

[00:04:28] what HR needs versus what maybe the CIO hopes to have, which is fewer throats to choke, as they say.

[00:04:36] So how do you think about the ecosystem and your role in it?

[00:04:41] I think our feeling from the beginning was that there was a lot of innovation happening in recruiting technology.

[00:04:45] There's a lot of investment flowing into it.

[00:04:47] People are trying all sorts of different point solutions, whether it's around assessments or sourcing

[00:04:52] or scheduling or reporting or whatever.

[00:04:54] And so we, from the beginning, created a nice open API that made it really easy for folks to integrate with us.

[00:05:00] And so a lot of people would say, oh, yeah, I'm going to build my one-off tool or my kind of specialist solution,

[00:05:06] integrate with Greenhouse, and then go market it to the Greenhouse customers.

[00:05:09] And so we'd have our customers say, yeah, I buy Greenhouse, but I also build a tech stack on top of all these different tools.

[00:05:14] And that was very successful for us.

[00:05:16] We had hundreds of integration partners and companies that would say, oh, I really appreciate that.

[00:05:20] But all the innovation out there I can kind of access through Greenhouse.

[00:05:23] I think over the last couple of years, what we've seen is the pendulum swung the other way where people said,

[00:05:27] oh, I really would like to cut budget.

[00:05:29] I'd like to cut the complexity of having so many different tools.

[00:05:32] And so the natural thing that happens is you look and say, well, where are the natural edges of our platform?

[00:05:37] Where are things where we look and say, ooh, that thing over there we would never do.

[00:05:40] Those are going to be partners.

[00:05:41] And where do we look at some categories and say, you know, we actually have an advantage to do that better natively.

[00:05:46] And so we've picked a couple of categories where we now do it natively.

[00:05:50] And we still have those partners.

[00:05:51] There are still people who will say, oh, I have some really specialist concern.

[00:05:54] And so I'm going to go use that third-party partner.

[00:05:56] And we still support that.

[00:05:57] But then there are other areas where we say, I think we can actually do some of that natively.

[00:06:02] And some people will use it with us.

[00:06:04] So examples are like the whole CRM sourcing automation.

[00:06:08] Is that all the things around getting prospects, finding them, augmenting their profile, putting them in an email campaign.

[00:06:16] People used to be doing that solely kind of with third-party partners.

[00:06:18] Now we have native tools that do that.

[00:06:20] And most people are doing it natively in greenhouse.

[00:06:23] But there are still some folks who go outside to other partners.

[00:06:25] And we're seeing the same thing with reporting and scheduling and things like that.

[00:06:30] Right.

[00:06:30] Yeah, I mean, some of those components and sort of subdomains as you move through the funnel, I think are definitely getting a lot of attention these days.

[00:06:40] Interview, when I was at Tech Labs, we used to call it interview management solutions.

[00:06:44] But even that could be broken apart to interview scheduling, interview intelligence.

[00:06:50] In some cases, that was a matter of some degree of automation, like with the scheduling piece.

[00:06:56] But then on the interview intelligence side, it was more, how do we really get underneath where we might traditionally see a lot of human bias?

[00:07:06] And how do we get better about standardizing, making sure we're asking candidates the same questions, making sure we are exhibiting fairness through that phase of the process?

[00:07:18] I mean, that's actually the really core of what Greenhouse's initial insights were from day one was the notion that as much as people get excited about DE&I and what can you do to anonymize resumes and things like that.

[00:07:30] The core insight, though, around driving fairness and mitigating bias was really about having a consistent process that's lined up against what you're actually looking for.

[00:07:39] So it's not about somebody's identity, but it's about their ability to actually do the job.

[00:07:43] And so that was really baked into Greenhouse from day one was the idea that you're going to create a very specific rubric of skills and experiences and personality traits and whatever it is you think is required to be successful in the job.

[00:07:55] And then you create an explicit interview process that's lined up against that, have every candidate go through that same process, prep the interviewer to say, here's the exact questions you're supposed to ask, and then write down structured feedback afterwards.

[00:08:06] And so that's the thing that we've always kind of natively had within Greenhouse.

[00:08:09] Where there's a neat integration opportunity is the new category of where people are recording the interview, transcribing it, summarizing it, kind of a gong for recruiting.

[00:08:19] Where we said, well, that's a whole new set of technologies, and there's a bunch of partners doing it.

[00:08:24] The recent thing we've done is we've seen that a lot of our customers were very curious about the space but had friction, right?

[00:08:30] They said, oh, I don't even have the budget, or people are nervous the candidates won't like it, or people are nervous the interviewers won't like it.

[00:08:36] There's legal questions.

[00:08:38] And so to help people get over that, we actually just cut a deal with a partner called Brighthire where we actually include a couple seats with Greenhouse.

[00:08:44] It's just an easy way for people to trial it.

[00:08:46] And we're getting a lot of people taking us up on the offer because they just want to try it.

[00:08:50] How does that thing go?

[00:08:51] Because what we find is we personally use it.

[00:08:53] It's a pretty helpful tool.

[00:08:54] Yeah.

[00:08:55] No, that's great.

[00:08:55] It's nice to have that embedded and just try something different within the platform.

[00:09:00] That's actually pretty clever.

[00:09:02] I hadn't heard of that before.

[00:09:04] But yeah, that's a good way for people to do little A-B testing.

[00:09:08] I think we're finding that category of recording interviews.

[00:09:11] At some level, it really helps to already be doing structured interviewing to use that product.

[00:09:16] If you're not doing structured interviewing, if you're kind of making up your interviews as you go,

[00:09:20] then you're going to get less value out of that product because you're already kind of in the whole land.

[00:09:24] So the companies who are using Greenhouse, who are already doing structured interviewing, I think,

[00:09:29] are more positioned to like they're the ones who should be adopting these tools, these new tools.

[00:09:34] Yeah.

[00:09:35] You bring up a topic that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of people's just innate maturity level

[00:09:42] as they go and select some of these new tools, right?

[00:09:46] Whether that you're in a better position to take advantage of AI if you have data and analytics maturity

[00:09:53] or to your point, you've already got some semblance of structure.

[00:09:57] And I know you talk about this right at the beginning of your book in terms of the nonsense that happens

[00:10:02] where you're just like, hey, is anybody available 11 to 12 to talk to this guy?

[00:10:07] And it's just like, no prep.

[00:10:10] Ask these questions.

[00:10:11] You don't know what was asked before.

[00:10:14] And so the candidate is just like, this is not a good time.

[00:10:18] Right?

[00:10:18] Yeah.

[00:10:19] I mean, we actually another chapter of the whole book is about the hiring maturity curve

[00:10:23] is where we actually go and help diagnose, like, where are you on that curve?

[00:10:26] And there's no shame in being at the bottom.

[00:10:29] But like a lot of companies, like being great at hiring is not intuitive.

[00:10:32] It's not a natural thing that people just figure out on their own.

[00:10:35] Yeah.

[00:10:35] The natural thing is you'll hire some superstars who will just run around real fast and be successful

[00:10:40] on their own, which is good, but it leads to a very inconsistent place where you're kind

[00:10:44] of dependent on individual recruiters.

[00:10:46] Yeah.

[00:10:46] And if they so much as take a day off, you kind of fall apart.

[00:10:49] And then you end up doing things really differently at different in your different offices.

[00:10:53] And so that's a lot of what's going on with Greenhouse is we're trying not merely to be

[00:10:59] a transactional platform where you're just doing the various activities of recruiting.

[00:11:02] Obviously, that's all happening.

[00:11:03] But the real thing above that is how do we work with you to help you kind of up that maturity

[00:11:09] curve?

[00:11:09] And so you can say, yeah, every six months or every three months, I'm going to get better

[00:11:13] at hiring in some meaningful way.

[00:11:14] And so that's how we build out like our whole service model of what we're trying to help

[00:11:17] with people is that it's not simply about did you make your hires 5% faster?

[00:11:21] Like, that's great.

[00:11:22] But it's really about all the different functions for others from around candidate experience

[00:11:27] or around how you're sourcing candidates or how you're interviewing, how you're using

[00:11:30] data analytics to create transparency.

[00:11:33] Like, how do you get better at those consistently?

[00:11:35] And to your point, when you're down at the bottom, your ability to use some of these high

[00:11:40] end tools is like kind of not there yet.

[00:11:42] It's not like you have to get to actually a somewhat consistent systematic place where you're

[00:11:46] hiring systematically.

[00:11:47] We can actually take advantage of that next level stuff.

[00:12:18] Yeah.

[00:12:20] Why this works.

[00:12:22] And so I think if you've got some level of maturity in other areas and you're thinking

[00:12:28] in a more sort of system thinking kind of way about how all the pieces fit together, you're

[00:12:33] going to be in a much better position.

[00:12:34] So this isn't just about just ripping and replacing a piece of technology and we're good to go.

[00:12:38] I wish the tool was that good.

[00:12:41] But the truth is it does take the commitment of the organization to say like, hey, we're

[00:12:45] actually going to treat hiring as a first class concept and say we want to be as good

[00:12:48] at hiring as we are at any other business function.

[00:12:50] Yeah.

[00:12:51] And the unlock that happens when your CTO or your head of sales realizes that like, hey,

[00:12:57] the number one thing that I can do to hit my plan is really about people stuff.

[00:13:02] It's not about my personal ability to sell or my personal ability to program.

[00:13:05] It's about my ability to hire and bring and create a great culture and create a great team.

[00:13:12] Right.

[00:13:12] And at that moment, like you ask really different questions and you want really different things

[00:13:16] from your recruiters.

[00:13:17] And then you have the ability to do things in a really different way and start to differentiate

[00:13:21] yourself as a company through your hiring process.

[00:13:23] No, absolutely.

[00:13:25] So how do you think about the broader sort of talent landscape?

[00:13:30] You know, we've got talent intelligence.

[00:13:31] I just spent time in New York at the People Analytics Conference and putting these pieces together

[00:13:37] and just really thinking holistically about, you know, the talent that you need to move

[00:13:42] your organization forward and taking that sort of 360 degree view of, you know, where talent

[00:13:49] may exist and whether that's human talent or at this point now, we've got to think about,

[00:13:54] you know, digital labor as well.

[00:13:57] So just how do you think about the broader sort of talent landscape?

[00:14:02] In terms of the broader like talent tools landscape of the different tools across those things,

[00:14:06] or just more generally, like if you're sitting there as a chief people officer, how do you

[00:14:09] think about this broadly?

[00:14:10] Probably more towards the latter, but I'm just thinking about like, you know, all these

[00:14:15] different hidden talent pools.

[00:14:17] You've got potentially, you know, freelance people to pull in, contingent workforce, which

[00:14:21] might still be owned by, you know, procurement and a supply chain kind of sense as if people

[00:14:27] are, you know, widgets.

[00:14:28] And then you've got, of course, your internal talent that already that could have transferable

[00:14:34] skills to shift and reskill and things like that.

[00:14:37] I think it feels like we're actually in the middle of a great shaking up of all of that,

[00:14:42] right?

[00:14:42] If you put all these different trends together of the ability to work remotely or like not

[00:14:47] from the home office.

[00:14:48] And as much as people are saying, oh, well, you know, like we're going to get people

[00:14:51] returned to office.

[00:14:52] It's like, there's still more flexibility.

[00:14:54] Like this, the cat's out of like the horse is out of the barn at some level that people

[00:14:57] realize that you can be productive from a lot of places, which changes where you can

[00:15:02] recruit.

[00:15:03] You're not having to only recruit from the people who are within commutable distance to

[00:15:07] your office.

[00:15:07] Yep.

[00:15:08] The ability to have more flexibility, like when we talk about a bunch is moms coming back

[00:15:13] to the workforce after being like a stay-at-home mom for 15 years.

[00:15:17] Huge amounts of talent and saying, but I need extra flexibility.

[00:15:21] And used to be like, oh, well, that's a problem.

[00:15:22] And now it's like, that's not a problem.

[00:15:24] And there's a great, hugely underappreciated talent pool there that I think more companies

[00:15:30] are waking up to to realize like, oh, there's like a talent arbitrage thing here where there's

[00:15:33] like really valuable people who are undervalued.

[00:15:36] Then to your point of gig labor or the notion that there may be more things that you can do

[00:15:42] with contractors disrupts things.

[00:15:45] And then geographically, if you're saying, well, God, it used to be that, you know, everybody

[00:15:49] had to be there in their office, but now you're even going farther and saying, well,

[00:15:52] if it's a totally remote team or I can make a remote team work, why do they have to

[00:15:56] be in the US?

[00:15:57] Can I go to a more low cost place?

[00:16:00] And it used to be like, oh, you'd only outsource for like low skill things.

[00:16:03] Now it's like, oh, no, no, no.

[00:16:04] There's skilled people all over the world.

[00:16:06] That's right.

[00:16:07] And then the next one is AI, right?

[00:16:08] If you're saying like, hey, are more things possible?

[00:16:11] Like are more jobs going to get disrupted?

[00:16:14] And I think everybody's still trying to figure out how much of that's true or which jobs

[00:16:17] or to what extent.

[00:16:18] But all of these things are making the question of like, what's your talent strategy way less

[00:16:25] clear than it probably would have been 20 years ago.

[00:16:27] Yeah.

[00:16:28] Right.

[00:16:28] There's way more decisions to make here and ability to be creative about how are you going

[00:16:33] to do these things?

[00:16:33] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:16:36] So we talked a little bit about like some of these concepts under the responsible AI

[00:16:42] umbrella when we spoke at HR tech and one of the programs that piqued my interest is

[00:16:50] something you recently announced.

[00:16:51] I think it's still in beta, the greenhouse verified program.

[00:16:55] I thought maybe you could just spend a few minutes unpacking that.

[00:16:59] So start at the beginning, before we get to that specific feature or product, one of the

[00:17:03] overall dynamics that we're seeing in the market that I think this isn't news to anybody

[00:17:07] is that the candidates are feeling that they're in arms race with each other.

[00:17:11] Right.

[00:17:12] You go on social media, everybody's saying, oh, I applied to 100 jobs.

[00:17:14] I applied to 150 jobs.

[00:17:15] And so you're feeling if you don't apply to 100 jobs, you're falling behind.

[00:17:18] Right.

[00:17:19] And then you say, well, I'm using AI to personalize the resume and cover letter for each job.

[00:17:24] So, well, then I have to too.

[00:17:25] And so the candidates acting completely rationally are kind of optimizing for themselves for that

[00:17:32] one job.

[00:17:33] But what it does for the whole system is that the companies, you talk to them and they're

[00:17:36] like, yeah, I opened a job.

[00:17:37] I get 800 resumes the next day.

[00:17:39] And I'm not sure that they're actually real.

[00:17:40] I'm not sure that they really want to work at this company.

[00:17:43] And so the whole system is kind of getting bad on both sides.

[00:17:46] Yeah.

[00:17:46] There's a greater angst than ever.

[00:17:48] And this is a case where AI, I don't think, is making it better.

[00:17:50] It's making it worse.

[00:17:52] And so we're looking and saying, well, as an ATS, it kind of sits in the middle of this.

[00:17:56] It kind of facilitates both this whole interaction.

[00:17:58] Are there opportunities for us to try to make this better and not worse?

[00:18:03] Right.

[00:18:03] And so there's some tools we're launching or we've launched that are getting a huge take

[00:18:08] up on the company side around handling spam applications, handling duplicate applications,

[00:18:14] usually actually a huge percentage of their applications are the same person applying over

[00:18:17] and over again.

[00:18:18] And then filtering tools to be able to say, hey, we got 800 applicants.

[00:18:23] I don't want to read 800 resumes.

[00:18:24] I don't want to read 40.

[00:18:25] What are the ways I can filter down?

[00:18:27] For us, we're being very explicit is that we're putting the power in the hands of the

[00:18:31] company to say, what are the filters you want to use?

[00:18:33] We're not using some AI black box.

[00:18:35] People are like, what's your algorithm?

[00:18:36] How do I beat the algorithm?

[00:18:37] Like, there isn't one.

[00:18:38] Okay.

[00:18:39] We basically expose to the company.

[00:18:40] Here's everything you know about these candidates from the source of the candidate to the questions

[00:18:45] they answered on the job application to their resume.

[00:18:47] You do the filters in a very explainable way.

[00:18:50] You can go down.

[00:18:51] So those are the things on the company side.

[00:18:53] On the candidate side, we're looking and saying, God, are there ways that we could make this

[00:18:58] process a little bit easier, a little bit more fair?

[00:19:00] Can we help candidates actually differentiate themselves a little bit and create new data that's not

[00:19:05] actually on the resume?

[00:19:07] And so we've got a whole packet of those things that are launching and coming right now.

[00:19:11] But the specific one you mentioned was around, was a feature called Greenhouse Verified,

[00:19:16] where the thing that we were seeing is that when you talk to candidates, they're just like,

[00:19:20] oh my God, the rate at which I get ghosted, the rate at which I'm just treated horribly,

[00:19:25] it's just gone up.

[00:19:26] And we look at our data to our hiring maturity curve that we talked about earlier.

[00:19:30] Not all the companies are the same.

[00:19:32] There's some companies up here and some down here.

[00:19:34] And there's some companies who never ghost anybody.

[00:19:36] There's some companies who are absolutely awesome.

[00:19:38] They try to be fair.

[00:19:39] They're considerate.

[00:19:40] They don't ghost, like all those things.

[00:19:42] And there are other companies who are not so good.

[00:19:45] And so we said, you know, why don't we highlight the good ones?

[00:19:49] Right?

[00:19:50] We're not trying to be like Glassdoor where it kind of calls out the bad ones.

[00:19:52] We're just going to make it a positive thing.

[00:19:54] Why don't we highlight the good ones?

[00:19:55] And say, to the company, it's a great reward that you get to like, it's good for your employer brand that you get to show off that you're actually good.

[00:20:03] And to the candidates, they get to see, oh, these are the companies I actually want to work at.

[00:20:07] These are the jobs I want to work at.

[00:20:08] And so what Greenhouse Verified is, is a bunch of badges that show up on a company's career site that they have to earn.

[00:20:13] And we've set the bar pretty high, actually.

[00:20:15] They're kind of hard to earn around being fair, being considerate, being prepared.

[00:20:20] So the prepared interviews, not those like random interviews.

[00:20:23] And then being communicative.

[00:20:25] And so we're just launching this and people are just starting to turn it on right now.

[00:20:28] But what we're hoping is that it creates kind of a new bar, right?

[00:20:32] A new set of expectations that candidates will say, yeah, I want to work at those companies.

[00:20:35] And those companies should realize the benefit of actually being great.

[00:20:38] The other kind of secret thing, or not secret, the other unexpected thing we saw was how quickly the companies realized like, oh, this is amazing.

[00:20:47] This is a way for me to go internally and push my colleagues to recruit better.

[00:20:54] And say, don't be the one that costs us that badge because you're not sending out rejection emails.

[00:20:58] And so like that internal gamification is actually a really helpful thing.

[00:21:01] And so it's been neat to watch people kind of grapple with like, oh, wait, I want to get all these badges.

[00:21:07] How come we're not doing all these things that you should do?

[00:21:09] Many of these things are quite easy.

[00:21:10] Why aren't we doing them?

[00:21:11] It's like, oh, great.

[00:21:12] That's exactly what we're going for.

[00:21:14] I love it.

[00:21:16] Candidates are really frustrated.

[00:21:18] They just don't understand why you can't provide feedback.

[00:21:23] And, you know, it's interesting because greenhouse is different than a lot of other ATSs where, you know, it might actually give a score or a stack rank or something like that.

[00:21:33] And if you fall below that threshold, there's a reason why you would get the rejection, right?

[00:21:40] So just tell me what that is.

[00:21:43] So I don't know if there's like a legal reason or it's like just going to trigger all kinds of other problems or whatever.

[00:21:50] But it's a horrible, horrible experience because you think you did great and you really have no idea whether the resume just wasn't parsed properly or there were just that many better candidates such that they didn't even want to talk to you.

[00:22:04] Generally, it's soul crushing, right?

[00:22:06] It's really hard that you have to go out and put yourself in line with all these different companies and you fall in love with the job.

[00:22:11] You're like, that'd be the perfect thing.

[00:22:12] I'd be perfect for this job.

[00:22:13] And you don't hear anything.

[00:22:15] It feels awful.

[00:22:16] And so I think from my perspective, there's a lot of different things going on there, right?

[00:22:19] On the one hand, you've got things where there's never really a good excuse for why you didn't send out a rejection email, right?

[00:22:26] And so like, so there are folks who get sloppy, right?

[00:22:28] Or they get really focused on the folks moving forward and they don't go back and loop back and go back to the folks who are they're rejecting.

[00:22:34] There is an element of people are saying, I'm trying to preserve my time.

[00:22:37] If I go back and I do a phone call with every person and tell them here's exactly what happened and they don't argue with you and say, no, no, you're wrong.

[00:22:44] I'd be awesome at that.

[00:22:45] You're like, it's a huge time suck.

[00:22:48] I've always thought there's also like an emotional component from the recruiter side is that, you know, your job as a recruiter is to like find candidates and build connections with them and try to see why they would be good at your company.

[00:22:59] And then go to the hiring manager and say, hey, I found five people.

[00:23:01] They're awesome.

[00:23:02] And then go through the interview process and they pick one.

[00:23:04] And now you have to go back to four who you just built a connection with.

[00:23:07] If you did a good job, you built a connection with that person.

[00:23:10] And now you have to go back and tell them no.

[00:23:12] It's really hard.

[00:23:14] And if you have to do that 50 or 20 times a day or hundreds of times a day.

[00:23:18] Yeah.

[00:23:19] Like in some ways, I always think the opaqueness of the recruiting process is a way to preserve the mental health of the recruiter, which I know isn't great from a candidate perspective.

[00:23:27] But I do have empathy for why people don't always go back and have those conversations.

[00:23:32] Well, it's not easy to break up with somebody.

[00:23:34] You got it.

[00:23:35] You got it.

[00:23:36] So that said, can people at least get back to them promptly and send them an email?

[00:23:42] Like, sure.

[00:23:43] Yes.

[00:23:43] It may not have all the information that you wish it did.

[00:23:46] I will say the other thing happening right now is that in a world where everyone's getting 800 applications and people are using different strategies to kind of cut through them.

[00:23:55] But I think a common strategy that folks use is they look at the first 50 or they do their filters and they find 50 and they go, oh, yeah, I found 10.

[00:24:01] I want to interview.

[00:24:03] And that's it.

[00:24:04] And they may not have looked at all the rest of them.

[00:24:06] And so you'll say, I was perfect for that job.

[00:24:08] Why didn't they like me?

[00:24:09] It's like, they never looked at you.

[00:24:11] Hi, I'm Stephen Rothberg.

[00:24:12] And I'm Jeanette Leeds.

[00:24:13] And together, we're the co-hosts of the High Volume Hiring Podcast.

[00:24:17] Are you involved in hiring dozens or even hundreds of employees a year?

[00:24:21] If so, you know that the typical sourcing tools, tactics, and strategies, they just don't scale.

[00:24:27] Yeah.

[00:24:27] Our biweekly podcast features news, tips, case studies, and interviews with the world's leading experts about the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to high volume hiring.

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[00:24:40] And like, don't take it personally, right?

[00:24:43] I think people look for a very rational, they look for conspiracy where incompetence will do.

[00:24:51] Don't take it personally.

[00:24:52] Yeah.

[00:24:53] No, that's an interesting perspective.

[00:24:54] I mean, I guess it gets a little bit to the argument.

[00:24:58] Like, no one wants to be sort of, you know, ranked in such a way, I suppose.

[00:25:03] But you've got a lot of sort of dichotomies of like, look, I've got, maybe I didn't apply until a week after the posting.

[00:25:11] Well, they've already gotten a thousand resumes.

[00:25:13] And like, there's a temporal nature to that.

[00:25:16] They already, they've already sort of moved on and probably should have maybe at that point, they should have taken the posting down.

[00:25:21] And the inconsistency of, well, depending on which recruiter you get, they're going to apply different filters and they're going to look differently or whatever.

[00:25:29] So, so maybe the, you know, if there was some type of stack ranking or scoring, at least that would be consistent across a recruiting team or something.

[00:25:38] So there's a lot of, I'm not saying this is easy by any stretch.

[00:25:42] I think that's right.

[00:25:43] You want to get to like, how can you more consistently do this?

[00:25:45] And do you really think that somebody who applied on day two is more likely to succeed in your company than somebody applied on day seven?

[00:25:51] Like that seems pretty far-fetched, right?

[00:25:52] Yeah.

[00:25:53] And so I think the question is, you know, how do we generate like useful differentiating data from candidates without putting them through?

[00:26:02] And I don't want to have to have each person invest an hour of their time to apply.

[00:26:06] Yeah.

[00:26:07] Making them rewrite the resume, like that's not actually that helpful.

[00:26:10] But like what other data can you generate about somebody that is differentiating, that does get people to the top?

[00:26:16] And so I think that's what we're spending a lot of time thinking about is what can we do beyond the resume and job description?

[00:26:20] I've long thought that resumes and job descriptions are two of the most dishonest documents in business.

[00:26:26] And so trying to extract a bunch of wisdom from both documents is sometimes not such a great idea.

[00:26:32] Oh, I couldn't agree more.

[00:26:34] I think this is a cat and mouse game that is not getting any better and it's not getting more helpful.

[00:26:40] You know, AI generated JD, AI generated CV, third AI potentially sort of grading the match between the two.

[00:26:49] Someone could apply within the first five minutes and not even realize that they applied because they're using one of these mass supply, you know, tools.

[00:26:56] And they've got some automation that says as soon as you see any job post from, you know, IBM or whatever, and it says AI in it, just apply, just get my name in there.

[00:27:05] And then, you know, we'll see what happens.

[00:27:07] But, you know, there's on top of everything else, there's no way to understand person's actual interest in working for this company on this team.

[00:27:18] That's some of the directions we're going is like, how do you measure intent?

[00:27:22] In some ways, their intent, what they actually want, how interested they actually are in your company is a really interesting signal that's different than merely just their skills.

[00:27:29] It's certainly a sign of interest if they're applying to multiple jobs.

[00:27:35] I mean, I've applied to jobs where people said, try not to apply to more than three jobs in a year.

[00:27:40] We actually just launched a feature that is just being rolled out right now.

[00:27:43] People are turning on around, it's called job alerts, whereas you can subscribe to a company and say, I'm really interested in your company and I want to know every time you launch a new sales job.

[00:27:53] And that's helpful because they get notified, hey, there's a new sales job, you should go to apply.

[00:27:57] But it also becomes a filter.

[00:27:59] It's like, hey, out of those thousand people who applied, which people have been subscribed to my alerts for over a month that I know they're actually truly interested in my company?

[00:28:07] These talent communities, I mean, I'm not even sure that's the right term since there's nothing really communal about it a lot of times.

[00:28:15] But they've joined the talent community and maybe there's a periodic webinar to help job seekers or to learn more about some new project that the company is working on or stuff like that.

[00:28:27] But those are all signals that even if you consider each one individually not a strong signal in aggregate, it's a pretty strong signal that they're interested in work.

[00:28:36] I was having lunch with a customer yesterday.

[00:28:38] We were talking about that, of just how more and more dependent they are where they're not going out to open internet and finding strangers on LinkedIn anymore.

[00:28:47] They're like, we have a big enough database of people who have expressed interest in our company formally that that's a good signal.

[00:28:53] That's a signal of intent.

[00:28:54] And so we're just doing rediscovery and search within our own database and prospecting from there and getting all sorts of great people.

[00:29:02] And we can find people who are interested in our company and qualified.

[00:29:04] And that's the big focus right now.

[00:29:07] And so I think that'll continue to be true.

[00:29:09] No, I think that's huge.

[00:29:11] I have an HR background, so I never understood why CRMs, Candidate Relationship Management Systems, and ATSs were different.

[00:29:18] Because if you want to rediscover those candidates, if you want to find those signals of intent, if you want to take a silver medalist, as they say, and this new, maybe a second role has opened up in another region, whatever, like, why would you not just go right back?

[00:29:35] You can skip everything we just talked about and say, I've got some great candidates already in the queue who would be perfect.

[00:29:43] Totally agree.

[00:29:43] I mean, that's why we have them all together.

[00:29:45] I think what we found is – I think the thing I always struggle with is that recruiters are typically very focused on the role right in front of them right now.

[00:29:52] And so they're very focused on the candidates that they're moving forward and less focused on the candidates that they're not moving forward and not having the long-term view that all these candidates I'm not moving forward are actually my prospects for the next job I'm going to have.

[00:30:05] And it may not be me.

[00:30:06] It may be a colleague of mine six months from now.

[00:30:09] But that asset of all these people who you're meeting and you're collecting information about them and you're getting them to be interested in your company, that's a whole asset that is not going to pay out for you on this role, but it is going to pay out down the line for your company.

[00:30:21] And so I think that's just a natural maturation thing is people realize that and figure out that the skills that you would do with a CRM in a sales and marketing context, you have to start bringing those skills over to a recruiting context and have people whose job isn't solely about filling the next three roles, but about building that database and nurturing those folks so that you are having that – realizing that database is an asset that's going to pay off down the line.

[00:30:47] And that's just a different mindset that if you're an overworked, understaffed recruiting team who's just trying to like – who's been – they cut you – they cut the size of your team and said hire 10% more, it's hard to have that long-term view.

[00:31:01] And so they tend to have a very short-term view, unfortunately.

[00:31:05] Yeah, I think it ties to how you incentivize and measure people as well, right?

[00:31:11] Like do you look and see – are people thinking about how the team is performing, how the team is providing a better candidate experience?

[00:31:22] And instead of just worried about throughput, right?

[00:31:26] Yeah.

[00:31:26] I mean, I guess this is the overall meta point, even back to Greenhouse Verified, is that companies are taking really different choices right now.

[00:31:34] So there's some companies who are saying the thing I'm aspiring to with hiring, this real high-end thing, I want to have a great candidate experience.

[00:31:42] I want to be able to attract the very best people.

[00:31:45] I want to build this whole community.

[00:31:46] I want to be able to be predictable and fast.

[00:31:48] I want to have more fairness, create more diversity in my organization, and really say hiring is going to be a differentiator for my company.

[00:31:57] Even in a moment where I say, well, it might be hiring less.

[00:31:59] It's like, yeah, but each of the hires we make are going to be that much more important.

[00:32:01] And there's another set of companies who are saying, hiring less, let's spend a lot less money.

[00:32:07] And lots of people are applying, so you don't have to try as hard, right?

[00:32:10] And you can treat people badly because they're really desperate for a job.

[00:32:13] And they're two really different perspectives, right?

[00:32:17] And I think the candidates notice it.

[00:32:18] I think the employees notice it.

[00:32:20] And so that's what you see sorting out right now is there's a bunch of companies who are really on that side.

[00:32:27] They're awesome.

[00:32:27] And that's who everybody wants to discover, and that's who everybody wants to work for.

[00:32:30] It feels different to work at those companies.

[00:32:32] And there's a bunch of other companies who are taking this moment to say, well, what can we get away with?

[00:32:39] How badly can we behave and still make our hires?

[00:32:41] Yeah, I was thinking about this when you were talking earlier about just providing a great candidate experience and whether or not that's actually reflective,

[00:32:50] how they treat their employees and what it's like to work there.

[00:32:54] Or these are two different worlds that you shouldn't conflate.

[00:32:57] I conflate them.

[00:32:58] I think as a candidate, if in the moment where they're trying to sell you and want to take a job with them, they're treating you poorly, why do you think that after you take the job, they're going to treat you better?

[00:33:09] Yeah.

[00:33:10] Right?

[00:33:11] When somebody shows you who they are, believe them.

[00:33:14] I mean, the interesting thing we see now is like, you know, the ATS category used to be kind of under the hood.

[00:33:19] Nobody knew about it.

[00:33:20] Nobody had ever heard of an ATS.

[00:33:22] And now the job seekers are on to it.

[00:33:24] And they know what it's like when.

[00:33:26] And so they say they come to us like, oh, we love it when companies use Greenhouse because it's like really easy to apply and I'm going to be treated well.

[00:33:32] And if I go apply at that other company, you know, somebody who uses one of those other ATSs, I won't name them, they'll be like, I have to like upload my resume and then I have to spend an hour retyping everything that was on my resume.

[00:33:43] Like, why?

[00:33:44] Like, how does that help anything?

[00:33:46] And so there, it reflects on the company.

[00:33:50] The fact that they chose to use that ATS and it makes the Canada thing, I'm not sure I want to work at a company that would do that to me.

[00:33:56] You're like, wow, like how much the employer brand is dictated by the ATS?

[00:34:00] Like, I never saw that coming five years ago.

[00:34:02] But like, it seems really real right now.

[00:34:03] We hear a lot of it on social media.

[00:34:04] I have an issue with this just because I recognize as frustrating as it is to launch an application and see what system they're using and know what I'm about to spend the next 30 to 40 minutes doing.

[00:34:23] All because I recognize that this is an opportunity that I'm actually interested in and I want to get to the other side and this is just a necessary, you know, evil.

[00:34:32] But that exact scenario, the last time that happened to me, I just flat out refused to fill it in.

[00:34:38] So the very first rich text field, I said, I'm not playing this game.

[00:34:44] Your resume parsing engine is a joke.

[00:34:48] Just look at the resume, right?

[00:34:49] But I'm so close to this being in this space that I was like, do I shoot myself in the foot or, you know, just make a point?

[00:34:58] Or do I power through it and just deal knowing that this is how things work, you know, by most of my career at IBM?

[00:35:06] And so the fact that brass ring is still alive is just absolute comedy to me.

[00:35:11] Even imagine where we're like, listen, I need the job.

[00:35:13] I'm going to power through.

[00:35:14] I'm going to apply.

[00:35:14] I'm going to spend 30 or 40 minutes doing it.

[00:35:16] Yeah.

[00:35:17] That was your first impression with that candidate.

[00:35:19] Yeah.

[00:35:19] So if you are sitting there as a company saying, no, we have to go win candidates.

[00:35:23] I get that we're getting tons of applicants.

[00:35:25] But ultimately, we have to win over that employee and the people we want to hire.

[00:35:30] If we want to hire the best folks that they're going to have choices to apply different places or to get jobs in different places, we want to win them.

[00:35:36] Is that really the first impression you want?

[00:35:38] Yeah.

[00:35:39] And first impressions are important.

[00:35:41] So that's why we do a lot of things to make sure that was the first impression of the job application or the first impression of like, we let candidates record their name pronunciation or pronoun.

[00:35:51] Because it's just about winning the first impression.

[00:35:53] So that when you start that interview, when they say your name correctly, like that matters.

[00:35:59] And you see a bunch of companies who have the mindset that, yeah, I care about that.

[00:36:02] I want to get those things right.

[00:36:03] They don't cost anything.

[00:36:05] Not seeing somebody's name correctly or not misgendering them.

[00:36:07] Like the candidate really appreciates it.

[00:36:09] So it's like, are you trying or are you not trying?

[00:36:12] Right.

[00:36:13] And I think that's what people are looking at.

[00:36:15] Again, I find myself in an interesting position with some of this stuff just because I know all these technologies and I advise clients on this space.

[00:36:22] And so sometimes I'm applying and I'm literally like, maybe I shouldn't be applying for this job.

[00:36:27] Maybe I should be applying to run TA technology for this company because they clearly have not prioritized candidate experience or even recruiter experience in some cases to do this right.

[00:36:39] And make a good first impression.

[00:36:42] So do I fault the entire company because leadership has not made strategic investments in talent acquisition or whatever?

[00:36:51] So, again, I sort of recognize my own biases.

[00:36:55] Yeah, I also have a lot of self-interest in that question.

[00:36:58] But I tend to look at it and say, usually what happened there is not that some recruiter made a choice that said, I think this is great.

[00:37:06] This is what we should do.

[00:37:06] So usually the decision was out of the hands of the recruiter.

[00:37:10] And some IT person said, yep, we're going to buy this one HCM thing and buy everything and include the ATS in it.

[00:37:16] Who cares?

[00:37:17] And like, that's generally what's happening.

[00:37:20] And so do I fault the whole company for that?

[00:37:21] Like, absolutely I do.

[00:37:23] Yeah.

[00:37:23] Yeah.

[00:37:23] I think it does speak to what's going on with that company about how they prioritize hiring.

[00:37:28] Yeah.

[00:37:29] One of the things that I have experienced that I liked was basically skipping the entire JD to resume sort of matching at all and just sending out some type of, you know, sort of pre-hire assessment.

[00:37:47] So let's skip that whole thing.

[00:37:49] You've got my LinkedIn profile.

[00:37:51] Send me some questions.

[00:37:52] I'll answer them.

[00:37:54] Now, last time I did that was before generative AI.

[00:37:57] So I know people, unfortunately, are using AI in all kinds of assessments, whether it's technical or behavioral and psychometric, which is just screams of desperation to me, frankly, that you can't use your human brain and common sense in this moment.

[00:38:14] And I think that's what's happening is that in a world in 2021, right, when everybody's like desperate to hire and there aren't enough candidates, you set job applications to get much shorter.

[00:38:24] They'd say, I don't want to like create any barriers.

[00:38:26] So give us the bare minimum information and we'll get you in for an interview and make a decision as quickly as possible, right?

[00:38:32] Because you had to because it was competitive.

[00:38:34] Now, pendulum swings the other way.

[00:38:37] And you say, oh, God, I'm going to 800 applicants.

[00:38:40] I'd rather get 400.

[00:38:42] And so if I add questions to the job application or I add an assessment test or I make the candidates do a little bit more work, one, I'll scare some people away.

[00:38:51] Folks who are like, I just want to do the automation thing.

[00:38:53] Easy, click apply.

[00:38:54] I don't want to do the work.

[00:38:56] So you scare some people away.

[00:38:57] And then the data you collect from those questions is hopefully differentiating.

[00:39:02] You can look at it and say, oh, actually, now we can figure out who we want to move forward.

[00:39:06] And so that's what we're seeing is job applications go longer.

[00:39:08] And generally, the interview process goes longer.

[00:39:10] I think it's sort of counterintuitive.

[00:39:12] Sometimes people think, oh, there's so many candidates.

[00:39:14] You should be able to hire so easily.

[00:39:15] Oh, no, no, no.

[00:39:16] Now hiring managers know that they can always wait to see more people.

[00:39:19] And so they're a little big and they're making less hires.

[00:39:22] They want to be even more careful.

[00:39:23] So everything's gotten stretched out, actually.

[00:39:25] But yeah, I do think like more pre-hire assessments or more like assessments early in the funnel because they're like, yeah, we're willing to let the candidates do more work.

[00:39:33] I do think you could get some differentiating information to your point.

[00:39:37] I think you would be able to provide some feedback and constructive criticism in a more automated fashion.

[00:39:44] So it's not consuming the recruiter's time and they don't have to have that one-on-one, you know, I don't like giving feedback.

[00:39:52] That's why I'm not a people manager kind of conversation.

[00:39:55] And I do think it would weed out like all those people that didn't even realize they applied.

[00:40:00] They'd be like, you know, yeah, we can move on.

[00:40:02] So you'd have a significant drop off at that phase.

[00:40:05] But because, you know, Greenhouse in particular is not providing like a score.

[00:40:11] Now you have all this richer, you know, profile with which to work with.

[00:40:17] I think that's right.

[00:40:18] I think there's like lots of fear about having AI make decisions for folks and people, I don't want to like outsource decisions.

[00:40:24] And so it's got to be the human touch.

[00:40:26] And it's like, yeah, but that also creates a lot of room for inconsistency.

[00:40:30] And so I think there's a world where like, no, you'll have more assessments.

[00:40:34] They'll be automated.

[00:40:35] You won't talk to a human and it'll be consistent.

[00:40:39] Same thing every time.

[00:40:40] And you'll actually get feedback.

[00:40:41] It'll say, here's why you didn't move forward.

[00:40:43] And so I am still kind of optimistic that.

[00:40:47] Have you ever been to a webinar where the topic was great, but there wasn't enough time to ask questions or have a dialogue to learn more?

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[00:41:18] As much as there's lots of fear around AI decision making, that there is an opportunity to have more assessments where people are kind of treated actually fairly and treated consistently and then get feedback.

[00:41:31] I'm a fan of the solutions that take that approach.

[00:41:34] And, you know, I've changed to the process and people would have to get comfortable with that.

[00:41:39] And maybe some people will always say, you know, I really want a more human experience.

[00:41:44] But as you get, I think as you, if you were to try it, if you were to try some of these tools, you'd be like, oh, that was actually pretty good.

[00:41:51] I didn't need to talk to him.

[00:41:52] It's not like a chat.

[00:41:53] It's not like a customer service, you know, old school, you know, chat bot.

[00:41:58] In some cases, if we didn't tell you you were talking to an AI, which you should, by the way, should be transparent when you're doing that.

[00:42:06] But you might not know.

[00:42:08] You wouldn't otherwise know.

[00:42:09] The other ideal situation is that obviates the need for certain interviews.

[00:42:15] You know, you don't have to spend another hour with the Canada.

[00:42:18] You actually got all the insights that you needed from, you know, this assessment.

[00:42:22] But again, you've got to do it in a responsible, ethical way.

[00:42:27] You've got to be transparent.

[00:42:28] And overall, I think we'll see, you know, fairness go up.

[00:42:32] And some of the things that we've been pushing, you know, the original intent behind, you know, DEI initiatives and things like that, more inclusive hiring will actually improve.

[00:42:42] I agree.

[00:42:43] I think I share the optimism that'll happen.

[00:42:46] I think in the near term, it's pretty rough out there for candidates.

[00:42:49] Yeah, for sure.

[00:42:50] I just wanted to hit on the book, Talent Makers, that you wrote with your co-founder, Daniel.

[00:42:56] Just thought you could share a little bit about, you know, how the book is doing, the intent of the book.

[00:43:01] What we're finding is that we had all these ideas about hiring.

[00:43:05] And we would lay them all out.

[00:43:06] And the recruiters would say, like, yeah, obviously, we get it.

[00:43:10] Anybody's been recruiting for two decades, like, has figured out most of the stuff we have in the book.

[00:43:14] The aha was that their stakeholders, all of those leaders, did not have those moments.

[00:43:21] They did not figure these things out.

[00:43:23] And so we call it talent makers because we were talking about it as, like, these other leaders, not the recruiters, the other leaders, their job is talent making.

[00:43:31] Right?

[00:43:32] Like, their ability to succeed as a head of sales is about can you hire, can you manage, can you lead?

[00:43:37] Much more than can you sell.

[00:43:38] And so it's like, well, then, in your role as a talent maker, what are your responsibilities?

[00:43:43] What do you have to do?

[00:43:44] Right?

[00:43:45] Can you say, yeah, I have a recruiter.

[00:43:46] Like, you're not the recruiter.

[00:43:46] That's their job.

[00:43:47] Right?

[00:43:48] But how do you show up?

[00:43:50] And how do you be a talent magnet?

[00:43:51] How do you be a talent leader?

[00:43:53] And how do you set a tone?

[00:43:55] And so what we found is we wrote it all out.

[00:43:59] And the common thing I always hear from people is some recruiter will be like, oh, I read it.

[00:44:03] And it totally resonated with me.

[00:44:04] I was like, yes, this is what I've been trying to say.

[00:44:07] But I kind of knew it all already.

[00:44:08] And so I gave it as a gift to my, like, partner.

[00:44:12] And they said, oh, now I get what you're talking about.

[00:44:15] And so to your earlier point around behavior change is that you're trying to, like, change people's minds about what we're doing here in hiring is it can be a tool for that.

[00:44:24] It can be a tool that gets people to say, like, oh, gotcha.

[00:44:28] I've been hiring for 20 years.

[00:44:29] We didn't do it that way.

[00:44:30] And I've complained the whole time about everything, had bad results, and been frustrated.

[00:44:34] But I don't know what it looks like done well.

[00:44:36] And then you read the book and you're like, oh, I see.

[00:44:39] That's what we're trying to do here.

[00:44:40] And me, this is how I'm supposed to show up as a talent maker.

[00:44:45] So I don't know.

[00:44:45] I still get lots of positive feedback from folks who are like, yeah, to help people understand what we're trying to do here.

[00:44:50] Well, I have no doubt.

[00:44:50] I mean, it's not just your personal experiences, right?

[00:44:53] I mean, this is anonymized data from all the customers you've been supporting for years, right?

[00:44:59] Yeah.

[00:44:59] No, I mean, you know, the benefit of building a product like this, I've talked to, like, literally thousands of companies about this, right?

[00:45:06] I was just talking to somebody about the unique things of hypergrowth.

[00:45:09] What happens when you go from 200 to 1,000 and your plan is to now go to 3,000?

[00:45:13] There's unique hiring challenges in that moment.

[00:45:16] And I'm like, yeah.

[00:45:16] And I've talked to dozens of companies who have done that.

[00:45:18] And so when you put all that together and you see the commonalities of what's happening at these companies, it's like, yeah, this is a problem that you think you have that's so unique is actually kind of a cliche.

[00:45:28] I've seen it a lot of times.

[00:45:29] Right.

[00:45:30] Hopefully we can be helpful.

[00:45:31] Yeah.

[00:45:32] Awesome.

[00:45:32] Well, congrats on the book.

[00:45:34] Turning back to, you know, the topic of AI, I was just curious about you personally and how you might use it in your day-to-day, either personal use or professional use,

[00:45:45] or is it how you're taking advantage of some of the latest gadgetry?

[00:45:49] I use it for brainstorming.

[00:45:50] I tend not to use it as a blank sheet of paper.

[00:45:54] I'll brainstorm on my own and then have it fill in the gaps.

[00:45:58] And usually it'll be like, oh, yeah, here are three things you forgot about.

[00:46:01] And so I find that very helpful.

[00:46:04] So maybe I'll accelerate the time that I go from like nothing to a good rough draft.

[00:46:10] I had one around hiring.

[00:46:11] I was trying to hire a role and I was like, God, there's like a lot of different ways.

[00:46:14] Like this title has a lot of different personas.

[00:46:16] There's a lot of different ways that somebody could do this job.

[00:46:19] And it laid it out and said, here's the five different ways.

[00:46:21] And so I went into informational interviews and people were like, yeah, you have it.

[00:46:24] And I was like, oh, wow.

[00:46:25] I like short circuited that whole learning experience really quickly.

[00:46:28] Right.

[00:46:29] Nice.

[00:46:29] So I use it a lot around brainstorming.

[00:46:31] I think separately I could answer the question.

[00:46:33] I could answer this question a lot of ways.

[00:46:35] Yeah.

[00:46:36] I mean, I think what we're seeing inside our company is that programming is like the obvious

[00:46:41] place where the developers are like embedding it in my existing tool.

[00:46:46] It's just there.

[00:46:47] Right.

[00:46:47] Like I can use GitHub Copilot and it takes some skill to learn when to use it, when not to.

[00:46:54] Like they're like, you don't just say, here's the feature I want to do or write the feature.

[00:46:58] Like it's not that.

[00:46:58] But the amount of places where it'll just autocomplete for you and be correct.

[00:47:04] And it's not always correct.

[00:47:05] So you have to like know what you're doing.

[00:47:07] You have to have that good taste to know what's correct and not.

[00:47:09] But they're like, it makes a huge difference.

[00:47:11] And we're seeing it like the productivity by person goes up by significantly.

[00:47:15] Other places we're experimenting with and kind of our sales org and our support org,

[00:47:19] where I don't know that we have measurable wins quite yet that we could say, oh, it's

[00:47:23] changed everything.

[00:47:24] But I'm pretty optimistic.

[00:47:25] And I would say in the product, the thing that we're seeing, like the dominant dynamic

[00:47:31] when we talk to companies is that the recruiters are caught between CEOs and security and legal

[00:47:37] saying conflicting things.

[00:47:39] So you sit there as a recruiter and your CEO says, do AI, don't fall behind, get efficiencies.

[00:47:46] Let's join the future.

[00:47:48] And the security and legal team are like, don't you dare touch it.

[00:47:51] Like don't put Canada data in anywhere dangerous.

[00:47:53] Don't get us in trouble.

[00:47:55] And the recruiter sitting there saying, I'm busy.

[00:47:58] I don't have time to like figure this out on my own.

[00:48:01] And so they're caught.

[00:48:02] And I think that I don't think that like just telling recruiters to go to chat GPT and

[00:48:07] like reinvent their job and you figure it out is really going to do it.

[00:48:10] And the security and legal team are hoping they don't.

[00:48:13] I think it's hard for them to justify the spend of like, let's go bring in some new tool

[00:48:18] that's unproven that we're not sure and legal is worried about.

[00:48:21] And so I think the actual dominant way that people are going to adopt AI in the near term,

[00:48:26] I don't know if this is long term, in the near term, is that people do the same things

[00:48:30] they were already doing in the tools they were already using.

[00:48:34] And I will just be there and make it better.

[00:48:36] And so to me, like the obvious example of that was Google autocomplete.

[00:48:40] We did Google searching for 20 years.

[00:48:41] And then one day it started autocompleting when you typed.

[00:48:43] It was like, oh, it's just there.

[00:48:45] Like nobody chose that.

[00:48:46] Nobody, like if you don't want to use it, you just don't.

[00:48:49] I was like, that's a perfect example of how like AI just gets adopted in mass.

[00:48:53] And so we look inside of Greenhouse and we're like, yeah, like that's our job at Greenhouse

[00:48:58] is to help you adopt AI in a safe way.

[00:49:00] So the most popular AI feature we have, not a usable feature, is like the page that says,

[00:49:06] here's all the different AI we have.

[00:49:08] Here's all the different features.

[00:49:09] Here's what models they use.

[00:49:11] You can opt out of any of them.

[00:49:12] And here's a giant FAQ for your security and legal team to read.

[00:49:15] And generally they read it and they go, yeah, that's all fine.

[00:49:17] You're doing everything cool.

[00:49:18] You're free to use all this AI stuff in Greenhouse.

[00:49:21] And the recruiter can say, oh, awesome.

[00:49:23] Now we can use all this stuff and get the benefits.

[00:49:25] So from there, then there's like all the different use cases we're doing where there's like

[00:49:30] you were talking earlier about how do you move up the hiring maturity curve?

[00:49:32] Like there's easy ones.

[00:49:33] Like some companies don't have interview questions written out.

[00:49:37] They look at the blank sheet of paper and it's hard to write an interview question.

[00:49:40] AI is really good at that.

[00:49:41] I want to do an interview where I'm testing these three skills.

[00:49:43] Great.

[00:49:43] Here are five questions you should consider using.

[00:49:46] If they're bad questions, don't use them.

[00:49:47] But like if you think they're a good question, then you should use it.

[00:49:49] That's better than nothing, which is where a lot of companies are.

[00:49:52] So there's lots of AI.

[00:49:54] And then there's things like resume parsing, things like summarization you can do.

[00:49:59] All sorts of neat use cases for it that aren't about decision making.

[00:50:04] Yeah, for sure.

[00:50:05] I think that you're hitting on all the key points there.

[00:50:08] You've got to start just seeing what it can do, understanding that it may not always be

[00:50:14] 100% accurate.

[00:50:15] Let's make sure we've got controls in place.

[00:50:18] Let's make sure we've got the different teams and some cognitive diversity that helps us

[00:50:24] make decisions about where and when to use it.

[00:50:26] You should use it where you should, not where you can.

[00:50:29] And being responsible by design, just going back to your developers.

[00:50:33] I mean, yes, there's GitHub Copilot and there's other tools that you can use to either write

[00:50:37] code or check code and things like that.

[00:50:39] And so we've just got to make sure that we're not completely outsourcing our critical thinking

[00:50:46] and just thinking deeply about the implications of what it's giving you.

[00:50:51] Yeah.

[00:50:51] I mean, I think we always coach folks who are practitioners and saying it's really hard to

[00:50:56] get new tools bought at my company.

[00:50:58] It's hard to get budget.

[00:50:59] There's all this friction.

[00:51:01] But I really want to move forward.

[00:51:03] Say, go to your existing vendors and ask them what their AI roadmap is.

[00:51:06] And say, you've got to be the one to solve this for me.

[00:51:08] Because that's largely the easiest path that you're going to have is the tools you're

[00:51:12] already using are just going to have AI and you're going to be able to go back to your

[00:51:14] leadership and say, look, here are eight things that we're doing with AI now that we didn't

[00:51:18] used to be.

[00:51:19] That's actually the place to start versus like, I'm going to go educate myself and find

[00:51:23] some brand new tool and fight the internal resistance to like get new tools and spend more

[00:51:30] money.

[00:51:30] It's also fun, but like it can take a while.

[00:51:32] So I'd say that the easiest path is like go to your existing tools and demand more AI out of

[00:51:36] them.

[00:51:37] Excellent.

[00:51:37] Well, John, I really enjoyed talking to you.

[00:51:40] Thank you so much for carving out some time on this Friday morning.

[00:51:43] And I think there's a lot of insights and interesting tidbits for my listeners to take away.

[00:51:49] So thank you again for your time.

[00:51:51] Thanks for having me.

[00:51:52] Appreciate it.

[00:51:52] Absolutely.

[00:51:53] Thanks everyone for listening.

[00:51:55] We'll see you next time.