Using automation to enhance and streamline the human experience

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[00:00:25] Welcome to episode 86 of the High Volume Hiring Podcast. I am Steven Rothberg, one of your two co-hosts. I'm the founder of College Recruiter Job Search Site. Jeanette is my other co-host and it is awesome to see you here today.

[00:00:53] So good to see you, especially after missing last week's or last session. So, so great to be here. Hello everyone, Jeanette Leeds, HR tech entrepreneur for those who don't know me. And we have a great episode today. We are here with Harry Wittenberg, who's the CEO of WorkWeb Solution. Welcome, Harry. Hi, thanks for having me, Jeanette. Thanks, Steven. Absolutely. We always like to kick this off with, give us a quick update.

[00:01:22] Who are you? What's WorkWeb Solutions? Give us a little background for our listeners. Yeah, my name's Harry Wittenberg. Originally from New York. I've lived in Florida for the past decade. I started recruiting in the healthcare sector, mainly nurses and hospitals. When COVID hit, things got pretty crazy. I've staffed a few strikes, built a pretty large and successful team in the healthcare space.

[00:01:49] I found that there was a real missing jumping point from being completely entry level to making like $70,000, $80,000 a year. And I saw that there were a lot of human beings that were unable to achieve that income potential. And I partnered with a number of companies in the call center and insurance space to help take people from barely entry level to making, you know, $80,000 to $100,000 a year.

[00:02:18] And I saw that like tremendous opportunity to better people's lives and make my clients a lot of money in the process. And WorkWeb kind of got born through serving those clients. You know, breaking in was definitely difficult. There were a lot of challenges with the billing model for high value in clients. A lot of clients want to wait until something works before they pay money.

[00:02:47] They don't want to pay the amount of money that it would cost for the best possible result for the best possible result. And so we kind of developed a system that is very similar to a service related model, like the way that SaaS works, where, you know, clients will pay a small amount of money for our services so that we take them seriously and so that they take us and our candidates seriously.

[00:03:11] And based on the number of successful current working or employed hires, their fee scales with that. And the amount of money per person or per seat filled varies based on how, not how much the cost of the, like the salary of the person is.

[00:03:35] Because I found that salaries themselves, you know, if it's a higher than industry average salary, it's an easier fill. So why should we be charging more money for them paying more money for the person? So we inversely relate the slot price or the variable price to the market viability of the offering. Interesting.

[00:03:58] So, so staffing company and you kind of charge, like you were saying, like a SaaS, a software as a service, like by the seat, if you will. That that's really interesting. It also then, it doesn't incentivize the employer to pay the hire as little as possible to minimize your fee, the fee to you. Because, you know, typical, you know, placement kind of model is a percentage of, of start of starting.

[00:04:25] It also incentivizes you as the staffing company to find people that are going to stick around. Right. And if there's a problem or you need to upskill, I would think that you're going to be working with them and not on that. So we wanted to talk with you about automation and human touch and how those two things don't have to be separate.

[00:04:48] Maybe you can share with us like, like an experience or an example of, you know, of where you've seen success with that. What I found is that a lot of repetitive tasks can be automated. And that is, that is to the good. What is the human touch? Like for real, you know, is it remembering what your dog's name is or what your birthday is? Is it remembering? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, Mike. Absolutely.

[00:05:14] I, I, if, if Jeanette and I didn't remember what our dog's names were, then our dogs would be very, very sad. But the question is, can I remember what Steven's dog's name is? Oh. So there are things that, as a human, you need to remember. Yeah. Like how far is too far from your house for the job? Or what is the salary range? You know, that is where the humans are really, really involved.

[00:05:42] You know, the robots assist the humans in kind of a cyborg approach to screen as many people and get as much information as possible. So that the phone call is about what the clients are really looking for, you know? You know, so to get the qualified person on the phone and then screen for the psychographic qualifications of the job. For example, is this compensation actually aligned with what you're looking for? Do you have any other interviews this week?

[00:06:12] Do you intend to accept this position immediately upon offer? Have you Google maps the location of this interview from your house? Is that a commutable distance? Do you have a credit card? A computer? Is your car in good working order? Are you, yeah, do you have any vacations planned for the next couple of weeks? You know, that's what humans are really good for, you know? But robots can tell me you have experience in this industry. You have this license, this certification. This is your birthday.

[00:06:41] This is your address. That just saved me a lot of time of asking stupid questions a robot could ask when I already know that stuff. Now let's talk about what we really want to talk about here, you know? And the most important part of the human touch is do I like this person or not, you know? And our clients want to know that we are at least like the person that we're sending to them.

[00:07:06] And that takes physically, you know, having a touch point with them, you know? Yeah, it's a good point. So thinking about like over, let's say like the past year, so much things have changed from that automation. Like again, having the robots start to do a lot of these things and get rid of, you know, because it would be like these mundane tasks. Like how has that helped and transformed your business? Because like it's been such a dramatic change and knowing the volumes that you're doing over there.

[00:07:37] Maybe you could just talk to our listeners a bit about that. Sure. So Zapier is fantastic. You need something done every single time something happens and it happens. It would be somebody's job to make sure that thing happened every single time that it happened. That no longer exists. And I love that, you know? And the humans that I have employed with us are there to proofread things, to make sure the robots didn't make any mistakes, you know?

[00:08:04] To make sure that I looked at this person and I don't know that it won't work, which is essentially what our clients truly expect. You know, that we've done our homework and to the best of our ability, we haven't found any reason to believe that this won't be successful. So we have a very high submission offer ratio because of that.

[00:08:24] And our recruiters are going to be able to talk to and develop more relationships with more people because they're not spending time individually writing these briefs. They're putting the inputs and then the computer is doing it in the correct format. They are receiving meetings from people who had the direct qualifications from the role that they applied to,

[00:08:49] so that that person can very quickly be screened and sent to the place they were supposed to and wanted to work in the first place. And then if they are, you know, an outlier or are close to but not quite what that particular client is looking for, then a human can be the Harry Potter sorting hat that says, you're going to this client over here, actually, because this is a way better fit for you.

[00:09:12] I think that's such a really key point that you're making is whatever the computer or the robot, the AI agent puts out, like there has to be someone there to check it, to make sure it's right, you know? Like, and that is so key because it lacks that nuance of the human. And so to your point where it's like, hey, Harry Potter sorting hat, you know, came out to go here, but actually this kind of is going to be a little bit better here. So let me just recheck or what's the input, what the output.

[00:09:42] And so I think that's a really, for our listeners, that's a really key theme that I keep hearing about. Yeah. I mean, we have been working on something like the Harry Potter sorting hat for quite some time. Not Slytherin, not Slytherin, not Slytherin. Hey, it depends who you are and what your company stands for, just saying.

[00:10:02] It essentially has attempted to feed a decision matrix that I was able to articulate based off of my experience of things that were working and weren't working for particular clients, you know, so that it could, in fact, have relevant suggestions for the representatives. Because one of the most challenging parts of recruiting as a sale is that you don't know where the straight line is going. There's two parts to the sale. Yeah. The first part is determining where they should go by asking questions.

[00:10:30] And the second part is explaining why you have done all of the math and decided they're going to go there. And so some recruiters are excellent salespeople, but they are not excellent at figuring out the right answer. So that technology would bridge the gap. Looking for the inside scoop on payroll, whether you're a payroll pro or just curious about your paycheck, we've got two podcasts you cannot miss.

[00:10:56] It's about payroll delivers the latest trends for payroll pros, and it's about your paycheck is here for employees. Breaking down pay and rights in simple terms. Two great shows, two great hosts, and endless insights to keep you informed and empowered. Subscribe now and elevate your payroll knowledge. Brought to you by Work Defined, where payroll meets people. So a lot of our audience are going to be sort of on the corporate side.

[00:11:24] They're working in a talent acquisition department. I think it's fair to say that probably every single one of them embraces technology. You can't be good at high volume hiring without embracing the use of technology. What I'm hearing you say, Harry, is it's not about the technology replacing the recruiter or even the hiring manager. It's about augmenting.

[00:11:52] It's looking for those repetitive tasks that probably suck up an hour or two or three every day for every member of your team. And how do I automate that? Can you think of like two or three quick wins? You know, ones that a lot of TA people are just sort of doing because they've always been doing.

[00:12:18] And like what you've seen is, man, if we replace that, like even a Calendly link, you know, things like that, where you can save a ton of time and really not lose any of the humanity in the process. Sure. So the screening from the initial application has been tremendous. We integrated some chatbots with some very well-defined flows for various verticals that ask the exact questions that they need to ask.

[00:12:46] Now, that doesn't mean that if the candidate doesn't answer all the questions correctly or even complete the chatbot, they're qualified. It just prioritizes that. You know, we want people who want to work and who have the right answers to those questions to work at that company. So they're quickly on the phone with the computer with a recruiter, you know. And another thing that was automated that was really good was the brief writing.

[00:13:16] Writing the briefs, it's the information needs to be collected by the recruiter, then the mental processing of it into the proper format so that our brand and, you know, essentially our product is the brief, not the person, you know, that we have streamed this person. And we have asked all of these questions. These are the answers that we got in our professional opinion. We believe that they're going to be a good fit for your organization. Right.

[00:13:41] And yeah, the automation that we've done with the briefs has been fantastic. It helps our recruiters to spend more time focusing on the conversation they're in and less time focusing on the documentation that I need. Yeah, no, I think that's great. I think we have time for one last question. I'm just looking at the time goes by fast. I mean, we were talking a bit before in the quote unquote green room around a candidate experience.

[00:14:05] And I think, you know, just talking about, hey, the automation around briefs where you don't have a blank slate, like a blank piece of paper and you have to start from scratch and that this just helps and saves the recruiter time. That has such an improvement on the candidate experience, presumably, right, because it frees up their time to actually have the real conversations. Are there other things where you think you've seen this improvement in the candidate experience from your past, you know?

[00:14:31] So having more time for a recruiter improves the candidate experience. Because more time, more thoughts equals more touch points, you know? And there's certain touch points that can be automated. For example, their interviews today, I want to wish them good luck on that interview, right? Let's say they're responding, then I want my rep to know they're responding and say, hey, why don't you listen to, you know, G-Code by the Ghetto Boys and get really hyped up for this one, you know?

[00:14:59] Or, you know, like, why don't you put on Freebird while you're driving, you know, 30 minutes from, you know, Fort Pierce to Port St. Lucie, you know? And so that part can be human. But the automation part is that they're always reached out to before their interview, you know? Or they're congratulated on the hire, and then they respond back, thank you.

[00:15:23] Now my rep is there starting a conversation asking for referrals, asking them, how did you do the first week? Okay. They said something like, man, I didn't do so good. You get them on the phone and you talk them up. You know, you want them to watch some Jordan Belfort sales videos and get better for the next week. Don't give up. You know, on average, you're going to make $75,000 this year, but that doesn't mean you'll make $1,500 your first week. You have to learn the business. You need to invest in yourself.

[00:15:52] Don't give up. Because, you know, losing hires in the first 30 days, it's obviously, you know, like that little Thermopylae pass that so many people are trying to overcome the $300,000. I know the candidates shouldn't give up, but we are at the time where we have to give up. See what I did there? I know. That was a dad joke. If I had siblings, you know? That was, yeah, just, it was brutal. But Harry, thank you so much.

[00:16:23] This has been really enlightening. Jeanette, another good one is, as I say, in the can. Another one in the books. See you in a couple of weeks. Yes. Harry, thank you so much. Yeah. Cheers, Harry. Awesome. Take care, everyone.