Jonathan Whistman - How to Use AI to Improve Recruitment

[00:00:02] Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross-industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly and

[00:00:23] voila! You get the HR Data Labs podcast where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, but count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real-world problems.

[00:00:41] Now here's your host David Turetsky. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host David Turetsky alongside my friend, co-host, partner and salary.com colleague Dwight Brown. Hello Dwight. Hello David. How you doing? Oh, I'm okay. How are you?

[00:00:59] Good. So I'm not gonna talk about meteorological. Damn it, it's not spring yet. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, you'll get the joke if you listen to the Katherine Hammond podcast, you'll understand why. I just can't speak. Anyways, so today,

[00:01:23] Dwight and I have with us Jonathan Westman. Jonathan, how are you? I'm doing great. Nice to be back visiting with you both. And evidently you have inner episode jokes to just keep your audience

[00:01:37] tight. You have to listen to the whole series in order to be able to really get the value out of these jokes. The cliffhanger episodes. We have a few of those. We do actually. Yeah. This might be one of them.

[00:01:49] It could be, it could be depending upon how it goes. But Jonathan tell us about yourself and how you got to this moment in time. Oh boy, that is a big existential question. So I'm gonna limit it down to

[00:02:02] the professional world. Yes, remember how long this podcast goes. Well, my father met my mother but the I'm best known for writing a book called The Sales Boss and it is about building high-performing sales teams. How do you find the people, recruit them onto the team?

[00:02:23] How do you get the systems and processes around doing that? And it comes from my experience building and selling a couple of companies and realizing at the heart of every organization's success is the ability to build a team of people and

[00:02:39] even more importantly to have the the sales heart of the company beating strongly because that lifeblood feeds every other part of the organization. So that's my history. I'm currently running an AI company that helps organizations find great people. So that's the area I live and breathe.

[00:02:59] Awesome. Well, we're gonna be talking a lot about that and your book as we get into our topic. And unlike a lot of our guests, I've actually had the pleasure of being able to meet Jonathan in person and share adventures together in

[00:03:14] person. So we, I don't think I've met any of our podcast guests in person. I've met a bunch of them. There are a lot of them are my friends. So well, we're out here in the desert together and when I met David and Dwight, you know

[00:03:28] as a sort of a precursor to this show Dwight said parasailing and I was like, yes. Paragliding yeah, I got that wrong. So he invited me to go and I got to see a historic event take place on a dirt road out north of Phoenix.

[00:03:47] A historic event that could have gone really bad. That is the that is the cliffhanger part of this episode. So tune in next week. Tune in next week when we talk to Jonathan about what Dwight did when he went up in the air the last time.

[00:04:03] We're gonna attach the video that Jonathan took of me botching my paragliding launch. We'll attach it with the episode. That's lovely. You actually handled it like a pro. I didn't even see you break a sweat.

[00:04:17] No, you didn't see him break a sweat, but you may have heard him cursing. Jonathan as we do for every one of our guests though, we need to ask you what's one fun thing that no one knows about you?

[00:04:34] Wow, no one knows about no one and that precludes you from using the whole thing about Dwight now. What is one thing that nobody knows about me? That's a tough question. I'm gonna have to go with

[00:04:58] most people don't know about me is that I am a complete introvert. I think nobody would guess that about me. That's definitely true. We just talked about introverts and sales and podcast were just recorded.

[00:05:13] Yeah, I just early in life discovered that if I was going to do anything, I had to become extroverted. So it's sort of a push for me to do it and I can do it.

[00:05:23] But I would guess that if you pulled even like nine out of ten of my friends they would all peg me as an extrovert. Interesting. It is interesting. Yeah, you learn and adapt. You have to do it become survival almost. But now everyone knows.

[00:05:39] So Jonathan, the topic we're going to talk about today is actually one that I think a lot of people will be interested in because the topic of AI is pretty much on the top of most

[00:05:50] teams minds, especially in HR when they're talking about well, how will it affect their lives? So today's topic is how do you use AI and automation to improve the quality of your hires? So our first question is what is wrong with the current recruiting process?

[00:06:14] I think the thing that is wrong is the the burden of the weight of just the process of recruiting. When you the the way we get introduced to companies, the way we apply to companies, people sorting through resumes.

[00:06:30] Like there's just a lot of mind numbingly dull things that happen and we're sort of looking at chance that we get that magical connection between the right person and the right role. And so I think it's almost dehumanize the process of applying for jobs.

[00:06:47] It can be disheartening for the applicant looking for meaningful work and certainly for a company who has an opening that they need a talented bright individual to fill, you know that mind numbingly dull work of sorting through applicants. It's just completely inefficient.

[00:07:03] So I think there's a there's a ton of upside opportunities for organizations to do that in a more human way. Well, it's different of saying it's a more human way than a more humane way

[00:07:14] because for a lot of us who've applied to jobs within the last five years and getting a rejection notice five seconds after you've been applied. We kind of wish for the days when we used to send in resumes to the New York Times

[00:07:30] and have it actually come back maybe you know a month later with a letter in the mail saying yes we would like to meet you with you or no we've chosen somebody else. Well, that's a human problem. The human didn't use the automation delay button to say

[00:07:43] you know at least set it at 24 hours so it feels real. Right exactly. It feels real. Exactly. Yeah. But I mean that's one of the problems is that when you now have an algorithm that's looking through the

[00:07:58] the candidates that have applied or the at least just let's call them applicants at that point. They're not really even candidates, but the applicants using a scoring algorithm on the back end to kind of get who the right group is to send through.

[00:08:13] Having the human program that or to choose or filter that's got to take training doesn't it? I mean maybe it is the human's fault of what the AI is is allowing through. You know this is a question that's hotly debated in HR particularly now

[00:08:32] and here's my take on it is that when you can use automation correctly and use AI and AI you know it's a big term that people some people are sort of you know scared of what it is.

[00:08:45] If you can just simplify it to at its core what is AI? AI is really about recognizing patterns and it's you know large mathematical models. That's all it is. I liken it to if you've

[00:08:58] ever been in an airplane and you're you know taking off from the airfield or Dwight you know if you're running behind a truck before your parachute lifts you off the ground.

[00:09:07] When you're at a certain height like all you can see is right around you right? Maybe the tree tops and that sort of thing as you get a little higher you might know what city you're in.

[00:09:17] When you get high enough you look down at the field all of a sudden you see oh there's circular you know crops oh there's a cornfield there and the higher you go the more patterns

[00:09:26] that you can see and that's what using AI allows an organization to do is to recognize patterns at a scale and a speed at which it's just completely impossible for humans to do

[00:09:39] sustainably. And so if you can simplify it to that then the real question is what are the patterns that I'm unaware of? So if you have somebody you know in your office sitting sorting through resume they have a pattern they're using they have a mental shortcut they're using

[00:09:54] to say this person you know gets an interview this person doesn't but you just have to get comfortable with the fact that a computer model that you know that's supervised correctly I always think there should be a human in the loop but supervised correctly they're actually going to

[00:10:10] make a better decision most of the time. They're not coming into the office with indigestion they didn't just have a fight with their wife if you can set the parameters correctly you're going to get a very similar output every single time. Yes you have to be careful that

[00:10:24] you're not inadvertently screening out people by race or education or you know by gender but that's a very well studied area in human resources and I think that AI done correctly actually reduces the amount of those what I call unconscious biases which is really just

[00:10:45] somebody unconsciously applying a pattern that they're not even aware that they're doing. Well I mean but that actually gets into the job description and who you're targeting and what platforms you're targeting too isn't it? It's not just the selection part of that.

[00:11:00] Yeah it goes all the way down the list so if you're you know if you're posting your jobs on LinkedIn you're getting one sort of candidate you're on Craig's list you're on another right just by nature of where you posted you're introducing some bias into the

[00:11:12] hiring process in terms of what kind of candidates you're going to get in. Exactly. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com now back to the show.

[00:11:29] And I guess the question from there is you know that goes to as we mentioned the humans that are in control of the processes and who've programmed it or who've set it up right and so whether it's the hiring manager creating the job description whether it's the talent

[00:11:46] acquisition or the recruiter who's actually gathering those requirements and then putting them into the platform whatever platform is chosen and then whomever has programmed the entire process and workflows all of those people have a hand in what are the

[00:12:01] applicants or what are the candidates that come out of that applicant process right? Yeah that's it and the truth is even without technology they're putting a process in place. Exactly. So where I think that the advantages for organizations is if they can take away that

[00:12:20] just call it factory work of going through resume and sourcing candidates and you know trying to do the initial match they can spend real quality time having meaningful conversations at the bottom of the funnel with the best few candidates. Right. And that's where I see the

[00:12:37] advantage there's technology coming as well you're probably paying attention to the world of voice AI where it sounds very human so imagine applicants being able to hit a website click a button that says interview me now where they can ask all of those questions

[00:12:57] that they may and there's a whole study in like in the coaching field I'm using the wrong word where people are actually more transparent talking to an AI than they are to a human

[00:13:10] right because there's no judgment there and what we find is using a voice AI actually allows an applicant to ask meaningful questions like what do you pay which sometimes people will wait till the third or fourth interview just out of this false sense of I'm being polite

[00:13:26] you're giving the candidate the opportunity right at the front end to ask all the questions they want to decide whether or not you're even a company they want to apply for and my belief

[00:13:36] and I write about it in my book when you're trying to put together a team of any sort but especially with a sales team your goal is actually not to attract candidates your job is to repel candidates and let me give you an example that might sound counterintuitive

[00:13:53] but if you know if you're watching tv and you see an ad for the marines like you got bombs blowing up you got people chasing the feet you've got some of the epic battles that have

[00:14:03] happened in world war as a recruiting ad for me I'm like I'm patriotic but I'm not checking out right you're a certain subset of people who not only are patriotic but they raise their

[00:14:16] hand and they're on fire they're like that's for me that's where I want to live okay but both of you want to not just jump out of planes but you want to actually go up and maybe the

[00:14:27] marines might not be your place but air force might be air force right exactly yeah right but you go to the navy they might be putting you in the air force anyways but I think the

[00:14:36] question that I have there though is and I and I get what you're saying it's almost like you're trying to select people by by talking to certain groups and not to others or talking

[00:14:49] to those groups and saying yeah I don't know if this is necessarily a place for you right yeah how does ai come into that equation though so I think um ai may not come into that equation directly okay but I'm just sharing that thought of when when you're

[00:15:10] you're really manufacturing your entire you know process when you're trying to attract candidates and filter candidates so when the connection in my thought there is when you have voice ai I want to be able to have a candidate that can have a conversation early on without

[00:15:26] tying up my human resources of course right to ask all of those questions they want because they may discover look you have on calls every Thursday and the person goes well I

[00:15:35] can't do on call on Thursday because I got to do you know I have my kid at home or I can't travel or I could never work for the wage that you're offering there's some subset of

[00:15:44] this job that isn't a fit if you could allow candidates to really quickly sort of self-select out by asking questions that at a depth that you couldn't include in your standard job at I think you've sped up the process for both sides you've got a bilateral opportunity

[00:16:02] to reject each other basically yeah and I and that's where I would advise organizations when they're looking at their hiring process is to look at it as a two-sided coin where you're you really want to give as much control to the applicant and today's applicant wants speed there

[00:16:23] are large organizations or smaller organizations even that are completely ghosting candidates oh yeah you've got all the way through the hiring process and all of a sudden you never hear from them again yeah so you can use ai automation to help with a ton of that like

[00:16:36] once you've made the decision you're not going to hire people there's a lot of follow-up tying that off that can be very humane but be triggered through automation and I guess you're talking about having these conversations at scale and an ai or the computer can have you

[00:16:53] know a multitude of conversations simultaneously it's not like you have to schedule the computer yeah you can do it anytime so a lot of my clients will have you know they're outside of maybe posting on indeed or the other big jobs boards they might be trying to attract

[00:17:08] through social media channels right right and the plus side is you're going to get a lot of candidates the downside is you're going to get a lot of candidates so in order for the organization not to be overwhelmed and be able to have timely conversations with the people

[00:17:24] they would want to hire there has to be some sort of pattern recognition happening and ai can help that let me give you an example of a real world way one company is using automations there

[00:17:35] are assessment tools they can help predict how well somebody's going to perform in a job there's a ton of them out there and one of my clients is advertising at on movie theaters and

[00:17:47] on like top golf right oh yeah and they're in a blue collar industry but they're like what would you be you know how would you do as a garage door technician it's a six figure job

[00:17:59] right but people have that natural you know they're already employed you're trying to get them so what what they're what they do is they scan a code they're interacting with a questionnaire that's driven by ai that's based on real data from this company that says this person will

[00:18:13] perform well if you invest the thirty thousand dollars in two months to train this person to be a garage door tech right but what the applicant gets back and this is all pattern recognition is three videos it's three videos of actual employees that are working for this guy's

[00:18:28] company that are video from them saying i love working for this company and i'm just not going to say the name here just not to advertise them but i love working for this company right

[00:18:39] and i was a waiter before i became this technician so then you can chat with that technician online that's actually that chat is an ai bot that's trained with the way that technician would have answered all of those questions wow so they can get their questions answered

[00:18:57] and then what they're trying to do is the ai technician says david based on what you're sharing with me why don't we do a video call while i'm on my truck running my route

[00:19:08] so it automatically schedules it on their calendar so you know they pull up they get on a video call why do we want on a video call well we want them to see the actual job what's

[00:19:17] happening i want to see make sure this person is somebody we would actually put in a home right with our customer right right and ai's already done a bunch of work there it's helped make

[00:19:26] that connection it's helped screen to make sure this person's a good candidate now all the technician has to do is say hey david sounds like based on what you're saying this might be

[00:19:38] of interest why don't you come do a ride along with me i can give you a 150 gift card we work weekends you don't even have to take time off of your job just see if you even like it all right

[00:19:47] where do i go right david's taking notes right now i love garage door dudes but think about think about that pattern and now if the technician decides you know david wouldn't be a fit for our company that that technician doesn't have to carry the weight of that they

[00:20:06] can say david great chatting with you hopefully you know more i'm going to have our hr department be in touch with you right right and then that's sort of an automated process to kindly offload

[00:20:15] that person right what we're what we're doing is speed to hiring and we're making hr traditional hr sort of the last step in the hiring process what rather than the first screening process because our belief is that this hiring process is a very human decision

[00:20:35] and the closer i can put the person actually doing the job that the new employee is going to have to do and the faster i can do that the the more i'm going to increase the odds that

[00:20:46] there's a synergy synergy there and as the employer i can close the deal with the applicant and as an applicant i get to see really what is it i would be doing so i'm i'm coming into

[00:20:56] it without these you know rose colored glasses that's an example of a process you could not run without some sort of ai tools that and some sort of automation and thought into that so

[00:21:09] if you're thinking about using ai just to do the same process you've always done i think you're sort of limiting yourself you should be like tearing apart and saying what are these new

[00:21:18] tools like voice ai and being able to train an ai voice that sounds like me and can answer questions like me how can i deploy that in a way that assists the candidate so it creates an active recruiting process basically as opposed to the typical recruiting process where

[00:21:37] we have to imagine how somebody's going to perform in a job and the candidate has to imagine what that job is going to be like exactly it facilitates a lot more activity without necessarily increasing the human burden the human resources burden or manager burden

[00:21:52] and yeah you can run a voice ai model like that for around fully deployed on a lot of different platforms around five dollars an hour of talk time just like the processing costs right

[00:22:05] and running through your phone lines and that and it can always be available so if you if you're you know if you want to interact with candidates when they get done with their day job

[00:22:13] and they want to call in at nine o'clock at night you can fire up and have a very real conversation i was uh i follow the you know all of the latest things in ai so i feel like

[00:22:25] i'm fairly in tune to what's going on and i called into my bank the other day and i talked to an ai uh agent and i was 10 minutes in before i realized i wasn't actually talking to a human

[00:22:39] that's how good it's getting now i'm also of the belief that we should never try to fool people so and you know in my own applications i always identify that you're talking to an ai

[00:22:49] and the way i do that is i'm like i'm a digital agent thinking me like a fast pass ride to do a busy disney ride my job is to make this easy for you and get you connected with the right

[00:23:00] person in in the quick fastest time that i can yeah hey are you listening to this and thinking to yourself man i wish i could talk to david about this well you're in luck we have a

[00:23:12] special offer for listeners of the hr data labs podcast a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind go to salary.com forward

[00:23:25] slash hr dl consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today one of the things that i've seen lately is especially for what should be more customer service or customer oriented focused companies where they put chats in between you and actually talking to a live person

[00:23:45] and i'm talking on the consumer side not necessarily on the hr side so we're kind of getting used to talking to ai at least initially anyways as a as a as a country as a consumer base and that's not to me there's something wrong with that getting

[00:24:05] into the hr world except what you're talking about is a higher touch ai what i'm talking about is a lower touch dumber ai which doesn't satisfy that need yeah so i i think where you run into

[00:24:19] a challenge at the highest level of hr and organizations is because they're they're judging based on their outdated reference point if you went back 90 days your online chat still feels robotic you get frustrated half of the time in the last 90 days you can't tell the

[00:24:39] difference that you're not talking to a real human that is going to show up in the hr world and and the question then that's legitimate question so how do we think about this how do

[00:24:50] we deploy it i think you still have to come down to the the decision on who to hire is a very human decision it affects the life of that person and what they're able to provide

[00:25:01] for their family when you hire somebody inappropriately and they churn out of your organization i feel like as an employer you're causing damage to society certainly to that person and their family and their family right so it's incumbent to get it right

[00:25:17] and you have to get comfortable being in hr that part of your job is to say no to a lot of people yep right right and that is not a bad thing but how do we say no to people

[00:25:27] in in a way that is in their best interests and there is a ton of day you know it's almost like if you had i always think about like if you had a bunch of kids and you were able to say you

[00:25:40] know the one on this end with the right opportunity and training and instruction they could play at carnegie hall and this one with the same time and instruction and all of that they're probably

[00:25:50] going to be a karaoke singer at best like we accept that there are natural talents at a lot of things like you know it doesn't matter how much you train at something if you're going to

[00:26:02] be at the pro level of it it's it's not only training determination but it's there's also a little bit of inherent drive and skill and affinity for that thing and that's what you

[00:26:13] can really get at with pattern recognition is to say this seed this person really does well in this kind of soil and they blossom and they grow quickly and you know you think about dysfunctional companies dysfunctional companies have a lot of employees and a certain subset

[00:26:31] of those employees thrive in a dysfunctional environment right like they're best off being able to identify employees that do well in a dysfunctional environment and they're better off being able to exclude the employees that don't do well in a dysfunctional environment

[00:26:46] we all have a place that to us feels like home and that's where ai can be helpful is to be able to get to know you as a person as a human and say you're going to thrive in this

[00:26:58] environment surrounded by a bunch of individuals like this and these kinds of challenges but you're talking about it as if ai becomes the enabler in that part to find the right fit right yeah and

[00:27:12] i think that's ultimately where we're going i think at some point in the future we'll have a life concierge that is an ai that knows us more intimately than we even know ourselves

[00:27:24] and can proactively on our behalf go out and find opportunities that we're uniquely suited for they will everyone will have their own sports agent huh and they'll negotiate the deals for us with

[00:27:37] the business partner with the businesses and it's an ai on that side too so it's really just an exchange of information it's an exchange of data and a an api for the ai but not just not

[00:27:50] just disconnected data right but really understanding why and how things work so i can't wait for the day where i say david have your ai call my ai and they can have lunch together

[00:28:05] probably would happen they'd probably go to the internet cafe get it and then i'd be like what's this big credit card charge that my ai just racked up on racking up didn't i tell

[00:28:15] them only bottles of wine yeah exactly no lobster for you it's virtual it's virtual lobster and virtual wine so you know you have a shellfish allergy virtual lobster won't hurt me but but

[00:28:26] in that case though what we're talking about is we're talking about probably more of a gig economy where i'm more of a free agent and today i could work for xyz and tomorrow i could

[00:28:36] work for you know yzx it doesn't really matter as long as the two are are handshaking and making sure that my ai and those and the ai's for those businesses or collectives as they were

[00:28:50] understand what my role is understand what my reputation is from past gigs and whether or not my skills will fit what they have available for me yeah the world economic forum just released a study a couple of weeks ago where they projected by the year 2025 which is so

[00:29:09] far in the future oh my god that's really a long way away that 52% of work-related tasks will be replaced by robotics or ai 52% in 2025 sorry i'm going to call bullshit on that yeah that's too close yeah and i would say i believe you that you believe

[00:29:28] that because history has always said that those kinds of changes take a long time the truth is that change is happening so rapidly there as an example and i'll be happy to go on

[00:29:42] the record i would say by 2025 late 2025 there will be no call centers in the u.s at all the reason is all of that can be handled today with technology that exists that can do

[00:29:57] the job better than humans and that humans would prefer to do the job through those ai's there's there's no situation under which a corporate for-profit entity is going to continue to incur the costs of massive physical structures call centers paying people paying you know people

[00:30:19] to recruit those people paying to train those people trying to manage those people they're just not going to do it and so that industry will entirely go away we're talking millions and millions of people if you follow robotics right now you look at tesla tesla has

[00:30:33] been working on a humanoid robot which is sort of still clunky after three years of being under construction there was a company that was started 18 months ago that is fully humanoid that can learn human tasks from scratch without programming so it

[00:30:50] literally just looks at the items in front of them goes oh this is an apple that's edible these are dishes and knows how to manipulate all those yeah i've seen that yeah we tend to think

[00:31:00] that those are going to be expensive robots they're actually not when you look at the costs of the components that are inside of one of those robots your average robot will come in

[00:31:12] somewhere around the size of the price of a mid-size sedan here in the u.s which means you can't take it to get to work yeah but what that means is that it is likely more than likely

[00:31:25] that even middle-class families will have a humanoid robot in their homes that can learn and do any of the tasks that you need to do jonathan but it's a perfect world and i don't

[00:31:38] buy that that people are going to sign up to buy a robot not yet at least a robot in their home and trust something like that that you know somebody else programmed yeah because that's

[00:31:51] because you're my age right um that and that's it i've seen too many movies is that what you're seeing yeah no yeah you might have watched too many movies but have you seen a young kid like

[00:32:00] i've seen babies pick up a magazine like this a paper magazine and swipe sure right because they think it's an ipad they expect that the world's gonna respond that way so but we're compressing what you know if you look at like a 50-year time span humans

[00:32:14] are really good at adapting over time but we're compressing that into a five-year time span i would say i agree with you with the caveat that i think the capability will be there by 2025 to

[00:32:29] have everything replaced but i do think the adoption curve is going to slow that down because i mean you're right the you you've got babies you've got all these young people but you still have old dogs like us yeah because chat gpt took so long for people to

[00:32:47] change their workflows like i would say 80 percent of people are running things through chat gpt yeah but jonathan they still don't really understand the prompts well they still don't get it and a lot of the data and by the way i've seen this and i've tested

[00:33:01] it a few times some of the data that they're using is specious at best as a as you know underlying lookups to some of the information they're collecting and so i i get what you're

[00:33:13] saying and i totally agree with you i'm just saying it's not 2025 it's well but if you if you look at it's the pace of change if you would have went back 90 days ago there would

[00:33:25] have been no voice ai on the planet that would have passed for anything 90 days later there's voice ai that i guarantee that you could not distinguish from a human voice or the human responses that's a 90 day the like the and the cost of that even like the

[00:33:42] cost of processing a gpt model in one year the cost of delivery of that has gone down by 40x you don't see 40x reduction in costs in any other sort of technology at any other point in human history okay like we're getting really close to general artificial intelligence

[00:34:03] which which is very would be very is very interesting right like right now everything is purpose-built it is except i'm not willing to say that the robots are taking over yet

[00:34:16] i hope they don't take over so just and we can pull out the plug yeah there's there's a plug and we can pull out the plug and you know this isn't going to be a silo situation from

[00:34:26] battle star galactica take out a few data centers we're good yeah yeah we're shooting the battery or if it's a lithium ion battery it's going to blow up anyway but you know while this is all conjecture right yeah these are these are ways that if you're leading

[00:34:45] an organization you really have to mentally stretch yourself to think how is the world shifting and how is it changing and what i notice when i'm in organizations or people

[00:34:57] are hiring the same way today that they did last year and it isn't last year yeah right so much has changed the expectations that people have around the workplace are different the expectation around transparency that young people have as they come into the workplace are different

[00:35:15] and the response to that for many aged organizations are hey these millennials don't want to work or they you know there's a complaint towards the workforce that's coming in and when the reality is it's actually the workplace that hasn't really adopted to modern day reality

[00:35:38] our you know our schools are the same way our kids grow up swiping on devices watching you know dynamic history on the discovery channel with cgi graphics all in all of that they can

[00:35:51] google anything at an instant's notice and then they show up at school and they sit in a classroom with a printed textbook that was written 10 years ago right that just keeps getting republished with a teacher who hasn't done a bit of study since they got out of college

[00:36:10] a decade ago right right like and you wonder why they're disconnected in the classroom and screwing off is because education hasn't kept up with the pace at which young people are used to

[00:36:21] learning well my kid goes to a school that uses chromebooks they don't bring home any textbooks anymore they everything they do is using chrome and they use a lot of online resources they use

[00:36:34] a lot of videos they do a lot more modern things that i ever thought they would yeah and they have to he barely takes paper home anymore i mean he gets some workbooks but

[00:36:42] that's because i need him to do some extra stuff but and i would guess in another few months when they really you know get their act together there'll be macbooks everywhere i pray yeah

[00:36:55] having some apple stock left yeah chromebooks it's sort of like going back to the dark ages david's eyes just lit up when you said that yeah we are my apple stock took a major hit because of the department of justice there's this sort of existential question when you

[00:37:13] you know when you ask like how do you come to be here it's an interesting thing and you probably experience this as males in society i don't know what it is for women in society

[00:37:24] i'm you know just because i'm not one but i have four sisters but you can't be a guy at least here in the u.s and within you know 15 minutes max of meeting another guy you're going

[00:37:35] to get this question what do you do for a living like it's sort of very early in conversation when you meet another guy it's what do you do it's it's sort of like context it'll be

[00:37:46] interesting when we're in a situation where it doesn't take all of that human effort to keep society going and people are free from just working for a living like that that oh i wish i was

[00:37:59] alive during that time but that's not going to be like i'm not going to have that but i'd love that if that was true usually it's hey do you do you know about hockey that's my first question

[00:38:10] hey do you play hockey yeah yeah well you are an advanced species david yeah i'm definitely not going to go with that like it is sort of a very early thing right about

[00:38:23] your identity being so closely tied to what do you do for work right and it will because one of the things that we tend to love to do is to talk to people who are either analytical

[00:38:34] in nature we'd like to kind of bond with those people like we were talking about before you know you and dwight like to live dangerously i live dangerously by playing hockey or skating or whatnot that's okay i will i don't like getting off my skates too high

[00:38:50] so there you go so you're allowed to be six inches off the ground at most at most and then that's it that's that's the floor right there get it with the ceiling floor

[00:38:59] whatever but but i guess going back to what we were originally talking about though and i love your premise but i have to say that in order for the robots to take over in order for hr to

[00:39:11] allow robots to become more part of the processes a lot of things have to happen and one thing that we talk about all the time that dwight and i spend most of our time talking about is

[00:39:22] that the data that underlies hr is usually crap and right in order for the ai to be able to make decisions that are well founded it needs to have a better training data set

[00:39:36] and the training data sets that we're currently working with yeah suck why do you and i would agree with you but why is it that most hr departments have crap data it's because we're human and

[00:39:49] we make mistakes and there are mistakes that we can forgive that don't drive payroll and then there are some mistakes that we go out to find like the department numbers are they not

[00:39:59] correct it's okay the gl stuff comes out someplace else so we don't have to worry about payroll getting booked to the wrong department so there are things that we allow the payroll system or the hr system to live in a state of imperfection because it doesn't hurt us

[00:40:17] well and yeah and i would go one step deeper is that it the time and attention it takes to collect great data and analyze that data right right is beyond most humans capability and the

[00:40:31] thing that they like to do like most people don't like that part of it right oh yeah audits suck when we when we turn over data collection and analysis and identifying what's important and

[00:40:42] what's spurious to ai models and data models you actually get better quality data just by the act of feeding it to that so you as an example if you uh you know if you go to an oncologist

[00:40:56] for cancer here's a human that's you know spent four hundred thousand dollars plus right to put themselves through school eight years plus residency uh and now you can take a picture with an iphone camera and get as accurate a diagnosis as that person can give you

[00:41:17] second to that you can you can feed that picture into a database that compares it to every source of cancer that's ever happened on the planet and the three people that actually responded to this sort of treatment your doctor coming out of school and going through that will

[00:41:35] never be able to keep up with that i think at some point it will be malpractice for a doctor not to plug into an ai for the for an understanding of what's happening with a

[00:41:46] going to see that across almost every industry where the the outcome is better because you because you have an ai that doesn't mean that it doesn't present very real you know challenges to the human to humans as a species and even raise up a question of what

[00:42:06] does it mean to be human and how do we find meaning in life these are existential sorts sorts of questions but you you can't put the genie back in the bottle and i think it's coming

[00:42:15] faster than most people recognize remember back to our our training and our educational systems when we learned about you know how did people go through stages of development you know fire revolutionized certain things smelting you know iron into steel revolutionized things

[00:42:37] being able to create automobiles in mass revolutionized things cotton gin other things they revolutionized pieces of human existence and so then we stopped focusing on the labor that needed to do those things and then we were able to turn our attention elsewhere

[00:42:56] so what you're mentioning now is that computers and data and connectivity and artificial intelligence on top of that enables us to stop worrying about certain things and focus on others so really isn't it in getting back to the hr doesn't this then

[00:43:12] help hr then get out of one business and help focus strategically on other businesses yeah that's exactly my point all that filtering and mindless noise and data if they can offload that and just spend their time connected human to human in the business i think that not only

[00:43:32] will hr professionals find that more gratifying work it'll also have a bigger impact on the businesses that they work for on that note perfect ending to a great podcast jonathan thank

[00:43:54] you very much we're gonna have to do a round two on this because there's so much more to uncover we could easily have gone that five hours that we were joking about i mean this is well we

[00:44:04] made it past the 15 minute mark so yeah exactly 15 minutes yeah i think the 15 minutes actually ended your introduction and then we got it to the feet of the podcast soon into the next episode where we shall reveal what happened to dwight when he was running behind a large

[00:44:22] parachute and accidentally hooked onto the weather flag and flew 300 feet in the air and then dropped it to be continued anyways jonathan thank you so much that was awesome a pleasure gentlemen dwight thank you

[00:44:40] thank you appreciate your being here jonathan and thank you all for listening take care and stay safe and also pay attention we're gonna have round two with jonathan wisman the podcast title of that will be the robots will be taking over 2025

[00:44:59] that was the hr data labs podcast if you liked the episode please subscribe and if you know anyone that might like to hear it please send it their way thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode stay safe