EP123 | Is AI Making Hiring Better or Just Faster? The Truth Behind Phenom’s Bold Claims

[00:00:15] What's up YouTube and the Rectech listeners? Do a little pot swap today. Got my buddy Tim Sackett on the line from HR Famous, HR Famous Podcast. Definitely hit him up there if you haven't listened yet. One of my favorites as well. And just saw Tim in Philadelphia at I Am Phenom. We're here today to discuss the show. And a little debrief for you to talk about what we heard. Lots of new AI agents in the process. And Tim, it was great to see you again, my friend. Yeah, it's good to see you.

[00:00:43] It's like one of those weird, we're going to do like the crossover show. It's like when Law & Order meets like ER. Like you have these weird crossover podcasts. So we're going to do, we'll throw it up on both segments there and get that done. Yeah, Phenom, it was the first time I've been. You've been every year? All of them, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about like how I describe Phenom. They're like the Cadillac of recruiting software, I think. That's my description of them.

[00:01:09] Well, I came into it literally trying to go, because I think you and I both know there's so much buyer confusion, right? With the software, recruiting software industry. What's what? I mean, it used to be kind of simple. You had an ATS and you had a CRM and you had this sourcing tool and you had this, you know, and you could actually like define things.

[00:01:29] Because, and I think when you take a look at where Phenom is and there's other platforms like that, like, I don't even, like, what do you call them anymore, right? Yeah. Like, yeah. How do you go to your like CFO or to your operating people and go, hey, we need this thing. And like, literally there's nothing you, like, what do you call it, you know? Is it full site, full lifecycle recruiting software? That's kind of how I think about it.

[00:01:55] Yeah, like, you know, the hard part is there's a crossover everywhere, right? So, like, you go, okay, well, hey, we already have, like, this ATS. Why the heck did we spend six, seven figures a year on this ATS when we need to spend six, seven figures here? And you're like, well, the ATS doesn't do A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever, you know? And you're like, okay. So then you go, well, can we just use Phenom, like, as our ATS?

[00:02:23] You're like, well, yeah, probably, but it's not an ATS, you know? It's like, I just think it's super confusing, even though, obviously, the ATSs don't have all the functionality that people need. So that's why you have, you know, software and technologies like Phenom. I did like that Mahi, the CEO, co-founder, kind of created the title for us, right?

[00:02:50] He called it Applied AI, and because of all the Eugenic stuff, you know, that they launched, which I thought was super impressive. I didn't expect it when I saw it, when I came there. I knew they were going to talk about Eugenic, but, like, wow. Like, it was, I was kind of blown away by the whole thing. Yeah. No, every year, they, you know, they really, they think a lot about the innovation here, just having seen them from the start, right? It's, every year, it's, they just advance that tech as much as they can.

[00:03:19] And they're really, I think, kind of pushing the envelope here with some of this new stuff. Yeah. They're, they're definitely ahead of the market is, you know, where adoption will be at this point, right? Yeah. Average HR agronization, you know, this is, this is very new to them. They struggle a lot with implementation, but definitely Phenom is, you know, at that forefront there, I think. The three big people in this category, you have Phenom, you have Eightfold, you have Paradox, I think are the three ones probably out there combating for most of the enterprise kind of space in here.

[00:03:49] You have two of them in, in Phenom and Paradox who built their own private language models from a security standpoint, from a legal standpoint at the enterprise, probably a little bit easier. Eightfold went OpenAI. So a public language model, but it was like the enterprise edition, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's still a public model, right? Which is a little problematic.

[00:04:14] I mean, I think people would be really scared about this 18 months ago, like if that was the case. Now there's so many like guardrails and, you know, other pieces to kind of protect. I don't think it's as, you know, as an issue, you know, from that standpoint. But I think it does speak volumes to, to Phenom and, you know, and Paradox building out like their private, you know, language models. It takes, it's a lot more work, a lot more money.

[00:04:40] But at the end of the day, you know, the buyer is going to be, have a little bit more security around. And I guess, you know, for those who are kind of still like, well, what's the difference? You know, a public language model is just built on and educated on the entire internet, right? And these private models, it's almost like if you said, hey, I'm going to take a toddler and I'm going to train, I'm going to teach it everything the internet knows. You're like, oh God, like that's scary.

[00:05:05] Or I'm going to take a toddler and teach it only the best things in the world, you know, that it should know or whatever the job is, right? So if it's, you know, a recruiter, we're going to teach it how to be the best recruiter in the world and every great thing about being a recruiter. And it's the only thing it can do is be this amazing super recruiter, right? And that's basically kind of when you build private model, what you're doing. And I think that's powerful.

[00:05:31] I think it speaks again to how ahead of the curve they are, you know, compared to a lot of the people in the industry. Yeah. The term agents is going to be prevalent this year. They talked about how some, thinking of them as junior team members for your recruiting team. It's an interesting way to look at it. So a junior team member that actually knows everything and works 20 face up. Yeah. It's almost like the entry level recruiting job is not going to exist anymore.

[00:05:59] You've got just these, I think Josh Burson calls them like super workers now, right? Super employees, something like that. So if you think about it, I think he's right where the average, you know, recruiter today or tomorrow is going to have to have these junior team members with them. And they're going to do all the dirty work. Yeah. And they're going to just, you know, Diana Sai from Upwage calls them relationship architects at this point. Like you just basically, you're working that relationship with these candidates.

[00:06:29] 25, they announced new ones across really every aspect of recruiting. And I think the interesting thing was, is like, that's what they'd said publicly, right? When, uh, out like in the, in the big keynote, like when they showed it and it was, we were sitting there cause we were sitting together and we were kind of laughing. Cause it was like every time some new product person would come out, it was like another agent, another agent. Oh, and then like, I think it was an onboarding that came out and said, we have an app. And we all kind of like chuckle because we were like, Oh, only an app. Come on.

[00:06:57] Like you should have more than that. You know? Yeah. You know, I was, I was thinking too, like, like right now we have, there's a lot of autonomous stuff built into recruiting software, Tim. Like, especially like the, uh, the scheduling of candidates, like self scheduling that's already happening now. My question is like, I should have asked them this was how much more efficient is an agent, an AI agent scheduling the interview versus what we have today? Yeah. Like, I think it's, it's the one-off issues, right?

[00:07:25] So like, again, an agent can reason the automation camp. So like, if it's just machine learning, it's just like, Hey, here's a schedule of three times that you can interview, which would you like? Right. Or here's the calendar of all the times. And let's say the person can't meet any of those. An AI agent could reason through and go, Oh, so we only have allowed you first shift interview times. And this is a second shift job.

[00:07:53] And you actually can't come right at the times that we have open or whatever that might be, because let's say I'm a single mom and I have to go pick up my kids from school. And then, you know, there's no one to watch them and whatever. So I'm, you're looking for a different time slot. An AI agent could reason through that and go, okay, let me get back with my human, you know, counterpart here and we'll figure out like what we can do. A machine learning conversational AI would just be like, here's the times. Like, no, I don't have, here's the time.

[00:08:21] You know, and it would just keep coming at you. And you're like, I don't want to interview here anymore. Right. I'm frustrated. So I think that's, there's a little bit of that. It's, it's the, it's the one-offs that, you know, are problematic in any automation that I think maybe this reasoning side of an agent could help. But is it leaps and bounds different? Is it like, so let's say 85, 90% of the people could schedule an interview just fine.

[00:08:49] And the other 10% were having issues or whatever. Does that, does it take, does it solve all of those? I don't know. Like it's, it's incrementally better. Right. From that standpoint. I don't, scheduling is one thing because that one, you know, for the most part is, is kind of like A to B. I think it's back to, it's the screening and it's the nurturing and like that side of it, you know, where you're like, oh, okay. So often, like, so Chris, here's my thing.

[00:09:17] As a practitioner and someone that runs a recruiting job, here's what happens for almost every recruiter. You post a job, 25, 50 people apply, blah, blah, blah. Recruiter goes in, they cherry pick the five or 10 they think are the best, you know, and they probably didn't look at all 50. They just looked at the first 25 and they found five or 10, right? They go, they send, they do a little bit of screening, they send off. And like, you have this like gap of like 25 people that didn't even get a sniff.

[00:09:45] And by the way, those 25 people could be the best talent that's out there. And so I think with like the agent stuff, you're like, okay, hey, how powerful is to say a hundred percent of my candidates actually got an at bat? They actually got up to the plate, got to take a few swings. And now I actually do get to hire the best of who apply, you know? And I think from the process standpoint, that's leaps and bounds better than what we have right now. Yeah. I wrote about this recently and you and I are in the same mindset there.

[00:10:15] Every candidate deserves an interview. And I think we need to make that like a mantra going forward here and beat that into the industry's head, you know? Yeah. Well, and also with agents, every candidate can get actually really good feedback as well. It's like, hey, why didn't I get this job? I thought I was the best one. Because here's another weird psychological thing that happens with humans is recruiters screen. They don't really interview.

[00:10:42] Some might for certain positions, but for the most part, we're just screening. Candidates believe that screen is an actual interview. And so if my job as a recruiter is to get a candidate excited about a job and a hiring manager and a potential, like I hear from so many candidates like, oh my gosh, I interviewed, quote unquote, right? Air quotes. I interviewed with Amazon. And like the person loved me. They said I was great. And they couldn't wait to send me the hiring manager. And then I got ghosted. Yeah. And you're like, you didn't get ghosted.

[00:11:11] You got sent over with 10 other people. The hiring manager chose three. You weren't one of them. And they're like, but they're like, well, wait a minute. They told me they love me. They love my background. Like, yeah, that's a recruiter. That's what they're trying to do, right? That's how they're trying to, you know, you know, keep you interested in the company and the job. They're doing what they should be. But then they get no feedback and they get pissed off at the brand and everything else.

[00:11:33] So you're like, an agent's going to be able to go back and say, like, you know, hey, here's, you know, here's who, you know, they all know who got the job. They'll know where you fell short and be able to kind of give you some legally, you know, defensible feedback, you know, in terms of that. Yeah. AI generated feedback for every candidate. I mean, that's a no brainer. I mean, let's do that. Let's get on that, guys. Yeah. You know. All right. So they put 2,600 attendees this year. That thing was their biggest one ever.

[00:12:04] They happened at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Last year has been at the Marriott there, a little more crowded than you could find. I thought that stage was pretty cool. They had that, like, it was almost like sphere-like with the floor and it curved up in the back and stuff. It's like grandstands, right? Like a sports venue. Yeah. It's kind of cool. So they did a nice job with the overall presentation and stuff. So, you know, it's one of the few conferences on the East Coast. So it's why I go, number one.

[00:12:31] And I think it attracts, you know, this Eastern seaboard side of things. But what I heard, too, is like from the people that go, because this is a user conference thing is because when you go to a user conference. Yeah, it's very Phenom skewed, you know, and specific. Yeah, everyone there, for the most part, is probably either using Phenom or looking at Phenom. But it's all practitioners. It's very much enterprise-driven.

[00:12:56] So you get a lot of big brands, a lot of big titles, and a lot of people sharing, you know, information back and forth, which I think is unique. I mean, if you go to, like, an industry conference, like an HR tech or a SHRM, you get people from everywhere in different industries that are using different things. And the interaction isn't as high. It's one of the things I like about user conferences from that standpoint. Yeah, you have to drink a little bit of the Kool-Aid, you know. I mean, that's just part of it. But again, like, that's why you're there, right?

[00:13:25] You're like, hey, I want to be a super user of this technology. And I want to learn how to use it better. And I want to learn from others who are using it better. But I think also the networking side of it is so much better. Like, there's so much interaction between everybody because they're all kind of playing in the same world a little bit, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I was sitting, I sat in some of the sessions and, you know, the Q&As at the end were always good because those users wanted to hear from other users. And that's what they got a lot out of it, I think.

[00:13:54] Like, I made people from United, University of Virginia. Somebody from Yale was there. They have Phenom now. Yale University. UPS, Lowe's. Like, it was just, it's like just brand after brand. Like, I ran into people, you know, from that standpoint. Now, Chris, so one of the things that, like, I heard consistently from, like, the analyst crew that was there.

[00:14:19] And it was a pretty big group, what would you say, 40, 50, you know, kind of people that Phenom and what they built two years ahead of the industry right now. That was kind of the consensus. Yeah. I don't know if that's legit. I mean, I think we all got kind of, like, wowed by the 25 agents that were public. Like, and then behind the scenes, they said, hey, there's way, there's way more coming in a real hurry.

[00:14:45] And then they showed us the X plus agent studio where you can actually build your own, which to me is, like, that's where everybody wants to go. Like, I mean, he goes, and I can't remember if it was Hari or Mahi that said, like, at the end of the day, like, this agent thing is limitless, really. Like, I mean, you're going to be able to build unlimited number of agents.

[00:15:09] Now understand, like, we want to go, oh, it's just this little cool thing we can build, you know, and it's like, you know, like you're building, like, a PowerPoint presentation. These are expensive. Like, it costs money to run an agent. Is there a lot of energy behind running an agent? So I don't think companies are going to be able to go and just go, hey, Mr. Recruiter, Mrs. Recruiter, go build yourself a thousand agents. Like, that's, you can't afford it, right?

[00:15:35] Now, again, you might say, hey, we're going to sign up for the 25 best use case, you know, agents. And that's one of the things I like, too, is they build agents by use case. So it was like, hey, very specifically, which allows, I think, practitioners and leaders to go, hey, we want to kind of tip, like, dip our toe in the water. And we just want to use the agent for scheduling. Or we just want to use the agent for screening. Or we just want to use an agent for sourcing.

[00:16:01] Or whatever that might be, right, where they think it's maybe the least, you know, risky for them. Yeah, onboarding, account management, you know, employee survey stuff, you know. Yeah. A lot of stuff there. Yeah, I'd say it's the most advanced software on the market. I don't know if it's two years ahead or not, but it's definitely the most advanced. And Phenom has always been very ambitious around their software. So I give them a lot of credit for that. They have a big vision for it, you know. And I don't see a lot of vendors, you know, really pushing that down below, but like they are.

[00:16:28] Yeah, I think, like with any of these, there's, and they talked about this, like on the analyst side, too. Like, part of this is setting the expectation. When you buy this, this isn't something out of the box that in a few days you're going to be running with scissors, right? It's like six months minimum to a year. Yeah, and you better plan on a year to like build this thing out in this machine. But you like, don't like, don't like confuse the fact you're building a hiring machine. Yeah.

[00:16:57] You're changing everything about how you recruit the process, everything. But when the machine is done and ready, you are now like light years ahead innovation wise, comparable to the majority of the industry that's out there. Yep. And I think that's like the big thing is like, the concept is like, Phenom for me, and again, this is just my opinion. I'm not going to throw words into your mouth. What I've heard from the industry is like, they're amazing at selling.

[00:17:27] And then again, they have a lot of product. But then on the implementation side, they always kind of fell short, right? So it was like, and we heard a little bit of that, right, from their customers, honestly, you know, that they put in front of us. But they also have said like, look, over the last two years, our entire sole focus has been on focusing on this implementation delivery, right? And they feel that they have this solved.

[00:17:53] And we saw some of the timelines, again, that have come down in terms of how fast they can get, you know, get you to market and all this other stuff. And again, the proof will be in the pudding there, like from that standpoint. They admitted that, you know, it's been a shit show for the early years of Phenom where, you know, getting clients up and running is difficult. Yeah. They admitted that, which is refreshing.

[00:18:17] And, you know, I think that's always going to be a challenge for them, any software vendor, like because with clients. Well, especially CRM stuff is complex, right? Yeah, it's complex software. It takes a while. The HR team does not understand this technology. So you really have to handhold, hold her hand and, you know, do it slowly. And there's just inherently problems in there. And I think it's always going to be the case, you know.

[00:18:41] I saw this early on with Beemery is when I first saw it, I was like overwhelmed, like with how great the technology was. But they were selling, you know, these six figure, seven figure deals to enterprise. And the failure was they didn't go to him and said, hey, oh, by the way, you're going to go and spend, you know, six figures on this. You also have to have this role, this role and this role. If you want it to be, you're going to have to add three headcount because our mindset is, oh, if I buy great software, I can actually reduce my headcount.

[00:19:11] Right. I can reduce my automation. And you maybe can in other places, but don't be mistaken that like you have to have people specifically designed to run this kind of software. Like if you are a Workday shop or an Oracle shop or an SAP shop, you have an entire team that works on Workday, Oracle, SAP. If you buy something like Phenom, you're going to have a few people that this is their daily job every single day, every single week that they are on top of this.

[00:19:40] It doesn't mean that your recruiters won't be in there daily working on it, blah, blah, blah. Just like if you're an HR generalist, you're in Workday, but you still have a Workday team. And this is very similar to that. Now, again, not to the level of giant HCM, but like don't be mistaken. Like you have to have the right support around these things to make them successful. Yeah, you need an HR IT team now. You know, you have to have these technical experts in there to help you operate, manage and maintain this kind of software on a regular basis.

[00:20:10] The role of recruiter here is changing, though, Tim. I think one of their clients from Talos was talking about, he called them talent marketers now. That's what the recruiter is today. Let's talk about that. Yeah. What's your perspective on that? Yeah. Like, again, the whole agent thing to me, like I had said this to my, you're like, you're in the room of 2,500 people. You could feel the excitement and nervousness all at once. Yeah. When you're taking a look at those agents, you're like, holy crap.

[00:20:40] I want that. And also, I don't want that because that thing's doing my job. So then it begs the question like, okay, well, what's the future of TA? When you take a look at where Talos was and saying, hey, you now can do, you have this capacity to do some really cool stuff. What is that stuff going to be? I think you have to rethink that as a TA team. And every team is going to kind of come up with some different things. There's going to be obviously some, I think, commonalities that teams will come up with.

[00:21:09] One of those is I find that there's a huge disconnect between what our CEO, C-suite. If you ask them, how does talent come to your company? And they would tell you, oh my gosh, we have this TA team that goes out and they hunt for the best talent in the market. And I just always smile at them and go, oh, Pookie, that's so cute that you believe that.

[00:21:31] Because what we know is that the reality is the vast majority is just posting a job, finding people to apply, putting some branding, putting some recruitment marketing in there, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, they don't really know if the best people in the market are actually applying. They're not strategically going after. And I think as you start to put these agents in play and you have capacity, you're going to turn your recruiting team into snipers. They're going to be less farming and more hunting.

[00:22:02] And they're going to really go out and start to strategically target certain talent at certain companies or whatever that might be. And like, okay, hey, and the companies that figure this out the first are going to have a competitive advantage over the ones that don't. Yeah, totally. That's spot on there. Was there any agents? Like the one thing I think I even made a comment to you, like either you agree with Aaron Spencer as well from Deloitte. The data side of it.

[00:22:32] So if I'm a talent leader or if I'm a CHRO, I just want to go and talk to my agent and say, hey, I need this data right now and this tablet and put it in a pie charter, put it in a graph bar, blah, blah, blah. They didn't really show that. They did a little bit about hiring intelligence and it's there. And maybe that one, because of the artistic nature of arts and charts, you know, from a data perspective is a little more difficult to pull off. I was hoping to see that. And I'm sure it's there.

[00:23:01] I mean, we talked about that a little bit with them. The data is there. Yeah. The manager experience. Because they've got personas like built into the software for like hiring managers, recruiters, employees. Yeah. Managers. But one of the clients mentioned he wants the meta agent to talk to the other agents and give him an overall view of that. And that's what I think he was missing there. The other thing I think that's interesting is like, imagine. So Phenom in the, I don't know.

[00:23:30] I have no idea how many, like thousands of clients they have. Right. So imagine I'm, let's say we'll go with it. Like we saw, we met both the leaders from UPS and Lowe's that were there. So let's say UPS has somebody that applies and goes through this thing and they're a silver medalist. Right. Didn't get the job. Somebody else did. Could an agent then go and say, hey, by the way, we have another Phenom client Lowe's that has a similar job that's open. You should go over and apply there.

[00:24:00] Now, again, that then also now that you have this creation of relationship between as well, UPS is like, hey, that's our candidate. You can't just do that. And I totally understand that. But what if you had brands agree to have this partnership of saying, hey, once we release a candidate, right, they don't get hired for a position or maybe they applied to a position. But after 30 days, we didn't do anything with them. The agent can then start to market them to others.

[00:24:27] Now you have this community that becomes so much more powerful and sticky because it's not just your like talent marketplace. Now, potentially, you're leveraging thousands of talent marketplaces together. And I can see how that potentially builds this bigger, giant community that becomes really sticky. Phenom didn't talk about this, but like I think we're getting into an environment because we now have the technology that can make this happen seamlessly and really easily. Right.

[00:24:56] Remember when COVID happened, I think some of the like hospitality companies were sharing their cans with like a CVS maybe, weren't they? Yeah, I saw different like little things like I had. I know I ran into it was in like outside of Milwaukee. There was this like industrial park, right? They had literally like seven small manufacturing companies. And they developed this technology where they could actually they sold their extra candidates to each other.

[00:25:24] And so like what happened was they had the technology would suck all these candidates into a database. It was after seven days. So like if a company didn't go in and say in like so they would apply to their company. And if the company tagged them to say, OK, hey, we're interested in this person. We're using them. They wouldn't get sucked into the database within seven days. If they didn't, it got sucked into this database. And another company could go, oh, yeah, I want to talk to Chris. And then they would get one dollar would get paid to the other company.

[00:25:51] And there was one of the companies, the guy said that he actually made seventy five thousand dollars in a year off of other companies basically paying a dollar for all their candidates. And so I'm like, so there is a way to make this work that everyone feels good about it, because at the end of the day, we all are sitting on these databases in our ATSs that are just for the most part dead inventory. And it's like, why aren't we figuring out how to leverage this inventory for anything?

[00:26:20] Just great candidate experience, but maybe potentially even for a little bit of money. Right. And like it's so to me, I think that's one of those, you know, things that again, this is not something I'm talking about. We're just talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Conceptually, when you start to see what where they're going with technology, it opens your mind to think about what are the possibilities of all this stuff? You know, why can't all the ATSs in the world get together and just share their candidate data afterwards? I mean, it seems like a little consortium there. It doesn't have to be.

[00:26:49] Yeah. And again, like data privacy. See, literally all you have to do is like the candidate going, heck, yeah, share my stuff. And then like and also then the company going, heck, yeah, go ahead. Like, you know, let them share it with, you know, if the candidate wants it, we want the candidate to have the best experience. Go ahead. Like, it's not that difficult to pull this off. They all think like they have this magical secret sauce is like, well, they applied to us because we're amazing. Yeah. Okay. What's that? Like three or four or half a dozen brands in the world.

[00:27:20] Come on. Calm down. Yeah. Another thing I saw that was cool was the interview fraud agent. Did you see that demo? Oh, yes. Yes. I just saw on YouTube a candidate create some kind of avatar for himself and was taking an interview. It wouldn't put his hand in front of his face? Was it that one? I forget. I'll send it to you afterwards. But yeah, so this agent can detect candidate use of LLM on calls, face match and voice match. Yeah.

[00:27:49] That's going to be a thing, I think, in the next couple of years. So I've seen a couple. I saw one recently. It might be the same one you're talking about where it was a tech candidate being interviewed by a live tech interviewer. And he could tell like there was like a filter on the candidate's face. And it was making the candidate look like a white guy. And by the voice, he was like, hey, something's not right. And he's like, hey, can you put your hand in front of your face? And the guy refused to do it. And they entered the interview. They're like,

[00:28:17] you're using something and we don't understand why you would be doing that right for this. And again, it's one thing to say, hey, I may use a TikTok filter that makes my skin look glowing, you know, whatever. And I'm more beautiful, you know. And like, even then you could argue to like, hey, that's not legitimate, right? Or whatever. But it's like, hey, I'm just going to be as pretty as possible. Who cares? I've definitely seen where the people have the multiple monitors. Yeah.

[00:28:43] And they'll have the LLM running, listening to the conversation, responding. And so then you do, like the eye contact will go up or to the side and it's reading what they should be answering. And that's this fraud detection that like all of a sudden it would come up and say, hey, this person's actually just reading from chat GPT, you know? Yeah. I ran to Matt Dern from Tenable Software. And I asked him that question. Do you have any candidates who are, you think, using AI to answer the interview questions? And he said, yes,

[00:29:14] they've seen that before where they see like a delay in the answer. And they think, at least they think anyway, that's the candidates using AI. Chris, they did. The other one they launched was the, obviously the live voice. Oh yeah. The live voice too. Yep. And I've talked about that for, I've talked about that for a number of years now because last year, I think it was Sense and TalkPush came out with the interviewers. Yep. I did demos with them on my YouTube channel. Yeah. And I thought that was, that's going to be the future for credit. Every eight of this is going

[00:29:43] to have that in five years. Yeah. It's a commodity. We see a lot of those. I've, again, I've demoed probably six, seven. They all still, and even like when they did the demo at Phenom, the person doing it's a product manager. So they know exactly the cadence it has to take. And there's still the slight, it's literally a second delay. Yeah. But it is unnatural still, right? It's not a perfect language back and forth. You like,

[00:30:11] they'll say, Hey, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? And the person will be like, Oh, for sure. Great. You know? And you're like going, Oh, it's like, didn't like, so it's still, there's a little tiny bit of latency. And I think there has to be some prompting. Like when you go to a candidate and say, Hey, by the way, would you be open to interview with a live, you know, live quote unquote, like voice agent, um, understand, right. That,

[00:30:38] you know, there's a second delay, right. Sometimes, right. As the technology is working through and processing your answer. Like, I think that would, and no one does that, but I think it would help the candidate. I think candidates will get used to it. But like when the first time I demoed, I was just thinking, okay, I'm gonna have this natural conversation. And it would kept going, Oh wait, uh, you know, and did that like that max headroom thing where it had to, it kept going, like it would kept reverting. And then that would take even more of a delay.

[00:31:06] And you were like, Oh, I'm breaking the robot right now. Stop that. Talk slower. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's, uh, yeah. Google, you know, Google came out with it like five years ago. And I said, okay, as soon as I saw that, I think every ATS is going to have it. It is a commodity though. I literally know of a CTO that, um, left a company and in 30 days propped up a voice agent for the screening, like in 30 days had a website agent ready to go. And again,

[00:31:33] I couldn't tell the difference between that one and the ones that have had $3 million in backing, right? Like there's, there's no difference between those two things. And one was done bootstrapped and one was done with a lot of money. Cause they're all using the same underlying technology to do all this stuff. Exactly. The other one that caught my interest in when it first did was it was kind of a performance management kind of agent where it would show, Oh, Hey, there's an anticipation

[00:32:02] that this screening or the sourcing agent will find 25 candidates for this job, you know, top of funnel, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it only found eight, um, something's going wrong with this, this robot, but it showed the entire workflow and it showed where the agents were and it showed where the humans were. And I looked at that and immediately go, Oh, it's, it's going to show you where your humans are not producing, where they should be producing. Like they showed it with an

[00:32:28] agent, not producing where it should be producing, but I'm like going fat chance. The agent won't produce the agents going to do exactly what it was designed to do. It's the human that's going to have a bad day or be sick or have a personal issue and their mind's not into it today or whatever. And so there's also this performance management aspect that I actually really like. I think it, again, if you're, if your goal as an employee is to be, you know, an A player and be great,

[00:32:54] well, having the right performance management in line, I think will help you, you know, from that standpoint. So it was interesting that they had that built in. And well, again, it goes back to this concept of being two years ahead. I've been literally begging ATSs to put recruiter performance management in place for a decade. And they're just like, well, Tim, like no eight, no TA leaders asked for this. And I'm like, that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.

[00:33:20] Most TA leaders fail because they lack performance management. Like let's make this happen. You know? Well, now with Phenom, they had, they showed that like a manager screen where they showed the different, you know, your crew's part of your team and they showed like, okay, this recruiter has X amount of agents set up. This guy only has one, right? So you're going to see some of that with some of this new technology, I think. That's interesting. It was cool, right? They showed like the entire tree and this one had five agents. This one's using three agents.

[00:33:49] I can see every recruiter in the audience go, oh boy, I got to, I got to get on those agents. I got to create more agents today. I know. I'm waiting for like the, you know, the organizational chart to come out where it's like, it's like Tim Sackett recruiting leader. And then it's just a hundred agents. Agent leaderboard. They had an intake agent. They did. I mean, literally like the, like they, like, again, every use case, if you could think of not every use case, but again, the 25 biggest use cases you

[00:34:17] think of from, you know, from a recruiter. And I don't know if you remember, I think John, the marketing, you know, head of marketing had said that he was kind of surprised that they didn't launch more because they, yeah, cause they had a, they had a lot of other ones that were, I think still in the sandbox, right. That they're still kind of making sure they perfect, but potentially by literally end of next quarter, you're going to maybe see that double,

[00:34:43] you know, like, and again, we've seen smart recruiters come out with some agent stuff, um, that, you know, that I don't know if they have anybody live on yet. LinkedIn at, at talent connect, they had, they called it a hiring assistant. In reality, it was an agent. It's very similar to this. Like here, the agents don't necessarily like the, there's always a human in the loop here, right? These agents aren't doing everything without you going, Hey, by the way, like, here's what I did and you know, blah, blah, blah. They're,

[00:35:11] they're coming back and working with a human. You and I both know, like, that's just kind of a test. Like that's just getting people used to this. At the end of the day, you don't really need a human to say, Oh, you know, this job just got posted. Go screen. Like we know to screen, you know? Yeah. I want to read one of these, uh, they put some scenarios in the press release. I want to read one of these for the audience. So, uh, let's see here, uh, education pre-boarding agent. So

[00:35:37] after a newly hired bus driver submits a pre-employment documentation to an education pre-boarding agent, it streamlines the complex compliance process by requesting essential documentation, including a CDL, physical examination certificate, training verifications, and background check clearances, the agent's intelligent validation system detects incorrectly combined documents and immediately notifies the driver to correct the issue and resubmit. The result is a compliant onboarding experience that meets regulatory requirements while

[00:36:06] minimizing administrative burden. So there you go. Yeah. The onboarding, the onboarding one was pretty cool because it did, you think like, well, how does an agent, like that's just an automation flow, right? Like everybody has that already. They have like on online onboarding, but this was again, like, let's say you took a picture of your, your driver's license and it was a little blurry. The agent could actually say like, Hey, this is unreadable. You have to, it's not done, you know? And it would prompt the person to come in and it would just tell them, Hey, you put a picture

[00:36:33] in, it's a little blurry. We need one that's clear, you know, before we can like move you forward. I think that's good. The other piece of it was, was this, like it's kind of, it's, I called it, I call it anti ghosting. And I said, you guys should build a ghosting agent. And they kind of did that in their onboarding agent where they said, Hey, we're going to interact with this person every single day until the day they show up. Right. So the night before, you know, this person's going to get a message, you know, from the agent that was like, Oh my gosh, we can't wait to see you, you know, tomorrow, you know,

[00:37:00] 8am start time, like don't bring lunch. You know, we're going to, you know, we're going to take you out to lunch on your first day, blah, blah, blah. And it's just like all of this stuff to kind of keep the person engaged. And I think you could easily do that and set up an agent for also for like the interview. Right. So you kind of an anti ghosting interview where you're doing some call to actions. You're, you're getting the person engaged and you're just, if they don't interact with you, all of a sudden you're like, Hey, a red flag comes up human in the loop is going to call them or text them and say, Hey, you

[00:37:28] know, are you really going to show up to this interview? If not, can we like open up this time for somebody else? Right. Like we're all, we're all adults here. Let's figure this out. I think the time has finally arrived where AI is going to solve this resume black hole for us. I mean, it's, it's, it has to, you know, it's, uh, I've been talking about resume black hole for 25 years and I'm getting tired about it, but I think AI is finally going to fix this problem for us, you know? Yeah. When my middle son got out of college and he did like, he's kind of in a retentive

[00:37:55] and he did the spreadsheet of, um, he applied to 115 jobs and had a spreadsheet for everyone. When he applied, what he heard back, like he had all the columns and literally I was going to have an agent for that. So yeah. Well, he had 15% of companies actually even responded dispositioned, right? That's it. 15%. And I would like say like 24 months from now, it'll be 100% of the time. Not only did,

[00:38:22] you know, you apply to the job, but you're going to get the screen. You might get like a, an assessment you might get, like, you're going to be in every single one of these. And then you're going to be told either you're getting an interview or sorry, you know, you're not, you didn't make the top, you know, interview candidate, you know, profile, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And here's some feedback. Um, and that should be a hundred percent like, you know, like you and I both know, you know, Kevin Grossman over at ERE and the candidate

[00:38:48] board stuff. And, you know, we saw Dave Bannister at ERE was there as well as Phenom and they're big on candidate experience. And you talk about like still how low candidate experience is. And I'm like, it just seems like I just can't imagine 24, 36 months from now that we don't have exponentially higher candidate experience based on this technology. Yeah. I think that's going to start at the enterprise level. They're going to have this technology first and then it'll trickle down into the SMBs over time. Right. It might take

[00:39:17] probably more like five years, I think, but, um, yeah, it's coming. And I think that someone's going to build like a, you know, a $99 a month agents recruiting agent software for the SMBs into the space that we just wait, it's coming. I'm sure. Cause right now this technology is expensive. It's expensive. Like, and I, you know, it's interesting because you go, if you think of like RPO world staffing world, which I'm a part of, you go, Ooh, yeah, you can't afford Phenom,

[00:39:42] right? As a staffing firm. Like, well, or I, I could, if I'm, if I'm actually done delivering this agent service to all my clients. Right. So then all of a sudden now I'm spreading this cost. Okay. So there's, there's a little bit of me that goes, shoot, is the future of like RPO and the future of staffing really just being able to leverage amazing agent technology down

[00:40:06] to this mid enterprise SMB world that now I can spread cost over. So now if I'm an SMB, I can have world-class Phenom agent technology, but I'm only paying a fraction of it for the usage I do. Right. Like, and then, and then me as a staffing firm, can I spread that over a hundred clients? I'm like, gosh, like I literally was on the plane back yesterday going, holy crap. Like maybe I can rethink my entire model. Yep. There is a new software called Converse that's

[00:40:35] specifically for staffing team. It's ConverseAI.com. I'm looking at their page right now. Do they have any price? I will. Yeah. I'll take a look at it. There's a lot, like there's already like there's, you know, we've already seen a couple of our full, fully automated agentic RPOs that have hit the market. The reality is, is they're not, they're not actually that there is a little bit of vapor and a little bit of automation and probably some agent stuff. Yeah. Um, but again, I think you're going to see the RPO world completely

[00:41:01] gravitate, staffing and RPO tend to like gravitate towards the software very quickly. Right. Cause they don't have the same regulatory, you know, legal, um, security issues as like enterprise has. And so you're going to see companies and like somebody had asked me, they're like, Hey, does, are there RPOs that use Phenom? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm sure they have somebody, right. Um, that's probably doing this. And if not, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna see this because RPO literally hires the most average recruiters in the world. And these are going

[00:41:31] to be better than average. So. Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, over time here, the cost of this is going to come down a lot. Uh, yeah, that's, and I think they said that too, right. They've been, they've been seeing like that, that costs have been dropping pretty much, pretty exponentially. Yeah. Cool. All right, Tim, I think we, I think we covered it all, man. Yeah. Good to see you. Yeah. Same here. Am I going to see you? Where am I seeing you next? Unleash? I'll be at Unleash. Yeah. That's awesome. I'll see you there. Are you going to, uh, Shannon's

[00:41:58] thing down in Dallas? I will be at the hoedown. I don't know if I get it. If I get, I still have to decide if I'm buying like a hat and some boots and stuff. I don't know. Yeah. I'm not a, I'm not a cowboy. So I'm a Yankee, Connecticut Yankee. So I gotcha. Hey, great talking with you. Rec Tech Media, uh, HR famous, the crossover pod. I finally made it. HR famous. You made it.

[00:42:26] I'm in the club. So for all my audience, if you haven't checked out Chris, Chris, where can they find you? Uh, right. Tech media.com hit me up. Yeah. And he literally, I mean, if it's not on a daily basis, it's, you know, it's a, someone that for sure on a weekly basis, you have to see all the content he puts out because there's nobody in our space. That's letting you know the latest and greatest of what's happening in the world of recruiting technology. Thank you, Tim. I appreciate that. Yeah. My job is to inform the minor recruiter and

[00:42:53] I've been doing that for the last eight years now. So yeah, stay tuned. Thank you.