EP124 | Agentic AI Is Changing Recruiting - And Steven Jiang’s Leading the Charge

[00:00:15] Hey everybody, it's Tim Sackett. I'm back with another edition of the HR Famous, the world's most famous HR podcast. And I'm lucky enough today to have a great guest, a friend of mine, also the CEO, co-founder of HireEasy, Steven Yang. Steven, how are you doing? Good. And thank you for having me for this famous and most famous podcast for HR.

[00:00:42] So Steven, you had a big announcement, big kickoff. We had a hoedown down in Dallas, Texas with HireEasy crew. And there's been so much kind of energy around all of the agentic AI stuff across the industry, but you guys launched your own. Give me the basics of what's the story? What did you guys launch? Sure, sure. Oh, by the way, Tim, you enjoyed the hoedown? Oh yeah. Great. By the way, the food was amazing.

[00:01:13] Brandon Jeffs brought me boots and I put on cowboy boots for the first time since I was a kid. And then I had to have two grown men take them off me because I couldn't get them off myself. That was so hilarious. Okay. So you should visit us more often. Okay. I know. Yeah. And we, we should have more fun. Okay. So back to your question. And we released our agentic AI product. We call easy agent.

[00:01:44] Okay. Yeah. Easy agent. It's the easy agent. Yeah. Easy. Yeah. So it's, it's way better than the typical, the human name and people give. Okay. So I also, uh, I, I, I just fear the too many names in the market. Okay. So, and we believe we have the best name. Yeah. Easy, easy. Okay. So everybody loves easy. So that easy agent, this is, this is the product we have been building for a long time.

[00:02:13] Um, and the second half of a 2023, uh, we started to build the, at that time it didn't, that, there was no such popular turn call agentic, uh, okay. So, and then we, we say, Hey, we need to build something, uh, semi, uh, autonomous and being a companion to, uh, recruiters.

[00:02:40] And the partially, uh, the idea was, uh, also, uh, influenced by, uh, our investor and, uh, uh, zoom's a co-founder and CEO. Hey, so he, uh, he's a company all in the AI and also the, uh, AI companion. And I say, yeah, we should also start to build something all in the generative AI and to create something to empower recruiters.

[00:03:05] Okay. So, and we started to build and we had a fan pivot, fan pivot. And then we got it to the right format. In my opinion, this is the right format. Why? And, uh, I had the strong gut feeling. And if we design as the right hand to recruiters and put it always on the right, right side of the screen and do a lot of, uh, great work for recruiters.

[00:03:31] Like there's a lot of philosophy behind how you designed what you designed, even to the, like, you know, right hand of the recruiter, it's on the right hand side, like all the things that it can do. And so there is this kind of like this natural, because we've heard so much about co-pilots. Yeah. And then we've heard so much about agents. Yeah. What's the real, so for the audience that's still learning AI, what's the real difference between a co-pilot and an agent? Great, great question.

[00:03:58] Many people, uh, they have their own understanding, but I, I will share with you, uh, about my own understanding. Okay. So yeah, the agent compared to, uh, the typical chatbot or the co-pilot, it has a two fundamental difference. Okay. Number one, it use tools. Okay.

[00:04:23] It use tools and the semi autonomous nature will make the intelligent system. And to call a lot of the tools, tools means like the typical databases and the APIs and even other third party applications. Okay. Just like a human can use tools.

[00:04:48] And second fundamental differentiation is that the multi-step planning, reasoning and execution. And this is also very fundamental. So, uh, in the market and you see, uh, uh, a lot of, uh, HR tech vendors and they, they say they release the agent, but then you simply see they embed the generative AIs, uh, into those functions. So a good example of that would be, and you guys even have some of this generative capability

[00:05:18] in HireEasy as well, but it was, it's like when we say somebody goes, Oh, um, here's a generative co-pilot to help you write a job description. That's not really an agent. It's just a generative large language model helping you write something better. Right. You are right. Yeah. Right. And that's a very concise example. Yeah. But, but, but if we, uh, so actually we also, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, easy agent is able to create a digital job, but then we call it the agentic experience.

[00:05:46] The agentic experience is where do the multi-step planning and say, okay, based on your company's, uh, historical, uh, job descriptions and similar jobs. And then also based on the recruiting set performance. And also, uh, we, uh, look around the whole open web and hey, this will be the best job description we should create. Yeah. And those reasoning with behind the scene and also create the transparent information.

[00:06:15] You see the log and you say, wow, what a, it's a very, uh, comprehensive and also smart. The log is also really important because when we take a look at like big enterprises using AI, they get scared because of the legal aspects. Where is it coming with this answer? How did it come up with this? Right. And giving them or giving them access, especially the recruiting teams and legal teams. Hey, this is exactly how it came up with this decision. It makes it legally defensible, right? It's, it's all right there out in the open.

[00:06:44] There's no black box. Um, I think that's really important to have that. Actually completely agree with what you just said. And from the technology's point of view, I think about the agentic AI is the, in my opinion, it's the best and most practical format for enterprise software and enterprise environment to adopt, deploy the generative AI technology. Yeah.

[00:07:12] We had this conversation in Dallas at the hoedown. The, the, what I love about the easy agent, you know, in the genic AI that you guys are being built is this concept of so often candidates believe when they, when they apply to a job for a company, it's a black hole, you know, like, and we see this, you guys see this, the, the data shows us that we have double the number of candidates applying to jobs than we did a year ago, two years ago.

[00:07:38] And yet the vast majority of candidates still believe they fought, they fall into this black hole. And when you use a genic, you, you actually give a hundred percent of your candidates the ability to go through the process, to become part of the process, to, to get, at least get themselves up to the plate to have an at bat, right? Yeah. Versus how we traditionally do it. And so to me, that's the power of this and saying, if you really care about being inclusive,

[00:08:05] if you care about getting a tremendous candidate experience, you almost have to use a genic AI. You must have to use an easy agent to do that. No, no argument for me. I, I, I, this is a, the right technology has a, the natural adoption and also the natural, uh, experience improvements for all of parties involved. Yes. Yeah. Spot on. So I have a question.

[00:08:35] So HireEasy, obviously you jumped in, um, has put a lot of work into, you know, getting the easy agent, you know, ready to launch. What do we, but everyone knows HireEasy is for those who've been around and not, you know, when you first, when it was just you and a couple other people had HireTool, which I actually still like HireTool as a name, but, but we know Shannon came on and she's amazing. For those who don't know, um, Steven's CMO is Shannon Pritchett of SourceCon fame.

[00:09:05] And she's kind of her own famous self. And so HireEasy was launched and we thought, okay, there's this great sourcing product. You guys are no longer, I mean, you're still a great sourcing product, but you're no longer a sourcing product. Like, what do you call yourself now? Because, and not just because of the eugenic, you have CRM capabilities, you have ATS capability, like you, you have everything there. What, so what do you, what do you call yourself?

[00:09:33] So we call all in one recruiting platform in agent mode. Yes. Right. All in one recruiting platform in agent mode. Simple enough. Yes. And it's all in one. Then let me explain a little bit why, why we, uh, we, we, we go so further, so much further than the sourcing. Yeah.

[00:09:57] And, uh, how true, how easy, and, uh, we are very technology driven and risk taking. So, and we work with, uh, recruiters a lot. And you, you, you know that, and, and a lot of, uh, great, great experience of working with, uh, community members. So, the more we work with our users, our customers, and we realize as a technology advances, naturally

[00:10:25] people will expect more things from the same vendor. Because the technology will drive people to have this, uh, aggressive and very high expectation that, uh, the product should streamline the process much, much more. Especially the generative AI now breaks, broke all the boundaries, right?

[00:10:52] And you, uh, put the agent, uh, on the right side, the agent naturally will take care of a lot of tedious work. And then the recruiters, they don't want to switch to a lot of platform to do many other things, right? And all, all those are frictions will, uh, impact the day of productivity. And then it was, Hey agent, can you do this? Can you do that? Right? And then a long list that we look at them. Oh, okay.

[00:11:18] So something in sourcing, something in posting, something in CM, something in ATS. Then we say, okay, that's unified return. All will be in agentic experience. That's why we say agentic CM, agentic sourcing, agentic outreach, agentic ATS. So yeah, it makes it easy when we think about if I'm a head of TA, right? At a company right now.

[00:11:43] And I'm being told my executive team, like, Hey, we have to really dig into this AI piece. We have to get our foot, you know, we got to start dipping our toes in. We got to go and do this. What should they expect? So they go out, they say, Hey, we, we decide easy agents, the one for us. Give us a picture of how the job changes for them using easy agent. I can describe my version of their day to day.

[00:12:11] And you can also like close your eyes and to imagine. I also to hear your version. So yes, let's say tomorrow's morning when they get to the desk and they access to high easy, the agent will auto pop up on the right side and to understand what had happened in that specific job that that project, what had happened in the past weeks, months, and the surprise.

[00:12:39] Or maybe the, just the, that the past evening, the past 12 hours since I was back at my desk. Right? Yes. Yeah. I understand the contextual environment of that job and they suggested action. Then recruiters click on one of the action and the agent will start to do the work. And also on the left side, recruiters still see the left side is the typical, the traditional sauce. UI, UI. Yeah.

[00:13:09] They still see the result and they can click here and there. But then anytime they say, okay, now this is the, uh, strategic move I want to have. And then they tell agent do this for me. So for example, I want to tune my search and type tune the search. The agent said, okay, I got it. Now let me think about it. So start to think, right?

[00:13:35] Aging is thinking and then reasoning and create the multi-steps executions. And every step we go out to create probably tens of searches and then compare what will be the best. And so do all the steps, right? And very thoroughly. And then say, hey, this is the, my best suggestion. Do you agree?

[00:14:03] It, it, because that type of work, right? For the screening, scheduling every, every task process, because there's a very people-centric AI first, that type of a new recruiting model. Yeah. I feel like we, you know, we've talked about this and you and I have had these conversations over years that people struggle to have high adoption with a, with a traditional sourcing product. Mm-hmm.

[00:14:33] Because when they first get it, they see it, they're like, oh my gosh, this is like having LinkedIn, but I get, I get all the contact information. This is amazing. And then they realize, oh, but none of these people know who I am and what my job is. I, it's all cold outreach, right? So it's the strength and the challenge. And now you have an agent helping you saying, okay, here's the job, here's the search, here's the people, here's the actual nurture campaign that you should send out, right?

[00:15:00] And it allows us as recruiters to really go out and let candidates feel like they're wanted, like they're desired by us, right? That's the superpower that we have as recruiters is we now at scale can go out and say, I have 10 jobs or I have 25 jobs at the same time. And all of these candidates are feeling wanted and desired because we're able to put this entire robust plan together to go after them, right?

[00:15:29] And thus, like I always, then the question for me is always, okay, well then what's the role of, if the agent's doing this stuff, what's the role of me as a recruiter? That's a great question.

[00:15:40] And I always think, so I'll give you mine and then you tell me if I'm off base, but for me, the role of the recruiter then in the future is to do what our executives think we're already doing, which is we're actually going out and hunting for the best talent in the marketplace and then nurturing that talent. So like, if I call you Steven one time, I'm a recruiter, you have no idea who I am. Steven, I have this COO position working for this SaaS company. Would you be interested?

[00:16:09] And you'd be like, no, I'm a CEO, bye. But then I start having more calls with you and over a year's worth of time, you're like, now I come to you with a position where it says, hey, I actually have a CEO position of a $2 billion SaaS company, blah, blah, blah. You might go, oh, I'm interested. I want to talk because we've built this relationship and trust over time. I keep coming to you. We keep learning each other. Right now, recruiters don't really do that.

[00:16:39] Everything's very transactional, very fast. And we don't have time to go out to an engineer or to a software person or to an accountant, to a nurse and go, hey, I want you to come work for us. But I'm willing to take the time to show you how much I really want you.

[00:16:58] And it might be 30 days from now, it might be six months from now, but I'm going to build this relationship so that I'm consistently working to bring the best talent in because I have my agents doing the day-to-day tasking stuff of just running the machine so I can think about higher level things. I'm going to develop an interview process that makes you feel like a superstar when you come to interview with us, right? Where I know my hiring managers know you.

[00:17:26] I know what your favorite drink is, and it's going to be sitting on the conference room table waiting for you. I'm going to develop this white glove service. But I can't do that now because I don't have capacity. But once I have an agent, I can really go higher level around a lot of things. Is this your philosophy? Absolutely, but not as great as you said. Okay. I'm very good at stealing your ideas. Okay.

[00:17:52] So, from what you said, see, in my mind and the picture, the recruiters' personal branding will be significantly improved or say reviewed by these other tools. And think about this. Recruiters, suppose you should be the tenant strategists. Yes.

[00:18:23] I love that. Yeah. But because of it, so many daily routine and also broken processes, and that dragged recruiters' time into this tool, that tool, this process, that process. Oh, yeah. They forgot about, oh, I'm doing people's business. Yes. Hey, this is William Tencup, and I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Practitioner Corner Podcast.

[00:18:51] It's a wonderful podcast about the journey, the paths of how practitioners, both HR and TA, kind of go from high school, college, all the way to where they are right now. Some of the things that they've learned, how they've been successful, people that thrive around them, et cetera. It's a fun podcast. You'll love it. You'll learn from it. Subscribe to it. Thanks. You make a great point. I love the talent strategist title because we've called people like talent advisors for years, but it's just a title.

[00:19:21] They didn't change the job. The job was still very tasky. It was still posting jobs, screening candidates, setting up interviews, putting data into ATSs, blah, blah, blah. It was all kind of just tasky work, right? And the talent strategist for me, and I actually talked to a head of TA last week, and they were like, we're going to use, we're using some agentic AI. We know it's going to give us capacity.

[00:19:46] And what we're going to do is we're going to move some recruiters into this role of like this talent strategist role. They had a different title for it, but it's basically what you're saying, where they're going to be embedded in the teams they support to understand what talent do we actually need to increase? How do we help the hiring manager develop the talent? Like that's, it's one of the things that we've been beating our heads against the wall forever in HR and TA is like, these managers don't know how to develop talent.

[00:20:14] Well, yes, because you hired the best accountant and made them a manager and they're a great accountant, but they're not a great leader of people. But what if we gave you a really great talent strategist to help you develop your team, to get better performance, to actually increase the talent of your team systematically? Because we had this other resource in terms of like an easy agent doing all this other tasky work that we no longer have to do.

[00:20:43] Like, I think that's the question, like people like you and I have to answer is the future of recruitment. When you layer in a genetic AI, it opens up an entire new world that we can create, which I think is really exciting. Absolutely. Absolutely. So think about today, a lot of misleading information.

[00:21:07] And when people see, when people saw the, some people, they saw the agent AI, HiAZ is a product. Wow. It's so powerful. And their first reaction was, oh, is this going to replace my job? The worst case is that the manager or the VP of HR, when they see it, oh, I can get rid of it. A lot of recruiters.

[00:21:37] Those are very bad ideas. Bad ideas. Every time we have this technological advantage, right? Like through history, there's always going to be that part. There's always going to be a CFO that says, oh, I can save some money over here. Or we have the ability as leaders to go, what if we actually could increase performance, could increase talent?

[00:21:59] We could be competitively better than our competition because we let tech do this over here, but then we did all this new stuff over here. I think that's where, as we start to layer in AI, we have to also be layering in this future of what we're going to do and be ready to do it and start doing it and testing how we do it. And I think that's the strength. And I think you're going to have some companies that take a really short-term view and they're going to cut some heads.

[00:22:27] And then later on, they're going to see some other company beating their butt, going, what are they doing differently? And it's like, hey, they actually used this capacity to actually make sure their people were highly engaged and they had low turnover. And these people were getting the most out of the talent that they had, blah, blah, blah. I still go back to the fact of I could go talk to 100 CEOs and ask them how talent comes into their company and almost 0% know exactly how that happens.

[00:22:57] Oh, I know. But they think, yeah, but they think they have recruiters with sniper rifles out there looking for the top talent and they're only going after top talent. And that's not what's happening. And so, like, we could actually deliver on that. We could deliver on that what they think is happening. We could actually go, okay, we actually are going to go hunt. We're going to go hunt the best talent. We're going to find out who the best talent is. And then we're going to make them fall in love with us and want to come to work for us.

[00:23:25] And that's a completely different talent acquisition than we have today. Agree. And the future talent acquisition, and this is also the mission we shared in a group conversation. And we need to bring a future talent acquisition. And the future talent acquisition, the big part of it is to empower the future ready talent acquisition professionals, those recruiters.

[00:23:55] Make them better first. Before we say, oh, yeah, replace them. No, make them better first. And the businesses need their authentic, confident, strategic recruiters to bring in the future employees. Otherwise, how can you say, oh, help me find the best, best talent to build my great business.

[00:24:24] But then how the smartest people outside the organization will trust the people that you don't want to invest. It's very logically self-conflicting, but it's happening every day in every business. That's ridiculous. Let's make things have changed. Yeah. So for those who don't know, like Stephen and I have known each other for a long time. One of the things I love about you as just a person, Stephen, is you have this giant heart.

[00:24:53] You really care about people first and foremost. And so when you design technology and you're building these products, you really take to heart, like how is this truly going to help the individual be better? Right. And so I know that's a big philosophy around how you build. And so and I saw that like in the product, like in how you guys are building this out. So it's going to be interesting. So I think everybody, you know that the industry is going to copy. The industry is going to everyone's going to build their agent. Everyone's going to do different things.

[00:25:23] And at the end of the day, you know, people are going to decide what they like best, like they do with anything. Yeah. I want to get like out of recruiting for a minute and go, if you think about eugenic AI, you know probably more than a lot of people what the capabilities are. What do you think is the first agent you'll have outside of your professional life? So think of your personal life. Because I know you're a father, husband. Think about what is an agent that you want that you don't have now for your personal life.

[00:25:52] Or maybe you have one. I don't know. I have one. I have two. Okay. My wife has one for shopping experience. Okay. Right. And logical. Right. I do want that. I want an agent that is like knows every single like piece of like food and drink I have in my house. That can just so I can just go like, hey, I'm hungry. Like, what do we have? And it will actually give me not like a list of food, but it'll say, oh, you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You could do whatever.

[00:26:21] Like, well, Tim, what are you hungry for? It's like pizza. You're like, too bad. You don't have pizza. Pho? Okay. Yeah. You have that. Let's go figure that out. You know. That's a good one. Yeah. I give you the one that I truly appreciate and that helps me a lot. And so you, after I tell you, you will say, aha. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I created one and for my son's education. Yeah. And my son's a teacher.

[00:26:50] She's phenomenal. Okay. Very kind. Very cares about my son. And so one afternoon we received, my wife and I received the email. Hey, you need to enhance the pronunciation for author. And they gave the example. Yeah. English is my third language. Yeah. Pronunciation. That must be misled by me. Okay. I have the root cause.

[00:27:19] And then they sent me the information to correct that root cause. Okay. So. Yeah. And we use the agent to do the pronunciation and reading and something that way better than me. Okay. So that empowers me. Yeah. That gave me the confidence. Now, did you give your agent like a Texan accent? So Arthur's going to have a Texan accent? He's going to sound Southern. Very professional. Very, yeah.

[00:27:48] Very middle of the American Midwestern, you know, accent. So. So. And for the Texan style. And I don't worry about that. He starts to be exactly in that way already. So. Oh, yeah. I'm sure. Just from school. Just like the slang language. Yeah. That's amazing. So. When is the agent live? When does it go live? When can people actually come and see what you have? It's live.

[00:28:15] And we are busy with onboarding customers. And we also want to be honest and transparent. And we want to onboard group by group. And we don't want to, like, saturate the backend infrastructure. So. Yeah. And every week, we brought tens of our customers. And so step by step. So if our customers are in the audience and they didn't hear us,

[00:28:44] if they didn't get the account enabled, right? And it will be just several weeks apart. Okay. So. And we are working very hard to bring people on board. And we also need to tell them, hey, this is how it works. Right? Yeah. And the part is that the implementation and deployment is trivial because it's embedded, integrated into their existing workflow already. Yeah.

[00:29:12] Here's the thing, too, I think that people will learn. They don't really understand now is when you start using an agent, it actually is a constant learning engine. It's learning what you like, what you do, all these things. Right? And the more you use it, the more it's going to learn, the better, more precise it's going to be for you, for you specifically as a recruiter for your company. And I think it becomes really sticky then. Like you're going to start, because people are going to start working with these agents over years

[00:29:41] and they're not going to want that agent. They're not going to want to leave that agent. They'll be like, look, this thing knows me inside now. It knows like what I'm asking for. It understands. It responds faster because of that. That's unique, I think, to any, because we haven't ever had technology like that, that would like kind of learn who we were and what we wanted kind of thing. It's a huge space for us to imagine for the future. And today we are on the business side. But don't forget about the other side,

[00:30:11] the candidate side, the job side. And in this generative AI is a new era. We, down the road, you and I will see the new marketplace, probably even bigger than LinkedIn. And that's the, that's the world we want to see. And how does a generative AI benefit the consumers, okay, the job seekers? We will see.

[00:30:39] Well, and I think like in a multi-agent environment as well, like, again, that's one thing that I get really excited about is like, because you can imagine all of your, like, higher easy clients who are using this. And maybe company A is, you know, the agents, like, you know, sourcing and they're screening this, you know, candidate and they're like, pretty good. But, you know, for client B, this person would be perfect. You know, let me talk to that agent over there. And people are like, wait a minute, that's my candidate. My agent found it, blah, blah, blah. But like,

[00:31:08] if we start to come up with this ecosystem of, of abundance and say, Hey, we're all working together as in this ecosystem and we're finding great talent. Let's start sharing this across. Yeah. Like there's some, there can be, again, I'm not saying that this is what it does now. I'm just saying, as you start to open up and brainstorm, like what could be like, holy crap. Like we could, you could really make, like, it can be super powerful in terms of being able to share talent back and forth, help other companies. Right.

[00:31:37] We sit on so much inventory of candidates now that we never use, that it's just a waste. It's a waste for everybody. It's a waste for us. It's a waste for the candidate. I love the ability of agents giving every single candidate, like actual feedback. Like, Hey, you know what? Here's what we actually liked. Here's what we thought you matched in the job really well, but also here's where you didn't match. And maybe here's some links, right? To some training or whatever that could, would help you in the future. Like there's so many things we could deliver to candidates that we just don't do now.

[00:32:07] Yeah. And I can summarize what you said in this way to see if, correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah. AI not only improve the existing recruiting process efficiency, but also redefines what an individual recruiter can do. Oh yeah. Completely redefines what they can do. And even in the future, right? The, the,

[00:32:37] the, the, the, the agents word, a, I, I, I think it's a happening. And because of the vendors, like open AI and throw big, and they start to create the protocol and they created a framework to create, to, to develop an agent for other, for third party application vendors. In the meantime, they also define protocol and they solve a lot of fundamental, uh, uh, problems behind. So, and also including those, uh, short memory issue of,

[00:33:07] of, uh, of, uh, a large language model. So we will see a, a lot of exciting things. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see, like, as we start to get more use cases and really start to hear from your clients and how they're using this, like to me, that's the exciting stuff. So I can't wait for you. I know. And you guys are, are very open to sharing that with the community. So, um, so take a look. If you haven't seen the hire easy, easy agent, um, you can go to their site, you can go and you can get a demo, um, and take a look at it.

[00:33:37] There's all kinds of like examples and videos and stuff like that. Steven, thank you so much for joining me today. If you, if you're not connected with Steven, they can find you on LinkedIn. Yes. You're very, you're, you're one of the more accessible CEOs in our space. I mean, not that you're not, you're busy, but you're, you're, you'll interact with everybody. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Very grateful. I'm very honored to be here. Um, and also anyone wants to reach out to me.

[00:34:06] I'm finding me connect with me. Ding. Thank you. Thank you. And, and, everybody check them out. Hire easy big announcement. This will last week at the, when this comes out, it'll be last week. So check them out and check out the agentic AI features that they have. It's pretty amazing. We'll try better next time. It's HR famous. Another episodes in the books. We are out. We are out. We are out. We are out.