How does AI impact recruiters?

[00:00:12] Welcome to Episode 92 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. I am Stephen Rothberg, one of your co-hosts. My other regular co-host, Peter Zulman, is unavailable to be with us today. So we're going to do a one-on-one. Fortunately, my guest today is somebody I have known since I think we weren't quite still in high school, but it's been a couple decades.

[00:00:40] Terry Baker with Daxter Technologies is definitely one of the leaders, the pioneers in our space. He has seen that, done that, and now we're going to talk about what is coming next. Terry, it is awesome to see you. Stephen, so good to be back with you today, and I'm excited to share about what is happening with AI and recruiting.

[00:01:04] So, Terry, for the people who are not familiar with Daxter, give us the elevator pitch. What is it? What do you do? Where is it going? What are some confidential information that we could use to make a lot of money at the expense of other people? Maybe go to jail, maybe not.

[00:01:23] Okay. One of our mantras is humanized hiring through the use of AI and automation. And there's a ton of fear by recruiters with the impact of AI and the speed at which AI is coming to market.

[00:01:40] And so, our goal is to alleviate that fear and to make recruiters know that AI is being utilized to make their jobs easier and to help them focus on what they do best. What I think recruiters do best, most of the recruiters I've worked with are the best salespeople in the world.

[00:02:00] They have the ability to qualify candidates, to sell those candidates to hiring managers, and sell candidates on the opportunity that they have. Those will not be replaced by AI in the long term. But the manual tasks, the manual tasks, the skilling, scoring, ranking of candidates, the engagement with candidates, all of that can be automated and can be done so with AI.

[00:02:28] And that's what Daxter has been doing for 22 years now. And we add value to ATSs. So, we come alongside ATSs and we provide the ability to automatically search on candidates within the database, enable that search to go to job boards, and automate the process of acquiring candidates.

[00:02:51] One of the problems that we see within the recruiter community is 70% of candidates that come from either corporate career sites or through job board access never get into the ATS. And so, our goal is to, from a data integrity standpoint, to make sure that happens.

[00:03:14] We can even extract, you know, candidate information out of recruiters' email boxes and get it into the ATS. And that makes it more productive going forward because if you've built a high volume of candidates in the ATS, running a semantic search across that and being able to see relative to the job position you're trying to recruit for, who is the best candidate in the database?

[00:03:42] And who is the best candidate that's coming from job boards? That's what we do. And we do it with semantic search. And then, once you have the most qualified candidate, the next step is engagement. And we enable that engagement. We acquired a product last year called Pivot CX. It's now become Daxter Engage.

[00:04:05] And, you know, recruiters and candidates that are highly qualified, they don't want to go through a chatbot session. They want to talk to a human. They want to understand, if I'm qualified for this job, I want to understand what's the culture like at your company.

[00:04:22] What, you know, things that typically chatbots and even AI-assisted agents don't do a whole job of, you know, making sure people understand what the value is with this job opportunity. Recruiters do that better than anybody. So, we enable that engagement.

[00:04:44] We work through WhatsApp, SMS, and we ensure we capture all that data, conversational data, and we put it into the ATS. Interesting. So, I want to unpack a couple things that you said, but leave most of our time to talk about, you know, the subject at hand. Like, what's AI going to do to the recruiting industry and their work to job boards, you know, which is really the focus.

[00:05:08] So, one thing that you said was that 70% of the candidates from job boards, the corporate career site, that they don't get into the ATS. Yeah. Is that because, and I'm just going to use like LinkedIn as an example. So, if the candidate goes to LinkedIn and sees the job posting and applies, that application is being delivered, at least in some cases, to the recruiter via email or through the LinkedIn interface and therefore not in the ATS.

[00:05:36] Is that that 70% you're talking about? Yeah, that and combined with actually automated search of the job boards, right? Okay. There's proactive search and there's reactive candidate applies. Okay. So, when the recruiter may be doing, they have their sourcing hat on. Exactly. And they're out, they're searching LinkedIn, they're searching Indeed, whatever, and they find Cindy and she's a great fit and they message her.

[00:06:05] However, all of that takes place outside of the ATS. Yes. Cool. The demo that I had, and I think it was with David Bernstein after PivotCX was acquired by Daxtra, showed me the Daxtra interface. And my word's not yours or his, but it was kind of like an all-encompassing single platform.

[00:06:29] So, you could log into Daxtra, you could search the ATS, you could manage the candidates, as well as the two or five or ten or whatever job board contracts you had, whether those were with postings or whether that was with resume CV searching. For those who haven't seen like kind of behind the firewall, is that a fair description? That's an accurate description. Yeah. And we do this at scale.

[00:06:54] So, recruiters, they want to see, you know, they don't want to just converse with one or two people. They want the large aggregate amount of data that can come into the ATS and then sift, score, and manage those candidates relative to the job post. Hey, everybody. I'm Lori Rudiman. What are you doing? Working? Nah. You're listening to a podcast about work, and that barely counts. So, while you're at it, check out my show, Punk Rock HR, now on the Work Defined Network.

[00:07:25] We chat with smart people about work, power, politics, and money. Are we succeeding? Are we fixing work? Probably not. Work still sucks. But tune in for some fun, a little nonsense, and a fresh take on how to fix work once and for all. So, let's turn to AI because the other thing that you said that I thought was really interesting, and I think you and I have talked about this before. I've certainly talked about it also with others is, you know, will AI put recruiters out of work?

[00:07:52] And I think your opinion, and I've come to believe this also, is some. I think it's inevitable. Like, people who don't embrace technology are probably going to be the first to suffer from it. A lot of the functions, scheduling meetings, you know, sending thanks but no thanks letters.

[00:08:13] I mean, a lot of that grunt work, which no recruiter becomes a recruiter to do any of that, that work is going to be automated. Yeah. I thought what you said earlier, too, was really interesting that recruiters are some of the best salespeople you've ever met. One thing that the job board people, maybe you can speak to this, I think virtually every job board is a double-sided marketplace, right? We have to balance the interest of the candidate with that of the employer. Yeah. And I think recruiters do very much the same thing.

[00:08:43] Whether it's a third-party and agency recruiter or whether it's a corporate in-house recruiter, they have to balance the interest of the candidate, make it work for them, as well as the hiring manager, make it work for them also. I think that's what you were getting at when you talked about recruiters being really great salespeople. Yes. And, you know, there's automation, which you mentioned, which is solving, you know, manual tasks, but that's not truly utilizing AI.

[00:09:11] What AI is being used for is candidate screening and skill assessment, being able to take the job posting, take a resume, parse it, understand what components of the resume correlate to the requirements of the job description. Then you can match and provide selection of candidates through AI without introducing bias, right? Just based upon what's in the resume, what's in the job description.

[00:09:39] And then a third component, which is really beginning to be utilized much more successfully today is what I call internal mobility or redeployment. Yeah. A lot of talent acquisition recruiters don't have access to the human capital management system.

[00:09:58] They have access to the ATS and they're sourcing candidates for recruiting, but there are within large organizations, there are a lot of employees that are looking to upscale, looking to improve their mobility within the organization. That might actually be quicker, faster, better, higher based upon just a small skills gap between what they currently do today and what the job position requires.

[00:10:25] And that is, I think, a big capability to bring that skill gap assessment for existing employees into the equation for talent acquisition recruiters so they don't have to go external to hire great qualified candidates. Yeah. You know, they know the culture, they're already working within the organization. Why not give them some internal mobility?

[00:10:50] And the risk of that hire, if you can define it that way, that the person in the new role is going to be way less than bringing in an outsider, right? Their manager and therefore their new manager is going to know the good, the bad, and the ugly. Like, Terry's awesome at X, Y, and Z. But if we want Terry to shine, let's not have him do A, B, and C. And I suspect that there have been managers that you've had in the past who have said that.

[00:11:19] It certainly happened with me. So for job boards, let's talk about if AI is going to have this kind of impact on recruiters, on the talent acquisition function. For most job boards, that's where most of our revenues come from. What happens to the job board in that equation?

[00:11:40] Do you think that AI is going to essentially bypass where the employer is almost like ChatGPT is kind of bypassing a lot of content sites? And so now you just sort of read what you want to know on ChatGPT. Why do you think not? Well, there's two kinds of hiring, right? And for high-volume hiring with high-complexity candidates, it's a different scenario than high-volume hiring, low-quality candidates.

[00:12:08] If you're hiring for hospitality or warehouse workers, you know, the volume is high. Yes. But the complexity is low. Yes. There's only three qualification questions you need for an Amazon delivery driver or warehouse worker. Can you lift 50 pounds? You're available at this time. Are you willing to take 20 bucks an hour, whatever it is? If yes, you start tomorrow. Right.

[00:12:31] But if you're a software developer, if you're in the healthcare industry with certifications, then it requires some additional work that I think tools like AI can help not only source those candidates from job boards and aggregate job boards with a single search.

[00:12:50] So if I'm searching my ATS and I'm using semantic search and I'm qualifying those candidates, I can use that same semantic search against job boards that I have against LinkedIn or other sources. And pull those candidates in and grade score and rank them. At some point, if people do this right, it does reduce the number of job boards they need access to because they're going to build their own database. Okay.

[00:13:18] You know, if you're doing high-volume hiring for travel nurses, there's only so many travel nurses in North America. And if you're going to access them from job boards and get them into the database, your ATS, you're going to own that candidate over time. And you're not going to have to go to the job board again for every new job description that you maybe have.

[00:13:44] So big companies, I think, are building value into their ATS, aggregating that data, and it does reduce the expense that they have on third-party job boards. Cool. We only have about half a minute left. Quick question. Bullish, not bullish on the job board industry? How's that for an open-ended, somewhat loaded question? That is a tough question.

[00:14:13] Dexter works with a lot of job boards. And we value the relationship and partnership with job boards because there are some very niche-specific job boards that, you know, you have to go to beyond the LinkedIn to find the quality of candidate that you need. So those aren't going to go away.

[00:14:30] But one of the things I haven't viewed as positive is the centralization of the job board business around two or three major sites, like an Indeed and a LinkedIn, who today represent 70% of the total spend. I don't think that's a good thing.

[00:14:55] And so I think recruiters who depend on one or two job boards, like in LinkedIn and in Indeed are missing some of the candidates that we can automatically acquire through automated process. And so I think the broader your reach, the better your reach. And so the concentration in the job board industry, I don't think is a good thing for recruiters. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it kind of goes back to the same old thing.

[00:15:23] It's like you've got to add value. And if all you're doing is just sort of repurposing the same candidates, the same jobs, then at the end of the day, there's not nearly as much value as if you have unique candidates, unique jobs. And the more of that you have, it sounds to me like that's Terry Baker's recipe for building a moat to protecting your business. Well, Terry, awesome.

[00:15:50] This has been fun as always and informative. And I really appreciate your time. Well, it's great to catch up with you. And thank you for the good questions. And let's go solve AI and humanize hiring for recruiters. Hear, hear. Couldn't say it better myself. Cheers, my friend. Take care. Thanks.