Technology is evolving quickly, and advances in AI are likely to change Talent Acquisition forever. If you are a regular listener to this podcast, you will know that I firmly believe there is an opportunity here to make recruiting better for everyone, with the potential for AI to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and experience exponentially. I call this Recruiting Nirvana. However, other less favorable future scenarios still exist, and there is only a short window of time for TA's future to be in its own hands.
It is critical; then, that TA Leaders keep up to date with the art of the possible when it comes to AI and technology and have a clear vision of the future, they are moving towards.
At the recent HR Technology Conference, I sat down with six practitioners and analysts to find out what they thought the biggest challenges are in TA at the moment, which of the current use cases of AI they feel are most valuable, and, most importantly, what their own vision of Recruiting Nirvana looks like.
In this episode, you will hear from:
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Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer at Cieolo Talent
A huge thank you to Gem for hosting me at their booth at HR Tech so that I could have these conversations.
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Support for this podcast comes from Gem. Gem is the AI-powered recruiting platform that TA teams love. It helps you maximize productivity, hire faster and save money. All while giving recruiters a solution that they find easy to use. Use Gem as your all-in-one recruiting platform. Or, enhance your ATS with integrated products for CRM, sourcing, scheduling, analytics, career sites, events and more. Over a thousand companies, from start-ups to industry leaders like Airbnb, Wayfair, Syntass, Carmax, DoorDash and Zillow, Trust Gem, to hire with speed and ease. CYGEM is the recruiting industry's most beloved solution with a 4.8 out of 5 rating on G2 by going to gem.com. That's gem.com. Hi there! Welcome to Episode 645, a recruiting future with me, Matt Alder. Technology is evolving quickly. Advances in AI are likely to change talent acquisition forever. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I firmly believe there's an opportunity here to make recruiting better for everyone, with the potential for AI to increase effectiveness, efficiency and experience exponentially. I call this recruiting Nirvana. However, other less favourable future scenarios still exist. And there's only a short window of time that TA's future will be in its own hands. It's critical then that TA leaders keep up to date with the art of the possible when it comes to AI and technology, and also have a clear vision of the future that they're moving towards. At the recent HR Technology Conference, I sat down with six practitioners and analysts to find out what they thought the biggest challenges are in TA at the moment, which are the current use cases of AI they think are most useful, and most importantly, what their own vision of recruiting Nirvana looks like. In this episode, you're going to hear from Lindsey Salas, Head of TA Insights and Enablement at Dropbox, Matt Courret, Director of Client Delivery at Hudson RPO, Sarah White, Founder of Aspect43, Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer at Cielo Talent, Maureen Clough, Creator and Host of the It Gets Late Early podcast, and Matt Charny, Editor-in-Chief at Recruiter.com. A huge thank you to Gem for hosting me on their booth at HR Tech so I could have these conversations. Hi Lindsey and welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be here. Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do. Yes, I am the Head of TA Insights, Enablement and Coordination at Dropbox. Awesome. Tell us a bit more about what that job entails. Yes, it's a funny job. You can think of it more as like strategy and operations. We work really closely with our operations and programs team. Insights and Enablement is founded on this belief that recruiting and sales are actually quite similar in a lot of ways. Sales enablement is this foundational piece of any good sales organization but very rarely recruiting enablement is something that people invest in. So, Insights and Enablement is essentially we own all of our TA data and we use that data and all of the insights from that data to train our team up level our team with a five-prommed enablement solution. And then I also manage our talent coordinators which as you probably know those roles are they're evolving so quickly and so there's a lot of like enablement within that and like a big factor of my work has been putting in more automation and AI into our process. And we'll get to that in a minute because that's kind of really what I want to talk about. But before we do tell us about some of the challenges that you're seeing in the market I mean both your organization and in general. Yes. I think the biggest honestly like the biggest challenge that I have I mean there's always been the challenge of we are trying to get the best and the brightest AI engineers into our organization which is hard because not a lot of people are experts there are only a few like it's hard to stay current with. But from a like when I think about kind of up leveling our organization it's so hard to wrap my arms around this ever-changing market because new tools are coming down the pike all the time and new features for those tools and suddenly something else is an all-in-one solution that just a couple of months ago only kind of like was more boutique and so that's really difficult. I think there's also a little bit I find some challenge in like identifying the really exciting players who are really flashy and really good at sales with and like the fact that they're unproven products they are they're unproven yet and so how do I make it so that my org it's we have to strike this balance of like we're not guinea pigs but we're not the last to the market and like how do you do that and it really means like we need to kind of be more partners with these vendors rather than a traditional like buyer seller relationship. Is that how you work with Jim? It is very much yes. Awesome so um in terms of the kind of AI and automation I'm kind of sort of asking people about what use cases are they actually sort of using this for rather than all the hype and the kind of future focusing things so tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with AI automation those kind of things. The biggest use cases that we currently have for AI are sourcing and being able to um kind of across the entirety of our funnel whether it's applicants people in our CRM ATS or just like external in the market how do we surface them really quickly so we have AI that's helping us with that and then I think that the next kind of like lowest-haining fruit is around talent coordination and the calendaring even complex loops there is there's stuff that AI can do there to bring all of it together um those are like the real world scenarios of what we're actually like truly using AI for. And you mentioned as part of that the talent coordinator role is evolving. How is it evolving? I think that talent coordination they are really the they're on the front lines of candidate experience and I think candidate experience is going to be where companies win or lose it's going to be that that like the highest currency in this next stage the stage really that we're in and so the way that it's evolving at Dropbox is that we want to enable talent coordinators to like let's automate the bottom 40 40% of your job and allow you to like dive into the art of candidate experience which people in other industries have been doing for years. This is like hospitality and like five-star dining and you know the way that you feel going into a very high-end restaurant is the way that you should feel applying to Dropbox and like going through the process and so that's where that's where they're going. Awesome I mean that makes that makes that makes perfect sense I suppose that that kind of lives nicely onto the final question which is you know where's this where do you hope this is all going in the future you know if you had a recruiting nirvana what would that what would that look like. I definitely think that that cross-pollination of hospitality and candidate experience needs to become they need to become closer but I also think and so much of what I've seen here is really telling me that talent acquisition and talent management are really converging and that there needs to be this strong feedback loop and that it's almost in the future I don't know if this is a nirvana but I think that it is actually because we're all doing more with less and we're all taking you know we're upskilling I would love to have recruiters have that kind of like really holistic feedback loop of how hires are doing and be involved in more of that life cycle of the employee and I think that there's also my vision my hope is that we also begin to focus more on the recruiting experience as much as we do the candidate experience I think recruiters are so important to a company's revenue they're so important to the growth of the company and like the people that you bring in are just talent is only getting more important and so I'm thinking a lot about that Lindsey thank you very much for talking to me thank you it was a pleasure so my name is makared I'm the director of client delivery for Hudson RPO over our projects and technology business now I'm obviously you're dealing with a number of a number of clients what are you seeing is the main challenges at the moment what is it that's tricky for your clients what are they what are they really focusing on across our business right we work with a number of different customers so I think there are you know some similar themes across those challenges but I think the the biggest one that we face today no matter what level of industry is just you know the you know the responsiveness right so kind of separation between opportunities in the marketplace even in what some might say as a softened market there's still plenty of opportunities for top talent and so distinguishing you know a customer for them to be able to distinguish themselves from another opportunity in the marketplace is really where they're finding you know large challenge we're sitting at the HR tech show we're right at the back of the expo floor and I can just see in front of me a sea of a sea of technologies you know it's like a living breathing a living breathing tech stack basically um you obviously deal with a lot of technology in terms of what you what you do what are you seeing so far in terms of the the benefits of AI and how do you think people should sort of simplify the tech stacks that they're working with I love that you know the idea of kind of looking at a sea of technology out there and I think these companies are all faced with a very similar challenge to kind of differentiate but I think from an AI perspective where I think we're going to start to see the most impact around town acquisition and recruiting is you know the expansion of scale and by that I mean how much more can a recruiter take on and how much more breadth and width do they have across the market as they leverage that not only from a task perspective but being able to engage more candidates across the market and then move them across the funnel for their customers but you obviously quite a lot work with gem how do you find that in terms of yeah I think from a gem perspective one of the things I love about it is it's unbelievably intuitive right it's not really click heavy it's very straightforward the data accuracy of their platform is incredible compared to others that I've worked with and I think again it's a multiplier of of capability because when we talk about the campaign the outreach feature um that's where recruiters are seeing the most benefit from you know from a sourcing perspective is being able to easily pull in targets and then increase outreach tenfold we're moving to a world where we're seeing kind of more automation of these um of these tasks and um you know there were some question marks about the role of talent acquisition as we kind of move forward but from a kind of purely sort of conceptual level if we're looking at talent acquisition as suddenly having a lot of capacity to do other things because a lot of the the work that they do is being is kind of being automated and um simplified how do you think we can change recruiting how can we make it better for everyone and what's the role of recruiters in that in the future so I've always talked about this and it's been especially prescient during uh you know what we've looked at as kind of a either a softened market or down market right when when things are things are going well recruiters are expected to wear every single hat in the in the company right you know you're the marketer you're the salesperson you're the recruiter you know bringing on you know highly competitive talent you know when the market moves in another direction sometimes that that role is reduced and I think for to answer your question about you know how does AI I think in some way strengthen the role of a recruiter and what does the expansion of that role look like I think it actually provides them the capabilities to act in all those other capacities I think it complements all these things that you know the business has always asked of them but maybe never given them the resources to achieve and now they're way more you know ready to be to be pointed in those directions and take on those tasks and as a final question for you what does your own like personal recruiting divana look like so if we looked sort of five years into the future what would recruiting look and feel like you know to candidates and hiring managers and recruiters if you could kind of design the perfect way for it to operate yeah I think the the perfect way for to operate is for recruiters to be able to focus in on you know their key strengths which is the relationship piece you know the qualification piece in terms of really sussing out you know someone's capabilities based on fit of project and experience you know and allow the pieces of technology right to complement their efforts but again by offering more people more opportunity by able being able to cast a wider net that qualifies at the top of the funnel right and I think where we sometimes fall short you know in a TA you know function today is that sometimes we can't reach out to everybody that that we want to consider right we keep we don't have you know we don't have the luxury of time and I think technology is giving us some of that back Matt thank you very much for talking to me you got it pleasure Hi Sarah welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me excited to be here it's always a pleasure could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do sure my name is Sarah White I am the founder of Aspect 43 we are a research and strategy firm focused on bringing the voice of the recruiter and HR into all of the vendors so we work on product strategy um marketing we help them understand really like stop cold calling like recruiters don't want to hear it and so we work with a lot of the vendors to like improve what they're doing and really make sure that HR and recruiting and employees in general especially in the recruiting candidates are having a voice in a way they've never had before within all of the different technology partners no absolutely new firm you've had an exceptionally busy couple of days I have our team has met with about 77 different vendors this week so obviously you know you're looking very carefully at the market and what's going on what's going on at the moment what do you think the big kind of challenges are in TA or what are you seeing you know what do you think that the tech companies should be should be addressing yeah I think some of the challenges that are happening is we are having a functional shift in the organizational design of recruiting departments and so how things were set up pre pandemic are not going to be the same as they are now because not only has hiring changed and what we are doing run hiring changed the technology available has advanced so rapidly in six years you know I've been in TA tech since 1999 I would say we haven't seen this fast of an advancement in my entire career like what has happened in the last 36 to 48 months um is what used to take us seven to ten years to achieve and so we're half-lifeing and then it's going to just continue to half-life so what's going to happen over the next 24 months is uh really I'm so excited to be able to see this but I think that's really the biggest challenge uh the the number of roles and how those roles are going to be are just never going to be the same no I kind of agree with 100% and I think with the uh you know the AI piece that's just driving a lot of this there's uh I just think you know we're kind of like sort of hype max at the moment you know looking at my eyes kind of everywhere and um all the kind of the vendor presentations I've sat through in the last few days I've actually had what they call the AI section because they feel they have to talk about it so stripping through all of that yes what are you actually seeing that is genuinely useful and being adopted right now that is that is kind of driven by AI I think where AI is actually having the biggest benefit in recruiting is around the impact it's having on automation and not the overall automation but automation of the parts of what we did um we I used to be a recruiter obviously I'm not a recruiter anymore but what we did that we didn't like to do and I think with as much as I'm excited about what we are seeing coming I think the biggest risk that we all need to be aware of from a technical perspective and a product perspective is not automating out those little moments that we love right there's a lot of like stupid stuff right that we can do as recruiters um that could easily be automated but there are little things that we personally like to do in the day and as almost like a mental break to everything else we're doing and we have to be really cautious with how we are doing the automation and where we are rolling in AI that it maybe supports or augments some of those little mini moments without removing them um in a way that takes that personalized and I don't mean AI personalization which is another big hype cycle conversation here but those genuine personal moments that we have as recruiters with that candidate with that hiring manager with whoever else is involved in that process that we enjoy like it's okay to enjoy work and I want to make sure that as we are bringing AI into roadmaps and we are bringing AI into conversations on how we're selling it and how we're marketing and and how we're thinking about it from a strategy we're also thinking about it from a very human perspective about the little things people actually like to do that's an incredible point because uh like ultimately all of this is about uh making humans making work better yeah you know the obviously a big part of that is driving value for organizations but ultimately it's it's the humans that that kind of do this yeah I think that's a big consideration I think it's also going to be a battleground over the next few years in terms of um how it how it pans out one of the things that I was really encouraged by so we've run state of HR tech uh research every year where we actually do large-scale research of HR leaders business leaders employees candidates as well as recruiting teams and we ask uh you know a whole series of questions but one of the things we ask is why are you buying technology what is the goal what are you hoping to get out of new recruiting software what are you hoping to get out new HR software and number one is efficiency everybody was sure it was going to be cost effectiveness and it's just not um it's efficiency how do we do things which is what we always focus on with the AI and that's what it is the number two thing was improving the employee experience and it had increased 10 percentage points since last year and so there seems to be not like oh let's bring in employee experience software but how do we make sure whatever we do bring in is going to impact for instance that recruiter in a way that makes it easier for them to do the job but also doesn't take away the part of the job they love the most so building on that then as a as a final question what would recruiting nirvana look like to you I think really if we're thinking about like what I can envision recruiting nirvana I mean we're so close compared to what we were 20 years ago when I was having to smile and dial um to get candidates um I think what I really hope that we get to a point and see is technology that is really able to engage and be easy for a candidate and is respectful to that employee and the employee lifecycle starts at the moment we first engage and talk to that person but it also continues the whole way through and so the candidate perspective is taken into play that recruiter perspective is taken into play some of those automated moments that are menial tasks that nobody wants to do are done in a way where they don't feel like it's AI doing it it feels um very much like what we're doing on the other side of HR in the flow of work um it's done not because I have to log into a system not because I have to go here I can do my job as a recruiter as a hiring manager as an interview interview participant or as a candidate from wherever I want to work maybe that is my slack maybe that is my email maybe that is my text and I don't have some piece of technology telling me how I have to do it it's just enabling me to get it done to support everybody's experience in the process. Sarah thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me. Hi Matt Jones I'm the chief product officer at Cielo I lead our product and solutions organization my main focus is thinking about the future of talent acquisition and talent and how we respond as a talent acquisition partner to that to meet our customers in the future. It's obviously a very interesting slash disruptive slash unique time at the moment with everything that's kind of happening um what are you seeing is the sort of the biggest challenges that uh talent acquisition teams have kind of in the market at the moment. I think there's two or three um we should probably like sunset the word disruption as well or at least just claim it back like this is the new normal that's another one of those phrases the new normal. Exactly. Um I think you know prioritization of spend like what is the important space to go and invest time energy effort dollars pounds euros um that that's kind of one and this show is a great example of that. There are many many many great partners you could choose from which one is going to help you deliver against the biggest priority you have um right now. The second one is I think we're approaching a really interesting moment from a I would call it peak risk hype moment. Yes. Specifically thinking about AI feels a bit like pre GDPR to me um and if you think about most of the AI legislation has kind of enforcement timelines of summer 25 to summer 26. I think as a HR professional or a TA professional you get a lot of focus from your legal team your info sec team and you'll see so over the next um six to twelve months and being equipped to um work through that while not giving up on you know the the great experiences that tech this technology can drive is going to be a big challenge for people. So obviously you know the talk around AI is almost deafening in terms of you know hype and all that sort of stuff. What are you actually seeing as genuine use cases that are sort of changing the game at the moment? Yeah I mean yes there's a lot of I mean literally every booth here has AI written on it so um that's that's uh it's the year of AI last year I think it was the year of analytics um I think it's again it's a couple of different categories really so the idea of kind of recruiting co-pilot I think is one real interesting use case so how do you use generative AI to do some of the things and by the way old fashioned AI and RPA to do some of the things that can free up crudest time or TA professional's time or even higher managers time to invest in more human kind of experiences talking to candidates you know interviewing those kind of things so that could include you know um creating better job descriptions that are on brands that have you know compliant tone of voice that have the right EEO regulations and so on and so forth it could be helping with summarization so hey we've got all these great candidates we've had all these great notes how do we summarize that turn into a package so that's one area the second one I think is hyper personalization in everything I was we were running around table last week in London and I was telling the group that I think 25 is going to be the year of hyper personalization of everything which will create a new bar or a new level for kind of recruitment recruiting outreach or employee engagement if you're not hyper personalizing you can actually fall behind and see lower response rates so I think those are the two that we're seeing kind of the best experiences in and then if you think about it it's relevant for other parts of the enterprise the co-pilot is great in engineering is great in other areas of the enterprise that's why that's going to be useful in HR and TA and hyper personalization consumer marketing consumer experiences that'll flow into HR and TA. The hyper personalization thing is fascinating and so important and we could probably have a whole half an hour just talking just talking about that but as a final question so you know you kind of sort of indicated there what's happening what the direction of travel kind of looks like when we kind of get to a phase where you know everything that's automated can be automated we have this kind of hyper personalization what would you like recruiting to look like what's your recruiting Nirvana? Yeah I think I'd like it to look a little bit more like a consumer experience we've been shortening the gap sort of B to C, B to E we've been narrowing the gap a lot over the last few years but there's still a gap so the experiences I have in my everyday life are not the same experiences I have if I'm in a recruiting process and so I'd like to see that that sort of shortened or closed entirely the other thing as well is we label talent a lot in recruiting you're an FTE you're a 1099 you're a I'd like to see that disappear and just be talking about humans and getting work done which is the human work we need to get done which work can we be automated and then how do we have a great conversation and drive a great experience for those human beings as well I think that'll be a super rewarding recruiting career actually. Matt thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you very much Matt. Can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Sure I'm Maureen Wiley-Clough I host a podcast that's all about the experience of getting older in the youth obsessed and dominated tech industry and so we are talking about age which is something that should be a part of inclusion conversation and for some reason has been left off the table in 92 percent of cases. Why do you think that is in a environment where in many cases people are struggling to find the talent that they need? Right that's that's the reality it's interesting to see people say we can't fill these roles when in fact there are so many people who are very qualified and experienced who could in fact do so. Well the population is aging at a rapid clip by 2030 it's going to be some massive percentage of the workforce that will be over 50 so we have a society that is insanely ageist. One in two people according to the World Health Organization are ageist I think half of those people are lying to themselves and to the WHO because we have been given these messages from such a young age that to get older is the worst thing that you can possibly do and so we we marginalized people over a certain age and it starts early in the tech industry and you know people over age 40 believe it or not are part of what's called a protected class so I'm now a part of it as well good times but so we are federally protected in the United States it against age discrimination in nominally at least but yet it is quite rampant and there are these deep-seated stereotypes that abound the thought that for example as you age you are set and entrenched in your ways and you don't care to learn or grow which is lunacy to think. Right now we have a talent shortage right and people can't fill the roles that they need filled and we're overlooking some incredible value in the possibility of having experienced workers come to the table so. Now do you think that as we kind of walk around the exhibition everything's about AI you know we're very much sort of talking about what AI is doing to talent acquisition you know on this on this particular episode do you think that there is optimism in terms of technology being able to solve some of these problems and remove some of the challenge some of the entrenched thinking. I do I like to be slightly optimistic in life generally speaking I think you know you put bias data and you're going to get bias data out with an AI situation but I do think that there is the possibility of it being really an equalizer of sorts if it's done correctly right and when I think about even AI as a new tool I actually I had a guest on my show who was in his 60s and he was trying to get a tech job and he explained exactly how much it sucked to interview in your 60s for tech jobs but what he said that really struck me was that he sees AI as a very hopeful thing as the great equalizer because the fact is even though of course these things have been worked on for ages now and they're just coming to the forefront and our collective mind now it's really relatively early on and so anyone of any age doesn't matter you can go and you can harness the skills that you know you can bring to the AI arena and really make a name for yourself so that's something that really has nothing to do with age since it is such a new thing so anybody anybody can get in there and do it and I suppose also the you know most employers are talking about skills-based hiring now and the sort of technology like Gem that really helps advance that and I suppose if we're in a world where we're just looking at people's skills they're potential to keep learning that should help shouldn't it I would think so I would think so I mean it's it's just a it's a very intriguing thing like we just have these very deep-seated biases within us and we don't even know we're doing them right but if you start nerding out on the stuff as I have you see that these messages are everywhere and my own children are seven and nine and they have been like hey mom you're old like it's like it's a diss right and I'm like who taught you this and and the research actually supports that kids as young as age four spot-off harmful ages stereotypes so this is being embedded in our young minds and it's continuing it's a it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if we don't stop it right when did age go from you know Asian experience go from the asset to liability it's like why are we here it's those my mind and I can tell you from my own personal experience I went from receiving an abundance of inbound unsolicited recruiter interests for companies who had open roles in tech and that happened I was very fortunate it happened often I turned 40 those fell off the cliff I'm not kidding and nothing else changed and granted you could say of course it hasn't been a particularly great great job market so there's you know a correlative factor there but I mean now I'm getting those like can we buy a couple hours of your time for your valuable expertise getting those all the time those you know those little companies that ask you know on behalf of their client they want off this consulting and yet you know suddenly I'm like not valuable is an FTE potentially it's bizarre but it overnight and I'm like it has to be the age it has to be as a final question for you so I'm asking everyone what their recruiting nirvana looks like so we've got the you know we have these tools that are coming in that from a recruiter's perspective providing lots of automation we've talked about the optimistic side of them potentially removing bias there's a whole dark side to that as well but let's focus on the optimistic side what is recruiting nirvana look like for you where would you love recruiting to be in a few years time I would love recruiting to anonymize enough people's data as they're going into the initial application process so as to prevent bias from taking place like I for example the Colorado state government actually enacted a law in july of this year called the job application fairness act and you're no longer allowed to ask for any age identification markers so graduation date your birth that's gone that's scrapped so that to me is a great way to level the playing field a little bit but obviously there are always other sorts of bias but to the extent possible I think if you can anonymize that data you're going to give everybody a better shot at actually getting in the door but you know this is this is more than than just recruiting you have to actually influence at the hiring manager level throughout the organization to make an impactful lasting change but I I believe that you know if we can just help people get a shot right get a shot at that because people people are biased it's just when we restart type people we suck we do it boring thank you very much talking to me absolutely thanks for having me so hey hi Matt welcome to the podcast hey thank you so much for having me what are you seeing from you know the work that you do and the conversations that you have what do you think the kind of the biggest challenges are for talent acquisition at the moment well according to the survey and that I've done we do a monthly kind of poll survey the number two challenges that recruiters say are actually things that recruiters don't have control over which is having enough diversity candidates and compensation not being market competitive so I think what I'm seeing are the challenges are ones that aren't actually sitting in the department and have very little to do with software the other challenge though is technical complexity and process and efficiencies and so what I'm seeing is a lot of vendors calling themselves AI which in fact are process automation tools and there is a lot of utility in that yeah I think that's really interesting there isn't a differentiation between that it's almost like AI kind of means automation for for many people but there's just so much more potential and things around there yeah it's I would call it algorithmic automation how do you think that's kind of panning out at the moment what are you saying that's useful what are people using how can we help people make sense of just the craziness around this topic so first off I think that people need to take a step back and figure out what problem it is they're trying to solve and in from my experience 90 of the time that is a process problem that can be corrected without applying any sort of automation technology but when it comes to AI certainly where I think I have a little bit of concern looking at the market is that every vendor is trying to bolt on some sort of AI offering because it's hot rather than invest in their core product and core market fit so I think it may be actually distracting many vendors from producing a product that's going to help recruiters hire better talent faster yeah I kind of agree I mean I've been in the analyst room for a lot of this conference and in almost every presentation you get there this is the AI section about what we're doing with AI and I think that the company's doing it well I've contextualized it as you say in in kind of what their and what their offering is what's the what's the most interesting like use case you've seen so far so I think that for me one of the most interesting applications of it is actually the PEO and payroll vendors which sounds really boring I know but they have a lot of variables that go into making sure they have enough float for different customers pay periods currencies and all that so being able to essentially automate that and be able to predict both foreign exchange rates and liquidity as a giant nerd that has a tremendous amount of utility absolutely and that's really interesting that's a really interesting point actually and there does appear to be a lot of innovation in that in that particular in that particular space coming back to recruiting we're sort of asking people about what their recruitment nirvana would look like so kind of in a world where it's pretty clear that a lot of kind of activity that recruiters do is going to be is going to be automated what fills that gap you could design you know the perfect recruiting scenario what would it look like so here's the thing is that it is it remains incredibly inefficient and I think you're seeing a lot of doubling down on inefficiencies which is adding tools adding complexity for me the interesting thing I think people overlook is if you look at nps scores of individual categories ats is rank is number one and so the way that companies have approach recruiting is they have an ats which works fine for purpose and they have been basically uh hoovering up candidates and data for years so for me nirvana looks like being able to do more uh abm or like you know lead lead targeting and scoring moving down funnel as opposed to continually reopening the funnel so I think it's using your system of record as a system of engagement so just finish me give us give us a little bit of a prediction what do you think so if we have this conversation hr tech this time next year what would be talking about what would have what's going to change what's going to happen in the next 12 months I think we are going to be talking a lot about the changing role of talent acquisition and how it is sort of moving away from an hr function and much more into an operations and essentially procurement function so I think we're really starting because of the technology to see a shift in orientation and just overall thought framing away from hr which thank goodness because it is the least interesting function in the company matt thank you very much for tuning in thank you thank you my thanks to lindsay to matt korett to sera white to matt jones to mooring cluff and to matt chani and a huge thank you to everyone at gem for making this episode possible you can follow this podcast on apple podcasts on spotify or wherever you get your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting future feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening i'll be back next time and I hope you'll join me there's been more of scientific discovery more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind that of all the ages of history (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
