AI made recruiting harder not easier

Mikilis, this has been great. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, so Aquantative, you know, is really where I started in my, you know, journey in business. And so that was a digital marketing firm that at the time we were kind of like the Avis to the Hertz, where we were competing against DoubleClick, which ultimately Google acquired. And so we were the second kind of the second person in that race. And then ultimately Microsoft acquired it for what we ended up charging double for what Google acquired double click for. So it was one of the large it was the largest acquisition that Microsoft did at the time. and then from there I went over to Amazon and started the online marketing capabilities that they had. And so they ended up needing to build out different marketing ad units. And so I was responsible for building that. Then ultimately it became you know multi-billion dollar business after I had left. But I that was a a good start again, starting at a business that was really nascent and hadn't really been built out before. And then I wanted to go and take those learning there and a quantitative learning. And so I went over to a bank called Washington Mutual and started the online marketing there. and then ultimately About twenty-two years ago, people in my network who had started the Laurel Group were recruiting me. And I my experience with recruiters was kind of like used car salespeople. So I was I put them off for like six months, you know, maybe even a year. And ultimately I wanted to get back to a startup again. and so I decided, all right, I'll take a flyer, I'll try this. and they convinced me that, you know, executive search is not like, you know, more pushing candidates. It's really more talent brokering and talent management. And so that's when I realized yeah, it's really about building a relationship with leaders and executives and then figuring out where they're going to be best fit for a company. And so the companies, you know, hire us to find those people that are open to a conversation, that have the right kind of skill sets that they need. And then probably almost more importantly, It are going to be the best cultural fit for that company. And so we've been doing this for 20, you know, I've been doing this for 22 years. The company's been around for 24 years. we focus in technology by and large. So I'm in Seattle, my partners are along the West Coast. And as you can imagine, 22 years ago, we were focusing on SaaS, you know, and as that was coming into vogue, so moving from an on-prem environment to a SaaS environment. And so educating companies on what that's going to look like and what kind of skill sets they're going need. And then, of course, I'm being in Seattle, cloud capital of the world, both weather and also from a you know technology standpoint. So, you know, you've got the Amazon's, Microsoft's, Google, and Oracle have built shops up here as well to support their cloud initiatives. so we're engaged with in that, and now we have Gen AI and watching that evolve as well. So I feel like we're oftentimes at the bleeding edge of a lot of these different technologies and having to figure out what is going to be appropriate for companies and you know, kind of guiding them as consultants on what they need to look out for in some of these different evolutions.

That well, I think that's the million dollar question just in general. What is you know, where is AI? Because on one hand, you have the dystopian view that you know we have a more than 10% chance that AI is gonna decimate the population. And you know, you have people clamoring about it on that end, you know, within those different LLMs. You have then on the other side, you have the government, you know, US government, and shareholders saying, hey, we need to go and accelerate the growth of this. And so you have these different, you know, really competing forces because no one really knows what the true outcome. And and I think was it just yesterday that OpenAI show said that they found six other instances where the technology jumped out of the parameters that they had defined and you know we're looking to figure that out. So, you know, you you look at this and you can take a dystopian view or you can take a optimistic view. And I look at this as a a tool like everything else, that like a knife, it can be used for good and for bad. And so how do you set up the right kind of structure that allows the Good side of this to be maximized and the downside to be minimized. And that's, you know, that's from a larger perspective. On the recruiting side of things, it's fascinating because there is a lot of benefit that we have seen from an efficiency standpoint, from a research standpoint, from a knowledge standpoint. You don't have to have as many technologies to get a lot of the benefit that. an AI tool produces. So, you know, you used to have to subscribe to a cer research types technology and get information from that. Now you don't have to necessarily subscribe to that. You, you know, you used different emails or so to go and services to send out emails or to find emails and now you can find those you know leveraging a AI tools. When it comes to writing you know you end up you can create A customized email that goes to a candidate for that initial outreach. So there's a lot of different steps. I think someone made a analysis of this, and they said, you know, if they break down every task that a recruiter does, AI can have a serious impact on 180 of all those tasks, out of, you know, call it 240. so those just you know, and they are breaking it down into very minutiae segments but it just shows that this has a huge impact on our daily routines but it has to be done and and and managed because you know a lot of the stuff I see and it's just almost too easy to send out information and so it doesn't have the personality or the right kind of message and you have to be mindful of this that you don't get stuck in the ease of some of this because a lot of it will show up and and make your brand look poorer if it's not managed correctly.

Yeah, so I've got two college age kids. And w one of the things that I've seen is just the amount of roles that they are of that are available for that age of population has dropped off. You know, so if you look at the unemployment rate by age, that demographic is the one that's been most impacted most recently. And A large part of it is that a lot of companies were moving into saying, hey, this whole function can go away and we'll replace it by a with AI. And so I was concerned about that. And so I started thinking, you know, doing research, started thinking about this and have had quite conversations with many leaders over the past couple of years, you know, a few years as you know, AI has become much more prevalent and and impacted different roles. And so I saw that yes, it is doing that. But the question that came to me is, well, if that those roles are going to go away, where does a early stage employee gain knowledge of their craft? You know, be it accounting, be it sales, be it marketing, whatever that is, if those entry level roles go away, where are they going to learn how to do that job? And then ultimately, how are they going to learn how to do business so they can become leaders in the future? And so that was a question I've posed to many different sea level, you know, the people that I've placed, the people that I've are are my clients, and I've just asked that question, and no one really had a good answer for that. So I started, you know, thinking about this more and having some debate with people, you know, my partners, and just figuring out where and what kind of solution can come up with that. And what I've fallen on, or what I decided was that. We really have to be deliberate that we that AI is not going to replace roles across the board. It'll impact roles, it'll make your role more efficient, but you can't just get rid of a whole function. And Klarna found this out where they tried to get rid of their entire customer service function and replace it with AI, and they re re recognized over time that wait a second, our service levels have just dropped. And so you need to have that empathy, you need to have that human. component within those conversations. And so that I think companies are recognizing that they can't just get rid of it completely now. But they also need to think about how do we make sure that we're training pe our employees and and those that are, you know, and there may not be as many, but we need to make sure we're deliberate in giving them the tools so that they can learn how to do business better in the future. And so what I'm it's apprenticeship, but it's deliberate apprenticeship, meaning that you have to be set up the objectives. And so whatever the project is, be very structured in finding what the goals are, what you anticipate will be the outcome, and then go through the project. And the projects can grow as the you know employee grows in knowledge. It can grow in more and more impactful type projects. But each one has to be, all right, what are we feeling that the objective or our outcome is going to be? And then really important is the post mortem. When the project is done, when the initiative is completed, what did you learn? What did you find? What did you see that happened that was different than what you expected to happen? And being deliberate around that whole end-to-end process and Come, I get it. You know, I'm we're in the same boat where we're moving so fast that we forget some of these steps or we just kind of minimize those steps. But I think in the future, if you if we really are investing into our employees to be better leaders in the future, they need to see how their decisions were thought of initially and what the outcome really truly was. And so that's what basically what the paper says is we need to make sure that we're deliberate in our in in our apprenticeships and and really being mindful of each step of that decision process because ai is going to make decis will will allow the answers to be derived they'll it'll decide a lot of these answers but the piece that ai can't touch is our own intuition and our thinking about hey what is gonna be the best outcome based on knowledge that we've seen before that is not just data that you AI can decide on. So it really is that human component that we need to make sure that we are emphasizing and maximizing. And then quite frankly, those are the who are going to be the leaders in the future are those people that can gain buy-in, can gain alignment within an organization. by building those relationships across a company's team.

No. Yeah.

You know, it's so it I I had a paper last year that I wrote about how AI is impacting recruiting and making it more difficult. Actually, it's it's not making it easier, it's making recruiting more difficult because of the volume that of applicants that companies are seeing. And so to your point, job descriptions are getting written by AI. People are crafting their resume and their cover letter using AI. To address the keywords that are in that job description. And then it goes into an ATS, an applicant tracking system internally, which screens those AI jer written resumes in or out. So you have three steps there that may have, may or may not have a human involved. And so that's why companies are seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for a role. And some of this is done automatically.

where a person doesn't even know their information's getting sent to a a company. So, you know, it's the bots talking to bots, you know, screening out another bot. And so it bec makes this very challenging because now an internal recruiter, they're looking at resumes and cover letters that essentially look the same. And so, you know, I'm I'm saying this is gonna go back old school, where we're gonna, it's gonna be who you know. Not necessarily, you know, more important than anything else. And it we're not gonna fax resumes to each other, but we're gonna end up having to use our network. And this is what I'm telling people don't apply online. In fact, I was talking to you know a friend of mine over at Amazon, and he goes, Yeah, I don't even look at the people that come in for my careers page. I look at people that get referred to me through my network. I know that those people will only give me good people. And then I'll be able to ask them questions about that candidate's capabilities. And so right there, I was like, well, that's exactly why recruiters who know the market, who know candidates, can make sure that they're putting forward the right person for a role versus you know a hundred people that are applying online that no one really knows. And and some of them may, you know, some of those applicants are maybe bots themselves, right? Where they may not even be real people. So I I look at that as there's just and then taking it to the marketing, there's just so much slop out there. And you can see that the volume you know, since AI, the amount of in mail, you know, emails that I get that are just unsolicited, that are just, you know, kind of garbage, has increased, you know, whatever, tenfold. So you end up seeing on the marketing side, it's almost too easy to create a marketing piece, but what's gonna be differentiating Is are you creating something that's unique, that's creative, that is gonna be attention grabbing because what AI does is it looks in the rear view, picks information and different campaigns that have done been created before, and it is really the average of all of the previous pieces that have been created. What is gonna be differentiating is the unique pieces, the new piece that no one's thought of. And how do you make sure that you cut through the noise is by being unique.

That's that's what makes us human, right? I mean, that's the personality. Or bad language, yeah, exactly. But I mean, it well, and then there was somebody that was one of my candidates, they said, Well, should I just make like an error in my resume to show that I'm not an AI bot? You know, when I when I r submitted resume, and I'm like, well, we're not going to go to that level. But yeah, you want to make sure that you're presenting who you are and that you're not glossing that over and making it. Like everyone else, you need to show that differentiation.

Well and I'll give an example of one. So I was doing a search for a company called DuckDuckGo, which is a privacy search engine. Yeah. So I I I've pretty much staffed their leadership team across, you know, over we we've had a long-standing relationship with them for the past seven years. and one of the roles I was looking to fill was a VP of engineering. And I had a great person out of Microsoft, and I was trying to move him through the process quickly because I just knew how strong he was. And

I got a ping from him and he said, Hey, I'm gonna have to pull myself from the process. And I was really kind of disappointed. But I asked him, I said, that great. He goes, I took another role at a different company and I said, Can I ask who it was? And he told me who it was. And I was like, my gosh, I didn't realize they had that role open. And he said, Well, they didn't, but at Microsoft, we launched a product that was in the same space that they just launched a product in. And so I wrote the CEO and I said, Hey, you guys just launched this product. against you know for this market have you run against this challenge this is how we addressed it and he was really just you know kind of sharing his knowledge with the CEO and he goes you know surprisingly enough the CEO wrote me back and said hey can we jump on a quick call they jumped on a quick call they hit it off he said hey can I put you in touch with more of my team they talked they did a you know they had a great conversation there and they said we weren't planning on opening this role for nine months but would you be interested and so he goes yeah sure So he got hired. And you know, I was thinking about this later on is that look, the company got the benefit because they found someone that knew that space very well. He was able to communicate that effectively, had the gumption, the drive to share that with him. So, you know, he's he's being outgoing, and so they knew that he had the right kind of personality. the company's saving money from having to hire somebody like me, they find that executive. And and it cut the time frame down substantially. And so I looked at that going, that is showing your, you know, it's again, how do you market yourself? And he was just doing it because that's his personality was just, hey, you know what? They seemed like they needed some you know information. But it turns out, you know, he was marketing himself. He saw the product market fit for that company, and he showed and communicated so his marketing and sales. Of himself to that company. And I was like, wow, that is hitting everything right on the head. And it just it resonated and he ended up getting a good job.

Yeah, I mean, the reason why companies hire us is because they don't or aren't able to do that internally themselves. So meaning that it's a it's a hard role to fill and they don't can't dedicate time to just do that. So and it's you know, typically a strategic position. It's gonna have a material impact on the company. And so, you know, each search has its own challenges and there's always, you know, some different components to it that make it more challenging. but that's the reason why companies hire us. So I I I don't know if things are more challenging these days. I think a lot of companies want to try to do this internally first because the sheer volume of resumes, they figure, hey, we have internal recruiters, we just need to go through all the resumes that we're getting and we'll find the right person. The challenge is that it just takes time. And so if they have a need that's gonna be time to market or they need to have a person in that chair in a shorter time frame. It's just gonna take more time to try to wade through all those resumes versus knowing people in the right market with the right skill set that are gonna be appropriate for that position. And that's what we provide is that we have knowledge of specific areas of experience and we know people who are open to having conversations. So it's like I said, that talent Management talent broker.

Yeah, on LinkedIn I'm at Chris Berta, B-E-R-T-A. our website is Laurel Group dot com. and I'm at Chris at Laurel Dash Group dot com is my email address.

Mikhailas, this has been great. Thank you very much for your time.