Nobody told you AI screening could get you sued

My pleasure.

Yeah, so really quick, Jared Black, founder, president of Nove Unemployment Group. essentially I'm a professional recruiter. businesses come to me when they need to hire a high leverage, high performer, inject directly into their business. They need to do it quickly, they need to do it efficiently, they need to do it correctly. that's why businesses come to me. I got into recruitment, I think the same way most people get into recruitment, completely by accident, not by choice or not an I would say not a intentional choice at at first. but it was kind of like a more of a revelation for me. I started in the import flour industry. That was a family industry. My three past generations of my family had been in that space. So I kind of assumed that I was also gonna work in the import flower industry. I started as a young professional there, worked many years on that side of it. But that industry is very dependent on temporary staffing. And because of the seasonality of flowers, flowers are peak. Season is, you know, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, those times of years, big holidays. But because of the dependency on staffing, I became very familiar with the world of staffing. And what I was experiencing as a customer of staffing companies, it was very bad. You know, I was getting poor quality, I was getting poor customer service, I was getting bad employees, I was getting unprepared employees. They would show up to work in a cooler that was 30 degrees Fahrenheit. They would show up to work in shorts and sandals and t-shirts. And it was just the worst. Experience from a customer side. So after talking to a lot of peers and colleagues and trying to understand, like, hey, who are you using? What experience you're having, everyone was having the same experience. Everyone was kind of made peace with it in a way that they were like, Hey, this is who we have to work with. So get used to it. that was my aha moment to say, you know, go out and and create the company that's going to solve this problem. And so we started as a at first as a staffing company. And we had immediate success because I approached all those people. I said, Hey, listen, I know your business, I know your industry, I know the problems you're having. I'm gonna solve those problems. I'm gonna cater to your business. So we started with just white glove customer service, with dedication to the customer to solving their problem. Obviously, if they needed to hire a certain person, we wanted to provide the person who's going to actually fulfill that role correctly the first time. And so I approached all those colleagues, those peers. I Hey, I'm gonna do this, give me a shot, I won't let you down. That's exactly what happened, and we achieved immediate success. shortly after that, we started getting into direct placement recruitment, and the rest is history.

AI is it it it's incredible. I'm a I'm absolutely obsessed with AI. Ever since ChatGPT first launched, I became obsessed with AI and immediately started thinking about how I could inject this into my business in my everyday life. But there's a lot of I think there are booby traps everywhere. And what you just said is one of the biggest traps that I think a lot of businesses are gonna fall into, especially recruitment businesses who don't fully understand AI, but also don't fully understand candidates. Two parts there. One, the EU. The EU has just passed their AI law. I think that went live in August. And so they have very specific protocols when it comes to using AI around hiring. And if companies are using AI to make decisions, whether somebody is to proceed in the contention or consideration, or they're being rejected before a human actually sees the candidate. They're opening themselves up for lawsuit. And so companies that are using this type of AI or using AI in this part of the process pertaining to hiring are gonna find themselves in some sort of serious legal trouble in the near future. I suspect probably as soon as the end of this year, but more realistically, probably you'll start hearing these stories beginning of 2027. Where I use AI, AI is phenomenal. It's a great tool. We use it in a lot of parts of our business. The sourcing, I think, is a huge advantage. It's kind of aggregating data, right? It's AI is really good at doing heavy work in a very short period of time. It's really good at doing the automated tasks that humans do repetitively or maybe make make a human more efficient to get that done for them quicker. Where I think a lot of companies wish they can just substitute a human is that recruitment and interview stage. I don't believe in that. I don't think that you should replace a human recruiter from the judgment perspective with AI. Not yet, at least, not until it's done correctly and safely. But also, A players just don't respond to that. If I'm trying to recruit an A player, a top performer, they want to be respected and treated with respect to know that they're going to be speaking with a real human. Now, if you want to identify that A player using AI, absolutely. I've built tools. I have a I have a SaaS product out there that people can sign up for, and they can identify all the A players in the market, what we call hidden talent, by just simple prompting, like you would Claude or Chat. And it works amazing. But taking those next steps, actually interviewing and having conversations, building the relationships with the candidate, that still needs to be owned by the human. you can you can pepper in AI throughout those processes to make things go faster, whether it's you know, responding, put booking calendars, you know, answering questions, getting feedback, things like that, but passing judgment still needs to be remained in the hands of of our human recruiter.

Well, I think that depends on their goals. If if they want to be an AI native company and they want AI to touch every part of their business, including hiring, they need to look at, you know, what is the process that they're following? You know, what process does a senior level or C suite executive play in that? do are what tools are they using? How do they collect, you know, the data? How do they manage the data? How do they make decisions? All that needs to be evaluated. If they're a company that just wants to hire great talent and they want to do so quickly, there's really great tools out there that'll help them do that, that are AI, essentially AI powered tools. or they can partner with someone like myself that leverages these tools and they just do the work for them on their behalf. So it really just depends on what their goals are. But I would say that every company should be prepared to inject AI into their business, specifically in the areas that are highly repetitive tasks. That are tasks that do a great service to maybe a pr a person or or their customer. For example, in the in this area of recruitment, if a if a candidate wants to book a meeting with me, they should be able to do that anytime, not just when I'm available to give them my calendar availability, right? If they want to go through a discovery process and learn more about the opportunity, they should be able to do that 247, not just when I'm available or online. So creating a a way for them to do that by leveraging AI is very helpful, but it shouldn't replace 100% of the task or 100% of the relationship. so those would be examples of how companies could inject AI. But your original question is what have I learned? I would say what I've learned over the last year pertaining to AI is beware of the shiny object. And AI is changing so fast, and the rules change so fast that You can't make decisions that are just for now or for today. They have to be long-term decisions or decisions that would outlast the common changes that are gonna happen in the next quarter or two weeks, whatever it would be, right? if this tool comes out, there's probably gonna be five other tools that are released in the next month. If this feature is now now you're able to do X, Y, Z with Claude in a few weeks. Gemini Chat, X, all of them are going to do the exact same thing. So I wouldn't be tearing up my entire company, injecting things today because of a new feature that was rolled out. Stay true to your principles, stay true to what your goals are, and the tools will come. You'll find the right tools, you'll find the right processes, and the technology is moving fast enough that you can make a decision and feel good about the decision and not have buyers' remorse, so to speak, by choosing an AI tool.

Well, I you know, inside I feel we're very different. from the outside, I think a lot of companies may think of recruiters to be very much the same, like we talked about earlier. I'll tell you what we do different is one boutique. So we choose who we want to work with. We don't work with every company. we work with companies that have strategic vision, that are looking to grow and scale. They want to hire A players, they wanna they want to build great teams. They wanna, they want to build teams that are that are kind of structured for for long-term success. And those companies make and produce great things. Like they either have great products or great services. So we help them identify their brand, we help them advertise their brand. We help communicate what they do or their vision to the talent market. And then we specialize in kind of extracting that founder vision or that leadership vision. Going out to the open market, identifying the A players that best fit with that model and bring them into that opportunity. So we have a signature method in the way we do this. My signature method kind of goes like these five parts. First, it's identifying the X factor. That's an X factor to the candidate. What makes that candidate special or unique relative to the opportunity? Next, skills verification. After that, we're getting aligned on values. We want to make sure that the candidate and the company have alignment on their core values. Then we verify this personality assessments. Or sorry, I should say we verify the candidate's personality through personality assessments. that's very important because we want to make sure that the the candidate coming into this environment has the ability to succeed in that environment just based on their personality and the and the success of personalities alike that that have been in that company or have are currently in that company at that time. And then last thing, we wanna align on on growth potential. What that means is if somebody's coming into this company and the company's hiring them for let's say I know, operations manager. And they have a vision to say, I want to be a chief operations officer in a year. If the company doesn't have the roadmap or the pathway for them to get to that within a year, they might burn out or they might turn out in a year. And so as long as there's alignment, if this person's coming in and say, hey, I'm going to go do my own thing in 12 months, if the company says, Hey, we just need you to come in and do this thing for us, and that's okay if you want to go do your own thing in 12 months, they're aligned. Even if it's not forever, they're still aligned on the timeline, right? So those five steps is what we considered or what I consider to be my signature method. If you answer all five of those areas, you guarantee that you're gonna hire an A player into your company. And that's what we help companies achieve.

Yeah, so great question. Newvine Employment Group is our staffing and our recruitment entity. Vine Talent Partner is just kind of like a a branded service, a part of New Vine Employment Group. We just Vine is is a part of our, it's our kind of like our inner theme. But Vine AI is a tool that we built and we released, and this is a SaaS product. So if you look about the ecosystem of New Vine Employment Group, we have a done-for-you model. This is completely white glove. You're hands-off as an employer. We do everything start to finish for you. We have a done with you where our team will partner with your team and we'll work together in a reduced rate that will help fast track placements because we have the tools, the resources, the knowledge. And so that's talent partnership. That's the AI, that's Vine AI talent partner. And then the last is a DIY model. So let's say You know we know what we're talking about. You know we have the tools and the resources, but maybe your team's not ready. Maybe you're not ready. Maybe you want to kind of build the team on your own and you just want to be a part of the ecosystem. We have an offer, which is our SaaS product. This is as low as, well, we have a free we have a freemium model, but basically there's a free version where you can just sign up, have access for free. It's limited, but you'll be able to basically search any talent anywhere in the world, identify that talent. get their contact information and then approach them and reach out to them directly. If you wanted more tools, more resources, more features, you could pay as low as $90 a month on a subscription model and get get really cool features powered by AI, trained by expert recruiters that finds and evaluates talent for you in a matter of seconds.

Great question. That's that's that's such an important question because a lot of companies start their their search with not so much a job, but sometimes with a person, or sometimes with a problem or a number of problems. And then they combine those things into one job description and they're like, go find me this person. Well, that's what we call in recruitment like a purple squirrel. It doesn't exist, right? It's just, it's, it's not somebody, there's nobody out there in the market that can do these things. And if there is, very limited by location, compensation, you know, alignment on on some of these other factors. So first thing what we do is we try to get them to get aligned on what the core problem or what the core job actually is. Are we hiring for a CTO? Are we hiring a Engineer? Are we hiring a creative director? Like who are we actually hiring? What problem are they solving? What goals do they need to achieve in the next 30, 60, 90 days? And in a year from now, what would success look like? If you look back and say this was a massive win in this hire, why would it be a massive win? What would they have to do right in order for you to feel that way? And so we kind of map this out looking ahead and we come back. And then we say, okay, this is the person we're looking for today. And this is where we hope that they can be in six months, 12 months from now. And then from there, we just basically extract as much as we can from the company. What are the values? What does success look like? What what goes right? What goes wrong? When somebody performs well, what happens? When somebody performs poorly, what happens? what's the history of the company? Where do you want to go? Do you want to sell? Do you want to raise money? Do you want to give incentives like Phantom Stock or Profit sharing. or do you want your people to be self-managed? Do you want to manage them a little bit closer? So all these things matter. And we build the profile, what we call an ICP, ideal candidate persona. This is like a imaginary avatar for the candidate. And we start our search and we use that as our blueprint. And that's where we go after.

That's another great question. That answer changes based on how I feel at the time sometimes. At the end of the day, New Vine is an agency. The agency model is a very difficult business model for it, no matter what you're doing, whether you're recruitment, whether you're doing AI, whether you're doing marketing. At the end of the day, agency models are very, very relationship-based. So when I see when I think about AI in the future, I always think about

What are the value of relationships that I or that New Vine hold? And my goal, or I should say, my objective over these days have been form those relationships, create bonds that people feel attracted to, they feel value, they feel this is the person or the company that I trust to do this. And so my goal is to form as many relationships, strong relationships with value and enriched, you know. mutually beneficial type of behaviors. And that would lead to massive success for under an agency model. Attached to that, I want to continue to release great features, great tools that would do great services to the world, right? So AI makes that possible and investment in those features and those tools are a continued focus point for me. So Vine AI will continue to invest in that. That will become a more popular product. obviously it's you know a SaaS product, so that's a much more scalable business model. So eventually that could be its own standalone company if we choose to do that. if not, it'll just be a feature that would be available under the same umbrella as well. But yeah, I I see New Unemployment Group being a strong agency, still very much boutique because you know I like the ability to work with with customers of my choosing. As well as form deep-rooted relationships with all my clients. I have very strong relationships with all my clients. I I I respect my clients. We get along great. I understand them. I understand their problems. I have an entrepreneurial background. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. So all of those things to me feel natural. They feel great. They feel beneficial. I'm doing a great service to them. As long as I'm providing value, I feel strongly about that.

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I just Jared Black on LinkedIn. I'm also on YouTube. I have basically a YouTube channel that shares all these methodologies, my ideas, my thoughts, my strategies, my processes. You could just search new button or Jared Black on YouTube. you can also find me on the hierarchy newsletter where I share every week updates, changes. You know, if you were paying attention to the newsletter, you would have heard about the the AI law coming out of the EU. several weeks ago. but you can find me by searching the hierarchy, and that's the hierarchy.com.

My pleasure. Thanks.