Why Human-First Recruiting Still Wins (Even in an AI World)

What's up guys, welcome to another episode of Recruiting is NoJoke. I'm your host Joe Laugie and this is the Ultimate Recruitment Podcast that brings you a blend of entertainment, known on-sense insights and of course the latest trends. Join me as I expose bad takes in the recruitment industry and get real with town leaders to give you an inside view of the industry. Recruiting is NoJoke. Welcome to Recruiting is NoJoke. I'm your host Joe Laugie. I am as always super excited. I'm back off the road. You guys will have seen the last few episodes were at Recfest in Nashville and now I'm back in my recruitment cave and I have another amazing guest. I promise you guys this is going to be a great episode and I know I say that about a lot of my episodes but this will be the best. I have Nicole Hersh with me Nicole welcome to the show it's good to have you here for anyone that doesn't know you when he gives like a quick bio like who are you what do you do and who do you do it for. Yeah, that's big shoes to fill so let's go I'm hoping we can get a little tactical here today too talk about some real real stuff so I love it cool yeah let's get into it. Yeah yeah yeah so hi everyone my name is Nicole Hersh I have been in Recruiting for 17 almost 18 years now I started off in agency in 2008 and if anyone's in the workforce then what was that like I just want to get into it like 2008 to start in recruiting I had to be insane 2008 so hang on I'm going to make it worse I was recruiting for mortgage companies in Philadelphia oh wow I can't imagine it wasn't good so you were recruiting for like mortgage agents yeah so hiring underwriters and what the demand must have been crazy it was down they was up and I was right out of college didn't have any idea what a regular volume looked like or anything else like that so that was interesting so I didn't think I wanted to be a recruiter based on that experience but I stuck with it and I did agency for almost three years and then I went in house for an edtech I've worked in marketing tech and now working HR tech I am forever grateful for the agency time I met some of my best friends in the whole world there I've worked with many of them multiple times but I love the in-house gig I've been doing that ever since 2011 and now I do recruiting in-house for a company called lattice which is we are best known for our performance management and fully engagement technology we're actually much beloved by our 5,000 plus customers for all of that and yeah it's fun it's cool being on the HR team at an HR company so that's pretty right interesting yeah that's cool I'm curious like when you got into the agency recruiting obviously like 2008 it's a tough time to jump in anything but did you know kind of right away when you got in the agency like hey I actually want to go internal like what was that process like I did not know I was still trying to figure out how to even recruit and what good recruiting look like yeah and what I figured out pretty quickly was that at the time I wasn't a great volume recruiter I found out that I was actually a much better deep dive recruiter so the more technical roles the hunt the tricky matches there's not a lot of people in the market who have this skill set that's actually where I did a lot better where I could take a little bit of time and I think that that made a lot of sense because I was learning and you actually had time to learn through the course of those searches but no I wasn't sure what I wanted to do I studied marketing I thought I wanted to go work at an ad agency and then I thought I wanted to go work in education so I took the option of going in house at an education company as my bridge there and I thought for years and years that I didn't want to stay in recruiting and I took a brief stint on doing more of an education job and then I realized that the reason it took me so long to do that was because I had spent the last 10 years recruiting building up my career recruiting every job that existed in the companies that I worked for and building up recruiting teams from just me and one other person to teams of over a dozen and I said wait a second a couple months after I left wait I love this why did I leave when I went back and never looked back so I love that yeah I mean like you can try and get out of recruiting but it always gets your back back in although in the last few years I know we've seen a lot of people exiting the industry because those ups and downs it can be tough particularly right now we were just right before actually pressing live we're talking about some of the major layoffs that are going on I'm curious like you know you've been around during the great recession and that's kind of when you started does it feel similar is it different what you kind of feel obviously you were in a slightly different position but you're working internal now is it giving you like the 2008 vibes in terms of how many applicants you're getting like what are you kind of feeling and is there a comparison there between that time period and now that's a good question and this is where we should be looking at history just kind of like we should be looking at history and life and be students of what's happened in the past but you got to look forward at the same time when I was doing all of that in 2008 I was working with a lot of people who'd gone through the dot com bubble yeah and drawing a lot of comparisons and saying well this is what was the same and this is what was different and people want to create connections like they want to see as humans we very naturally pattern match so yeah we're very naturally than a pattern match and I think there's a lot of things that are similar the two things that stand out to me to your point about applications versus open jobs that's actually relatively similar although there's a very different dynamics that are going on right now and during the great recession jobs were so much more localized like the jobs were in the metropolitan areas where the companies were so I mentioned fill it the jobs were in filly they were in New York they were in Chicago they were in cleaver wherever it is that the company was that's where the jobs were so there were fewer applications but there is this understanding that you would by and large be in that place what's happening now which is why we're seeing this magnitude of volume change as much as there's all of this about return the office and whatnot there's still a substantially higher number of jobs that have the opportunity to be in even if not fully remote in places there's a couple of different office locations were hey you can be in this office or this office or this office and that has increased substantially so that's the one thing the second thing that I think is it's not the same thing but potentially similar dynamic in 2012 was when LinkedIn recruiter came out LinkedIn existed but that's when recruiter came out if I've got my dates right we was a little earlier than that but there was this sentiment that LinkedIn recruiter was going to do our jobs do our recruiting jobs for us here we are in 2025 and I don't know a recruiter that hasn't used LinkedIn recruiter but I don't think anyone would say it's replaced us and this whole conversation around AI I mean look I hope I'm not eating my words here and you know someone's going to do all of our jobs for us but I think that there's this mentality of like oh this new technology Joel you've written posts about this I think you wrote one just a couple of days ago about it's not just filling roles it's about all of these other things that recruiters need to do to be successful so I think that that sentiment is the same and then once people realized that wait a second I need to adapt to LinkedIn recruiter because this is going to take the power of an agency database or anything else like that and now I have to harness it and the better people were at LinkedIn recruiter those were the people that won the wars for talent as the tech was just up and to the right for like 10 plus years that's such a good point and I think too with the advancements in AI at least what I've seen in terms of what recruiters can use you know I've seen the evolution too with messaging so I think about sequencing where five to 10 years ago you were setting up sequences you were kind of head of people and it was this magical thing I can send one message and follow up with people now everybody's doing that now with a lot of these AI sourcing tools you're able to find similar candidates and you can get an email sent to you with 50 matches for the jobs you're working on and so it seems like it's kind of easier to find people but it's just engagement like this is what I'm thinking about it's like how do you stand out particularly if you're not like a household name like you're not an Amazon you're not a Google you're not a matter you're not a brand that everybody knows like how do you stand out in that noise how do you engage people how do you stand out in the inbox when I think of my own inbox I'm hit up by salespeople I'm hit up by retailers I'm hit up by random solarpreneurs that are starting newsletters my inbox is insane my LinkedIn inbox is insane it's like how do you stand out or like what do you think some of those keys are particularly for those brands that aren't as recognizable like you're looking at reach out someone how do you stand out and just how noisy things are the noise thing is so real and if anyone and a lot of folks who work in recruiting who are listening here and I'm assuming that most people know of that that linked in other inbox but I try to stay out of there because I just love that horrible so starting out is tough and I've rarely worked for a household name kind of company so that's always it the first in house job that I had all of our marketing dollars were spent on our costs like market like building our customers up none of it was for employer brand like we were intentionally in the background of our customers which meant anything that was employer related it was all coming from the recruiting team every last bit of it so I feel that big time and that's kind of what you get an agency to right it's like you necessarily even able to say sometimes the company you're working with or it's confidential so you have to figure out a way to get out of that to get away from the noise I think in that so hot take on this spicy take maybe don't use AI like honest to God this is that everyone is so inundated with AI Slop and by the way I am pro AI I think that the amount that it can do for us as we harness it is already so incredible and the use cases that we have and this is not the place this is the place to be human to be personal this is potentially more geared to my folks who are not doing like the big high volume recruiting because I can imagine that this would be different but I go low volume really high quality really high touch this is funny that you brought this up I felt like we planned this and we absolutely didn't absolutely looking at my own personal and male metrics because as much as I've been in a recruiting leadership role I've been carrying Rex and they've largely been it's that's largely been leadership roles but I've had IC roles early in career mid career so I've recruited all of those in the last couple years my current company lattice and I don't use AI for my outreach I customize the message it's human it's personal I say who I am and what I'm about I talk a little bit about what the hiring manager is about I have a much higher response rate than average I have a much faster response rate so you can see LinkedIn how quickly prospects are responding to you I have a higher response rate on average and the other thing is leaving it open ended it's less about you have to talk to me right now kind of thing and that all of that urgency that comes with things like marketing emails or spam emails that it's like you got to talk to me right now and it's more about relationship building than anything else and that's the thing that's stood out and every single in-mail has something that's personal about that person right whether it's where they work whether it's about a skill set whether it's about some progression that they've made because some LinkedIn profiles have a ton of information and some LinkedIn profiles just have where they worked or it's about making that personal connection and that's actually the thing that gets to be a little bit more fun is looking for who you have in common or who at your company you have in common saying like hey like we both worked with Joel so I worked with Joel at this company and you worked with Joel at that company creating some of that connection and adding some of that like you are actually paying attention to them because the thing for me too I've gotten those outreaches before the outreaches that are spam I ignore the outreaches that are real even though I'm not looking to leave my job I will respond to them I will call them I will say I'm not interested but let me connect to it people in my network it's so clear who is making an effort and who is actually like looking at my profile and by the way what I'm talking about does not take a huge amount of time no that's why I was wondering it's like okay so I think about let's just look a map out of day right like you got eight to ten hours of working okay I get my sourcing my mastering done in 15 minutes like what exactly am I okay maybe I'm just screening calls but it's almost like sometimes it's like why are we trying to speed things up like what else do we have to do and then it's just a race to the bottom then as well so I love that I love the intentionality behind it and I think that's how you keep that human in the loop and I think with something like outreach it's so critical because it's like you're representing your brand especially with what you're doing too in like HR tech they could be a buyer you know they could be connected someone who's a buyer I love that too in terms of thinking about it open ended and then also thinking about okay maybe they respond and say I'm not a fit but if they trust that you're real and you're genuine then maybe they introduce you to someone else as well absolutely I get that actually more often the further in my career that I have gotten and I remember I'm thinking of my first agency boss then I moved to a different but I'm remembering like did you ask for referrals and how I was like how you get referrals from this you know someone who I don't even know and I get it now right and I you know it's because you it's like a what's in it for me and you have to think about what's in it for them and yeah I get referrals from people all the time they're like hey this sounds I'm actually starting a new job next month but I actually know someone who would be great for this if you are that compelling and I wanted to add on to what you were saying yeah I'm representing my company I'm representing myself too yeah that's new to my LinkedIn profile that they're seeing and as much as I've been with companies for long periods of time that we don't work in 40-year stints anymore we work in like totally two to 10-year stints at the absolute most so you're still representing yourself and I love that best recruiters who I know everyone thinks that roller dexas have gone out but we know maybe to some extent they have but when you are operating with this like high integrity human personal touch people remember that let's say you change companies in a year from now and you reach back out to someone think about how much they recognize your name yeah and if they had a good experience with you so yeah you're representing your company but you're representing you as a person too this is huge across the board too we were talking about and another show I was on the critical and foreign right now being curious about AI but I cannot get away without thinking about how important intentionality is with relationships with connections with humans because it's just something that's not going away and it's like in everything that you're saying intentional with your messaging right you're trying to create that real human connection but at the end of the day like that as recruiters whatever area you're in if you're looking for a job if you're a salesperson if you're in HR whatever field you're in that ability to connect with people and that network that you have to meet is just becoming more and more valuable and it's like it is kind of like your brand but it's also your network as well and it's like this culmination of both of them together I'm curious like obviously I love that approach by the way of without reach getting not being so AI reliant and I'm 100% on board with you what are some areas that you are excited about and you mentioned like AI is helping you in a lot of ways like how do you I guess assess where you use AI in your process unlike when you're working with your team how are you looking at like okay how do we implement and what are the processes we're looking at actually using AI and so we can get better with some of this human outreach. Totally and this is where I'm always thinking how do we keep the relationship first because recruiters have such hard jobs there's so much to do I think about I probably shouldn't love these but I love the means that's comparing recruiters to other workers and how like recruiters will they're at the hospital and they're still like taking a call and we accept this job right in the wedding day just the wedding day yeah the whole shabang there so it's true I work to my honeymoon I'm sad to say it's sad I closed a deal though it was nice yeah I get some grief for my husband on this as well but there's the amount of times that I've been on my old school wired headphones pacing around gesturing as I'm on the phone and it's a couple's besides what do you do close in a deal leave me out exactly I'm close in a deal close in the candidate exactly so I think about all of the areas of recruiters jobs that like you think about like what gives recruiters the energy and the enthusiasm and what makes them feel oh this is just a drag on my time and yeah it's important but you know so for those things I think about and by the way it's not AI interviewing it's not it AI interviewing oh you see my post this week about this too like where I don't know I won't get into that you know I found out the AI interviews that's interesting I'm not a fan of the AI interviews yet I just think the technology is not there yet okay I think it could be we'll see I'm actually hopeful I implemented video interviewing through a non AI but just video interviewing which was took a ton of change management back in like 2016 and no one was doing that and I got a ton of flak for all of that so we can talk about all of that but I beg you well it's like that's one of the you want to go trending on anywhere you want to go on in like recruiting hell on Reddit just tell everybody that you instituted one-way video interviews that's people hate that I don't know which like I kind of get it but then I'm also like I don't know sometimes I think people over people kind of over-inflate things a lot I don't necessarily see that big of a deal with it but I know people don't like it well let's stay on that for a second so the one that I implemented in 2016 we had a very narrow use case and we were hiring basically inside sales people and the amount of time that it was taking us we were behind hiring for that role for the literal years wow and it was behind before I got there it was behind when I was there there is I worked with one person on my team in particular and she started off as my intern became my like recruiting coordinator junior recruiter and she is a brilliant operational mind and she was the one who was my partner in setting this up and what we did was we're like how do we make this really high touch how do we make this great experience for our candidates we recorded professional videos with our CEO our head of sales okay managers and I see you throughout the sales organization people from the HR team to do intros about what our company was all about intros about what our sales organization and the values of that sales organization were and what you would get from a career at the company we had managers and ICs and HR people recording the questions so that way it was this like very like high touch experience even though it was one way so this is the thing that takes a ton of setup so we had to almost like go slow we went so fast the year we got it done and we got a ton of positive feedback from candidates and it was actually more inclusive in a lot of ways because instead of candidates needing to do interviews during our working hours which was all East Coast time nine to six or what have you we had people who were working retail jobs or had family responsibilities that wasn't going to work they could now do their interviews any time of day they didn't need a laptop they could do it on just recorded on their smartphone okay and we had a handful of situations where someone was like I was just so nervous or like okay like here you go and it was I think I can count the number of times we did that on one hand and it was even less than that and we gave people the opportunity to rerecord we got all of our higher like the first year we implemented it because we had it kicked off in like the beginning of a calendar year I told you we were behind for five years straight we got all of our hiring done by August that year and there you go great response from candidates our quality of hire went up we still had recruiters actually like anyone who passed a video interviewer the recruiter would still call them and say like hey got your video submission just wanted to confirm a couple details for you see if you had any questions for me but then she was able to knock out dozens of those calls in a day because they weren't scheduled phone screens and they were just quick touchpoint calls where she was still building the relationship with them and people loved it they're like this is great it's not a really heavy interview process so it's an example of something that's not AI but it is some automation well that's what I'm interested about though because kind of what you described I'm like those are a lot of the arguments for like an AI interviewer right like you get thousands applicants and you have an AI kind of screen then the recruiter can go into those calls with a little you know they can kind of dig a little bit deeper in person so I'm curious is it just like you don't think the text where it's at or I guess I'm curious because that's a lot of the same arguments for the AI interviewers I think the AI will get there but I think that the tech is just I haven't seen anything great yet so I'm hopeful that it's going to get there very shortly and then here's the other thing that's a factor here too which I hate having to say this because I'd rather just go fast and figure stuff out there are also regulations that are coming out at the state level around automatic decision making where by AI the candidates have to have the opportunity to opt out and I think that there's probably going to be so there's going to be regulation coming that means there's usually litigation that's coming I haven't seen enough of the safeguards that the providers of the AI interviewing and again I could be wrong I haven't done an exhaustive look at all of this so that's so I mean it's like we just had a conference and there was I think 105 vendors and I want to say at least 60% of them were AI interviewers it's like that's so many yeah so it's like I want someone to come at me in the comments tell me that I'm wrong and I would love to be wrong about this but as recruiting professionals right now we need to rely on the folks who are creating the technology and distributing the technology to help us with safeguards around the regulations that are coming you think about something like GDPR and GDPR was a really big deal for a long time and now every applicant tracking system in order to be GDPR compliant has all the safeguards in it that's all built right in yeah built in that I've seen yet to any of these AI interviewing things yet so I think we also have to be it's this combination of I think the text got to get better the rules are rules but at the same time I think we've got to be a little conservative at this moment in time when everything is so new like I'm not going to be the one to say to be on the front page of a newspaper or to have a lawsuit or something like that because we said let's just go for it so that's my big wish my call to action for all the folks out there who are building AI interviewing I think it's got incredible potential but we got to do it right for the candidates first and foremost and we got to do it right for the recruiters yeah and I think jumping into things it is a dangerous game as well I mean I've already seen a couple of AI interviewers trending on social media because people are smart you know how to mess with things and kind of make you look better than it and so I think it's being smart I think my hope is that the tech does get there and I think in this moment in time one of the biggest challenges is there's a big supply of a certain type of talent and there's just not that much demand for it and I think like I've seen it for a number of years with recruiting I mean it's just such a good example where I saw it firsthand I was recruiting recruiters in 21 and every recruiter I talked to had eight offers and they were making so much money working remotely and they're like I'm not interested and then it was like literally in a six month span same recruiters are reaching out to me my racks are going low I don't know what I'm going to do I don't only do a freaking out and now it's kind of just spread to different areas and so with these corporate positions we're now like you said one of the big differences between 2008 and now is it's just way easier to apply to jobs and everything's gone online and now it's even easier to put together a resume because you got chat GPT so you got these like AI smart job seekers and they're clogging up the system and so I think probably the biggest thing I would be excited about with any type of AI interviewer is I just imagine a world where you apply for a job and I love that opt-in opt-out but I love the idea of like kind of forcing people to think a little bit more about the jobs that they apply to so we can just kind of on both sides get rid of the numbers game because the numbers game right now is just not helping anyone and when I coach jobs because I tell them like hey you've got to apply to more jobs than you think oh yeah which adds to the numbers game but it's also like you can't just tell it jobs you behave just apply to five jobs a month you'll be fine they've got to keep the volume up because it's competitive but then at the same time you've got to balance that with the quality like you still have to apply to jobs you're qualified for and even the misinformation out there about say qualification isn't can I do the job qualification is okay from the hiring managers perspective how much of a risk is it going to be for them to bring you on board and unfortunately they're looking at what have you done what have you done in the past because their boss is going to say why did you hire this person if you can't show on your resume you've done similar work it's tough so I think if AI can promise like a solution that helps candidates be more effective and helps recruiting teams I'm all on board for it and to your point it's what we don't want is just like people to get lazy and go and just let AI kind of take the wheel and start selecting people I think that's the danger there and I don't think that would happen intentionally I see it more of happening is like hey we're just overwhelmed and this is a solution to help us not be overwhelmed or I can not change right yeah yeah yeah I think the don't let AI take the wheel is perfectly put so I'm curious like have you seen any really good AI interviewing yet I've seen a couple of those like what I really pay attention to with any type of tech as well as just like the people behind it so like I'm more interested in like people who genuinely care and then people who don't and what I mean by that is there's a lot of people just in tech in general they're in it for like a quick acquisition or they just want to be rich right and I'm not saying like making money is bad thing necessarily but I listen a lot of like hey I've heard candidates are really struggling and it's really short and I've heard recruiting teams are really struggling and I want to create a solution like help that's what I'm listening to behind the tech and to be honest with you I think a lot of the tech is kind of similar like I've seen the voice AI interviewers I've seen kind of the classic chatbot type type things and I think from the candidate perspective it's really interesting because I think a lot of recruiters assume like oh all candidates they wouldn't like it but I've interviewed real people and it's really 50/50 I hear a lot of people saying I feel less judged with technology than a human because they might have had experiences with humans where they felt judged and maybe the recruiters on there like they can hear them taking notes and being like mmm mmm and they're feeling judged and it's like then like well robots not gonna judge me in the same way where I think most people think for a long time it was like well the AI is gonna be super biased but what I hear from candidates sometimes like maybe won't be as biased as a human so I don't think there's like a one way solution which is what I think it's hard and like to your point even with your team like you're thinking about okay what it's painful for you as a recruiter one of the things that you don't enjoy doing one of the things you're good at and you enjoy doing even that I think with recruitment teams like I know some people who love like I don't know taking notes and they just like they love taking notes and I know the people who hate taking notes I think with some of these tools it's like trying to come up with what things that are flexible don't go best for the individual and there's like how do we kind of bake in some of that customization just to know like okay this is actually probably better for this person maybe not so great for that person so my rambled way of saying like yeah I don't know there's a lot and a lot of change what are you paying attention like how do you keep yourself upskilled with this because I know a lot of times people are saying like hey stay curious with the tech stay up-to-date how do you do that and you also asked me that I didn't answer you does directly because I wanted a you know a tangent I'm using so I'll bundle those together and I think you're right too it's there was one that came out and there was someone who I think I looked at this person's LinkedIn profile and they had worked in tech for like six months and said that recruiters were gonna be obsolete in six months and I was like stop yeah I don't think that's right as honeyways yeah especially when you set like just a tip for any vendor if you're selling into a space probably good to not say that you're just gonna make everything obsolete within the space like just a general like at least lie and say this is gonna help you and be better right like I literally met with those a really big thing in a conference there was someone who was walking around they like yeah recruiters are gonna be replaced by next year and I'm like dude you're at a recruiting conference no your audience yeah exactly well put so in terms of how to stay up on it and in terms of what we're actually doing we implemented bright hire two and a half years ago it took some change management I would have a riot on my hands if we ever tried to remove bright hire I love the AI notes we also love the metadata that tells us talk time in terms of like interactivity ratios between the recruiter or interviewer and the candidate is there any bias that is existing in terms of male or female candidates getting more questions or fewer questions or different questions things like that which has been awesome it now gives interview coaching insights to people and if anything that's like sometimes it tells me good job and I'm like that's pretty cool I'm getting coached on interviewing I don't really get that much at this at this point so I'll take it but that's something that works really well because we have structured interview processes call intelligence interviews everything is built out on our ATS we have faster and more complete scorecards I have my entire executive team filling out scorecards for apple contracting system that has never happened to me before and they've been awesome about it and I'm going to attribute a big part of that to bright hires interview intelligence the other thing that we're tinkering with and trying to stay up on right by the way I love that because I think sometimes I've heard people get critical with the note takers and I'm like no interview intelligence that's where the value is because then you can train and you can keep people accountable and you can like help them get better can you talk about that more versus like just the it's a note taker like it's not about the note taking understanding like what's going on in the interview anyway I wish that was talking about more it should be talked about more and it gives us when there's more data there I mean we've been using it for two and a half years and the thing that we've been able to put together is like an actual legitimately good quality of higher assessment and by the way I know quality of higher can be a little debatable contentious even and I don't think there is one perfect way to measure it but what we are able to do because we have all of this data from our interviews now because we've got the scorecards but then we also have transcripts right from our interviews and we've got 102 percent opt-out rate we do over 7,000 interviews in a calendar year kind of thing with our recruiting team of five so wow all interviews right that's that's the recruiters interviews higher manager interviews coding team interviews everything we can now link what strengths did we correctly identify in the interview process what areas for coaching did we correctly identify in the interview process not just the recruiting team but the interviewing team too and I say areas for coaching because there is no perfect hire will stop no one and a year the thing that you said Joel is so accurate about people need to have done the exact job in order to get hired which is can be lazy hiring in some points of view sometimes my own as well of like as opposed to seeing the potential in people's progression of work experience but that's another totally story for another time I know I was just saying that as a point of like that it's just again people want to do the easy way they don't want to take the risk right so that's like what they default to a lot of the time but like you said like being able to identify potential understanding who are those future people who are going to do great things that's very hard for people to nail that though within recruitment which is what I found it's like we just default to what have you done if you done it before great in this and I have to think about it yeah yeah can you bring your rolodex along because that's what's going to make you successful in the sales role it's like okay perfect it's like hiring accountants right out of big four it's exactly that because it's signaling because big four has all of the training and the structure and everything else like all the controls in place already so it is what it is but all that to say the interview intelligence piece and pulling together quality of hire we can now actually assess that with a much higher level and we're pulling in 90 day reviews which we do through a lattices zone performance management tool and we're matching those things up and that allows us to come back and iterate on our interview process and say hey actually we're doing pretty well in this area or hey we're actually seeing a pattern where there's something that we're missing in our interview process we can iterate on that and improve our interview process because we have this interview intelligence that we I think every person who's recruited for a year or for 10 years or for 30 years has had incomplete scorecards and the interview intelligence tools just bypass that completely I love that even I just think of interview training in general I think that's one of the things I noticed just getting into recruitment from initially was like how can we ask in the same question over and over and over and it's like six rounds of interviews and why do you want to work here it's like people just default to the same questions I just think yeah this is where interview intelligence can come in you could figure out like are we asking the same questions over and over do we need to ask the question who do we need to train up is a really great interview who isn't and it's like that's how you get better and that's what I love about I love that more than anything and yeah it's nice not to take notes but that's not the actual value of this stuff which bonus it's a bonus yeah it's a bonus the other thing that I would say that has been I don't say it's been a foreign in my side ever since I was started in in house recruiting but I think about weekly updates and you think about on our Friday and Friday is such a prime time in recruiting in so many ways of like you're trying to get an offer out before you know you're running a debrief you're trying to get an offer out before the weekend the candidate maybe as a competing offer and then you're thinking about the rest if you're recload and sending out your weekly update to a hiring manager or department head or an executive or whatever it might be and the time that it takes to pull data and some Apple contracting systems are getting way better at this and there's other tools out there like gem and so on and so forth and I think they're great and I think they're getting better all the time that's the other thing by the way that's different from the great recession is that the tools that recruiters have at their disposal I have never seen anything like it and there's been an explosion of tools or there's some slop out there too but there's so much more that's available to recruiters but we're doing some experimenting with AI is actually building bots agents whatever you want to call it in slack which is the primary chat tool that we use at my company and we're pulling reports out of our ATS and having the agent take care of writing the report and automatically to slack tonight you have it to where like a hiring manager could just ask a question and get kind of like an answer and an update from an agent or we're working on that we're training it on that now because we care more about them getting the right answers like not hallucinating in things we have that set up for our recruiters to be able to pull things like yeah the search is going amazing you know like it's not though you're just doing the chat gbt thing or you're just being nice to me right we've got other things set up where recruiters we have this agent set up where recruiters can retrieve salary ranges salary tier so as opposed to saying like what geographic tier is Ann Arbor Michigan or what geographic tier is Phoenix Arizona it'll just and like looking at where that is on the map is that 50 miles from another major metro we've got a wiki that has all of them listed out so it just returns all of that and then going and looking in the compensation system and seeing like this job family at fist level and this tier and it just returns all of it for the recruiters when they're just on the phone so they don't have to try to triangulate information that took some training and obviously that comp data needs to be accurate it can't hallucinate something like that so our next step is creating more like recruiting wiki self-serve for our hiring managers we're really close really because you think you'll have somebody responsible for like the quality assurance on that at some point like I guess how do you kind of manage that yeah that's the question mark to be honest with you because when you're training the data it's like okay that's one of the reasons that we haven't released it to hiring managers yet is because right now we've got a bit of a control that it passes through the recruiter to just kind of spot check it before it gets pushed to the hiring manager the department head yeah which is why I think we were talking all that hype about AI replacing recruiters there's obviously a lot of fear out there about AI replacing all these different job fields I don't think what I've seen is you still need that knowledge base you still need the people who just know and can just sniff okay that's good information that's bad information like that is still so valuable because the reports of the hallucinations and just wrong information has actually been going up with a lot of these tools and at the end of the day you still need to be a subject matter expert and that's why it's important still to just know it there's still so much value in that and I think sometimes people are overestimating or they're underestimating the value of just knowing what's true and what's not it's still so big and I've also noticed that and I've seen the studies around just people getting lazy with AI and I was thinking about that today with the Google search where it's like you just type it in it's like now we don't have to go look for the answer on the website it just tells you what the answer is but that yeah it's just a scary thing to think about especially in recruiting where it's like you're just going to take the word of AI that summarized a resume and said that they're a good fit for the job description is like no like you got to call the person and talk to them so and you still going to be able to sniff out like whether someone's like real or not or without telling the truth so there's so much value in that yeah there's actually a really good study that Josh person just he's on BBC I'm just double checking make sure I get the percentage right but something like 45% of AI queries are resulting in erroneous answers and it's because the more crazy which it's like starting with law of small numbers and it's like oh 2% error but then it's getting magnified in these LLMs so there's all sorts of interesting things about okay what is that going to result in for a company that are creating these AI agents and like how do you create guardrails and things like that I'll send you the article it's actually I was reading through and I was like it's something that I feel like we're intuitively understanding and this quantified it and I was like oh cool so it's good I just don't honestly though I'm like sting me to the end like why are they getting all this data from like well they get a lot of the data from like the internet and I'm like what is the internet proved to be like that accurate I'm like I don't know anyway obviously there's a lot of good information on that but if they were like we trained our LLM on like scientific papers it'd be like oh I trust that but then when it's like yeah we trained on our data of reddit I'm like reddit ever it's like helpful sometimes but there's also a lot of weird stuff on there like the drag recruiters to the dirt all the time I don't want that being what the data is trained on so okay so interview intelligence sounds like some of these interactions are you doing anything and I know we're kind of wrapping up for time here but are you doing anything candidate wise what's your thought with this kind of overall candidate experience surely there's a lot of what we could do better like what are some of the things that you're doing it sounds like you've got some pretty good processes there but just curious for other recruiting leaders or even just other recruiters what are some things that you're seeing on the candidate side of things as far as candidate experience yeah this is where I don't know if this is spicy or not but it's the non AI answer and I think that AI has the potential to be so powerful in so many ways but you've got to have just bullet proof foundation right have your ATS clean is a whistle in terms of like how you have things set up and all your email templates if you use a scheduling tool and so on and make sure it's clean consistent stages across your entire organizations you can do really good reporting and that's when you can start to layer AI on top but from a candidate experience perspective forgive me this is a bit of an old school answer but the two most important things are prepping candidates for interviews and picking up the phone and calling them in between their interviews not like in between like oh you've got an interview at one o'clock and then later at three three I'm saying like from one stage to the next yes agency right there yeah and I mean I think half the people who have worked on my recruiting teams have come from agency and half of them have come from in-house in terms of like how they've come up and that is the one thing you pick up the phone and you talk to them because that's the other thing that like an AI or a fake candidate if you are building your relationship with your candidates all of my recruiters know right now the likelihood that their candidates are going to accept our offer or not and they had they are right right and I'm not saying we have a perfect offer accept rate ours are way higher than industry benchmarks you know we're consistently above 85% were usually over 90% offer accept rate and so on and we're really fortunate for that but it's because we pick up the phone so like from a candidate experience perspective the way to differentiate yourself is what other people go and do like sure you can send an email and you're going to have some candidates who are going to prefer that yeah but pick up the phone have a conversation be real like people are craving that human connection so true that for them you were going to be for my in-house recruiters who are out there you're actually going to work with these people right like your company this is your future go-worker yeah I think past guess that we had is actually recently passed away I met Lavry over at UPS like led the whole hiring for them and one of the things that always stuck out to me like we talking about just Canada experiencing just like transparency communication he'd always just say like every single and obviously with the UPS they're a massive company and they have so many customers but he's like every single candidate is a potential customer so we need to treat them that way and what I'm going to take from this is treat everybody like they're going to be your co-worker because likelihood is you know if that's a top candidate they will be but you're going to see that person at the whatever you have like your annual retreat got offered retreat and I think it's like those types of mindsets like we sometimes just need to refresh because I get it like I've done those means before it's like the best part of recruiting is the people the worst part is the people but it's like people of people and it's like sometimes we just forget and it's like I know how corny it is when it's like don't forget behind every application is a human they can be corny but the reality is it's just true and I think sometimes I love recruiters we get beaten up on both sides like the higher manager blames us the candidate blames us like we just get blamed but it's like we have to like not get jaded by that just remember you said keep in mind this person is going to be so when you're working with or it's like candidate right now maybe three years from now or four years from now they will be working with you or maybe you move company and you move to their company like you said in the beginning you have your own brand someone's like oh that's a recruiter that ghosted me now they work for us you know it's like what brand are you creating again with all that being said I think there's always this is where it's just like having just empathy and grace for people and being like all right and just being honest with yourself like yeah okay maybe I made a mistake not get it that's why I think on social media sometimes we've got to play like hey where are humans too like sometimes we do make mistakes but are we able to admit that and like oh those things as well as just being human that's being real the transparency I love that transparency I don't have the answer right now and that's I'm gonna get you the answer but yeah be in real be in human pick up the phone a lot of my big takeaways here I think I'm just because I've got a training coming up where I'm gonna be helping a team out with some outreach and I'm like use a high sparingly like that first contact the more human the better especially nowadays I see on social media it's like the more real content you do that is what people are looking for it's kind of crazy so you're giving me my secret sauce here Joel well you're giving everybody now everyone's no one's gonna be using AI all these AI vendors are gonna be pissed up but Nicole what's the best place for people to find you where can they find out about opportunities about lattice as well where's the best place for people to go come find me on LinkedIn I'm pretty easy to find Nicole Thompson Hirsch even though I just go in Nicole Hirsch nowadays at lattice.com we're pretty cool so there's a lot of cool stuff that we're doing we actually have I think magical the only way to describe it AI agent that we've deployed so it's pretty incredible so come check out lattice.com lattice.com slash careers we'd love to hear from you okay so as always if you're listening in the show you want to connect when to call just be patient she's not hanging out on LinkedIn all day like me so be patient and then just say hey heard you on the recruiting is no joke podcast as well that always helps out and as always guys if you go to www.therealistrecordid.com you can find some more resources if you're reaching out to me I get a lot of messages as well so just be patient but appreciate all of you guys and we'll be back next week with another episode not as good but still pretty good but Nicole again appreciate your time thank you so much for spending time with us great conversation I'm sure we'll go back and listen to it over and over and hopefully we'll be able to meet in real life soon love it thanks for having me Joel all right we'll talk soon thanks so much for tuning into this episode of recruiting is no joke if these conversations resonated with you don't forget to hit the follow button to stay updated on our latest episodes to stay connected with me head over to therealistrecordid.com it's your go-to place for more content connections and a deeper dive into the world of recruitment see you next week