HR Meets AI: What Every Professional Needs to Know About AI in Hiring, Res

Welcome, everybody. I'm so glad you could join us today. If you're in the Northeast, the weather's getting nicer and spring is in the air. And I'm glad you took time out of your busy schedules to join us. My name is Ben Mills, and I'm one of the co-founders of the AI Ready Business. We're committed to breaking down AI topics and showing you how you can use AI in your personal and your business life. Effectively and efficiently. I would like to also introduce my partner now and co-founder, Ary Aranguiz.

Hey everybody, welcome, welcome! How is everyone doing? We have a very special guest for you today, Sam Valoo. But before we get started, we are going to take care of some housekeeping items. As always, every week we share with you that this presentation is for informational purposes only. And participants are responsible for conducting their own independent assessment before adopting or relying on any AI tools or recommendations discussed. Attendees should carefully review each AI provider's confidentiality, data security, and privacy policies to ensure compliance with their organization's legal and regulatory requirements. All right, so now that we have that out of the way, Say hello in the chat. We are so glad to have you back. Say hello. We have a special guest, Sam Balu. He is a Chief People Officer. He's going to tell us all about AI in human resources. So please share your LinkedIn profile, share your questions, and we're going to put the link to our networking sheet. We are building up that network, that community. So keep sharing your profiles there. I'm going to add that now. for everyone. And if you don't see it for whatever reason, let us know, DM us, and we will send it to you. And hello, Javier. So Javier says, I was in a recent interview for an AI position. I was tested on various tools, so I'm very interested in this episode. Happy to be in this space with you all. Awesome, that's great to hear, Javier. All right, please say hello in the chat and tell us where you're calling from.

So, Ary, this topic has been coming up more and more. As you know, more and more people have been reaching out to us because HR affects everybody, every level of a business, every part of an organization, whether you're job seeking or you're hiring, it impacts it. And AI is changing how everything is done. So Ary and I felt this was a perfect time to bring this topic to the forefront and get it on the table so we can discuss, learn, and get more information about it. And we're fortunate enough today to have Sam Valu with us, who is a Chief People Officer with over 30 years of experience working with HR departments, staffing, and recruiting. He's been an early adopter of AI from many years ago, and he continually just grows his business and grows his job by using different AI tools. He's been a national speaker, keynote speaker at different events, and he also educates job seekers in all areas of their job search. using AI and using some of the traditional formats. With that said, I'd like to turn it over to Sam and just say welcome.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Ary, for the opportunity. It's a big topic and I know everybody, it's a hot topic. There's a lot of noise going on. But as I tell people, don't worry about the noise, just spend 15 minutes a day to learn something new. We are living in a very completely different world. What I don't care if you're a job seeker, if you're in the job, or if you're looking to upgrade yourself, you will, you will have to touch AI and you will have to learn something new every day. When I started this journey 2 years ago, I was dealing with 200 tools. Today there are about 30,000+ tools that are coming up on and off. AI is no longer nice to have. AI is a must-to-have going forward if you want to do. We'll have some fun with it at the last. We'll do a quick demo. I cannot cover everything in the 30 minutes, but I'll try to do my best to educate people and pique their curiosity. If you need to reach out to us later, you can absolutely do that. AI is learning faster than human beings. That is the scary part, but it's also exciting for us to be a part of it. It's once in a lifetime disruptor, like iPhone disrupted— I forgot what it was, the music thing disrupted in 2000, where you could carry 500 songs on your iPod or whatever that was at that time. AI is going to disrupt every job that you can think about except for the plumbing, electricians, and those type of jobs. You can go to the next slide. All right. Companies are investing millions of dollars in AI, and that is why I started this journey, because as a job seeker, we do not have the advantage of, of learning or spending money on the tools like the companies are doing. HR was always vulnerable because we never had the seat at the table. We were a liability in most of the organizations. Now with AI, it becomes a lot more because a lot of the onboarding, offboarding— I deal in the recruiting part of my business. I've not looked at a resume in a long time. I use resume as a baseline, but I have not opened a resume. A lot of people spend hours reformatting the resume. But the human element is also going to be a part of this journey, and that is where you can make a big difference in terms of how how your experience can come in and how you can use AI as a multiplier to make sure that you can do your job much better, faster, and quicker. Until 3 months ago, AI was just an assistant, but now it is true force multiplier. With all the things that Claude has been updating in the last month and a half, they have been updating every day. They've been dropping new things. And Perplexity is trying to catch up with it. All these LLM tools, doesn't matter which you are using. A lot of you are using ChatGPT probably. I talk LLM as ice creams, right? Somebody likes vanilla, somebody likes strawberry, somebody likes both. But one of the things in this new world of LLM, you need to play around with 2 or 3 tools. The more you play around with the tools, the more the tools are learning about you and your style, your tone, your voice. That is something that you should be doing. Just not use only one. Play around with it with Claude, which is the latest and greatest thing that people are talking about. In the next month, it can be Perplexity. In the following month, it can be Grok. In the following month, ChatGPT can come back. Just play with the tools and get comfortable with it because those are the things that you are going to be doing in your job going forward. In terms of what I can tell everybody on this call is you want to be an AI orchestrator. You're like a music director. You want to know which tool to use when, where, and how. As far as the job seeker goes, the way you apply jobs has completely changed. If you're applying jobs the old way, you're not going to get— I know job seekers always complain about the applicant tracking system, which is called the ATS. And they call it a black hole. But that is, that is what people have done. I tell people, people were cheating 10 years ago by writing their resumes and, and whitening it out and sending it for the machines could be beaten. But today you have to do a 2-pronged approach. One, you have to beat the ATS, which is the applicant tracking system. And next, after you get through that gate, now you have to beat another human who's looking at your resume maybe for 6 seconds or less. 75% of applications do not even make to that second level to the human eye. Some of the tools and tricks, we don't have time to cover all of it, but you can reach out to us, me, and I will send you some things that you can start using immediately. One of the things that Ary asked me is, do AI certifications matter? In some cases it will matter, but the most important thing you want to do is to make sure that you are using AI on a constant basis. You have a Lamborghini at your disposal and you're using it just like a regular car or a regular bicycle. There is a lot of horsepower in the AI that you can use and start using it and start making sure. Practice, practice, practice. Like Allen Iverson, I'm not sure if anybody remembers, you're talking about practice. This one only you will get better with a lot of practice and what somebody does and what you do, they will get different results because it is the memory, it is the instructions, it is a lot of the things what changes for each people to do it. We will run Claude today and we'll run NotebookLM and some of those things. I will show you a quick live demo of what you can do and cannot do. But skills matter and AI skills are going to be paramount. How you can use AI to make decisions quicker, faster, and better. That is the ballgame for any company that they are looking to hire people. From the hiring perspective, what I have seen is people who are afraid to use technology. I'm sure a lot of you are using technology for a long period of time. I'm sure everybody is using GPS today. It is a form of automation. It is a form of thing. Before, we used to do Yahoo or we used to go to AAA to get our maps and do the route. Now you're using Google Maps or Waze or any of those other things. The same way, what I want to do is to pique your curiosity, make sure we can teach you the process, and then you go and build on it and use it 15 minutes, 30 minutes a day so that you can get better at it. We will look at some of these tools that I spoke about. We'll do some live demos. Some of the tools are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Notebook LM is a great tool. Google has introduced a lot of free tools and people don't really use some of those. Gamma is for presentation. The PPT world is done. If anybody is doing PPTs and doing it manually, you should forget. There are a lot of tools available for you to do. Gamma is one of them, Beautiful.ai. There are so many of them. Now Claude can do within itself, ChatGPT can do within itself, Gemini can do within itself. NotebookLM can do within that part of it. These tools are going to mature. What you're doing today will become outdated in 3 months. You need to learn a process to finding new tools. I'll show you Notion so you will see what I'm talking about. Are you ready for the jobs for the future? Yeah, start today, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, upskill strategically what your job One of the prompts I tell everybody to try is, I'm currently a project manager today working for these domains. What will my job look like in the next 3 months with the advent of AI? What should I upskill on? What should I learn? What should I be doing? Can I start the demo, Ari?

Yes. I just wanted to call attention to, I see some comments in the chat here that there— that some people are having some technical difficulties. From our end, everything, everything seems fine. Just remember that you will get the recording. So let's just— yeah.

So as I told you, Claude is the latest and greatest I have a paid version for it. I don't recommend anybody to be paying for it until you get mastery of it. But here is when you log into Claude, you will see something like this, that this is how you will see it says good afternoon, I have my name. But when you go into this part, settings in Claude, you can set it up in any shape or form that you want. If you go to settings, you will see These are all available for free things. You can put your name, account, but here is capabilities. One of the things that Claude did very smart is somewhere in the middle you can see Start Import. If I start import, you can copy this prompt and take it to ChatGPT and paste it there, and you will get your chats you did in ChatGPT or Gemini or any of those things, and you will be able to bring back Whatever the output comes, just paste it here and that memory is added to Claude. It's not like Claude is completely new. Claude can get some of your memory from ChatGPT, Gemini, or other tools that you have been using. One of the things I tell the free people, free version to use it, consolidate your prompts into— think about it, what you want the outcome to be. And think about all the questions, put it as one prompt instead of prompting 5, 6 times and iterating it because you don't go into the technical terms, you're consuming a lot of tokens and you'll say you'll run out of memory and you'll run out of the free version of whatever, how much of it they gave you. Instead of that, you can go to projects. This is something that you should set up. If you're looking for a job, you should say, job postings or whatever you want to do. I'll just show you the project, that job seekers portal right here is— I just, I didn't create it yet. I just created just before this. But here you see memory and instructions. Here is an instruction that I gave it. You're an expert recruiter, career coaching, helping job seekers navigate AI-driven. Whatever the instructions you want, you can give it here and you can edit this instruction as well. I just created on the fly here. Now if I go and add a resume, let me see if I can add a resume for it. I'm not sure whose resume. Here is somebody's. Again, don't put the information. This is a paid version. I'm just going to— Look at it. It will give me— it will do the whole work. Hopefully my tokens will not run out. As this is running, we will look at NotebookLM and I'll come back to that. NotebookLM is a Google free tool. If you're learning something, you can learn this very quickly. If we want to learn something about it, I just say create a notebook. You can upload the files if you already have process documents, you can upload it. You can go to YouTube, you can upload some of the things that you find there, or you can come to any of these places and say, I want to learn. I'm just going to prompt here, learn about AI. It's going to be a big topic, but Let's do that. It will go do whatever it needs to do. It will find— I can do fast research. It will come back with some sources. And if you have YouTube videos that you can— I can create now some of these. I can go to web also, or I can add sources and say, Ary, just keep track of time so you can tell me if I'm running out of time.

Yes, we're— we have about, um, 10 more minutes.

Okay, so I'm, I'm, I'm way ahead of the— so I just did it. I just told it and it brought some sites. I'm just going to say I'm just to uncheck a couple of these things so that I don't want it to do. I just brought a few things.

This is a great demo because we just did this last week. This was our last session that we did.

I'll just show you quickly.

It's a forcer.

Yeah, it is. I can do an audio, it will do a podcast. I can do a slide deck, I can do an infographic. I'm just going to do those things. If you have some tests to take, it can create some flashcards and other parts of it. Let's go back to the job search. It says, uh, which roles, titles you're targeting. Now it's asking questions. Now it is becoming an assistant and it's clarifying questions from me. I'm a senior project manager. I can do project program manager. I can do— that's somebody's resume. I'm not sure who it was. Um, I'm on— I'm looking for hybrid, 3, 1 to 3 days. I can work in healthcare technology. You see that it is acting like a human and asking questions, and now it will create the whole shebang for me. Got it. What compensation and work authorization? It will ask target salaries. It's asking all those things. I'll say skip.

Sam, just to clarify, what you're demoing right now is Claude just Claude.ai. So it's not Claude Cowork, and this is—

No, no, no, no, it's not Claude Cowork. Cowork is only available for the paid version of it. So I didn't— it's all free version of Claude.ai is what I'm trying to show. Yeah, here's a brief thing about the candidate that it gave me, a quick understanding of what it is. Does this look right? I, I confirm it. This is where the human in the loop should be there and it will go do the work. Let's go back to NotebookLM and see if it's still doing it, but I'm sure it will.

Just to clarify also, for NotebookLM, what was the use case that you were doing?

I just did Learn AI. I just did a generic one and it brought websites from there and YouTube or from web or something. And I checked off few because I, I knew we are running out of time, right? But I just picked 2 websites and it's going to go look through it.

Yeah.

Here is an ATS-ready resume that it's going to do for you because that's the instructions I gave in my thing, right? If I go to Claude, I'll show you the instructions that I put there, right? So you can, you can direct it to give exactly what you want to do. You do not want the LLM to hallucinate because they make up stories. If they can't answer, they make up things because they don't want to. It's like, I don't want to create a controversy here. My wife knows everything. At the end of the day, it is what it is. The LLMs don't want to hallucinate. You give it specific instruction, only use my data. If you don't understand it, Ask me clarifying questions. This was the portal that it's running on right now, and this is the instructions I gave. The instructions I didn't— I said, I'm a job seeker, what should I be doing? Giving an instruction. I asked the LLM to create this and it gave me this whole prompt that I can paste in there, and it is going to do all of those things. From a job seeker, from the time you are looking for jobs on the web, And there are tools available for you to automatically apply for jobs. If you're not applying for more than 10, 15 jobs in 1 hour, you are doing something really wrong, right? It shouldn't take 8 hours, 9 hours like the previous. AI will be able to help you to apply for jobs.

Hey, Sam, I just— Sam, I have a quick question for you. What would you say are the top 3 differences today when you're seeking a job than say 5 or 7 years ago? What would you be doing differently today than if you were to seek a job 5 years ago?

I would optimize my job search in such a way that I'm applying for jobs quicker. I'm applying for jobs. I'm targeting the jobs that I'm applying for. Every job that I'm applying for gives me an instruction of whether I'm a good fit for the job or not, where my gaps are. All that LLM is very good in recognizing patterns. If you add a resume and a job description, it tells you how much of a fit you are and whether this job is really in your wheelhouse or not. If it is not, sometimes it will tell you, you can do this, you could cross sections of you and upskilling. Some of those things are quicker, faster, and better if you use the AI, Ben, otherwise— That is one part of it. Then tweaking the LinkedIn, tweaking the things. LinkedIn algorithm changed 6 months ago. You want to make sure that you are utilizing your LinkedIn, you are changing your things. The problems it told me, I'm just not going to read it because we don't have time. It gave me an ATS-ready resume. It gave me everything that I need to do to apply for it. Problems fixed on your old resume, what the resume looks like. It gave me a master service thing. And if I, if I need to go do— if I add the job description, it will compare the job description. So this is what it will do for me. If it will also do a whole LinkedIn optimization, please optimize my LinkedIn.

You made an interesting comment when we spoke earlier that besides your resume, employers now with AI tools are going through your LinkedIn and your LinkedIn is a sort of part of your resume now, whether you like it or not. And you need to keep your LinkedIn up to date, correct?

Absolutely. It is one of the things that in the IT jobs people are doing. The LinkedIn algorithm, before you could go and just like something and the algorithm would— nowadays you have to write something which is at least 15 words in length. Otherwise LinkedIn will neglect it. If you look at a post and just go like it, it's not doing anything for you. If you look at a post, go and comment about it and say, hey, this is something that you need to do. I disagree with the point that the author is making. give your point of view. That's how your LinkedIn optimization works. Here it is. All of this would take so much time for me. You have to hire a coach. I'm not saying don't hire a coach, but you can use this. If I get a job, I can do the research on the company very quickly. I can do the research on the manager. I can do research on the job. It can also do a mock interview for you. 20 to 30, you can do the STAR methodology or you can do the DIRE methodology, and it will give you the questions and answers how you should prepare for the job interview and optimize it. You have these tools which can give all that information at your fingertips in 1 second, and why not use it? Again, if this is what it is telling, it's giving you everything in, in to optimize it. And it does a very good job of what you need to do. And then you customize it. It doesn't know your personal story. That's where your value comes in, where you can personalize your story and say, you know what, I helped the company to become better. I hired 20 people spending less time and my productivity went up 50%. Right. All those things only you will be able to Understand. It asked me a question.

Sorry to interrupt you. We have about 4 minutes left.

Here it's asking me, what do you want to do next? Tailor your resume because that is what I told it to do. Do you want to tell the stories? If I say yes, it will start doing— do all 4, it will start doing it. Let's go to NotebookLM. I'll show you the power of NotebookLM. Here is what it did. It created an infographic, AI Career Launchpad, your 2026 roadmap. It gave you that roadmap which will give you some things that it gave you Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 to learn what you should be doing. You can be very specific to your roles. It is still just generating the slide deck. It will create some of those things. NotebookLM is really a good tool for you to do. I do not watch YouTube videos and spend 1 hour doing it anymore. I take the link from YouTube video. If I go to YouTube, I take the link from YouTube video. Again, my YouTube is probably you will see a lot of things come up. One other thing I'll show you quick because I'm running out of time.

We have about 3 minutes.

Yeah. Let me just show one.

While you're bringing that up, I just wanted to mention also with NotebookLM, you can create a gem. We talked a little bit about this last week. You can create a gem and you can create a coach for yourself as well. As you mentioned, the interview coach, you can put in the job description and create that gem that allows you to practice different interview questions depending on what the role is.

Gem is in Gemini and this one, Claude, the projects are in Claude and CustomGPT is in GPT. Here is what I did. I just copy and then I can go to NotebookLM and just paste that and it will Do all that work for me. And it— I don't need to spend the 25 minutes or 30 minutes what this guy is talking. I don't need to do any of those things.

So, Sam, in closing, what would you say is the best piece of advice that you would give to job seekers?

Use AI tools every day, 15 to 30 minutes. That is absolutely required. And don't, don't be afraid. You're not killing anybody. You're not doing any of those things. One other tool I will show you here, that this is my notion.so, which I love so much. If you go to cheat sheets and you can organize your— these are all the cheat sheets that I copied from LinkedIn. It takes me 1 minute to copy it and everything is here. Now I can refer Claude to go back to my Notion and pull something for job seekers. something on my job for leadership, I can pull it in 1 second. That is, that is the beauty of what it is. Again, I just want to pique your interest. If you want to reach out to me, you can reach out to me. If there's any questions, I can answer some of it.

Thanks, Sam. Thanks so much. I want to thank everybody for joining us today. This is part of our AI Ready Business. We have a newsletter that comes out twice a month. It gives you access to a monthly newsletter to keep you up to date on what's going on. It's also going to give you access to tutorial videos, and we're building an AI community where you can share your information, share your concerns, share your questions, and get AI solutions from everyone that's going through the AI challenge and educational process right now. But once again, we want to thank everyone for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you, uh, next Wednesday.

Thank you so much, everyone. Thanks, Sam. And we'll see you on the recording.

Just drop your information into the Google Sheets.

That's right. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.

And if you want to drop it and connect with me, I will send you some resources. Thank you.