From ATS Nerd to Recruiting Innovator with Daniel Miller

Hey everybody, happy Friday! You are live. At Shelly's Alley. You're live and in the alley Friday, March 13th. I just realized as I looked at the date, it's Friday the 13th. It doesn't happen frequently, but I do occasionally get a 13th Friday on these, uh, on these podcasts. Very, very Freddy Krueger— Jesus, Freddy Krueger-esque of me, right? Um, Friday the 13th. So don't be scared, it's, it's just a regular podcast, nothing special. Today we have a good friend and special guest, Daniel Miller, who a lot of you probably don't know because he's been kind of behind the scenes building things and definitely, you know, a very seasoned expert in the industry. I have arguably the youngest person to start in staffing that I know of. In other words, I've never met anyone else aside from Daniel who started in staffing and in recruiting at an earlier age. He's been in the business since he was 15 years old. And if you ask yourself why that happened, well, family business, right? Your dad, your pops had a business in staffing, and that's how you got into it.

Actually, I was in high school and it was a co-op job at a local MRI franchise company. So it wasn't even my family business. Wow.

Yep.

Like an intern.

Yeah. That's pretty— so that was like, what, 3 years before, 2 years before you graduated high school?

Yeah. It was an amazing experience. And I stayed with them all through college.

Wow. And that was that MRI?

That was MRI. Yep.

It was back then. It was a franchise model, right?

Yeah, and then I started helping other MRI companies as like a corporate trainer, so I had a lot of fun.

So you learned how to do this and then went out and started teaching about like ATSs and CRM. Now folks, this is a while back, like early 2000s, where, where CRMs were, were still not kind of an accepted thing in recruiting. I think I built my first recruiting-related CRM, not ATS. My first ATS was— do you remember CPaaS from Lotus Notes, like way back in the '90s? Um, that was my first one. But, but my first CRM officially, I think I, I have to say it was a sales— I took Salesforce and sort of forced it into a recruiting CRM, and this was probably 2003, 2004. Maybe at Google. So CRM was definitely not a thing in, you know, in recruiting yet. It was still very much sales. What was the CRM that you first started working with?

I actually started with PC Recruiter back in the early 2000s.

So it was an ATS though, right? Or was that—

it was an ATS and a CRM. So it was an all-in-one. So I got experience working in all-in-one day one, thank God, because then I would be like you building out, you know, customizations and this and that, you know.

Yeah, it was— we didn't have anything when I, when I was actually at Google. We had, um, the— they might still use this now, it's called MoMA, but basically it's their internal— it's Google's internal system, HRIS, that they wrote. And it was— it started out as an ATS, but it didn't have any CRM functionality. For example, you couldn't really do like email campaigns and, you know, anything like that. So that's what we brought Salesforce. And then when I went to Microsoft, you're gonna, you're gonna fall off your chair if I— if you recognize this. When I went to Microsoft, I worked— I created a CRM on a tool called InfoPath.

I don't even know.

InfoPath was the precursor, was— it was Microsoft's CRM and several other things that, that later on got merged with when they bought Great Plains, which was the big CRM. And then later on, all of that became Dynamics, right? So this was like literally a form-based interface for essentially a VB database of sorts. Um, crazy. So I had to build it from scratch at Salesforce and at Infopat. So I feel your pain. But anyway, folks, uh, Daniel, after, after a career in staffing with MRI, went to help rebrand a company and got some experience in corporate recruiting as well. So, you know, staffing, corporate recruiter, and then product management. And in his latest incarnation is the founder and also chief product officer of a platform called Recruiter PM, where the PM stands for Project Management, not Afternoon. It's not Recruiter— it's Recruiter Product Management. So, and, um, Recruiter PM, I, I came across when I was doing some research about ways that I could potentially use AI and automate. And Recruiter PM has a whole bunch of built-in, um, features that connect with other systems, and it's, it's very well integrated. It's almost like It's like everything you would ever need. I'm not trying to advertise for you here, by the way, but explaining what it is. If you think of recruiting as project management and you realize that it's more than just a CRM or an ATS, you also have, you know, processes and workflows and it connects all of that whole business process into a single platform, which is pretty powerful. And I was exploring using that for a business that I was running at the time. So that's how we met, um, face to face. But before that, you had been, you had been reading— tell me, tell me again, you had been reading the Cyber Sleuthing newsletter, the Job Machine newsletter back in the MRI days? So all the way back to what, 2000, 2001?

Yeah, so I actually looked up to you when I was 15 years old as like the Boolean genius guru head of recruiting because I used your Boolean guide from Job Machine and you would teach all the recruiters how to do Boolean because of you. So you meant a lot back in those days, you know, to my training and my upstart in the industry.

That's great. And then you were using the cheat sheet to actually teach other people how to do it. That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, it still works today. It still works today. Yeah, for the most part. You know, if people ask me like, oh, did— is, is, is sourcing gone now that there's AI? And like, you know, we, we have AI source— it's like Yo, I mean, it's not— it's the same thing. Like, when I was experimenting with and trying to figure out how to get AltaVista and, um, remember Hotbot and, you know, all those original search engines, I was trying to get them to give me the results that I wanted. What I was doing was, was writing prompts. I mean, you know, that's what they were. They were prompts. The original search engine queries, the Boolean syntax was just my way of trying to figure out how to get the results that I needed. And today, prompt engineering with AI and all that stuff is really the same thing. Um, just, you know, it's a different process, but it's the same idea of start with this and then, oh, that didn't work, let me try that, let me try the other thing, and, you know, iterate and all that. But man, from, from ATS nerd to ATS founder, you have been— this has been quite a trajectory. In, um, in, you know, your career life, if you will, working both agency and the corporate side and being head of a product, basically. Um, where did you— I want to know, what was, what was the moment where you made— maybe there wasn't one, but you sat down and you said, the systems that we're using are just bad, there's got to be something better, right? Like, was it— did that happen? Were you sitting around going Man, I'm so tired of all these broken systems. There's gotta be something better. And then, and then you decided I'm gonna have to build it. Is that kind of how that happened? Yeah.

As an agency founder and even when I was doing corporate recruiting, I had to find the best systems. But every time I thought I found the best system, I would need like 5 or 6 or 7 other integrations to get everything I wanted. And then when I wanted certain analytics and I was obsessed with metrics analytics so I could forecast and figure out what was going on in every single side of recruiting. I didn't get exactly what I wanted. And instead of like annoying the product teams at all these companies and, and then even training new employees, it was such a pain to teach them all these integrations. And then this system, everything got so frustrating that I said, listen, I'm gonna leave my own company. I'm gonna just focus on, you know, the ATS. And I had my partner take over the agency and You know, thank God it was a really good direction because I was able to build everything I could possibly dream of in one platform, which is really what was my goal, you know.

So it was, it was almost like putting the Lego pieces together, kind of, or the— yeah, I see. So, so there wasn't like an aha moment where you're like, ah, there's got to be a better tool, but rather you had been putting together all the different pieces to what you needed enough that you realize, hey, there's an opportunity here.

Yeah, and it really became an aha moment when I was training new recruiters in our system. They got so frustrated that they had to leave to do this and leave to do that. And, you know, training was— it took longer than ever. And, you know, I figured if training is an issue, then just imagine if I had a system that was so much easier that they can learn it in a day or two and then just jump right in because everything is just another button. There's not another system. And so that was my aha moment during training when all these recruiters were complaining about using too many systems, you know.

That was the aha moment. Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so, um, you've seen a lot of angles, right? Different, you know, looking at it from an agency. Agencies have needs for— agencies need ATSs for different reasons than corporate necessarily. Um, you know, corporate might have like some compliance needs that maybe agencies don't necessarily have. Um, you know, it's, it's— agencies have more than one employer versus an employer usually only has one employer. So there's these different perspectives, right, from the agency, from the ATS, from the staffing firm. But what's the biggest, in your opinion, the biggest design mistake that most platforms, whatever you want to call them, in our business still make that drives recruiters crazy, where you still get people complaining like, I can't believe they did this. What is there one thing you can point to that is like the most momentous, arguably, uh, hair-pulling design mistake, or not really?

I think there's two things. If I could be you know, be honest with you. Yeah. And they work hand in hand. I think that there's workflow issues and I think that there's pipeline visibility to really understand where the bottlenecks are issues. And these are two things that really hurt you with predicting your future and understanding where issues lie in your company, whether it's an agency understanding the issues with their clients individually or corporate understanding their issues with departments, hiring managers, what have you. Workflows need to adjust to departments, to companies, to different clients. And understanding these bottlenecks is something that still is a, you know, a gap in a lot of platforms. Some people are so caring about like how many days it takes to close, but who cares about that? Like, where is the issue? The issue is actually I send you the candidate that gets hired on day 7, but it takes you 60 days to actually make the hire. Let's dive in deeper. Days to delivery is more important than how fast the job is closing when you're trying to analyze, but people still are on old school basic metrics, and I think understanding things deeper is important, you know.

So what— understand, so how does, how does that get lost? Like, is it because of reporting? Is it because of search? Like, it's there, you're saying the data is there, it's just not coming to the surface, right?

I would say that a lot of times people are using very, you know, dashboards that are already pre-made, and maybe they don't have the real data to dive in deeper, and they can't customize what data is more important for them to understand how they can move the needle.

Way of showing, here's what you're— and so what they want to see may not be there, then they have to pull the— I do, yeah, I do see that a lot where They, they have people ask about like, how do I get this information or that? Because not everybody's measuring the same things the same ways. Or even if they're measuring the same things, it's that they're not measuring it the same way. Like, I mean, just I'll throw out a number, like for example, time to fill, which is probably my least favorite and arguably the most useless measure of all. But you can start time to fill, you can start the clock when the job is posted or when it's opened, or when it's approved. That— and that's just 3 examples. You can close the, the clock when it's filled, but how do you define that? Is it because the offer was accepted? Was it accepted verbally? Was it accepted in writing? Or is it when the offer was extended? Or is it when the person starts? Or is it when you have a start date? Or is it when you have a background check that clears? Like, these are all, you know, there's no— and so if, if the platform shows time to fill based on requisition added to system and offer made, but you really don't track that, now you have a measure that you can't use because the system doesn't show you the way that you define that particular measure. So I see how that multiplies with every other version, um, and that's— I think that's the same for CRMs and ATSs. That's going to be a mistake in design simply by trying to— trying to make everybody happy, right? I mean, you've told me that before. You're like, I can't make everybody happy. Everybody has a different, you know, some people want to go left, some people want to go right, some people want to go up, some people want to go down. And, you know, so there's no way to address that with a system unless you somehow make it modular to where you can add the widget. And, and even then, I mean, widgets are only— they only go so far, you know what I mean?

Oh yeah, I mean, and then there's even more if you dive in a little bit deeper from there. Like, some people think some recruiters are amazing because they have a bunch of submittals, but how many of those submittals on that individual recruiter are turning into real interviews, you know? And maybe they don't have so many interviews, but— or so many submittals, but they have a ton of interviews, which means like they're so amazing at sourcing and research that they don't need as many candidates. Everyone is different, and so you have to customize things based on the person, the department, the hiring manager, You can't just have a one-size-fits-all for anything, you know. It just doesn't work that way.

It doesn't. That's a good point. That's a good point. So as you were talking about that, I thought of somebody, uh, a friend of mine I actually haven't talked to in a long, long time, but, um, I hired them and put them on a few, uh, projects. And in my entire 30 years of experience, I have never met— just like you're the youngest recruiter that I've ever met or, you know, you were the first, the youngest person in the industry. He's, he's got the highest submittal-to-hire ratio that I've ever experienced. And honestly, I don't even think I would want to— like, I don't even strive for that because it's so far out there. He has a 1-to-1 ratio, so every person that he submits gets hired.

It's amazing.

It's crazy, right? But I put him on a project where the expectation from this particular client was that they wanted to see resumes, and he never thought to ask what the expectation was. So the, the— I rolled out the project, and it was 30 days before the hiring manager heard from him. So the hiring manager contacts me and goes, I haven't heard from so-and-so in 30 days. We need to fire him and find somebody else. And I'm like, no, like, you literally have the best person that we got on our team. If he sends you a candidate, you're gonna, you're gonna hire them. He's got a 1-to-1 ratio. And the hiring manager is like, yeah, but I mean, it's been 30 days and I haven't seen a single resume. And I'm like, you're not gonna see any resumes. He doesn't send Calibration profiles. He doesn't send some middle— when he sends you somebody, it's going to be the person you interview and hire. And the hiring manager's like, well, but I want to interview at least 5 people. And I'm like, oh, we got the wrong person for you then, because if you want to interview 5 people just to waste the time and have 4 people you're not going to hire, this isn't the guy. He's not the guy that you want because he's going to find you that one person and nail it. Other recruiters are going to send you 3 or 4 or 5. So like me, this is one of those things that you have to start out by setting expectations with. If at the beginning of the relationship the recruiter would have said, hey, what's your expectation? Do you want to see resumes before I contact them? You know, whatever, then this would have come out. But one-to-one is— I mean, I've never seen anybody else. It's unheard of. I mean, I, I— when, when I do training and I, and I talk in corporate, not in staffing, which is different, but in corporate, um, when I talk about like what's a good ratio, you know, submittals to interviews and so on, I like to say I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a believer in what I call the Clean Plate Club, right? You're probably coming from the same background where if you're sitting at the dinner table and you eat everything that's on your plate, Nana is going to put more food on it because that means you are still hungry. Right? If you leave a little bit, it doesn't have to be much, but if you leave, if you leave a morsel, then now you're full. But if you clean your plate, that means you want more food. So that's how I think about it in terms of recruiting. If I send the hiring manager 5 people and they accept all 5 and move all 5 forward, to me that tells me they want more. So I would actually rather have a hiring manager with an 80% accept rate where they take 8 out of the 10 and 2 get left on the plate, because that tells me they're full, right? That's my belief. And so that's how I talk about it. And it's like, all right, so how many people do you need to send in order to get the interviews? And then how many interviews do you need in order to get the hire? If the hiring manager wants to see 3 people, you need to send them 3 people. Otherwise, they're just not going to make a decision. They're going to sit there and wait for the third candidate before they move. And that's just as much your responsibility as it is the workflow. You can't force that. You can't go to a hiring manager and say, no, no, no, no, man, there's only two. You have to interview two and pick. The hiring manager is going to be like, I've always met three people. I need to see three people. That's how I operate, right? And the other one wants 12, right?

That's why I think you need to have the ability for hiring managers to have visibility into people you're calling and the people that are actually getting submitted, and then ability to leave feedback and how quick they are to leave feedback and notifying everyone. I mean, visibility makes hiring managers calm down. If they see there's 100 people on your list and all their statuses, and these are the only people making it, they see, they feel comfortable. If you're a guy who only submits one and makes one hire, gave them visibility tomorrow and the next day, they would never have issues or questions. They would be so excited. Yeah, I'm not getting all the submittals, but this dude's doing his job, you know?

Right, he's doing the outrage, he's doing the— yeah. So that visibility definitely answers a lot of, a lot of questions. Here's, here's another question for you. There's— and this has been an age-old debate, older than probably both of us, um, there's, there's, there's been this constant debate in, in recruiting tech that whether you go for like the best of the best stack and have the best CRM, the best ATS, and by best I mean the best that fits your needs, right? But like the best of the best background check, the best sourcing platform, and then you put that together versus an all-in-one platform. So some people will say it's better to have everything in one platform, everything, right? And, and there's solutions out there that, that try to cater to that. In the corporate world, Workday, for example, is one of those where, like, they're really good at a few things, and then in order to have everything in there, they have all these little modules, half of which were, like, literally no more than an afterthought, and they don't really work that well. But then you can check the box of, I've got everything I need in my one, you know, all-in-one, versus Greenhouse, where they're like, hey, we're going to be open to other platforms and we have a really great API. So if you have a tool that you want to use, it'll plug in right, right with the API. So we don't need to be the monolithic. And so this is a debate right now. You're— I know where you said you've got a, you've got a solution that's an ecosystem, but my question isn't about, you know, this product versus that product. It's more about where do you think the industry gets this debate wrong? In other words, where do you think the debate of best-of-breed stack versus all-in-one platform is actually wrong?

It's a really good question. I think there's a balance with this though. Um, I think if you're an all-in-one, or if you aren't, you have to be open-minded to always have those API calls because you're never going to please everyone with your all-in-one. You're going to have some people that say, listen, I love your all-in-one, but I need this background check company. I don't want to use yours. Or I love your name sourcing, your, you know, your sourcing tool, but I'm obsessed with X tool and I need this. So I think even if you're an all-in-one, you need to have the ability to connect to any place that a client wants you to connect to, and you need to have those API calls. I also feel like, you know, as an all-in-one platform product, head of product, I'm always trying to pick— I don't necessarily develop everything in-house. I'll pick a partnership that I believe is the best in class. Bring it in, white label it, and make sure it's available to all my users built into the same pricing structure. So I think you need to have an open mind on both sides, if that makes sense.

So it does, yeah. So I think what you're saying is that where we get this debate wrong is that whether you want best in breed, um, build your own stack, or you want a platform that does most of what you need, either way there needs to be something that allows you to glue it all together, right? And that doesn't really— that is definitely— I think that's a gap in the marketplace. Because take a look at, for example, um, and I'm going— there's somewhere I'm going with this, which is a philosophical point that I wanted to ask you about. But take a look, for example, at like LinkedIn. They're, they're such a secluded, walled-out you know, environment that they— there's only a handful of very select handful of companies that integrate, like HubSpot, for example, or whatever, that plug in. You and I have talked about this many times, the plug into LinkedIn and allow you to do things like send a message through their, their inbox system, which is, you know, really, really blocked out for many other applications. So clearly they're in the 'I don't want to integrate,' you know, bucket. Then you have Greenhouse integrates with you know, whatever tools make sense and has multiple choices. Um, and then you have Workday, which is, um, an example of, you know, it's not that they don't want to integrate, it's that they're so difficult to integrate with. Um, they really don't have an API because of the architecture, the design of it. It's not set up that way. So there isn't anywhere that you could go where you can buy like the scaffolding to put your tech into. That doesn't exist. Maybe that's a product opportunity for somebody. Maybe it doesn't exist for a good reason. Here's my point though, and here's my question to you. Is AI, what we call AI now, these agentic systems that are supposed to be, you know, self-sustaining, like people are talking about OpenClaw, which is extremely dangerous and risky and I don't recommend it. but there's also other tools that allow you to connect. Like, you turned me on to N8N, which technically could be the scaffolding because it allows you to connect to, you know, almost everything. So my question is, do you feel like where we're going with AI is the way to solve this? Whether you have a behemoth or a tech stack, is there a way to get AI to be the glue that bounces back and forth between the systems that don't talk to each other.

Yeah. There's a lot of compliance and legal issues that I'm not going to go into in security, but with the new AI bots—

Right. Because it's going to access everything. Absolutely.

Right. Yeah. But with the AI bots of today and the Perplexity computer and Claude and all these things and what they're coming out with, they can do things in the background as if a user is doing it. So even if there's no integration, things can be done. Before we had Make.com and Nan and Zapier and all these things and they had to be API calls and connect and do everything. But now we're entering a universe where like things can be done by telling it to do something and showing it and have them building skills for themselves. Like Claude, you can explain it to something, they build a skill for it and all of a sudden it's on the go, right? And now we have these like, Cloud computer ideas where, and Perplexity Computer where it's like building its own agent atmosphere and doing things for you as if it's an employee. So like we're entering a whole new world now. Open Claw is, I think, started this concept and now everyone's kind of taking over with the same concept internally at every AI company. But I think we're entering a phase where like, is LinkedIn gonna be happy that these automations are gonna happen? I don't know. Are they gonna put you in LinkedIn jail? I don't know. That's why people like me, I'm trying to work up the— work up my integrations. I'm on like level 1 with LinkedIn. We're trying to go to level 2 where in-mail sync can happen because I don't want to use a gray market integration tool, which is happening. And a lot of ATS systems now have LinkedIn automations, but you know, it's not allowed. They are gray market, and recruiters don't understand. They can go to jail by using their Chrome extension, by using these automations that are totally not allowed. How are they happening? These API companies are building integrations by having cloud services and automations happening in the background. It is so risky. And so we're entering a weird territory where how are the AIs gonna look in the eyes of these LinkedIns and whatever? Is it gonna, is, are they gonna just let it happen or are they gonna shut it down? And how does that affect the companies? So, you know, I think we're, we're figuring things out in this moment, but I think a company like me or other product people, we have to be smart and build relationships and partnerships directly with these companies and do it the right way so our users don't get blocked or screwed or banned.

Or, you know, go to jail. When you sit by this, by the way, for those uninitiated, go to jail means LinkedIn jail.

Yeah, that's what I mean. I'm so sorry.

Not prison, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn jail where they block you for 24 hours. So that's where I wanted to go with this. And, and, and the reason is, uh, I'm a hacker. I've been a hacker since the beginning. I get tools to do things that they're not supposed to do, not because it's illegal or illicit or prohibited, but because I want, I want this flavor with this, you know, packaging. And it's so— and there's no reason for them not to work together other than Nobody else has thought of it, and so I'm the one that kind of breaks that mold. Um, but I want to make one comment and then follow it up with, with kind of a question for— to piggyback on what you said. And the comment is, I'm sorry, LinkedIn doesn't have a choice, okay? And I just— I hate to put it that way, but if you are going to be so closed off and draconian that you are going to prohibit access to the systems that you had your users build for you, because let's face it, LinkedIn is nothing without users. Users are what made LinkedIn. It's not an app, it's not an app or a platform that in— that exists independently of its users. No users means no LinkedIn, full stop, period, end of story. It is completely dependent. So if LinkedIn is going to be that mean to their own product that they make, the people that they put into the platform, then why should anybody respect the boundaries when a tool exists that behaves exactly like you do on your machine with your credentials in a way that doesn't violate any of the spirit of the end-user license agreement? In other words, it's still you on your machine doing the clicking and typing, but a robot is doing it for you. That would be no different, in my opinion, than having Mini Shally, my apprentice, a 15-year-old apprentice— connecting this back to you— doing the work for me. So I'm just going to ask this question, you don't have to answer. Wasn't there ever a time when you were 15, in the beginning of things, where somebody gave you a password to their database and you did the searches for them? Is that really that much of a violation? Is that really that illegal? No, you're working on behalf of the person who gave you the credentials. Every assistant, every executive— my executive assistant has the passwords to my email. Is she violating Google's terms and services by logging in as me with my permission, at my request, under my supervision?

No.

So what I want to say is LinkedIn doesn't have a choice. Now I understand, and I value your point of view, which is you as the technology company don't want to violate that privilege. I totally get it, and nor should you. But why does the maker of chocolate milk want to prevent me from mixing chocolate milk with Cocoa Puffs? Why should the chocolate milk manufacturer be the one to dictate how I eat my Cocoa Puffs?

I'm going to give you my idea on this, and you can argue with it and you can take it wherever you want, but there's two sides to this conversation. Yeah, in my head there's like two that come to mind right away, right? So like one is abuse. There are people that abuse their powers. They're, they're, they, they abuse how many they're connecting with. They abuse how many messages go out. They're not using in-mails, which LinkedIn makes money off of. They're doing connects with little messages, which drive people like me nuts because then I, when I press accept, I have a message on every— so I'm now looking at what they send before I connect with them, right? So there's abuse. And then at the same time, beyond the abuse, I would say that they want authenticity and they want it to be who that person is. Now, do I agree with all that stuff? Do I Do I think that there should be limits and whatever? And should LinkedIn integrate with everyone? I don't know if they should. I think they should work with people that agree to certain terms and whatever and allow more behaviors to happen. For instance, if you're connecting an ATS, then that person inside the ATS has that username and password. They can send an InMail on someone's behalf, but because they're manually doing it, it's not abusing the power of LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn needs to have a larger integration team with more people helping because their biggest issue right now From what I've learned is they just need more people to make more integrations. Their team is limited and there's a lot of softwares that want to get in. So based off of how many mutual customers you have, then they give you more abilities to work together, you know? So you have to work up the ladder, which I'm doing and many other ATSs are doing. But I think that there's a fear of abuse and a fear of spam and a fear of, you know, people taking advantage and that there has to be a balance, you know?

Well, that's it. That's not just a fear, that's, that's 100% legitimate because, um, there definitely are going to be people who, who abuse it. But, you know, maybe, maybe chocolate milk and Cocoa Puffs is the wrong analogy. Let me try a different analogy. Um, let me, let me be a car manufacturer that sells cars. Why, as a car manufacturer, am I also the person that sets speed limits and gives out speeding tickets. That doesn't make any sense. The, the enforcement of abuse— or, you know, if, if I buy a car and I choose to do something wrong with that car, that decision is on me. It's not up to the car manufacturer to somehow prohibit or prevent me from breaking the law with my car that I bought, right?

I hear you.

So that's what LinkedIn is doing, is it's saying, here's a car, but you can't use it this way or that way or this other way. And by the way, you also can't use it in this way that is perfectly legal, but we just don't like it.

It's tricky. You know, at the end of the day, whoever uses the platforms that do LinkedIn automations, whether it's an ATS or a name sourcing tool, whatever, You're taking a risk. If you're willing to take the risk, then put limits in your risk. I'm sure you have to do that. But, you know, it's a game. And in recruiting, a lot of us start from an early age. We all love black hat and, you know, gray areas and how to do things where we can get away with getting phone numbers and email addresses. I'm not going to go into what, you know, everyone used to do back in the day, but we're all kind of liking that stuff. And it's now a matter of compliance more than ever before. If you cold call too much now, you can be marked as spam. If you do cold email, you can be blocked forever. It's, it's a weird thing. Everything is being monitored now more than ever before, and we have to be smart about it, you know.

So let me take LinkedIn off the table because that's, that's a very contentious platform with lots of other things that, that, that are questionable in their practices, not to mention some practices that are straight up illegal. For example, the, the, the way that they obfuscate your privacy by making it look like you have privacy and then sharing your profile with Google so that they can make profit off of your profile, to me, is downright fraud. In other words, they're saying that I am blocking myself from being found by search results, but they fail to say that those search results are internal. Meanwhile, my profile is still found by search engines externally, and they hide that setting on purpose so that I choose one and not the other. So let's just— but let's get off of the whole LinkedIn platform and let's talk about something that's completely different. Twilio, for example. So you, uh, your system has a, uh, the ability to send messages, SMS messages. And I, I don't know if there's any other, any bigger 500-pound gorilla than Twilio. As far as I know Twilio is kind of the biggest, most commonly used player for sending messages. So platforms like CRMs and ATSs that send text messages usually use a provider like Twilio. In other words, let me maybe make this a little bit more reasonable for most people that are not quite that technical. When you buy a CRM and the CRM sends emails for you, It isn't sending emails from your email. It's sending emails through an ESP or an email service provider like SendGrid or Mailgun. And these are the mailman, just like the post office, just like UPS. Their job is to deliver your email. So the CRM that you purchase uses this post office to send your emails for you. The same thing happens with text messaging. And so that's Twilio. Now Twilio has a lot of extension ability in APIs and things like that, but if you log into Twilio, there's no easy way to configure your own CRM. You have to connect through APIs and coding. Until now. I can now use Claude to send messages via Twilio.

Okay, but there's a caveat to all this which we have to bring up also.

Which?

You cannot just send text messages anymore. That's not allowed. You have to go and go through compliance, and the compliance needs a screenshot of your opt-in process. So now the ATS, which gets you a phone number, you need to go through the compliance or else you'll— the messages won't actually get delivered. They'll be stuck. You can't do it. So, uh, Twilio is—

I, you know, legitimately subscribed to Twilio, and I have compliance, and it is an opt-in list. But I'm sending the text messages through Claude because the other way before this was for me to connect through Python and do it through code. I am legitimately using the system the way it's supposed to, but Twilio doesn't have an interface where you can upload phone numbers and send a message, right?

It's meant for, you know, platforms to use it as, you know, an API world, and they're amazing, and I only have good things to say about Twilio and all the other brands, but There's a lot of compliance with texting. If someone blocks you, your number gets blocked. And if it's under your brand and your campaign, your campaign could get blocked. And the campaign goes through the campaign registry. And if the campaign registry sees that people don't like your messaging, you're done for. So like, you have to be careful, so careful. And like you mentioned SendGrid and, you know, Mailgun and all these other places, those are only for warm emails. It's not meant for cold email. If you do cold email, you get shut off.

In just so much compliance.

Yeah, there's so much. I mean, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, I mean, all of them went crazy 2 years ago, and now they monitor subject lines and emails. Does it go in the promotions folder? Is this too— there's so much now, more than ever before. So recruiters have to be careful. Like these new platforms coming out that give you access to 800 million records and go do your email campaign, are they teaching people not to use their main domain? And if they're not using the main domain and using a backup another alternative domain? Are they warming it up? And if they're warming it up, that's gray area. The, the, the servers don't like warm-ups because it's not real, it's fake. So this world is changing, and that's why Indeed can charge a bunch of money for Indeed messaging. LinkedIn can charge a bunch for in-mails. It's the only world of opted-in people outside of your own ATS and people that know you. They're opted in, they're ready for your messages. You can't get in trouble. Maybe you lose your bulk messaging ability, but That's why they're able to charge what they're able to, because of all the other compliance and texting and emailing. Where else is recruiters going to go? They're going to start spending more money on LinkedIn and Indeed messaging and, you know, ZipRecruiter's database and whatever, because now they have real world where they can go in and not get in trouble. Does that make sense?

It does, yeah. And that sheds a lot of light on the subject. Um, I just want to clarify, when I'm talking about using the AI in order to enable me to do things that I couldn't do before, it's not because I'm circumventing compliance. In other words, in this particular case, the texting that I'm talking about is for my members, my subscribers who opted in, double opt-in and can reply stop at any time and all that stuff. So I'm playing it clean, but it's much more difficult as a solopreneur for me to use an API, which I was doing before through coding my own in Python, than it is to just tell Claude to send a message to my list, which it knows what my list is and all that. Um, likewise with email, the same kind of idea. I can tell Claude to send email and it's sending it through my Gmail, which is compliant, etc. So I'm not trying to circumvent anything. Um, in, in a LinkedIn world, it would be like me being able to say, hey Claude, please send a message through LinkedIn. I would still be paying for the in-mail I would still be used to. I'm not trying to circumvent anything or get away without, but it's an easy interface because I will bring this down back to earth for you. If I go into my LinkedIn Recruiter and try to contact people that way, the interface is so freaking slow that it takes me 2 or 3 minutes to switch from one message to the next. And this is just people emailing me and I'm responding to them. It slows me down to the point where it is exasperating. It takes me hours to reply to people when I should be able to, to reply from my inbox in Outlook. Why not? I'm still using InMail. Why can't I just reply? No, I have to go to this interface, be forced by them to use their platform, which is slow, unwieldy, doesn't have any of my other tools in it, doesn't have my AI writing assistant in it, all that stuff, right? So I guess my question comes back to this: is this new evolution compliance being taken care of, right? So not, not thinking about circumventing compliance, but with compliance being handled, is this new evolution of AI going to allow us to take a platform that we want to use like Recruiter PM and are paying for, and a platform that we want to use like SendGrid, and use them both legally in a way that makes it user-friendly because what's missing is the user-friendly. That's what's missing.

I agree.

You see what I mean?

I think that's the ultimate goal that AI should have is to build compliant integrations where people can do what they want and the AIs watch, you know, just like a real human to make sure they're doing it right and things are good. I think Claude and all these things need to have relationships. They need to build partnerships and relationships with the, the, with all the companies in the ecosystems instead of doing things just automatically. They need to start building partnerships and relationships, and that's going to be very important. And I think that's where platforms are actually beneficial that have strong partnerships and relationships. That's where you're able to not just build something overnight by yourself, but you know, you're using a platform that has years of partnerships and integrations that are doing things the right way, and that's the right thing to do. And I think Claude and all the AIs and ChatGPT, OpenAI, all of them need to start building strong integration partnerships and do things the right way. I think that's going to be the way of the future, you know. I agree.

That's, that's what I hope, because for me, the, the dream is, the dream is not, not to have a robot that answers my questions. I used to have that. It was called Google, you know. So what's changed? Nothing. I, I go from Google to Claude, I ask the same question. It's not that different. But what I want the AI to be able to do is to make my life easier, to help me do things I wasn't able to do before. Not because I was— not because I want to do something illegal, but because I want to be able to do something that I couldn't technically do before. And even better, I would like these AI systems or any platform really in our industry to start doing some of those visibility problems that you were talking about. Like, wouldn't it be nice if ChatGPT or whatever, Perplexity, it doesn't matter, if instead of just doing what I tell it, wouldn't it be nice if every once in a while it'd be like, hey, Shelly, knock knock. You know, by the way, you know that candidate, you left them hanging. It's been 3 days and they're waiting for you. Like to respond, like, what's up? You know, wouldn't it be nice if the AI did that? That doesn't even really involve a whole much more than just simply thinking about things differently. Be my, be my thinking partner, not my go-getter, not my go-for. But I think people use AIs as go-fors instead of thinking partners a lot.

And right now, how systems are set up is you have to set up a trigger. Like if I didn't do anything with this candidate in 3 days, send me a reminder, send me an email, send me a text. And you create these drip trigger campaigns for your own self. And so like even my platform that I built, we can put all those ideas in there, but you actually have to put them in and then it does it. I think the future is, you know, having these AIs integrate the right way and then it just comes to you, you know, and I think things are going in that direction. Without having to put the trigger in there, like, hey, based off of industry standards, it's typical to follow up with candidates within a week. It seems like you haven't followed up with this list of candidates within the last 7 days. Go for it. You know what I mean?

Or would you like to follow up with them? Yes or no? You know, remind me later, whatever. That makes sense. So, you know, and this is actually a really good segue into my other question, which is, you know, you go to these events and there's vendors everywhere with booths. 20 years ago, the same vendors slapped a sticker on that said, and now with diversity. And then 10 years ago, they slapped another sticker on the sign and now with big data and now with semantic search. And now you go to these events and they slapped another sticker and now with AI. Literally, they're just slapping a sticker on a product that's 20 years old. Everybody's slapping AI labels on their tool right now. From the perspective of someone that's actually building the software, Where is AI genuinely improving my life as a recruiter, my workflow, versus just slapping a label, you know, versus here's a lot.

It's a loaded— it's really loaded. There's so much, right? Um, I mean, you can think of AI helping you with research and targeting the right companies. You know, you can think of AI helping you build out interview summaries and everything that went on so you don't have to take notes and you know, give you follow-up and whatever, right? You can think of it as admin automation. You can think of it as, you know, taking search and matching to a whole new level where you were looking for developers, but maybe you should really be looking for all these other titles that fit in based off of responsibilities, not just semantic search, but really smart searching, right? Uh, even candidate communication and how to write to that person specifically based off the resume and background, right? There's so many layers that AI can help in today. And it's about giving AI the right data, teaching it with the right set of rules, ideas, and safeguarding, so to speak, and then having it play a role in making your life easier, almost to that agentic level. You know what I'm saying?

Making your life easier is really what it's about. But thinking kind of high level, so a lot of the things that you described are incremental changes. You know, better matching is still matching. You already knew how to do that. If you knew how to do it better, you don't need the tool. Better writing is still good writing. If you know how to write, you don't need the tool. There's a lot of things that it's just— so it's making it easier for people that know less to do better. But what I want to know is where is it actually fundamentally improving our workflow? Where— what at the high level, where is AI actually reducing cognitive load, reducing friction or improving job satisfaction for recruiters? Where is a recruiter saying, oh my God, I can't believe I finally have this solved versus this is just a better way of doing everything that I already did. It's a better, cheaper, faster, more effective, more efficient, whatever. So those are all just incremental improvements. Is there a place where AI is actually like saving someone from the loony bin?

Yeah, I think so. So I've been a recruiter for over 20 years. I get really frustrated with low-level tasks that I should not be doing. If it's taking notes off of a conversation and summarizing it, that's annoying to me. If I have to do research and give me a list of all this and, and sort and rank it based on— that's annoying. I could do it. It's annoying. Anything that's annoying and taking a lot of time out of your day, AI should take it over for you because that's where you go to the loony bin. If I'm doing the same task over and over and over again, I'm gonna go nuts. If I can take all those tasks off my plate and allow AI to do it, I'm not gonna go to the loony bin. It's not about high-level decision-making and strategic analysis and whatever. It can do that, but it's really like, take away all the stuff I don't want to do anymore. It's taking too much time and it's saving me my hours so I can go on a lunch break and not eat lunch at my desk and, you know, go for a walk. Like, let me have a work-life balance. And I think things that don't allow a work-life balance outside of stresses is administrative and like low-level task stresses that should be moved to the side.

That makes sense. So it's, it's, it's in giving you some time back. Do you feel like it's really doing that, or right now are most recruiters actually spending more work hours trying to figure out how to use AI? In other words, they're actually spending more hours at work to, to figure this out.

I think people are playing right now. It's like a playground, and they're using OpenClaw like a playground. There's security risks, but some people overcome them because they're smarter than the average next person. Um, I think some people are figuring it out, and I think it's on the platforms to do whatever they can to automatically do this for people. So they don't have to figure it out and use security risk type situations. I think it's on me and all the other platform product owners to say, hey, you know, we're doing automations where when you're done with the phone call, it instantly gives you these summaries. Hey, we're doing it where if you need a summary of an overview of a candidate, uses all the notes and everything and sends it to the hiring manager so you don't have to type those notes anymore. Or, you know, I think there's a lot of things, but it's on the platform owners to figure out the best ways AI can solve the low-level tasks and take it out of the day-to-day, you know.

That makes sense. So bringing, bringing about some sanity and some order. And it's kind of like the Wild West, right? We're sort of figuring out where things are going. We're, you know, we're shooting from the hip, we're trying it out. But I mean, that was, that was kind of the way it was back in the day, the early days of search engines too. I remember finding— I every once in a while still do this coming across a document that very clearly says not for distribution, confidential, and it's like, I just clicked on a link on a website. Like, how did that happen, right? So that happened a lot more in the past. So what you're saying is we're sort of— yeah, we're sort of figuring it out, and maybe we have to spend a little bit more time going gray, um, and risking the loony bin to learn how to get this stuff to work so we can save ourselves from the loony bin later. That makes sense. I get that. I do get that. I wanted to, I wanted to ask you kind of like my, my signature spicy closing question because we're getting pretty close to the end of the hour here. And I wanted to ask you something a little bit more, I don't know, maybe controversial, maybe not. You, you know, you've built a platform, you've run staffing, you've trained recruiters, you've done corporate recruiter, you've seen a lot of these different angles. In all of those, in all of those different hats that you wore, was there something that recruiters very often blame their ATS for that's actually a recruiter problem? They kind of sweep it under the— like, well, that's the ATS, but it's really not.

This is a big question, and I'm going to answer it as direct as possible without going into too much detail. I don't wanna bore anyone that's listening, but it's a workflow issue all, all the time. You know, the, the, the platform set up where you can do things and do things smoothly, but you've created your own little system inside the system and it could have been done smoother if you listened to your training and were part of the sessions when you were doing onboarding, but you decided to do things this way and it's slowing you down, you know? And that becomes a repetitive theme I see over and over again. There are smoother ways to do things. Use your customer success team, talk to your ATS, figure out all your issues and talk to them. They will show you how to use things better. People just figure things out themselves, but sometimes they're building harder processes and doing things that they shouldn't be doing without realizing there's a better way to do it. And that's with all software, whether it's ATS or anything.

They'll blame ATS for slowing them down, but in fact it was their own choice of doing it this way versus the other way.

And yeah.

That's a really good— that's a— that applies to a lot of things. So it covers a lot of areas that all come back to the same: you made a choice to do it that way, which is why it isn't working.

Yeah, I see this many times over. You have to use your customer success teams. You have to have an awesome point of contact that knows the system inside and out, that will give you advice and strategy based off of your workflow and what you're trying to accomplish and what's available and making everything mesh together so those frustrations go away.

That makes sense. So a lot of times those frustrations appear to be the platform or the technology or whatever, but in fact, well, they are now because you made it that way, but they weren't before. Yeah.

Yeah. And sometimes people are scared or they just use the knowledge base and they don't actually have a conversation with the person at the company, but Many software companies do things in the right way. It's just maybe it's not being done that way. So you need to have an open conversation. Maybe it's the fact that there is a frustration. So talk to customer success, they'll talk to product and maybe make a better way to do it. But there needs to be an open conversation between software and people and not just rely on a knowledge base or figuring things out yourself. There needs to be an open conversation and that's how roadmaps are created. Created. We make things better based off of feedback. If we don't have that feedback, A, you could be doing it better, or B, we could be doing it better. But there, it needs to be back and forth.

That's a really good— it's just a really good way to kind of wrap things up and, and, and end the show, because I think it, it forces people to think, are you really— whatever the tool it is, whatever the technology, whatever it is that you bought that you already paid for, are you actually using it, you know, in the best way you possibly could, or are you trying to bring your own— unfortunately, you know, your own baggage and stereotypes to it, making it do something you want to do that may not be the best option? So have that open-mindedness to, to ask the question. And I think sometimes people are afraid of doing that because they don't want to look stupid. It's like, oh, I don't want to ask because I don't want them to go, duh, why don't you already know that? And that's never going to happen. No customer service person is going to be like, you should already know that. They're going to gladly show you because they want you to use their tool successfully. So yeah, it's encouraging people out there to communicate with your vendor and actually allow them to help you build this thing. It's really good advice for anyone. Um, yeah, well, last, last thing, not to put you on the spot, but you know, I like to make sure that I offer people something extra for being members of TSI University. And there's an after-hours inside of TSI University that you can access for a nominal fee. Would you be willing to offer as your gift to TSI University members some kind of special code or discount code to your platform, were someone to be interested, that I could put on there? And we don't have to talk about it now, but Of course. Okay, great. Excellent. So you heard it here, folks. If you are a member, you'll be able to, um, acquire the platform at a discounted price if you check out tsiuniversity.com and sign up. Uh, with that, man, brother, it's good to see you. I know you got a big night tonight, so thank you so much for sharing your time with us. I appreciate you being here.

Thank you for having me. It's been awesome. I love the open conversation. It's been great.

We'll keep it going.

Awesome.

Thanks a lot, Daniel. Have a good weekend, everybody. Folks, be kind to yourselves, and we'll see you next week on Shelly's Alley. Take care.

Bye.