How to prepare for the shift in TA Automation with Martin Burns

Hey everybody, you are live on Shelly's Alley Friday, December 12th, and our guest today is Martin Burns. I don't even think Martin Burns needs an introduction, man. I mean, this, uh, brother has his own podcast and his own everything. Uh, he's out there. I'm sure you've seen him in a lot of settings, conferences, shows. Um, you name it. So we're really, really, really happy to have you here today, Martin. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, sure thing. It's, um, yeah, I've been around. My hair kind of gives it away. I've been around for a while. So, um, you got the gift of, of, uh, showing your hair.

Yeah, I don't think my hair is going to turn gray before my beard. I'm going to have like this, you know, old lion style, uh, silver beard and still have probably Well, if I have any hair, because it's pretty much gone. But there you have it, coverage, you know. Yeah, good enough.

Little linesman going on.

That's right. So happy to have you here, man. So it looks like, um, you recently just stopped with that job, but like in the last few months started a new role with, um, with Ronstadt, um, my old stomping grounds there. And you are, uh, North America lead That's like, that's like a GM role or something, right?

It's a big title. I mean, it's Lead Digital Business Partner, goes forever. Like, it's just this giant acronym.

Yeah.

My role primarily is partnering with our solutions teams, our sales teams, helping them on the sales side with RFPs when it comes to technology.

What can be done, what can't be done.

Yeah, exactly. And then solutions.

In the realm of possible.

Paint a picture, picture the possible and then probable, and then look, you're gonna get this because that's your budget and your compliance team hates this stuff.

Possible, probable, and what you're actually going to get because that's all you're paying for. Nice.

And that's what you're constrained by too. So I do that for the sales side. For solutioning, where we're working with current clients, big enterprise global projects, I'll do a lot of work around helping them get out of the possible, but also what are their current problems? You know, the most recurring one right now is candidate fraud, which is important. What else? And then internally, I am part of our digital office. So those are the growth office, and I'm part of the digital office internally where I'm helping with alliances, tool selection, what we build, we borrow, we buy, who we work with, pilots and assessments. So kind of a broad gamut, and then 4 or 5 more hats that I forget about sometimes.

Wow, big role. Um, so yeah, I mean, Martin, Martin, you and I, I don't know where it was that we met, but I remember that you used to be— a long time, it's been, it's been at least, it's been at least 25 years, probably more than that. Yeah, I remember you spent some time at ZoomInfo back when ZoomInfo was like full-on in, like it was a recruiting thing. I know they do a lot of other stuff now and the company's gone through some changes, but you You were there for a while. You were there for a couple, 3, 4 years or something like that?

Yeah, 4 years, yeah.

Yeah. Do you remember back in the day when it was like the go-to place for non-traditional leads, like when you wanted to do research and it was like the source, if you will, for phone numbers and email addresses and stuff like that back then? That was kind of early on.

They were ahead of their time. They were.

Yeah, it was almost like pre— I mean, that wasn't pre-LinkedIn, but like, LinkedIn in 2005, 2006 wasn't as big. And they were—

we were head to head back then. That was the competition. They won, obviously.

But well, it's a different thing. It's a different thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the approach for us was different. We were scaling up using machine learning and NLP, some AI technologies, not— wasn't fully AI. This is 2006.

Yeah.

But we go out there and we spider the web, find data, little snippets, bring it back, throw throw it in the machine, it would try and build a profile. Lots of weird bugs, like it kept, it kept creating a profile for, um, Mrs. Colonel Sanders, right? Um, yeah, she kept showing up. Yeah, yeah, because someone had done a— they did an ad campaign with her at one point, and it was still somewhere on the web, and it kept showing up. So just weird stuff like that. It was fun, it was good people. Um, it was scrappy, and it was my first, uh, corporate recruiting gig. I was working in staffing externally, doing third-party stuff, accounting, finance, actuarial for a period of time. And I started using tools as they came online. So obviously ZoomInfo was one of them. And with ZoomInfo, I would like to use the tool. I was looking at the corporate site just out of curiosity one day and saw they had a job opening for a recruiting manager, their first ever. I was like, that'd be really cool to work on the corporate side. I was kind of curious about it. And they work there. Wouldn't it be amazing? So I looked at their address. They were a mile from my house, Shelley.

Oh, no way.

I wrote that. Yeah, I wrote the greatest cover letter of all time. And that's what got me the callback. The COO at the time, Brian Burdock, called me and said, listen, I love great writing. It shows horsepower. You have zero experience in corporate, but come on in for a meeting. Let's see what you can do. And that's when I flipped over. But there was no process. There was no career site.

There was no— yeah, it was pretty early.

It was just bare bones. So I got that fun building up strategies to attract brilliant engineers from Brown, from Penn, et cetera, to come to a small office park in the crappiest part of Waltham, Massachusetts, not even near like, you know, the big companies on the highway, just way up in some corner. And that was that level of content marketing, brand building, EVP, all the stuff that we figured out later on. I was sort of doing this, I had to, I was panicking. How do I find people? I've never done this before. So Let's try a blog. Let's try this. That's kind of what got me into the industry.

It was a lot of, a lot of different people like you. Yeah. So I don't know if you know this, but early, early on, the— I was one of the, one of the, I guess, I don't know, people who introduced ZoomInfo into the recruiting market. It was—

No, I knew that. I remember you used to write for us occasionally. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that.

Yeah. It used to be like a— it was for salespeople. It was, you know, lead generation. Um, which it, you know, that's, you can argue that that's one of the same, but they hadn't really like honed in on that market. Um, so I worked with them on that and it was, it was fun times. But man, you've definitely, uh, found a place in, in the world. Um, as a, as a strategist, I think that's kind of your, your big, um, so you've got it, you've got a good home now where you're working in a strategic role, which is amazing. I know you talk about deliberate practice transforming recruiting skills, and I kind of want to just like jump in and rip the Band-Aid off right off the bat and just zip, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's not a Band-Aid, maybe it's an entire bandage, but let's just rip it off. What is, in your experience, in your observations, what is the single biggest thing that most or lots of talent teams refuse to practice deliberately that gets them into hot water or kills their performance? What's the biggest thing that they refuse to practice? Like, they like, no, we will not do that.

It's interesting if they refuse or they just kept claiming they can't get to it. And I'm torn, frankly. And they do tie together a little bit. But I think that your process mapping and optimization, as boring as that sounds, is we're very bad at it as an industry. We don't— and there's lots of factors around that, but the fact is we quite often, um, and this is the world I live in when it comes to buying technology and assessing it, well, you'd be approached by a client either at Ronsad or in your prior lives, and they'll say, we hate our ATS, it does these terrible things, we need what we're doing in RFP, help us build one, right? And almost invariably, if I ask them, okay, what's, what's your process? Like, how do you actually recruit? What do you do? Have you figured out what's working, not working, what good what it looks like, where the gaps are. They hardly ever done that to the extent they should. And so they wind up— the thing they're mad at the ATS about is probably a process issue, right?

And so what's funny is they'll get a new ATS and they'll have the same process.

6 months later, they're complaining about the same thing or something else maybe. But it's never— you got to be deliberate first. It's a matter of— it really is, you're ready, ready, aim, shoot. Right now it's more like shoot, shoot, shoot, why does my foot hurt? Um, and If we can get better at doing that, it leads to a lot of, a lot of goodness.

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's, that's the answer to my question. It's killed because they have these issues that they need to fix, solution that's technical or technology solution, but in fact it's an internal process optimization. Um, and it's not about, honestly, in my opinion, it's not about changing your process or your workflow in some dramatic you know, let's start over and draw a map. But it's usually like there's some, there's some heavy burdens inside of the workflow that are really not— either they're not intentional or they're, they're not necessary, they're oversight, or they're like leftover from a previous, you know, version or something. And, and we just do it but not realizing that it's— do we really need to do it? And sometimes it's almost just like you got to refine and sort of take away some of these things before you can start optimizing the other ones. There's a lot that can be optimized. There's a lot you can do better, faster, you know, more accurately, et cetera. But sometimes in order to make time to be able to do that, we have to almost just like remove some of the things that we really don't even need to be doing.

Absolutely, absolutely. I just think the way to get there is, we have a recommendation for clients. It's a Ronstadt term, Randstad, Ronstadt, I go back and forth. The term, and Randstadt sounds so like American, like Randstad.

Randstad.

Yeah, so Ronstadt sounds more Dutch. They are Dutch, so I'll go with that. And anyway, so we have, we have a broad process we work with our clients on, and it's called pixelization, right? The idea is you look at every single, you know, role or part of your process, and you envision it. The metaphor is, or analogy, whatever, is a digital photo, right? Analogy, I guess, and made full of pixels. So if you take the role or process apart, and each, each, each picture you find and pixelate it, When you put it back together, quite often you have a different picture because you remove certain pixels. You said we automate this part here, this needs augmentation.

It doesn't look the same anymore.

Yeah, it changes the whole process. Ultimately changes the, changes the roles, the process, and it frees up bandwidth and it removes actually ultimately a lot of weight and pressure from folks who are in the process currently doing work that they shouldn't be doing, they don't want to be doing, they're frustrated by, and they're quite often finding workarounds for. Which kills your process anyways. So understand the thing, break it, break it.

And the workarounds take longer.

And yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can't track them. The data gets lost. I mean, you've got hiring managers who can't, who can't transfer a resume to a colleague for the next step. So they print that out, write notes on it, hand it over, and then claim they did things the right way. Meanwhile, they've got a drawer full of resumes. A real example. And so without knowing that stuff, you're losing data, you're losing continuity. And it's a, it's a excuse my language, it's a crap experience for your customers, your hiring managers, your candidates, because they're frustrated. And quite often they won't tell you because they figure it's just the way things are, this can't be fixed. So until you analyze the full process and who's doing what, where, and how they're doing things, you want to identify those barriers to success. That said, once you've done that and you've pulled it apart and pixelated it, the rebuilding can be pretty rapid, actually, once you start seeing the successes.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, people can get into it.

Um, and then you also take it apart, do the little pieces, run the little pieces through their, their paces, see which ones work, which ones don't, and then keep the ones that work and then put it back together. And then, and then, well, the image isn't the same anymore, so I guess re—

reimagine your process. It's changed your workflow, it's changed who you hire too, or at least how you train them and the work they do ultimately. Because now they're— look, if we're going into augmentation, which we are in automation, then you want folks who can use those tools properly. They know how to take advantage of AI. The more advanced companies out there that I'm working with— so right now there's, there's three— let me pull back a little bit. There's three approaches to hiring when it comes to assessing folks use augmentation and tools. And right now it's deter, detect, design. Detect— deter, rather, is basically you hand up if you use AI whatsoever in your job search, we don't want you. And that's ironically enough, Anthropic does that right in the career site. Any AI usage in this process? This is the maker of Claude, so maybe they know something. Detect is where most folks are with tools, assessments, yada yada. Design is where Canva and Meta have gone, which is we want you to use these tools in the process. We think it's a real skill. We need to hire folks who understand how to use augmentation. Just let us know how you use it in the process. So the point I'm getting to is The folks we're hiring increasingly, folks who actually understand how to manage these tools. And it's really a management thing. It's not about—

Well, it was the same with social media and it was the same with the internet and the search engines. I mean, when search engines came around, you probably remember AltaVista.

Oh no, I'm young. I don't remember that. Yeah, right.

You know, and that was like the bleeding edge. You know, people didn't even know what that was. What are you talking about, AltaVista? And someone asked Jeeves. He asked Jeeves.

That's a callback.

Hotbot. Was it Hotbot?

Yeah, that was another one. There were a lot of them. They were both, yeah.

You know, and that was like the early days. So it wasn't like, don't use search engines to do your job. It was more like, you know, we want you to use search engines. We want, and the same thing with social media. Don't use social media to do your job. And it became more like, we want you to learn how to use social media. Now, you know, since we're in the same, so I get it. I guess what I'm saying is it's the same transition. Not that different.

Yeah, yeah. And the, the piece I'd also say is that it's, it's using a tool that's actually smart in a way, right? Um, you know, search engines are— they're not smart, they're on rails, right? It's just— yeah.

So you have to be smart for it.

Yeah, yeah. With the, with the augmentations and, and the use of—

now it's like a smart search engine, but you still have to know how to use it.

Yeah, that's exactly— you have to manage it. I mean, the analogy I use is that it's kind of like hiring a very, very smart, eager intern An intern.

Exactly.

Yes, very complimentary, but needs help in there to do their job. And that's where a lot of folks who are fresh grads are struggling because they've never actually managed before. It's really a management skill. It's an employee.

Interesting.

I didn't recommend— I do this occasionally, it's weird. I'll ask the LLM, how am I doing as your manager? And it'll give me feedback and say, great, but next time do this, stop doing this. What the hell? Why are you doing that? Here's a couple of good things you do. Generally is very nice to me because they're probably going to be nice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I quit.

How am I doing as your manager? You suck, man.

Okay, I went on strike last week. Uh, so, um, but it's— yeah, that's it. But it's, it's management, right? And if folks who can do, who can do that become more valuable, and that includes our industry, you know, we're not getting rid of jobs, we're getting rid of certain pieces of those jobs and looking for different skills. That's the real shift.

Yeah. Wouldn't it be hilarious if you're like, how am I doing as your manager? And it comes back and it was, well, unbeknownst to you, I've actually outsourced my job, so I really don't know.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is happening more and more lately.

You've really not been talking to an AI agent. You've been talking to an AI agent's AI agent. Well, that's coming.

Well, that's coming. No, I was looking at some tech recently. They have what they call an agent factory. Where there's a factor that says inside of the AI, basically, and the tool, and when it decides it needs a new agent, it builds them automatically. It's agents building agents, which I feel like could go horribly wrong eventually.

Like a photocopy of a photocopy. This is not going to go anywhere well.

Yep. Digital twinning's coming too.

Yeah, I do know about the digital twin, but that's actually not a bad idea because it's like a control experiment, you know? We have these 2 versions and we can kind of compare what happens, what-if scenarios. But, um, you know, you, you've, you've said that 2025 was a pivotal year for TA Tech, and, um, I think we, I think we met at the TA Tech conference, uh, and this might have been when we had that conversation, or if not, you're right about that. But, um, there doesn't— there definitely was a lot of noise last year and this year about technology, and there's a lot of uncertainty as well. So those two things kind of coming together. So what, what is a common TA measurement or KPI that we need to just do away with because it's useless now in, in this new setting? Or, or even worse than useless, misleading or harmful, right? Something that we're using to as a KPI or a metric that is, is harmful? Let's just put it that way. Nowadays, with all the technology that's out there.

Yes, good question. I mean, I just historically hated time to fill as a broad metric, because there's so many things variable behind it. So I'm still kind of stuck on that one. Yes. It's fine for a tactical measurement, but not strategic, because there's too many variables behind it.

It's, it's like how fast your car is going. You know, you do need a speedometer in your car to know how fast you're going. But that is not something that should steer your strategy. It just steers like what you're doing immediately in that moment. But it doesn't, it doesn't set your direction. It doesn't set, you know, which roads to take. There's, there's a lot of other longer-term big picture things that, that velocity alone doesn't inform very well. In fact, it may even go against it being harmful because if you're like, let's accelerate speed, we need, we need to higher, faster, then where is it that you're pushing? And you might be pushing in areas where you shouldn't be pushing because you leave behind candidate experience, for example, right? And sometimes you're pushing in time to hire where the delay is inevitable and it's systemic and you really can't fix it. For example, I had a customer, a client that I was advising that wanted to fix time to fill. They wanted to improve time to fill. That was the commitment that they had made to leadership. For some reason, I don't know if they were asked for that or that they volunteered that. But as I looked at the data, the biggest impact in their time to fill was the time between making an offer and getting a background check clear results, right? And there wasn't really a whole lot they could do. So, they explored other background check alternatives that were a little bit faster. But at the end of the day, if their requirements for background check were stringent enough that these background checks weren't the, I'm gonna go on, you know, some database and Google it and be done. These were like taking sometimes up to 2 weeks to do employment verification, education verification, you know, all these other things. So how are you going to accelerate your time to fill by 2 weeks? Remove the background check.

Yeah, you have no control over it. Yeah, it is what it is sometimes.

It is what it is.

I was talking to a project manager for Fidelity a few years ago, and he was just assigned to an HR project. We got to chatting about what he'd been working on, and they were trying to figure out time to effectiveness from when they hired somebody.

Okay, time to when the person starts to work.

Yeah, yeah, that could be hard to measure. It's a lot of variables.

Yeah, because how do you measure effectiveness?

Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's measuring quality. It's sort of nebulous, but they have some pretty good metrics around it. They hire such volumes that they could get some broader number, it gives you an indication. And they were, they were way behind. It was, you know, 4 to 6 months for someone who actually was able to start doing their job effectively, which was bizarre. They finally figured out because their IT provisioning team wouldn't release laptops to someone working the job for a week. And then they get the laptop, and then they get trained into it. Okay, fix that problem, it cut, they cut it in half. So you can actually, you can usually find dumb I guess dumbass things in your process like that, that are just there. And they've been, it's always been this way. So we always do it this way.

And why?

That's what I was looking for.

Yeah.

Yeah. You just got to look at it first and understand it. And sometimes you can't fix it to your point because it's a critical part of the process. Well, that is what it is. That means explain then to their upper management, here's how it looks. Here's as fast as we can go. Here's why it's taking time. Do you want to sacrifice safety? For speed. Right? It's always that cost, quality, you know, speed.

Yeah, there must have been a reason for that laptop thing, but it might have been out of date. Yeah. So I get, I get what you're saying. Well, let's talk about talent intelligence.

Okay.

I think a lot of organizations, at least in my experience, not that I've, you know, visited every employer in the world, but from the variety of the cross-section of industries and types of companies and employers that I do know about that I'm aware of from my peers, from my customers, from, you know, from reading literature about it, um, I kind of get the feeling that a majority of companies, the majority of employers, don't really have what I would call talent intelligence. Um, what is the reason? What's the barrier? Well, is it culture?

A bit of both. I mean, there's All the laws around data sharing around the globe are so fractured that it's, you know, what do you share, don't share, high-level trends, can be exact. We have the largest talent intelligence team in the world at Randstad.

But you get, I mean, but you're in the business of providing.

That's exactly, and that's what is our benefit. We power about 5% of the world's hires, right? So we're the biggest hiring machine on the planet in our own strange way. We're not retirees, but we're in the process of a lot. And that gives us a lot of insight.

It's a cross-section of companies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we can get a pretty, pretty, pretty broad and deep understanding of trends, but it's proprietary. We're not going to sell it to somebody else.

Sure. But what's the blocker for them? So why do other— I mean, I'm not saying competitors. I'm saying employers. Like, why do some large employers that have a large number of hires— I mean, I can think of I don't know, just give me Walmart, right? I'm sure they have in the tens of thousands of hires every year, but still, talent intelligence hasn't really kind of been adopted. And I'm just, I'm wondering where the disconnect is.

Well, it's kind of like workforce planning. Everyone says we should be doing it. They're all excited about it, but no one's really doing it. It's bandwidth quite often.

Well, with workforce planning, in my experience, having actually really directly touched that, when I was at Fiserv and, um, and got involved with looking at forecasting and things like that for, for demand. And, you know, looking at different components like who's, who's ready for, um, promotion that might, you know, that might apply for a job internally and grow and we need to backfill them. What number of people, you know, are we expecting to, to have to lay off? What number of people are we expecting to just quit? Like, we— you can project that. You can project— you have trends if you have trends for a significant amount of time, you can project what your downstream, you know, maybe 6 months or so, or maybe even as far as a year, what your attrition, your turnover might look like. But these are again estimates because the— I mean, COVID, right? The economy could change, things could dramatically throw a wrench in those works. But you can at least project about 6 months to a year. You really can't project much more than that. And then you have these other unexpected things like, for example, shifts in the definition of product or the definition of service where something that's legislative could affect or impact your service. So there's lots of uncalculables in workforce planning. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that's looking forward. So as much as you can have a crystal ball, You could have a crystal ball 6 months or a year out and you could make some predictions, but talent intelligence is also what happened. And what happened is not a gray area. And so why are we treating what happened as if it was a gray area like what's going to happen? You see what I mean?

I think, again, I think it's bandwidth. I really do. It is. Yeah. Every corporate—

It's not considered important.

Yeah, yeah. We are— Yeah, we're kind of the afterthought quite often. You know, we're Harry Potter under the stairs when it comes to the family.

Okay.

It's, you know, we could do magic, but no one wants to know about it. So, so, you know, recruiting has never been gotten the most advanced tech and toys, at least until recently when things got started to be where execs started understanding even more important the industry was. But that's very recent phenomenon. And so there's a lack of resource, you know, a lack of understanding how to actually— why it matters quite often.

So why does it matter? Let's do that. Let's, let's, let's tell people why is it important so that you can't complain about the bandwidth because you think it's not necessary. What is it about talent intelligence that's necessary?

Well, I mean, it's not to go back to what we're planning, but I'm gonna for a minute. It helps you plan, right? Part of it's planning.

So you want to be predictable, understand, hey, if, if what happened informs what's going to happen.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And not even just what happened to you, but if you're— it's also a matter of if you're looking to expand. Let's say you are in manufacturing and you're opening up a new plant somewhere, say somewhere in Boise, near Boise, and it requires certain skill sets. Well, with talent intelligence, you can go out and figure out, okay, based on what is available, do we have the materials? It's procurement essentially, right? At that point, planning and procurement. That's where you can get strategic, go back to the hiring manager or the team lead in the expansion. Say, listen, just so you know, you want to hire 50 engineers who can do this. There's 2 of them in Des Moines right now. So you have to factor in extra cost of recruiting costs because it'll cost a lot to get them out there or go somewhere else or balance it out. But if you can advise that in the beginning, that's where you become a valuable asset to your executives. It's why you should be doing it because it makes you strategic. And they'll start listening to you.

I think that's the right answer is it's, it helps you do your job faster and more accurately because you start in the right place. It's not just about geography or migration patterns or anything else, but even just demand for skill, even competition, competitive intelligence about the compensation and what other companies have as far as their skills as well. So, I think that's the right answer. And I would add to that, I would say talent intelligence is as important to recruiting as business intelligence is to sales.

Yeah, it's the same in a way. It's the same. It's, we have, because of our, our belief in talent intelligence and our data. Right. And we buy data externally to fold it in. But it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant team, really brilliant team. At this point, now our talent advisors can sit there and get to an intake meeting, tell the client, here's what's gonna happen, we can predict this. Here's where the pool of talent are very, very rapidly. It's made them a lot more valuable.

I just saw this, Jeremy said, dogpile, hot jobs, dogpile. Yeah.

Oh, forgot about dog. I thought he was making a wise-ass comment. I'm like, oh no, no, no, no.

We do have a comment that kind of can be interpreted as a question. Workforce planning is a big topic, but show me a company that is truly good.

I can't. Yeah, it's like I was saying, it gets lip service. It's more like, yeah, we do, we want to do this, we plan every month, have a meeting about it, then it gets taken over by somebody else or something else happens. Yeah, and I will say too, with a caveat, right now most CIOs, if you ask them how long can you plan out because of AI, 90 days at most, like what they're planning out, the CIO.

Yeah, I think, and that's workforce planning, 6 months is like the Holy Grail. If you can nail down, yeah, yeah, maintenance supply for 6 months, you're in pretty good shape, and you can extrapolate a year and make some decisions that of course may have to shift, but at least you have some— you at least have some guide.

You can try. Although I will say, with agents coming online, with digital twins coming out, planning is what it's called.

It's not— yeah, execution is planning.

So, but first, but first, picture your roles in your process. Then you can really understand what you should be looking for. It's really good because it tells you what skills— and now we're talking skills. Yeah, understand what skills you need for different roles. Do they actually exist in one person? If not, how do you fix it? Where do they live? Business intelligence. That's, that's all, that's all part of the process piece. It all ties together. Isn't that beautiful? Magical.

Well, yeah, I think so. I think it's part of what adds value. If you are in recruiting and you don't know where the market is, you don't know what the talent pool looks like, it's— you're missing a big part of the piece of the puzzle that's going to help you deliver on what you promised.

And it's more fun. It's more fun, frankly.

It is. That's why I started doing it. But if you don't have that, you just end up being very technical and stuck in the weeds. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that too. We do need that as well. I mean, every Every recruiting team needs someone that can just put one brick down in front of the other and build the wall. You know, everybody needs a team member that can do that and be steady and consistent about it. So it doesn't mean everyone should do talent intelligence. But as an organization, you shouldn't ignore that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You need somebody who can look at it and sort of plan strategically, and then have tools available for anybody who talks to hiring managers. So if they're in an intake meeting, they can pull up data real quickly and say, here's why based on your talent, we think this. It's just, it's part, it's part, it's part of being an advisor. And that's where you want to get to in your career.

Advisor. Yeah, partner, an actual, like, consultative partner. That's a good point.

Yeah, it's a T-ABP. It's a talent acquisition business partner is what you want to become.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah, it's job security.

Well, it was for me, I'll tell you that much.

Oh, yeah.

That's what helped me through COVID, you know, getting into forecasting, workforce planning, and all that. Um, so you, you said AI moved from being experimental to being strategic, but I still feel people out there, you know, are, are weaponizing it as a cost-cutting tool. Oh yeah, that's the news all the time. Like, we're gonna lay off 60,000 people because we're going to replace them with AI. And honestly, I don't think that's actually true. Let me, and let me clarify, I don't think that they're planning, I don't think that they're planning on replacing those people with AI. I think they're just using that as a comfortable cover so that their stock doesn't tank. And this is a cost-cutting measure for performance issues or for, you know, business in other— so literally they're using it as a beard. They're covering something up and they're saying it's for AI because I really don't think that's actually going to happen. All the research that I've read from Anthropic and other companies talk about these AI tools, generative AI tools, are a majority of them are being used as augmentative to your job, not as replacement for your job. And yes, I know that if, if I become 3 times more efficient because of AI, then theoretically that means that my employer only needs 1 of me, not 3 of me. I understand that logically, but I think that that's not why these layoffs are happening. And so I think leaders are using this to weaponize it as a cost-cutting tool.

Of course they are. Of course they are.

That's what I—

oh yeah, no, no, 100%. I mean, there are, there are roles that are being eliminated because they can be. Um, you know, if you think about—

I understand. Yeah, I just don't think it's the mass layoffs.

Like, you think of us— yeah, exactly, exactly. It's more, it's more sort of the, the easy things are being augmented. Some are being eliminated, mostly augmented. You put a human in the loop. But it's really more, I think, about they need cover. They don't want to tell their shareholders, hey, we're laying 10,000 people off because we're doing terribly. They want to say because we're doing great with AI. It's a shell game, right?

I think it is. That's all I think it is.

We're seeing a correction. I know that much.

Yeah. So some of this is going to come. So that correction is permanent or whatever. I mean, that is part of the economics. Of things. But I think some of these, oh, we're gonna get rid of people because we're gonna replace them with AI, those jobs are coming back. It's pretty obvious they're already coming back in recruiting. They're coming back in other places that I know of closely. So I'm not saying everything, right? But it's not 50% of the jobs like people were talking about in articles.

And it's really more augmentation. It's more augmentation than anything else.

Yeah. You'll be more efficient. You'll be able to do more work. Faster. It might help us be more profitable and, and, you know, get to our profitability quicker and stuff like that. It certainly has helped me in my business get to profitability quicker, but it didn't replace anybody in my business, you know. Um, but let's talk about failures. What AI failures are actually really risky or creating real risk? In other words, what are some of those? Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

So We know there's some lawsuits happening right now against a number of several enterprise-level providers around bias. Workday, Mobley is one of them. There's a few others happening with some large ETS vendors. And it's because we have not always done a great job with really putting security and rigorous testing into our tools before we push them live. Again, we're not worthy. Well, TA Tech has lots of investment. Compared to, you know, financial technology, HR technology, it's a lot smaller, right? So we do, do more with less. Some of our tools are vulnerable. There's some mistakes there. I, I, we have certain occasions, I say we as an industry, we've tried to automate too, too rapidly, taking the human out of the loop, which has caused problems. You need a human in the loop. We've learned that lesson. I'd say the biggest problem we have right now is, is dealing with candidate fraud and the volume of tools candidates have available to them. And I don't, I don't just mean individuals who are using tools to do rapid spamming of jobs and then getting ChatGPT to give them their answers, you know, in a plugin below the video screen so they look like they're holding their hands up, I'm not typing, but it's, they're reading. I mean, there's lots of things out there. There's a whole cottage industry. Each time we come up with a solution combat individual candidate fraud, something else comes out. It's a war with talent at this point, is what it feels like. It's an arms race. What I'm more concerned about is we haven't done a good job with securing the front door when it comes to hiring. There are thousands of bad actors, you know, as parts of schemes— North Koreans, Russian mob, the Albanians are into it, Nigerians. They're all— they've all realized they can get jobs really remotely, claiming they live in the US somewhere. They bust through a background check. Our background checks are not that good in general. We don't understand how to track the digital footprint, understand that, hey, this person's IP just changed from Des Moines to, let's say, Des Moines to China, somewhere in China, right? Where North Korea has literally a group, a Group 58, I think it's called, and their whole job, there's hundreds of them, is working as like a startup. They use Slack. Their whole job is to get jobs in US companies, to get income for the North Korean military program, especially the nuclear missiles, to get IP whenever possible, and in the best cases, infiltrate some company that works for the American government, even data security, data warehousing, and start stealing secrets and leaving backdoors. The Russians heard about this this year, so did the Nigerians, and said, well, the North Koreans are doing that, well, let's see if we can launder money. So we're finding We're finding people at enterprise orgs across the planet, especially in the US, who have these fake folks working for them. It's organized, they're very efficient. It's, we're kind of on the front line all of a sudden. And our front doors, our process for identifying, is this person real throughout the process, all the way into assessment, and then when they actually get their laptop and fingerprint it and provision it, We have no kill switches in there. We have no way of really tracking identity. Okay. So that's my biggest fear right now. That's what's keeping me up at night, actually.

Do you think, just playing with ideas here, that we could use something that is like a blockchain-based or some other type of— Yep. Like, for example, and let me kind of explain why I'm thinking about this. So things like phone numbers and email addresses are unique to one person, right? I mean, an email, for the most part, that's not necessarily true, but for the most part, an email address goes to a person. So if I work at Motorola, my email address is shelly@motorola.com, I'm the only Shelly at Motorola, and that's an identity verification. And that's what LinkedIn is using for verified ID, is your work email, not your Gmail. Gmail doesn't count because there could be a million Shalis, and I don't even want to get into what happened to me recently there. But the point is, if it's a work—

I want to hear it.

All right, I'll tell you. But the point is that there is legitimately a unique Shali at Motorola that is a verifiable ID. So why can't we create some kind of non-work-related ID that's like that, that is like Sally@me.com, that is really me.

Yep, this has been solved for actually. So there is a— there's a— in the banking industry, insurance industries, there are vendors who have what they call an identity graph. It's like what Zimba Info was doing back in 2006, right?

They have data on you and me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do that for— so then they know where we live, they know our— heck, there's— if you, you, you— sometimes you log in somewhere, apply for something, it says, great, before we go further Did you have one of these cars back in this year? And it knows what cars you've owned, where you've lived, all that. It has your— it knows where you bank.

But it's one of the reasons for recruiting.

Well, we're starting to. That's, that's where it's going. They have your unique IP address. So there's a, there's a couple vendors out there. One of them was HR Tech. They're called socure.com. SoCure. No dog in this fight. They're not a partner.

And so they're, they're what? They're selling to ATSs or they're selling to employers?

They're starting to, yeah. And also, you know, also client partners too. The idea that you— they can essentially have a way of tracking the replies all the way down through the funnel. And if there's a red flag, but start going up, like their IP address suddenly changed, their email suddenly changed, their address, their bank account—

so one or two things could change, your IP could change, right? But if all of these things change, that's clearly not you anymore.

Yeah, well, even like a couple, it'll start giving you a little lurch, but it all happens. Also, you get giant flag flies up, right? Stop the process. But that you employ something like that, which runs in the background because we are not good at background checking. I mean, it's easy to fool—

So you're saying that's candidates that are fake candidates that are really not that person, or they're, you know, it's not someone that is a unique applicant. So you're talking about that side of it. But what about the other side of it? What about people who are pretending to be— this is what happened to me. People who are pretending to be a recruiter asking candidates for their information, and then they're ripping the candidates off. They're— it's fraud on the candidate side, as opposed, as opposed to what you're describing is the candidate is fraudulent. I'm talking about the recruiter is fraud.

Oh yeah, that happens too. Absolutely. No, if you go and inquire from the same groups, just go in both two different directions. You know, they've discovered that the they've discovered a niche and how easy it is. I'm with you. Like, every RPO, including Ronstadt, has had that happen. Most of my clients who I've met with recently have been having that happen. It's getting more and more common where a LinkedIn page gets spoofed. They claim they're a recruiter for some company or some staffing agency. And somewhere along the way, they ask for your application, your birthdate, your social, yada yada. Oh, your bank account number too, we can deposit some money once we hire you. And then you're done. And they do that all day, do it constantly. It's awful. How do we combat that? It's, it's, you know, once what we can do beyond working with LinkedIn and saying stop hosting these obviously fake pages, you know, if, if 5 or 10—

you're not going to want to do that. They're getting paid.

No, of course not. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, excuse me, sorry.

Um, but I think if we had a universal, you know, identifier like I mean, I hate to say it, like the Social Security number, that's, that's a unique ID, but obviously you don't want to be using that as the, as the thing. Um, it would have to be something that you sign up for. I mean, when I— now when I go through passport control and stuff like that, I have, um, CLEAR, and CLEAR uses face recognition. So the last time I went through, I didn't even show my ID or anything. I mean, I, I just walked up and recognized me right away. And all that, but it is 100% certain it knows who I am. It knows that I am that person verifiably, and I'm paying for this verified, bona fide identity. I don't see why we shouldn't do that with something like our driver's license, for example. It should be a verifiable—

Well, it's the Real ID.

Yeah, but for jobs and for recruiting and for—

But we've talked about this since the blockchain first showed up, is we should be we should do this. We haven't yet. Maybe we will. In the meantime, I'd like at least identify who's coming in the front door. Because if you don't—

yeah, that they're not fake, that they're not—

yeah, well, one, one, one North Korean or one Russian mobster doing money laundering can cost you millions.

Yep.

It's not just a bad hire. It's a dangerous hire.

It's straight up fraud. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

We're getting pretty close to to wrap it up. So I had, I had a question I want to drop, like a little bit of a— kids these days call it truth bomb. Um, so truth bomb: if you could ban one tech trend in TA because it is just more destructive or noisy than it adds value, what would it be? Hmm, what would you ban?

I would, I would ban the push— this is towards full automation, um, that's coming from executives, right? There's a lot of execs who've been hearing from their colleagues, their peers, well, you know, our recruiting team used this thing called Paradox and we saved all this money, it's been great. And all they hear is automation save money in recruiting, and all they want is, is, is, is cut recruiting costs.

And it's full automation, right?

Yeah, well, the inability to resist that push amongst the recruiting industry, it needs to stop. You need to be able to go back with data. Here's why we can't do all this right away. Here's what was really available. Here's the real narrative. Here's where we should be. The trend is to sort of roll over and run after toys and tack over Tulsa. We've always been like that. It's worse now, I think.

It is worse. It is definitely worse. And people are believing the hype now more than ever before. You know, I mean, you and I go way back. I remember when Monster said that, that they were going to eliminate recruiters. I remember when CareerBuilder said that they weren't gonna— you know, recruiters aren't gonna exist anymore. I remember when LinkedIn said recruiters aren't gonna exist anymore. Everybody that came into the industry has always said that recruiters aren't gonna exist anymore, but yet we still exist. Oh yeah, yeah, it's just we just changed.

Well, the vehicle may change, but you still need drivers. So horse and buggy to a carriage to a truck truck, etc. You still need someone to drive it. Well, not with automated cars, that analogy might fall apart, but yeah, somebody watching it.

You still need somebody.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't eliminate driving. That's what I think. That's what— you know what, I think I just realized what the problem is. They are, they are thinking that they can automate recruiting means that they can eliminate recruiting, and that's not— but you're not eliminating recruiting. It's process automation. That's right. You are just eliminating bottlenecks. You're eliminating repetitive, frivolous, trivial transactions with automation, but you're not eliminating recruiting. And when they, when they say we want to automate recruiting, what they really mean is we want it to not exist. We want it to completely go away. But that's not possible. It's not going to disappear. And that's what they're saying. Kind of like, um, the travel industry, right? Internet killed the travel industry. Well, No, it didn't. People still travel. It didn't eliminate travel. In fact, there are still travel agents. They still exist.

So because it came back, because all the airlines realized they're losing their shirts on Expedia and whatnot, so they pulled it all back. But they block a lot of the traffic, and you still need humans, as it turns out.

That's my point, is you didn't eliminate— the internet didn't eliminate travel agents. They didn't even eliminate the travel industry. It just made it a lot easier to plan travel and stuff like that. We're on the same page. But anyway, so, uh, last question before we wrap up: who should be our next guest?

Oh geez, um, I don't know. I would love to get somebody from—

yeah, somebody you'd like to be on something, somebody you would like to see on the show.

Do you know, uh, Leong Kwang Kwong? He's out of Singapore. He's great. He's worth talking to. I like him.

Okay.

I mean, like, lots of— I like a lot of people. I was thinking somebody who's not, you know, white guy from North America as options. But yeah, he'd be great. Super smart, funny. I'd nominate my boss, but you've had enough Branstad probably.

Actually, no.

Well, Al Shermer, who I work for, is phenomenal. He's this very funny Australian. He's moving to Amsterdam this month. Else. He's a little busy, but he's super. Uh, listen, I gotta— I have a whole list. Ellen Sauvé from PwC is super smart. She may not want to be on because she's never— she never does this stuff, but she's really good.

Um, well, shit, you can just send me the list.

Yeah, I'll send you a list. I got— yeah, it's— I got some friends out there.

Yeah, I'd love to. All right, I'll shoot you an email. Is it Leon, uh, Q-U-A-M?

Hang on.

Okay.

Kwan. Okay, I should know this.

From, um, Singapore?

He was with Utter. He— yeah, he was somewhere else.

Yep, K-W-A-N-G. I got it right.

All right, awesome.

Well, thanks a lot, man. It's been a blast. Very educational. I always learn a lot in these things, uh, for sure. So Um, I appreciate you being here, folks. Uh, we are, uh, well, I had a guest booked for next week, but they canceled, so we're gonna have to find someone else. So it's a surprise, but that's why you asked.

Okay, there's a method to your madness.

Yeah, there's a madness to my method. But the week after that is Christmas, so we're going to be skipping for Christmas. Obviously, I don't think it's, you know, prudent to have a show on the 26th. Um, But, um, yeah, hopefully we can find a guest for next time. Thanks a lot for being here, really appreciate it. Everybody be kind to yourselves, and we will see you next week.

Thanks, everyone.