Terry Terhark Live on Shally's Alley

Hello everybody and welcome! You are live on Shally's Alley on May 9th, and today we have a very special guest because all my guests are special, but sometimes very, very special. And that's the case with Terry. Terry is legend Wait for it. Aerie, legendary in the industry. He goes way back further than I do by about half a decade. Starting in the '90s, I started in like '96 in the industry. And he has a couple of— Terry's got a couple of claims to fame. First of all, he's first and foremost, he's a very business acumen savvy entrepreneur who started multiple companies. And sold them. Early on, he was in a staffing firm, which, by the way, essentially became the model for RPOs. It wasn't called an RPO back then, but it was kind of where things were headed. And then later on, he actually started a company that was an RPO once the RPO terminology became a little bit more commonplace. So, you might have heard of Aon and The Right Thing. Um, the, that is all part of— well, actually, The Right Thing is part of ADP. Aon is part of, uh, well, Aon, Aon Hewitt, right? Um, so that's the story. And, uh, now he's got a new company, two new companies actually, right?

Uh, actually one, Next Thing. Yeah.

Okay. Randar is, uh, no, no more. Ah, got it. Okay. Uh, yeah, that was a— I thought, I thought I I'd seen something about that. But the Next Thing, NXT Thing RPO, and he moved down here to be near me in Georgia. He lives in Georgia now, used to be a resident of Ohio. How do you like Georgia? Oh, looks like we dropped. There you go, you're back.

Oh, sorry about that. I'm not sure what happened, but no, we love Georgia. The weather is, uh, much more conducive to our lifestyle. And yeah, tell me about it, because kids love to come down here as well. So yeah, it's great.

Well, now I'm going to come down there too because you're near, uh, Jekyll Island and those places. A beautiful part there, lots of oceans, scenery, and things like that. So awesome. Well, I'm really happy that you're here. It's been a long time since we, we connected, and a lot has happened. Um, you've, uh You've built and scaled RPOs through— and I'm going to be sensitive when I say this, but I also— because I don't want to— well, you know what, the hell with it, I'll piss people off. You've built and scaled RPOs through labor markets that were more volatile than what we're going through today. And that's not saying— I mean, that's saying a lot. So we're going through a very late, you know, volatile market now, but But you've done this before. You've built and scaled companies through, at least that I can remember, 3 major shifts in the market. And so, I wanted you to be the voice of reason, if you will, and just kind of calm down some of the hysteria that's going on about what, you know, everything, you know, AI, the shift in the market. And we can tackle a couple of these things one at a time. But I just wanted you to You know, show people that for those that this is their first time going through essentially market evolution to just kind of be calm and carry on, right? Stop panicking, right? So be honest. Has RPO evolved fast enough to keep up with the complexity that we have today with, you know, everything? You know, AI, the shift in the candidate experience, all these— it's not just AI, it's everything. Has RPO in general evolved enough to deal with that, or are we just kind of repackaging old models and giving them new buzzwords?

Yeah, what a great question, Shelley. You know, I would say some have evolved. You know, I think if I were to look— you're right, I've been through, you know, several relatively severe downturns in the market, and we've been fortunate to come through those. And, and in fact, during 2008-9, when That was maybe the worst, was maybe the worst that I've seen. We actually grew at that, at that point. So, you know, there's always opportunities when markets shift, and you just need to know how to take advantage of them. But, you know, the last 5 years have been kind of fundamentally game-changing in the recruiting space, in my opinion, in particular in RPO. You know, do you think that a number of the RPOs were caught flat-footed when COVID came out, as a lot of industries were, you know, really weren't ready to respond to the kind of the massive turn that we saw because of the labor challenges right after COVID. And then RPOs, you know, scaled up very quickly. In fact, I'm sure people have heard this, you know, during 2022, there were more recruiter openings than there were software engineer openings. And so a lot of people came into the space. And what we've seen in '23, '24 is a lot of people have exited the space, which I don't think is good for recruiting and RPOs in general.

But you're saying it's kind of a bit of a risk, like huge influx and then huge outflux. So it averaged out.

For sure. And it always normalizes, right? So, you know, even now with what we're seeing in AI and You know, I know we're going to talk a good bit around what we're seeing in AI and talent acquisition. I just, I asked ChatGPT right before we got on how many technology companies are claiming to have AI products in talent acquisition, and ChatGPT's answer was between 200 and 500 companies. And I can assure you that's accurate. I mean, I was just at a conference this week, Unleash, and You know, every single company claims to be an AI provider, which—

but that means they're just using ChatGPT. So the claims, not really.

I think, you know, for me, and I've had to break it down to its simplest form, you know, I claim to be an old dinosaur in the industry. And, you know, for me, it's the definition of automation versus artificial intelligence. A lot of companies are just automating processes and claiming that it's AI when in fact it's not. So, there's a lot of confusion in defining kind of what is AI, particularly in talent acquisition. And I've heard this, having been around as long as I have, like I've heard for 30+ years that the recruiters go away and AI, claims that they're going to be able to replace the recruiter. I fundamentally believe that the role of the recruiter will never go away. You know, that, that elegant balance of the relationship that you have with a hiring manager and the relationship that you have with a candidate cannot be replaced. You know, that's that human interaction kind of coupled with technology that really kind of delivers the best experience.

I want to, um, I highlighted the financial crisis in 2008-2009, which is what you were referring to. Um, and for folks that didn't go through that, that was way worse than now. Yeah, I don't know if it's going to get worse from here or better, or— but that was a really tough time for a number of reasons. And yet again, China had something to do with that. It started when China decided to not pay Cisco for their infrastructure that they had leased for 99 years, and we couldn't really do anything about it. Um, and that crashed Cisco, which crashed Ariba, which crashed all these fabless semiconductors, and then it crashed the dot-coms. And then in 2008, 2009, um, let me put it this way, I started doing more commercial mortgage inspections while I was still you know, struggling with my recruiting practice. So just as a way to pick up money, kind of like gig work today. Like I was basically driving Uber, which is probably what I would be doing today if that was the case. You know, I was driving Uber in 2008, 2009 by doing these commercials just to stay solvent. It was rough. Big impact. And it's, you know, 2 massive crashes in 1 decade. So you had the dot-com burst. 2002 and the financial crisis in 2007, '08, '09. Some people refer to that as the lost decade in US equities. That's huge. But anyway, I want to point that out. And I also want to point the noise— point to the noise that you just alluded to. Folks, I'm going to repeat what Terry said, not because I'm a very educated parrot, but the role of the recruiter will never go away. And that's really important. There's been a lot of talk, especially at some events that we've been to recently, where people say, "Oh, the recruiter is The sorcerer is dead. I've been hearing that since 2000. And it's really not true. What happens is the role changes. It shifts. Terry, you've been through some of these major shifts. You've led teams through these major shifts. You've been at the helm basically, right, of you've been driving the ship during these acquisitions, integrations, reinventions. What's the inside story where talent strategy absolutely blew up? And what did it teach you about what not to do in recruiting? Because it's happened 3 times to you.

Yeah. So, kind of first and foremost, I'm a recruiter at my core, right? I started off as a contingency recruiter. And many people won't know this term, but I started off in what was called an applicant-paid-fee market, meaning the applicant would actually pay the fee, not the company. Which was super hard. But I absolutely learned that, you know, the value of building a relationship and whether it's with the hiring manager or the candidates and, you know, being able to put those pieces together. And that still works today for the most part, right? Like I was meeting with one of our senior recruiters today and she's an incredible recruiter. And, you know, her job is to find the talent and convince the hiring manager and the candidate to get together. And it's not always a perfect match. But if you think about it, you know, many of the jobs or placements that we've made or jobs that we've filled is not the perfect match to the job description.

Some of my favorite ones, my favorite stories. Yeah.

And yeah, some of the great stories are like, you know, you convinced a hiring manager to take a look at someone that maybe didn't meet, you know, the actual job description and turned out to be their best hire. But, you know, we are in a period right now where I do think that recruiters, you know, have to be aware of how technology is changing the game. So while I say that the role of the recruiter will never go away, to your point, Shelly, recruiters do have to evolve. Yeah, like AI is not going away.

No, we need to evolve, but we're not going to be totally eliminated.

Absolutely. And, you know, some of the technologies that are coming out there, you know, you know, I see AI today adding value in some places, not other. And, and somebody shared with me a couple of months ago, to think about AI and talent acquisition as features, not platforms. So I think, you know, you hear about all these companies and they're going to revolutionize recruiting and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, the AI that exists in talent acquisition or recruiting today are features. And whether it's a sourcing feature, whether it's an interviewing feature, you know, whether it's a sourcing tool, etc., They are features and there'll be winners and losers. Like, you know, over the next several years, these things will ferret themselves out and it will also normalize, meaning there's this rush right now where companies are like, how much AI can I deploy? How can I automate my process? You know, I think the high level of adoption that we're seeing, you know, it all comes full circle at some point. It goes up, it goes down. Companies will, you know, will eliminate recruiters, but then they'll come back and say, we have to bring more recruiters back in. So, to your point, like, you know, the world is not ending. You know, I do think that the labor markets that we're in right now are the most awkward I've ever seen. And that's a long time. So, you know, 30-plus years of doing this. And when I say awkward, what I see is a really divided marketplace. So, and I can use our business as an example of this. Frontline hiring. So what I would call standing positions, that is very vibrant. It is still very pressured. And that's where most of the jobs are. If you look at the 7+ million jobs, about 80% of them are frontline, meaning hospitality, retail, manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera. 20% of them are professional. So sitting jobs. And so we are seeing great growth, great pressure in these frontline roles, But companies are incredibly conservative on their professional or example-level hiring right now. And that is causing a lot of disruption within kind of recruiter levels, you know, capacity of recruiters, et cetera. It's just created this dynamic that is really, really awkward. I've never seen a time quite like this.

When you say awkward, is it And I might step a little bit outside of the comfort zone of a lot of people here on the show. But is it the economic buyer or is it the user? That's where's the discomfort.

So, I think the awkwardness is that there are a lot of jobs but the jobs are not matching where people are looking for jobs.

Right. And there are a lot of unfilled jobs. Yes. People say there's— So, there's unfilled jobs and then there's automation is going to replace us, right? So, we know the candidates are feeling very awkward. But in what you're describing, is this an economic buyer deciding whether or not to buy AI or what to buy where it's getting weird? Or is this the recruiter day-to-day trying to do the job not be overwhelmed by the choices? Like, where is the pressure?

I think it's a little bit of both, you know. So I was talking to a very large life sciences company, um, and, and in many years they get about 225,000 resumes for their roles. They're a pretty big company, um, well branded, etc. They introduced, uh, an AI sourcing tool. They're now getting 200,000 resumes per month. Um, so if you— and, and So the impact on the recruiter is now they have to go through, you know, 10 times more, you know, resumes. So that's creating a complexity and an awkwardness, you know. And on the candidate side, candidates can literally apply to as many jobs as they want very, very easily, right? So click, click, click, click, click, apply to all. You know, they don't ever hear back, you know, and they're frustrated because they're not getting the feedback. Yet companies are frustrated because they're getting far too many resumes. But there's a mismatch on the actual jobs that companies have and what people are looking for. So that's why I say it's awkward right now. And I think it'll continue to be awkward until we see a little bit more certainty in the economy. And, you know, some of the things that are happening at a national level.

So I actually, I don't know if you read this. It would be presumptive if you did. I actually wrote a white paper called The Talent Abundance Trap that nails exactly what you just said. Too many resumes. Back when you and I started and folks, some folks may know the company called Ayres. Terry purchased Ayres and later became part of ADP. So he's well aware of, you know, internet sourcing. And so, you know that the solution that was providing was we can't find people. And so, we were finding the unfindable. But now, we can find— I'm not going to say everyone because I know that's not true. But there's so much more that we find too much. And so, the solution that sourcing provides now is in cutting through the clutter. It's in applying smart filters. And I think AI can have a very strong effect in helping us reduce large models of data because that's what LLMs do. But you still have to— once you filter all that out, You still have to have that intuition to be able to bridge the gap between what the requirements say, the language written in the requirements, and what the candidates say or what they put on their resume. And there's that human— I don't want to say intuition because that's really not the right word.

It's evaluation.

Evaluation. It's predictiveness, right, that is missing from AI fundamentally. In other words, it's not coded into the model. It can help us with language patterns, but it can't help us with human sensitivity, basically.

I couldn't agree more. And, you know, if I, you know, I, and again, I may irritate some folks when I say that.

I think we're past that.

That, you know, I've not necessarily found sourcing tools that are the most effective. And so, yes, they can be good at matching skill to skills with job description says this, resume says this, it's an 80% match. But, you know, skills and taxonomy of skills are still not well defined because every company looks at it differently. And, and, and so you still need that recruiter to be able to interpret what someone has done and does that match what the company need is. And, you know, if I think about the recruiters, the senior recruiters that are super successful, within our company. Number one, they're very experienced. They know their industry. They know their hiring managers. They know, you know, what the companies look for, and they can have that kind of a discussion with a candidate to dig into what those skills are and what does it mean. Whereas technology can match it at the surface, but it can't do the deeper connection in terms of what's going to work for that particular company. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. That's exactly what I've been talking about. I want to take things just a little bit— excuse me— a little bit further. RPOs and, uh, staffing firms. And, and for those that don't know the difference between an RPO and a staffing firm, I'm sure you can give us a 5-second explanation. But in my opinion, an RPO is responsible for the— as the, the name says— the outsourcing of the entire process, whereas a staffing firm, vendor, executive search firm, a partner, they're working on a specific requirement, um, as opposed to, you know, the outsourcing of the phrase. So think RPOs are replacement of the function because it can be done at scale externally, you know, faster, cheaper, better, whatever, whereas staffing firms are a partner with the function. And that's really the key difference. You can probably explain that better. But are RPOs embracing the, the technology as a real differentiator, or are they just kind of attaching it to the process so that they can innovate?

Um, I would say today it's the latter. I mean, so they're attaching—

they're adding it, yeah, to the process.

It's so— it's additive. I do believe in the future that in order for RPOs to really kind of show the value that they should, they have to be able to come to the table with differentiated technology. And that, of course, is AI. But let me expand just a little bit on the RPO versus staffing.

Absolutely.

You're dead on in terms of that kind of core definition. I think what's interesting for me, having been in the RPO space for 20-plus years, is how the industry has evolved. So RPO became popular in the 2000s and a lot of companies would outsource the entire thing, like the whole function. Like, we want you to fill all the jobs, you know.

It came from BPO, business process outsourcing.

Exactly. What I've seen over the last 5+ years is that companies are less willing to outsource the whole thing. However, I'll give you a good example of one of our clients. So they fill about 15,000 jobs a year. They're all frontline hires type. What they elected to do was to keep the, what they call the revenue-producing jobs, it with their in-house team and outsource the repeatable jobs to the RPO, which would be us. And, and in what I've seen in the past is when the companies were looking at RPOs, like, give the RPO all the hard jobs, we'll take all the easy jobs. Well, this company thought of it differently. It's like, you know what, our recruiters have to be able to provide us the revenue-producing roles which is the most important thing we can do for the company. And then, you know, partner with someone who's really efficient, brings technology, can scale quickly, etc.

Highly repetitive ones. Yeah, that makes sense.

To do these repetitive jobs. And so we're seeing a lot more what I call blended models, shall we? That makes sense. You know, companies still want to be able to own kind of the core strategic value of bringing talent into the company, but also partnering with someone who can bring scale, bring technology, bring expertise. Bring a voice, etc. The other thing I wanted to mention that has changed a good bit is, and this goes back to the role of the recruiter, we've invested heavily in, and a lot of companies are investing heavily in providing what I call labor market tools for the recruiter so that when I have my first conversation with the hiring manager, I'm already telling them this is what the market is doing. This is where you fit into the market. This is where your company, how your company is positioned. This is how difficult or, you know, not difficult this search is going to be. And here's what I'm going to need you to do as my partner to be successful in this.

They call it talent intelligence. It's the market, the talent market intelligence, the intelligence on what, what's out there. Where are they? How much does it cost? Is it viable? Where should we go? Those kinds of things.

Are you competitive? You know, We've seen kind of wage inflation, you know, kind of post-COVID. That's certainly normalized over the past year or two. You know, but companies were trying to keep up and increasing salaries and, you know, making sure that they're competitive to be able to get the right type of talent is critical for the role of the recruiter. It goes to that evolution of the role. Like, you know, to me, today's recruiter is absolutely much more of a strategic advisor. You know, they understand these roles, they understand the hiring manager, need. They know where they need to go to get these people. They know that, that they have to direct recruit them. They're going to have to pull them from, you know, a competitor or desirable company, etc.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Yep. So, um, I wanted to get a quick follow-up on that, uh, what you were talking about as far as like the sort of hype versus reality. What, what is, uh, what would you suggest as a red flag for a leader, an executive, or let's call it economic buyer, the person making the acquisition decision, sorry. What is a red flag that the economic buyer could look for when someone claims powered by AI that isn't, right? Like what's the red flag that they should look at or dig into when they hear powered by AI to determine whether or not it really is?

Yeah. So, I mean, I would be skeptical of anything that says AI and talent acquisition, like as a starter, right?

So that's a red flag.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good point. So, you know, and then, you know, there are, there's a number of use cases today where AI is predominantly used and it tends to be in interviewing, like video interviewing. We are seeing some really good technology around interview scheduling and that it's working and it's viable for companies. You know, sourcing, if anyone's— there's so many companies that will come to you and say, we have access to every person in the world and we can source candidates. And I've just not seen it work effectively yet. So that's a definite red flag when someone says they can bring an AI sourcing tool and replace a sourcer or a group of sourcers. So, you know, I think, and, you know, I had a company, one of our clients come to us and say, hey, go get us some of that AI. And I'm like, well, that's a pretty broad request, right? Like, you know, there's so many companies that say they're doing AI and most of it's automation versus artificial intelligence. You know, those companies that are truly using NLP, language models and that can be very predictive and have artificial intelligence, they can articulate that incredibly well in terms of how it works. Companies that are just automating are very challenged to share how they differentiate and exactly what their technology does. So I think digging into kind of the functional performance of, of, you know, what that tool is, is actually doing, there's nothing better than references, right?

Like, I love that.

Yeah, talking to someone who's—

anybody use that? You know, can you, can I meet anybody that uses that today or whatever?

Yeah, so I mean, you really have to be careful. Like I said, there's 200 to 500 technologies in talent acquisition alone, and new ones, and there is no barrier to entry, right? So a company can say that I'm an AI sourcing tool or a chatbot, right? And even to me, like, a chatbot is not, is not AI. I mean, it's a library of responses that, you know, uh, you know, that they pull the answers from. And if there's not an answer there, then they can't answer the question. So, um, just be careful thinking that you're bringing in AI when it may just be automation of a process. Yeah.

And there's nothing wrong with automation.

That's right.

If you want to automate, that's fine. You should and you can. But we have been able to. I mean, what we see today as this AI stuff is really an evolution or an incremental level of ease of use and efficiency on what was previously, I mean, even just a couple years ago, known as robotic process automation, RPA. It's the same logic, it's just now, um, instructionally based as opposed to you have to configure it with APIs and calls. And so I would say it's similar in this way. Maybe you agree with this, um, or not, that's fine. But I see it like back in the day when we used to have to know about FTP and we had to connect into the FTP to upload an HTML page and we had to know how to code HTML. In order to have a blog, you needed to have some level of, you know, HTML or JavaScript knowledge to be able to do that. And then along came technology that made it possible for anyone to blog from anywhere without having the slightest, you know, technical ability. That's what's happening now. It used to be you needed to be somewhat technical to do robotic process automation.

Right.

And now it's just conversation with an AI that does the same thing. But it's the same thing. It's not something where it, it never was where you would go to an RPA solution and say, I want you to outsource the entire function. It was never that. So it's more, more of, um, the sky's the limit.

You're—

you— whatever you can imagine, you can automate, but you still have to automate it. It's not being done for you without you having to put any effort in. That's the thing that I think is dangerous and misleading is this illusion that I plug in the API and everything gets done for me. That's not the case. Even with real AI, that's not the case. It's not an insert the disk into the machine and then voilà.

Yeah, yeah. I've seen so many companies buy these AI tools or features and then just not use them. And And I was at a conference not too long ago, and very large life sciences company was very proud of the fact that they had introduced 9 AI tools into their recruiting process. And the person was telling us all about them and everything, and then she was done, and I raised my hand and I said, so they were at Workday, they were on Workday, and I was like, can you tell me how many of those are integrated with Workday? And she said, I knew somebody was going to ask me that. None of them are integrated with Workday. And to me, I told her, I said, well, that sounds awful.

Right.

I'm just like, yeah. But I will tell you one true thing that's worked for me. Whenever I, you know, because I get a lot of inquiries from AI, you know, companies who want to try to get us to adopt, I will always get, you know, some of our best recruiters to go and play around with the tool. And, you know, they'll be able to, you know, call BS or not. On whether this is something that seems really interesting or something we should pursue. Um, you know, they, they know, you know, if this is going to help them or if it's going to hurt them as it relates to that, you know. And I, and, and I don't want the audience to think that I'm, I'm not a fan of AI because I personally am.

Me too, absolutely.

I just think that it's so cluttered right now. It is. Everybody's claiming—

noisy. Yeah. And, and then this— and it's honestly It's misleading. Do you remember back when it was a semantic search? Yes. Yeah. And the same thing happened then. It was like everybody had semantic search and no, they didn't. Some companies had basically taxonomically-based structures that weren't semantic-based. They weren't an ontology. They were taxonomy. But they were calling it semantic, which is not accurate. It just behaves like it. But a taxonomy is very defined. Think of A taxonomy basically could be like the way that we name— it may be, it just actually is the way that we name, you know, creatures in the scientific nomenclature. That's a taxonomy, right?

Right.

It's a, you know, it's a scientific name for a bovine, for a cow, right? That's taxonomy. An ontology is the hierarchy above that, that would, would make— it allows for, it gives, provides room for the things to enter the taxonomy that didn't previously exist. And so it's a little bit more fluid, it's a little bit more dynamic, it changes, and it's really more about defining the space as opposed to naming the things.

Yeah, I think that—

yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I could, you know, talk forever on taxonomy because, you know, taxonomy is important because all the ATSs use these parsers.

It's our dictionary.

And there's— and there's— it is, it's a dictionary or taxonomy But they're only, you know, anywhere from 50 to 70% accurate. And, you know, I'd like to use the example, you know, if I want to hire a barista for a coffee shop, but I put coffee maestro on my resume, that's not caught in the taxonomy.

Until somebody updates coffee maestro means barista.

That's right. That's right. And because the automation or the AI cannot figure that out. The other thing I just wanted to mention is, you know, when we talk about AI, We almost exclusively talk about how does this help a company, but candidates are using AI and they're using it probably more effectively than most companies. In fact, we just did a survey and one of the questions that we ask of candidates were, how do you use AI to help you in your job search? And the number one was finding or matching with relevant job listings. So, you know, does my background match this job listing? So it kind of helps them do that writing and reviewing resumes, cover letters, and generating interview questions. Now, you do have to be careful because some candidates are using AI inappropriately, meaning, you know, they can sit on a Teams call or Zoom call, somebody asks them a question, they're so adept, like especially the younger generation, of being able to get a good answer. Or they can type it into ChatGPT and come up with the answer and then respond to it.

So yeah, and they're doing it on their mobile phone, not on the interviewing application. Absolutely. You can't detect it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I, you know, I've, I've heard a number of people who are offended that candidates are using it. I'm not offended. I think they should use it. I think I'd use everything in your power to help you get the job that you want to get, so long as you're not I'm not, you know, doing anything that, you know, is not moral or, you know, not right.

So, and as an interviewer, you can easily defeat that if what you're looking for. So, you know, if you ask a question and the candidate types it into ChatGPT or whatever, and they get a, you know, an elegant answer, it's easy to dig in and follow up and say, how did you arrive at that? Can you give me an example when you utilize that? Can you give me an example when that didn't work from your actual work history? Like, you know, great. I'm glad that you know how to summarize because, you know, I'll tell you what, Terry, I'm a little shocked and disturbed, but also in a good way. Like disturbed, but like, huh, I didn't think that was possible. I created—

don't laugh—

I created a robot called Ask Shelly.

Okay.

It's a ChatGPT, but it's a custom ChatGPT that I pay for. And it has proprietary information in it. And what I found is that Ask Shally can tell me about things that I know about and talk about more succinctly than I can talk about. Oh, you're kidding.

Really?

It's crazy. But first of all, mind you, I populated it with a bunch, you know, with all my writings and my books and everything. So, it knows me fairly well, but it also has the ability to take all of that language. I mean, I'm talking about terabytes of information. Me and synthesize it. And I honestly, if I wrote something 30 years ago, there probably are still relevant pieces in there, but I haven't reread it. And I mean, I may have completely forgotten about it, but this machine doesn't. So I ask it questions that I would— it's kind of like this. I might go to Google Drive and type in some keywords to try to find that old presentation. Instead, I'm asking the AI because it has all the presentations Wow, very cool. But it's still just pulling up my own stuff. I mean, it's—

I would, I would like to just maybe get your perspective, shall we, on— and I think you'll know the answer to this— but do you know what the number one complaint of the job seeker is?

No, the black hole, no response from recruiters, never hearing back.

So when I started, however many years ago, guess what the number one complaint was?

No, not hearing back from recruiters.

That's it. Yeah, never hearing on the job, you know, never getting any feedback, etc. Here's where I get, you know, super passionate, like, as an industry, as a group of professionals, and we have the technology to be able to communicate, but yet we still find ourselves— the number one complaint of job seekers is never hearing back, you know, when the job closes or disposition, you know, et cetera. And I do think that we as an industry, we as a group of professionals really need to be able to attack that. It is the holy grail to me in terms of being able to, you know, communicate effectively with seekers who are not going to get the role, being helpful to them.

You know, it's a bare minimum when you close a rec that you send a message to everybody that applied. That the rec has been closed. At the bare minimum, you should inform people that that position is no longer available, just to let them know not to expect anything. You know, candidates are expecting to hear more than that, um, and I understand the reason for, for all of that. But if you close the rec and just send a notification that the rec is closed, we've filled this position, thank you, at least that's enough to know that I was, you know, I was in process. When you don't do that, it feels like as a candidate, uh, they never got— did they even get my application? You know, it's like you feel ignored. But I will tell you this, and I know you're very passionate about this. I will tell you this. In my experience, the same problem— the number one— as a consultant, the number one complaint that I hear from recruiters about the process is they don't hear back from hiring managers. The number one complaint that I hear from hiring managers is that they don't get enough resumes. Those are two actually Although they seem opposite, they are the same problem. Here's why. The resumes that the recruiters are sending are not good enough to elicit a response. So, what the hiring manager is saying is, "I need better resumes and not more." And so, the answer is the recruiter should send less resumes even though they're saying, "I want more." They should send less resumes. But there's something missing in the match. So take that to the, to the candidate. And this is what I have to say. If you didn't hear back from the job, you didn't get the job. That's your feedback.

Correct. However, you want more.

I get it.

But yes, well, I think the frustration is, is that candidates don't ever feel that their resume was looked at.

You know, that's what I'm saying. So at least say we looked at your resume and you didn't get the job.

That's correct. That's correct. So I think, you know, I talk to so many candidates and hear their frustration around the recruiting process. And, you know, they'll say they've sent out 100 resumes or 200 resumes and only heard from 2 companies, you know, that acknowledged that they're being considered or they weren't being considered, etc. And that's not good. Like, you know, that kind of missing gap. But kind of going back to your comment on the hiring manager, You know, and we tell our recruiters that, you know, so many problems can be avoided by communication, right? So, and, you know, it used to be, you know, you didn't have a resume to share with the hiring manager, so you didn't get back to the hiring manager, you know. But if you just had a conversation with the hiring manager, you know, like, hey, I'm working on it, I haven't found what you're looking for, or, you know, we're 2 weeks in, you know, what you're looking for isn't available, we I need to change the specs, et cetera. That kind of communication, you know, solves so many, so, so many problems. And getting in front of it and communicating with whether it's a candidate, the hiring manager, HR, et cetera.

Yeah. You probably know Peter Drucker.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is one of my favorite quotes from him. It's not about doing more things right, or really it's not about doing more. It's about doing it well, you know. And so that's— yeah, you're not saying let's add another layer of complexity. You're saying let's, you know, let's handle this one thing at least, because it's a big gap. But I tell recruiters the same thing. If you haven't heard from the hiring manager, it's because they didn't like the resume. If they like the resume, they'll let you know. Now you can ask for more, and I think you have a right to ask for more. And there's a lot of ways you can get more from hiring managers so that you can direct your search and hone your search. And if you're a professional, you want to do that. And if they're interested, in filling the job, they want to do that. But at the end of the day, if they don't tell you anything about a resume, it's because they didn't like it. And that is feedback. It's just not the feedback that you want.

Yeah. You know, again, for me, it's all about setting expectation with that hiring manager up front.

So when you have the first conversation with them, I really need your feedback, right?

Yeah. And I need to be able to refine. So if I send you a resume that you don't like, that's all right. But please tell me why you didn't like it. You know, I want to That way I can get better at getting you the exact type of fit that you're desiring. So, and as a recruiter, we should expect that the hiring manager is going to be responsive to us. So, I get it. They're busy. You know, they may have looked at a resume, didn't like it. Tell me why you didn't like it so that I can now hone in on exactly what it is that you need.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

Let me turn things in a slightly different direction and ask you something kind of a little bit funny, tongue-in-cheek, sort of humorously. Let's say recruiters— pretend recruiters were chefs and we have access to all the tools in the kitchen, right? Most people know some of the basic tools in the kitchen. So, recruiters were chefs and we had access to all the tools in the kitchen. Which tool would AI be, and why isn't it the Vitamix that everybody thinks it is?

Wow, what a really good question. Um, so I think it has the potential to be the Vitamix. I just think it's too new.

It isn't right now. Yeah, it's not the solution to anything. It's—

to me, recruiting is a human sport, right? So absolutely, yeah, it's not as simple as—

but we use tools, right? Like in a human sport, you use Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, if you use the chef analogy, I may, I may use a tool to kind of help me make or prepare a particular item. But as the chef, I'm the one who knows the recipe, recipe, created that recipe, know that, you know, the exact mixture of the ingredients that need to go into that. And I think for me, Shelley, that's the elegance of recruiting. And, you know, top recruiters, good recruiters, They're the chefs, you know, they know what ingredients and what level of ingredient to put into it.

And they can use whatever tool they have.

That's right.

Obviously, they're going to want the best quality knives and the best quality stoves or whatever, you know, the best of they can get. And they want more tools to be able to do things faster and better. But ultimately, they're tools in the kitchen that the chef uses, and how you use them, how you put them together, whether you use them or not, is still your decision. Yeah, so would AI be like the, what, the, the, the, the multi, you know, what's that thing called with the, um, that makes bread and chops things?

Uh, oh yeah, yeah, I'm not sure what the name, I'm not a chef myself, but yeah, but you know what I mean.

So is it, what does it replace? What is the tool that it, that it replaces?

AI is the ingredients, right? You know, so, um, and, and, and so it's the mixture of those ingredients that allow you to get the perfect recipe or prepare the perfect dish.

So it's not a tool, it's an ingredient. That's brilliant, actually.

Yeah, it's really— So, and—

It's salt and pepper or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and it's the level that you have of each of those ingredients. So how much AI do I use for sourcing? How much AI do I use for interviewing or pre-screening or, you know, and it could be that AI is a really good ingredient ingredient for this job, but it's a terrible ingredient for that job, right? So, you know, I would say that, you know, AI screening tools are really good for repeatable jobs, right? You know, very simple. But if you're looking for an R&D scientist with a particular oncology specialty, AI is not going to help you a whole lot there in terms of screening. Like, that is an intellectual conversation that the recruiter is I have with that candidate to better understand exactly what, what they had. So in that case, I wouldn't use that ingredient because it's not going to be valuable to that recipe.

I like that. Yeah, it's— Todd says it's the, um, the cookbook. It's the cookbook, but it's not the— yeah, I like the cookbook idea. I like the ingredient idea. Yeah, both of those are pretty good.

That's really good. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, you have to be prepared, you know, that AI is not going away, right?

No, no, I don't want it to at all.

Yeah.

No, I wanted to actually take the next step and, you know, the promise of agentic AI where I can actually, uh, what I'd love to be, I've, I've, I've wanted this since I was a child. I wanted to be able to ask the computer to do something for me and have it do it. It still doesn't.

Right. Right. That's what I know. It's moving in the right direction.

We're moving in the right direction, right? Yeah. But I mean, I wish Siri could literally like pick a restaurant and make reservations and add it to my calendar. It can't. I got to tell it what restaurant and it can do it. Or, you know, there's other things like I can find a restaurant, but I can't just say, hey, make reservations for tonight.

Yeah. It might make recommendations to you based upon your history.

And then they might make, but it's still steps. It's still, you know, for sure the agent should be able to do all of that. And know what I want. Kind of like those commercials with Woody Harrelson and the Salesforce ones where like the AI agent should have known that it was going to be raining tonight and move your reservation. That's what I want.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't think you've seen that anywhere.

Yeah, I have.

Terry, it's been a blast. I know we're getting close to the hour here and there actually are two questions that I need to ask every one of my guests. And the first one of those questions is who should be our next guest?

I'd love for you to have someone who has built some, one of these AI tools, right? That like someone from an Eightfold or someone from a sourcing tool, someone from a Paradox, you know, who maybe can give a different perspective on, you know, how they see AI. In the recruiting space. You know, it would be super interesting for me to hear where they think it's going, where, like, where it's at in terms of its evolution. Are we at, you know, 0 of 100, 1 of 100, or 50 of 100? You know, and that'll always change. So, I mean, I'd love to see maybe the opposite side, you know, from a technology perspective.

Do you know anybody that you nominate? I mean, I'm going to reach out and ask. They may not accept, But yeah, anybody you could nominate?

The CEO of Paradox, I think, would be awesome. Um, and I know he does a lot of speaking. He was at Unleash this week as well. So, and, and that company is growing by leaps and bounds. Um, you know, so I think there's a lot of value that could be provided there, just a different perspective.

Perfect. Yeah, I'll, um, uh, Godson, Adam Godson.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'll reach out. Thank you for that. And so, my last question to close things out. I like folks to have something to think about for themselves because typically, they'll watch this and they don't have a chance to interact. They'll watch this as a recording in other time zones tomorrow, et cetera. Can you give us a question to ask ourselves about whatever we talked about today or anything that's important to you. So something that we should ask ourselves to think deeply about ourselves. So what should we be asking ourselves this weekend, basically?

Yeah. So if I stick to kind of this AI topic, I think as a recruiter, I would want to ask myself the question, Am I truly embracing technology vis-à-vis AI? Do I have an open mind about how it could aid me, make me more efficient, you know, as a recruiter? Or do I automatically, when I hear the word AI in recruiting, get threatened that it may take my job away? You know, I would really want the recruiter I want a recruiter who's curious, who wants to learn, who wants to be able to understand how technology can enable me, make me, make me better, you know, make me more efficient, you know, maybe speedier, etc. So really evaluate, are you being open to the possibility of how AI can aid in the role of the recruiter, which does require evolution, right?

Does require.

Yeah. Yeah.

Good.

Are you really being open to it, or are you just, you know, shutting down?

Yeah, I like that. Thanks a lot, Terry. Really appreciate you being on the show today.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Charlie, and, and thank you for everything you do for the industry and for our profession.

And I love it.

Honored to be on your show, so thank you.

I love it. All right, we'll be in touch.

Awesome.

All right, take care. Be kind to yourselves