Tim Sackett Live on Shally's Alley

All right everybody, how's it going? Welcome, you are live on Shally's Alley. It is January 24th of the year 2025. We're literally a quarter into this century already, for those of you that are, that are keeping track. And, uh, and I'm, and I'm half a century into, uh, well, I'm not even going to get into that, but Hey, happy 2025. My very special guest today is none other than Tim Sackett. Say hi, Tim.

Hey, how's it going, everybody?

All right. So most of you probably already know Tim. If not, you've probably heard of him. Maybe you've seen him at a conference, at a SHRM conference or anything. Uh, one of the most highly controversial speakers in the circuit of all time. Um, Tim and I actually shared a table recently in Toronto. and we had some interesting things to, to say, uh, you know, talking about the industry and stuff like that with each other. Um, you know, I always thought that, uh, as a consultant, Tim, Tim and I were in the same space, but get, you know, ignorance is bliss, right? Once we got to know each other a little bit better, we realized that we're in, we're in cooperative spaces but not occupying the same space. Yeah, we're in two different segments. And so it's quite possible we might even run into each other out there at some point and maybe even share clients. Yeah. So Tim's— Tim goes around speaking at all these events about HR and HR technology and TA and TA technology and also advising companies on mostly the— what is it that you're advising? Your primary consulting practices?

It's mostly talent acquisition execution, technology selection, some of those things. Like, they usually find me with like, hey, like, we're broken, and it's They usually think it's their tech that's broken. Sometimes, sometimes not. You know how it goes.

So, and you jump in and do it.

I dig in and do the diagnostic and figure out what's really going on.

Yeah. And are you a solo operator? Are you part of a big group?

Um, so I own, um, a technical staffing company, HRU Tech, and then this is just kind of born out of that. Um, and so I have a big group, you know, that we, you know, we have a dozen recruiters and salespeople and back office and everything.

So. Got it. Well, um, one of the funny topics that we were talking about is the confusion in the market, especially in TA tech, HR tech, about this whole, uh, Gen AI and agents and generative AI versus artificial intelligence, AGI, and how like things get mixed up.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the things that you did at the very beginning when you took the stage was you, you basically You broke it down in a really no-nonsense, very simple, easy-to-absorb way. I'd love for you to kind of give us a quick recap of that. What are the 4 different kinds of AI that are out there for people that are in the market for this technology, not to get blindsided by vendors?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's really, yeah, like I said, there's really 4 main things to kind of be aware of and know as a buyer. One is AI that's called machine learning. You know, it's basically, uh, it's if-then, right? So machine learning AI simply learns what you like it to do or what you like to select, and it just gives you more of that, right? And that was early AI when we heard all the controversy of, oh, my AI is, you know, biased. And it was like, well, you're teaching it to be biased, and it just is giving you more of what you're already asking it for, right?

So people teach it, it learns fast, and it learns A lot. It's simple.

It's not— and it doesn't really understand language. It's more of a, of a like number data kind of thing. It's like, hey, I understand that Tim likes to hire people from Harvard that like worked at Google, so I should try to find more people that work at Harvard. It's just, it's very simple. It's a very simple way to talk about machine learning, right? But again, we've been using that for a better part of a decade or more. Within HR, I mean, machine learning has been around probably since the '50s, right? So, so like AI in that level has been— it's always funny when you ask people like, hey, are you using AI right now in HR? And people will say no. Well, we're all using AI to some degree.

Absolutely.

We're using AI in our office products. And we have been. And so to actually freak out now that you might buy something that has AI in it is kind of laughable because you're like, you're already using AI.

You already did.

The legal teams that freak out and go, we're not going to use AI. And I'm like, you're using AI right now as you're talking to me.

Whoops. So that one type of AI, the old school stuff is the machine learning, deep learning where it just does a lot of stuff more the same and faster. But then there's definitely an evolution with what folks are associated.

Generative.

Yeah. And that's kind of been used as a marketing term everywhere, even misnamed. And then there's now everybody thinks everything is an agent. Is that really the case? And what is an agent?

Yeah. So like, obviously you've heard like the, like the large language models, LLMs, the ChatGPTs, the Claudes. This is all this kind of generative AI, which becomes much more robust. And this is the same, we're seeing these features crop up in our stuff where they'll go, hey, write me a better email response to a candidate, right? And it helps you and you agree to it and, and all that. There's a lot of, you know, there's gonna be a lot of like those features that we see in our technology. It's going to continue to be robust. And then like now we start to hear like Microsoft came out with Copilots and LinkedIn came out with Hiring Assistant, which is a kind of a copilot or kind of this AI assistant to help you do your work. And then there's an agent. Now, the difference between a copilot AI and an agent AI is a copilot is like these features where it's like, hey, by the way, you have a task that you should be doing, right? There's— you have an interview coming up and here's the questions you might want to ask this person. And then you, you know, but it's not doing anything besides suggesting.

It sort of reminds you, suggests, right?

Yeah. And like, even like you could think of it like an HR self-serve, like service stuff of somebody asking a question like, hey, what's our vacation policy? And immediately it just comes and gives you this. And then it might send a message to the HR person saying, hey, Tim asked about vacation policy. You might want to check in with them, blah, blah, blah. An agent actually is, let's say, um, uh, putting through a vacation request, right? Where, uh, an HR person might have to go into the HCM, it might have to go into the payroll system, and then go and then approve it into an email, right? So you have 3 different systems that you're working in. You could actually program an agent to say, you know, to basically the person could go, hey, I want to take vacation from January 1st to January 7th.

And it goes in and it does the approval process and sends it out.

You would have no idea that it actually did it, right? You know, it would send an email to the boss. Do you approve? Yes. Bam. But like the HR person would have no idea. It's automatically the AI is actually doing this based on, again, a set of training and rules and the policies that you have and all that.

But it is taking action.

Taking action. And we've already seen it with smart recruiters. I'll be honest, like the LinkedIn one is really an agent that they set up as a copilot. Right. But when you have recruiter licenses that you're paying for, you can't just eliminate all that revenue. So it's kind of like, hey, we're going to have an agent in there, but we're going to have you as the recruiter approve every step. It's actually, it's kind of an agent copilot.

It's an agent that asks for confirmation for everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so they're trying to set it up as a copilot, but in reality it's not, but the smart recruiters Winston is a full agent. It, um, this agent would somehow get an awareness that an opening— maybe the HCM would alert, hey, Shelly just put in his 2 weeks notice. Then the agent would reach out to the hiring manager, hey, do you want to replace Shelly? Um, this, you know, the hiring manager would say yes, and it would do a full intake with, with the hiring manager. It would go post the job, um, it would go source, it would screen, it would set up interviews. And the next thing the hiring manager would know is it would have interviews on their calendar.

Right.

And the recruiter would again have no idea any of this stuff was actually taking place.

But they might be able to go in there and get involved and—

could, yeah, yeah. At any point, right, you could say, hey, I want my agent to go and do this, and then I'm going to be the one that screens, and then I'm going to be the one then that, you know, and then the agent's going to come back in and set up that, you know, um, schedule an interview with the manager, and then we'll take it from there.

So putting it in like ChatGPT sort of, uh, terms, because a lot of folks use at least the free version of ChatGPT. By the way, I told you when I was at the table that I started paying for it and I regretted not having paid for it earlier because of all the things that I'm able to do now that I couldn't do before. But in the context of like ChatGPT, the generative AI, the gen AI that everybody, you know, had a major crush on, it's a large language model. So what it does is it sort of finishes your sentence for you or predicts the fill-in-the-blank, right? So you've got a huge model of a bunch of pictures of bees and you ask it to generate a bee. So it takes all those pictures of bees and makes a generic bee with the description that you get it. So it sort of combines what it knows into something that you're asking for, but it's not creating anything new. It's just remixing and recreating and stuff like that. In that context, the agent, by the way, ChatGPT just created their, or they launched their agent yesterday, I think it was.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you can use it if you have the Teams Pro, but they're going to be releasing it for the individual Pro. So I'll be able to check into that. That one has its own browser. So in comparison, regular ChatGPT, it's a big pool of data. You ask it a question and it answers it based on that data. The agent has its own browser and it can go somewhere and do something. And if it has permission to, it could log you in, enter things into a dropdown menu or, you know, database and plug stuff in, get the results, format them, put them somewhere else. So you could say create a PowerPoint and it'll actually create a PowerPoint versus give you bullet points to put into the PowerPoint.

Right.

Yeah.

There's going to be— I think the future of work is much more of us having these live conversations with agentic AI saying, hey, again, think of every little classic, like, hey, a pay raise. What are the process steps to get somebody a pay raise and the go-in-between? And as an HR person, you might just go, hey, I need to give Shelly a 4% pay increase. And then boom, it's done. It's just going to go through and do everything, all the approvals. And is there the budget? Is there for it? And blah, blah, blah. You're not going to have to—

And it learns. You may not have to actually teach it. You know, click here, click there, it will click and it'll self-correct and stuff like that. So early on, when there was a huge push for generative AI and people were talking about recruiters were talking about like, oh, it's gonna replace my job, all that stuff. I kept telling everybody that this was just a stepping stone. I kept saying, what you see now, ChatGPT, this is gonna be gone in a year or two.

Yeah.

It'll be replaced by something. This is like the halfway point. In the evolution to something else. We're not there to that something else yet. That's what I was saying. We will get there eventually. And the there that I'm talking about didn't have a name back then, but now it does, is this agentic independent AI that actually does things. Yeah. And so that's what I was telling people. So we really are seeing the birth of the actual revolution now.

Yes.

The other one was essentially the beta test.

Yeah, you know, yeah, that's like early, early internet, uh, you know, with Yahoo and Mail and, you know, all that stuff. Like, that was— you go, you go like, oh, this is so cool. Well, now the internet is completely transformed, right, into like how we live our life. And this will be the same kind of thing. The other, the other one that people will hear and kind of get confused is AGI with the genic. AGI is theoretical. This is, this is like the concept of a robot thinking on its own and launching nuclear weapons. Independent thought, independent thought, right? While we can, while we can think about that and we can understand that, hey, this potentially we want to have this, nowhere is there technology even close to AGI. Like, I, I was on a panel with some Stanford, um, uh, AI professors, you know, some of the smartest people in the world around AI, and they're young, they were probably in their 30s, and they're like, in my lifetime I won't see AGI. Right. Like, just because conceptually we can think about it, like, they just know the computing power already just to run an agent. Can you, like, a free-thinking, like, computer program, they can't even conceptually understand the energy that would take.

And that's the problem. It's not that we can't think of it. It's that it's simply physically not possible. In order to run these Gen AI, you need gigantic data centers. Yeah. And in order to run these agents, you need, you know, special— they're even coming up with special processors. They're not even using GPUs. In some cases. So it's, you know, so the evolution to an actual artificial general intelligence is going to require, you know, massive supercomputers. And some people say, well, quantum computing can get us there. Yeah, it can get us there. It's just not there right now. So we are talking about a long time away.

Yeah, yeah, no doubt.

So going backwards, because, you know, AGI is, is kind of definitely still there in the future, but not in our lifetime.

Yeah.

You know, there's all these recruiters that are like, oh my God, it's gonna— AI is gonna take over my job. I'm gonna be unemployed. Um, you know, you and I have both said bullshit to that so many times.

Yeah.

I think we're just tired of saying that. The truth is, as I see it, that these tools, agents, are just taking away the mind-numbing, tedious, laborious tasks that we don't like to do anyway, but we have to do, and replacing them with a system that's able to do things that wasn't able to do before. So it should free us up to do more important, more value-added things. Yeah, you have a little bit of a different answer on, you know, AI is going to take my job away. Love to hear you reiterate that.

Well, if you— here's the problem we have is we have too many recruiters who actually do love that tactical work, and they're getting paid a lot of money in corporate jobs to basically move people through a process in an ATS or a recruiting module of an HCM. And they spend most of their day basically on a, you know, a computer board, clicky clacking away, moving people through process.

There is some value add in that process, but a bulk of it is labor. It's hard labor, right?

Anything I can do on a keyboard as a human, I'm going to have an agent do in the near future. I mean, that's just reality. That's what's going to happen. So if, you know, for me to say an AI won't take your job, I can't really say that because it will take your job. If you think your job— if all you do is hack at a keyboard, if you think your job is just tactically, you know, I'm going to post jobs, wait for people to apply and run them through a process, those jobs are gone in the near future. So the bigger question is, is—

but you and I don't define that as a recruiter. We define that as—

no, that's the difference. Yeah. If you're really recruiting, think about the stuff that you can't do now that you could do. So Again, to me, and I had this kind of awakening last year, we did this CEO study and we simply asked the question to start with a CEO was, do you agree with this statement? We only hire the top talent.

Oh God.

Right. Like 89% of the CEOs said yes. And then the next question was, do you know how talent comes into your company? And it all fell apart. They had no idea. They assume We as recruiters are out hunting for the best talent in the marketplace. When you and I know the reality, 90% plus post a job, wait for somebody to apply, and of those that apply, they hire the best, which could be the worst people in the market, right?

Not everybody can hire the best and you're not looking for them. So really what you're saying is you're hiring the best of what's available.

Yes.

In your inbox. Yeah.

Which could be the worst. Could be the worst talent.

You have no idea.

And so if we really thought about talent in a different way and we sat down with our executive team, our executives would go, I want you guys to go actually find who the best are in our market, in our range. I want to validate that they're actually the best, and then I want to court them and bring them in. Now, you and I both know that as kind of old school recruiting and sourcing, but that's the reality of the future of recruiting that I believe.

Now, at the very least, like, define what the best is so we can even— yeah, you know, maybe we can't— maybe the best is Bill Gates and we can't recruit Bill Gates. Yeah, but what made Bill Gates the best? And let's find the people that are going to be the next Bill Gates, you know.

So I think we're going to see recruiters hunting. I think we're going to see recruiters— here's the other thing that we have going on: because candidates are using AI to apply to jobs and the AI is actually, um, building them profiles that's closer to the job, recruiters are having a harder and harder time to understand. They're getting more replies and they're getting more that are closer to the job. So it's like, okay, I used to have a half a dozen, dozen candidates that actually, you know, look good. Now I have 30, 40, 50 that look good. How do I really know who's good? And so now there's more of a validation, which is, hey, I need to sit down with you face to face and really, really dig into your background, have a really broad conversation and a deep conversation. So I know that you're not faking it kind of thing, right? So I see much more interviewing going on, much more interviewing technology.

You know, that is literally the definition. So you, you just You just synthesized 28 years of my life because the— when people ask me what's the difference between a recruiter and a sourcer, what you just said is a recruiter. Yeah, that's the recruiter's job, is to have that conversation with the candidate and validate their background, understand. So as a recruiter, and I've been both, right, as a recruiter, one of my best, my favorite examples of this was when I was working at Fiserv and I had a candidate that I had recently spoken to, spoken with, I shouldn't say. You know, we had a long conversation. We really hit it off. And it was for a different job. But unfortunately, I didn't feel like he was qualified enough for that job. And so, while we're in the conversation and I'm like, "Well, based on everything you're telling me, you have great qualifications. But this job isn't that." I think, you know, out of just out of the blue, Do you mind if I share with you another job description that you would never have applied for?

Yeah.

And you're going to look at this at first glance and go, that's not me. But please read through and just suspend your disbelief for a minute. So I emailed it to him and I'm like, did you get it? He's like, yeah. And he reads it through and I'm like, what do you think? He goes, I don't understand. This is not what I do at all. And I'm like, well, it is and it isn't. So he was a consultant looking for a consultative role. But part of the things that he had to do in order to be a good consultant in these organizations was build the architecture for a consulting platform. The requirement was an expert in architecture building for consulting platforms. So I was like, this is really ideal for you.

Yeah.

Would you mind if I share your profile with the hiring manager for this? And he's like, sure, I don't think they're going to like it, but sure. So then I call the hiring manager and I do the same thing and I go, listen, You would never in a million years— if I sent this candidate to you for this rec, you'd be like, 'Shelly, you've lost your mind.' But I want you to look at this profile and don't just focus on the resume. Focus on this. At the last 3 jobs that he held, he built the architecture for a consulting platform that manages resources, time, helps you select consultants, and all these other things that you want someone to build. He is not a PhD in computer software, but he does know how to write code. However, it doesn't say you have to know how to write code for this job. Yeah, you just need to know how to architect. Because when I talked to you about the requirements, you told me someone else is going to write the code. We just need someone to set the, you know. So I said, talk to him. And he did. And he hired him. And the guy took the job and started. And within a week, he's coming looking for me. I want to take you to coffee. And he was like, I would have never found this job if it wasn't for you. In my mind, that is a recruiter.

Yeah. No. And over the last year, the more that we— the more automation that we've added, we've actually made recruiting less human, right? We've got to the point where we're trying to move so fast that we miss those kind of opportunities. I would never say, wait a minute, I'm just a recruiter and I recruit for 50 different jobs. How am I ever going to know all these jobs? Well, you're going to have more in-depth conversations with the hiring manager on the intake. You're going to spend more time with these teams like That's going to be the value that you add. You're no longer going to have to spend all this time going out and looking on LinkedIn for a candidate. Like AI is going to do that better than you can.

You don't have to do the bulk search, right? And the other thing is you really don't have 50 jobs. You really have 8 or 9 because those are the ones where you're having the conversation with the hiring manager right now.

Yeah.

You know, if you want to know how many requisitions a recruiter carries, look at their calendar and see how many weekly cadences they have with hiring managers. That's how many reqs they're really carrying because all the other ones are at the end of the process. People were waiting for final review or waiting for, you know, those are not— they may be open jobs, but you're not working them. You're only working the ones where you're actively talking to candidates. Now, a sourcer is a completely different job. The sourcer is supposed to translate what the hiring manager wants with what the candidate does. And go out there and identify people who would not normally apply. Their job is to bring these people in so the recruiter can have the conversation. It doesn't work when the sourcer brings in somebody like that guy I was telling you about and the recruiter looks at the resume and goes, "Oh, hell no." If the sourcer can tell the recruiter, "No, really, listen, you got to talk to this guy because he doesn't have it on his resume, but he really did it," then the sourcer and the recruiter together can do that. And so sourcing like recruiting isn't going to be replaced.

No. And I think so often now, you know, and I have, you know, I see this with my own recruiting team is that they're not having really deep conversations with candidates where they could go into a hiring manager and tell that hiring manager one, like, it's just the screen is too surface level. And if you really want to wow a hiring manager, you really want to have a great relationship with a hiring manager, have a deep enough conversation where you can go to that hiring manager and go, look, you really need to do— you need to do me a solid and interview this person, even though I know you don't want to, based on the paper, right?

Exactly.

And then when you— when that time shows up and that person shows up and they have that conversation, the hiring manager comes back and goes, holy crap, that was amazing. I never would have interviewed that person. That's the win as a recruiter and a sourcer, right? Like, that's when you go, now this is how we find talent. Um, So I think that's one, that's one piece of this, right? The other side is like, I think we have this for, for decades prior to the last 2 or 3, as companies we would build talent and then we decided somewhere along the line, no, that's, that's education's job to build talent. And we stopped building talent. And I think again, if we have more capacity, is it our job to get in the community and start to really build talent in the markets that we need it, right? Like, if, you know, Google wanted to complain forever, Facebook wanted to complain forever, there's not enough female software engineers, that's a you problem. You guys never invested at the right level in elementary schools and secondary schools to bring girls through STEM to make them want to become a software engineer and show them how great it could be. Um, instead you just wanted to yell at Stanford for not bringing enough software engineers, and you're just like, That's not going to work. That's not how this works. So I think there's so many cool things we can do. I'm hopeful, right, for the future of TA because I think it becomes more human because AI is going to give us that ability to have really deep conversations, know who the talent is. I always tell people, I love to share this example of we think we pipeline talent. We don't really pipeline talent. We spam talent. You know, if you really wanted to pipeline talent, imagine you had a group. Let's say it's a group of salespeople. You had 10 salespeople in this group. And you said, hey, we would— like, if we lose one of our salespeople immediately, I want to be able to replace that with a great person. You're like, oh yeah, don't worry, we have 5,000 people in our pipeline. You're just gonna spam 5,000 people. Now what if we actually went through hire— like, went through the entire process of finding a great salesperson, interviewing them, they already have a job, we don't have a job, but like, we actually put them on quote-unquote the bench where I'm going to pay them $1,000 a month. They still keep working at their job. They, they have a commitment to us so that when we have a job, that we're going to make them an offer at whatever we agreed upon. So we, you know, and then when that job comes up—

until then, until then, they keep working their job and we have an agreement, right?

Yeah. And you're gonna work for us as a gig worker 5 hours a month. You're going to show up to some meetings, blah blah blah, see some email, whatever that might be. And then when, when the offer comes, you're going to put your 2 weeks in and we have you. We already know. And we have a contractual relationship.

Sounds good to me.

That's real fucking— that's real pipelining. And like, people go, wait a minute, that costs money. Well, how much does it cost when a salesperson leaves you and you have that job open for 6 months because you weren't ready to fill it and you have to go through?

Yeah.

And then you, you know, you have false starts and all this other stuff. Like, I just think like there's way better ways for us to do this. But we capacity-wise right now, we couldn't even think about that. Because we're caught in fighting fires every day. You know, I had this wreck, I thought it was closed, and then the person didn't show up day one, and now it was— I got to start all over again because my number 2 also bailed on me. And like, that's our— that's the job of a recruiter now, is to fight fires on fire.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's gonna— a lot of that work will go away. It's just gonna go away.

So totally in agreement with that. And I think there's a— there's a secondary step or a halfway step between here and there, um, because that's like you said, I mean, lots of things would have to change.

Yeah.

And it would be ideal if you could put people on retainer, but there's going to be a while before that. Between here and there, what we could do is really build an actual talent community or talent network, which is not a list of people that you only spam. It's actually a list of people that you can keep updated and send, you know, other messages with and have conversations with. And, you know, that would be a little bit more work than what we're doing now, but a lot less work than the way you're describing it.

Yeah.

And it would be a humane way to do it. Yeah. But you can't do it right now when your pants are on fire.

So, yeah, like, imagine, right? Like, we always like, imagine if we could do this. A CIO comes to you and says, yeah, we need this talent pipeline of software engineers, whatever. So we start building the pipeline and then we said, hey, CIO, since this is so important to you, every Friday we're going to do an AMA at noon and we're just going to go live only to the people in the community. We might have 5 show up, we might have 25 show up, whatever, but we're going to start to do things like that, right? Where we have to have real content, real conversation, building real community around we want you to come work here. Again, we don't even think about that now because we just don't have the capacity to pull it off.

So there's so many things we could do, or an event, some kind of an event. Yeah. Yep, yep. I like that.

So I love that stuff.

So something else that really lit you up, and I was like, I saw the fire in your eyes, um, when we were chatting, was this, this whole concept of ghost job, fake job, um, and, uh, but you know, you and I both know there's a hell of a lot of fraud out there.

Yes.

And people are being taken advantage and ripped off and everything. But this whole ghost job, fake job argument, particularly when, when, uh, I'm going to use air quotes for those on the radio, career influencers on TikTok who have, um, maybe had one 6-month job in their entire life. And all of a sudden now they're a career influencer teaching people how to get a job. Um, so tell me why that lit you up so much, this, this fake job, ghost job, career influencer thing?

Well, conceptually, it makes zero sense. One is that it's not free to post a job. You and I know that. I mean, even if, like, I could find a site where I could actually post a job for free, there's still resources being spent. There's time to have to go post it. There's things coming in that you have to deal with. Like, there's no reason that someone's going to spend the money to put out a fake job for no reason, right? Like, so And to me, I was like, that's— I'm screaming, like, these fake jobs aren't real. Ghost jobs aren't real. Now, the problem we have is that so often candidates are applying for jobs and hearing nothing, and then the job closes and they just go, well, that, that must have been a fake job, or it's a ghost job.

You and I both know what that is. It's not a fake job. Yeah. Now, I just want to differentiate. There are fake jobs. That are fraudulent and people apply and they'll try to, you know, get you to pay for an airplane ticket.

Oh yeah. So computer—

these are fraud. That's fraud. That's not a fake job. That is a real job posting that's going to rip you off and take your money.

Yeah.

Well, we're talking—

and so like we can be very clear. No company is ever going to say, hey, you got the job. I'm going to send you a link, click on it, put in your credit card for your computer thing. We'll reimburse you. This will just make it happen faster. That's fraud. No one's going to ask you to do that.

Companies don't have you pay them upfront.

By the way, I'm completely like, my heart goes out to the people because, you know, the people that got taken advantage of that were the most desperate and they needed a job. They were so happy to finally get a job. They like, they have to pay their bills and they were desperate enough to say, oh, okay, I guess this makes sense. And you're like, no, no company is ever going to ask you to pay money out of your own pocket. For that kind of stuff, you know.

Um, so, so back to the ghost job thing. You and I both know why that happens, right? We have— and there's a few reasons. One of them is we're required to post the jobs.

Could be.

And we have to distribute them everywhere, and so it, it's broadly broadcast and everybody applies.

Yeah.

And then we're overwhelmed with applicants. Another one is we accidentally, or for whatever reason, kept the job open and posted even though we already have people in the final stages. And so if we're about to make an offer to somebody and somebody else just applied, it's like you're kind of like, sorry, my bad, I should have taken that job down. Yeah, you know, so what's, what's your take on this whole thing, and especially the career influencer environment?

Yeah, one is like, I— the TikTok career influencer people drive me insane because when you take a look, the vast majority of them are failed recruiters. Like, and you know, I know the resume, right? It's like 6 months at this company, 12 months at this company, 9 months at this company. And all of a sudden I'm a TikTok influencer on careers. You're like, no, you're a failed recruiter that couldn't get another job. But like, regardless, right? Um, but their advice is, well, and their advice is usually they treat like recruiters like they're garbage because they don't even know what a good recruiter is and they weren't one. And they're just— it's all about clickbait, right? So it's like, oh, what can I say that the candidate will go, yeah, I'm getting screwed. And they're like, oh, I got 500,000 likes. And you're like, of course you did, because you had— like, these people are frustrated with the career job search. And so I do think like, hey, we own the bad communication. We own, you know, their lack of understanding of, oh, by the way, this is a government position. We have— we're forced to force it, even though The hiring manager already has a candidate internally they've decided on. They're going to hire this person. And yet we have to go out for 2 weeks, post this job, and then tell everybody you didn't get the job. You know, stuff like that. Like there's just bad stuff that happens that we just, you know, how often a manager, right, tells us, hey, we have this, I have this job, post it. And we go through, we screen candidates, we give them candidates and they're just like, yeah. I'm not ready to hire right now, or I want to see some more. And then just keep it open. Keep it open. And you're just like, what else is out there? What else is out there? You know? And they just are feeling, feeling, feeling the market. And again, it gives this perception that like, hey, this isn't a real job. It is a real job.

Now, in some organizations, the policy is that recruiters are required to disposition candidates within 48 hours, 72 hours. So that means that they're really roughly and rapidly going through this list of people and just sending them to the rejection pile, even if they didn't spend more than a few seconds on the resume and they get an automated message or no message at all. And it's just because we have 20,000 applicants and we—

hey, it's, it's real. I was at a dinner this week with, um, an HR executive and he was telling me how their head of TA was new coming into the company, enterprise company, and she had a person she wanted to bring in with her. And so she— but she wanted to play by the rules, so she told this person, hey, go to our career site, apply to the job to this executive recruiter, and I'll tell the recruiter that you're going to apply. But by the time the person applied, the executive didn't have a chance to tell the recruiter, and the recruiter dispositioned them. And it was like, wait a minute, why did you reject me?

Uh-oh.

Exactly. Yeah. She was like, And so they, I mean, they had a big laugh about it, but it showed like, here's a person that 100% was going to get hired by the executive. They had an amazing resume and this recruiter just went and dispositioned them for who knows what reason. Like they, I wanted to dig there. I kept asking, why did they disposition? And they were like, well, we never really asked. Like it was that uncomfortable conversation of, you know, I didn't think this person. And really what it came down to was like, this person had this role at this company. There's no way they would want to come work here. And you're like, oh my God, that's a huge recruiter. Yeah, a huge assumption.

It's a huge assumption. Wow.

Okay, I saw the comment come in right on the—

oh yeah, I was going to ask you about that because it's a pretty good question and it's cut off, but, um, Jaswal is asking about VMS portals where resumes are submitted in a flood for the first few minutes and then if you're late, your candidate is going straight to the recycle bin. Um, do you think VMS portals should change something to address that?

So it's not really a VMS issue, it's, it's a client issue, right? Like, the VMS people could easily change it, but the clients, like, you know, they want to be able to show the client, oh, we have— see, we filled your— you know, we got you 20 submittals in 15 minutes, which we all know are garbage submittals, right? Like, I— again, this is a conversation I have almost a weekly with clients. If I'm, if I'm a big enterprise and I'm using VMS, I'm going to go to the VMS and say, hey, we're going to post a job. We're probably going to have some kind of a hiring manager intake, either video or call or something, to send out to the recruiters. And then we're going to wait 48 to 72 hours before we even open it up. And then we're going to limit the submissions that somebody can actually submit. If you're, if you're a recruiter, you can only put in your best 2 people after 72 hours, whatever.

Whatever.

And then on top of that, we're going to measure how many of those people that you submit actually get screened or interviewed for the next level. And, and if you fall in the bottom 10% or whatever, a quarter percent, uh, 25% of those— or those recruiters or companies that don't get— or aren't getting interviews, which means you're just putting in junk, we're going to knock you out of the system because we don't want that. We want you to take time to put in really great people that want to come work here. And that's where the VMSs are broken. And the VMS, the VMS should be going to clients and going, hey, we have a better way. You— it's on the outward, like, it's gonna— you're gonna think it's gonna actually take longer for you to get great talent. What I'm telling you is you're not getting great talent now. If you let us slow the process down a little, I potentially could get you better talent. On, and let's do it that way. And, and so few, shall we, actually do that. We have some that'll go like they do a 24-hour thing, and then they'll go, and then they, or they just limit the number you can put in. But Gopal's completely right. Like, we work with so many VMSs that the moment the opening comes up, within 10 minutes there it's completely full. And you're like, there's no possible way people had conversations with those candidates to know they want to see if they wanted to go to those ops. It's, it's a completely broken system.

Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question.

It's really good.

Yeah, but it's not something that you can solve by changing the software, you know.

I mean, you can put in roadblocks and like, you know, stopgaps and stuff like that, but the client has to go— the client has to really understand what's going on. And most of the time when I have that conversation with the head of TA, head of HR about their VMS, They have no clue that's what happens, what's happening. If you talk to the hiring managers, they know. They're like, look, I can't— I hate our VMS, and because it's all garbage. And then like, and like, but no one's willing to actually go forward and just say, hey, we need to change this, because again, they just, they don't understand it either, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I want to quickly come back to just— I have one other question I want to ask you, but I want to quickly come back to the whole, um, ghosting candidates.

Yeah, yeah.

And all that. One thing you and I talked about briefly but didn't really dive into too much detail is the job seeker using AI to apply for hundreds of jobs. And you dropped a hint of a Wall Street Journal article.

Yeah, yeah.

About that. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? So this is now not a recruiter using AI, but a job seeker using specifically a kind of automation that that applies for jobs for them somewhat indiscriminately and in high volume.

We started seeing this last year and it started to come out of the ATSs were like, hey, we kind of have a data blip going on. And the data blip was like their jobs went from— if let's say the average apply to a job was 100, it was, it was doubling, it was going to 200.

It was.

And like, that's— I mean, statistically, that's just an outlier, but it was across the board for all jobs. And so as we started to dig in, what they, what they were able to show on the ATS side was like, hey, because we have, you know, tens of thousands of clients in this ATS and we see that, you know, these are going up, we have one candidate who applied to 100 jobs and it took them 3 minutes to do so, which, you know, that can't happen.

So clearly not human, right?

Yeah, AI is doing this. Um, but then the problem also is that not only are candidates using— it's not like they're taking one profile profile and this jamming it to 100 jobs, the AI is simultaneously matching the job and the profile and making changes to the profile. So as a recruiter now, where you might have had 10 or 12 candidates that actually met the, like, the description and what you were looking for, now you might have 2x, 3x the number of candidates that look great, but you don't even know if they are great because AI just creates this profile that looks like they're you know, to match your keywords. It's a real problem. Like the job of a recruiter has gotten more difficult, not less, because of AI right now today. Now again, every, every little piece that's coming out is probably gonna help, right? And we're gonna start to see some of this stuff. I do think like you see, um, Match 2 just came out. This is Doug Bird's new company, which, so he's, he's flipping the apply thing on its head. He's basically saying, hey, if you come to our career site, and you decide you want to apply to a job, the first thing you have to do is upload your profile. We're not going to show you open jobs. We're going to— you're going to upload your profile, or we might show you open jobs, but we're not going to allow you to apply.

You're not going to apply for them, right?

You're going to upload your profile, and then the AI is going to say, here's what you actually match for, and do you want to do this and this and this? Also, the AI might go, hey, by the way, you worked at AWS, and we know that if you work there in this job, that you also should have this skill and this skill. Do you have these skills? If so, we want to add it to your profile because there's 2 other jobs that you might match with. And so now instead of having somebody come in and just randomly apply to 100 jobs you have open, they're not going to be able to. They're only going to be able to apply to the jobs that they actually, you know, have really do the skills for and all that, right? Which I think is a, is a super interesting way because it's kind of a middleware. Um, you don't, you don't, I mean, you can use it with any ATS, any recruiting It's pretty lightweight, um, but it stops this, hey, I'm going to have 1,000 people apply to a job, right?

You're just—

it's not going to happen because, you know, you're in— anyone that doesn't have the background, it won't even see the job, you know, to apply, right?

It won't even— yeah, they might get some sample jobs to understand how the technology works, but yeah, right.

So I think we're going to see a lot of that kind of stuff come up. Um, again, you know how it is, the candidates will find something and it blows us up, and then we find something on our side that kind of combats it, and vice versa. We'll go back and forth.

Yep. So I, I have time for one more question, and then I need to do my wrap-up questions. My, my final question— hopefully you'll have time to come back on the show some other day.

Yeah, love to.

You write a lot about— you write extensively about talent acquisition, the intersection of TA and technology. You go to a lot of conferences and speak at them, and you're actually one of the few speakers like me that has the decency of sticking around and listening to the other speakers. Um, you don't just show up, do your thing, and leave. So you're, you're listening. You have a blog with lots of comments. You, you know, you're very active. All of this to say, I'm not trying to flatter you and blow smoke up your ass, but I just want to give you credibility as far as like the amount of different perspectives that you see. What is the most common piece of advice that you see in the industry that you completely disagree with? And what would you do instead?

It's a great question. I think it all has to do around metrics. I think time to fill is the most worthless metric ever made to man.

Yes.

So, like, I say that openly and I say it on stage and I tell leaders to their face. There is zero causation between the time it takes to fill a job and the quality of that hire. You can correlate, right? And we do that all the time. But just because you're faster doesn't mean you're better at recruiting in TA. Just because you're slower doesn't mean you're worse. I always say it's a health metric, right? If you know it roughly takes you 30 days to fill an accounting position in your, in your market, and you're— it takes you 90 days in your company, you have a problem. That's probably cancer. But if you're at 37 days or 25 days, you're no worse or better. You're fine. You're in the market, you know.

And, you know, saying, oh, we reduce our time to fill from 45 to 44 days.

Yeah, like, and shout— like, here's why I know, because I will go in and do these recruiting diagnostics, and part of that is to meet with the senior executive team. The senior executive team will say, Tim, we suck at recruiting and we're failing. And then I'll go and say, well, I pulled data. In the last 5 years, you paid 100% bonuses to your TA team because they met and reduced time to fill every single year. And they're like, yeah, but we're terrible. No, no, no, you're saying they're awesome because they got faster. They got faster, incrementally faster, right? It went from 37.1 to 36.9. You're incentivizing wrong thing, incentivizing the wrong thing. Um, so to me, that would be the one thing. And again, I would dig it— people go, well, what do you measure? So what—

why— you may not be able to answer this. I think I, I probably couldn't even begin to start unraveling the thread. Why is time to fill such a pervasive metric?

Because it's the only clean data that we knew how to pull out of TA for the longest time. We know when a job—

you're saying that it's clean, but it's not.

No, no, but we know when a job opens and we know when a job fills. Oh, so to me, that's the cleanest data we can have, are those two timestamps.

I see what you're saying.

So there's— so that's what— that's since we said that. And then what you have constantly is executives and hiring managers go, I need people faster, I need people faster, and not really understanding the dynamics of how someone gets hired, right? Hey, We're going to come and we're going to talk to you about this job and we're going to post the job and then people are going to apply and then we're going to screen and then we have to go through your calendar to find interviews and then they have to put 2 weeks in right away. Almost any job is at 30, 36 days, right? Just to fill a simple job that you have good candidates for. And yet somehow a hiring manager thinks that, you know, somebody should show up 3 days later when they have an opening. And you're like, that's just not reality. So time to fill became important for really no reason besides it was clean data that we could pull. And we're so nervous about going into a board meeting and then having dirty data and our CFO calls us out and said, no, that's not correct, you know, or whoever, right? Versus going, hey, we know what we're going to do. We're going to actually pull I need capacity data. I know that it takes, um, 25 top of funnel applies to fill one of our high volume jobs, and we need to fill 100 of those, um, in a month. Thus, I need 2,500 top of funnel, and thus I need, um, 30% of those screened, blah, blah, blah, right? And by the way, we're currently at 93% capacity. You just came to us and said you wanted to just hire another additional 100 a month. That's not going to happen. We're going to fail unless we have A, B, C, D, you know, resources to make this happen or shop some of this out to a third party, whatever that might be. But we're just, we're, we're really thinking about TA like in the wrong. And I immediately, when I have somebody come to me and like, yeah, like we lead the country in time to fill, I'm like, you're worthless. I would fire that person immediately. You're worthless.

Yeah. Right. So time to fill. Yeah, I like that. Um, number of hires and, and how long it takes you to make the hires are both very insular metrics in my opinion. They, they are, if anything, a snapshot of a point in time. Um, and although they can give you some measure, like a, like a speedometer in a car, it can tell you how fast you're driving, it doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're going to get there on time because you might be going the the wrong way, or there might be traffic ahead.

Yeah, the car might break down, right?

There's some of those measures that are like, sure, we know how fast we're going, but that really doesn't even predict how— when we're going to get there. There's, there's other factors. So if they're trying to figure out— if the, if the, the question they're trying to answer is, how is our TA team doing?

Yeah.

What is a better question to answer that actually demonstrates that they're doing well.

Yeah, I mean, to me then it comes back to really understanding the jobs that you have open and the impact on revenue that it's making by having those open, right? And the priority that you have there. So like I go back to, like, I don't need new metrics. What I need is to know, understand what the business is trying to accomplish.

Accomplish?

And then what is talent, or the lack of talent that I have, what's the impact cost of that? So if I know I have a sales position open and every day that sales position open, it costs the company $25,000 revenue, I should be able to put a ton of resources towards making sure we fill that as well as we can, right? Um, and stuff like that. So I want to— there's a common— every— and every company is a little bit different, so I don't have one magic like metric or number they should be, you know. But to me, I'm always looking at, you know, are the positions that we have open causing an impact to business in a negative way, right? And if they are, then how do we change those? You know, how do we change that?

Yeah. I don't need new metrics recruiting 2025. Yeah. So I'm not asking for a metric at this point. I'm really looking for a way to be able to go to the C-suite and say, your TA team is doing a good job and I can prove it. And it's not time to fill. Um, and it's not, some people say staffing rate, which is the percentage of jobs that are left open or whatever. I mean, again, number of hires is not going to do it either. Are you saying that this is really ever only going to be a subjective? Measure? Or are you saying that is there a solid way that I can prove to the C-suite that we're doing better or worse than last year?

Yeah, it's a great question, Shaal. I mean, again, like I said, I think every company's that answer is a little different. I still go back to the business metric. What's the most important business metric? Is it revenue? Is it margin? Is it quality?

Right. What did the C-suite say? Are we acquiring new markets, buying a new company, are we going to a new product, are we going to a new country? And then how is TA helping us achieve that goal?

Yeah. And then, and then like if I can, like if I can prove like, hey, there's something we're doing that's either having a positive or negative impact on any of those measures, that's the conversation I should be having with my C-suite, right? Hey, we know because I don't have the best, you know, sourcing technology or recruitment marketing technology or whatever, It's taking us longer to fill these revenue-generating roles, right? It's costing us this much money. If I can have that conversation, it's a way better conversation than, hey guys, just know we're doing great. We went, we went down 0.3 days this year. Meaningless.

Yeah. Well, we have a few minutes left. So I want to, first of all, thank you very much for coming on. This is a very exciting show. Uh, and we're going to, we're going to get lots of airtime out of this, but before you go, I, there's two questions that I ask everybody and you probably haven't seen my show yet. So you probably have no idea what's coming. Um, the first of those questions is who should be our next guest?

Love that. Um, God, I think there's so many people.

I'll take several names. And by the way, they don't have to say yes. I just I'll look like them.

Well, I mean, I always go— my go-to is always going to be Chris Dunn. He's currently the CHRO of US Canada for Marriott. But I mean, in December, he was the global head of TA for Marriott. He is probably one of the corporate TA leaders that I could easily say in my mind, the number one in the world in terms of getting it at a way different level than everybody else. But he has people on his team, like Tyler Weeks, right, from a TA data or HR data, HR perspective, again, that is awesome and really understands, you know, that. I think there's just, God, there's so many great minds out there. But those are two names for you.

OK. Chris Dunn and Maria, I'm going to reach out and see. The second question, or, you know, the final question is, because this show is almost always, most of the time, people look at this or listen to this later after the fact. It's not usually a live audience, although we had a big one today. I want to give them something. I want to trigger a thought. I want to give them something to think about deeply. So, can you give us a question to ask ourselves that we need to think about for ourselves? It could be about anything we talked about today or something different.

No, I think it's the question we had today. It's a question I keep asking myself over and over again. It's the question I'll probably ask myself over and over throughout the year and next year. If tomorrow 75% of my work went away, what could I do? What should I do? Because that's the future of what TA and what HR is going to be. Now, AI is not going to be a light switch. 75% of your stuff's not going to go away tomorrow. But if you're not—

it does.

Yeah, right. Because if we don't answer that question, the CFO is just going to come and say, okay, how many heads can you give me, right? Because they're not going to do it because we're getting rid of all this work. I need heads. Instead, if you go, hey, I understand that they're not doing this work now. Here's the new work and the new value that we're going to add to the table. And I think that's what we have to be answering. And it's not an easy question to answer because again, every company is going to be a little bit different in terms of, hey, blank slate, wipe out your mind of what you used to do. What could you do? What's the— what I mean, just like brainstorm that, write things down, send yourself messages. There's so many really, really cool things that we could do. And to me, that's what I mean energizes me right now. Like, I just had 3 conversations this week with some technology people that literally I'm like going, holy crap, this could do everything my team does right now. What could we do? What could we— what should we do? Um, of course it's not going to be like put my head in the sand and hope that the technology goes away. It's not going away.

It's going to evolve and change and everything. But it doesn't— what you're saying doesn't matter whether it's AI or whatever. You're saying if hiring were to stop or whatever, the point is if 75% of your role is eliminated, how do you evolve? What do you need to do to prepare for that eventuality? Yeah.

And it's not becoming a prompt engineer.

Yeah. Do we even need that anymore?

I don't think so.

Oh man, it's been a blast having you on the show. Really appreciate you being on here. I know you're busy.

No, yeah, like, I love talking shop. You know that. We saw that. Like, again, the reason I, um, go to conferences and stay is because I'm curious. Yeah, like, you never know what's going on. Like, I, I pick up something from everybody, right? Like, like, no matter who's on stage, like, someone's gonna talk about something or someone's gonna ask a really great question. It's like And it just like, that's what energizes me because I think it's not one person that's gonna like determine the future of recruiting in TA. It's going to be all of us, right? And so it's like hearing all these opinions and ideas and then putting them together to me is amazing, you know?

Yep. Love it, love it. Thanks a lot, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's a blast, folks. Uh, we have, uh, next Up on the show, we have Ravi Tondra, the CEO of a revolutionary sourcing/recruiting platform called Provenbase that has introduced a bunch of very interesting filters for information that address a lot of what we were talking about today as far as like looking for the right match as opposed to just sourcing in volume. The focus is with this tool is to, um, get these micro indicators that tell us that this could be the right person for the job even if their keywords don't match, right? Yeah, yeah. So, um, it's pretty cool. I encourage you to check in with us. And then Steve Hardy, former colleague of mine from Fiserv, is coming next week. So hopefully you'll tune in. If not, you'll get the recording. Either way, be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.