Unlocking the Power of AI in Recruitment with José Kadlec and Gabi Sarkadi

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Hiring Excellence podcast. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent and this week we have a very special episode for you. This one was recorded a little while back in the Recrutech studio with Gabby Sadaki, Senior talent acquisition advisor, my good friend Jose Kadlek, founder of the Recruitment Academy and author of the HR RoboSapiens book. Together we discussed how AI can assist in recruitment by automating repetitive tasks and increasing efficiency while while emphasizing the need for human oversight. Tune in next week where I'll be chatting with Catherine Marie about skills first hiring. Until then, enjoy the show.

This is the Recrutek podcast.

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Hello everybody. Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is Recrutec podcast. We are sitting now in the Central European University and this is a Recruit XC event. This is very first time we on the 23rd of May. I'm very excited. Everybody can see in me and listening on my voice. Sorry for that. Recruited podcast is podcast for profession, not people, to professional people. For everybody who is working or interested in recruitment. So that's why we are here and this is my honor to meet you gentlemen to speak about recruitment. This is more or less the first time at least speaking in this, this, this small round with you and this is the first time that we meet in person with Johnny and the second with with Jose. And first of all let me introduce myself if you don't mind. My name is Gabi Sharkady. I'm representing here, the DTC team and the organizer team of the Recrutek CE and also the Recrutek podcast. And well I have started my career in recruitment in 2006. So I'm an. I always call myself like a dinosaur. I. This is my passion and my profession. Being a recruitment professional. I have been working on corporate side on agency side. I established my own little recruitment agency and these days I'm acting as a some kind of strategic talent acquisition consultant to help companies to improve the recruitment processes. And well, I like to speak probably that's why this is my issue to do this podcast and I'm very happy to meet you and let me tell you something about yourself and then I let you to introduce yourself. I believe that this is the right vayner. I know you, both of you, Johnny, Mr. Johnny Campbell as someone who is the CEO of the SOR Social Talent Platform And Jose, you are famous for a couple of things like recruitment academy and you will list your yourself in the, in the next moment and but overall I have the experience that you are someone from whom we recruitment professionals can learn in elearning platforms, in webinars, in person trainings. You are speakers, keynotes in couple of events worldwide. And that's my pleasure for me to sit here with you. But I let you introduce yourself and 1, 2, 3, 4, let's start with Johnny. What people, I cannot really believe that someone doesn't know your names. But if somebody would like to know more about yourself, how do you introduce yourself? What we should know about you?

Well, one thing I'm not and unfortunately I, I admire to be which is a best selling author, my good friend, the best selling author. That's the one I'm missing. But yeah. Gabby, you call yourself a dinosaur in recruitment. I, I'm. I must be the prehistoric dinosaur. I've been doing this for more than 25 years. Set up social talent. Maybe 13, 14 years ago I turned my passion for recruiting into a training business that yeah became an online learning platform. Very passionate about hiring excellence. How do we make hiring better? And really I do today what I did when I first started recruiting, which is I ask lots of questions, I try and find the patterns and then I try and share those patterns with as many people as possible. Video, podcasts, articles, our platform, whatever that works. I'm a father of four boys, which keeps me very busy. Myself and Jose, we're just talking about life with families on the road as well, traveling. So I get, I get to spend a lot of time with those boys and I learn more from the those boys these days than anything else. But my real passion is in hiring. As I said, big passion for movies and music as well. And I love a good debate and it's great to be here.

Thank you very much. This was very complete and good to hear that you like music and, and videos. I like myself and it was good to learn from you when I was watching some social talent videos. So that's why it's great to hear about yourself.

By the way, Gabby, I also started sort of in recruitment in 2006, 2007, but really but back then I still a software engineer, so that's my actually background I came from software engineering. I studied the faculty of nuclear sciences and physical engineering. And at that time I realized that maybe there is something wrong with recruitment. I may be identified that as maybe kind of a rigged industry which would need some transformation. And I started I would say that's sort of my mission like to transform rigid industries by application of analytical approach and maybe software. Yeah, that's why then of course after a few years, basically 10 years ago, we celebrated 10 years anniversary of Good Call and Recruitment Academy last week actually. So we kind of with my business partners embodied all of this into not only Recruitment Academy, but of course Good Call where we do the business and data crude which is our recruitment software business. Still of course in my blood there is software, there are analytic approach, there are things like maybe IT security which in connection with today's what's happening also with AI and imagine AI in HR is even more I would say sensitive from perspective because we handle with personal data, sensitive data of candidates. So I still of course work heavily on this transformation. But now it's a lot of about AI. That's why I wrote a new book, HR Robosapiens as you mentioned. Maybe to mention something which people don't know about me much and it's sort of connected with these things is that I have two daughters, two young baby girls. But you cannot see it from social media. Why? Because I think now one of the that's maybe like Insight and Jonikan add to it that one of the most selling courses in recruitment for maybe the past three years was personal branding. Personal branding for recruiters, hiring managers and for other employees with the intention to lure more people into the company. But now you can see what's happening with AI. I will be in my speech here at Record Tech CES showing some cases how you can use AI for good but for bad as well. Yeah, and maybe the next bitcoin is that your kids will not have the digital footprint on the Internet. So that's maybe what people actually don't know about me because this is behind it.

Congratulations. I am a mommy of two boys. Just to join you with some family facts. And yes, I don't share any pictures of my kids either because yeah, they have, they have the rights and the decision if they want to share something. And you know, there are some dark things on the web and I don't want to share photos because of this reason. And now thank you very much for the introduction you had and have very exciting career paths.

So.

Okay, I am. Yes, we have some kind of track record working in different countries but the common thing is recruitment that we like very much. And I have a list of questions. I drop it away because as I mentioned you previously, I believe that we can figure out the next questions from one sentence. And you mentioned the AI, which is a very actual thing, not today, but had started some years ago. But as this conversation is about educational issues of the recruiters, what do you think? What an average. This is not the right word, but maybe a corporate or an agency recruiter should know about the AI, how to use it. I know this is very big question and we can somehow go and focus on what products, what methodologies, what we should know about using AI, Right? And the challenge for you now not to speak more than three sentences or four about that. I know this is a big topic and sorry, sorry for me, Johnny, but what, what is your, your teaching about AI or your belief? What do you think?

So we're in Budapest this morning and I'm going to be speaking to this topic about largely there being two big categories of AI in recruiting. There's AI in the platforms and tools that the enterprises you work for might, you know, invest in. So AI in your CRM and your ATS and your assessment software, et cetera. Largely that's out of the control of the recruiter, the frontline recruiter. She doesn't make it, get involved in that decision. Her boss's boss's boss maybe makes that decision. And sometimes people think, therefore you can't use AI until it's approved. My big passion is really just the co pilots. So whether it's Gemini, whether it's ChatGPT or one of those types of co pilots, because it's like a PhD assistant. So if you imagine a 23 year old PhD student working full time for you 24, 7, it's not going to do recruiting better than you, but it can do a whole bunch of tasks based on your instructions extremely well and extremely fast. And there's absolutely no reason in the world why every recruiter shouldn't be using this PhD assistant to support them in everything they do to be that co pilot. Not to do the work for them necessarily, but to support them and get a lot of work done. The speed in which you can recruit, the quality in which you can be a better business partner, the insights you can bring to the table. Not always 100% correct and accurate because you know you're going to have to review that as the recruiter, just like you would you had a PhD student working for you. You wouldn't trust 100% what they gave you, but they would, they would give you a lot of support. So to me, you know, I'm very passionate about trying to get more recruiters to use copilots immediately, to try them out, particularly using voice as their way to communicate with these co pilots. I think they're really primed for voice communication and you know, we can get so much value for them, which I'll hopefully demonstrate to the audience today.

Okay, thank you. Jose, what do you think? Have you seen any good, good examples of using the, the AI in. In recruitment teams or. Please add your thoughts to this topic.

Totally. I, I would maybe clarify that as Jonah mentioned, it should be your. It should be your body, not. I still get the questions when and if the recruiter will be replaced by AI. I say yeah, technically it's probably possible. It's not happening tomorrow because many reasons. For example, you can even for example replace interviews. But do you have like 10,000 interviews which you did in the past recorded? Probably don't. So you cannot use the machine learning to actually learn to fine tune the algorithm on that. So there are these things. So this is really a transformation. This is not like we like turn off the lights, turn on and there will be a robot instead of a recruiter. So currently HR people because it's not only about recruiters, it's really things like HR marketing. Imagine like absolutely. Visuals like if you want to, I don't know, for example, delete something from the picture, upscale the picture and these type of things. Or for example you can look at my LinkedIn profile. That's actually AI picture I use on my LinkedIn profile, for example.

Yeah.

And that's. That have some connotations that if you have for example unified pictures of your all employees in your company, you don't need a photographer, you don't need a good camera. Yeah, because the AI can improve even if we don't have these rode nice microphones here we have like really some creepy microphone. AI can improve it. So it sounds like rode microphone.

Yeah, exactly.

So it should be really your partner. It should be something sitting in your tab. Like whether it's Gemini, whether it's Anthropics, cloud Copilot by Microsoft or ChatGPT. And you should be using that like your, your body for a particular tasks. Maybe you are sourcing. Maybe you know that when you are sourcing IT security managers, you for example would appreciate a list of IT certifications or a list of synonyms of for the word IT, security manager, these type of things. That's all. You can throw it there and use it.

Totally agree. The big question is coming from everywhere. Do I replace recruiters? Do you think that we'll take over the recruiter or do the human should can be replaced by AI in order all the process in the recruitment, from sourcing to, I don't know, from having onboarding.

So Gabby, 50 years ago, an accountant, right, would largely do all the manual calculations, the addition, subtraction division, all that kind of work. And then came the calculator and then came Excel. Did Excel replace accountants? It didn't.

Right.

Accountants don't do all that manual calculation work anymore because Excel is much better at it. It kind of took all that manual work and put it into spreadsheets. So now accountants do the analysis, they do the reporting, they do the insights. On top of that, I think the same analogy will work for recruiters, right? The job is going to change. There's a lot of manual processes that are a lot of recruiters really, they're just good at processing recruitment activity. They pass one thing from, you know, here to there that was never really recruiting. Let's be honest, right? A great recruiter doesn't just pass on a CV to you. They give you insights, advice, recommendations, hints. They tell you what to do as a hiring manager, how you're going to close that candidate. Unfortunately, I think a lot of recruiters today don't do that. They do the manual processing stuff. So that manual stuff, that calculation, addition, subtraction, the accountancy analogy. Yeah, chat. CPD is going to do that stuff for you, right. Or co pilots or Gemini, something else. But if you're a true advisor, if you're really actually being a recruiter, as we all probably were when we started recruiting, I think you're good.

Okay, I, I think like to answer really briefly, I would say yes, but maybe sometime in the future, not now because now will be. We will be in the phase where maybe the soft skills will be even more important because those things like synonyms, give me the certifications, find me the candidates on LinkedIn, etc. By using natural language, not Boolean searches as well as programming will program it like, I mean like really software coding will probably transform in five years that it will be more natural language like prompting. I actually yesterday I was showing I got the AI training for our people and I kind of set up trip for myself. I was. Because I was working a lot of in GPT doing prompts and I was asking what are the top or not top. But give me the examples of recruitment campaigns which went viral in the past. Yeah, I put it into gpd. Then I switched to Google and I basically forgot how to Google. I put there the same thing give me. And it showed me nothing. I was like. And I really, for a few seconds I was like what's happening? So we already kind of are switching our minds into the natural language, working with the AI because it can speak, we can speak to it, etc. Etc. And therefore also the Google search will be. And they kind of announced that already it. It will merge, it will be sort of AI man. So another example friend of mine got marketing agency. He's preparing basically to shut down the business because the new tools for example by Google they will. You will say I want campaign for IT Security manager in Dublin. It will do everything, all the visuals, texting, copywriting, etc etc. So not like it's a question of time. I think that recruitment might be that the hiring manager needs. And that's a question. If we will be hiring people, maybe we will be hiring for task. Not like for like full time, part time, etc. But I can imagine it will be like that the hiring manager push the button and it will happen on the background. Maybe with it will be 90% like digitalized, 10% there will be some like human element which do something. But in near future I think we probably need as recruiters focus more on these things like even like leading team, client management, personal branding as well. Yeah, because everything will be quantum like commoditized I would say. So then these things like personal branding, I will order it from this guy because I trust him, he does this branding. Those will be the important things I think.

Okay, okay, thank you very much. Very exciting. And I'm very curious what will happen in the future? Probably when we will be retired. We will see 30, 40 years later.

It takes over in five years and we're all AI slaves. It's a possibility.

Honestly my belief that we cannot exclude the human from the selection procedure. Just understand what candidate is speaking to us, to resonate, to have the feeling. So how can you. Yeah, it's a good question. How can you measure or how can you use the AI for challenging the culture of fitness? So if, if there is any chemistry. Chemistry with the candidate and with our company does it something that that AI can decide or we should do exactly. A recruiter or maybe a hiring team all together to. To decide if, if, if a candidate is matching to us culturally. So I'm not sure if, if AI can.

Yeah, I think yes, maybe as I said like not right now because imaging how for example, I'm using these things like text to video that I will generate myself my digital twin. I use it normally for creating videos now for educational videos. It wasn't possible six months ago because the Quality wasn't there, now it's there. There are some new tools where when you speak about something positive, you smile more, when it's negative, you are kind of neutral face, etc. The new GPT4, okay, it's now better that when you talk to it, it's not transferring the voice into text and then the text working as a prompt. It's not working like that, it's working directly with the voice. So it's not about words you say, it's also about how you say it. And also you can say to GPT, say it more aggressively, say it calmly, whisper it, etc. So even as when you judge the culture fit, you judge it based on something. You may be asked some questions, you are waiting for some answers. This can be automated. Maybe you are working with some body language with the background of the person where he or she worked before, etc. So all of these things, it's just a question if you can grasp all of these data points and put it into the machine learning. So just my technical view is it's possible and it might be, let's say, I don't want to say unbiased. It would be biased. Like. Yeah, if it's trained on you, it would be biased. Like it would be judging those candidates with all the bias you have.

Interesting.

You jump in, right? You look at it from the. What's technically possible. Absolutely right. Most of this stuff can be done by AI, Right. And done better by AI. But there's. There's always. You gotta remember the humans in the mix, right. And not just are we better or are we not better?

Yeah.

But will we use it? So, you know, autonomous vehicles, they work. We don't let them on the road.

Right.

You know, we can do. Myself and Jose over the years have shown fantastic things you can do with data online. But then GDPR came in and you know these rules that you say, well, you can't touch this. That neither. We're afraid to use an email address anyway.

Yeah.

So all these things are possible, but then regulations come in because people are afraid are there's habits where we just don't want to use them. Somebody showed me a startup that you've probably seen. I can't remember the name of it. It was a company who basically will automate the first recruiter screen. Right. So it's AI does the recruiter screen for you. So rings Gabby. And it does a really good recruiter screen. You can demo it and it's brilliant. But here's the thing, right? Candidates Hate it. You know, if you're, if you're going for a job, your first job at a university, in a store, fine, I do, I do a recruiter screen with AI, no problem. But you're ahead of marketing. You're in your early 40s, you're a director, you're a VP. I will not do a recruiter screen with AI, period. Forget it. So you talk about the experience and you're talking about the employer branding piece. It comes down to what's the experience and how you're differentiating or differentiating yourself as an employer. I firmly believe that even if the AI gets to a point where the abilities are fantastic, the differentiation will come from companies going, no, no, we give you a human to ring you. You have a conversation with a human. And the higher end roles, the premium companies with the bigger margins, bigger brands will have more humans. And then the volume hiring companies will have AI doing lots of stuff. Right. Like you see in kind of arms and legs or retail recruitment today. So it's more than just can the technology do it. There's not about the legislation and then what do the people want? What we accept. And they're very different things, I think.

Yeah, thank you.

I totally agree with the things that they are. We didn't mention costs. For example, the cost of the solution might be still, for example, too expensive. That we rather let it do by people. That's also like even with the electromobiles also now it's, it's subsidized. Etc, so people are buying that suddenly in Germany. No, subsidized. And yeah, but in, in general recruitment is also really complex. Yeah, you were talking about hiring maybe CEOs etc, then you got maybe blue collar workers, etc. If you observe people as they go for example into McDonald's, do they rather go to the person or to the stand where it's most likely. People rather firstly if they need some information etc. They firstly rather Google it. If they need to contact support, they maybe do it by chat or email. The final destination is that they call. Which means sort of that people rather communicate with robots.

Yeah.

The thing is why they hate it. For example robots now because they are not perfect. Yeah, you wait till the nearest. But they don't understand. But this is heavily improving and there are some studies where people even more open to a robot because yeah, when I would. For example, you're my recruiter, I can be somehow like, like. I don't want to say like biased or whatever and I, I don't want to Say something because. Because.

Yeah, yeah.

But to a robot people might be sometimes even more open than to a real human being.

Okay, okay, thank you. Thank you guys. I think half of the time is already about AI and it's very exciting. We can continue but just talk more about the recruiters education and you mentioned the word of transformation and probably you said Joni, the switching the mind. I would like to ask your opinion. The recruiter role and the skill set has completely changed since 2006 and maybe 2000. So you know, when I have started my career, I just had the feeling that I would like to deal with people, to help people. What is the right way for me? I decided to go to HR and I learned everything about recruitment on the job. And later I attended on the post gradual HR studies in university. There was two years long course and just. We had just some sessions about recruitment and it's a big educational question. If the world is changing, the tools are changing, the skill sets should change and there is a transformation and we have to change our mindset. What do you think? What at this time, at these days, what are the top three skills that a recruiter should have in the everyday jobs if he or she wants to be really a good recruiter? I know it's not easy but, but this can be a longer list of course, but, but just some, some points that you, you truly believe that recruiters should, should have in, in the skill set.

Well, what top three? I think the, the skills that you don't want to be reliant upon are back to those processing skills, right? And that could be writing Boolean search strings, it could be organizing interviews, or it could be just passing on CVS to somebody else with a summary. Right? Like those skills are redundant, gone, forget about it. And that's where a lot of people start recruiting in those kind of roles. And I fear that there won't be an entry point for recruiters because those skills will disappear for a lot of people. But the skills that people want you think about on a high level, right? What do candidates want? Candidates want an advisor they can trust, get information from. So you think about the sourcer. When I started teaching sourcing skills, it was largely about writing Boolean search strings, how to use different social media sites, how to get email addresses, etc. And it evolved into the communication piece. Really it's going to be about how do you become a credible, trusted partner to the talent, right? So I ring Jose because Jose understands people like me, engineers or sales people or what it might be. And he can give me good advice and I can trust what he'll say to me. And if he asks me how to prep for an interview, he's going to give me good advice, etc. So, so the partnering skills from a candid side, I think if you understand your candidate market really well, great insights. Yes, Chat GPD can run reports, but you can validate that stuff. And that skill of understanding the candidate market, I mean a trusted advisor to candidates is what I double down on. And the second big skill is you flip that to the hiring manager, the hiring teams, the company that's hiring, whether you're internal or external. How do you advise that, that, that hiring manager on what's a good hiring process? The talent market, how to run a good process, has to assess talent, what skills to look for, what to train for, what to hire internally, what to bring journey, how to structure your team. You want a partner who understand talent and can give you all that insight. And then, okay, we're going to hire what skills? No, I'm going to change your job role. We're going to go for this type of person.

Why?

Because you'll never find that skill over there in the current market. But we'll find this type of skill. And if we reorganize your team slightly and hire for this type of person, we'll get lots of people. We can train them up, we can build a good talent kind of pipeline in your organization to get work done. They're the kind of people you want and you want to be talking about those kind of advisory skills on the candidate or the hiring manager side. Everything else is a waste of time.

Okay, thank you. I truly agree with you. So this is being a trusted advisor is absolutely my, my archbatic as well with, with the recruitment, being a trusted advisor with, with the candidate, with the hiring manager, with the recruiter peers and, and everybody in, in the recruitment process. And, and I think this is a hard, hard thing because there are a couple of people who decide to be a recruiter. But you know, being a trusted advisor, is it something that we can teach to anybody who decide to. I don't, I want to be a recruiter because I like to deal with people and I like to support them in their career path and because I have seen some bad examples when somebody wanted to be. But after I don't know, three months, he or she feel bored. She discovered that, okay, I don't want to deal with some technology thing like ATS or something like that, but we have to improve our recruiters and what is the best way that we can improve the top. Maybe the top skills or not the top skills, but this complete skills skill set. Sorry. Of a good recruiter.

I think it also depends if it's. Of course imagine like we got something like 140 talent sourcers and a recruiter. So there are people like you got with the experience, long time experience. But also you started for example in recruitment in the time where for example LinkedIn wasn't like a standard tool.

No. At all.

Or it was about a time where it was like starting. On the other hand, those junior people usually there is a problem that they don't have. Maybe recruitment is their first experience. Of course they say at the interview I like to work with people. Okay, so let's see. You will be working every day with people so you will be sick of it. There will be hundreds of them every day. So let's see if you.

I hate that line. I hate that I want to work with people.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And they don't have the experience with working anywhere. So they cannot imagine what are.

Aha.

There are some companies, there is HR department, marketing department, CEO, etc. You know how. How the business world works because they are from school. I. I was the same when I was at. At university. I didn't know that there are some kind of recruitment agencies. I experienced that because I was also a cand some agency than working as a software engineer. So. And sometimes you are surprised because at university you are kind of living some like ideal world. And then in the business world some things are like why you are working like that. So for these people it's. I think John mentioned like the industry knowledge for example. If you, if you want to be like IT recruiter of course the industry knowledge of IT definitely beneficial. You will better assess the candidates, you will better talk to them. So engage with them at the, at the beginning of the process. You will be better able to find them actually because you need to structure the brilliant searches or whatever how you search, knowing what are the related technologies, what's more important, etc. But imagine my business partner Melan, he also he. He doesn't have the. The technological background and he was a brilliant IT recruiter because he got like the let's say client oriented business acumen. So the. He was able to talk to people in general and he learned although all of those skills from candidates interviews. So yeah, tell me about Java. What is it like? What's the difference? Java and C Sharp. And he learned interview by interview and basically that was his social talent for this. Yeah. So it can be done. It can be done, yeah.

And probably the mentorship is also useful if there is someone, maybe senior colleagues or maybe a manager or team lead from whom we can learn from. But just there are a lot of chance for someone who would like to work in recruitment or already an acting recruiter to learn from. Since the COVID there are more and more e learning materials on the web and probably less classroom training things. What do. What is your experience? What do you think? What is the biggest challenge in the, in the recruitment education? Just I'm curious of your own experience. So educating recruiters, what is the globally, what do you think? What is the. I think the biggest stuff.

Any education. Right. We talked about all our young children, right. And teaching them anything. You can show somebody what to do, which is, let's say what, what my platform does with videos and what you begin to do in a classroom environment as well. But that on its own just isn't enough. Right. I'll be the first to admit it, it scales. It's great for large teams, great across countries. But what you need to be able to do is learn something, practice it, get feedback, and then learn again. And to me, the practice and feedback is the hardest bit. And it doesn't scale in a classroom. It doesn't scale online at the moment. Right. Because someone will walk away and go, brilliant. I watched a great training video or I attended an hour talk from somebody talking about how you, let's say, work with a hiring manager. But now I actually have to go into a real meeting with a real hiring manager and I'm nervous and I've forgotten half of what I learned. And the hiring manager isn't like the hiring manager in the training session. She's different. She's got different things going on and I've forgotten it all. I got nervous and I don't do it. Ideally, you want to be able to practice over and over and over and over and over again. Right. People in sports get this. I'm not, not big into sports, but you know, you're practicing your backswing, your, your tennis swing, you're kicking a football. This concept of deliberate practice, practicing the thing that is hardest with feedback is really important in learning. It's how you create that learning loop. I think we're actually on the cusp of it with AI actually gives us the ability to finally scale this, begin to scale this, this feedback and practice loop. But I think it's the biggest challenge in learning and recruitment learning and any learning is you know and you talked about partnering and coaching and we did it in the recruiting world by you'd sit down beside in more experienced recruiter she would listen to you, she'd stop you and go Gabby, I wouldn't do it that way. Try it this way. You go back to work, she'd be listening to you in the desk. When we all used to work in offices it was a lot easier. I think it's harder to scale that bit. So it's. That's. That's what the 80% of learning is that isn't probably done in the classroom or online.

Yeah. Okay, thank you.

By the way about this. Maybe one practical tip for your listeners is, is just open ChatGPT and say now behave as a hiring manager with maybe demanding requirements for the role. I'm the recruiter, ask me the questions one by one, not at once. My first sentence is hello Mr. Hiring Manager. And you will basically create a simulator of a demanding hiring manager. And you can have sort of like training right, with AI. Yeah. Otherwise just to add maybe something to Johnny's tips as you mentioned, like eLearning versus Classroom. It also depends on what kind of training we for example train of course people, AI and these things. It can be nicely done in elearning. And then of course there's also difference because this is the things which are sort of now evolving rapidly. So pre recorded or live training. Of course live training might be let's say more up to date at that time because the speaker will probably be talking about the latest things as we do right now here. But there are trainings like we. For example, one of our trainings we have is psychology of interviews. That's the Paul Ekman's methodology of facial micro expressions. And of course that's better to do it face to face with the practical examples with the role plays which is sort of even technically because you have some frame rate of whatever solution you use. And sometimes the micro expression you cannot see it on Zoom or Teams etc. Because it's micro expression, it's therefore really a millisecond. So even technically here or maybe in general interviewing skills you can do some kind of role play. So it really depends also which type of training of course which type of skill you want to upscale or rescale the person on.

Okay, I'm curious that since there is the global crisis in the past years and we are sometimes still struggling that what the companies what to invest on. Do you have the feeling that the companies are more and more willing to spend money on the Recruitment education because hirings are not stopping or there are some freezes. But companies investing on the recruitment education.

For me practically it sort of correlates with the situation on the recruitment on the market. So when there are even more free recruiters on the market even now you heard that companies like Facebook, Microsoft for example, they laid off quite a lot of people recently where we actually hired some people from Microsoft for ourselves at our company and it somehow is going even let's say to central Eastern Europe. So even in the Czech Republic where we usually got something like 2.5% unemployment rate still like the lowest in the European Union, we also have companies and even the IT companies who laid off like for example hundred of IT guys. So currently, for example companies are not that much under stress, under pressure and they can do something for example with advertisement and they don't need active sourcing for that. So of course this correlates with that companies who as we for example hired the guy from Microsoft, we took it as the opportunity to hire a players now on the market because yeah simply market is providing that of course these companies still super.

It's good to hear. Yeah. Because it's important. I don't know if you what is your experience now, John?

I think certain industries where they've decimated their recruiting teams, they are pulling back. Right. It is what it is tech largely the enablement of the recruiting teams. The budgets just aren't there. Right. The CFOs aren't giving those budgets. Even though I'd argue the enablement need with AI has gone up because the road is transforming as we've been discussing. Right. Which is a lot of automation. Therefore you need to invest in new skills, soft skills that most recruiting teams teams do not do. So take for an example one of our big tech clients. They they identified that their recruiters only do a screening interview. They don't actually interview and assess for skills. And now they want them to do that. They've never trained them to do that. Like it's kind of crazy, but it's a basic skill that recruiters just don't really have. But if I think of the more broadly what's happening organizations are moving from enabling recruiters to enabling the business to hire. So enabling interviewers and hiring managers and upskilling those to better align them with the recruiters. And even we're seeing a movement to better enable the candid from an equity perspective, but also a quality perspective allow the candidate to come up come to that interview if you've got a prepared recruiter A prepared hiring manager and interviewer. Why not have a prepared candidate who's been giving good advice on scale of how to prepare, how to do a behavioral interview, situational interview, understands it about the company so that she gives her best interview, which is what we all want. We want the best interviewers and we want the best interviewee so that we actually hire the best candidates. So I think the bigger world of enablement is broadening beyond recruiters into the business because they're recognizing hiring is a team sport across the business, not just about the recruiters. It's got to be with the whole organization and even the candidates as well.

Thank you. Thank you. I liked your idea and you thought that recruitment is a team sport. I absolutely agree. And that's why the education is not just for recruiters, but also it should be an education should go also for the hiring managers. The recruitment team leads the recruitment managers and everybody who was involved in the, in the process. Unfortunately, we are close to the end of this conversation and I really enjoy. But if you would like to define just one message for the future recruiters, for somebody who would like to be a professional recruiter, what would be your message? How to improve the skills, what kind of education to look for, how can he or she can improve the skill set? I'm looking at you first.

No, I can maybe just say that like recruitment can be really. How to say like all around job where you can touch on psychology, you can touch on it skills, including all the AI things like now we talk about. And I would say mainly there are no boundaries, let's say for your imagination, if you will. It's not a process which is, which is done somehow and you cannot go like outbound of those boundaries. So if you will find a better solution, how to hire these people, how to hire more people, how to hire them quickly, how to hire better people through whatever I was doing that through technology. Maybe someone else will do it through something a little bit different. There's definitely opportunity for that.

Okay, thank you.

Building on, on Jose's comment about there's many roles in recruiting, many, many skills required in the recruiting team, modern recruiting team. I think the core thing for me, you know, we opened the podcast by talking about candidates or graduates to talk about. I like people, so I like to work in recruitment. Right. I push that further. I think the people who are most successful in recruiting, they fall in love with problems, they ask questions, they're inquisitive. And so if you're inquisitive, if you are the person always Asks why? How, how does that work? What is that? That is the best attribute to have as a recruiter. I think it's all the education you'll need. We talked about when we all started recruiting, I learned about the industries. I was hiring accountants by interviewing people and saying, tell me about your job as accountant. What do you do? How does that connect to this other thing and not being afraid to ask questions. I still find that today recruiters who say, how could AI help me? How could this help me? How could I find this? This the best sourcers with trial and error, they said, what if I try this? What if I try this whatever, try this other method. Myself and Jose didn't go learn off somebody else. We learned through brute force because we're inquisitive. We had that and have that characteristic to try things and not be afraid to experiment, to ask questions. So to me, if that is you, if you're listening to this and saying, I love this, I want to know how to make a podcast. I want to know about these road mics. I want to know about all these things that were mentioned today. You're probably going to make a great recruiter.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate all your, all your messages and I have a very nice memory. From March. I had a podcast conversation with Karin Filipsic from the Smart Recruiters team and her final word was that if somebody would like to be a recruitment professional, we should improve our skill sets. I also believe in lifelong learning. And Karin said, and I totally agree that we have to be this profession with passion and we learn new things continuously because people's life in our hand at the end of the day. So we are in the process when we have to make decision about people's life, which is something heavy. And I'm very happy that we have somehow the same mindset probably because we learned a lot in our lives and we still have something that we can learn continuously. And from this conversation comes out to me that both of you are learning new things while you are education in the educational business and you teach the future and the actual recruiters. Thank you very much for sharing your experience, your thoughts and I'm very happy to meet you. For everybody who is listening us, we are sitting now here at the Recruiter XI event recording this podcast here. My kind guests are Johnny Campbell from Social Tal and Jose Karla. Which company to say? Recruitment Academy.

Recruitment Academy. And Good call.

And good call. Thank you very much. And about myself, my name is Gabi Sharkadi. Everybody who is listening can listen on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Watch the recording of this podcast on YouTube. We are more than happy to see your comments on the comment boxes and thank you very much for coming and for this chat. I really enjoyed and you are always welcome back to Budapest. Gabby thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much and good luck to all.

Thank you. For you all, thank you very much. This is the Recrutech Podcast, the cutting.

Edge podcast in the sea region by Professionals for professionals about recruitment and technology. We are here to help professionals in the human resources and recruitment fields navigate the challenges and opportunities of finding and hiring top talent lands.