The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
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- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 151: Innovative AI solutions for modern hiring with hollyhires.ai CEO, Jacob Claerhout
James Mackey, CEO of a leading RPO provider, SecureVision, and Elijah Elkins, CEO of Avoda, a highly rated global recruiting firm, co-host hollyhires.ai CEO, Jacob Claerhout in our special series on AI for Hiring.
Jacob shares how his company is transforming recruitment with AI. Since its launch, Hollyhires has focused on automating candidate vetting, managing databases, and running personalized campaigns for staffing companies. He explains how AI boosts recruitment efficiency and quality, aiming to create a more balanced, value-driven process for both employers and candidates.
0:00 Jacob's journey and Hollyhires' origin
10:48 AI Technology in staffing industry
23:59 Future of AI in career management
33:58 Future of AI in talent matching
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. Thanks for joining us today. I am joined by Elijah Elkins, our co-host. Elijah, what's going on? Doing well, doing well, good. And we're also joined today by Jacob Klerhout. Jacob is the founder and CEO of Holly Hires. Jacob, it's great to meet you and thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:No, thanks a lot for having me. It Thanks a lot for having me. It's a pleasure being here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's going to be a great episode, I guess, just to kick us off, are you based out of London or where are you based right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm, let's say, a Belgian, spent some time living in Paris, currently live in London and actually spend a lot of time in San Francisco, because that's where things are happening when it comes to AI.
Speaker 1:Everything try and spend as much time as possible on American soil. Okay, cool, nice. Yeah, we're looking forward to learning more about Holly Hires. I saw that you started the company and it looks like around December 2022. So I would love to, just like Elijah, and I just want to learn about what it is that got you to start the company and primary value proposition of what you're building. Just an overview to get us started would be great.
Speaker 2:No, happy to Myself. I used to be an intercapitalist investing in early stage businesses, which is an absolute privilege to have as a job. Before that, actually, together with friends already, you used to run a small recruitment agency placing investment professionals, which was a blast. I learned a lot and also there got the knack for the talents, or the match between talent and opportunity. While being a vc invested in a couple of really exciting hr tech businesses that turned into unicorns, which was a real privilege to to work with amazing founders this closely. But for me the mission all along was to go out and build a business of my own and at some point after a couple years you have to either, let's say, put your money where your mouth is, leave the cushy and golden handcuffs there and go and do it, or you commit to the profession of a venture capitalist, because the time to feedback cycles are infinitely long, so you need to really commit to that.
Speaker 2:I took a leap of faith there. Together with my co-founder, who's a fellow Belgian, we first got started building a talent marketplace where on one side we had freelance recruiters and on the other side companies looking to hire. What we did was obviously momentum building on both sides, and then quality control in the middle. Initially that was going well. We managed to get a couple of thousands of recruiters on board. We had a specific niche where we had worked for some of the largest brands in the world, managed to make that profitable.
Speaker 2:But after a while we came to the conclusion that, okay, quality control needed, say, technical solutions. We couldn't just keep on adding people to that equation. And that's when we started playing with the back then technology that was at its infancy, the GPTs of this world, this world. And it is at that point that we realized that this technology would not only disrupt our own business but actually going to reshape a large part of the value chain in the industry at large. And with that in mind, we said, okay, let's be the change we anticipate, going for this industry and start building what we think the future of recruitment looks like. And that's how we got started with Holly Hires.
Speaker 1:Nice. Okay, that's really cool, and usually I don't know I end up I feel like monopolizing the first several questions, so this time I'm going to take the backseat. Elijah, if you want to kick us off some questions, that'd be great.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, I would love to understand a little better, jacob, what exactly Holly Hire does, right In a detailed way, and the three different areas that it shows on your website, right Like the database and the outbound and then the inbound.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. So zooming out slightly from that is I believe that AI is going to change the way we hire people, and not only on the company side, but actually also on the candidate side. And like listening to the podcast, for instance, like I feel there's a lot of focus that goes into the company side because that's where talent professionals sit, but there's real implications to having AI agents on the candidate side as well and we actually play with that. If talent acquisition like matching talent and opportunity changes to an agent, to agent world, then all of a sudden both companies and candidates have AI agents optimizing for them. Companies and candidates have AI agents optimizing for them. Basically, you have one of the transaction function, the career agents of a candidate that helps you think through okay, where do I want to be? Like, let's filter the opportunities that I get spammed with, but also make sure that I'm always aware as to what the most exciting opportunities for me could look like. And on the flip side of that on the company side you have an AI recruiter. The flip side of that, on the company side, you have an ai recruiter. And what an ai recruiter should do is make sure that you attract and the most exciting of all individuals, just like you would expect that from like your best recruitment efforts, right so, and that's actually where first we got started with an ai agent called holly. Holly is an ai recruiter specifically built for staffing and recruitment companies and what she does, indeed, is built automatically, build a top-up funnel for your, for your company.
Speaker 2:What happens as soon as a position goes live in your ats whether that's yeah, bullhorn or a job diva, like a position goes live, ollie picks it up and does one of three things, as you alluded to. The first thing is inbound vetting. As we all know, like everybody is getting spammed, a lot of platforms have one-click apply buttons, which means that the inbounds you get signal overnoses is deteriorating rapidly and staffing and recruitment companies expect solutions to help solve that and that wholly helps mitigate. I'll get into the how in a second. The second part is a lot of companies, and especially those large recruitment and staffing companies that we serve. They sit on a lot of data. Everybody always tells you data is the new oil, data is the new gold. Everybody invests in having data, but when it comes to actually using that data, then it's surprising how little If you look at the placements that recruitment or staffing companies make yeah, less than 5% tend to come from internal database searches, which is insane because these are people that you have consent to reach out to, that know your company and your brand.
Speaker 2:So what we do there is we basically let Holly search through that data in a novel way, leveraging the latest technology, and, by extension, she can also do that for the outside world. We have, let's say, a very large database of 750 million profiles. What Holly will do is, as soon as that position goes live, she'll start working on that position. She'll email the recruiter in charge saying, hey, I found 100 candidates. If you're okay with that, I'll reach out to them automatically In a hyper-personalized way. She would drop connection requests, emails, linkedin messages, emails all of that without having to basically do much. And there it depends on, let's say, the setup and the agreements we have with management. But either it happens by default, really trying to make the process as seamless and even not requiring any real interaction, or recruiters individually come and sign off on certain campaigns for people.
Speaker 3:Nice. So it sounds very comprehensive being able to handle all three of those, because a lot of AI solutions try to only do one of those. Is there any, I don't know? Do you feel like the approach to all three has made it where you can better serve customers, or do you feel like you do struggle with any certain use cases? Yeah, I'm just curious.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting question. When buying solutions, especially like for our ideal customer profiles, which are, like, let's say, mid-size staffing companies, the level of stakeholder management already required with implementing one tool is insane. What we're pushing for is, basically, you want to remove as much friction from the process as possible, and that also means buying five vendors to help solve one workflow, and that also means, like buying five vendors to help solve one workflow. Right, if you take the workflow of getting like interviews with great candidates on that top of funnel, yeah, our clients were pretty clear that, look, I don't want to buy someone else in doing this. Please help me, please build this for us.
Speaker 2:So we do a lot of, let's say, product development with our customers and yeah, especially, we got started on the outbound side of things, that's, let's say, where our bread and butter first was. Our strongest customers became staffing companies, and then they said, hey, this analysis that Holly does when presenting candidates, could we also do that for our inbound? And then we said, hey, yeah, we have all the flows already. It's basically just plugging them in a separate entity and with that we can serve those different streams. Also, I know that some of these streams are not necessarily built for longevity. For instance, I would expect ATS vendors to pick up and to start doing a better job with search in their own database. They have a very strong incentive on doing that, but at the same time, the incentive has been there for the last 10, 20 years as well.
Speaker 2:And that hasn't changed that much. Yeah, I know, like we let's say, it's not easy to handle those multiple use cases, but it does get really appreciated by our customers.
Speaker 3:Nice and have you? I'm curious because that use case for staffing and recruitment companies right. They do tend to probably have larger databases than a lot of just normal kind of corporate businesses, but it seems like the solution would be relevant for corporate recruiting as well. Is that something you guys are exploring or you just feel like it's really better to focus on the staffing industry right now?
Speaker 2:We do work for a couple of end customers. It's just, if you think about, let's say, the go-to-market motion as an early stage startup, it just makes more sense for us or that's something we've learned to focus on. Businesses where hiring is their bread and butter, where, let's say, technology is, yeah, I wouldn't say sometimes underserved, but if you look at like how old school some of the software, like the core ATS systems, is, yeah, there's just a very large opportunity and also I would argue that there's a larger willingness to experiment with new technology there. If a lot of people are talking about like a downward pressure, needing to do more with less, and if you're like recruitment or staffing business, your business is very person, like people intensive, needing to do more with less. And if you're a recruitment or staffing business, your business is very people-intensive and everybody who owns or runs a staffing company knows that there's a lot of labor that goes into building talent funnels back and forth with those customers and business owners just identify that AI can have an almost transformative impact on that.
Speaker 2:So that's where we got started, or that's where we decided to focus, not because we can't serve end customers, but, yeah, the level of pragmatism and the urgency is just larger. And also, speaking like from a lot almost vision perspective, they know hiring really well and so that means that if you can learn from them that it becomes almost easier to then go back and do it for in-house teams after that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
Speaker 1:It's also like a consistency thing in my opinion, right, like in any market environment, staffing agencies are going to be hiring, so there's always going to be that amount, like a certain amount of demand, but of course, like that also is true of like upper mid-market enterprise customers as well, there's always going to be hiring happening.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I could see that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me in terms of there's a bigger push for productivity gains and organization and search for databases for candidates and whatnot through a staffing agency, just because of how difficult it is from a margin perspective to run a services company where your overhead expense for databases for candidates and whatnot through a staffing agency, just because of how difficult it is from a margin perspective to run a services company where your overhead expense when it comes to payroll is just massive right To have recruiters on payroll.
Speaker 1:And then, particularly for these staff augmentation firms or contingent agencies, which have these contingent revenue models that are difficult to predict out as well, just having a solution where we almost like, regardless of the annual contract value, it's probably the efficiency gains are going to outweigh what it could potentially take for to have several junior recruiters doing these database searches and probably a lot more effective and then better. Like it trickles down to like faster placements, lower time to fill, just probably like starting top of funnel but looks better on a pnl and then so it's more sustainable business. But then it's also like snowballs right down funnel into revenue and growth.
Speaker 3:I would assume potentially so isn't that similar to what when we interviewed qual a few weeks ago? On the podcast they're running similar motion like going after staffing and recruiting. I don't know, jacob, if you've heard of Qual yet, but they do more of the like a screening, yeah, like a voice agent, so that's interesting too, of further down funnel. But they're doing recruiting and staffing, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's like a similar kind of motion where it's like it's a different, completely different product. But what I mean by that is I see the appeal to go with having a like a staffing, staffing customers particularly early stage because, like, the demand is going to be there and is essentially as long as they're going to be in business, they're going to need your product right it's actually a good product.
Speaker 3:They're going to stick with it.
Speaker 1:It's actually a good product, they're gonna stick with it, it's like they need you consistently. It's not like these tech companies where it's like 2021 they're hiring like crazy and then they just cut off, like their entire north america staff.
Speaker 2:No, totally and I see that actually in the exploratory calls where, like you, you have those enterprises and then they're like oh, we're exploring tools for like next year, and then like all that is great, I'm happy to be on a call with with them and learn from them and see how they think.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I, I would prefer working with customers that need our solution yesterday and there, yeah, with staffing companies. The case is very obvious. They want to move faster, not saying that the sales cycles are infinitely short. Either it still requires, let's say, a good amount of stakeholder management and multiple meetings, but it is interesting to see how staffing is catching cycles are infinitely short. Either it still requires, let's say, a good amount of stakeholder management and multiple meetings, but it is interesting to see how stuff is catching up and also knowing that, um, yeah, that market, especially as it got like the economy, starts looking differently, or the outlook is slightly more, let's say, pessimistic.
Speaker 2:Like people need to compete, uh, even harsher. It's like it's all about speeds. Like you need to compete even harsher, it's all about speeds. You need to deliver really good quality service at breakneck speed, which, yeah, obviously, if you're marvelously set up with amazing teams, then great. But yeah, it's pretty obvious that technology can do a significantly better job. Holly, there, in building lead lists, in reaching out to people. Like Holly does that in five minutes. She does the work that a recruiter would need two days for. And that's also the type of reporting that we do towards those like the staffing owners or managers, like heads of delivery, where we say, look, this week Holly worked the equivalent of seven full-time equivalents for your team and that, yeah, that doesn't.
Speaker 2:Or in the beginning that might feel a bit scary, but at the same time it's helping everybody in those teams reach and crush the targets and goals, and that for, let's say, a fraction of the cost of hiring extra employees to do it. Yeah, I feel like the trade-off of hiring additional recruiters to do better delivery and higher speed versus investing in technology is a very obvious one.
Speaker 1:So it's just to get a sense of the full workflow because we covered a lot of ground pretty quickly. So it's like creating, like pulling candidates from the ATS to create like essentially shortlist for roles or whatever else. It's also then doing like the customized messaging and doing the emails and then, from a scheduling standpoint, is it also essentially scheduling screens or how does that?
Speaker 2:For now we end when that first, whatever the first step of the process looks like whether that finding in your own database and engaging with people, or doing outbound and having multi-touchpoint drip campaigns, through which then Holly can also come back and answer let's say, the follow-up questions, gather resumes, those types of things she does for you and you do that by connecting your LinkedIn account and emails and all of a sudden, yeah, you have a meeting booked with a great candidate, which feels pretty magical. In the beginning it's a bit scary, but once you explain to people how to manage the requirements and how to manage the process, then they tend to be very enthusiastic. We see people now with high expectations and that increase the mandates that Holly gets on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1:So can you tell us like so in terms of your products, like stack ranking candidates, right? So it's like when it's compiling what's like, how is it going about stack ranking and evaluating profiles for relevancy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, what we do there is basically, we pull in the candidates and then we make a list based on the job description, we make a list of requirements. So one of the things that we wanted to start implementing relatively early on was, like more declarative hiring. You don't want to think in search terms, but you want to think in requirements, and what we always do is you bring in a profile for a specific position. That position has a short description and a list of requirements Must have two to five years of experience, must have a degree in computer science, must have worked on consumer-facing products. Those are things that those first two might be easy to boil down into a Boolean, but the last one is not and that requires a level of understanding.
Speaker 2:So what we do is, for every like, holly will construct an entire tree of options with like search parameters that shall all run in parallel. You can think of that as like the equivalent of a couple hours, if not days, of search work just by filling in Booleans, and she will vet the results. So stack, rank the results that come up, all of that again in parallel, against those criteria, saying okay, who here meets the criteria? And there we have some sort of, let's say, reinforcement learning algorithm, where Holly basically weighs the going deeper down the tree that is working for her versus exploring new branches, and there what you end up with is a list of candidates where you see yes, meets criteria one to five, yes inferred. Where she's, for instance, the consumer arguments If somebody works for Revolut and they work on the mobile team, then you know that they've built products that have consumer facing.
Speaker 2:That is not something that you can boil down in a boolean, but Holly understands that and will make the case for that. It will be question marks like I can't possibly know this or does not meet this, and then, based on how many of the requirements are met, she will decide whether or not somebody should be pursued or not.
Speaker 1:So is this primarily on the resume or also just like within the ATS? If people have answered screening questions in the past scorecards, things of that nature is it pulling in data from there as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we pull. So for the internal search part, we pull data into our own system and then we pull as much as possible. If people have prior relevant information, then great. It's often, though, very messy and it's almost more worth. It's just not worth the effort, because standardizing that across different roles and different systems. Often people have switched systems, switched methodology, so it's not always worth the effort, but Holly can use any information that is present there. The most valuable source there tends to be the resume and the notes that people have left on candidates.
Speaker 1:Okay, Got it. So notes too, All right, but my other question would just be like for your staffing customers, what types of roles or specializations do they typically have? Paul was saying the CEO of David Tell was telling us that he was seeing a lot of demand within light industrial staffing agencies. For light industrial, he just said, just due to a ton of volume of openings that they have in the United States right now. Are you seeing different specializations really stand out in terms of where you're seeing the most demand?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and that makes a ton of sense. Also, if you think about the like, which parts of the flow do you automate? First, that as a staffing business is a question you need to ask right, okay, where are there obvious opportunities? What are the most easiest? Which ones affect my customers and my candidates? And they are obviously introducing voice agents fascinating, but that that does change the experience. For for your candidates in light industrial, yes, there's a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 2:However, what are bread and butter tends to be the highly skilled, actually, like the really white, like white collar staffing companies, because for them it's like the identification matters, like it's the difference. That's also why they tend to be more expensive. Right, it's. Not only is the salary of the person significantly higher, which makes it like they are more demanding, they're harder to find, harder to close. So that's where we play.
Speaker 2:We tend to do software engineering, anything that is healthcare or pharmaceuticals, like the jobs that tend to have advanced degrees, are the ones that the staff and companies that we focus on, mainly because there Holly's intelligence matters, like she understands the difference between a C++ developer and a React developer, and it's that level of understanding that your customers expect from you or demand from you. So we yeah, that's the realm where we play and that's also where Holly can make the biggest difference, because judging, yeah, if the quality is okay, you need to be able bodies and be able to come and work this shift. That is obviously also important that you can still validate, and there's a lot of an entire, let's say, focus of the market that needs to do that, but that's not where holly's strengths lie yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense too. It's like where more nuance is needed, like exactly okay, cool. So what about future functionality when you're looking like in terms of customer feedback right now, and then just your own knowledge and insights into what you've seen on the market and what you think functionality and features are going to make the most sense over the next six months to a year? Do you have a? What are your top priorities in terms of additional functionality for your product?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first thing there is the HR tech space, and then, especially, like the core infrastructure. It's such a like, such a fragmented space that it's insane the amount of coverage you need to have if you want to integrate just the five largest or the 10 largest, and every time you meet the new exciting customer, they're on a system that you don't get support. So there's a lot of like grounds that needs to be covered there. And then, additionally, like the details matter when building systems like this. So you, you want to build in enough and I can refine enough. Okay, the tweaks and like of the of the core of your flow. It's sometimes like small things that like the way you communicate towards the recruiter or create a buy-in front that wholly creates buy-in for certain candidates, for instance, like it matters.
Speaker 2:We're now, for instance, working on resume formatting. Like a lot of customers mentioned that they spend like hours on trying to format resumes. When we looked at that as a company, we're like what, how is this? How are people like? How can this be a job? But, yeah, apparently, large traffic companies have full-time like people in like often not on the payroll, but very often freelancers that do nothing but that. So there's a lot of. As we further pull like on some threads, we learn a lot of additional functionalities where holly could have a very big impact.
Speaker 2:But in in terms of the longer term vision, I believe in that agent-to-agent vision where not only will we automate the hell out of things on the company side of things and primarily for staffing companies, but if I think, okay, three to five years, what excites me it's trying to match that with a consumer angle. If you think through, okay, the, the inefficiency of trying to like, blast messages towards, like the whole world, everybody who's high and blasting towards the whole world, and then on the receiving end, like not even seeing or hearing things anymore, even great opportunity like GoMist, because of the fact that it's so hard to filter that signal from noise. I'm really excited about being able to match those two and I think the new paradigm that is Gen AI allows you to work with unstructured data and interact with software in novel ways, and those are two things that with Holly we take, let's say, really too hard. But applying that on the flip side, on the, the candidate side, is going to allow us to create for our customers a channel through which candidates can be like, reached and really reached, but only if it makes sense. Because that's the beauty if you can find a real match, then you earn your spots to get their attention.
Speaker 2:And I feel like a lot of the old school companies, old school, okay, everybody pays their tax to linkedin, right, but like linkedin, you pay per email. You don't pay per conversion, right, where you feel that there's like an almost like a wrong alignment of incentives. So I'm really excited about trying to, let's say, correct that wrong, but it's going to take more than a couple quarters so what?
Speaker 1:I'm curious what do you guys think in terms of how candidates are going to be leveraging AI? What product functionality are they really going to be using? I guess there's optimization of job descriptions, I don't know. I guess leveraging AI to maybe find jobs or apply to jobs. Honestly, on the candidate side, I haven't given it as much thought. So I'm just like Jacob. You're talking agent to agent experience. What do you think is going to be like? What are? How are candidates going to be leveraging job seekers, going to be leveraging ai over the next few years? How's that going to change?
Speaker 2:I. My bet there is that, like people will have an experience similar to the ones that superstars, like movie stars and sports people have. Like they have an agent. Like they agent, they don't have to think about their career the whole time because somebody else is doing it for them, and that is something really powerful. With the democratization of intelligence, we'll see more people having access to what I would call a career agent, and the idea there should be that a career agent finds tempting opportunities for you even when you're not actively looking. That is how I think about it. It should be quality over quantity and always on, so that your agent always has your back, and that concretely will translate in my head to something where you just like you, working with the best human recruiter. I think the process will look very close to what that is like. You'll have a relationship with your agent, which means that agent needs to be close to you.
Speaker 2:My bet would be that it will live either in a messenger trend like iMessage or WhatsApp, where you can interact through text but, most importantly, through voice, and there I think, like the other company that we were discussing is on an interesting trend that we've run similar experiments there, where, if you can get to know a candidate not only their resume, but actually also what they're about and what they might be looking for, because a lot of things such a significant part of, like job matching happens through things that are not present on your LinkedIn. Right, is it okay? I want to move closer to my mom, I just had a second child, I need better insurance or I need a higher pay and I'm willing to work harder, or no, I'm towards the end of my career and I want to start, let's say, taking more time with my family. So these types of things you don't put on LinkedIn, but you can tell your AI career agents, and what will happen in my mind, is the two agents the one that knows the company really well will have an incentive to try and get in touch, and it will almost become like a protocol where, okay, you share an opportunity, you, a company, shares one, a career agent responds saying, hey, no, I'm not open at all because you don't meet any of the criteria that my clients being like okay, my boss has set for me or what I understood from how we've communicated prior, and it's basically that gliding scale where, if you feel an opportunity, that does mean a lot of it, that you will expect your agent to run it by you and say, hey, you know what, like Jacob, even though you're like a great founder, but OpenAI is working on a like a career agent thing.
Speaker 2:Would you want to chat? Even though I'm definitely not leaving my startup, I would want to know that. So that's so. That's the type of thing that you would expect your agent to do, and it's that trust and that proximity that will enable a whole new way of matching and I'm very excited about that. That would be my bet as to what the career side of things or the candidates side of this world will look like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's going to be really cool. That's a pretty compelling future. Just essentially, that's going to be really cool. That's a pretty compelling future. And to the extent, too, where it's not just punching in requirements but to the extent where it can be a guide as well, would be pretty't necessarily sure, unless a candidate just starts asking for advice and you have you decide to take 10 extra minutes to try to, you know, help somebody out and you're like, okay, here we go. It's like getting into the nuances of okay, maybe you can get this jump in comp right now, but if you take this path, then you're ultimately going to stall out two years from now and it's going to be hard for you to have continued growth five, 10 years in the future. Or thinking, yeah, basically those like decision mapping where it's like all right, if you take this step short term here, it helps you do this. Long term, it's going to make things challenging. Where you take this other step, You're going to stay at a similar conference for longer, but the experience you're going to gather is going to be more robust or helping you understand like gaps in your skill set or experience that could prevent you from getting jobs and align you with roles that like can set you up for future success.
Speaker 1:This is stuff that like, quite honestly, like top tier talent in most industries. Like this is the kind of way they're thinking, but it's not necessarily as intuitive as we might think. It is A lot of people, I feel, like their careers they're just going with the flow. They push out their resume to a bunch of companies and whoever responds like where there's the least amount of friction is like where they end up working and there's a to be clear, there's a fair percentage of folks in the world maybe even the majority of like people that they just don't have options. They have to do what they have to do. But when we're talking about like your customers, where it's like the white collar workers, it's people are fortunate enough to be in this position where they could be more intentional about their career and there's just a lack of intention.
Speaker 1:It's like you look at the number one hated interview question and it's like what's your three year plan, five year plan? It's people hate that question. It's like why have you not thought about that? I think it's I honestly people who don't like that question. I don't want to hire them, but I think it's just interesting right, like helping you bring structure to what's your long-term goals. Your long-term goals might shift, but for the time being what your long-term goals are and helping you map toward that, I think would be really cool. Maybe that's like a further iteration of just like matching, but that would be awesome.
Speaker 2:I had an amazing experience back when I was a VC and like the I'm not going to name them, but like there, there's some amazing recruiters out there that in order for them to make the placement fee money, they know that they have to play the real long game. Where they're like you know what? We'll get to know you now. We'll help you think through your career, like your deal-making, like your positioning. How do you market yourself as a professional? What should you be focusing on? Where should you be spending time? Like all those conversations they were having with me and I was amazed but like, how much amazing value do I get? And they never made money off of me yet. Like I don't think they ever will. But it's amazing that if you have somebody that is willing to play that long game, share those insights, share also their contact. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2:The only problem often with real recruiters is that they work for both sides, which makes, let's say, it's hard if you have two bosses or let's say, two things to keep in mind.
Speaker 2:The true beauty of having a career agent.
Speaker 2:And that's why I believe the world with agents is going to move towards a better internet, because you can serve one master truly, for instance, where you say, okay, I have this job offer or somebody wants to hire me for a project that I know that I'm not qualified for, should I do this? You could never ask your real recruiter that, because then the decision is made for you versus an AI agent that you know and trust and that you know that is secure and would never share. That you can reason through that, and there's a lot of people that make poor decisions. Right, they don't run a proper process, which means that they only hire for three. They apply for 10 companies, get interviews at three and take the first one, the first offer to land, which is insane. Right, that's one of the things that they teach you at business school, which costs a lot of money just to to learn that, and there's such an opportunity to try and instill better practices for a wider audience there. And, yeah, this new software paradigm might just provide the platform for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool, elijah, do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:I'm just curious how you think that companies like OpenAI will respond. I know there's agents, but as I find myself using GPT and other Gen AI tools, I don't really want to pick an agent for this question or that question. I just want to ask it to GPT and if I could share my resume, share different pieces of data in a secure way, right, that wouldn't be used to train their models or whatever. I would rather do that. This is just personal, right, Then have an agent for everything.
Speaker 3:I have 40 different agents One. I ask personal finance questions to one, I ask career questions to one, I ask like recruitment thought leadership questions to, and I always have to figure out which one I should ask what question to. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think it helps out of the user.
Speaker 2:No, it is a fascinating one. I don't have the answer. I don't think anybody has.
Speaker 1:What.
Speaker 2:I do know is that right now, people for the technology come to chat GPT, right, that's where they go and that's where they expect things to live.
Speaker 2:The bet that even OpenAI is taking is that.
Speaker 2:No, we just need to get this technology everywhere so that it becomes the go-to in any piece of software and therefore in any product or service.
Speaker 2:My bet there for now is that people will have, for certain functions in their life, you won't mind the structure and the format of a certain communication channel, like iterations, where you say, okay, a recruiter should not bother you every week, right, if you're not actively looking, you should have a call every quarter maybe. So a lot of that is context dependent and context switching is expensive. So if you can do that in a flow that makes sense, then that's fine. If you zoom out from a company building perspective and that is also a view that I think is shared by OpenAI they want different people like myself to care about one problem and build solutions for that one problem. It's true that a lot of those problems and solutions might have touch points with consumers, and what I anticipate happening there is then for there to be a meta agent where if there's too many agents dealing with too many things, then you have a personal assistant that deals with your career agents, and that is what superstars, again, also do.
Speaker 3:An agent for your agents right.
Speaker 2:And I don't know, but that would be one of the bets that I could foresee. Obviously, having the attention directly as a business with consumers is more valuable, but that might be the world that we're evolving into Changing consumer behaviors. It takes a while, but ChatGPT has shown that it can actually go pretty rapidly, so I'm very excited to see what it will look like. But I do know that, yeah, the future of talent and opportunity matching will need to, let's say, reinvent itself within, let's say, within that paradigm shift. And, yeah, like happy to, as a small startup, take on that bet against giants that are the linkedins and the indies of this world, who obviously sit on a major advantage but who also have legacy. So, yeah, I'm stoked about what the next 18 to 24 months will bring for our space yeah, it's a.
Speaker 1:It's definitely a pretty, pretty cool time here and we've had probably six seven ceos on the show thus far specifically to discuss how ai is being incorporated into recruitment at different stages of the funnel. So definitely been learning a lot here. And, jacob, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on to the show today with us and sharing your insights Any like kind of parting thoughts of anything we didn't cover yet related to AI. It's cool. If not, I'm just wondering if there's anything else you want to share with the audience, and we have a couple of minutes here.
Speaker 2:No, maybe a last thought there is actually to. I would challenge, indeed, the wider recruitment industry to think beyond just like how can we spam more at like cheaper, because that in itself cannot be the long-term vision Like what will continue to happen and we've seen that now with, for instance, google and Microsoft, like they're now making it harder to land in inboxes, and so we'll see a shift away from that. Like we need to have the real discussion of like how can we drive value both for our customers, like our stocking companies and therefore their end customers, and for candidates. And therefore, I think we need to sometimes just zoom out from okay, like only candidate identification and then spamming? No, it needs to go beyond that. And that's why I feel like you feel me being riled up about some of the discussions we've had.
Speaker 2:That doesn't negate the fact that there's a lot of productivity to be gained, but what I believe and what I want to do is we start on the productivity side and change it to an access game.
Speaker 2:And yeah, and those are some of the thoughts that I feel like not enough people are having that conversation as to what the five-year plan looks like. But, yeah, happy to try and change and influence that narrative, because it might actually be coming quicker than we all think. And then, obviously, on the short term, if you're a staffing company and you're working to future-proof your business, then yeah, we're happy to partner with you, because it does start with a mandate. If you want to drive value for candidates and your end customers, then having a mandate to fill positions is incredibly powerful, and that is something that staffing agencies know really well, and recruitment agencies as well is getting closing clients and getting those open positions. It's impressive how much hustling goes around in that, but it's a big shame if your sales team works so hard to get a client and you lose it because you didn't deliver quickly enough or at high quality, and that's where Holly can make a very meaningful difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. That's a great summary there. In conclusion, elijah, any other follow-up thoughts on your end?
Speaker 3:Just the last thing I would mention, going off what you just said, jacob, is I don't know if either of you have heard of Mark Kosoglow.
Speaker 3:He was the, I think, svp of global sales at outreach during a lot of their scaling, and then CRO at Catalyst.
Speaker 3:Anyways, really recently, like within the last six months, he started a company called Operator and they're talking about the great ignore, right, they're in the sales space and, as you're saying, jake, it's not about just sending more emails. A lot of times, recruitment tools are either trailing behind and looking to what's happening in like the sales space and sales automation, outreach, etc. I'll be curious to see what some of the thought leaders in the sales space do, where they're trying to strip things back and focus more on like human connection and meaningful conversations to see what we can learn for recruiting, because it feels like recruiting is doing what you're saying, jacob, right. Like how do we send more messages to more people that are more personalized to get, like, more interested candidates? And I think there's a couple thought leaders in sales that are realizing the sales emails are being ignored and we may be on their precipice in the next six to 12 months. You have similar things happening for recruitment.
Speaker 3:Just too many emails that people are getting so anyways just wanted to throw that out there as something to keep an eye on is how the sales space combats with that Gen AI kind of hitting massive amounts of email outreach.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. But that's where I see the difference, actually, and that's why I'm actually more enthusiastic about the space we're in than the sales space People. I don't anticipate selling to move to an agent-to-agent world anytime soon, because nobody sets up an agent that says you know what, please sell me, like you might have a more secondary effect which is hey, I want to run a better business, I want to become a better human, I want to become a healthier. No, you don't. But the career function is more straightforward Our entire industry in the HR space.
Speaker 2:What we do is we match talent and opportunity, and that is a fascinating match where you can have a real deep impact on people's lives. But it's more constraints, which means that transforming that into an agent-to-agent world in which we can imagine an AI recruiter and imagine an AI career agent is more straightforward and therefore, like the fighting, the noise and the signal-to-noise ratio being managed on both ends is something that I see happening, first in recruitment and maybe at a later date in sales. So, yeah, I'm actually very excited about that and I think that recruitment might actually lead the way for a change, maybe.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, that'd be amazing. That would be a nice change to see more of that, but anyways, yeah, this has been a great episode. Jacob, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:No, all pleasure.
Speaker 1:Super cool. Thanks for having me and it's been a pleasure getting to know you. That's great. Yeah, likewise, If everybody tuning in, we have many more great episodes coming up to discuss AI and hiring probably close to at least 10, 15 more episodes. So make sure to continue to check us out. Thank you so much for joining us today. Take care.
