Adam Godson (00:00):

Welcome to our presentation on AI 101 in talent acquisition. Now and in the future. We're so excited to have you take some time out of your day to join us on this educational journey as we all have been thrown into a new world of using ai. I'm Adam Godson. I wanted to introduce my colleague Kristen Bailey, as well as she'll be my co-host in guiding us through the world of AI and talent acquisition. Kristen, welcome and thank you for joining.

Kristen Bailey (00:29):

Hey, Adam, always good to see you and excited for our conversation this morning.

Adam Godson (00:34):

Fantastic. This is what we're going to talk about. It is a brave new world of AI in ta, so we hope to give you a useful overview of that talk about tech evolution more broadly and how this has happened over the years, what AI should and shouldn't do. We'll also cover that tricky question of AI legislation and ethics. How do I understand that? And we'll talk about AI in the future, and so we hope you join us and enjoy the journey learning about ai. So first, let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about technology and the evolution of work and what changed and why. So,

(01:40):

So let's start with the very basics about what is this new set of things to do. Artificial intelligence has lots of place in culture and movies and the public consciousness, but fundamentally from a computer standpoint, it really is a machine's ability to perform cognitive functions, the things we associate with human mind, that's where the word artificial comes from. It's done by a computer, but associated with human intelligence. Things like perceiving reasoning, learning, interacting with an environment, problem solving, even exercising creativity, and so ways that you sometimes would think a human would act. Computer is starting to act in that way to mimic that functionality. And so it's different from traditional computing in that way. As we think about what is new in the world of ai, I want to jump through really quickly to talk about the why and why some of these things are happening.

(02:38):

Now. The fundamental reason is this, and some of you have maybe seen this in the past. It's sometimes talked about as Moore's law, which is the exponential growth of computing power and being able to have for calculations per second per thousand dollars. Computing power is getting cheaper, more available. It continues to grow at an exponential rate. And so the computer that used to take up an entire room now fits in a very, very tiny tip of your finger, and that continues to increase every single year. And so as the technology has changed, so our computing power and our ability to use computing power has changed as well. And so we're reaching soon the point of being able to have the computing power for a human brain and then soon an event in the future for all human brains. And so thinking about how that amount of computing power changes the way the world works is in some extent what we're here to do today. I want to talk about where we see ai. And Kristen, I would love your thoughts. Kristen, where did you use AI today?

Kristen Bailey (03:49):

Well, earlier this morning I was listening to some music and I was able to request a playlist just by using my voice, though I think we all, I'm not saying her name in case she decides to interact with me while I'm sitting here on this webinar, but I think so often we're sometimes intimidated by ai and I think as a TA professional, we think, oh, what is this? I should be using this. I'm behind. And I think what gives me comfort is thinking about all of the examples of where I'm using this every day, whether it's I'm asking a question to Siri on my smartphone, I'm setting an alarm, I'm changing the thermostat. There's so many different ways where we're interacting with technology all around us in our everyday lives.

Adam Godson (04:39):

Yeah, it's interesting that one of my favorite quotes is that as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore. Said in 1956 by John McCarthy was an early AI scientist, we don't realize how much AI is in our lives because it's part of everything that we do. And so the reality is most of us are already using AI in talent acquisition in other places, and there's important distinctions about how we use AI specifically if we use it for decisions and how we use it for automation and other things. But rest assured, you used AI today in some ways, you unlocked your phone with your face or you had a great music recommendation or something would fall into that category.

(05:25):

And so we're all talent acquisition professionals and some of us have been around a long time. Kristen and I put ourselves as maybe medium in that bucket, I'm not going to say long yet, but long enough that we've seen a thing or two. We both have placed newspaper ads regularly for recruitment. So we have that badge. And so as we think about the interaction with technology and recruiting, I think as technology has changed, you see that represented in the top row over time. So how we use it in talent acquisition, and that has changed as well as we think about what is defined each decade and then how the recruiting world has adapted. I think some of the key C change that we have seen in the years was really in the two thousands with taking, going from an offline world to a fully online world, and then all the new systems and new problems and challenges that created. Now that we have online applicants, we need online applicant tracking systems. And when we have a vertical search with jobs, we now have people in databases that we have to manage as well. And so that is a framework that will continue. So as external technology changes and the world is changing, the way that recruiting technology works will also change.

Kristen Bailey (06:44):

I mean, I think this is a really interesting history and like you said, I can kind of remember when I was getting my start in town acquisition, and it seems like over the years as more technology has become available to some extent, our jobs have gotten a little more complicated here in ta. And sometimes the technology that's supposed to help make our roles easier actually sometimes can slow us down. And we think a little bit about, I know we're going to talk more about that, but just really what makes recruiting special, our ability to build relationships, connect with people. Sometimes you've got to think about where is the technology accelerating that and where might it actually be adding complication?

Adam Godson (07:29):

Yeah, that's a really good point about how do we not add complication to that? I can think of having years of systems trainings that have taken up tremendous amounts of time and people adding more and more technology and walking into looking at companies and seeing they have 30 or 40 different types of tools just for talent acquisition alone, which is and ended up complicating the process. So how do we think about the experiences the right way and simplifying that and more is not always better, but how do we change with the times and have the newest and the technology that we need to get work done?

(08:12):

Getting work done is a good segue in lots of ways. People ask sometimes about is this going to eliminate jobs? And the answer to that is yes, it will absolutely change jobs and technology has always transformed the way that work gets done. There was a time where an assembly line for a car you see in the pictures here was almost always all manual. And now much of that work is done by robots, but new jobs are created and the great likelihood is that the jobs my kids will hold to hold in the future doesn't exist today. It is a new job that's yet to be invented and technology continues to change how that looks. Even things and software is the same beyond manual work, but we used to do things that we do today in Excel. We used to be done in literal spreadsheets like a sheet of paper and being able to be done in so many different ways and the world really has changed with how we get work done.

Kristen Bailey (09:13):

That's right. I think our ability to continue to adapt and evolve and understand the new skills that are going to be required to be able to fully leverage the technology that's available is really what's going to continue to change the work and the role and the skills needed in recruiting.

Adam Godson (09:32):

Yeah, that's interesting. And that's the point we'll get to is about recruiting and how that will change our work. And I know we have a great perspective on that, but I think sometimes the baseline people come up with is work itself going to change? And the answer is yes, work will change, but work will always be work and there will be enough work to do and there will be things that will look similar and yet very different at the same time. So let's talk about conversational AI in talent acquisition. I know I'm passionate about you two, Kristen, and how this looks. Tell me a little bit about the future and how the world works here.

Kristen Bailey (10:15):

Yeah, so I mean I think about what we expect as consumers when we interact with any company that we might be doing business. And we have this expectation today that expect we should be able to have a very seamless technology driven engagement with two clicks of a button. I can order almost anything anywhere in the world and have it delivered to my home. I can engage whether I'm making a reservation, confirming an appointment, ordering a ride. What you can see here are examples of where we just have this expectation of how we engage with the brands that we trust the most in the world. And you just wouldn't accept anything less than a mobile first. Very easy, seamless experience. And we look at the, so the real question that we have to ask ourselves. We can have these conversations with these organizations that we are interacting with every day. Why wouldn't we have that same expectation if we are trying to apply for a job? I think that's really what we think a lot about at Paradox is this conversational experience as it relates to the way we recruit and hire talent for our organizations.

Adam Godson (11:39):

Yeah, I think you're right with the way that that's changing and getting different in the things we experience in our consumer lives are then reflected in the talent acquisition world too.

Kristen Bailey (11:50):

I can't remember the last time I used the phone to make a dinner reservation. Can you? Sometimes I will, unless it's somewhere I'm really desperate to get into. I'm not picking up the phone for that. I can do it through a number of apps that make it so easy to engage.

Adam Godson (12:07):

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So tell me, Kristen, about how that looks in talent acquisition. What are the key things that conversational AI could do in talent acquisition today?

Kristen Bailey (12:18):

Absolutely. I mean there are so many, but I think it starts with some of the things that can seem the most simple, but we have made them so complicated. And so what you see here is you see a couple different experiences. So think about trying to get candidates to come to your career site and we actually spend a lot of time and money and resources to build these beautiful career sites, and yet our candidates have to jump around from page to page to try to find the information that they're looking for. Instead, you can have a conversational mobile first experience where candidates can actually have information offered up to them so they can ask a question through kind of having a text conversation with a friend and say, Hey, tell me about your benefits. And we can actually deliver them the content. They don't have to search for it, we're providing it to them when it comes time to apply for a role.

(13:17):

No more logins and passwords, no more friction that is unnecessary. No more lengthy applications. Candidates can have, again, a text-based conversation to make it super easy to apply and really only have to provide the basic information that the employer really needs. And then we can do all kinds of cool things to automate work that I know in my previous lives I had hundreds of people doing this work to schedule and to process applications and to schedule interviews and to reschedule interviews. And we can automate all of that work and be able to have the candidates have such a simple conversational experience right from their smartphone. And so when we just think about those pieces of the process where many companies are having, many TA organizations are seeing significant dropoff of candidates who want to apply, but they're seeing so much friction in the process of being able to search for a role, get information about the company, apply and get scheduled for an interview, all of those things we can completely transform. And you can see representation here on the slide of whether it's scheduling, applying through chat, or being able to get information you would normally have to sift through a career site to find, and you can see all of that on your smartphone through the conversation itself. So it's pretty exciting stuff to see just even in those parts of the process what the automation can do.

Adam Godson (14:51):

Yeah, it's interesting. Those are three key friction points that happen that cause drop off and being able to nail those three things. How do I get information? How do I give you information about myself? And then how do we get to the point where we're actually going to talk are three key areas that AI can really help with. And I love the point at the top here, sometimes people ask, why is your company called paradox? That's the paradox. By using software, you can spend more time with people, not software. And that's of course what we love to see. And then the conversations are important and it's important that they're fluid and being able to do that. Walk us through what conversational AI looks like. I think people know conceptually sometimes what we're talking about because they've used conversational AI in other contexts, but walk me through what it looks like in hiring.

Kristen Bailey (15:47):

Yeah, I mean I think one of the things that, again, when you mentioned the word paradox, part of the paradox is how invisible the technology can actually feel. So if you think about you can start the process with as simple as being able to send a short code through your mobile phone to start a text conversation or even scanning a QR code. You can imagine walking into a restaurant and seeing a QR code that you can scan. You can actually start having a conversation to explore career opportunities right there while you're having your experience as a customer. So what you can see here is the beginning of this conversation is that text to apply. I don't have to try to navigate to a career side. I don't have to try to find the right place to start. I can just start it as a conversation on my smartphone.

(16:42):

And then very quickly I can provide just a few pieces of information. So I'm engaging here with Olivia, our AI recruiting assistant, and through a few back and forth messages over text, I can share the basic information that I need to begin the application process. So my name, I can start searching for a role. I can be offered up positions that are tailored to me. Where am I located? What type of position am I interested in? I no longer have to search through sometimes thousands of postings on a career site and I might get lost trying to find what I'm looking for. We can actually personalize that experience and you can see some of that going on here. And then based on some basic screening criteria, it might be years of experience, it might be ability to work a certain shift, it might be some skills that we can do some pre-screening for.

(17:41):

We can actually qualify a candidate immediately. So no more waiting sometimes days, weeks to hear back if a candidate is qualified, we can start to move them forward in the process virtually immediately, sometimes within minutes rather than days or weeks. And that speed is a huge difference maker. We know that candidates are often applying to 15 jobs at a time. And so if candidates are maybe considering an opportunity with you and 15 other companies at the same time, your ability to get to the ones who are most qualified for your roles the fastest is a huge differentiator. So within this conversation, we can move from the very beginning of our engagement all the way through being able to schedule a candidate for an interview within a matter of moments. And that's just a huge difference in experience for the candidate. And then saving tons of time on the backend for your TA teams and hiring managers who have to process that volume.

Adam Godson (18:45):

Yeah, I love it. And I think the other part for me is always the scalability. There was a time I did frontline hiring earlier in my career, and if I wanted to be really tired at the end of the day, I could probably hit 25 or 30 interviews in a day and Olivia can do thousands or tens of thousands, which is sort of embarrassing for me. I lose a lot on that scale game.

Kristen Bailey (19:06):

I know I think about a couple other examples from over my past lives of just having really big pushes for hiring, whether that might be campus hiring, which happens all at one point in time, there's a seasonality there, or just really big ramps where we had plenty of candidates applying to us, but we struggled to be able to process all of those applications in a timely manner and then we would find ourselves with a backlog of candidates that we were trying to schedule. So we had people that wanted to work for us and we were just kind of crumbling under the volume. And I think about what that can look like when you actually have an assistant who can take that work off your plate. And it really doesn't matter how many humans I tried to deploy towards those problems. We were just basically couldn't dig out from under that volume. And instead we can have an assistant helping us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So when my recruiters are sleeping, Olivia is still working. And I think that's another really important thing to think about is when candidates want to interact with us, sometimes they're working and so their ability to respond, they might respond after hours and you just lose so much time if you can't keep the process moving around the clock.

Adam Godson (20:30):

Yeah, it's a scale game that only technology can win, which is why I, Olivia is here. I think this is another point that's was really strong is letting recruiters focus on what they're good at. Maybe we just made this point in some ways about the scale automation is great at scale, but maybe give me the flip side, what are the things that humans are great at and what should they be doing?

Kristen Bailey (20:55):

Yeah, I mean I think we all get into this business because we love helping our business. We love being a partner to the business. We love being able to connect with people and help them find opportunities. And those are the things that the humans are better at, right? Building trust, building relationships, understanding what our business needs, making high judgment decisions on who's the best addition to your organization, but we don't get to do all of that great work when we're spending all of our time on these manual tasks that we could be automating. And I think this is just such an aha moment for me to look at the kind of spectrum of where we spend our time and kind of challenge ourselves as TA professionals to say, how do we get out of the business of doing all of this manual work so we can spend time on the things that make us special and actually differentiate our profession? And we can't do it if 80% of our time is spent on all of these manual tasks.

Adam Godson (21:58):

Yeah, it's so interesting. I get asked this question sort of regularly, what are recruiters going to do in the future? There are a few different ways to react where I think some people say, oh my gosh, that's a threat to jobs. And others say like, oh my gosh, how freeing this is to say I'll be able to do the things I actually want to do. And some of the issue is we've sort of conflated what recruiting is. Over the last 20 years as recruiting moved online, there became lots of administrative things, looking through applicant tracking, system scheduling, interviews, and in reality, recruiting is about convincing people to join, having great conversations and convincing them that they should be with you. And machines can't do that. They aren't there so they can't join you, but it's what people are great at. And I think people that love it really love that future.

Kristen Bailey (22:52):

There's nothing weirder than walking into a room of recruiters where it's completely silent because everyone is just doing data entry in the A t S and sending emails. I don't really think that that's what we're best at, right? We're best at connecting with people, having conversations, building relationships, and candidates are making a huge life decision on if they're going to join your organization. And so being able to have the time to spend with them is so important, but again, we have to create the capacity to have that time to do that more meaningful, impactful work, and this is the pathway to get there.

Adam Godson (23:35):

Yeah, I love it. That's where sometimes people conflate online shopping with looking for a job, and I'm like, not really. I've never bought a pair of shoes and considered my self worth. And all the emotional parts that go into building a career is the same as buying a pair of shoes. So there's some similarities on that, but so maybe we'll talk a little bit about the risks in using that as we start to think about the paradigm of what should we automate, what shouldn't we automate in that world? And I think I wanted to separate a couple of different paradigms for you. One is the use of AI and hiring. And as we talked about earlier, there's some sort of what could be classified as AI in everything. And so of course you will use AI in hiring. And what has changed though is using AI in decision-making and being able to starting to have some regulation there.

(24:33):

We'll talk about the city of New York and declaring a definition for an A E D T, very snappy automated employment decision tool that has a different regulatory pattern in that. But I think our view on this is very much that it's early days and many much of this is untested. There's a lot automate, there's a lot of great things to move out of the process, but decisions really belong with humans Until we get deeper in a path of testing and regulation, that is the safest path. The city of New York, for example, decided that if you make decisions with ai, you can do that, but it needs to be tested in a certain way. And so it is a fast developing world you will get as a TA professional, lots of questions from your legal team and probably some AI teams in your IT organization and it thrusts you into a whole different place, which is great for personal growth, but certainly one that needs to be managed as we go forward.

Kristen Bailey (25:37):

Forward. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I know we're going to talk a little bit more in a second, but I think it's important to be paying attention to what's going on in the regulatory landscape and understanding that the technology is moving really fast and yet there will be some regulation that is here and more to come. So it's important to have the awareness of it and understand how it will impact us here in ta.

Adam Godson (26:05):

Yeah, love it. Love it. Let's jump in to talking about understanding some of the recent pieces in AI legislation. I think for me, New York actually took a few shots at this. They revised and delayed this thing three times, but that's what you get when you're at the front end of it. But they ended up with something really useful, which was the separation between AI in hiring and this new category that they framed as the automated employment decision tool. And so AI can help with analysis and automation and many things and not be subject to any new laws. But then what their definition is when AI is relied to make on or overrule any final employment decisions, it needs to have an audit, a bias audit. And the audit framework they chose was very similar to that has been used with employment assessments for over 50 years That also made sense, been looking at how to make those calculations and how to do that in a way that is familiar to the industry and has been accepted. And so I think lead this to get to our bottom line, which is in the state we are today, people should be thinking about the final hiring decision and being sure that human inputs are used to make those final calls.

Kristen Bailey (27:25):

I actually kind of find some comfort in this because I think that there is so much opportunity if we could just get number one right on this list. We've got a lot of work ahead of us to be able to look at the process as we have it today and where we can be leveraging AI to help us become more efficient, to help us become more candidate centric and to really be able to give hiring teams and recruiting teams so much time back to be able to spend on the things that matter the most

Adam Godson (27:58):

Decisions, to be honest where I think about, if you asked me where I want my people spending their time, let's make great decisions and do that.

Kristen Bailey (28:07):

That's right.

Adam Godson (28:09):

Lemme pose my question to you, Kristen. What does the future and I look like?

Kristen Bailey (28:14):

I mean, I think that we already are seeing so much of it and we're getting started of just the ability to look at any part of the process. I'm going to speak to this from the talent acquisition perspective, really looking at the entire talent acquisition process from end to end and automating all of the things that don't take advantage of the special things that we want the humans to do. The things we've been talking about, like building relationships, convincing people to join, helping candidates make these really important decisions, helping hiring managers make really important decisions and everything else I think is right for automation and simplification. And so I think the role of recruiter is going to change and evolve significantly to free us up to do the stuff that we're really the best at and the things that I believe our businesses need us to be doing. So that's where I think we're headed and I think we're pretty optimistic to say we're at the beginning and there's so much opportunity ahead of us.

Adam Godson (29:23):

I love that. And that's a future that I think a lot of people would really love to see as we did a study recently with Harvard Business Review and so interesting, two things stood out to me is one that organizations that are heavy in automation in the talent acquisition process, 97% and 97% of people don't agree on anything, agree that they're finding it valuable in their process, and yet it's still really early days. Only 11% are doing it. There's still chance to be early still chance to get some value and get ahead of the competition in using it. What do you take from that study?

Kristen Bailey (30:06):

I mean, I think I have a really optimistic view of these two numbers and kind of the, yes, there is wide agreement. I agree with you. It's hard to get anybody to on anything, especially 97% of business leaders that we surveyed. But when I look at 11% and it's just the very beginning, and I think there's so much opportunity to get started and to be really looking at your hiring process and to say, what are the one to two biggest pain points that are causing friction or causing dropoff or where you have your team members doing rework that we could get started and you don't really have to worry yet about the broader implications of where we're headed because there's so much that you could tackle today. So I think this is, I have a really optimistic view of this statistic and saying you can get started now and you can see, and I see the results that we are seeing from some of the clients that we get to work with of the transformation of the time they get back, the experiences that they can deliver the savings to their business. It's amazing to see. And that's just again, a small percentage of organizations that are in the club that have actually gotten started.

Adam Godson (31:33):

For sure. Let's folks that are moving it forward and would love all of you to read the report as well. So the Harvard Business Reviews findings on AI and talent acquisition. If you want to scan the QR code, you can get yourself there. Otherwise the Google machine will do that as well, get you to the right place. But some really interesting findings, obviously from a highly credible academic source on what's happening, what real companies are doing, and how they are getting ahead. I'm going to just say a big thank you to you, Kristen, for a great conversation. Really enjoyed spending time, thank you to all you who have joined us as well. It is an incredibly exciting time to be in talent acquisition and we're excited about the future to be more human and more interactive and more of the things that we all got into this business to do. So we're excited to do that. I'll just offer as well, if the folks at Paradox myself personally can be a resource for you as you think about your automation journey or as you have questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to engage in the conversation that way as well.

Kristen Bailey (32:44):

Thanks so much, Adam. It was really fun to spend some time with you and talk about AI and ta.

Adam Godson (32:51):

Awesome. Thanks so much Kristen, and happy automating.

‍