Josh Bersin (01:09):

I think of all of the different areas of HR that AI plays a role. Recruiting is by far the most advanced and maybe one of the most powerful today. Other areas are catching up, but they're not there yet. And the reason for that is everything from the early days of applicant tracking systems have been using algorithms to try to figure out from a resume or a job application, what is the match between so-and-so candidate and such and such job. And that was sort of not very intelligent in the early days and there were scores, but it got smarter and smarter and smarter. So one giant application area of AI in HR is sourcing, locating, identifying qualifying candidates when you're looking for people. And everybody I think who is a recruiter, and I'm sure a lot of you are that's used LinkedIn or Indeed or any other tool have seen that and that gets smarter and smarter and smarter because now the AI can infer what an individual's skills might be, what their culture fit to an organization might be, and more advanced ideas like this particular candidate worked for these companies and in our company, people who worked for these companies are highly successful, but people who worked for those companies are not highly successful.

(02:43):

So maybe we should skip the people that work for those companies and talk to the people that work for these companies. So this stuff is getting smarter and smarter and smarter in the sourcing side. The second area though that's even more interesting that paradox is pioneered is the whole idea of the candidate experience and the candidate and recruiter and organizational end to end process. And you're going to hear about this from Shay and from Stella.

(03:13):

Once we went to mobile phones and people started to use web or mobile phones to look for and apply for jobs, all of a sudden the idea of talking to somebody on the phone and waiting to get hold of a recruiter or a call center agent to answer questions about a job suddenly seemed kind of obsolete. And if you look at the data on people looking for jobs right now, by the way, there's a strange thing going on in the job market where people are not leaving companies as much as they have been in the past. I'm not sure why that is. There's a little bit of a blip, but generally speaking, in the US, 20 to 25% of people change jobs every year, even during recessions and during the pandemic it was almost 40%. So there's a lot of people looking for jobs all the time.

(04:03):

People that maybe feel that they're underpaid, they don't like their shift, they don't like their boss, they don't like their location, whatever. And if they have to get on the phone and talk to somebody or browse through some website and scroll through 50 jobs, then they're not going to do it. What Paradox did in the early days under the real kind of innovation pioneering ideas that paradox is way ahead of the other technology vendors in this is they said, what if we had a chat bot that a candidate could talk to that would answer questions? Well, all of a sudden you realize there's a lot of questions. What's the shift? What's the company? What are the job requirements? What's the certification? How far is it from my house? How much does it pay? Et cetera. And then it gets into lots of other issues. How do I apply?

(04:56):

When can I apply? How quickly can I hear back? What's the interview process? On and on and on. And what Paradox did over the years is built more and more functionality into the platform and it has a personification in different companies. Shay, you can talk more about how you guys use it and turned it into almost an AI powered recruiting system. Now there's still humans involved, but not always. There are Paradox customers that we've talked to, and I'll be curious if shares this where people interacted with the system, took a job, showed up and asked to talk to Sally or whatever the name of the agent was when there is no Sally, because Sally's an ai. So it's very sophisticated and on the backend of that, for those of you that are running recruiting operations, whether it be recruiters or schedulers or call center people, automating a massive amount of that which basically turned paradox in a sense A CRM and an applicant tracking system too, so that we didn't have to have dozens and dozens of people looking at all these job applications and figuring out which ones to call back and managing that process.

(06:11):

So it's really spectacular. I think the interesting thing about calling it ai, which we are all calling it AI for now, maybe a year from now, we're not going to call it that, is that in some sense if I compare paradox's implementation of this versus the typical stuff you'll find if you go to a trade show, it's very, very advanced. It's much, much more sophisticated. And the reason for that is that Paradox didn't just discover AI a year ago and start bolting things onto an older system. They started from scratch with this I think eight years ago, seven or eight years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong and learned about these use cases. And so I think what we can take away from this in terms of general use of AI and what's going on in recruiting is that a lot of the easy to understand simplistic use cases of ai, like let's generate a job description, whatever are almost commodities and not really that value add anymore, and the vendors that we buy our technology from have to go down this learning curve and figure out what all these use cases are.

(07:24):

And there's many, many other things that Paradox does that are even more sophisticated. It does assessment and there's even an employee experience implementation of it for people that have joined the company. It can help you with onboarding and scheduling of interviews and all that kind of messy stuff that takes humans. So I think there's kind two stories. One is yes, AI is real. Yes, it does amazing things. Yes, you should learn about it. Yes, you should take advantage of it. Second is that this story you're going to hear about is unique to Paradox. I don't think you're going to find companies like Compass Group doing this kind of solution in another vendor today. And I think taking lessons from Paradox, you can see the sophistication of these systems and where they're going. And this is just the beginning. I mean the technology is getting more powerful by the minute. Okay, that's my little intro you guys. Over to you.

Stella Ioannidou (08:25):

Thank you. Thanks so much, Josh, for the context setting and for signaling that it's time for us to hear the Compass story. So let's hear it right from the center of development. Shay, would you like to walk us through one a little bit about what Compass Group is about for some of our members who maybe they don't know you and need to understand a little bit about the company and what you do, but also what does the TA landscape look like and what's the challenge you're solving for that you found that you needed to adopt AI to solve it?

Shay Johnson (09:09):

Yeah, of course. Checking that. You can hear me okay Stella?

Stella Ioannidou (09:12):

Yeah, all good.

Shay Johnson (09:14):

Perfect. So I'll start with a little bit about Compass Group because assuming some people joining the call may not know that much about us or maybe they're confusing us, there's a couple of different companies with a Compass name out there. Compass Group is the world's largest contract food service and support services company. So there's a pretty good reason why a lot of people don't know the name Compass, even though we're so large and we're involved in so many different industries with so many different clients, and it's because we don't typically operate under the Compass name. We have at this point now over 30 different brands and growing. Some of them are on the screen, you may recognize them. These are probably our most prominent or most recognizable, but we work across a multitude of different industries and serve everywhere from guests and patients and fans of sports.

(10:05):

Pretty much any environment you can imagine, you've probably interacted with us, eaten our food, worked in an office that we're providing services for or something along those lines. So as I mentioned, 30 plus different brands or as we call them, sectors that work across sports, entertainment, healthcare, K 12 and higher ed schools, senior living facilities or senior living communities. And when you think of the business and industry environment as we call it, or corporate cafes, corporate dining, we're actually partnered with 99 of the Fortune 100. So if you're on this call and you work for a large company that has food service in their office, chances are it's one of our brands or sectors that are serving your food and hopefully you love it. Obviously, we're a large revenue engine both in terms of what we spend from a procurement perspective and how we go about that, and then the revenue that we bring in as a business and how we reinvest that into some of the solutions that I'm going to talk about today.

(11:06):

And you can see on the screen a few other stats, but I think for the context of this conversation, Stella, people are going to want to focus on our scale as an employer. So we're going to keep the context of the conversation today focused on what we're doing here in the us. So 300,000 plus associates in the US RTA team, specifically on the hourly side, the high volume hourly hiring that we do is in excess of 140,000 hires each year. And what's really interesting about that is we have what I'll call a coordinated decentralization or a decentralized coordinated model where we only have about 20 recruiters that are supporting all of that high volume hiring Right now, obviously we have thousands of operators and hiring managers out in the field that are actually the ones that are going to be onboarding, hiring and supporting those people. But we do have a really small lean team that's supporting the technology and the sourcing and how we go about actually bringing candidates through our hiring process.

(12:08):

So just want to call out a couple of our challenges, and this kind of goes back even to when we first started our conversational AI journey that Josh alluded to and we'll spend the majority of our time talking about today. But like I said, we have a high, high volume of hiring that we have to do annually. We also have very seasonal parts of our business like sports and entertainment, higher education, and schools where you are going to have seasonally a lot of people leaving work maybe for the summer or for the off season. And then you have to rehire and hire net new thousands upon thousands of people all in a matter of weeks leading up to a ramp up. We also, as I mentioned, have a really lean and agile team of recruiters. We had this model in place going back to 20 16, 20 17, where we really wanted to have a small, lean, adaptable team supporting a lot of this high volume hiring so that we could enable great technology and really efficient processes so that a hiring manager can really drive the process and get right to their hires instead of having a recruiting or TA team bottlenecking things, which can be the case in some organizations.

(13:15):

And as I mentioned, we're highly, highly coordinated. We have a very coordinated centralized strategy technology stack, kind of the way that we support our business. But then what we're doing with that technology and that approach is enabling thousands of users around the country to have easy access to actually manage those processes and those hires. So when you look at it from a peer numbers perspective, it'll appear that we are making 7,000 hires for every one recruiter on the high volume hourly side. A little bit about that model. I think what's interesting about this for people that kind of come away from this and say that's very different from RTA model, I wonder how that works and how they get adoption for that. The first thing is we're really becoming more efficient with our resource allocation. So again, by focusing on a really high tech high touch approach as we call it, you're making it so that your resources can be upskilled.

(14:13):

The people on your TA team can be touching a lot more things because they're not burdened down with a lot of the administrative tasks that typically come with a heavy process low tech team that has a lot of resources. And like I said, we can really allow the hiring managers in the business to impact the process. They can get right to candidates as soon as they're applying and being screened and assessed. They can get their interviews done in a timely manner and they can get their people into the business and start building that relationship and that onboarding experience for candidates. So that's where we want managers spending their time first and foremost, we don't want them to have to spend a lot of time on recruiting. They have businesses to manage, they have clients that they need to build their relationship with. So when it comes to the recruiting process, we really want them focused only on the highest value pieces of the process, which is have a good interview, make sure that we get offers out in a timely manner, and make sure that you really focus on the new hire onboarding experience because retaining obviously sits on the other side of hiring and we want to make sure that people come into the company have a great experience and are well equipped to stay and to grow with us.

(15:21):

So Stella, to answer your question, I do want to just go back and quickly run through the timeline of our journey so far with conversational AI and how Paradox has been a support to that, and then obviously we can kind of jump into an open discussion. So the first thing that we noticed, I would say back in 2018, so again, paradox was in its infancy. I think Tyler, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you guys were formed in 2016, so definitely weren't anywhere near the maturity of where Paradox is today, but what we wanted to solve for at Compass Group was first and foremost the candidate experience when they come to apply for a job. And so some of you may still have an application experience that looks like this, where if you are on a career site or let's say you're on a job site like Indeed or LinkedIn that redirects to your career site, candidates are going to see this as the first thing when they hit apply for the job, it's going to ask them to create an account or to sign in or what you really need them to see if they're a new candidate for the first time is that message at the bottom where it says, Hey, create an account.

(16:28):

This is counterintuitive because it's so small and it's not the focal point of the screen, but this is where a new applicant was supposed to start was by creating a profile so that they could exist in our A TS and then go through an application process and down funnel through everything else we really needed to fix this. Where we started was by bringing our first conversational recruiting assistant into the mix through paradox. Ours is called Olivia, as Josh mentioned, some people out there use different names or personas for their assistants, but what this really allowed us to do was, as Josh was talking about, if a candidate comes to a site, they're not going to want to have to go through the process of creating account when they don't even have their basic questions answered. So we enabled our assistant to be able to answer.

(17:14):

Right now there's a sampling of 530 plus questions that you could ask Olivia, and that's obviously growing every day now with a lot of the new generative capabilities where conversation can be a lot more open-ended. But we wanted to give our candidates the ability to not only ask any question they could think of about our company, our benefits shift information, how close is this job to me, but also to be able to help them search and match with jobs as quickly as possible. So by simply saying, Hey, I'm looking for a job near me, or I'm looking for a cook job, quickly, them with the most relevant jobs that are closest to them, that is probably what this candidate is looking for and then allowing them to go through that conversation or that application conversationally. The biggest win when we went live with this back in 2018 is how it influenced the conversion of candidates and the completion rate of our application simply because going back to that screen before, they didn't have to create a profile or a password or something that they needed to log into first.

(18:20):

Our assistant, Olivia is actually taking care of that for them. So by the candidate simply providing their name and their email, Olivia is provisioning their account for them in the course of that conversation. And then at the end of the conversation tells that candidate how they could log in at any time should they want to build out their profile more comprehensively or see the status of their application, but they can also chat with her for that experience as well. And then once we had that in place, it really took off in terms of the offerings that companies like Paradox had and where we wanted to go. So 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, we had a big need for virtual event solutions because we were not able to do our large scale hiring events in person. And so this really changed the game in terms of how our hiring managers started to see the value in conversational AI because now they are coordinating large scale events at first virtually and now we're back to in-person.

(19:18):

But being able to automate the registration process reminders, interview scheduling, candidate screening, and sorting at an event check in, all of that can be done conversationally with Olivia supporting it so that ultimately the people that are running the hiring events can show up quickly, get candidates through an event process, and ultimately we have a lot more people showing up for our events and a lot more people getting offers and hires out of these events. Then once we realized the value of that, especially the interview scheduling piece in 2021, we turned on conversational scheduling. So integrating Olivia's ability to read the calendar availability of all of our managers and recruiters throughout the company to be able to book conference rooms to be able to send the scheduling invites to both the candidate and the manager, all of that calendar coordination that recruiters do this can all be automated in a really seamless way, but from a candidate experience perspective, fantastic because they can go right from applying to a job to moments later getting that invitation to select their interview time and having the rest taken care of so you truly can go from applied to interview scheduled or interview conducted in the same day after that.

(20:39):

And at 2022, we realized that hey, we're sort of out of the worst part of the labor strain that we had coming out of the pandemic and we wanted to put a focus back on candidate quality, right? We're not just looking for candidate volume anymore. We want to do a better job of how do we assess candidates, how do we look at them in terms of their fit for a certain role and how do you look at them comprehensively? So if a candidate applies to one job and it turns out they might be a much better fit for another role that they didn't see originally, that's also closer to them. We can have a hiring manager recruiter or automation recommend that job to them and increase the chance that they convert into the company. We turned on those tradify hourly assessments in 2022, and those were really, really great immediate results because where in most cases an assessment can be a bottleneck in the process by having it flow through the course of that conversation post apply, we actually have about a 96% completion rate, and that includes candidates completing it right in line with the application.

(21:43):

So application submitted in a matter of three minutes via conversation assessment invitation comes immediately and that's completed within two minutes and then an interview scheduling request could come after that. So then the next year we turned to using more of the CRM capabilities within paradox. So having conversational job alerts go to candidates, having our recruiters leverage a lot of the campaign functionality and building out custom talent communities. This was another thing that we noticed, huge, huge conversion. More so in terms of when we're doing SMS text-based campaigns versus doing traditional email campaigns that you would see in a legacy CRM and then where we are today in our journey and kind of the current project that we're focused on is the career site experience. So if you go to our career site today, I think what you'll find is it's primarily a jobs page. We have over 13,000 jobs usually posted at any given time with multiple openings on each of those jobs, and we're just trying to connect candidates with jobs as fast as possible and get them to apply.

(22:48):

But now we're really focused on how do we revamp our career site and bring relevant content to life. So again, we're keeping conversation at the heart of it and letting Olivia drive that experience, but being able to deliver dynamic, relevant content to candidates in a personalized way during the conversation is going to be key. So if candidates do ask questions about benefits, we can dynamically start to serve up benefits information. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's a PDF that we want them to read through and we can tap into that content too so Olivia can answer your questions Generatively the same way that you would experience today with a chat GBT or a Gemini or a Claude. You can have that same information call and response sort of experience, but at the same time we can also serve up content alongside those responses. So really excited that project's underway and should go live early 2025. So Stella, I know we're going to talk about this here in a minute. I don't know if you had any questions for me about immediate impact or if you wanted me to just kind of breeze through this piece.

Stella Ioannidou (23:54):

I mean I want us just to take a moment to step back and figure out some of the numbers that you've shared. Shea, you said the recruiter to hire ratio is one in every 7,000 and I want us to go through at any given moment there's 13,000 job openings on the Compass Group website. So I mean there's some questions and thank you for everyone who's been using the q and a. We will be addressing that all of those in a moment. So thank you for your active participation there, but I'm so eager for you to tell us what are some of the things that immediately you noticed but after that journey, because you've been in this, it's quite the process for you guys since 2018. So what are some of the long term benefits you've also noticed through that journey?

Shay Johnson (24:52):

Yeah, for sure. So I mean you can see on the screen some of the immediate impact that we got, especially when we first implemented this several years ago, to just dropping our application time down. And it wasn't just by converting our application into a conversation, it was also a great opportunity for us to look at do we really need to be asking all of these questions, all of these fields that we have in our application? No, I think turning our application into a conversation forced us to think, let's make this a much simpler experience. What information can we ask upfront or do we really need to ask upfront versus information that we can uncover further into the process? And because this is a conversational experience, because you have a lot of new AI capabilities, you don't need to be sourcing that information from the candidate at the very start of the process.

(25:40):

So the experience combined with some refinement in our application made it so that our entire application process, we're not even talking assessment, scheduling, anything else. Just the application went from taking nine minutes to under three minutes in most cases, that's our average. And what that did on our career site was when you look at career site traffic converting all the way into an actual applicant, that increased by 600% over the course of the first year that we had this on the site. So that was the immediate impact. That was the biggest is like, wow, we're really seeing better conversion of site traffic and just the completion rate applications are actually being completed, people are starting them, and I think we see what industry benchmarks can be in this. We're over 50%, so a candidate if they actually say apply the apply button, the chances that they're actually going to go through this conversation, complete it and not just complete one, but probably complete multiple applications is over 50%.

(26:39):

So that was an 85% increase from where we were pre-implementation to post-implementation. But Stella, you asked about the long-term impact and this is what's most important because it's how it's sort of transformed our approach and what it enables us now to think about, not just as a TA team but as an entire HR function and the kind of experience that you want to create for candidates and new hires is you want to create a standard experience. So I think the problem that we had before is we had at the time what was considered an impressive cutting edge tech stack. We were using really great technology in 20 16, 20 17, but there were too many different experience touchpoints, too many different systems that we were using. So a candidate is going through one experience on the career site and then they're getting an email to go into a different platform to do a video interview and then they're getting a text from a different system to do another piece.

(27:35):

And by putting the entire candidate experience in the context of make it a fluid conversation, put a single point of contact like an AI assistant there to be able to answer questions, help them through each piece of the process, let them know what's next, point them to the next step in the process, assist the hiring managers in the same way. That's been huge because now as your standardizing an experience, it makes it much, much easier to refine processes, get buy-in from candidates and managers to adopt things because they know that it works. It's easy, it's all connected and it's not learning software. We're moving more to a conversational experience where if you're a candidate or if you're a recruiter or you're a manager, if you know how to text and have a conversation, then you know how to use this technology and that's really important.

(28:25):

And then the other thing that I think is really big, there's a couple of things on this slide, but I think the biggest from a TA perspective is you're taking the administrative tasks that traditionally can bog down recruiting teams or contractors or you're changing it from an administrative function into a strategic partnership to the business, not just sitting here clicking buttons all day every day. We now have AI and automation driving a large portion of the process, so now your recruiters can spend more time building trust with candidates, educating them on the process and the interview prep and the offer and those high value touch points and your hiring managers can spend more time with recruiters, making sure that they're building really good hiring strategies, understanding the market, understanding the role progression and working on succession planning and other things that we want to be doing as an HR function rather than just being a reactive hiring high volume function. So I think this has been the impact in what it's created our ability to do

Stella Ioannidou (29:27):

A hundred percent. And you know what a huge fan I am of the story and the great research work that we published, but you literally sparked up some thought provoking questions here from our audience. Everyone wants understand a little bit of how, for example, what was the conversion rate prior to the conversational AI and where is it now? One of our attendees is actually they want to know the actual numbers, where was it and where is it now? What can you share about it to understand the type of impact? Because when we are talking about this type of, you're not just using ai, you're not just putting software and technology into a process. This is the type of work that has, you revisit the whole ecosystem and kind of think about, Hey, do I really need that part of my tech stack or do I really need to have the experience of the candidate pass through that checkpoint? And there is no way to see if you're on the right track or not unless you actually have some metrics. So what was conversion rate prior to conversational ai?

Shay Johnson (30:39):

Yeah, and I think what's funny about this question too is the word conversion has even

(30:44):

Over time, which conversion metric do we really care about? So when it started, like I mentioned, when you're thinking about the conversion of someone landing on our career site to actually completing an application, that would probably be some people in marketing would even look at the first one, how many people are landing on the career site and clicking apply, right? Whereas that increase, but that wasn't a holistic enough point for us. It was saying, Hey, the amount of people landing on the career site clicking apply and actually completing it and turning into an applicant was less than 10%. And like I said, once we refined some of the career side experiences and the job matching and the conversational capabilities with paradox, that number went up to about 35%. So pretty significant increase. We have millions and millions of career site visitors. Of

Stella Ioannidou (31:35):

Course it's three times

Shay Johnson (31:38):

More than three times increase, but then with paradox it specifically within that conversational apply flow, we've noticed a really significant increase in apply start conversion. If they start the conversation, do they actually complete it and we receive them as an applicant. Well above industry benchmark, I think for a lot of companies that sits with apply start to finish, it can sit somewhere around 35% or so. We're above 50% that we increased and I forget what that exact number is when I go back in time, but it was a significant, that's where that 600% came from was we landed on the career site to actually start and finish an application. A huge increase for us just in terms of, okay, we're actually getting people through the process and that's just on our career site that doesn't even account for some of the things that we've done recently to say how do we take better advantage of the external job marketplace and how that connects directly into the conversation without making them side.

Stella Ioannidou (32:37):

And how has this helped with retention?

Shay Johnson (32:40):

One

Stella Ioannidou (32:40):

Of our members wants to find out exactly on the long-term, what have you seen for example?

Shay Johnson (32:46):

Yeah, that one's a little bit harder to answer just because I would say as an organization, especially in the last year, thankfully we've had a really great positive movement in terms of retention overall where it's gotten significantly better. But I did put up some numbers there that we're going in and doing some analysis now around specifically an hourly space in this past year since we launched our hourly assessment with trade fify, and that's become a little bit more of a cornerstone of how hiring managers can sort of prioritize and match candidates and decide, hey, do we want to make sure that certain candidates, if they're automatically screened for minimum requirements, they've got a preferred assessment score for this job and a couple of other, let's automatically schedule their interview or start moving them through the process by turning on those capabilities, now we're starting to say, Hey, when you look at that population and look at what you would call short-term turnover, are they staying beyond the first 90 days? We've seen, I think that number that I put up was a 13% increase in that short-term retention. So for us, some companies may think that's small, but for us with 300,000 plus associates, that is huge because once they stay beyond 90 days, that's where you see a significant increase in six month or one year beyond tenure.

Stella Ioannidou (34:02):

Of course, there's a set of questions that I also want to read you. Oh my god, Shay, you're like the star of the discussion here, so there's a lot of questions in the chat and the q and a, and please, please, if you have questions, just put them in the q and a. It's easier for me to spot, but Brian on the chat and another attendee on the q and a, they're both now trying to figure out, okay, so is there a team now TA coordinators that oversees communication to ensure that the process is flowing smoothly or as another member is calling it, what are recruiters actually doing?

Shay Johnson (34:42):

Yeah, that's it. We could probably spend a whole webinar just talking about all the things that the TA team, especially on the high volume hourly side, how their roles have changed. I think yes, one of those is a good example. About two years ago we got to say, Hey, let's have a lot of these recruiters that have not had a lot of opportunity to develop. First of all, they've been newer at the company, maybe a post pandemic new recruiter hire. They're just getting used to this world and understanding, but now a lot of time it's freed up for them and so we put them on special projects like candidate experience reviews. So we want them constantly going through the different candidate journeys that are possible through a career site or other sources to say, Hey, let's really look at this experience, this messaging. Is this up to date?

(35:33):

Is there a bottleneck here that a candidate's going to run into? So we have a of people on the recruiting team that are constantly looking and suggesting ways in which we can improve candidate experience points along the journey. There's multiple projects ongoing on that right now, but I think the most important thing is it's allowed our recruiters to not be admins where it's like, Hey, we're really just here to help manage the a TS and sort of all of the things that need to be navigated behind the scenes. They've been able to become much more involved with the actual hands-on staffing or recruiting strategies, new business activation. So when we're going live with a new account or taking over a piece of business, we are one of the first teams that gets involved in the transition. So well ahead of that, our recruiters are actually using all of our systems to say, Hey, you don't have to worry about a thing.

(36:22):

We're going to set this up for you. We're going to use a nice level of automation but also high touch where it's needed. We're going to help you understand the market and what to anticipate. We're going to recommend how you're going to set up events and we're going to drive the event strategy and the technology for you. And because that is so easy for us to do now versus how it used to be, if you need four or five of our recruiters or resources to fly to New York and run those two hiring events that week, we can do that. You don't need to send or borrow HR or operators from around the region leaving their day jobs to come and do this because you're not prepared or ready to handle this huge influx of staffing need at a new account. Our team can essentially start to offer more and more of those components of what you think for a full service RPO that was never possible four or five years ago and now more and more of our team you say, Hey, what are all the different things you could be involved in? And the answer is whatever the business needs, we used to have to say, I'm sorry, we don't have the capacity or the bandwidth. That's not in our SLA and now it's really like, Hey, we're truly here to serve the business and partner with them and make sure that they have what they need because everything else is fairly well covered.

Stella Ioannidou (37:33):

I love that. And we actually published this year a big research report on the role of the recruiter and how it's shifting amid AI and the whole empowerment of the teams because now they have access to better tools that are more intuitive. They're no longer the professionals that just take orders about talent needs or even a step behind that requests about job roles to fill. We're not even having the talent discussion. Give me three people for this particular role and go fetch and just give me a short list of candidates to interview. And now there's two main points that came out of our research. The first one is about the use of AI and how it's taking away, it's stripping away the experience and the impact of the recruiter from all the mundane, repetitive operational things like the please go and schedule this or send that assessment, do the checks, do we have all the documents that we need?

(38:38):

Did you crosscheck the CV and everything and everyth. So all this goes away and it actually allows recruiters and all the TA team in general to focus on, as you also call it, more value add tasks. The second thing that we saw was about the use of data. So it's not only about having AI strip away all the operational stuff, but it is also allow some extra time to the TA team to actually research the market, see what's out there and have discussions not about how fast can you give me the short lists of candidates to interview, but more like, okay, why do we have that talent need? What is the underlying reason behind the request? Is hiring for that talent actually the go-to strategy or do we have that talent internally and we can now have a different type of discussion that hey, maybe through upskilling or maybe if we transfer a few people from here to here, we can cover that.

(39:45):

Or maybe it's a mixed strategy or we having other organizations have told us for example that now with the combined use of data and AI in recruitment, actually talent acquisition professionals can have even more informed conversations and say, Hey, that person you're looking that has the 10,000 skills and it has a very particular profile. There's three people on the planet right now with that exact profile. So do we really want to invest into going out and trying to hire for that role? And these also big shifts I would like to call them, is what actually transforms the role of the recruiter into a strategic talent advisor. We actually run a survey in one of our recent research work around TA that we ask TA executives, what is the top two most pressing challenges that is limiting the impact that you can have on the business?

(40:55):

And the number one was like we're not seeing as a strategic partner, we're seeing as the people who take the order to go fill the role and figure it out and just give us a short list. But that can really happen overnight. To your point, Shay, it can really happen because someone just put a system in place and answering all of those questions. What are the recruit, where is the recruiter team doing? I'm pretty sure that shift didn't also happen overnight, right? You're gradually seeing that change in how they were perceived, but also how they generated value.

Shay Johnson (41:39):

Yeah, I think it's just been transformative too for our own internal teams how we're able to, there's obviously resourcing and cost optimization. How do you become more effective and not needing to throw people at the problem? That's a big benefit, but if you're already on the team and you're established and you're using these tools, well I think the best thing ever is that we actually can develop our recruiters and there's this really great partnership now between talent and development, talent management, learning and development, whatever your organization wants to call it, and TA where we've actually got them involved not only in strategic talent planning and sort of bringing TA into the fold and recruiters get to be hyper involved in that process and get exposure to it, more areas of HR and we become a more melded function, but also a lot of our recruiters are now leading Q Qs with executives.

(42:30):

You know what I mean? So a recruiter that before us a few years ago was never even on a call with a local manager in the business because they were two behind the scenes. They went from being at the forefront of those calls at a regional level to now are saying, Hey, we want to continue to build your skills. You're better at understanding how to use this data. You can speak really well to this technology and the strategy behind it. You can speak to what we've done big use cases and wins. You go and lead the QBR with that division or with that CEO. And that's great in terms of developing your TA team from just being again, a TA function that's taking orders to their driving the conversation with your business.

Stella Ioannidou (43:07):

Yeah, for sure. And Josh, we're seeing that SIC rift on how the role of TA is being completely, and what are some of the discussions you've been having around the executives of TA and what are the biggest, the hairiest messiest problems on their minds right now?

Josh Bersin (43:29):

Yeah, so I mean I think that the big story to me is what Shay's describing is automating more of the operational parts of ta, which frees up these more strategic things. Another example of a really big issue that one of the comments in the question is somebody who's having a hard time getting people to apply to their company is your EVPI was with a big company in Europe a couple of weeks ago and very sophisticated, large high volume recruiting company, and the head of TA said to me, we didn't realize that we were getting lower quality candidates over a short or sort of a steady period, and we were getting a lot of AI generated resumes that were kind of junky and we were trying to figure out what was going on. And we realized that our EVP, there's stuff going on amongst the younger part of the workforce about the Trump stuff and people worried about their careers.

(44:28):

And she said, we decided after looking at this data and taking some time away from the operations that we need to reposition ourselves as a place to grow your career, not a place to get a job. Now they happened to be able to do that. They actually do have that kind of a capability, but she said it wasn't really in our EVP, it wasn't in our branding, it wasn't in our marketing, it wasn't in our job descriptions at all. She and I talked a lot about what that implies. And so if you're totally bogged down with operations, you don't think about that stuff because the idea of doing it is so complex you're just not going to do it.

(45:09):

And so I think those in the study that Stella was just talking about, more than 70% of the TA leaders we surveyed, I believe it was maybe 77, I kind of forget the number, said that they are not involved in any strategic workforce planning in their companies. They are just fulfilling demand. And one of my big stories and thesis here with the AI revolution of business is that you're not going to be hiring people as fast in the future necessarily as you may have been because if all this automation actually works, and we do make our companies more productive, the number of people you meet may not be as high. So if TA is not involved in those conversations, you may be optimizing something that the company doesn't need as much of. I dunno, she how that makes you feel, but you know what I mean?

Shay Johnson (46:08):

Oh, you hit it right on the mark. Someone asked me the other day and maybe there's a question in here about time to fill or something like that, and I was like, we've stopped putting as much emphasis on metrics like that because yes, initially there were definitely time to fill gains where people wanted them, but as the market has sort of leveled out and things have shifted and we've optimized in different ways, some of this has become so effective that combined with your retention going up, your turnover going down, we don't need to worry as much about speed as we used to. And by nature, our hire managers are saying, I've got enough applicants in my pipeline to be able to take my time and make a good quality hire. I'm not struggling to just staff because I'm understaffed. They're like, I can be selective.

(46:57):

I can have better conversations with these candidates. We can actually make sure we get the right person in the door. They're actually staying, they're staying longer. So because they're fully staffed in most cases, they take their time with hiring, they're not behind the eight ball. And so that's just one of those changes where we're like, oh, this metric that we used to be obsessed with, you get on A QBR with a CEO and they say, yeah, I know my time to fill actually went up by a day this past quarter, but that doesn't bother me because I'm hearing from my business that everything is working better and more smoothly and everything that we want to see happen does. So it's just shifting even the way in. What data are we looking at and how are we measuring success?

Josh Bersin (47:31):

Well, in some sense, I think time to fill or time to hire is a metric defining a problem.

(47:41):

If you make that problem, it'll go away. Maybe that metric isn't even worth considering. Let's talk about quality of hire and job design and other things. But yeah, that's a really good point. I mean that's why I think paradox is so revolutionary. I think somebody is going to talk to the person on the line that was having problems. But another idea, Shea, I just want to throw out there for you to think about is there's this mentality in business. In fact, it's hilarious to me that last Friday, mark Benioff at Salesforce announced that he was going to hire a thousand people to sell the AI agents to make you more productive at selling. I'm like, wait a minute, what's wrong with this? Why are you hiring a thousand people to do the thing that you're trying to teach your customers how to do with no people? There's this mentality that hire more people, hire more people, hire more. It is just the way management's been trained for decades. Once you have a tool like this, you don't have to think that way as much. It's a totally different way of thinking about your company.

Shay Johnson (48:48):

And I don't know if we had that on the stats, but when I go back to pre-implementation of this, our team, the size of our recruiting team has barely grown. So if you look at our number of, I didn't put that on the screen, but if you go back to about 2018 when we first implemented this, I think on the hourly side, we're averaging a little over a hundred thousand hires, maybe just shy of a hundred thousand hires per year, and now we're at on 140,000 plus. So you've got that much of an increase. The team has not changed. We haven't had to hire more recruiters. If anything, like I said, we've upskilled them and so there's been more internal team growth. So we've been able to promote from within, have more managers, strategic project leaders within the TA function. You're just shifting the model, but you have not had to say, oh, the business is growing, so we need more recruiters. No. Can I

Josh Bersin (49:35):

Ask you another question? I actually have another question for you. So I believe that recruiters in some sense are more sophisticated in understanding the organization than many, many other HR roles because they have to match. They have this really interesting problem of matching this amorphous organization and job to this amorphous group of candidates. What has been your experience in giving recruiters more strategic roles? High success. I mean, people always complain, oh, well, how do we train our recruiters to do this stuff? I don't think it's as hard as people realize.

Shay Johnson (50:09):

Yeah, and I think more than what we found is anything is it's hard to train. You grow people through experience. You have to give them exposure to the business, connect them with leaders, getting them into the business accounts, like I said recently where it's saying, Hey, the technology front is so much more stable and automated now that we can send people to say, Hey, I want you to go out there. I want you to support their staffing strategy, their prelaunch. I want you to be there. I want you to be able to meet that client, have a better understanding of the environment these people are going to be working in. It's funny because then those recruiters come back and it's like a million different things have clicked for them in terms of, Hey, I better understand now how we might want to rethink this, have some recommendations. So yeah, I mean the capability of so many, it's not just recruiters, a lot of your HR function, I think the more that we see, the less they'll be bogged down by traditionally administrative roles and processes because of automation or AI and embracing it and designing it the right way. That's what you're going to find is you don't need more people. You've just made your people smarter and they've got more time and more capabilities to better understand and support the business.

Stella Ioannidou (51:16):

There are so many questions on the q and a guys. I'm not sure we're going to be able to address all of them, but there is one that's been, it's caught my attention for a while. So Shey, what has texting done to older generations? Are you seeing these demographics changing within your workforce after bringing in Olivia?

Shay Johnson (51:41):

Oh, it's so much better. And I'll tell you why is because we are in hospitality, food service, support services, so think janitorial, housekeeping, dishwashers, line cooks, and a lot of these candidates, they definitely don't. It doesn't matter if you're in that workforce or not, just most people aren't owning personal computers or laptops and a large part of the population may not have a smartphone. And so to be able to give them an option to connect with us, get matched with jobs, apply, get their questions answered everything via text, we've seen that open up and tap it into and help out with older workers so much more because they understand how to text. They may not know how to navigate a website or a certain UI or forms, things that are a little bit too over-designed from a product perspective, but texting is so accessible to anybody these days that it has made things a lot easier and the fact that you have multilingual capabilities with that is fantastic too. So I would say it's helped far more than it has heard.

Stella Ioannidou (52:47):

Yeah, I hear you. But I did want us to talk about it because I know that you guys are also doing the data analytics behind that, so everyone's thinking that, oh, maybe it's through mobile phone, maybe it's even harder for this demographic or that demographic. I wanted them to hear from you from

Shay Johnson (53:09):

The, and again, that's where there's always going to be moments where human and people and support is needed, especially if people are not as ready to use or as familiar with technology. And that's fine because again, that's something where we've enabled more people to help, right? Our recruiters, that's part of that onsite support that we can now offer because their time has been freed up to kind of feel that demand. Sometimes that's the case is you're saying, Hey, we're having a hiring event or an onboarding or an orientation. Can you just send a few people with some Chromebooks? So if there's anybody that needs that personal assistance or that help, we can be there with help them through that process. They might not have a phone at all or any device to use technology. So we're able to bring the technology or bring the device that's needed knowing that it's going to be a smaller and smaller percentage every day that goes forward.

Stella Ioannidou (53:58):

Right. And I know you started your talk Shay saying that, hey, we're going to be talking about the US based operations and that part, but there's a lot of talk in the q and a about, Hey, what do you do if you are running international business? How do you adjust your processes based on lock on requirements, international requirements? I'm pretty sure that, I don't know if you use them, different requirements for geography, but I'm pretty sure that's one of the flexes of the paradox team that they can definitely take that question on and dive more. But I'm curious, do you also use that internationally or is it US based only

Shay Johnson (54:42):

Currently US based only, but we do use similar solutions and certain crossover integrations that are with Paradox and some of our other core solutions globally. So it really comes down to your global solution design and your data architecture. A lot of that is underlying, and so it's a harder question to answer, but I know a lot of these vendors, like Paradox being one of many are, they're building modern solutions for global capabilities and a lot of times the challenges are not software challenges, they're infrastructure challenges. And so that's going to come down more to infrastructure, data architecture and your teams. We're currently at Compass Group, we're just set up in a way where from a global perspective, each of our brands or sectors or companies in different countries are able to operate independently. And so we do have certain global solutions, but a lot of them, countries are able to pick and choose their solutions independently just for whatever works for their locale so that we don't always have to be bottlenecked by some of those things that people are talking about as their big challenges.

Stella Ioannidou (55:47):

For sure. Having said that, Shea, what a huge fan I am of the story. I think I'm going to send us back to Tyler from the paradox team to do us the outro.

Tyler McEvilly (56:01):

Thank you Stella, and thank you Shay for sharing such an awesome story. And obviously we love what your team has been able to do, so it it's super cool to hear it firsthand. Again, thank you all for joining us today, everyone attending here, or even the folks that weren't able to make it. If it's your team, we're going to be sending out a recording via email. Again, we have some follow-ups that we're going to make sure to reach out to folks, but if you have any questions, any interest of what Shay mentioned, please feel free to reach out via email tomorrow and you're going to be able to get a response from our team and we're going to make sure you get to the right person. So thank you again and everyone, have a good rest of your Tuesday.

Stella Ioannidou (56:51):

Bye everyone.

Tyler McEvilly (56:53):

Thanks all.

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