L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - AI-Enabled Recruiting: Better Hiring and Personnel Management with Talent Intelligence

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Talent intelligence platforms such as Loxo have been helping recruiters turn seemingly limitless data on candidates into simplified and expedited recruiting decisions. This week, we speak with Sam Kuehnle, VP of Marketing at Loxo, about the benefits of talent intelligence, and how to get the most out of such technology as its human collaborators.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today I'm speaking with Sam Keenly. Sam is the Vice President of Marketing at Loxo, an AI-enabled talent intelligence platform used by more than 125,000 recruiters across the globe. Sam is a designated top B2B marketing strategy voice on LinkedIn and a veritable thought leader

in the worlds of demand generation and digital marketing. He has taken his digital marketing talents to the world of talent and recruitment, where he also serves as host of the podcast Becoming a Hiring Machine. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Sam Keenly. Sam, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Look forward to it. So we're going to talk about recruiting today. We're going to talk about HR stuff, maybe even jump into some marketing. I'm very happy to have a fellow marketer on the show for the first time so we can get into that stuff a little bit, hopefully toward the end. But I wanted to start with an interesting LinkedIn post that I saw from you recently.

It's about onboarding, which we will cover more in depth. You said that you think organizations should throw new people into the deep end. And I'm just going to turn it over to you and kind of tell me what your philosophy is there, if you don't mind. A lot of it stems from experience. So I'm sure everyone here can remember at least one onboarding that contains a week of some type of like classroom training, which was basically history of the company, how great the CEO is, three days worth of HR videos, how to set up your email signature, like all that fun stuff that is not really fun. And before you know it, like two weeks have passed and you've lost all your initial enthusiasm of getting started. Like that's such an undervalued time when someone joins an

organization. So the approach like throw them in the deep end isn't so much just like, here you go, here's your desk, go have fun, start doing incredible things for our business. But it's basically taking that initial two weeks and then constraining it to the first day with what's truly important. Like, so sorry, CEO, I don't care how great you are, but like, let's get your email signature set up. Let's go through the HR videos you have to watch. But by day two, they should be starting to at least get into the organization. So one thing I like to do is on that first day, I meet with them one-on-one. I go over my expectations, but I also go over like, and want to understand what excites this new hire and how can I start to overlap what they are

excited by with some of the things that I have envisioned for that role. So an example of this, we hired a head of brand and content back in August, and our website has been undergoing updates all this year. So on day two, they were helping with the vision and the execution of these webpages. And ultimately this was a strategic option for them because one, it gets them involved early. Two, it gives them a sense of ownership and contribution early. And three, it gets them to truly learn about our products and our markets and who we serve because they're doing it in practice, not just theory. Like it's really easy to get your little persona. This is Linda. She's a recruiter. This is, you know, her, what she likes, what she doesn't like. It's like, that's

not really helpful. But when you have to go in, write messaging and really research to figure out how do I speak to them when they're on our website, not just this perfect little persona sheet. It's a completely different way of internalizing like what you're going to be doing in your role, what you need to know about your market and how you can be successful in helping the organization. Last week on the show, Stephen Miller was on. He's an AI guy who has a lot of experience with L&D teams. And he mentioned something that I've heard of many times. But as an L&D person, as a learning and development person, when you create a whole system of

trainings and onboardings, and it's a two-week program like that, the worst thing that can happen is you've created all of this. Maybe it's even bespoke for specific roles, and then a new hire comes in and then just dips out when that's complete. And in many ways, you can feel guilty. You can feel forlorn. You can feel like they just harmed you directly because they said, I don't like what's happening here. And most of their experience was from that L&D team. So here, I have two follow-up questions that are related to this. First of all, what is the sort of time period that you need to make that first impression? We're going to talk a little bit about recruiting and company branding when it comes to the HR process. So what is the sort of time period that you really need to make an impact that you just described on a new hire? And then the second thing is what is really the litmus for the deep end?

I want you to define a little bit further if you can sort of like are you giving them maybe a stretch assignment really early on are you asking them to do things that are really pushing the boundaries of their job description when they first come in so the first one the timing of it i would say do it within the first week at some point because there is that enthusiasm curve it is going to quickly go up or it's going to quickly go down from there so you kind of get it's like choose your own adventure book right so you can pick which course you want them to take it's they're excited to get started so at the end of the week are they thrilled to jump into week two or at the end of week one are they kind of like i have one more week of this and then i get to start doing something so that's where i say like i would i

would aim for at least within the first week, if not within by day. I mean, my personal is day two. That's my preference. That's like day three, somewhere around there. I mean, two days worth of training sounds short on paper, but go sit through 16 hours of training and tell me that that's short. So that's my stance from the time perspective litmus for the deep end. Is it a stretch project?

Is it something that they're done soon i would think of it as not a stretch but it's not an easy task it's not something that anyone can do but it also does have a sense of a time constraint so if your service is company it's you know maybe it's to use a recruiting angle it's like go help the senior sourcer on this project, go find 100 great candidates for this role. Or it's help this agency or organization write a much better job description or job advertisement that they can come up with. So it's something that gets them in the weeds, contributing to something. It doesn't have to be this overarching, like, go update our website like I did, but just contributing to one piece of it. And have that be within the first few weeks also,'s, they feel like they've done their training, they've contributed

during that time. And I would include that honestly, as part of like, if you're perfect or creating the perfect like two week L&D training program, include something like that in there. That's not a Thursday at 2 PM, they're going to do this, but you know, from day four to day seven, working on defined projects by reporting manager, something like that. A common thread in these examples that you've given seems to be that they're working with different categories of leadership. You know, maybe you're working with like an account manager or somebody else that isn't maybe directly in your department. Do you think that's important to just expanding new hires in terms of who they're

actually going to be engaging with on a daily basis, getting them kind of outside of that circle very quickly? Yeah, if you can, it helps. I mean, the more you work cross-departmentally, the better, because you understand one, what they're even doing, what they're working on, two, building those relationships early. It's amazing how willing people are to meet with new hires, tell them about what they do. And that sets the tone for the relationship versus four months down the road. It's like, go meet with our head of customer success or something. They're just like, I don't have the time to do this. I don't want to talk to them. What do you want? What are you after? It's just, it's a completely different relationship dynamic. So I think it helps everyone on all fronts if you can do it.

Absolutely. So let's rewind a little bit. Let's talk about the actual recruitment process. Let's focus on the challenges there. So as far as I'm aware, the biggest challenges with recruiting and finding talent are just that attracting top talent and assessing and hiring people efficiently, I guess, you know, doing it quickly without bogging your teams down, that sort of thing. I think there are some assumptions as to how tech can help in these worlds. And there are tons of tools as to how that works, but it still seems like there are some issues. So what does AI do here? I know that you're working in that field right now. What does AI and sort of the next layer of technology

actually help in the recruiting world? I'll say there's two ways to quickly bucket recruiting as we think about this. So you have called like inbound and outbound recruiting. You have, I post a job, applicants come in, I have a job, I need to find candidates for this. So you have called like inbound and outbound recruiting. You have, I post a job, applicants come in, I have a job, I need to find candidates for this. So we, I work a lot with people who do the latter where it's more like, I want to go find passive talent who are perfect fit for the organization. So I'll talk about that. I'll get into the other one, the inbound side in a second. But if you think about speed, so our typical user is a recruiter that's been hired to help organization find a very specific candidate. So say you're in Charlotte, big financial city, you are brought in to find a VP of finance.

from candidates. And you have Boolean searches, which is kind of like filter logic and or. So like I'm looking for someone with finance background and CPA and this, or these just standard filters, you know, worked at JP Chase Morgan previously, something like that. You're going to have a list of hundreds of candidates because this is a more senior role. But I mean, if you're looking at a controller, you're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of potential candidates. So where speed comes into play is AI can help rank. I mean, it's pretty simple, but what you do is you can have it look at things like what's a job title specifically. So based on that and what you kind of train it to know, it's like what types of skills experience are associated with that. You look at the hiring company. So hiring a CFO at Capital One is going to be wildly

different than hiring a CFO at a 15 person startup. And then the job description, there's always going to be little nuances buried within there about, you know, what the day to day is, certain certifications that may or may not be needed. And so if you were to go and just use the standard way, you're going to get a list of 100 pages of candidates, and it's not going to be ranked. It's not going to be ordered. The perfect fit person for you could be on page 100 out of 100. And I doubt that most people are going that far. So AI can recognize those things and then it can rank that. So that person that was on page 100 is actually sorted up to the top. So that's where you can get quicker with it. In the instance of like, there's a lot of data. So most people aren't hiring

incredibly niche positions like we work with health organizations that's like if you're looking for a board certified allergist in the usa there's 4 500 of them you should have the full list of them but to the above point of speed and ai when you have tens of thousands of candidates you need to be able to sort through like it's a large not really structured data set and you're doing that very manually so that's where ai helps with the speed in terms of getting to that person quickly, but also adding a little bit more structure to it based on what you need, what you know of the role and the organization that goes into it. So that's kind of the outbound side of it.

I'll take a second before we jump to the inbound side. I do want to ask you, I don't want to be a detractor here, but there has been plenty of cases where AI has not done a great job. It's more or less failed us. There have been the reinforcement of existing human biases and things that resulted in discrimination. It's been argued that AI does kind of just relegate people to, you know, an equation, an algorithmic conclusion that doesn't always reflect their true ability. And of course, you know, when you have literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,

at some point you have to make that exception. But it's an important question. How do we actually use AI to reduce the bias and unfairness that may have existed before? I appreciate that you're taking a skeptical position on this. I think our vision on this may align more than you think. There was a recent article, I think it was like CNBC or something, but I pulled out the quote on my desktop. I thought it was not funny, but how it was used relative to what you and I are talking about right now was the president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau said, when AI tools are well-designed, deployed, and monitored properly, the technology has the potential to mitigate discrimination and

bias on a broader scale. That's great to slap on a website and say how AI is going to solve all the problems with it, but the only problem with this is that humans have never figured out how to solve for human bias. So if they can't solve for it at that level, how can we expect it to be solved at a larger level, like AI? Humans are writing this code that informs EII. Or AI is continuously learning and taking in multiple human inputs from the web, from other places. So it's taking that content, it's taking binary information about candidates that make it to late stages about these people are hired, these people aren't hired, and it's optimizing towards that. So it's never going to be able to get rid of that. And again, not to be like the skeptic

with you, but it's really hard to just kind of say that we think that AI is going to solve for all that when we're the ones that are creating it in a way. I read Weapons of Math Destruction by, I think it's Kathy O'Neill. I think it's from like 2016. So at this point, you know, there's probably a much bigger conversation about this, but she cites many different cases of things in health, things in education, examples of like teachers getting fired because of their performance, you know, quote unquote, their performance as it was assessed by an AI. And it seems to me that there's always the major argument that people who develop these tools must represent the population that that is going to utilize the tools and that

is going to be represented within the tool. So I think from a simple standpoint, you know, how do we diversify the people that are actually creating AI? And that's always been a question, you know, how do we get different populations into different fields of work and that sort of thing. But when it comes to deploying and utilizing these things, are there any checks and balances in the systems that you've seen, whether it's LOXO or elsewhere? You know, there's just warnings or moments where the machine or the people using it can sort of check it in the process. And I guess the simpler question is maybe, you know, how do we as humans work alongside these machines in the best way with these goals in mind? I mean, I think there's ways that can help keep some biases from popping up. So you can use different filters.

For example, you can use diversity filters to say, I want a pool that's focused more on veterans, that's focused more on Asian Americans, that's focused more on disability. You can pull those in to make sure that you're getting a proper sample within it and not just going straight off of, I want the 100 best candidates for this so you can give others a fair run. But that's where I always say, it's funny, it's going to come back to this. Humans have their own bias. AI and tech are only going to float

what it perceives as the best. So it almost comes back to the human to be the other, like you have the little angel and the other angel on the shoulder, right? Where it's like, you have to kind of check yourself and that way to be like,

have I really thought about who all is being represented in this pool, who we're reaching out to? And maybe it just becomes a quick checkbox question you have to ask yourself is like, I don't know the parameters of it, but that's where it's like, you can swing too far in the AI direction that you have to balance it back out with just the human common sense empathy side. I mean, it always does come back to the humans at the end of the day, at the beginning and the end of it, the development and also the utilization of the tool. I guess there's, there isn't much more to be said. So I want to pivot to recruitment branding. So I've seen

so many LinkedIn posts in the past, I think like year or two now that are so many about the recruitment process and then like complaining about the process of getting hired or just calling out problems. People who describe how hard it has been to get a job despite their immense qualifications, you know, who knows if those are valid qualifications. But then there are so many that talk about getting ghosted by a company, which I think is so funny. That's the language that we're using around the hiring process now in our professional lives. But it seems to be a real issue that with big data comes big responsibility. It can be really hard to keep track of all that's

going on when you're a recruiter, when you have access to something of this volume. Naturally, I would hope that the purpose of such tools is to take that and minimize the amount of work that we have to do. But it does mean that we have access to more. And even if it refines things for us, it still gives us probably more acute information that means that if we want to, we could spend more time assessing the value of a candidate or the value of an input, whatever that input is. So how important do you think it is for companies to take very seriously their recruitment and hiring processes as they're viewed by the public? I mean, I think it's one incredibly important when

you think about your organization and what you're after. So when I define workplace branding at the highest level, I think of it as a scale of how desirable is it to work at your company? Like, think Google, think Nike. Like, it has nothing to do with if you have ping pong tables, kombucha on tap. Like the kombucha matters, right? I don't know about you, but if there's kombucha, I'm in. Gimmick, that's a discount for a sale, right?

To try to get someone out the door. But a lot of time, employer brand has everything to do with the quality of the work that's done by the collective and its impact in their market or within the world like there's a reason why you see people put x google x apple x amazon in their linkedin headlines right

it's a status symbol in a way and only a very selective group are deemed worthy it's kind of like ivy league schools right but the exclusivity part of it may be a little bit extreme but like i think there's something to truly holding your organization accountable to hiring A players only or people that you would be proud of to say, I work at my company or I worked at that company. So you have like the 1992 Olympic dream team, right? Like this team is forever immortalized because of the caliber of every single player on that roster. immortalized because of the caliber of every single player on that roster. When you translate this over to a hiring organization, when you have an incredibly high bar, what it does is it attracts even more top talent. And the reason it does this is because they want to be able to work alongside other high caliber individuals. And then you're going to have this flywheel where it's like

you have the best people coming to you. You don't have to go outbound to them as much. But what it's also doing is whether you're a software company, a services provider, anything else, it's going to attract prospects to you who understand that your solution is or will be better than any competitors because it sees the inputs that are creating it. So it's this long tail where it's like, I know people, there's that old saying, it's like A players hire A players, B players hire C players. It's kind of that like downward trajectory there. So it's really easy to get caught up in the, I need someone in the seat

now. But if you're thinking about your company and where you want to go, not in the next two months, but the next two years, 10 years, you have to really think long and hard about who you're hiring because that's going to make or break. There's a lot of dominoes that can fall after that. So this concerns me because you're kind of affirming what I believe too is that you have these big companies that are worthy of putting X company name in your profile. And those are going to inevitably the big ones that are famous and popular and in the news and doing big things in our society, creating products that are well-liked and that sort of thing. But there are many, many other companies in the world. There are lots of companies that

are providing the products and services that we don't even know of. The things that we consume, and we still don't know who creates or manufactures or supplies those things in many cases, but then there are so many more out there that still need to hire people. So is it a valid concern that top talent is always going to just quote unquote meritocratic system where the top talent just kind of inevitably skews toward those companies? Or do smaller companies have a hope and do tools that include AI in the recruitment process like Lockso? Do these tools actually give these companies a fair chance? Or at the end of the day, are the larger companies still going to be able to better utilize those tools? What do you think about that? are the larger companies still going to be able to better utilize those tools? What do you think about that? I personally don't think it's going to benefit the large companies as much. One, I see ex-Uber all the time now.

Go back five years. What was Uber? So there were a lot of people there at the beginning. But two, I can speak from experience on this, and I know that many others, like, people tend to have a disposition once they've worked at different types of organizations, whether it's with different industries or different company sizes in terms of the number of employees, the revenue bands. I know I personally, I will never go back to working at a large enterprise.

Too much red tape for me, too much bureaucracy, too much of all that. I love to move fast, try things, break things, have fun with it. you're only going to get that at a startup. So I know that there are plenty of people, regardless of where they're at in their career, that might look great to work at Apple, but there could be a small up-and-coming cell phone maker. There could be a small chip provider coming along. And that's where to go to like over the project management tools. Have you ever heard of Basecamp? I mean, they go up against Trello, Monday, these giant behemoths, right, that are owned by like Atlassian and all those. They are very intentional about staying small. And they're like, we're bootstrapped. We don't need to grow to 900 million ARR. Like we're happy where we're at. We have a work-life balance. The

team loves it. I would say, honestly, that they probably attract higher quality people because there is a sense of like, ooh, a technical developer role just opened up. They only have one of these every three years. I bet the quality that they get for one of those openings, on average, the talent density, I bet is higher than at a Trello or a Monday or something like that.

So it also comes down to positioning and what people within the industry or people who follow that company know about them. That's fascinating. Yeah, I used to use Basecamp. I think at the same time, used many of its competitors it was one of those scenarios we were testing everything at once and yeah i forgot about

base camp i didn't realize that about them so what about just the general decentralization of work then how does all of this come into play when we're talking about global workforces do you think that we're moving in a direction where companies are actually looking to diversify in that way they're looking to have a more global workforce because they have access to so much more data about applicants. And, you know, there are many ideas and theories about how that's important. Cognitive diversity is the term that Shane Snow uses. He was a guest and a friend of mine. This is an important idea that the greater diversity of thought in your organization, especially when it comes to innovation and creativity, that's

going to be a benefit. But also, you know, markets in different places are much more accessible on a global scale now. So do you see this, you know, a more global recruitment happening and even more so in the future? I have personal preferences. Like I love it. I absolutely love everything about it. I will say there's always going to be nuances, right? So there are going to be certain industries, roles, companies that in theory they could, but it will be better for them to be in office, whether it's due to security clearance items being needed, hospitals, medically, you have to have healthcare workers on staff. But when we think about knowledge workers that encapsulates a lot of software services,

those types of things, I would absolutely say like, you're going to get a much wider range of diverse skill sets and individuals. And what it also does is, so before I'm currently in Florida, I used to live in Charleston, South Carolina. There were about like five software companies in Charleston, South Carolina. So if you wanted to work at one, they knew that you had to live within this like 25 mile radius of the city. And that was kind of their talent pool because they didn't have remote work. So you either had to move there for it, or they were stuck with, well, I guess we're going to take whoever lives

here. With this type of world that we're in now, you've just expanded that pool of, you know, a hundred thousand working aged people, not even qualified people to a hundred thousand strong fit candidates that could be great for a very specific sales role that you have, finance role that you have, whatever it is. So I think that most companies are doing themselves a disservice if they are more in the knowledge work where it's like, do you really need people in the office to collaborate? Or is it okay if you have someone in Seattle, Washington, and then someone else in Charlottesville, Virginia, they can still collaborate? Well, sorry there's a two-hour overlap where it's going to be hard for them to

work together, but you can absolutely make it work. And I think that the outcome of hiring phenomenal people in those versus settling for good enough people, the results are going to pay off dividends over time when you're willing to make that work. So let's look forward a decade or more then let's say in 10 years, but also in 20 years and beyond that, do you think that things will be more global? Do you think we're going to go in an increasingly global route for the companies that can do that that don't really need the in person thing? And also, how do you see the nature of recruitment at that point to are things going to be even more automated? Are we going to be working with even bigger pools of people? What do you think it's going to look like? I'm sure there's going to be more automations. That's the trend

that we're going is what can you automate and then what can you give yourself time to do what you do best at? So that doesn't mean that like to go back to recruiters, there's going to be less for recruiters to do because we're automating it. It's just going to give them more time to do the things that they do best, talking to candidates talking to hiring managers all of that versus going and populating the their information into the recruiting crm and dragging the resumes in like that can all be automated at the end of the day on the decentralized side like yeah i absolutely think kind of back to what we said a little bit ago is like you're no longer confined to that radius within your city region whatever you're at like you can hire perfect fit person not only for the role

based on their skills but also their preferences when you have someone who really enjoys the industry that you're in the market you serve the product that you're building the service you provide that's kind of like an x factor so to speak if you can find that individual so say you need a marketer who is going to be working for a sas finance company if you can find that individual so say you need a marketer who is going to be working for a sass finance company if you can find somebody like they actually they love finance they're intrigued by it and they work wherever it's like hire that person because they're going to put more into the content they create they're going to be more involved they're also going to have a better knack for making something that's relevant versus making something that just like

that gets picked up on by Google with SEO. But when someone who knows what they're talking about reads the article like this is fluff, this isn't helpful. They have an eye for that. So those are some of the intangible things that it's really hard to hire for on paper. But when you have those people that kind of can overlap hobby passion with the role that they're in, when you open up your pool, you're going to have a lot more of that overlap than if you try to constrain yourself within a smaller circle. No, absolutely. That's definitely true. Skill-based talent development is a term that has gotten a lot more recognition in the last few years. Don Taylor has a survey that he puts out every year that asks one question, which is what is going to be hot in L&D this year? And I think skills-based talent development was either number one or two. No, it wasn't number one. I think it was number two or number three. And I think the year before it was also pretty

high up, but I think it got a bump. And this idea is just generally increasing in importance and focus. And the idea of promoting and filling gaps from within, I think is increasingly important there too, because people are looking to make sustainable companies and to, you know, foster stronger cultures, especially in this more decentralized environment where having a strong company culture is just very, very difficult. So I think we're seeing a lot of business leaders really want to rely more on their people and look internally and to give people a chance to, you know, fill skills gaps. So what do you think about that? Do you think that's important internal development of talent? Do you agree?

Absolutely. I'll caveat it before I get started. Like the one caveat being the stage of the company, the size of the company, like unless you're an early company with few employees that you need to hire externally in order to bring in key leaders, key skills. Like you should absolutely at least start looking within before you start thinking externally. least start looking within before you start thinking externally. When we start to unpack this before we get into like what happens if you hire an external, if you are hiring A players, kind of back to our earlier conversation, these are people who aren't just good at what they're doing now, but usually they possess like a growth mindset. They're always curious to learn more. They want to take on more. So if you give them that opportunity, more often than not, they're going to meet, if not exceed your expectations. So if you've already spent that money investing in those people and you know that there's a long path ahead of them, absolutely

take advantage of that runway. I would. So definitely agree with that. And then when you start to think about going over the external candidate side, and I apologize for any of our customers who are recruiting agencies, but it's more expensive to hire an external candidate, right? Like you're going to have a dip in team productivity when you get a team member who is demoralized after the position that they saw as their next career step is filled by an external candidate. So you've paid that recruiting agency to fill it and now you've got dip. So you've got negative and then the other side, you want to know like what's more expensive than that is the dip in individual productivity. When that team member starts looking for a job, finds another job, leaves you, and now you have to hire a second external candidate to replace that person.

So now you've got two heads going. And then you have the third part of the domino effect that the overall team productivity, when they start to see people leaving, a lot of change going on, they see how you've started to prioritize external candidates over internal, they're now thinking about their long-term careers. And your company's probably not in that picture anymore, whether you like it or not, because they see themselves as like, well, this is the ceiling. If next time I want to take on more responsibility, get a pay bump, it's clearly not going to be here. You're not even going to hear that in the internal, whether you have like, you know, quarterly reviews with them, annual reviews, they're going to be looking on the backend. And it's kind of unfortunate, but you can see where I'm going with it. It's like,

those are the things you have to get ahead of when it's not just, I have a seat to fill, but what is the psychological impact to the organization of if I foster this type of environment where I want to promote within, I want to help people grow, or I just see them as like, you're okay at what you do, but I need somebody who's really smart. That's clearly not you. So I'm going to go bring it in externally. This is a fascinating topic because I can imagine that the conventional resolution to all of this is, well, you have to have strong leaders, you have to have strong relationships existing in a strong culture, as I said before. And when you're making decisions like this to hire externally versus internally, and maybe something that won't please everybody in certain positions, I would hope on, you know, the number of people in

certain positions and the style of the position and precedent and history that AI enabled platform might have, what the psychological impact might actually be of making a certain change at an organization. Of course, it would probably have to create some sort of a valuable metric out of something that is very abstract, which is, who are the people that are going to be impacted by this move? To what extent? What might that mean for the organization at large? You know, here are the potential possibilities. But if there's one thing that I've seen about AI that I understand in the technology is that it loves to run millions of models of potential outcomes of the thing. So this, to me, is like one of those things. It's,

okay, if you hire this person in this position, what would that potentially mean as the waves, the repercussions kind of move throughout the organization? Do you see this as something that could be used in the future? Oh, it already is. I know I promised I wouldn't pitch our product. I'm just going to talk about this in general. This is built in the product. So especially internally, so you have things like, what's succession planning? We have, whether it's a CFO who we know they're probably going to be retiring a handful of years, you start figuring out like, well, who's on track internally? Who would we need to bring externally?

You start to figure that out and develop. And then to your point on good leadership, if you have a number of internal candidates or people that would be good fit, they better be coaching them up and starting to have that conversation. One, figure out, are they interested in it? And two, if so, like, let's start building up that skill set because these shouldn't be a surprise when, you know, you have your new person who's been at the company for 40 years, you know, they're going to be retiring in a handful of years, like, you know, it's coming, you can start preparing. So that's a big part of

it. And then you also have things like talent graphs where you can figure out what is the average or what's a common career path for let's take like a senior software engineer something like that you can see what usually they start is a junior engineer a dev and like there's different little things so you can see like oh i've got five of those within our company i don't need to go and hire one when we in that position or figure out we need a new one you can start to look at all of that and good recruiting platforms and hr, they should have that built in already. If not, they will be very soon. And it's for that exact thing because it is

expensive to go and replace. And that's where recruiting agencies are actually getting smart and they are becoming talent advisors, not just saying, I'm going to go help you fill this role externally, but I'm going to help you figure out how you can make this hire internally. They're still getting paid. They don't care at the end of the day, whether that comes from making an external hire or helping you place it internally. But they're teaching the internal HR team how to make the truly perfect fit hire for that role and for your company, which is the direction that a true talent intelligence platform should be going.

So let's expand on that then. If we're making sure that that's all working out, what are the steps that you see that are most effective? You mentioned, you know, getting ready to coach somebody up for a certain position. I think this is very common in most companies of certain sizes when a large position is going to be vacated for whatever reason. You know, you have a system, you have a set of candidates, you have all that. But in terms of threading that throughout the hierarchy of an organization and potentially being able to do that in more places, because with greater data access and deeper data access, we can maybe know what the likelihood that somebody

will leave is, you know, based on things like age or whatever, as long as we're not discriminating, that sort of thing. With greater information, we can determine, you know, what's the likelihood that a new position will pop up or that you'll need to address skill gaps, as we already talked about. So what are the things that the actual people need to do within the organizations to support this? Does this mean that we might actually need different roles to help fulfill working alongside the systems that help make these predictions? What do you think? Does leadership need to change? I mean, I think it can be necessarily need new roles to create it.

I mean, but then again, look at marketing operations, revenue operations. That didn't exist five years ago until all the different automation tools came into play. I wouldn't be surprised if recruiting or HR followed suit, but to our point earlier of more and more things are getting automated. How do you let people who are already in those positions do more of what they do best? Like if I was an HR, I sure as heck would want to like go help coach people figure out their paths versus going in and putting God knows what information to your HRIS system or anything else. So I think that you can absolutely leverage some of that, but to getting ahead of it. So, you know, maybe it's not the CFO, but there's a lot of data insights, whether it's from recruiting tools, from just

industry insights being in the HR space that you usually know roles like business development, relationship representatives, customer success managers, there's a lifespan on them. They can being in the HR space that you usually know roles like business development relationship representatives, customer success managers, there's a lifespan on them. They can only go for so many years. So you can start to plan ahead of that. The sense of a BDR, there's really not many roles that grow into it other than like college grad, someone that wants to break into new industries. You can work with that, but say you go up a level, you have an account executive. So instead of going and poaching an account executive from a competitor, what if you promoted a BDR into your account executive role?

You know that someone's going to take on a sales leadership role. Someone's going to leave after three years. You can start to build out that bench where it gives them a career path. It gives them something to look forward to. And you also lose or get rid of having to pay to bring someone else in, bring them up on the learning curve of your product. Your BDR knows all that. Same kind of thing with a customer success manager.

Maybe a customer support representative wants to move into it. Maybe a sales rep is over it. They don't want to deal with a commission hanging over their head any longer, but they love working with customers. They might want to transition over to that. So you can start to look at all the different paths that intertwine, but a lot of it, to your point of like good leadership earlier, it comes down to you have companies that are doing well now are much more transparent than they used to be in the past. They're willing to have the conversations that people used to hold their cards close to their chest on. Like, what do you want to do in three years? Be real with me. Are you money motivated? Do you want a growing career path? Are you content

with what you have in the work-life balance? If you tell me that, that way, when you get frustrated, you can say, hey, I'm not having fun with this anymore. I'm not enjoying it. Okay, cool. Let's figure out something that you can do versus you getting frustrated, you hating what you do every day. You're spending eight hours here. I hope that you aren't hating a third of your day and then starting to look elsewhere. No one really wins in the end. So if you're able to create a good managerial relationship with your team, you can start to get ahead of that. One more question about the recruiting process to go back to the question of what's it going to look like in the future and automation. I do just want to address the topic of communication more directly, because as I mentioned before, we're seeing things like companies, you know, ghosting their candidates.

But I'm curious as to if you think that one of those things that we might be enabled to do is spend more time actually speaking to candidates, because if we're automating a lot of things, can we actually end up with the right candidates, the right small pool, and then speaking to them and engaging with them directly? Do you think that is a path that we might go to? And do you think that's even important to really spend time actually engaging directly with our prospective hires? That's a tough one to solve. I don't think anyone's really figured out yet because that is the blessing and the curse of expanding to remote roles is before it's, well, there's only a hundred qualified people within our little radius that can apply. I can go and talk to all of them, open that up globally or just within the U S and you're talking thousands of potential people. And then layer on top of that LinkedIn easy apply. You're

getting people who aren't even like, they're going clicking because they want a job they're not even remotely interested or qualified for that so i feel for recruiters on that because they get beaten over and over i've been ghosted it's like we haven't been ghosted if they ever got in touch with you in the first place but also it's like you did the same thing with 75 other roles so is it you think it's an industry thing but i think that's something that is where ai might come into play and figure out how like if you can back to the beginning of our conversation inbound applicants how do you rank and sort those when they come in like that's again that's something that you can absolutely do within a tool so it's not i had 75 applicants come in

yesterday and 150 come in the day before that i'm just going to start with the oldest and work my way through it's like why wouldn't you rank that? Spend your time more efficiently, have more conversations, and you can kind of go from there. But I think it's going to be really hard for a one-to-one level on when you're getting hundreds of applications to ever happen, just to be realistic. No, I totally understand. All right, let's finish up with some marketing stuff. You posted about a campaign a few days ago based on the Now Music series, and I thought this was great. I think it was for Loxo. There was a time when marketing was just, it felt so much simpler. I mean, I've only worked in marketing for a handful of years, but I've been marketed

too, and I've been advertised too for much of my life. And I'll never forget when I started to realize that all the major insurance companies on the TV just were turning into comedy sketch groups, basically. And all of a sudden, because that's the one sort of like, you know, captive audience that everybody has to have auto insurance in America, you can just do whatever you want because somebody you're going to have to choose one of them. You might as well be the one that they remember the most. And this is a very specific category of business, obviously, in a very specific category of big time advertising. But before that, you know, things just felt simpler. And it didn't feel as hard to capture attention, even when we were doing like the early era of Facebook marketing, like

when a platform is new, that sort of thing. But now, it feels like so much of society is not only experiencing shorter attention spans, but also a hyper awareness of the process of marketing and advertising. And it's just there are so many hyper awareness of the process of marketing and advertising. And it's just, there are so many different layers of the competition that you actually have to fight through. So in a very simple sense, what do you think we have to do to win people's attention these days, Sam, from a marketing perspective? That's where it's tough.

I mean, you mentioned insurance. There's, you have to have car insurance. There's only so many providers. You're in the HR space, like go through a rock. You're going to hit some HR tech software company. Like there's so many of them out there. So historically, a lot of marketing efforts have been in the fashion of like keeping up with the Joneses. What are your competitors doing? And then I need to do more of that. One insurance company does comedy. They're getting more business. We've all got to do comedy.

So you see a lot of that. And there's a reason why you often see like prices are all pretty similar within markets. Offers are all pretty similar within markets offers are all pretty similar within markets all that does though is lead to race to the bottom and pricing and way too many ads or commercials that have a blue background and some vague statement about increasing your roi like they all start to blend into that like sameness and like in all honesty humans we truly are so simple when you stop thinking like a marketer instead, just as like an end user or as a human, like what grabs your attention? What do you engage with? It's human. It's something that teaches you something or it's something that inspires you. And like most marketing doesn't do any of these. So that's how low

the bar currently is. And that's what all the noise is about. So break through the noise with something funny, break through the noise with something that's teaching them like this podcast break through the noise with something inspirational like go on a tiktok feed or an instagram feed like there's a reason that you have a lot of those people creating that content they get so much likes because people enjoy that they want to have some type of drive behind them so many companies just don't do any of those and that's where i say like it's really it's not hard to break out of the noise and that's why i'll never go back to working in a big company because they keep up with the joneses you have to stay within brand guidelines you have to do this you have to do that and it leaves

no room for any of that creativity that lead to all of those i love that i also want to point out that the now music series is in fact still going so as much as it is in nostalgia i just looked it up i found as high as now 115. So we've gotten into three figures. Wow. I recognize almost none of the songs on the CD because I'd stopped listening to the radio a decade ago. I don't even know. And that's, it still seems to be like pop music on the radio, which I guess I've just given up on without even realizing it. But I still love that idea. I went to ATD, the Association for Talent Development, I think it is, in San Diego earlier this year. And

there was a couple brands that did the same sort of thing, you know, playing on nostalgia, and they turned their whole booth into like a giant, just like nostalgia trip. And they were very popular. One of them did a blockbuster reference, and I think it actually won an award. I really liked that. Specifically, nostalgia, I think is very effective. But I agree, you know, you have to entertain in a very serious way sometimes to really break free. But like you said, a lot of brands just aren't doing much that's very creative. I know I go on Instagram and I make fun little one minute videos. And I think adding education and edutainment, as they call it, I think that's very effective.

Yeah. And it's not just funny for funny sake, but funny, but also relevant. Like the CD that we made, we did riffs on a bunch of old 80s classics like roxanne we called it loxanne and it's just like little things like that that are so you just kind of like roll your eyes laugh at but it's that's where when you can tie it in with like what your market actually does they appreciate it that little bit more so then my last question for you from a learning perspective, learning and development, but also just from a general education perspective. Do you think we need to follow suit with that sort of goal with our marketing content where we need to make things break free from all that bogs it down, all the boring stuff and the conventional stuff?

We've all had, you know, our favorite teacher from high school or maybe our favorite professor who just did something different. favorite teacher from high school or maybe our favorite professor who just did something different. And, you know, we can't all be different, but we can all at least try to be fun and try to spice things up instead of just teaching in the very simple ways. So if we're creating educational content of any sort, do you think we need to just ask ourselves that question? Is this actually going to engage our audience? Is this actually going to capture their attention? If not, how can I do it? Do you think we need to take that extra step? I mean, given the current state of it, yeah. One question I always like to ask is it's so easy, but none of us ever want to do it is, would I engage with this? Would I reply to this? Would I answer this phone call? Would I click on

this ad? And you'll quickly find that most of the stuff you make does not pass your own test, which is, it's a gut check. So within the learning space, it's like the reality is, and I'm seeing this from my side, it's like no check. So within the learning space, it's like the reality is, and I'm saying this from my side, it's like no one looks forward to watching the videos, taking the test, doing whatever those things, like we know that we have to do them, right? They aren't entertaining. And they're also, they're too far removed

from like the practice end of it. So the end user, they struggle to connect the dots of like, well, what does this mean for what I'm actually going to be doing in my role? So to your point about like favorite teachers, favorite professors, they did so by taking that lesson that they wanted to get across and then they put it into a medium that they knew

would be well received by a six-year-old, a 16-year-old, a 21-year-old, whoever it is. And it takes them out of the textbooks and puts it into ways that they'll learn through application. So a couple that come to mind is like, remember in high school an economics class our teacher spent three days having us play a long game of monopoly versus like textbook reading how to supply and demand work college we had a business professor where we grew a fictional company over the course of a quarter and his new scenarios came in every class versus like reading books about what historical companies did and how they succeeded in different time periods you never learn learn about the bad stuff in those though, but you actually get to see like, how does this impact our margins? How does this impact our team's morale?

Those are the types of practical things. And even like to go on the science loop, like anatomy, did you ever, how many bones do you really remember in muscles versus do you remember dissecting that frog in eighth grade or something like that, where you got to see like, this is what a muscle actually looks like. That's pretty cool, right? So maybe it's just partially my personal preference of like practical learning versus theoretical learning. But I think that when you can just get people out of what they expect, which is just be monologued at for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or however long your course is, just changing that up a little bit into more appropriate medium in a way that's going to engage them, it goes a really long way. I think you're absolutely right. I think very few would

disagree with you. It's really just a matter of how do we all get that creativity out there to really do something fun and engaging. Do you have any last tips about that? How do we be more creative? How do we come up with the now CD idea for our content. There's a lot of jobs. I think a lot of the reason a lot of this happens is that it's really easy to check the boxes. I need to get another campaign out the door. I need to have people attend this learning class. And you go to simple, what's easy? Okay, well, I'm going to play this hour-long video for them.

They're going to take a quiz. Versus it's a lot harder to think of what's a better way to do this. And it might take two hours to go through, but they're going to remember it more or other little things. So i think it's a combination of not just wanting to check the box but it's going to be a little bit more work but also like if you were on the end user side of it and i love what i do the market that i serve so that's why it's fun for me like build these

creative campaigns is what i go and engage with what i think is fun like we did a buzzfeed quiz like what's your 80s song? And it was just like going through, we made this like super fun. Like we titled like your morning first starts off. What are you doing? Are you working out? Are you throwing your computer out the window? Are you getting some coffee? Are you going and talking to a hiring manager? No, one's going to click that fourth one, but there's fun little things that you can do there where it's, we're never going to get attribution on that at the end of the day. I don't care, but it's like, those are the fun little brand moments that help people

remember you. Yeah, I think you make an important point that it's, you need to realize when you're creating something that will be consumed, that the ROI of maybe spending more time and putting a little bit more creative energy into it is probably going to be greater because the engagement will be more significant. Retention will be higher. It's just a matter of saying, okay, if I go through the motions, it's going to work. It's going to get out there, but is it going to have the same long-term impact as if I really put some energy into this and make it fun, make it

engaging, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's a really important point. And that's, I think it changes it from finite to infinite in that if you make one person laugh or you give one person value, they're going to go tell other people about it versus you have one person that's like perfect fit in your market. They see this ebook you promoted and it's like, cool, great. Like they might get it. They're not going to tell anyone about that. So you also have that shareability side of it where it's like people want to associate with that kind of brand experience. Absolutely. Okay. Well, before I let you go, Sam, can you just let our folks, our listeners know where they can learn more about you and also just about Loxo too?

Yeah. LinkedIn will be your best bet. I post frequently on there. So I got a profile. Loxo.co is our website. We have a podcast, Becoming a Hiring Machine. Very much like yours, where we help recruiters just not preach about our product, but like, how can we help you do better in your day to day?

So I'd say those are best bets. So thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. This was fun. Yeah. Thank you, Sam. It was a great conversation. And for our folks listening at home, thank you for joining us. We will catch

you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.