Adopting modern tech with Cian Collins

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founders of startups if you're listening to us your mind will be blown in ut Tech even if it's small simple thing it's incredibly difficult to maneuver and configure objections can I can I I make hiring decisions for example or like I use canver for example I love Canan the perfect moment someone needs to be really desperate just felt helpless and miserable you will not need to have somebody sitting in a corner plugging manually plugging data into a spreadsheet anymore that would be gone

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yeah hire to [Applause] [Music] retire hello uh good morning everyone uh or good afternoon or good evening depending on when are you listening or watching this um my name is qua I'm together with my co-founder Mariam we're hosts of ha High podcast and this is episode two um just a couple words about haaha and then we're going to introduce our guest and what we're going to speak about today um so as you know haaha is an AI co-pilot for recruiters and we also have a tiny Boutique recruitment

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agency where we focus on product and design Talent um so if you haven't check it out today we are we have a fantastic guest um um Kian Collins was very kind to join us um and Ken has a very impressive career in all things HR he worked in like big well-known names companies like Twitter where he was HR business partner he worked at workday uh he worked at startups like frankly um and currently he's running his own consultancy which is called Nova HCM and he's based in SLO Ireland where I am as

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well so we even had a chance to meet in person which is very rare these days so Ken and good to see you yeah great hi Mar hi Costa thank you so much for for inviting me on your podcast my first ever podcast so this is this is Grace oh really is it your first ever wow I didn't know that my first ever podcast I love listening to podcasts i i l podcast I like listening to but I've never been on a guest on a podcast so I'm delighted to uh finally get get going very interesting okay yeah well I hope I hope

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we deliver then on what your expectations are uh which I don't know about but maybe let's start a little bit with just your personal J um I wanted to ask again like yeah you moved from corporate roles like Twitter and War day to startups to being a consultant in your own company so what are the biggest lessons you learned from each of this environment so I kind of fell into HR maybe like 20 years ago I you know I went to college at communications and then I worked in uh Finance for a while and it was it was

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from there I kind of had an interest I I I knew nothing about human resources until I left College uh really um and until I kind of got working in a big or so I started working in a big organiz called vone in their finance department and it was there I kind of had my first interaction with HR um and kind of getting an insight into what they do and how they operate and I just thought that that's really interesting and uh I then when traveling came back uh year later and I got working in goway in Boston Scientific

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and I that's where I got my start in human resource s my first kind of role was uh supporting the HR team and what I was doing was uh helping them kind of run report analytics in HR systems so really for my very first job I was I've always been involved in some capacity in either maintaining utilizing optimizing improving HR systems okay and from there I kind of I kind of moved into different roles in Ho but I was always H kind of trying to figure out what's the way we can what's the best we can automate this

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or kind of digitize this or get away from paper or whatever and when I got the role in Twitter in Dublin and they were setting up their European head office and it was while I was doing that role I got involved in the workday implementation which they were rolling at globally and that just really interested me and I guess it was from there I had decided you know the day the pure kind of HR Ro where you kind of you know one minute you you're you're sitting down with the with the the site head or the

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site lead you're talking about kind of like strategically hiring key talents into uh you know different roles in order to expand the business and then 10 minutes later you could be in a room kind of dealing with a grievance or disciplinary situation and I just didn't like that part of Human Resources so I just kind of said look I'd like to do something a little bit more kind of tech and business focused so I left Twitter did an NBA and I joined workday as a product manager and I got stuck into

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working on um Global human Capital Management uh solutions for workday like non us uh things like contracts of agreement um employment sorry employment contracts uh colletive bargaining agreements uh that kind of stuff and uh it was from there then uh I had some we decided we were living in Du time and you know it was before Co we made a move out of Dublin and after doing the Masters I decided or wanted to do uh or get involved in some kind of startup um you know it was it was it was a it was a

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scratch that uh that I I wanted H H1 from scratch sorry and um so I did that for a number of years I met a guy here at SLO we we we co-founded a uh a startup called frankly it's still going uh um and it's still working away thankfully and after frankly I did another scale up I worked with a an Italian kind of founder he wanted to set up a European uh operation uh so I scaled an Irish and UK office uh to about 25 people uh that then got Acquired and then I decided to uh instead of going back into another

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company I decided to set up my own Consulting uh business so where I am right now is kind of it's been a bit of a journey bit of a long journey but I'm very happy what I'm doing because I'm kind of taking my experience my wisdom my knowledge uh and I'm kind of sitting across from I would say heads of HR HR managers HR leaders I I you know I'd like to think I bring credibility because I've sat where they say and I have a really good understanding of the challenges they face what we do is

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fairly straightforward we do what's called a Nova HTM diagnostic so we go in we uh take a look where your business is we figure out you know um based on a metric that we've built you kind of you answer the you we'll take you to a scorecard and then depending on how you answer that scorecard we'll say right castia we think that based on your headcount and your current you know growth trajectory you need to uh overhaul the following processes or you need a new HR System or you need to hire a new um

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compa bz person or whatever it is we'll kind of help you figure out the strategy and then the second phase then is we have Nova hm grow which is we will um not only do the diagnostic but we'll also uh work with the relevant HR vendor to ensure that the system you've selected are the solution that you want is correctly embedded into your business and the third thing we do is scale so we'll do the full end to end uh we'll go in we'll do the diagnostic we'll work with the vendors and then we'll program

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manage the implementation and we'll make sure that the system that you selected is fully adopted so just kind of like starter Middle full if that makes [Applause] sense when you were mentioning um implementation of of uh applicant tracking systems and other uh people stuff the first thing that the first thought that came to my mind is are there still any companies who don't use it like do they really need uh somebody to let them know there are such applications and operational tools your

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mind will be blown there are so many companies that are successful companies that have built up uh substantial businesses with nothing with spreadsheets boss when you peel that back you discover that they're doing it on the back of people who are just doing hours of manual work in spreadsheets and duplicating and so anytime anyone says to me oh i' I've you know I have a five million turnover business I don't need a h system and like when I start to dig a little bit I can fairly quickly poke holes in that

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strategy and say look how do you manage uh you know candidate data how do you manage compliance how do you manage gdpr how do you manage automation how do you do this how do you do that like yes you could have lot of macros and vlookups on the spreadsheet and and go that way but it's it's it's incredibly manual and you're relying on one person's tcid knowledge of that spreadsheet to keep that going so if that person leaves the business all that information and all that kind of um process that they built

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up goes with them so uh there is and there's loads of huge multinational companies as well they are using limited versions of ATS Solutions so there's a lot of ATS Solutions in the market smart recruiters one I know uh client I'm working with they're using that right now but they're using a I would say um a variance of it they're not using the full twet of us so they're not using you can onboard employees TR us they're not using that they're literally just using it to track the

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recruitment journey and like your product for example the AI uh automation piece that I don't think that's in it you know so there's lots of there's lots of uh CS along the way and there there's hu it's a huge there's huge opportunity for the likes of high and hire for sure you know Ken you know even if you are a tech seby and I used to work in um really well optimized HR teams but even when they uh somebody from my head of HR operation suggest a new tech even if it's small simple thing like notaker or

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something else I felt how hard it was um adopted and the on boarding was so tough for everybody and I can't imagine how it feels for the teams who didn't have even an ATS can you can you remember some real cases how you implemented ATS in a who switched from paper you know yeah I did it last year actually with a client uh they were they were just using spreadsheets and um so I think the challenge is mar uh if you're somebody working in a road for a long time and they've kind of they've kind of carved

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out their own process of doing things and yeah it's not so much the like it's not so much introducing the new technology it's more about the adoption change management so you almost have to uh walk them through the value ad of the solution and how it's going to impact their job and how it's going to make their job easier but there's also you have to you I have to be comfortable with the fact that there I'm very like I'm very comfortable with these systems that I can get in and tweak around and

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then I know enough to be dangerous I like I'm not a coder or nothing like that I'm not I wouldn't classify myself as technical in any way but I'm just kind of uh I can get in and I can configures okay um so one uh company we worked with last year they're currently using a a product called success factors uh for the Performance Management and they're using it as their kind of ATS as well and it's incredibly uh difficult to maneuver and configure and they're they back in I

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think is sap uh on PR so when you looked at their website and their careers page and you started to go to all the different steps they would have like a front end sitting on ATS if that makes sense and then you would have to apply for the job and then you could see in the URL you're being brought to this other website and the whole ux UI changes and it's a completely different experience and it's not a great experience and it's about eight different steps to get to actually apply for the job right so they're

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putting loads of barriers in place someone needs to be really desperate uh to get get a Sho but people do Costo when you're looking for a job people will generally they'll try and overcome these because they want to get their CD and then BL oh of course of course yeah so but my feedback straight away was you know we can definitely um we can definitely make this process easier if we go and start from here so you bring them in and you show them a demo of the vendor that you're thinking of putting in front of

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them that you think would work and then you explain to the to the vendor before you get on the call look this client is doing this this and this and they're having this problem and this problem this problem and this is the barrier to entry and there's a lot of friction in the in the uh recruitment process and we need to make that really really easy and like one uh website love kind of referring to all the time stripe if you look at strip's website and intercome actually have a good one as well but stripe is a

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good example Stripes careers pages is amazing and their flow and the application process it just you can apply through Linkedin or you can apply direct it's just very very easy and they make it really easy to find the role you want and Source it by location and you know it's just it's easy okay and uh I don't think they use a third party ATS I think they have their own stack really interesting or maybe they do but they just have it have they have a kind of uh cover it but it looks really really

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easy so what I'm trying to do is uh like just get the client to a really simple solution quickly and without without having to make it too complicated and I suppose I'm the difference now is I'm not designing the software like you guys are I'm like I've been there I've done that I don't have to worry about the the the tech sack on on on you know because I know the venders I don't work have that covered like if I was to recommend H hiring to a client I wouldn't give I wouldn't give it a

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second thought because I know you guys would have that coverage do you know so but what I do think about is I do think about the user experience and uh what the client will re how the client will react when they see because I want them to react the way I react and say because I can see the value like I work with I have four or five vendors I would I would recommend into clients all the time and personio bamboo H or Darwin box um sometimes HR locker and then for ats's uh yourselves and I would look if

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they're looking for like a fully FL fully bait like a lever or Greenhouse maybe if they if they have the budget for something like that okay oh you have the best intentions yeah it's clear that you have the best Ines but still uh there is some resilience in the teams and uh can you recall some uh you know most uh common uh objections from uh HR Specialists sorry sorry sorry before we go there I just did a little research while we were talking about stripe and it looks like they're using Greenhouse

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uh but what they did is they embedded the greenhouse application form we inside of their website so it does look seamless for a candidate you never you're never redirected you're not going to Greenhouse page or whatever but the whole like greenhous form is just embedded within the stripes website so fair play to them there you go that's a good example so to answer your question Marian and there will always be resistance to new it's just change you're you're you know and I

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think uh like sometimes people will feel okay this this app is going to remove part of my job and then I might have to go and do something else and that's not that's never the intentional never trying to make somebody's job redundant and it but I it's about how do I make your job easier and better and like the one of the clients I'm working on now have this their Nord star is is TLC Talent leadership and culture and they don't want their Sor what what's TLC can again TLC Talent

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leadership and culture and they just want their HR team to focus on leadership development talent management and like making sure that it's a great place to work okay and they don't want their guys to spending hours and hours and hours like like downloading reports from workday and then and you know doing vlookups and sitting through and all that stuff right and then they're you know spending hours managing time in attendance and sick leave and all that stuff right and they do spend a lot of

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time doing that stuff because those those process just take up a lot of time so how the the challenge there is how do you help the HR team uh do really high value Ad work and because a lot of that stuff in HR teams it's low value ad it goes on and nobody you know they don't really it just goes under the radar and if they don't do it people get annoyed because it might impact their payroll or their holiday balances or they don't get the offer letter on time or whatever it is so kind

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of so you're constantly going back to the process and then the process is kind of executed on the [Applause] system I think you also need some um you know uh to to act as a psychotherapist for those who are not ready to adopt new tech because I know this feeling when you have created your own system okay to sprad it or F your a table and then somebody says oh it doesn't work well let's um let's launch some Greenhouse or a liever or something and you said but I build it I've been

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building it for years uh it has so many specific so many customized fields and um it's just it's just very time consuming to move all this data to a new system and it's just part of you you've been working with this with this sprad sheet for years and it's so hard to give it away there was an anecdote that I heard I think from Des from intercom that you remember this like there were large office floors full of cubicles um each cubicle is today like one cell in a spreadsheet it's just

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like got completely replaced like people were doing this job all the time and then like spreadsheet is already a huge technological advancement if we think about it uh but then like yeah what we're talking about is just the next even the next level people do run really success of business on the back of nothing but Excel uh Excel cheets so what you're talking about Mar is is you're right I've seen this all I've see this a lot and I kind of sometimes I people sometimes I call this failure

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points and I don't mean that in they draw good way I just mean that if if you've spent like three years maram perfecting this uh spreadsheet and then you decide you want to head off to aaban for a cruise and not come back uh the next person that comes in they don't know that Mariam has like this very specific Niche way of doing it and uh that's your way you've you've built a kind of a mo around your job and you've kind of dictated this is the process and this how I do it and maybe works great

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but the risk to the business is if you leave the business or something was to happen to you or you decided to change your job within that business straight away that process is going to fall over because you're no longer there to run it or manage it or maintain it so that's the other risk I see in a lot of companies is there's no backup a lot of the times companies have kind of like let's just give this to Keen ke knows how to do he he'll manage it and they forget and move on to and they're

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thinking about other things and then Kean leaves and they're like well why is there time to hire so long why are we why is it taking so long to hire these people are we we don't have a system or process Keen did that and he's gone there you know yeah it's amazing to see how it all so common cuz don't forget how long are people staying in jobs they're not staying forever in jobs anymore people are staying like three years on average in a job yeah yeah in start or in San Francisco

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it's like one year average I think which is also kind of crazy what can you do in one year you can barely get context in in my opinion but anyway as a recruiter I used to consider job Hoppers um like three years ago these group contained people who change jobs every two years uh then every one and a half year and today I think oh he's already worked for one year in each company such a champion i' say crazy stuff okay um I actually wanted to suggest um moving to slightly different topic uh which is going to be

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or maybe just piggy back on what we already were discussing but anyway going more into the future Ken I think like you have a really amazing perspective what I like is that like un unlike us who see like we stand in our own bubble and we see the world through the lens of I know tiny startup um in Tech space uh but you've been there like you've been all you've seen startups you've seen large Orcs you were the HR yourself you were on the product management side uh you are now like talking to vendors as

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well as their clients and like you've really seen it all so what do you think like what do you see as the most exciting or disruptive Trends in the next five 10 years of work yeah like the farest Gump of H or CA um um the most exciting Trends I I tell you I did sit in on the uh the rise of the super worker um webinar this week with Josh Bon oh what's the super worker super super curious let's let's do so he he has a thing and it's he's I've heard him talk about this a few times where

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he's talking about uh a lot of companies measured the out the the uh the dollar output of an employee so if you're like a five million turnover business and you have you know a thousand employees you can say right well each employee is generating say 50,000 uh dollars whatever so what he's saying now is it it's we've never had such a low um unemployment rate in the history of employment it's it's been very very low for a long long time but the output Sor is that you had specific

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us us specific for example okay and but what he's saying is the the the productivity output is very very high and uh what he what he the change he's seeing now is I kind of seen hearding people talk about this and I haven't seen it but I'm he talk about it is these AI agents coming in to um not take your job you'll hear this Mantra of AI is not going to take your job it's the person using AI is going to take your job so um where he sees this going is in the next number of years you will have an

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agent um for specific tasks so for example you guys are brilliant at you know I would say optimizing the interview process so that hiring managers do not have to worry about taking notes and then kind of oh they don't have to think too hard about the questions because based on the role you you guys are presenting the questions and then you're summarizing and then you're helping them move to the next stage so he sees a lot a lot of the low value the stuff that I see as well like the low value Ad work that a lot of the

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HR teams I see doing like a lot of them admin and and manual kind of like just kind of fining like putting stuff into spreadsheets and trying to manually update uh processes he he's fairly convinced to us and the kind of agentic AI is going to just wash all of that away in the next number of years okay you will not need to have somebody sitting in a corner plugging manually plugging data into a spreadsheet anymore that would be gone and because the systems will be will be kind of advanced to to do that or you will be able to

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work with some like yourselves who can kind of like custom build an agent to do a specific task in a business okay so um and it's it's not like I'm not concerned in that it's going to like make everybody redundant and we're no longer have jobs and nothing like that I just think that it will free up a lot of people to do more high value Ad work and that I definitely believe that and I I can kind of see it myself so so I'm working with a huge organization they're like they a 250 billion market cap and

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they're still like they're still doing stuff the way I would I would have seen it maybe 15 20 years ago um because they haven't fully embraced Automation and Ai and process sorry sorry yeah let's uh we we hear we hear it pretty often from HR teams that yeah they they don't have their own budget but let's get back for AI uh replacing or not replacing or augmenting the jobs for a second because like I've heard two perspectives one is like let's call it wildly optimistic and

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it's like yeah it's going to create more jobs and it will take the jobs are just going to evolve will be freed up from like labor and um routine tasks and instead we'll do more like creative work and the other perspective is that it will eventually take everything it'll be much like I know maybe there's still a Founder a solo founder building the entire billion company with just AI agents like not a single other human working at the company so where you are on this spectrum like of know optimism

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versus being an AI Doomer to an extent I'm definitely not an AI Doom Merchant uh definitely not I think AI is amazing and I look I use track GPT all the time I think it's brilliant um I use it to help me you know script uh emails I used to help me script um proposals I used to help me script kind of like strategy docs for myself so I'm kind of got you know it's just I I kind of think of it as my own personal digital assistant really um so I'm not I'm I'm absolutely not against AI at all I think

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[Music] um there's going to be a big redesign of work I think in the next number of years like roles are going to be redesign so again go back to the person thing he talks about Talent not talent management anymore more like Talent density so trying to like trying to put the right people in the right jobs at the right time and um again like companies are definitely I would say thinking how can we automate or save money and how can we move people internally to ensure that they're they're satisfied in their job

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and they're happy in their work and they're motivated and they're not just kind of stock doing the same thing day in day out so but I'm talking like technology uh kind of it type work and you know if you're even if you're a clumber or Builder or a stone Mason just ways you can use CH you can still use chaty PT to do your back office stuff uh you still can do your core job but just so it's going to like it's it is going to impact everything uh CI from where I'm sitting

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I can I can really just see it's going to have a huge impact but there's loads of companies again back to what I said earlier who have built up really successful businesses on spreadsheets and it's the generational thing as well cost you I know when I met you that time you've got workplaces now where You' people who are kind of 50 plus who are just they're not maybe as uh techsavvy I say the younger employees in the business but they their view is look I've built this business from nothing

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we're now do x million turnover we're you know are leading in our industry uh we've gotten away this far without it and that's they're probably okay to an extent but it's you're you know just you can't there's no way you can ignore this like it's it's just here and it's changing it's it's changing companies already you know um like just what you also what you said about like using uh chbt for example here like I can see and I can see how this change changes over

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time as well um CU like we were like really early optimists started using it when it came out we actually like we were playing with GPT before it became chat GPT because if some people remember you could do it through playground and so on and we recording this uh like at the end of January in 2025 and I'm saying this because maybe like if people listen to it like a month later things can already be different but as of end of January in 2025 it was interesting to also see just how the models evolve like I'm for

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sometimes task are using GPT 40 which is like great generating the answer quickly and general knowledge but for some tasks I started using gp01 and I pitched it to Mariam actually recently and I think like maram tell tell me your experience there as well uh which is supposed to be a reasoning model that's designed for Ma and coding stuff like this but it actually performs really well on a large like different different volume of tasks where there is a lot of context and it needs to think and reason about it so

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whenever it's for me like for example generate a job description like here a long conversation transcript with the hiring manager here's all we know about the company here's how we do things you can just upload like documents into it and then ask it to to generate a job description for you and it'll think for much much longer than GPT 40 would do this but it then produces the result that to me is like really Next Level so we compare it like GPT 40 was like a junior employee that yeah it's smart

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it's really bright but it's Junior but gpt1 is like a really strong mid level like it is another level in my opinion at least wowow okay so you're saying gp01 is is better than GPT 40 for some tusks where you need thinking uh sorry Mar you're muted yeah I say it's really way better especially you mentioned that you are uh crafting uh messages uh and if you need some uh personalization some special styling so that all your messages come with the same uh tone of voice Etc all these

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small details uh they're very well embraced by the 01 version uh 10 minutes before our podcast I had to uh finish one small task and um of course I opened my chat and uh it turned out that my payment method dropped and um I didn't have um chity for completing my task and I just felt helpless and miserable I just had to craft a new outre message but I just uh uh you know it felt like I I lost my brain at the moment so I didn't do it take a take a try to uh write it myself because uh of course why should I waste

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my time I just can't uh recover my um subscription and and do it with the chat interesting okay yeah like I also last night I um I downloaded deeps last night just to look at us and oh very very hot on deep seek yeah so again I haven't really played around with it but again I just like it was wasn't it very interesting how much media that whole uh thing got and the timing obviously like China just happened to release that the week Trump was in I thought that was amazing and just just before Chinese New

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Year also cuz they're celebrating they're not working these days it was like the perfect moment it was just an awful two fingers to America really situation but um and also I would also question you know did they really did it really cost $6 million and like you know I would question that because you know just it was just I find that very interesting but no I I I looked at yesterday I haven't played around with Jess and um and again I think people are kind of I don't think people are going to

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just immediately drop chaty PT because they all have built up a kind of a history of kind of of of course of course with chat PT and it has reasoning and it knows their business and knows what they're about yeah it certainly tries to like have some sort of mode there so that it'll make it more difficult for folks yeah and you know the way people are kind of like I only use Apple devices and I only use iPhones I would never have an Android or Android users are the same thing I think there'll be an element of that with the

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with Chachi PT and CLA maybe that people are like I'm I'm happy with Chachi BT I'm sticking with it I don't need to go to deep seek but some people are you know will will will fit between the two I don't know but yeah there's also like um like go back to the Josh Bon thing he's actually built his own HR learning model which I thought was really interesting called Galileo and you can spend $40 a month and it's just for HR professionals so what that does is it allows you to um what that does it

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allows you to um build up your kind of a core knowledge but it's only related to kind of HR so whether you're a talent acquisition talent management core HR and Total Rewards there's something in there for you okay and I thought that's really clever what he's doing so he has uh basically built uh HR learning model on on the back of his own because he's been an analyst for years so he has a huge wealth of information and he has an academy you know H super well known yeah for sure yeah I know I sound like I'm

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flagging for the guy not I have no no monetary uh reward here for mentioning this yeah but I just thought that's a clever like he's early to Market pretty pretty much with that okay there's nobody else from what I can see is doing that [Applause] yes yeah let's let's just talk about ethics for a second uh because I mean like it probably is driven by um the best of intent I hope like like I think I think there is good intent that that's behind all this regulation uh what what is an ethical Ai

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and HR for example like what do you what do you think are some pitfalls um or where should people look at when it comes to ethics um for AI in in HR spe specifically like I would be very sensitive to like I would never put um like personal data into chat GPT like you know like your buying details or PPS or um like ethical you're asking chat GPT like you're you're plugging in maybe some personal situation happening to an employee looking for a resolution to help them in that situation i' like that

00:36:54 - 00:38:09

to me is where I would come from an Ethics point of view this more like data pre privacy right so you don't you don't want to trust your data uh to yeah no no no like and it's it's very hard to get to once that's once you do that it's very hard to come back from that um and like there's like so many companies are I would say Wing winging it uh when it comes to uh compliance and gdpr and where they Store employee data and you know like people storing uh like whole lists of employee data with like you

00:37:31 - 00:38:39

know name address PPS number date of birth bind details like in spreadsheets that are not past or protected on maybe their personal you know accounts and it's very hard to um keep that locked down you know unless you're been really stringent and so like how do you then stop somebody from just plugging that into chaty PT and saying here help me you know build a you know do something know do you know what I mean like so it's still very very gray and I think a lot of companies they they have they

00:38:05 - 00:39:06

definitely don't uh some of the bigger companies they do restrict your access to the likes of chat GPT and Cloud they they pop up a window to say you know this has been monitored or we know your traffic is being watched and whatever so they try and kind of stop it or prevent it or limit it that way but what's to stop you doing like uh Incognito and or just using a VPN and off you go you know exactly exactly and what do you think about AI making decisions like can can AI make hiring decisions for example or

00:38:35 - 00:39:36

decisions about promotions in the company or decisions about uh Performance Management I think I think it's going going to get to a stage where you'd want to be careful because you don't want to unnecessarily screen out the right people from the process because an AI agent believes they don't meet the criteria for the role and there's a lot of lows and loads and loads of of use cases cost J you see as well where the person hired might may not have been the right person for the

00:39:06 - 00:40:04

role they were interviewing for but they got into the company and then they they transitioned into a different role and they absolutely flew it R because they found their maybe the hiring manager wasn't the right hiring manager for them or the role wasn't the right role or the company was the right company you know and uh I've seen that so many times where people come in and they don't necessarily you know take off in the in in initially but they maybe transition or a new hiring manager comes

00:39:35 - 00:40:35

in or something changes but then they absolutely fly it okay so if you have an AI agent saying the cost is not the right person for this role you're blocked from getting into the company at all and so you may uh so I would be really not not not against this but I would say this kind of like we want caution is advised you know I think there's there has to be a human decision at all at all stages because this is somebody's career somebody's job it can't be what you're saying is that we

00:40:05 - 00:41:03

we trust humans more but do we really do that are humans really that great at making decisions always I think the agent what could agent to do is within reason say look Kean is qualified to appoint for this role but you need to decide whether you want to hire him okay he's better than these other candidates because he has these these skills and these qualifications and he's working these companies that are relevant to your business and he has delivered these projects and so on and so on and so on

00:40:33 - 00:41:35

um right so uh but you still need to make the decision so I don't and so look C you know some companies would go all in on this and they like yeah we'll just let AI decide it takes away the the decision from us and then you know but that get you get that gets really gray and murky because you got you you know you could get into discrimination situations whereby people like I was discriminated against by an AI agent that's definitely going to happen I could totally see that being a a case in the in the Labor Relations

00:41:05 - 00:42:34

commission the next number of years but I think there is even now when um there are no at least very well known um recruiter AI agents uh there is still some harsh filters for example when um there are 500 applications on um a a job description on uh LinkedIn their internal AI system highlights like top 50 from 500 profiles and you're you you still can claim you are discriminated by AI but we don't do this I think this going to be uh very smooth and we won't even notice how how it happened at least

00:41:49 - 00:42:54

the AI agents will give you a detailed feedback unlik human recruiter okay no no all the ques with most of them I'm doing some work at the moment with with this with um with a client and he records all our calls with a with a technology called fathom AI have you heard of this no yeah it's a general group of not taker yeah yeah yeah and then at the end of the call within like two minutes I get this email back with really specific um okay here's a breakdown the conversation here's what

00:42:22 - 00:43:23

we discussed here's the next steps here's boom boom so you're like that is amazing um and it's he doesn't have to do anything he just we just have the conversation and H at the end of it it the this thing just goes and there you go um so like that's I only saw that for the first time literally I think two weeks ago and I was really impressed uh when I saw that I never even heard of this thing and and again it's it's AI enabled and all that so um that's just an example maybe of a simple use case

00:42:52 - 00:44:05

but like I can see what you guys do now is again you're bringing that level of um synopsis and concise kind of notetaking to the process at such a huge time suck for so many hiring managers and again when I met Kasia the first time I was I just as soon as he told me what he was doing I instantly got it because um I I been there myself and I see other teams struggling H and not and they don't always do it to the standard that would be expected or to be fair to the candidate you know um so having a

00:43:29 - 00:44:21

tech solution of what you guys offer would would certainly add a lot of value there you know yeah and I can even build build a case like for if we expand on like I I totally agree with you that overall there should be hiring processes maybe AI assisted like you said with like no no taking and just I know some some analytics on this but that's done by humans and like in the end if humans are going to work together they should be able to see each other they should be able to talk to each other it should be

00:43:54 - 00:44:52

done somehow with humans um but I was thinking that still like um maybe if if we talk about doing the very first screen or even pre-screen that recruiters often do by phone like they would just call and ask a few basic questions that to me is a thing that is probably better done by AI or I I believe it may be done by AI better in the future where know candidates can then have this call like ASAP or any time they don't need to schedule it because AI can interview like everyone at the same time they don't need to I

00:44:24 - 00:45:21

know find the time in the calendar and then evaluation is consistent and it doesn't depend I know the human recruiter might just be hungry or hry as some people say and for for that reason I know decline someone and AI is more consistent than that and no issues with language or accents like we we both with Mar are not native English speakers um so obviously there might be sometimes like issues with accent and how we speak but for AI it's probably fine and then like it's it's sometimes often better

00:44:52 - 00:45:46

able to assess technical or position position specific answers U better than General recruiter because it it has some general knowledge in like in coding in design and lots of engineering lots of different lots of different parts so I I can see how like an AI agent might be actually more convenient for all sides to do like a pre-screen and then the recruiter might have a look at I know like the top candidates that that or just the answers that the candidates provided and then make some decisions

00:45:19 - 00:46:24

based off off of this yeah like that's all I agree I agree um like it's I think sometimes Val cost Mar you have to stand back a little bit because there's so much going on it would literally explode your brain and so you kind of have to kind of just you know comp compartmentalize some of the stuff and there's so much change happening there's so much Tech in the market now today than there was say even when I was doing the start with 5 years ago and there's so many like small two to five to 10

00:45:51 - 00:47:14

employee startups targeting like Niche elements all that kind of hard to reti process they're trying to go in and be you know a layer on top of a stack to do XY Z and it's what you know it is it is difficult to sell in uh these types of products into the HR space because again you're you're trying to um appeal to a certain you know cohort and the buyer and your your timing as well okay uh we're over an hour speaking now so maybe it's time to like wrap up uh or move to wrapping up um are there any I know any

00:46:34 - 00:47:32

other thoughts or Reflections that you have Kim that you would like to share uh maybe some topics that we didn't go deep enough on but yeah anything off the top of your head I think for me uh you know just preparing clients for the change that's coming like so that's kind of where my head is at a loss you know and over the next year I'm going to be like I'm going to try and force myself to to to produce a bit more content around this like I spend a lot of my time on the delivery side so I don't get a

00:47:03 - 00:48:10

chance to spend a lot of time kind of on the but I'm you know I know I need to be doing more of these podcasts and more content creation and and kind of like um defi defining the narrative um but like you know if you think about the the insights that are like there's so many companies that need your skill set uh to help them save time on their talent acquisition side of things there's so many companies that uh would welcome a different Viewpoint and like there's so many people in the market like like

00:47:36 - 00:48:33

yourselves myself and different people who have kind of been through the been through different processes and who can kind of bring a lot of value to to clients um but like the the whole digital transformation in HR thing is just that's not going away any time seeing cost yet and it's and it's going to be it's going to be here for a long time so like you could just have have a speaker on every week for the next year talking about digital transformation in HR and like you could focus it on

00:48:05 - 00:49:03

different steps that in the process and you could have a speaker dedicated to that that that's how big it is and how how varied it is um and then AI transformation and then some other transformation yeah and like it's AI agents now like what's it going to be in two years I don't know I mean I I don't know I don't know it's just AI everything at the moment's boss and yeah it's it's just it's just staying on top of that you know yeah yeah all right well Ken uh thank you so much for

00:48:33 - 00:49:31

joining us this morning uh really pleasure talking to you and thank you for everyone who was listening we'll try to drop some links uh in the description of this video um so you can dive more into I know what we do or or like maybe this church person seminar that you mentioned if it's possible to to link to it we can do it as well uh otherwise folks please leave comments if you have any questions or reactions we do really happy to um hear what you think and maybe address them in the next episodes

00:49:02 - 00:49:58

and until next time thank you and good luck with promoting HR Tech in the world [Applause] [Music]