Episode 136

Alle Prestipino on Mastering the Art of Hiring and Perspective on AI

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show today, and we're joined by Alle. Alle, thank you so much for joining us.

ALLE: Thank you for having me.

TIM: It is absolutely our pleasure. And where I'd love to start is just to hear a little bit more about yourself, because I think it helps to understand a little bit more about who they're listening to today.

ALLE: Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for the introduction. My name's Alle Prestipino. I have been with a company called SAP for the last 11-plus years. I actually recently just decided to take a bit of a break and a bit of a sabbatical. But my former role was the chief operating officer for Asia Pacific Japan with SAP SuccessFactors, which is our HR suite within SAP. So very exciting space to be in. Obviously very topical as we go into this new world of AI and hiring and skills and re-skilling. I'm really excited to be here today to chat with you a little bit about my experience and hear yours as well.

TIM: Yeah, that's an awesome introduction, and a great place to start would be your career, I think, because you rose through the ranks quite meteorically, I'd say. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you managed to achieve that.

ALLE: Absolutely. So a bit of an interesting story. So I started with SAP when I was still finishing my university degrees. I was studying law and business, assuming I'd become a lawyer. I started in SAPI and come from a tech family, so that kind of seemed like a natural place to start my career and get some exposure. Essentially got distracted by the shiny lights of software sales and decided to pursue that instead of law. I did the SAP Sales Academy, which is a really world-class program, and I was lucky enough to do that. I then was back in Sydney doing my sales career for a number of years across all the SAP solutions. Which was obviously really eye-opening to see how much there was to sell and how we could help customers. And I was working within the public sector space specifically. Then in 2020, not planned well, but I and my husband decided to move to Singapore during the middle of a pandemic. We didn't know that at the time, and that's when I made my jump with SuccessFactors and came over and started to do a number of roles. While I was with SuccessFactors, I was exposed to sides outside of sales, so I was really working closely with the COO and the president and working on the strategic initiatives to strategic objectives for how we grow the Asia Pacific Japan business. And it was something that I just honestly fell in love with, and I just kept asking for more work. I kept asking to get more deeply entrenched. I was able to create a role as head of strategic initiatives where I was working across all market units, so India, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea. And it was essentially the training to become the COO. When I got the call, it was earlier than I expected in my career, to be completely honest. I was lucky that I was, had the training, and had the mentorship. And then there we were for the last 18 months. Been in the COO seat.

TIM: Is it the sort of thing where, in a sense, you're never quite ready for it, but when you got it, it was as good a time as any?

ALLE: Exactly. I think you're never ready for the job, and if you are, you're in the wrong job. Do you know what I mean? You're not really challenging yourself. So of course there were learning curves, and there's one thing to work alongside someone doing the role, and then having to do it yourself is very different. Experience—there's nothing better than getting thrown in the deep end. And if you have the right support system around you, I think anything's really possible. Yeah, it was a challenge, and the hours were long, but I loved every minute of it, so it was good. TIM: You used a phrase earlier where you said you created something for yourself. I'd love to hear more about that kind of proactive mindset you've had in your career. ALLE: It's so I don't want to give you too long of a version, but essentially I was going for, I was interviewing for a sales role and to be a first-line sales leader. And I thought, okay, this is the right next step. Everyone does sales, then you become a sales leader, and that's how you move through the ranks. And I didn't end up getting the job, and I was thinking, oh gosh, okay, what do I do now? I was speaking with the president and the COO, and I essentially, I remember using the words, I'm just not using my brain enough. I need to be doing more. So what can I do? And they said, Tell us what you want to do. I said, Okay, here's what I've realized. I really enjoy doing it. Here's where I'm good. Here's where I think I can add value to you. And I think one of the. Tips and tricks I learned pretty early on in my career were, if you're making your bosses look good, if you're making their lives easier, if you are taking things off their plates, not only does it help them, but you are teaching yourself in rapid time. Hey, don't worry about that. Let me do it for you. And I got to learn even faster than I normally would. I created a job spec, and I told them, This is where I think I can add value. I see a gap in the roles at the moment. You don't have anyone doing these things. If you really want to propel us to the next level, here's how I think we can get there. They said, Okay. And there you go. So sometimes just seeing those opportunities, I just went for it, and I was lucky enough to have the support to do that. Of course, it's not always that easy, especially in times of headcount restrictions and whatnot. But yeah, I was lucky enough to be able to create that opportunity.

TIM: I am wondering if. You would take the same mindset now, external, trying to go into a company. Is it also having that kind of high empathy for the person? Trying to think how you can solve a problem for someone in particular and carving out your own idea of a role? Is that also the way you're thinking about it?

ALLE: Yeah, I think that's, yeah, I haven't thought about it as much externally, but I think that's the right approach because sometimes. You don't know what you don't know. So bringing a different perspective, I think, is always useful. Being able to go externally and say, Hey, look, this worked really well in my last role. I don't know if it's going to be the exact same. Of course every business is different, but here's what I was able to do to create an impact. Do you think it'd be successful there, or do you think you have a need for it there? And bringing that experience alongside you. Some people say, No, we don't need it. It doesn't really apply to this type of industry or this type of technology. But it's something I think that you should always have a point of view on. I think people like when you come in with a point of view, right? Here's what I've thought about. Here's where I think you may be able to improve things. Here's where I see some gaps. Here's what other people are doing that you are maybe not doing. Just being able to bring some insight. I think it's always nicer than showing up for an interview and being asked, What do you expect for the role? Do you know what I mean?

TIM: Yes. And I guess once you get to a certain level of seniority, that mindset would be more expected rather than, let's say you're an individual contributor in your second year in the job and you're coming in with the agenda, I feel yeah, it might not resonate so well.

ALLE: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You need to be coming in with a very clear point of view of how you would help the business and how

TIM: Yeah.

ALLE: It's successful. Absolutely.

TIM: Yes. What I'm interested in also is shifting the gear a little bit now to thinking about hiring into your teams and all the people you've hired. I. Has your lens or your view over hiring changed as you've gone up the ranks yourself? Do you view maybe your bit of the process as different, or what you look for as different? And like, how has your view of hiring evolved?

ALLE: Yeah, it's a good, it's a really good question, I think, and again, I maybe have a little bit of a different perspective because it wasn't that long ago that I was in sales roles. Coming through the different stages. So I think when I'm doing an interview, I probably have a slightly different lens because I do remember what it's like to be on the front line. I do remember the challenges of picking up the phone and speaking to customers, and I'm focusing more on the sales role because that was obviously a really big part of our hiring for the different market units and just being empathetic. To people trying to cut, to interview, and to showcase their skills. But because I remember very clearly what they had to do. So I think I'm supposed to use your quote, like coming through the ranks that quickly. I do remember what it's like. So I think when someone's coming to an interview, I also maybe expect a little bit more because I do remember what it's like to be on the sales side. Very well. So I think, for me, it's that there's definitely the empathy, but coming in very prepared, coming in with a very clear point of view of how you think you're going to be successful, where you want to be. I never ask people what their next role is. I always say, what's your next role? Where do you want to get to? Because everything's a stepping stone. And that's how I treated my last few roles before the COO role. So I really want to understand where people want to get to, and I hate using the five-year or 10-year timeframe. It's more about your next role. I think that's been helpful to me. I've also had a pretty strong bias to wanting to look external. I think it's really nice. I shouldn't use the word bias, but perspective of going external. Because I think fresh perspectives are so important, and I think in any organization we sometimes get very, This is how we've always done it; this is how X company runs things, and I like to have people come in and challenge my way of thinking and challenge the company's way of thinking. I loved hearing what our competitors were doing because I hated being behind anyone. So if we weren't keeping ahead of things, then we were falling behind. So having people come in from outside the organization as well was something I really advocated for. And it wasn't always something that was easy to do, but it was something that was important to me.

TIM: And this would be people from outside the industry completely but with transferable skills from another similar business or maybe a completely different business.

ALLE: I think you would need some level of similarity, but I think the learning part was never there. A deal breaker. Anyone can learn solutions and understand the technology over enough time. I really looked for things that were more on the characteristic side, to be honest, than having someone who came from technology. Of course, it's nice to have people from, let's say, our competitors want to interview with us because that's always a nice set of skills as well as insights. But no, it didn't have to; for me, it was not; you had to come from technology. You had to be a technical person. I did not think that was the most important. And the hiring methodology that I had, which we might get into a little bit later, was definitely not so much on experience, but it was a lot more on other characteristics.

TIM: Let's dive into that now, then. So yeah, what was your philosophy?

ALLE: And I have to give credit, I stole this for my husband because he's

TIM: i.

ALLE: Lots of recruiting in his RVP role for a sales team. And he taught me this years ago. So, he, the methodology is called ICEE. It essentially starts with intelligence. So having the EQ the IQ—those are things you can't necessarily teach. But if someone comes in. With a certain degree of IQ and EQ, you're really able to teach them anything. You can teach any tech, you can teach any type of solution, and you can teach any method or sales methodology. So that was point number one. Second was coachability. So the C is for coachability. Who had the right attitude? Someone who wanted to be a team player, someone who was open to feedback, or someone who wanted to learn new ways of doing things. If you have that, I. That's really one of the best things you can get in a new hire. So tick, okay. They've got the intelligence; they want to be there. They've got the hunger; they want to be coached. And then entrepreneurship is the first E. This is an interesting one as well, especially, again, I have my sales hat on, but when you're hiring salespeople, you know you want that hunger. You want people to want to build their own out of their territory and really be responsible for it. I know people use the phrase, Be the CEO of your own territory. And that's an overused cliché, but it's quite true, really. And some of the best hires that I've seen are people whose first job was door-to-door salesman, or salesperson. And they never forget that rejection. They never forget what it is like. To have that rejection over and over until they figure out how to make it a yes. And that doesn't go away in people. Those characteristics don't go away. And they make the best salespeople. They make the best hires. So I love asking the question, what was your first job? And maybe they'll say, Oh, McDonald's. It's not really relevant. Actually, it is, like you had to learn how to work on a line and work with other people. Maybe you were a manager at 17 of managing other 16- and 17-year-olds; like that is learning how to be a leader. Very young. So I like asking those questions as well. And then the last D is experience. So this is why I say I don't put experience first because if you have these other characteristics, then experience is great. But the experience part can. Can come later. And I think if you have those other things, it can make up for a lack of experience, and hopefully it may be a bit of an example where experience doesn't always translate or is needed to translate to results. Sorry, that was long-winded.

TIM: No, that's perfect. I love the detail. And to see the coachability, I'm interested in how you would evaluate that in an interview. Is it almost poking them a little bit? Maybe critiquing their approach and just seeing how they respond? Like, how did you, how did you tease out the coachability?

ALLE: Yeah, good. Good question. I think it's a lot of the example questions. And then finding and drilling down into them. So tell me an example of when you were successful. Okay, fine. But then it's, Tell me about an example when you weren't successful, and then drilling a bit further and then drilling a bit further. And then, if you hear things like, I didn't know the answer, so I needed to go to my mentor. I needed to go to my sponsor, I needed to get help, and I needed to look here. You can figure out where people have that. Desire to want to learn further rather than I knew all the answers, and I figured it all out by myself, and I'm fantastic. But. They showcase where they leaned on people and where they, or some people, didn't know the answer and didn't figure it out, but it's a lesson learned, and now I know for next time. So they're showing that. Going back to the EQ as well, they're showing that awareness of being able to learn from those mistakes and then translate that into moving forward and being successful the next time they move forward. I think it's just that, having your ear a little tuned to it and then just flushing that out a little bit through the questions.

TIM: Yeah, it strikes me, having had a bunch of these conversations recently, how important it is for candidates to prepare, obviously for an interview, but to have really thought about what they've done in the last few years. I. Write stuff out so you can get it clear in your head. Like for me, if you asked me what was a project I didn't do, I don't know, two years ago, I would not be able to remember.

ALLE: Yes.

TIM: For an interview now I'd be an absolute shambles because I'd be all over the place without being able to have a coherent narrative and explanation. So I feel like there's such a big win to just sitting down there thinking, writing, documenting, just getting everything set, because if not, I could say you could get into an interview and. It's not that you didn't do the things; it's just that you couldn't articulate them easily.

ALLE: A hundred percent, and something even I'm kicking myself for not doing more regularly is actually making a list, three

TIM: Yes.

ALLE: Should have sat down and gone, okay, what did I achieve this quarter? And so sometimes I

TIM: Yeah.

ALLE: I go back and look at my presentations and things to remind myself of all the things I've done. So I think if I could go back 18 months, I would tell myself, or anyone, just jot down your achievements, jot down the work you're doing, because it may not seem like a big deal to you. When you articulate this to someone else, oh wow, you worked on that project, you achieved that business case, and you were successful in closing that deal. All these little things add up. So I think that's a very good point, and it's something I need to get better at myself, because you're right, when the time comes to interview, you want to have that list of all the great things you've done and to be able to explain it in a really clear way to people.

TIM: Yes. I wonder if a bit of chai chip tea could help with this. If I were trying to do this now, I'd be like, oh, where's all the data that's tracked? Everything I've done for six years. Like my emails, Slack, JIRA, and HubSpot, I'd be like, Export, summarize, ChatGPT. What the hell have I done for six years? Give me my top five achievements.

ALLE: That's a great idea. I might try that after this call. Just go and export everything into.

TIM: That is maybe a nice segue onto AI. The most buzzed, hyped two letters of the English or Latin alphabet ever. For sure.

ALLE: Yep.

TIM: Some of it is probably justified, and some of it, maybe not. I'd love to get your views on AI in the hiring context. Like the lay of the land of what you've seen so far. Love to hear what SAP has, too, like what avenue they're going down as well.

ALLE: Obviously, with SAP, AI is now embedded into all the solutions. So HR was actually the first suite to have AI embedded, and we started rolling that out. So we had a number of use cases where AI was being tested and used by customers. And we were actually very quick to market with it, but we, at the same time, were very careful when we were doing it. And I was. I remember I became very close with the head of AI for SuccessFactors, who's the global lead, and she was teaching me. We have to be very careful because there are so many biases that can come into the program, especially when we're talking about HR. We need to be very sure that if we're using AI in our suite, it doesn't come with biases and it doesn't come with hallucinations. We need to be very responsible about how we're going about this. So I really liked the approach that we took because I think the reality is, if we're talking about using AI for hiring, anyone who's applied for a job on LinkedIn, you do the easy apply button or you put your resume through. The AI robots that are now scanning resumes and the number of rejections that people just get because you don't have enough keywords or you don't have enough things in the resume that are standing out with the job spec. It's difficult. So I think. Maybe separating the two things. It's really exciting what SuccessFactors is doing on the AI side. It's obviously a lot deeper than just scanning resumes. It goes right into the solution on all parts, whether it be skills ontology, whether it be writing job descriptions, payroll, et cetera. But on the AI side for hiring, I think we still have a long way to go because it is a little bit scary. A very competent person can be putting their resume through, and it doesn't even see the light of day. It doesn't see a recruiter because it just didn't meet those keywords that AI was wanting to see. So I think it's going to be great. It's going to be great, but I think we cannot rely on it yet. We still have work to do in that space. And people still want to feel like someone is looking at their resume. And if you're not right for that job, maybe you'd be right for another job coming up. But you never get that opportunity because it doesn't even make it that far. I'd even be curious to hear your view and what other people are saying on the topic, but that's my view at the moment.

TIM: Yeah, if I were to summarize the conversations I've had in the past four months, I'd say very few companies are really using it. At any level of scale, certainly for the core selection of a candidate. So where there has been some use so far of what I've seen is more like skunk work projects where an analytics leader or an engineering leader has built out their own little pipeline with Claude or ChatGPT kind of behind the scenes to do their own little thing. Whereas for most of the talent leaders I've spoken to, yeah, they're dabbling with some use cases like the writing of the job descriptions. AI summaries of interviews, but not really. Hey, I've got these thousand candidates. Who are the 10 I should interview? Or, I've interviewed these 10 candidates. Who's the one I should hire? The core selection process, I don't think, has really been touched by AI yet much. I think the candidates seem to be using a lot more throughout the resume to do the automatic applications to help with interview prep. Some cases also in the interview itself, I feel like. Probably a bit of fearmongering there. Like, I don't think the average candidate is also using ChatGPT at the same time as trying to do the interview themselves. So it's more like the preparatory work. But I personally feel like our expectations and the standards we're holding AI to are maybe extraordinarily high compared to how we hold humans in the sense that. The way recruitment's currently done is so biased anyway, the way humans do it. To give you an interesting start to a study here in Australia that Sydney Uni did a few years ago, they applied to thousands of different roles around Sydney and Melbourne with different buckets of resumes, with the only difference among the buckets of resumes just being the names. So they're trying to test if there is some kind of bias against people from certain countries. They specifically tested. Chinese-sounding names versus Anglo-Saxon-sounding names. To cut a long story short, they found that if you applied for a job in Australia with a Chinese name, your odds of a callback were only one-third that of an Anglo-Saxon name. All else being equal. And this is three years ago, I think. So it would've been completely human-driven screening. And I've seen similar kinds of studies in other markets testing different subpopulations, and if that's the base case of how rife bias is, it's hard for me to imagine anything other than a disastrous implementation of AI being worse than that. You see what I mean? So I feel like maybe we're comparing AI to some idealized hiring world that doesn't exist, as opposed to the current world, which is so flawed and tedious and slow and manual and biased.

ALLE: Yeah. That's, yeah, a very good point. And that's very interesting. And I think that kind of just goes back to why we spent so much time when we were building out the products to make sure that those biases were not. Accidentally, and I use the word accidentally because they will, they can build out over time without meaning to be in the products because that's not what it was designed for. That's not what we're trying to achieve. We're not trying to; we're trying to make the world better through the use of technology. So we have to be very careful and responsible about how we do that because people will start to rely on it, so it's really important to get it right now.

TIM: Yeah, I agree completely. And maybe it is right that we just have higher standards, because then we'll move the needle or make the new solution better than the current one. And I can also see easily how things could go awry because it could be a. Scenario of, oh, hey, we want to, yes, we want to implement, I don't know, resume screening in our company. Cool. Where's our training data? Oh, let's look at all the resumes we've screened previously and just redo what we're currently doing. If that's the approach, it is bound to just magnify any existing biases that are in place in that particular company. Yeah,

ALLE: Exactly.

TIM: It could get derailed pretty quickly if it's not done right.

ALLE: Absolutely tricky space, but exciting.

TIM: It is exciting because I just see so much upside also, again, if done right, even something as simple as the interview itself. Like, I remember when we were doing interview research only two years ago, speaking to hiring managers about how they conducted interviews. 20% would take notes on paper with a pen. Another 40% use some other tool like a spreadsheet or a Trello board, and it's like all this data is just all over the shop. Like, what I found so interesting is how often there's a disconnect between what the hiring teams are doing versus what the talent and HR teams are doing. And often the HR tech is not necessarily used consistently across the whole company.

ALLE: Absolutely.

TIM: And so yeah, anyway, we have to then even just record the interviews, have them transcribed, and have them summarized. Imagine being able to search over every interview you've ever done for years, matching candidates and this kind of stuff. There's just such a huge upside, I think, for doing this well.

ALLE: Absolutely. I think uniformity and processes throughout interviewing are so important, and you're so right because. Even again, speaking from my own experience, sometimes I'll be on the road, right? So I'm just taking quick notes here, or I'm just writing in my notebook, and sometimes I get sent a spreadsheet, and I use the spreadsheet, but it's not always. The same. Is that always the right process? Probably not. I'm going to go with no. Having that uniform way of interviewing, whether it be the questions, the scoring, the commentary, or even the debrief with a panel. Sometimes it's just down to, okay, I want to respect this person's decision. Okay, fine. They went in that direction. We'll go with them. So yeah, it's a very good point and something I think every organization can do a review of. Do we really have the interview process down perfectly? And I'd argue there's a lot of room for improvement.

TIM: Yeah, a hundred percent. And again, from my experience interviewing, you'll often do them in batches. So you might have, I don't know, 3, 4, or 5 interviews a day if I don't record notes. In or immediately after that interview, honestly, I've forgotten who that person is by the end of the day. If you have 10 different meetings, you're like, who's this candidate again? What were they about? And so there just has to be some way to capture the data in real time at some level, even if it's because I get some people's hesitation to have an AI doing scoring or whatever. But if at the moment the choice is there's no summary, there are no notes, and there's no data at all, surely. An AI summary, even if it's imperfect, even if it's biased, is going to be better than data just evaporating into thin air.

ALLE: Yeah, I'd agree. And it's. Not the deciding factor, but at least it helps remind you of what stood out about the candidate and where some concerns were, and you can follow up on that yourself. But no, I completely agree. I think it could be very helpful in that respect. And the candidates also deserve it, right? You put a lot of work into an interview, and they deserve for us to take the right notes and remember what they said and get back to them in a timely manner and give them feedback. If they weren't successful. So yeah, I completely agree.

TIM: Yes. And. And this comes to another bit of pushback. I would often hear in talent circles about the use of technology in hiring, where there's sometimes almost the starting assumption that it's dehumanizing. Whereas I view it very differently. Obviously very biased in this regard, but what could be more dehumanizing than a process that has no technology, that's so manual that stuff slips through the cracks all the time, and some poor TA is trying to chase around all this manual paper trail in emails and this and this, and then that's how candidates get ghosted? That's how you are late on feedback. So surely anything that enables that, that makes it easier, is actually going to be better for the candidate. More humanizing rather than dehumanizing.

ALLE: Yes, I. Completely agree. The number one thing, when I talk to my friends, colleagues, my husband, or whoever, is the candidate experience, and I think every single organization is guilty of not doing the best they can on getting back to candidates in a timely manner, giving them feedback, and just keeping them in the loop. Okay, there's a hiring freeze going on. Let's just tell them, Hey, it's nothing to do with you. We've just had to freeze the process because we've got our internal stuff going on. You were great, but we'll get back to you. Every little step that we can do along the way just makes such a difference to a candidate. And I keep thinking about how we don't want people to start their first day. Without the best impression, with a bad taste in their mouth, you want them to be coming in, having the whole process feel really supported and welcoming and streamlined. Because if someone doesn't want to work for an organization where they can't even get through the hiring process in a streamlined way, they're probably thinking, Oh gosh, what's it like once I actually get in there? Which may not be the case at all, but it's just you naturally are going to be thinking about those things. So I think that is a very big area of improvement across the board that everyone can do better in. It's something that I think about a lot and try to actively make an effort to do, even if I have to just get the candidates WhatsApp numbers and just send them a message: Hey, look, I'm really sorry it's taking longer than expected; we've just got some internal stuff happening, and we'll let you know. I think that goes a long way.

TIM: It really does. What do they say? No news is. Your news—that's an acceptable update.

ALLE: Yeah, that's right. That's right. They just want to be reassured that they're still in the process or whatever is going on has maybe nothing to do with them. Because it's nerve-wracking out there. And like I said, people put a lot of effort into interviews, so I think that needs to be respected, and at the end of the day, you are trying to convince people to work for your organization.

TIM: Yep.

ALLE: You want to put your best foot forward as much as they're trying to put their best foot forward. So I think we always have to remember that as we go through the process.

TIM: Yes, and I have detected over the past couple of years, maybe in particular, increasing distrust in recruitment, arguably on both sides, probably exacerbated by AI. At some level, where companies are concerned, it's like, is this candidate who they say they are? Are they taking the test themselves, or are they getting help? Does this person have an avatar when I'm doing an interview with them, and then the comp, the candidate's, is this job real? It's a fake job. The posting hasn't been pulled down, the rule being pulled, and I haven't heard back. There's just a lot of, yeah, annoyance and distrust on both sides, which is hard to recover. I think. From that position.

ALLE: agree. And yeah, we have to work really hard to overcome some of those things, like even people thinking, okay, are they just posting it because they have to post on LinkedIn, but they had no intention of going? With anyone external, there are all these things that are running through your mind when you're out there looking for a role. And that can be really difficult if there isn't that communication coming from the talent acquisition team because they're your first point of contact with an organization. You really want that to be a positive experience for candidates so that you know whether they're successful or not, or maybe they'll reconsider coming back and applying for another role. You want them. To feel that, that good experience.

TIM: Yes, and the worst thing would be somehow turning someone who is, let's say, neutral into a detractor. If the process is actually that bad, they're put off your entire brand by that. And that's probably going to be rare. But I don't know. If I applied for a job nowadays and I didn't interview and never heard back at all, I'd be pretty annoyed.

ALLE: Yes. Yes, I would too.

TIM: In fact, I can remember vividly now one job I went for; I, of course, won't name the company. This is, I don't know, 10 years ago. Now, I'm not still bitter about it, but I will mention it. The founder basically said, Hey, 99% of the way there, I definitely want to hire you. Just come in and have a chat with my MD, like his business partner. Drove all the way up to Sydney. It's like a five-hour round trip. Had a chat with him in his office, 10 minutes max. We didn't even talk about work. We spoke about, I remember, Tottenham Hotspur and football, so maybe he was like an Arsenal fan or vice versa. I don't know. Maybe I rubbed him the wrong way, but I did not get that job, and I still don't know why. It's so frustrating, and I can remember this company 10 years later.

ALLE: Yeah. Yeah. And that, you made that effort and you did all those, the right things, and then you never got feedback. That's. It's not a good feeling. It doesn't help you learn. You don't know what you could have improved on. Maybe they had someone else the whole time, and you were just a tick box in the process. It's

TIM: Yep.

ALLE: Important to get that feedback for sure.

TIM: Yeah, exactly. 'Cause otherwise you just don't know, especially that's probably hard at the application stages, isn't it'? Because most of the time you get at best a kind of generic rejection email back, maybe a few weeks after you've applied. But what are you meant to do? Is it? Was there something wrong with the way you pitched yourself? Were you not right for the role? You just left wondering, didn't you?

ALLE: That's right, and I. I would love to see some of the unsuccessful applicants because maybe they'd be right for a future role. And building your talent pipeline when you are not hiring is so important. And that's probably another thing. I think that organizations, and we, I take responsibility for that. Don't always think about enough because you get so busy in day-to-day, and then when a role comes up, you think, Oh gosh, okay, let's start looking at who's in the market and. Who would be suitable for this role? But if you were more efficient and smarter about it, you'd already have an entire talent pipeline ready to go. Hey, look, I remember interviewing this girl. She was fantastic. It didn't work out for the marketing role, but she'd be fantastic for a demand generation role. And you already have these nurtured candidates who have had a positive experience with you. They still want to work for the organization. It makes the hiring process easier because you already have that pipeline ready to go. You've got a much broader pool of candidates than you maybe would if you had those two weeks to just go out and get whoever you could. So I do think that nurturing of the talent pipeline is so critical to avoid those situations.

TIM: I wonder if one of the unlocks here would be then again. Systems where there's like a very comprehensive collection of data where every interview has been recorded, they've been scored perfectly. You could easily go in and search. To your point, here's this new role. Maybe it's automatically searching across all the candidates, automatically doing outreach, and getting them into the next role like that. I feel like with the right quality data, it doesn't seem that complicated to do well.

ALLE: No, absolutely. So many people now have hiring KPIs baked into their role, right? You want to hire faster; you want to make sure you have bums on seats as quickly as possible. That becomes a lot easier if, to your point, you already have this repository of people and skills and information on candidates that you can easily go to. And yeah, I love that idea. Having. A folder of all these candidates and being able to go through and quickly search and see who would meet the requirements of roles coming up.

TIM: Yep. I don't think we should be that far off. Something like that. So you mentioned, yeah, talent pipelining and needing to improve that. If you think holistically, over the past kind of 10 years with the customers you've worked with, are there any recurring hiring process challenges that you saw? Things that companies need to do better on.

ALLE: I think skills is the number one thing that customers always talk to us about. Not having the right skills internally or, then, if they're trying to hire for a role externally, finding those people with those right skills. One of the interesting things as we're building out our skills ontology is. Skills. Not everyone uses the same words, right? For skills. And so being able to take someone's resume who has listed a set of skills and then being able to translate that into understanding and put it in our terminology or the customer's, more importantly, terminology. For talking about Coca-Cola, if we're talking about a big manufacturing company, they're going to use different words. So helping them make that hiring process much easier on the skill side, I know, was a number one thing. And then of course, skilling internally, they were always looking; customers are always looking for ways to be able to upskill their employees more effectively and faster with changing times in technology and with changing times in their industries. So that was another big thing that we really helped them keep on top of so that whether they're hiring, promoting internally, or jobs are changing, they had to be able to adapt to those changing jobs, especially as things like AI come into the fold. So those were really the main topics; those are two of the big main topics that customers were looking at. And that's going to keep going. The skills life journey is never ending. So being able to constantly help customers stay on top of that is really critical.

TIM: Yes, and if I, again, think back to all the conversations I've had with guests. Probably the number one thing they said that they're looking for in candidates is adaptability, willingness and ability to learn new things, maybe because technology is changing so quickly, really a skill set from five years ago. Maybe not redundant" is a bit of a stretch, but I guess it's changing faster than at any time in history. The skills that are needed.

ALLE: Absolutely. It's evolving faster than I've ever seen it evolve before, and I think it's going to continue that way. Late in hearing this quote, but I heard the Sam Altman quote: It's AI that's not going to replace jobs, but it's people who don't understand AI that will be replaced. And I'm maybe paraphrasing a little bit, or I butchered it a bit, but it was, it's interesting, like it's, yeah, it makes sense. It's having to just keep up to date with the evolution of what skills look like today and in the future. My dad just went and did his master's in AI because he just

TIM: Wow.

ALLE: Something I won't give away is his age, years old. He was like, I need to be on the forefront of this. I need to understand what's happening. And

TIM: Yes.

ALLE: I think the reality of what we're doing is that so many organizations now, especially in technology, are offering programs for AI. And there are so many resources available. It's not just about AI, just resources that we have at our fingertips now through AI, actually. We can really learn so much more. I think it's exciting, and it's something that's beneficial to everyone.

TIM: Even in day-to-day life, actually, I found Chachi, PT, and Claude are just great language tutors. You can speak to them in Spanish, Italian, Russian, or whatever. I use it sometimes to take, like, a picture of a book, and I've underlined the words I don't know, and I say, Give me a quiz for these words. Put them into a sentence.

ALLE: Yeah.

TIM: I like a mnemonic, like an easy way to remember a particular word. Just on the spot comes up with that, and it's effectively free. That is pretty staggering. No.

ALLE: Yeah, it's amazing the number of questions I'm putting into my Perplexity app every single day. It's just astounding, and it's just giving me so much information, and it also tells me the sources, which I really like, so you're trusting where the information's coming from. Yeah, there's really no excuse for not teaching ourselves even just day to day in our house and learning new things for sure.

TIM: I even got Che tea to help me out with the plants in the background there. One of them was a little bit sick. I was repotting it, and the soil looked a bit funky. I did the video mode straightaway. Said, Oh, it's a fungus. You need to do X, Y, and Z. Bang, Bob's your uncle. Amazing. tip. I have a plant that's dying outside, okay? Tree I just bought. I'm going to need to, okay?

ALLE: Bring it back to life.

TIM: You find yourself using perplexity more now than even Google. Is that like your standard search engine?

ALLE: A hundred percent. Everything is going into perplexity. I don't even bother with Google, to be honest. Whether it's a cooking recipe or whether it's just any question I have, I am constantly using Perplexity to the point where I'm like, I should probably use my brain a little bit more. Maybe try and search out some stuff. But it's just so easy. It's there at your fingertips.

TIM: Yeah. Is that the danger? Are we offloading too much of the thought process to AI, or does it just solve all these tedious problems for us, and we're going to? Our magical brains are going to focus on bigger issues. I don't know. What do you reckon? Alle Prestipino will not be focusing on these mundane

ALLE: Tasks. Yeah, I think that's, hopefully, the benefit of it. I know, especially when we were building out with SuccessFactors, it was like, okay, let's take away the not sexy, very boring tasks from people. Let's make that so much easier so that you can focus on more strategic things. And that's the hope. That's the goal.

TIM: And I feel like there's going to have to be a mindset shift then with people, like, for example, for software engineers, sometimes they call themselves coders. And so if your whole identity is based on your job for a lot of people, and then their job is literally the name of the task that now the large language model is going to do instead of them, there's going to have to be some shift to say, I'm not a coder, I'm a product developer, or I solve customers problems, or whatever. There's going to be some evolution because if we're stuck at a task level, the way we think about ourselves and that task is now. Done automatically, then we'd be left with an identity crisis potentially.

ALLE: Yeah, that's right. And that's where the human element comes back into it. So you know, when leading a team, obviously then you need to go back and work with your employees to say, okay. We're going to have to go on the journey together. We need to make this transition. Some people will be open to it; some people will not. And how do we just bring people along for the journey and understand that this. becoming a pro, a product manager as opposed to a coder. For me, that sounds so much more exciting because you can talk to customers, and you can go out there and see what they really need. You can see how the product should be fixed. You get to have an input on that. You get a say like me; it's easy for me to say it. Oh, that sounds fantastic. But someone who's wanted to be a coder their whole life, and that's what they love to do, making that transition, going down in front of customers, that could be really scary. I don't want to do that. I don't want to speak to people. I want to sit and do what I'm doing. So that's where the human part of it comes in, and that's not something AI can help us with. We need to go back to our leadership skills and have that empathy for the team and work through that.

TIM: I wonder if, because the shift and the technology have been so vast and quick, surely anyone who's not been living under a rock can see, wow, this is a pretty substantial shift. Like, you'd have to be incredibly stubborn. To completely refuse AI, like I haven't met anyone who hasn't at least dabbled a little bit.

ALLE: Yeah.

TIM: Maybe that's to their advantage, then, that it's easier to come along when there's so much hype and reality at the same time.

ALLE: I think so. I think it's in everyone's faces every day now, and you can go and use it at your fingertips so you can start to understand what it means for you in day-to-day life. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone now is faced with the reality that this is something we need to learn more about. You don't need to know how it works in detail. That was one of the things I used to say to my customers: We don't, and you don't need to know how AI works. No one probably should. It's How does it work for you? How do you use it? Let's not get bogged down in the technical side necessarily. Of course, it's important if you're talking in technical teams, but if you're talking to A-C-H-R-O or whoever. And yeah, so I think it's a new reality we all need to get used to. I don't even think I'm using it as much as I could. To be the fact that you're using it for plants. I didn't even think of that. So now I'm, it's unlimited what we can start using it for in our lives.

TIM: It is exactly. It's unlimited. You're limited by your imagination only. Really? And also, yeah, just because it's changing so quickly. Things that you might have tried a year ago, which is, Oh, that's crap. And now, absolutely. In play'. Because the development is so fast.

ALLE: Definitely. Definitely. My husband even used it to write our wedding vows, which I don't know how I feel about that—not something I thought of, but he, you know, a while there's great, so there you go.

TIM: Okay, so I don't feel so bad now because I sent a gift to my friend who just had a baby, and I'd written the note on it, but I'd asked Chey for a picture after writing the note. I was like, "Give me some feedback, and tidied up a little bit. And so I did edit it slightly, and I thought, oh, does that make it somehow less mine? But the end outcome is all that matters.

ALLE: Okay. Working smarter, not harder. It's

TIM: Yeah. Alle, if you could ask our next guest any question about hiring, what would you ask them?

ALLE: Oh, that's a good question. Ooh. I think I would be curious to see people's perspectives on a couple of things, actually. Maybe the external versus internal hiring—how they see that differently. However they may be, are they open? As open as I am to looking externally, I a hundred percent believe in promoting and internally nurturing your talent. That's without question. Having that external lens as well, I'm curious if that's something others in the market see as well. And I think the other big topic we spoke about that I would assume most people can agree on is how would you also go about improving the hiring process? So back to our conversation. Getting back to candidates in a timely manner, having interviews in a more uniform way, feedback being recorded, and all those sorts of things. How do we almost create, like, an industry-better standard for people moving forward? I'd love to hear other perspectives on that and, together, see how we can improve some of those things.

TIM: They are some great questions, which I'll level at the next couple of guests next week, and I'm really interested to hear what they say. Alle, it's been a great conversation today. Very easy, very smooth. You've offered us some great insights and some great wisdom. So thank you so much for joining us.

ALLE: No worries. Thanks so much for having me.