Episode 46

Jason Samuelsen on AI, Networking and Human Bias in the Modern Hiring Landscape

TIM: Jason Welcome to the objective hiring show. Thank you so much for joining us.

JASON: Of course, yeah, Tim, thank you for having me.

TIM: It's absolutely our pleasure, and Jason, I'd love to start with probably the buzz topic of buzz topics, and that is AI. I think it's changing the world at a fairly alarming rate when you keep up to date with all the changes that are occurring, and I feel like it's worth having a discussion about AI and hiring. Which so far I feel is at a fairly nascent stage based on what I've heard and seen, but I'd love to get your general thoughts on AI and hiring. Have you started to try any tools in any part of the process at all yourself? What are you noticing in terms of candidates using AI? I'd love to just get your general lay of the land.

JASON: Yeah, of course AI is such a hot button topic; everyone's talking about it and how we utilize it and how it's being utilized, and I think the first thing I'll say is it's a tool that speeds up processes naturally, and so a lot of people are utilizing it when it comes to the hiring process because what a lot of people have the opportunity to do now is be able to apply to a bunch of jobs as quickly as possible, and they don't need to revamp their resume so many times. You can drop in to AI: Here's my resume. Here's my resume and a job description. Let's make these two things aligned, and then they can apply to so many more jobs, and I think that's one that's a big challenge for people on the hiring side because I've opened up listings in the past, and we've had 700 people apply, and it's impossible to go through all those resumes. but secondarily it's inauthentic in a way that the people that you're going through because you're really looking at a bunch of resumes that almost sound similar in ways and are taking a couple of different data points from whatever their resume had originally and shifting that towards sounding a little bit better for you, and it does beg the question even entirely: are resumes even a really valuable way to have that first step of the process when it comes to hiring? And so I think in so many ways it's funny because you'll say, or somebody will say, Let's include more AI in the system in the process to then combat AI, and instead it's like AI on AI violence, if you will, or war, when at the same time there's probably a better way for us to look at the hiring process in general, especially given what happened in the summer here where we had a lot of challenges, a lot of people looking for jobs in the United States, at least in the market, slowed down drastically in that sense.

TIM: Yeah, it's such a difficult situation, and it'd be fascinating to see how this plays out because from a candidate's perspective, especially if you're out of work, there's a sense of like, I need a job, and they're probably looking at these job boards going, Oh wow, this role already has a thousand applicants. Oh my god, I'm going to have to apply it to probably 10 times the number of roles I thought I would have to based on a typical kind of conversion rate. So they're applying en masse using these tools, and it's this vicious cycle where now they're using the same tools, which means they're standing out less, which is the polar opposite of what they probably want to achieve. And companies, as you say, are going to have to combat this with some level of automation because who can read a thousand CVs? It's literally impossible. Where is this going to land in the next few months, I wonder?

JASON: Yeah, I think that's the interesting question. I don't know where it lands in the next few months necessarily, but looking even just in the long term, the long-term nature of it, I think when you see a lot of companies doing to combat this is you're not having as many people that are cold applying for roles. I've seen this a lot in my experience: where anyone gets a job now, it comes from knowing someone on the inside. It's a referral of some sort. You get introduced some way; you'll reach out on LinkedIn, whatever it is, and that Sure, that may seem like it works, right? It's a warm and fuzzy feeling because it's someone, and it feels so much more close, and these companies will hire these people, but then somebody will come in, and they won't have any of the skills for the job because they were able to politic their way into a position that they might not have the credibility for in the end. and they had a unique advantage over a bunch of applicants, and to your right, to your point, there are all these postings where people are just throwing in as many resumes as possible, but I don't think traditional job boards really have a place in this kind of new age of what hiring looks like. and so I think a solution is needed, of course, and there's just a natural threat that comes from what we're doing currently.

TIM: Yeah, it's such an interesting point you make around, I guess, it's almost a reframing. Candidates might think, Yeah, I could fight it out with another thousand chachapiti-optimized CVs in the mass war of the online job portal, or if I were clever, I could use my networks, but yeah, an angle I haven't thought about was the fact that if you do backdoor it, backchannel your way in, yeah, you're probably not going through the same process as the candidates who are coming in through the job board system. That's a really interesting angle, so then we might see some kind of quality issues, maybe unless companies put those inbounds or those kinds of behind-the-scenes candidates through the same process as everyone else. Maybe that's the way to solve that. I'm not sure.

JASON: Yeah, I think no matter what, they have a little bit of an unfair advantage, and I think it speaks to, on a macro level, probably more of our overreliance on people's soft skills inside of interviewing, and some people are really good at interviewing, and I've seen this play out across my career in multiple ways, but you'll see that one person that you worked with and you're like, Yeah, this person is not a very high performer. I don't really enjoy the work that they're doing for us, this and that, and then they'll end up leaving your company and getting a promotion in a way, and you wonder, How did they end up taking a step forward when it felt like when they were here they were going to take a step back? and so I think it's the whole hiring process now, especially as we get into a more technical workforce, right where a lot of skills, a lot of jobs, require some sort of hard skills. They still are heavily reliant on the soft skills that will propel somebody in an interview, and those are the people that will consistently get jobs and convert into new jobs. while someone who's just not as personable, not as spoken, will get looked past and in the end is probably your best ROI for a company in terms of who you'd want to hire

TIM: That's such a great take, and I hadn't thought of that, so we're now almost going to set the process up to select for more of a high soft skills, good networking, polished performer over maybe the slightly more introverted, a little more awkward, but nonetheless more technically gifted candidates. That's really interesting. What about then, if we think about it from the candidate's perspective? Is there any practical advice you would be giving right now? Imagine if you were starting your career now; how would you approach the job search? Would it be different from how you actually did it?

JASON: I don't think it'd be incredibly different than how I went about it because of the overreliance on these factors we're talking about, the need to be able to network well and do all these things when it comes to someone in the data space in which I'm operating. Obviously, it's I think it's really challenging because when I first started my career, I really heavily focused on getting the certifications I needed, getting trained up, and being proficient in all of these different skill sets to allow me to be diverse enough that I could fit into a lot of different roles, which I think is important early in your career. Especially if you do go due to college or something of that nature, you're just young in general, getting internships and getting that experience, so you just have you're building up some sort of resume because there's a ton of credibility, obviously, that comes with that, and the joke now being that there's no such thing as an entry-level job because every coordinator role out there asks for two to three years of experience. So you have to do that work ahead of time. I think that's one of the biggest things I would call out, but then you just have to network, and you have to make friends; you have to friend-raise, and I think that's, again, really challenging if you're someone who's not very good at that, but you could be an incredibly technical and talented individual. and you have to just play at a disadvantage in that sense, and you have to still learn how to go out and meet those people, whether it's in person or even just on LinkedIn, via email, or via calls, whatever it is.

TIM: And I would have thought for the current generation of, let's say, early twenties people, they may already be at a systemic deficit of those skills or networks because they were at college during COVID, or they started their career during COVID during lockdowns, which surely must have limited their ability to make new friends and build those networks. because it's obviously a lot easier to do that in person, so almost like that cohort should be over-adjusting maybe and doing an extra level of networking now to make up for the ones they might have missed out on compared to another cohort.

JASON: Yeah, and I'm not sure where exactly the fault lies in terms of that because when I speak to people in the younger generation, Gen Z is the term that everyone blankets over that group, but they are entering the workforce, and you're right, they do lack an ability to network as well. and at times I don't think it's because they're not social enough. Let's say that's the argument that's been made about how COVID has affected development in terms of sociability and how the internet and social media have, as a fact, I will still get a chance to meet these people in person wherever it may be. and I think there's a lack of even training on what is needed to be asked and how you need to care about people and how you need to take the actions you need to really learn about someone else's job because I've had plenty of times where I've been networking with people and meeting different people of the younger generation, and they just tend to view it as being very transactional at this point. and maybe it's because the system hasn't worked out well for them, so they're really, instead of nurturing relationships and learning more about what people do, it tends to be Hey, do you have a job opening at your place? Can you refer me, or do you know someone that does? In the end, from my perspective, I don't necessarily want to just refer you to a job. I don't know anything about you. I don't know if you're even interested in my work, and so I think that's a really interesting thing about the younger generation, and maybe this is just any generation; it's just that we always tend to target the ones that are younger than us, but there's a lot of opportunities for them there. and the ones that do it really stand out, I think, and have more opportunities come their way because of it.

TIM: Let's put this in like an online context now because I feel like we've all been the recipient of fairly ham-fisted outreach from people on LinkedIn wanting something from us, and again I'd like to, because I feel like there's a level of nuance here that if we don't discuss specific examples, people could get the wrong end of the stick. So what I would say is that a not effective way to try to do this is you need a job right now; you're going to bomb 50 people who you think are hiring a role and send them a CV that's generic in a LinkedIn message. Don't even include their name; half the time your CV is irrelevant, and you do that in a very mass, spammy way that is not going to resonate. That is a bad way to do it. No one is going to help you if you do it that way, but if you were to have a longer-term focus and you're building these relationships over years that are of mutual benefit and aren't transactional, That's what people really mean when they talk about networking. They don't mean weaseling your way in at the last moment in a way that is not going to help the person who you're reaching out to. Is that a fair summary, do you think?

JASON: It is indeed. It is indeed, and I think being genuine is super important and being cognizant of the fact that you usually are, in these cases, early in your career, and you don't really know a lot about the industry or the space or what people do, even myself, who's been working in the space for 10 years now, still can learn something new from every interaction. So there's no single person out there that you can't talk to that can teach you something, and I think in a lot of ways, when you just ask genuine questions, learn about things, critically think, and listen while you're in these conversations, a lot of people will offer to help you in some ways. So I think that's another important way to look at it: to your point, yeah, just forcing it through doesn't feel very human; in the end, people get turned off by that, and so how can you just listen, look for opportunities, and just be trying to grow in terms of your knowledge about any industry, any person, etc.?

TIM: I'd like to share a personal example of this, actually, so when I was starting my business, a Luber, about five years ago, the first thing I wanted to do was just understand if we were on the right track with our idea, some kind of validation of how I thought about the hiring process and what I thought the problems were. And so I reached out to data leaders in Sydney, where I live, and also Melbourne, where I could easily get to. I just asked them for coffee, and it was amazing how many were receptive to just a good, genuine coffee. I wasn't going there, and suddenly trying to flog them something I wasn't doing a bait and switch I was just having a conversation with them about themselves, how they hired, how they thought about people, all those kinds of things, and there was no ask, but as you say, like lots of people will try to help you; they'll be like, Oh, you should also speak to so-and-so; put you in touch with them. I've been even asked for that, but they're happy to do it. I think a lot of the time if you have a genuine conversation, you're not going in there in a transactional mindset; you're not overreaching; you're offering some value in exchange. Like, at least it's a reasonable conversation you're having, and so I feel like, yeah, if candidates, I mean, of any cohort, but maybe particularly the younger cohort, realized the longer-term nature of it, and maybe the less direct, less transactional viewpoint that might help them a lot, I reckon

JASON: Yeah, I agree. This is now so off topic, but there's the three degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? Every actor is somehow three degrees away from Kevin Bacon. It was a whole joke. There's a website with all this stuff, but you're always three degrees away from the person that can get you the job. and you have to remember that the person you're talking to isn't always going to be the one, but they typically know someone else in the space; they typically know another company; they've worked in a handful of places, and in most cases they can connect you to someone else who can connect you to somebody else. It's work, certainly it's effort, and it takes a lot of that, but I think showing up really authentically and just saying, Hey, I'm here to learn. I want to learn more about this. Where have you worked in the past? Who have you worked with in the past that does know about that? People want to help people. It's a natural thing, so yeah, I would highly recommend anybody to take that advice.

TIM: And if I were a young data candidate, let's say myself 12 years ago or whatever, and I was trying to get into the data field, maybe I had just done a degree in data science or something, and I was trying to land my first role, I was reasonably introverted; like, I wasn't the life of the party or whatever. I feel like now a skill set that I have that I didn't have then that would be tremendously helpful would be a bit of hustle, a bit of just willingness to make an ask, a willingness to cold email or cold call or cold LinkedIn message someone in a targeted, precise, careful manner to have that coffee, to have that initial chat, whatever it is that right now I think would separate candidates, because although we've all been bombed on LinkedIn with a generic CV, I have rarely received personalized outreach about a specific role we have open with a candidate who fit that role and a clear description of why they wanted to work for us. If all you were doing was writing, I think just well-crafted emails or outreach messages for a list of 10 target roles that you're open to, I feel like your odds right now in this market would actually be pretty good because that channel isn't decimated at all in the way that the online job boards are. What do you think?

JASON: You're 100 percent right. We, and even in practice, this works. My company, STN Digital, had a freelance position for social media analysts, and we put it out on our job boards, but we also, a bunch of us in the company, had posted Hey, if you're looking for this type of role, if you have a skill set And I ended up having a really good amount of inbound that every single person that messaged me in the end, maybe outside of one, we put into an interview. And when you're talking about that 800 candidates, that's a lot; that increases your conversion rate or your conversion chance a lot, and I think in the end, no matter how you want to tell it to yourself, a lot of these job boards now have, by default, 800 people, whether they're bots or whatever; they just hit that number regardless. And so, to your point, how do you stand out? Just because even I try to go through every single resume to provide that due diligence, but just taking that one extra step and doing something that's a little bit out of your comfort zone, frankly, but having to remind yourself what's the worst that can happen here, is really important. And so I think doing that is table stakes in a lot of ways to this whole process.

TIM: If I were a candidate now thinking about it, I would figure out what an entry-level sales development rep does because the skills and the problem are identical. Like, you're going to have to do some account-based research to know, Here's the 10 companies I'm most interested in working for. You have to go into those companies and figure out who are maybe one or two people that you feel like you could get a meeting with that might be first-order connections, or, as you say, second-order connections—who do I know? who knows someone is what is working there and then crafting some kind of specific message to what is only a set of about 20 people in a nice, obviously non-automated, non-AI bullshit way, and I feel like if you were to do that consistently and track all that—by the way, there's a tool that allows you to scale this, like Apollo is a tool where you can get contact information of anyone. You can send emails for free. I think on the entry-level plan it's not like this is inaccessible; you can get ChatGPT to help craft your message a little bit, but just a little bit. Don't copy and paste it like that kind of approach; I think it would be really helpful and would land quite well, I would have thought.

JASON: Of course, and if you want to take that even one step further, the biggest thing when we talk about marketing, right? I'm in the marketing space; you want to, one, make the barrier to entry incredibly low and make it really easy for people to engage with, so you don't want to, if you're going to message someone, let's say you're not going to send them three paragraphs because in the end they'll look at it and they won't even read two words. They'll just go, This is too much to read; I'm out. If you could put a sentence in there, you have a much higher chance—one or two sentences—but then also how can you provide value of some sort? And that's a big thing that we even do when we're trying to reach out to other companies, new companies: we will try to find ways to provide them with value. and I think there's a very similar opportunity, right? And I've talked to freelancers in the past who have reached out to me and then said, Hey, I wanted to be able to share this project I worked on with you. I thought you'd find it very interesting; you're in the same space, and that kind of stuff goes a really long way because that's something you don't get—you don't see a lot of, and people tend to put the ask in right away, and they say, Hey, I'd love to hop on a call, or I would love to have a job with you, or whatever it is, but instead find that way to say, Hey, I'm going to help you out. and then do you mind helping me out a little bit after that? I think that resonates a lot more with people, as they then feel like they owe you one, for lack of a better word.

TIM: Yeah, great suggestions there. Try to add value; try to make it reciprocal and as untransactional as you can possibly make it. Fair enough; I think if you're a candidate, you need a job; you're out of a job; there's always going to be this sense of desperation and just needing to get to the point, so I completely understand it. and when I was a graduate, I would have been exactly the same, but to the extent that you have a slightly longer-term horizon, I think it's going to be to your massive advantage. I would have thought, what about now in terms of hiring? So we've just painted this slightly bleak picture of the inbound funnel of candidates and dealing with this volume of CVs, a volume of increasingly similar-looking CVs that have been optimized, quote-unquote, by ChatGPT, where now the CV seems to deviate more from reality than it ever has in the past. That's the kind of vibe I'm getting, and it was never that close to reality anyway, but now it's been hallucinated, which is the polite way of saying it's got more bullshit on it, and that kind of screening step seems a little bit broken. What is going to replace that now, do you think? because it's just going to be so inaccurate to do screening based on a CV and application data. What are your thoughts?

JASON: Yeah, you paint a picture perfectly there, Tim. The challenge is there's just so much, so much intake, so much to look at, and again, even if you do find the right person, even if you do find the right person, your chances of actually being able to discern who has the skill sets right outside of just who's good at interviewing are all certainly challenges for any role, but especially when it comes to data roles, where it's an incredibly technical endeavor. So something that we try to do is try to have some sort of working interview, right? And that's not uncommon for a lot of these companies, but the challenge is if someone's interviewing for 10 jobs and everybody gives them a working interview and says, Showcase your skills; give us an idea of what you can do within the context of this industry, One, a lot of people hate those because, in the end, as a candidate, you don't like giving away free work, right? That's an issue to begin with, and then now you have to do 10 of them maybe, and so you're going Maybe half-ass most of them, or you're going to only work on the ones that you really enjoy or really care about for the certain companies. and there are ones you're going to halfway do, and that's a threat naturally for both. It's a threat for a lot of reasons, but I think having some sort of way of showcasing your skillsets to these companies in a manageable way, an easy way, a certifiable way, is super important. and I think it's taking the idea of all these certifications that everyone puts on their LinkedIn, all these badges that everyone's always updating. Hey, I just finished my Tableau beginner course, and now I can use Tableau. I think a more verifiable version of that is the path forward because without it we're just guessing a lot of the time, and in the end, it's back to the same old and we just are hiring people without knowing that they actually have the skills to compete in that industry.

TIM: Yeah, I feel like that's a root cause of a lot of the problems in hiring: at a few stages we just have to take the candidate's word for it. We've got their CV; they said X, and we have to assume they're not lying at that point, and I feel like also your more traditional behavioral style interviews that are more like, Tell me an example of this. give me an example of that also lends itself to a cunning candidate who talks a big game Who's very extroverted, who's charismatic, kind of glossing over the reality of what they did or didn't do, and without that validation step to know, Hang on, no, let's measure something like what exactly have you done here? which maybe if you're a really sharp interviewer and you start digging into the specific details of what they said they've accomplished, you can probably unlock a bit of that, but it's still not that measurable, and it's certainly not scalable, which is the challenge, so

JASON: Yeah, yeah, and I think that's one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to people when they share their resume with me. That's not an uncommon thing for me to do; I'll ask someone Hey, I see your resume. I want to just see what you're doing in the job hunt to understand what you're doing and how you're going to attract these people. That's how important the resume is, and the one thing people don't do enough of is quantify their abilities on a resume. Right? They'll put in Created dashboards for marketing optimization, and I always ask them, like, How many dashboards did you create, and did they improve marketing optimization? So you can quantify this in a couple of different ways, whether it's the actual labor, like the time it took to do the labor, the amount of output you had, the benefit to the company that the project did, and all of those things. One, they're fudgable in a way. You can make that up the way you talk about it right now, the same way as an interview and the same way how resumes are currently being manipulated in a lot of ways to fit into the round hole when it may be a square peg. Instead, having a tool that would actually verify those types of things, and obviously it's tough to verify if someone had a certain business impact, but when it comes to some of these skills, being able to truly showcase that you can do SQL is something that everyone's going to put on their resume: proficient in SQL, expert in SQL, all this stuff. and when I've been on plenty of interviews, they say right out of one out of ten How good are you at SQL? My answer usually always is, I think I know enough to know I'm not that good at it and that in this world there's an infinite ability to be good at this thing, so if someone tells you 10, they probably know very little. and there's a little bit of Dunning-Kruger effect that's happening if you're familiar at all, and so I think for all those reasons it's so hard to just trust the word of someone you're interviewing because in the end they might not even know how good they are because they know so little about something.

TIM: That's a great call to Dunning Kruger, and I'd like to share a data set that speaks a little bit to this, so on our products, where we test people's skills before they start the test, we ask them that very question: How do you rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 in this skill? And so what we do is after they've completed a test, we come up with a self-awareness map. that compares their perceived skills to their actual skills, and yes, on average, people overestimate their skills in some cases quite a lot, and so that Dunning-Kruger effect is, from what we can tell, definitely there in spades, and I'd seen this myself as an interviewer earlier in my career. I would typically start my interviews like that, going through a section by section some SQL questions. some stats questions I'd ask them, Okay, how do you rate yourself? If any candidate ever said 10, I'd be like, Okay, let's go for this. You're 10. You're perfect in this skill, and it was so common. How often, let's say in SQL, they'd say 10 out of 10, and I'd say, Okay, let's warm up. What's the difference between a left join and an inner join? If anyone's listening to this SQL that's like 0 1 lesson, all right, and they would fumble over that, and I'd be thinking, okay, you maybe don't have the full grasp of your capabilities, and that is the central problem of the screening step in hiring, I think, is that we're just taking the candidate's word for it. We're relying on what they say, and people do not have perfect self-awareness or anything close to that, unfortunately.

JASON: and what the alternative is that you can have these sorts of moments like I had in one of my interviews a long way back where I was interviewing for an analyst-type role at a company, and they said SQL. I said I answered the same way. I don't know what I don't know, but I think I'm proficient in SQL based on my experience. I'm a little bit new to this, and they go, Okay, let's just have you solve some SQL problems, and live, the person was asking me to read out what the SQL I would write for a project was, and it was so interesting, so I was like, I don't really know; I don't really know your data warehouse. I don't really know. I know very little about how you've had this all set up, and so these problems were complex in nature but also so different than the way that anybody would truly do them. No one's ever had to read aloud how they would write a formula in that sense or write that language. and so another example of there's not really a good way to replicate in an easy way and a scalable way the skills that are needed to really excel in a job, and that's where our whole system is flawed for the more technical positions, and data is full of them.

TIM: It's not only flawed for some of those technical evaluations, which are a bit more objective but certainly hard to do in an interview, hard or impossible, because you just say it's not really replicating how you would do it in the job, but I feel like the even grayer, even more subjective area is then once we start getting into softer skills and also cultural fit. I'd love to get your thoughts on this, like how much do you value cultural fit during the hiring process? How do you think about it? How do you evaluate it? What are your general thoughts on that aspect of hiring?

JASON: Yeah, it's a really good question, Tim, because I think when it comes to the companies that I've worked for, generally, we are in social media; we are typically younger companies, right? Working in social media and marketing is usually a younger person's endeavor in a lot of ways, and there's also a lot of when it comes to the culture you're working I've worked in sports entertainment for the last eight years now, and so there's culturally the idea that you never quite know the work you're going to be doing because you're reacting to a story that hasn't been told yet from a marketing perspective, right? A lot of people in the marketing world can kind of plan out their year, whereas if you work for a sports team, you'd really have no idea what's about to come, and for all those reasons, culture is important in some of those facets, right? To ensure that someone feels comfortable at the company, and for me personally, it's more about how they respond to our culture compared to trying to take a guess at how they might fit into it. In a lot of ways, I think one of the things that I see happen most often, though, is that people—and this is a similar vein, but it'll be a little bit different than your question initially—people, like subconsciously, like to hire people that are similar to them, and they don't really realize it. but the qualities that you probably admire in someone or qualities that you have in yourself a little bit, and so I find so often I've seen that so many companies there's a lot of skill stacking, as I like to call it, where you hire the same person that has all the same skills as you do in a position directly below you. and you don't even really realize it when you're doing this, but if your strengths are specifically in data visualization, specifically in speaking to clients, all this stuff, people will go and hire the same exact person, and then there's a lot of clash that happens because you're not filling strengths in areas that you don't have and it's actually really hard for someone to be able to maybe look past what strengths they had and why they were successful and say someone else could be as successful as I am with a totally different skill set and a totally different mindset on how they work, and if we were to have that diversity in thought diversity and skill set, we'd probably have a lot more success as well as we're able to fill in for each other's gaps. and so I think the same idea applies to culture, but just in general I see that happening so often.

TIM: I feel like a way to combat this and a lot of other similar challenges in hiring is to, before you start hiring Really think in detail about what exactly you're looking for in a candidate and why, because I feel like then once you've had this discussion, you'd unpack a lot of these things, and some of these biases might come to the fore. So you might say, Oh, we need someone who's got a lot of hustle, maybe as you say, because that's one of your characteristic traits. It could be. Oh, we want someone who's the life of the party or whatever, and that again would indicate a certain type of thing, and I feel like if we just had these initial discussions and kicked around the ball until we agree exactly what we're looking for on paper from the get-go. I feel like that would help steer the direction of the hiring to a lot more likely successful outcome. What do you think?

JASON: right I agree, and I think the biggest thing is being able to have, in some way, how does it be quantifiable or at least measurable in some capacity, and so that you're not creating, like, a persona, if you will, and you're looking for a certain person or a specific person. Instead, you're able to say we want someone who's more extroverted. We need someone who likes doing routine tasks, though, and doing kind of the same thing every day—that'd be a big part of this role. We need someone who's more of a logical problem solver than a creative problem solver. Those kinds of things, you can maybe tough to directly quantify it. You can measure in some capacity and then understand how all those pieces play into who you hire because, yeah, you go into interviews, and you have maybe five different people interviewing all these different people, and to your point, if you're not aligned on the intent of the intent, the end product of who you want to be hiring is you end up leaning on so many more of those soft skills and just looking at, Yeah, that person was pretty cool. They were also from the state of Ohio, and that was neat because they just got a chance to, and then none of that None of that good comparison that you really can do on when we went into this, though we really said we wanted this type of person, and we even had the chance to test them on that or had the chance to do something that was again like a control, if you will, because interviews, it's impossible to make them all the exact same enough to really be able to directly compare the two and say this candidate is quantifiably better than this candidate.

TIM: Yeah, I'm laughing because I've certainly seen how quickly hiring processes can get derailed when everyone's not on the same page, and so typically, you know, having more people's opinions would be pitched as a benefit, so having more rounds gets a slightly wider diversity of views of a candidate, which is fair enough, but it's certainly got a limit, especially if later-stage interviewers weren't part of the initial discussion about what exactly you're looking for. If everyone isn't laser-focused on these 10 criteria we're after in this candidate, be it technical or soft skills, inevitably they'll end up introducing their own. They'll go for a pub test or a coffee chat or a vibe check, and they'll just vibe the shit out of it, and either they'll like the person or they won't for millions of things in the back of their head. unless you're just sticking to those criteria, it's amazing how quickly extra things come up that sound fine. I think the tricky thing about them is you could have an interviewer who's come out and goes Yeah, they were good, but I just don't think they'll fit in here. It's hard to combat that unless you really dig in and unpack what you mean they won't fit in here. What exactly was it? Oh, I felt like they weren't really communicating that well how they were too succinct in their answers or too verbose or whatever, and suddenly you discover this new specific criteria that they were secretly looking for they might not have even realized, and so unless you have all this written down on paper to begin with, it's just amazing how quickly a very good candidate could be rejected almost arbitrarily by someone in the process.

JASON: Right, and naturally the ways that we have the biases that we have are a real threat to a lot of companies too who are trying to obviously, as we go into later years, are trying to excel in diversity, equity, and inclusion, find people that are nearly diverse, and create a really diverse workforce because it does benefit an organization to have different trains of thought. But naturally we want to hire people that are very similar to us, as we get along with them, and that's, in the end, what you're doing in an interview: trying to find who you get along with the most in most cases, and that's just a recipe for disaster for a lot of companies. So how can you combat that so that never becomes something that you have to worry about, that you're just hiring 15 or 20 of the exact same person? and then when a new challenge comes around that you guys haven't had the chance to solve yet, you don't really have anyone that can go and tackle it because you're really overloaded on maybe one or two skills.

TIM: is a way to combat this to have even those cultural fit interviews still measured in some way, so let's say there's, I don't know, four values you're looking for in a candidate; you've got maybe a question or two that are designed to evaluate that value; you could still score a candidate on a scale of one to five or whatever. And you could still, even if it's subjective, it's still down to your opinion; you're still introducing your biases, but surely that approach will be better than just getting to the end of it and doing the yeah, the vibe feelings evaluation, as I call it.

JASON: I think any way that you can make the interview process more three-dimensional or two-dimensional, what do you want to say? So there's more opportunities for comparison and more opportunities for analysis. I think it's valuable, and people that will listen to this obviously work in the data space, and so they want to be able to have some kind of number on a screen that you can look at in the end, but that's something that we do personally; we have a tool. We're able to quiz our applicants and be able to understand where they stand from some of those key metrics for us, and before the job even gets posted, we can go in and say, Hey, this is where we want this person to be; this is the type of archetype we want from this new hire. and we tend to find that we'll actually hire people outside of that, which is us naturally not following our own advice in a way of like we know what the skills this person needs to have are, but then we, our own biases, take someone and make them go a lot farther than they want, and I've even been on interview processes where we're looking for a certain type of person with certain skill sets. and I've excelled at someone saying this person might not have the credibility, but they're really a good communicator; they're good at this and that, and I've even tried to quantify things in a spreadsheet to the rest of the hiring team and say, Here are my scores for each of these seven metrics of one's experience. one's management one's communication whatever things that are core values for us and then later that person becomes a favorite, and I'm like, Guys, don't forget this person has almost no experience in this space. They were, in my mind, someone that was lesser on the first interview, and so for all of those reasons, there are just so many threats from the telephone game that you play between interviews and the ways that everyone can compare somebody and just how people start talking about it. It's crazy to think that a lot of people end up getting jobs or don't get jobs because of maybe one comment that's made either during the interview or entirely out of their control just because a group of people did a group interview and they just say, I don't know how I felt about that person. and then everyone goes, Yeah, I guess that's a negative, and we don't like them now, and we're going to go with this other more popular pick, and it's wild to see how that dice can roll sometimes.

TIM: Yeah, absolutely. I can think of a recent example of a candidate who we presented to a client, and one of the feedback from one of the interviews was, Oh, are they overconfident in their abilities? and so this carriage, this moniker, was carried around with this candidate through the whole process. and the origin of it was just one specific comment they'd made in one interview where they rated their sequel skills very highly, like they'd given themselves a nine out of ten. And that was perceived by the interviewer as, Oh, they must be delusional. I can't teach them; they're overconfident. And so it's this massive extrapolation of one tiny comment that then the candidate could basically come back from no matter how much I would try to reframe the problem, and then they're ever confident. Let's dismiss them because obviously they're dead to us now, you know.

JASON: Yeah.

TIM: It's really not fair at all.

JASON: It's so true, and when we've had interviews, they are so competitive, especially now, especially for any job that a big company is going to be putting together, and I think that's what kills it: you have the opportunity for something like that to happen, and it seems like such a problem for people that are interviewing. and that's why people get locked up, and they're going into interviews, and they're nervous, and they're scared. And that sucks; that really sucks for a lot of people out there who might not have the abilities to really command a room, for example, or get on a call and be able to wow the person on the other side with conversation, but that's not a huge portion of the population who are good at their jobs, who really excel at their jobs. And so there's this interesting phenomenon, I think, where the people that probably get the best opportunities are the ones that can communicate well, but then they're not always the best at the job, but they get put in the opportunities to then get more experience to become better, and it's unfortunate for the hiring process, obviously, for the candidates that don't get that good glance, but then it sucks for the companies too, and that's a huge problem. problem for them also because then they're bringing in talent that doesn't like the job, doesn't want to stay there, and ends up just not enjoying the work and ends up leaving early, and they're like, Great, now we got to spend however much money to find the next talent, and that costs the business as it costs the HR department. And it just takes a toll on your staff, right? And then you might lose other talent, so there are so many downstream effects of hiring the wrong person, especially in these types of roles, that you would hope there's some sort of system that we can build around and create a better solution for hiring.

TIM: Yeah, I'll tell you right now, Jason. I'm of the view that hiring is broken and that humans on average do more harm than good. I feel like we are within six to 12 months of some kind of solution to 100 percent automate all the evaluations of candidates at every stage because of lots of these reasons we've discussed that I think are just unsolvable, like no matter how much training you have, no matter how conscious you are of some of your biases, there's a thousand other ones you're not thinking about, and it's just that sometimes I think hiring can fail in a thousand different ways. and a lot of them are just because of ineffective decision-making, and so I wonder if we're on the precipice of a complete shift. Can you imagine that happening, or do you feel like there's still a value to that kind of gut feel intuition that an AI is nowhere near solving?

JASON: I think it has to be in a lot of ways. I think without it, I think here's a better way to say it in the United States, at least where the way that we would look at it is that if you're able to be more innovative and take an advantage in this space, you could see huge benefits to your organization. and I think that's where we're at right now. It's not as if there's going to be some sweeping mandate that's going to change the way everyone does this overnight, but the ones that do it, the ones that adopt early right now and find ways to innovate and find ways to acquire talent at a lesser cost because they're able to not have to do it as frequently They're able to identify people easier; they're able to spend less man-hours internally on it. Those companies are going to have the biggest advantage, and you're going to see that. In so many ways, but yes, I would say that those kinds of changes will happen in the next six to 12 months where companies will be asking how can we take a leg up because no longer in tech, for example, in tech, for so long they were hiring as many people as they possibly could. And now we've seen massive layoffs at a lot of these companies, and so no longer is the plan just to hire 70 people and keep 10 of them; they're going to have to start saying every one of these hires is gold to us, and we have to make sure that we retain them and keep them, or else there's going to be a real breach of trust between that industry alone and the people that might apply for it. because they might just say, I don't want to get laid off, so I'm not going to even apply, and you lose out on this really great talent. I think there's going to be massive changes in the near future.

TIM: I completely agree, and I for one embrace our future AI overlords, and I think it's an exciting time to be alive. Jason, it's been an interesting and engaging conversation today. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights with us.

JASON: Yeah, thank you, Tim. I appreciate it.