Episode 94

Eveline Smet on Evaluating Growth Mindset, Cultural Fit and Remote Hiring in the Age of AI

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show with Eveline. Eveline, thank you so much for joining us today.

EVELINE: Nice to be here, Tim. Thanks for inviting me.

TIM: It's absolutely our pleasure. And it would be great to start with getting a bit of an introduction about yourself. Who are we talking to today? Who's our audience listening to?

EVELINE: All right. So my name is Eveline Smet, originally from Belgium. I'm the founder and CEO of The Growth Agency. We're a fairly small digital marketing agency, really focused on data-driven marketing. So we're six people at the moment, all working remotely. throughout Europe. We have people in Indonesia in Dubai as well. So, a very distributed team, and we're working mostly for bigger corporates, mostly listed companies. And we're helping them with everything related to data-driven marketing, from performance campaigns to analytics implementation, conversion rate optimization, website building, et cetera, et cetera. So quite a full service there. I'm currently living in Spain, also a digital nomad, a remote worker. And yeah, I think that's a little bit it.

TIM: Wonderful. And yeah, Spain's on my bucket list. I haven't been there since I was 18. And I know they've got a great digital nomad visa recently, I think, as well. So it's quite friendly towards digital nomads.

EVELINE: Yeah, definitely. A lot of international people are coming here. The lifestyle is just great, but you're from Australia, right? I think—I don't know if you're on the coast or not—but I think the lifestyle must be pretty good there as well.

TIM: Yeah, normally I'm in Sydney, so not too far from the coast. So yeah, that's a beautiful bit of the world for sure. But Spain's got better football, I'd say, so that's more my interest in going there.

EVELINE: Yeah, for sure. I know, I don't know a lot about football, but I've never heard of Australian football teams. Sorry about that.

TIM: I don't blame you at all. What I'd love to start with today is understanding how you view your role. In hiring as a CEO, typically we'll be talking to hiring managers who have a view of their team, or maybe a talent acquisition person is viewing it from that perspective. But I'd love to have your view of what your role is. What are you looking for? And what's your bit of the hiring process?

EVELINE: Yeah. Since we're a fairly small company, I have quite a big role in the hiring process. So I always work together with a unit manager, depending on what kind of person we're looking for, to come up with a job description, et cetera, a little bit of an overview of who we're looking for. And then throughout the screening process as well, I'll be quite present, having usually the second or the third interview with the candidate and really assessing mostly their soft skills, I would say. If it's a data specialist that we're looking for, obviously the head of data will do the hard skills assessment, and I will be looking more at what's the cultural fit in the team. Does a person have a growth mindset? What kind of successes did they have in the past? How do they speak about their past experience? Are they curious? Are they quick learners? So those would be the kind of things that I would assess during an interview. And then we usually give a person at that stage a real business case to work on. And I will also be assisting in the assessment of that business case. That is made. So quite, quite a big role in the hiring process, and I really like it that way. I've hired maybe throughout my career of, let's say, 15 years, maybe. Around a hundred marketers and data specialists. So I would say I'm quite experienced in that. I made a lot of bad hires as well, especially in the beginning of my career. So I have a little bit of a hunch for finding a good candidate. Yeah.

TIM: That's a really interesting insight that I'd love to delve into. So if you could cast your mind back to the start of your career, when maybe your hiring accuracy wasn't as high as it is now, what's been the main change to your approach or philosophy to improve the way that you hire?

EVELINE: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think definitely going from, let's say, a freelancer and a one-person shop to having your first hire. It's a very difficult one. And people, friends, and my network asked me that all the time, like how to do that. It's so difficult. It's about letting go of a little bit of control as well. A lot of times you are the. The risk factor is there and not necessarily the other person. So it's about really understanding what kind of person you want to work alongside you. I also noticed that if you're higher based on scarcity, you're going to make a bad hire. So if you do like this panic hire. You're super overloaded. You needed someone yesterday. That's never going to be a good hire. You have to really take your time, assess everything, and make sure that the new person also enters a company where they have time to be onboarded to learn. So I would say I evolved as a person mostly. And obviously, it's also having the experience of going through a few fails, but also the process is much more streamlined. So we usually first post our job description on different platforms on our website, social media, and LinkedIn as well. And then in the second stage, we collect resumes. Then we will ask the people who are fitting to the role to send in a short video. And this is something that we added in the last few years. And you will see that maybe only 10 or 20 percent of the people will actually take the time to send in a video, a proper video that has, in which they answer a few questions. And from there we go to the next step. So we already make the process a little bit more streamlined and shift it out to people who just do bulk send-outs of their resumes, etc. So I would say that's the main difference in the process. Yeah.

TIM: You found it; you found a better way to identify good candidates. You said it was almost like you were partly responsible yourself for their lack of success. Which is a great perspective. Were there any, of course, without naming any names, any candidates you can think back to where really the responsibility is largely on them? Like, you gave them every chance to succeed, and they just either weren't the right person for the role or didn't have the skills you thought they had, and if so, was there any particular pattern?

EVELINE: Yeah, I think it mostly has to do with mentality because, to be honest, we give people quite a lot of backbone, quite a lot of structure. To work in some, people just really don't have the mentality to and the grit to push forward. So we had a few candidates who would say after a few months, Okay, this isn't for me. This is too complicated or whatnot. Or I don't want to work in a remote setting anyway. That's also not for everyone. I know now it's like the big thing; everyone wants to work remotely, but then sometimes after some months, they're just like, Don't find. They're not getting the hang of it. They're feeling a bit lonely or whatnot. So really the cultural fit and the mindset are what the difference is between a good candidate and a candidate that turns out not to be a fit with a company. It's really about finding that fit because if someone feels like, okay, they're not. having the exact skill set or they're lacking some knowledge, we would invest in training, mentoring, and all of that. Yeah, really the cultural fit and the mindset, I would say, make a difference between a good candidate and a not-so-ideal candidate.

TIM: And are there any like really specific bits of your culture that you're trying to select for in those candidates, any specific values like you mentioned, growth mindset, anything else that would make someone really fit in or not fit in your business?

EVELINE: Yeah, so being able to work quite, how to say that? Yeah. Being able to work quite by themselves, asking for help, being proactive, asking for help as well, and asking for feedback, learning from their mistakes as well. So I always ask people, like, what kind of mistakes did you make in the past? And how did you learn from them, for instance? Because that's a very hard thing for people to do. People always want to highlight, obviously, their good parts and their amazing parts during job interviews, but being, having this way of being introspective is very important for me. Because that helped me as well throughout my journey. So I'm trying to recognize that in people as well, and just, we're always looking for people who don't have a big ego and who are team players in the end, because if you have people who want to take all the credit for everything and try to push over other people, we know that's not going to work, especially in a remote environment where we don't do any kind of internal politics or it's really a flat structure. The person really has to fit in that mold a little bit as well.

TIM: And when you're evaluating their cultural fit in the interviews, are you trying to quantify this or measure it in any way, or is it more of an intuitive feel that you would get based on their answers?

EVELINE: Yeah, it's more of an intuitive feel. I would love to be able to quantify it. Somehow, I think it's hard to assess soft skills in a quantifiable way, but it would be a dream for me to have some kind of a workflow or a structure or a tool even to help do that. I don't know if that would be possible to really replace gut feeling with something based on machine learning or AI. But no, based on gut feeling, actually, not just my gut feeling. I definitely discussed that with the team. So it's a kind of general conclusion of the team. But that's a really important one. Yeah.

TIM: More data-driven is having scoring rubrics for an interview question and interview questions assessing a particular soft skill, and everyone fits within that. So that at least there's some parameters that you're grading them on. But it's still so subjective because it's still down to your own kind of view, but having other people involved then makes it, I think, a lot better because you get the different perspectives.

EVELINE: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

TIM: I realized we've got a lot in common because we're both running remote first companies of a similar size as well. Have you found any particular advantage when it comes to hiring talent running a remote company versus if you had, let's say, an office in a particular city?

EVELINE: Yeah, definitely. We have access to a much wider pool of talent. So I think that makes a lot of sense. I find also that the best people are a little bit more. They value their freedom a lot. So we're trying to find people who don't really fit the kind of corporate structure since that's also a little bit the reason why I started a remote agency because I wanted to have that lifestyle, and I want to give that lifestyle to other people as well. We have a really flexible schedule. Everyone is responsible for their tasks, et cetera. So they can set their schedule the way they want to. They can work from anywhere. And I find usually that the most creative people or the most entrepreneurial people love to work like that. And I like to hire people. From wherever they are. Yeah, it's really important to have that. I couldn't imagine just hiring people in Belgium, just hiring people in Belgium. I love to bring fresh perspectives to the table. And I think that really helps our clients as well to have a perspective. For instance, we have a person originally from India. India is quite far ahead sometimes on marketing. So he would be like, Okay, in India we have this, which could be interesting. Let's look at this business case or this use case. And yeah, it brings a much wider, much more international perspective to the team. Do you have an international team as well? Working

TIM: Yeah, exactly. We've been because we started just before the pandemic. And so at that point, it was myself and one other person. And we were right at the point of deciding what we're going to do in terms of building the business. Then when the pandemic started, our hand was forced anyway. So we went all in on remote hiring, and we were then fortunate that all the tooling got developed to facilitate that. I don't know if you remember, but trying to do a video call in 2019 was pretty much impossible. Certainly with Australian-quality internet, ​ It had been; it's not bad now, but like back then, I remember the last company I was working for in 2019 before founding Aluba. We tried several times to have remote meetings on Skype and Slack. We used it back then; it was just impossible. It just didn't work. So the fact that, yeah, those tools got so much better so quickly, then made all the remote work stuff a lot easier, I think. And yeah, we've gone all in; we've had people from, yeah, any time zone in the world. One thing we did find challenging when we decided to say, Let's just hire the best person we can literally irrespective of where they are in the world, which is, in some sense, a noble goal. It did backfire a little bit once we had people in like Brazil and Indonesia and Australia and Mexico and Europe, because if you're all trying to meet at the same time, someone inevitably is meeting at 3am, unfortunately, because that's just the way the earth revolves.

EVELINE: Yeah.

TIM: You had a similar challenge?

EVELINE: Yeah, we have a similar challenge. People need to be able to work in the time zone where clients are when our clients are working. So we're on the Brussels time zone. So that limits us a little bit geographically. I also don't want people to work from three in the morning until, so let's say for a designer, it can work. But for, okay. Someone who has to meet with the clients, that person has to be in a European time zone. So definitely, that's the only restriction we have there. And as well, yeah, we've been running the agency remotely for the past 10 years. And I found that I didn't have, as you like, the experience with that; the tools were not working. It was just then; our clients really weren't used to that. So pre-pandemic, they wanted to meet in person. And I remember living in Malta at that moment and having to fly back to Brussels every month to meet the clients, to see them face to face, et cetera. But that was only if I would happily do that. Of course. Now it's like, whenever we book a meeting. It's never a physical meeting. So they're so used to doing all the meetings online now, whereas before important meetings really had to be done in person. So everyone had to come to the office. So this mind shift actually really helped us along the way. And now sometimes even companies are looking, especially looking for remote agencies because we managed to offer better pricing. We don't have the large overhead costs. Yeah, I see it as a big advantage for us to resource talent, sometimes in a cheaper way, et cetera. So I see it as a big advantage for us.

TIM: Yeah, thinking back now, actually, we probably benefited in the same way, not that I thought about it much, but just even selling software to enterprises, maybe before 2020, might have been done in person as well, at least at some level. And yet, yeah, most of our customers have been people I've never met in person outside of Australia. Yeah, we probably had a bit of a boon there as well. You mentioned, yeah, so focusing really on hiring on the kind of cultural fit to make sure that the candidates fit in there. You also mentioned some of the more technical stuff maybe would be covered off by yourself or other team members, depending on the role. About thinking now from the candidate's perspective?

EVELINE: ahead

TIM: So you've mentioned candidates applying with ChatGPT-generated CVs, and this has been such a big trend in the last year. What are your thoughts on that? Do you feel like CVs are getting somehow less representative of a candidate's true abilities and skills? Is the truth index of a CV coming down at all, do you think?

EVELINE: Yeah, I think that's really a good point. You can quite easily spot which cover letters, for instance, are written by ChatGPT and not touched at all. So it's your standard cover letter, and it gives away a lot as well. So obviously, I think that in this day and age with all the AI tools that are available, you shouldn't make any more spelling mistakes in your resume and cover letter for sure. That's a given. That's a gold standard. And I really don't mind people working with AI for their cover letters, but you can do so much with AI and still make something very creative. That's representative of your background, of your skill set. You can. Check a whole website with ChatGPT and write your cover letter based on the company that you're applying for. That would show creativity, for instance, even if you do the legwork with ChatGPT and obviously double-check the facts and everything and put in some kind of personality as well. You can do good work with AI; you can do bad work with AI. If I see that someone does bad work with AI, I wouldn't even look beyond the cover letter. So that's like an automatic disqualification for me. Because it just shows that, okay, you work with the tools, but you don't manage. to do something good with it. So that's a direct no for me, but you see it so much sometimes; sometimes they didn't even change the intro where Chachipiti says, Yes, of course I can write you a cover letter. So we're seeing a lot of that coming in. That's also the reason why we do an interview for candidates as a second step, because obviously there you see the real person and you get a glimpse of their personality. But as I said, if the cover letter is purely written by ChatGPT or another tool, we don't bother to look beyond that, to be honest.

TIM: Have you ever had candidates who it seems as though they're using Chachapiti in the interview itself, which I imagine if you're hiring remotely is a possibility?

EVELINE: Yeah, we've noticed that, or just for the, for instance, for the video as well, where people are just, you see them like reading a script on their screen because we asked them, for instance. What kind of data-driven project have you done that you're proud of, et cetera? And they're just reading a script. So that's already also a turnoff, of course. But sometimes during the interview, we asked some technical questions, and you can see it immediately if people are typing in the meantime and trying to get some background data there. Yeah. Yeah, that happens.

TIM: How do you perceive that? What's your view of a candidate actually doing that?

EVELINE: Yeah, no, that's something that really cannot be done because we hire people who have to be client-facing as well. There's no problem with saying, I don't know that, or I'd have to check that. I don't know it. From the top of my mind or whatever, you're essentially hiring a human, not an AI or a system. So people don't have to be perfect, but they have to be human and be able to work with interpretation, et cetera. I think a lot of people are trying to be perfect. And that's just not what we're looking for. Yeah.

TIM: Yeah, last time we were hiring, I was struck by something. So we had as part of our evaluation process a question something along the lines of, This is for sales roles, or something along the lines of, Imagine it's like day one at Alooba. What are the three things you would need from us to give you the best chance of being successful in your

EVELINE: Oh, that's a Really good question. I Might steal that one. Yeah,

TIM: I was really expecting something that's quite personal to them. And I don't care what an AI thinks about this, because I'm not hiring the AI; I'm hiring this person. I really wanted their true answer. And no, so few of them gave it to me. And that felt a little bit annoying, that like I, I didn't want that, but then someone mentioned to me the thought, okay yeah, but the candidates might've thought this was actually part of the evaluation where they're going to get graded on how perfect this answer is. So maybe that's why they resorted to AI, but still, I just, it was like a lack of authenticity or something. I felt about it.

EVELINE: Yeah, I think that's the thing. They always think they're going to get graded, and everything has to be perfect, where everyone hires essentially a human to work within the team. And that's so important to not lose that perspective. I don't know if it has to be mentioned somewhere, or maybe for some people it's not clear. I can imagine for candidates as well, like the pressure is on, of course, and. Now that everyone is using AI, it's much more difficult for them to really showcase their skills. Because everyone has access to the standard answers and to the, like you said, just whack a questionnaire into ChatGPT, and it will come up with a pretty good answer. And if you manage to tweak it a little bit and put your personality in there, it might even be unnoticeable. So it's getting so much harder to really understand what person you're dealing with and who you're going to be hiring.

TIM: I would have thought for candidates, a strategy might be. What do they say in marketing, zig when other people are zagging? And so if every other candidate is using Chattiviti to write their CV and cover letter based on the job description, then do something like aggressively different. That is very obviously not AI-generated. Like, we had a similar thought process for our own email marketing comms, where everyone's bombarding everyone with AI content. We thought, okay, could we come up with something that's very obviously Definitely not AI-generated, and it's quite weird because at least it would stand out if nothing else.

EVELINE: Yeah, especially for creative marketers. That would be a really good point. I have a lot of people reaching out to me personally on LinkedIn to see if there are job openings and things like that. Or people who are following up quite meticulously. I appreciate it. I appreciate people also looking into the kind of posts that I'm posting there and reacting to that and having a little bit of a background and a kind of common ground to speak about. So all of that is becoming much more important. I think really having people who make their personality shine through. I totally agree with that. Yeah.

TIM: If you were a candidate yourself now, would you even bother applying through something like LinkedIn or a job board where there are a thousand other applicants? Or would you try to backchannel that, leverage your network, and try to get a

EVELINE: foot in

TIM: The door is that way.

EVELINE: I would definitely look at ways to leverage the network and kind of find a person in common that can put me on top of the list of CVs, because it's true, like so many people are applying for the same role. And I think I would go through the standard process, but then try to move forward through other ways as well. Definitely.

TIM: And if candidates are listening to this and are thinking of. Yeah. Trying to bypass the process. Is there like a good and a bad way to do it? I'm sure you've received some pretty mediocre direct outreach on LinkedIn. That's almost spammy. And then some stuff that's actually quite good. What's the good and the bad way to approach it?

EVELINE: Yeah, I think the more personal, the better. People, sometimes people are really like reaching out on a daily basis. I've uploaded my CV. What's the status? What's the status? What's the status? That's a little bit too much. That feels quite spammy. So I would say definitely not every day. But yeah. Some people are really good at that as well. Also, sometimes people are just asking, Do you have a job for me? I wouldn't reply to that at all. Like you didn't look at the website to see what open jobs there were. You didn't find a job anywhere. And they're just like sending that probably to half of their network on LinkedIn, but if someone is really precise in what kind of value they bring, maybe they worked with similar clients or a similar agency. Maybe we have some people in common that we know someone referred them to us. That builds a bit of a common ground. I really want to know exactly what this person, what value the person can bring. So someone has to be able to highlight that. Otherwise, I'm not going to bother trying to find out if we have a job for that kind of person. That's not the time I can spend there, unfortunately.

TIM: What I've noticed a lot of in the last year probably is okay. AI-generated LinkedIn content, but where it's got this obviously fake personalization, which then I feel like is somehow even worse than just something that was a template. And you get it so often via email as well. Hey, I've been following your website for X, Y, and Z years. I love your blah, blah, blah. It's no, I know straight away. The first sentence of your email is a lie. That's a bad way to start a relationship. You know what I mean?

EVELINE: Yeah, exactly. I get that as well. Or reaching out to all the important people in my network or something like that, where it's yeah, no, I would directly classify that as spam, so yeah, we're all trying to use AI to do a little bit of outreach. I do it myself as well, two very targeted groups, of course. So it's a very thin line between where I'm at. It gets obviously spammy, and there's no value attached to that message. Like, you see the person and their recruiter from, I don't know, the U.S., for instance, something that's really totally not relevant for what we're doing, so they didn't even assess their list or think of what value they can bring. So I think it's really the value that they can bring or not that makes it perceived as spammy or not. Okay.

TIM: Yeah, 100%. It's all about the value add. You have done quite a bit of guest lecturing at universities and helping the kind of younger generation. If you were starting your career again, how would you approach it? Is there any particular advice you'd give to young job seekers now?

EVELINE: Yeah, I would definitely start by doing some of my own projects, some side projects, to gain experience because I know it's difficult. Everyone is looking for people with experience, but no one wants to hire a marketer or data specialist with zero years of experience. So try to look for that experience either in doing. internships. This is what I did in the beginning of my career. I did four or five internships at big advertising agencies unpaid to gain the experience. And I was also involved in a startup where I really sharpened my whole skill set from, like, negotiation tactics to value proposition creation, website creation, everything. I really appreciate people who start projects, no matter how small they may be, and really put their skills that they learn in school into a practical skill set. Someone who built a website, it might be a personal blog, or someone who helped their mother and father with their small business, created a website or did AdWords; nowadays everything is so available online that you don't need to have a lot of budget to build a website, to start a small AdWords campaign, or to help other people. I'm seeing a lot of young marketers who start on platforms like Upwork as well to gain experience. And to earn a little bit of money as well. Obviously, there you compete with a lot of low-cost talent, so they're not going to earn a lot there, but it's more to sharpen their skill sets. So I really appreciate that as well. It shows me the entrepreneurial side of a person.

TIM: Yeah, and I'm reminded of a conversation that I think was just yesterday where someone told me about a concept in psychology. I think it's called the locus of control. This idea that you can either think that basically things are in your control or everything's outside of your control. And I do get this since sometimes there are some graduates where they, yeah, mentioned, Oh, I don't have any experience. And to get a job, I need experience. I'm stuck in this. Horrible circular death, but yeah, you can escape it yourself if you think about it. And as you just laid out those various ways, I can think of a particular engineer we hired who had dropped out of his software engineering degree. So he'd done maybe like a year or two of it. He'd done, like, a boot camp. So, like, outside of university, he had done a boot camp, and he'd learned a lot from that. And then he'd managed to build on his own an iOS app. I can't find some kind of music-playing app, and it worked on the iOS store. He'd shipped it. So he'd done the entire end-to-end cycle of, like, thinking of a problem. designing it, building it, getting the bugs sorted out, dealing with the iOS store, etc. So like that showed us so much that if he hadn't done that, he probably wouldn't have gotten an offer because we, he'd proven that he'd done it on a small scale. And so it's just really replicating that. And it was so impressive.

EVELINE: Absolutely. The scale really doesn't matter. It's about people taking actions. As well, you see it, for instance, with college graduates in marketing, for instance, who don't have experience with Google yet, who follow all the Google courses that are available for free. Shows me already that they are. There, too, they have some initiative, 'cause otherwise we would've let them follow the courses anyway; nothing better to do than to learn directly from the platforms that you're going to work with. So you have them for Meta, you have them for Google, you have them for LinkedIn, et cetera. So that's already the first thing that you can do; it's going to take you a few days, and you have the certificates. But then it's really working with that knowledge and trying to set some things up, building your own simple website, putting your content there. I think it's also important. I did that a lot in the beginning of my career as well, going to events to meet people and speak to people. I know it can be a bit scary in the beginning because. What are you going to speak about? Your recent graduate? But I found that a lot of people are happy to help you in the right direction, and you hear about opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise be hearing about just by being proactive and by having the courage to reach out to certain people. Most people are happy to help if you really are direct and proactive about what you want to get.

TIM: Yep. A little bit of hustle goes a long way. And in a job search as well. I'm just thinking about, yeah, if I were a grad again, so I took, I'd say the typical approach of a lot of applications, almost like a numbers game approach. If I were me now, I would not do that because your odds are just so slim. I'd probably still apply, but more selectively to the ones that I was really interested in on a more personalized basis, but I would probably do what I did when I started this company, which was just try to get a whole bunch of coffee meetings with people who I was interested in talking to that I thought I could add a bit of value to. And honestly, even without asking anything, a quarter of those people will probably offer to help in some way. Just because a lot of people are nice like that. And so if you just go in there, genuinely having a conversation with people and not in a kind of transactional way, that works. It doesn't work. If you're up against it and you need a job today, it's a slightly more like a long run strategy. Back to your comment at the start of the call about not wanting to hire in scarcity. You also don't want to try to get a job when you're frantically looking around. You want to have a nice. Relaxed search where you can choose the best job for you, Ideally, that's difficult. If you're out of money and you're living at your parents and you want to

EVELINE: out,

TIM: Said than done. Yeah.

EVELINE: Yeah, definitely at some point, not everyone has the runway to look for a job, chill for three months. So I get it as well. But what you were saying there, yeah. What was your first job, and how did you get it in the end?

TIM: Good question. So my first, I did an internship with one of the big four accounting firms. My first full-time job, believe it or not, was at a smash repairs, like where they fix cars. And it was as a financial analyst working on a joint venture, this fairly large family group of businesses was creating with a bank here to build like this massive car repair place. And so I worked on that for a year. That was a great job because I was working with the owner and CEO. I was doing. stuff that was way beyond what my skill set should have allowed me to do. I was building, like, a presentation for the CEO of this bank and all the financial modeling and running this business that I had really no clue what I was doing, if I were being completely honest, and dealing with my boss, who was a little bit crazy. And yeah, I learned a lot in what was an extraordinarily stressful job. And yeah, I think that set me up for a bit of my own entrepreneurship as well and dealing with colorful characters. and just. Making it happen, even when you don't really know everything you're meant to be doing. I guess.

EVELINE: Definitely. Definitely. I noticed that as well. My first job was at BBDO, and I managed to get it at BBDO in Brussels. I managed to get it because they did some kind of a talent program that was quite interesting. You had to apply for it. You had to do a presentation. There were psychologists available for it. And then out of those, I think we were 200 people to start with. They would choose 12 people. Put them in this kind of old villa for two weeks. And we would work on client pitches with a team of 12, obviously supported by their strategists, by their account managers, et cetera. But it's really like in a group, and out of those people, they chose maybe three or four to start working there, and I found that as. It was an amazing experience because I was fresh from school. You're together with 12 super ambitious people. And it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had, I think, in my life, even, but that's a really creative way to find talent. And I absolutely loved that. So that was really nice.

TIM: Are programs like that common in Europe? Like putting everyone in a place for a couple of weeks?

EVELINE: I think it was also a little bit of a PR kind of thing for the agency. So to show how they attract talent, how creative they are. We worked on big client projects as well. So they were like giving that for free to their big clients, like the national post. Of Belgium we were working for, so it was a little bit of a PR thing for them as well. I don't think it's so common. I think in the big four they have similar things, not necessarily where they put people together in a house but these kinds of boot camps, right? Where you were, you joined as a young talent to see if you got a job or not. But it's not that common now.

TIM: I'm almost imagining it being done again nowadays, but being filmed and like creating a lot of TV or YouTube.

EVELINE: Yeah, that would be amazing. That would be amazing. It was quite the media tie a little bit as well. But not like it would be today. It was speaking about 15 years ago. Yeah. TIM: One thing we've touched on a few times already in our conversations, AI. And I'd love to know, have you started to use it yourself as part of the hiring process either to, I don't know, screen CVs or write job ads or anything like that?

EVELINE: Yeah, to write job ads for sure AI helps streamline that also to come up with some kind of use cases that we let people do. AI also helps with creating good use cases and good kinds of clients, possible client scenarios, and a little bit more out-of-the-box ideas than what we usually do. It helps with the screening questions and all of that. Definitely to go through CVS sometimes when we get a hundred. CVs sometimes we, for a very specialized position, we get only like 20, 30, and I can go through them myself, but if it's a large set of CVs, I use it. I don't use an end-to-end AI process, of course. So I always like to be very involved and use this kind of personal touch a little bit too. So yeah, it's assists, I would say.

TIM: Could you imagine the entire hiring process being automated in the next two years?

EVELINE: That's an interesting question. I was speaking to a friend who is job hunting, and she said that she had a few interviews with really big companies where. She wasn't speaking to a person, but to an AI assistant for the first interview. So it was a little bit weird. They would just do their standard checks. Do you have the visa to work? What's your background? What education do you have? Do you know these programming languages? So all the kinds of hard data that they needed for a first interview were done completely by an AI bot. I imagine. it? What was her feeling? Yeah, she found it quite weird to be just speaking to a bot, especially since she didn't know before. So she said I made sure that I looked nice. I put all my effort in there. And then I was speaking to a bot. I think people will have to specify. That's a little bit like how the hiring process goes. I think a little bit of openness about that would be good, but I can imagine for big corporates who have to sift through hundreds and hundreds of CVs that something like that potentially could help. Yeah. So working on the highest volume problems to begin with, probably like outreach to candidates, sourcing, then the high-level screening like this, but the CV screening maybe then also like an interview assistant to someone who's like on the call doing the summary,

TIM: doing the notes, doing the pros and cons. Even something that would be interesting to me would be like interviewer feedback. So hey, This question you asked was biased because of this reason, or you didn't give her the person chance to answer this one or those kinds of things. I think we're not really measuring or tracking at all. That would be cool. Especially because. I've noticed that maybe this is just me, but I'm very receptive to AI giving me feedback. I'd say perfectly receptive. There's no issue at all. Whereas sometimes if a human gives you feedback that you don't quite agree with, it's a little bit awkward, but never the case with Chachapiti, I don't think.

EVELINE: Because you, we imagine it to be objective, right? Yeah. I agree with that. We use it a lot to give feedback on copy or design or something like that. People's opinions can be quite subjective, and AI's opinion is obviously objective, or we imagine it to be objective. So it's a good way to have a second pair of eyes and a second opinion. Definitely. That's a good point.

TIM: I personally am pretty bullish about AI and hiring. I feel like even in the current state of large language models, a lot could be improved to make it better. And maybe we're just waiting for the new wave of HR tech. That's like native AI products built in the last year to really come to fruition. But yeah, it sounds like your friend has already experienced a couple of them. And I've started to hear more and more anecdotes of people being interviewed by AI agents. So I'm sure it's only around the corner. And exciting, I think, because I feel like traditional hiring is. It's got a lot of room for improvements, not necessarily the fairest process. It's often very manual. It's a lot of effort. I feel like we could chip away at a lot of this with

EVELINE: Definitely. Do you have any plans of implementing these things in Aluba, or what's on the agenda for you to work on product-wise regarding AI?

TIM: Yeah. The CV screening stuff, we dabble with that a little bit. We've got like a simple version of that that we introduced fairly early on, actually, with the GPT models coming out. We are also. Using some large language models to expand our question content at the moment in an efficient way, generating question content using experts, is very time-consuming and very costly. So it's a relatively easy way for us to expand the content. So that's the thing we're doing at the moment with AI.

EVELINE: Okay. Okay. Amazing. I think most companies are really looking for ways to streamline the process, and AI is obviously a big thing that everyone is still using in their own way a little bit to help them with the process. It would be good if it's a streamlined, kind of end-to-end approach. Okay. Thank you. Without using the human touch, of course, I think that's important. I would never, and I cannot imagine anyone to hire. Again, everything can change someone from end to end with AI; just let AI decide who the best candidates are for you without bias. Then hopefully if it stays objective, that would be like the very next level. I would like to see some experiments like that, like maybe an AI hiring candidates and a candidate being hired. Completely without AI and then let them work for a few months to see who is the best candidate at the end. That would be a good A/B test.

TIM: That, yeah, I feel like we're not that far away from that. Maybe it'll be like some crazy early-stage tech startup that does it, and it gives them some weird advantage because they can hire so quickly and also accurately. And then maybe it'll become a little bit more normalized. Time will tell,

EVELINE: Exactly. I

TIM: Eveline, have you had the chance to ask our next guest one question about hiring or AI? What would that question be?

EVELINE: think we touched a point already, like how would hiring, how would an AI bot or an AI tool be able to assess Like the soft skills, cultural fit, growth mindset, or entrepreneurial mindset, if they can see that happening in the future and what that would look like, or if it's applicable for their business, how they would like to implement that. That would be an interesting question. I think.

TIM: Excellent. I will level that question at our next guest and see what they say. I'm interested to hear their answers. Eveline, it's been a great chat today. Great conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Thanks.

EVELINE: Yeah,

TIM: Thank you so much for sharing all your insights and thoughts with our audience today.

EVELINE: very welcome, Tim. And I had a great time being on the podcast, so thank you so much for that.