In this episode, Michael Bernzweig chats with Nick Jones, COO and cofounder of Classet, about the pivotal role speed plays in high-volume talent acquisition. Nick shares his journey from engineer to entrepreneur and how his experiences at BlueCrew informed Classet's mission. They discuss the challenges of recruiting at scale and the innovative solutions Classet offers to improve hiring outcomes. Recorded live at the Software Oasis AI Summit, this conversation provides actionable insights for anyone involved in talent acquisition.
Introduction
Interview
Presentation
Panel Q&A
[MICHAEL]: You know, when it comes to scaling a business, especially in talent acquisition, it's not just about finding the right people... it's about finding them fast. Nick Jones, the COO and cofounder of Classet, knows this challenge all too well. From his early days at BlueCrew, where he helped hire over a million employees, to now at Classet, Nick has been tackling the speed at which companies can efficiently fill positions. And here's the kicker: did you know that in high-volume hiring, it's often the speed of contact that determines success? By the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly why optimizing the candidate experience and speeding up the hiring process is critical. I am your host Michael Bernzweig and this is B2B Automation Spotlight.
--- INTERVIEW ---
[NICK]: I know a lot of the listeners that are tuning into the podcast this week have had their own journey, entrepreneurial or otherwise, getting to where they are, but for sure, your journey has been an interesting one, but not quite a straight path to success.
[NICK]: So I was hoping you could share, you know, your journey getting to the point where you and your cofounder launched Classet.
[NICK]: Sure.
[NICK]: So, yeah, I'm currently the COO and cofounder at Classette.
[NICK]: I've been working in the talent acquisition space, specifically through a technology lens for the last eleven years at this point.
[NICK]: So I'm originally an engineer, but back in two thousand fifteen, we started a company called BlueCrew.
[NICK]: The aspiration behind starting BlueCrew was to try to provide a more flexible work arrangement for the millions of Americans that can't work underneath that typical construct of the nine to five job.
[NICK]: So with BlueCrew, how the business operated was we kind of took the Uber experience where a driver today who is in a city can pick up a fare and they can make income flexibly.
[NICK]: Take that same experience to the light industrial and hospitality world where there is so much volatility in the demand for employees that these businesses have.
[NICK]: So if you think about the challenge of a baseball stadium, for example, where a few nights a week, they are flexing up their workforce by hundreds of percent in order to kind of maintain that capacity for their guests.
[NICK]: That's a huge undertaking for those businesses to keep up.
[NICK]: So with BlueCrew, you could essentially go through a single application process, a single background check, and this really unlocked your opportunities to pick up work at a lot of different, flexible locations, work with these businesses that had volatility in their labor demands.
[NICK]: As we were scaling that business, the key challenge that we continually ran into is your ability to recruit is really a very direct function of the headcount that you have on the team.
[NICK]: And recruiting for those positions starts to feel very analogous to working in a call center.
[NICK]: If you're trying to hire by the thousands, you're getting a ton of resumes in.
[NICK]: You're trying to figure out who the initial candidates that are a directional fit for what you're looking for are.
[NICK]: Then you start calling down the list and it requires a second, third, fourth phone call just to kind of even get the basics of the process moving.
[NICK]: So in order to scale that business, we had to continually hire more and more recruiters, and we'd invest more and more into places like Indeed and ZipRecruiter and social media advertising.
[NICK]: So it becomes extremely cost prohibitive, and it becomes a really tangible bottleneck to scaling your business.
[NICK]: Ultimately, we we had a really good run with BlueCrew.
[NICK]: So today, it's owned by EmployBridge.
[NICK]: It's great to see BlueCrew still around and and still doing great things.
[NICK]: With Classet, it's really in a lot of ways a pretty natural continuation of that work.
[NICK]: What we focus on providing at Classet is running a talent acquisition process that is faster.
[NICK]: You have lower time to fill.
[NICK]: It's cheaper.
[NICK]: You're investing less into recruitment marketing, but it's all underpinned by still creating a really great candidate experience.
[NICK]: Because it's all for nothing if at the end of the day, employees aren't accepting your job offers and moving forward.
[NICK]: So those are the three key pillars that we focus on, which are very much fed by the experience that we had at BlueCrew.
[NICK]: Makes a lot of sense, and I think you only have to turn the news on for for less than a second to hear, you know, in in the space different challenges and opportunities in in the sector, so I think it's, it's very interesting.
[MICHAEL]: Before we jump too far into the episode, for listeners that may not be familiar with either yourself or with Classit, can can you give us a high level understanding of the solution and and how it works and who who are you helping out in terms of users?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: Absolutely.
[MICHAEL]: The solution at its core is a recruiting assistant for high volume talent acquisition teams.
[MICHAEL]: That's really the headline.
[NICK]: In terms of the businesses that we support, there's a couple common denominators there.
[NICK]: They are hiring employees at significant scale.
[NICK]: So you are hiring hundreds of employees every single month to keep your business operational.
[NICK]: The industries that tends to cluster around are manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality, there's staffing, and then there's on prem security.
[NICK]: Not exclusively limited to those verticals, but what you see within those industries is a lot of highly mechanical, repetitive work just to execute your talent acquisition process.
[NICK]: We really have a very direct focus on what you might call the frontline workforce.
[NICK]: So those tend to be your nonexempt hourly employees that you, again, are hiring at a very meaningful scale just to operate your business.
[MICHAEL]: So a lot of the organizations, I'm assuming, are in the mid market enterprise space where where the volume of of need is is very high?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: That's correct.
[NICK]: Our our typical customer, if you look at a floor, tends to be around a thousand employees.
[NICK]: There's still a lot of utility in what we do for smaller businesses, and it's obviously been a a journey building to the point you don't start serving enterprise customers from day one out of the gate.
[NICK]: But that tends to be where there is the most ROI.
[NICK]: Because when you look at businesses of that scale, there tends to be a very established talent acquisition function where you've got dozens and dozens of recruiters.
[NICK]: You might have sourcers.
[NICK]: You might have recruiting coordinators.
[NICK]: But the common theme across a lot of those positions, especially when you look at the high volume world, there's a lot of inputs that are going into your day to day work that aren't ultimately producing more hires, and they're certainly not, adding any benefit to the candidate experience.
[NICK]: Well, I guess I would say you're nothing if not a serial entrepreneur.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: Something like that.
[NICK]: I I don't typically consider myself in that lens, but, yeah, looking back, you know, we're at our we're at our second real established startup and then a, you know, few side ventures here and there.
[NICK]: So it's been a fun journey, and I've worked with the same founding team since two thousand fifteen.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: And I I think that's an interesting part of the journey for a lot of founders is really assembling your crew of trusted individuals that that you meet along the way, and I think that's a big part of of, future success and and where you are right now.
[NICK]: So let me ask you, just pulling on a different thread, you made the decision early on to to to cofound the organization.
[MICHAEL]: How how has that played out, and and why did you choose a cofounder at the outset?
[NICK]: Well, it's extremely fortunate in that we felt like we had a good recipe from the BlueCrew team.
[NICK]: So three cofounders with Classet.
[NICK]: We've got myself, Gino, and Cooper.
[NICK]: Gino and Cooper both really bringing technical excellence to the table.
[NICK]: Whereas what I spend most of my time doing is is talking to our partners to understand their challenges and then bring our solutions to market.
[NICK]: But felt like we had a a really good recipe of kind of the right key elements.
[NICK]: And more broadly, it's a space that we're all really passionate about because so much is broken about what really is such a fundamental activity, which is how are you going to get a job and how are you going to pay your bills.
[NICK]: It's such a broken process.
[NICK]: Nobody enjoys that process on the job seeker side specifically can be a very deflating exercise to go through applying to twenty different jobs a day hoping that you're going to get that callback.
[NICK]: So what we perceived is a big opportunity not only to build a great business, but to really drive a lot of social impact and and get people into careers that are a good match for them faster.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: And I think having passion for what you're doing is important because at the end of the day, you are spending so much of your your time, you know, nurturing and and early on pushing the business into into existence.
[NICK]: And then after some time, having three co...
[NICK]: You know, the three of you really gives you the opportunity for for each to, to focus on their their area.
[NICK]: And having unique expertise as as each of you do really is is an important part of of becoming successful.
[NICK]: So the the second question that you...
[MICHAEL]: That that I wanted to dig into, how was ClassEd funded initially?
[MICHAEL]: Did did you bootstrap it initially, or did you bring aboard, you know, traditional funding or go through several rounds?
[MICHAEL]: Or...
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[NICK]: Initially, we just bootstrapped the business.
[NICK]: We were all coming out of BlueCrew, which was a a pretty intense journey and and weren't entirely sure what we wanted to do next outside of we all wanted to work together again.
[NICK]: So we bootstrapped initially.
[NICK]: That was the first eight to twelve months that we were just kind of operating off of capital that we had put into the business.
[NICK]: It was fortunate having gone through one prior successful exit in that the fundraising process was meaningfully faster for us.
[NICK]: So we had somewhat of a Rolodex of existing investors that we could we could get on the phone to discuss, walk through what we were aspiring to do.
[NICK]: We were also extremely fortunate in that I was in Chicago at the the time, and there's been a bit of a resurgence of venture capital in Chicago.
[NICK]: So we were able to get two great Chicago funds involved that were net new investors.
[NICK]: So in total, we've raised a little over five million of venture capital money, which has been great to to be able to allow us to invest in growth and building out the team a little bit more.
[NICK]: But a bit of an atypical fundraising journey just because we did have some of those prior connections from our last business.
[MICHAEL]: Now for any founders that might be listening in that are at that early juncture where maybe they're still bootstrapped and they're going back and forth saying, should we bring aboard funding?
[MICHAEL]: Should we not?
[MICHAEL]: You know, what what are your thoughts?
[MICHAEL]: What what...
[MICHAEL]: If you were looking back on it, what has funding allowed you to do that you may not have been able to do, whether it's, you know, connections or the funding or something different?
[MICHAEL]: Or or what what is it that you think, what are your thoughts?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: On fundraising in general, the...
[NICK]: Something that you'll hear pretty commonly, which I absolutely think is true, is that it's extremely easy for it to become a huge distraction, and that saps away time from actually working and focusing on the business.
[NICK]: So this table stakes for us before even considering bringing in any external capital was really validating the idea and starting to see some traction from the idea.
[NICK]: And that's where bootstrapping came from.
[NICK]: We've gone through the exercise with with both of our businesses and everything that we've considered of, let's outline a list of all the reasons that this won't work, and let's start crossing them off one by one to validate that we've got something here.
[NICK]: Let's take it to market.
[NICK]: Let's sell.
[NICK]: Let's get some customers in the door so that we can make sure there's some traction there.
[NICK]: That makes the fundraising process go meaningfully faster because you have somewhat of a validated business concept at that point.
[NICK]: In terms of what it allows you to do, in some ways, it's a it's a bit of a sigh of relief when you get that capital in.
[NICK]: But in some ways, it really does ratchet up the pressure.
[NICK]: It's different if you're bootstrapping and you're gonna lose your own capital.
[NICK]: But when you're bringing other people that you trust and trust you, there is a different level of pressure to that.
[NICK]: But where it's really the most beneficial is building out our team.
[NICK]: And it allows us to make more calculated bets on how we're going to take the the tool and the product to market.
[NICK]: Taking a product to market is very different than it was back in two thousand fifteen for our last business, so you do need capital to be able to understand what your proven channels are and where you're going to invest.
[NICK]: So for a lot of lot of founders, there's obviously what finances can help you do.
[MICHAEL]: But in choosing the right VC or the right firm or the right type of funding, are there other benefits that you see aside from the dollars and cents?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: Absolutely.
[MICHAEL]: From our...
[NICK]: We we have a very active group of investors, which has been extremely helpful in growing the business.
[NICK]: They're extremely well connected, right, which is the job of an investor.
[NICK]: So that's been invaluable in terms of getting connections to great potential customers.
[NICK]: You make one introduction and then you figure out that they're involved in five or six other portfolio companies.
[NICK]: So there's there's kind of a spider web out from our investor network of different customers that we've been able to get in front of and ultimately turn into long term customers and class that.
[NICK]: So it's it's certainly not limited to just the capital that they are putting into the business, but it is increasing your visibility.
[NICK]: It's getting conversations in the right place.
[NICK]: It's being able to expand the business a bit more organically just through the network that you get after you've raised money.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: That that makes a lot of sense.
[NICK]: So just shifting gears a little bit.
[NICK]: Obviously, when the three of you initially launched class, you had a very good idea as to where you were heading based on your your past experience working together.
[MICHAEL]: But what was the original idea that you went to market with versus where you're at now?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: It's interesting kind of comparing and contrasting what the class at journey has looked like with what the BlueCrew journey was like.
[NICK]: So with with BlueCrew, really, our business model was very established and didn't change very much from day one all the way through selling the business.
[NICK]: There weren't these really substantial adjustments to how do you price the business, who are your target customers, what's the core value that we're looking to provide.
[NICK]: That was a a bit more of a straight line.
[NICK]: With Classette originally part of the concept and so really focused on career growth and development, a big separate learning from the BlueCrew journey is that when you are working in the capacity of...
[NICK]: If you're working in retail, you're working in a huge distribution center or a manufacturing facility, the difference in income from maybe your most inconsistent employee to your best employee really kind of focusing on on being productive for their employer, the difference in compensation is extremely minimal, if any, between those two.
[NICK]: So a big portion of the...
[MICHAEL]: Our early focus at ClassEd is, okay, how can we create better upward mobility for those employees who are doing all of the right things?
[MICHAEL]: They're showing up to work on time every day.
[MICHAEL]: They're working hard.
[MICHAEL]: They're trying to better themselves.
[MICHAEL]: That really quickly took us to the best opportunity for them to really grow in their careers and in their earning capacities to look at careers within the skilled trades.
[NICK]: So that was our initial vertical of focus where it's how can we make the on ramps into these positions easier and faster because it tends to be such a black box skilled trades.
[NICK]: I mean, that...
[NICK]: That's a whole separate topic, but there's incredible earning potential within those.
[NICK]: So as we were initially going to market and and talking to different construction employers and home services, it was what we wanna do is create the easiest channel for people to begin careers in these fields so that they can learn and they can ultimately grow into these positions that we really desperately need.
[NICK]: That got a lot of resonance from every early customer that we talked to.
[NICK]: But the piece of things that we would also hear really continuously is, yes, I want a pipeline of new talent, but I also have this massive challenge with scaling my existing talent acquisition function.
[NICK]: And that was really our bread and butter at BlueCrew.
[NICK]: So over time, those kind of two concepts continued to merge, and and we had a focus on how can we make sure that you have the workforce that you need today and also the workforce that you're going to need for the future.
[NICK]: And it started to become very focused on, okay, we need to be the best possible talent acquisition pool to serve these employers and serve this workforce.
[NICK]: And and that's really led us to where we are today.
[NICK]: But not the the concept of class that exists today was certainly not fully baked from day one, which is a very stark contrast to BlueCrew where it was kind of right from the outset.
[NICK]: Felt like we had a good model, and we were able to grow that very quickly.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: Now an interesting part of your story that I I wanted to share with the audience, I know between the exit from Bluecrew and starting class that you took a little bit of personal time to really venture off and journey and and do some, you know, have some unique experiences before reuniting with your your your cofounders and and launching Glassette.
[MICHAEL]: Can can you share a little bit about that time and and what you learned?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[NICK]: Well, anyone who's who's been through the startup journey, I think, you know, how, how mentally and even physically taxing that can be on you.
[NICK]: So of our, of our three co founders, I was the first to leave BlueCrew.
[NICK]: Went from that, tried to catch my breath a little bit for a few weeks.
[NICK]: And then I was really fortunate just through connections that I'd made through BlueCrew and kinda thinking about what was next to jump into a bit of a freelance role.
[NICK]: I was able to work with some very large established businesses in Chicago, specifically in the staffing vertical, which were connections that I had made from BlueCrew.
[NICK]: And that just kind of parlayed from there into being able to work with some different startups and in a bit more of an isolated capacity and established businesses, which was also super useful to just get clarity on really what we wanted to focus on next.
[NICK]: As I was going through that journey, slowly, Coop and then Gino's time was winding down at BlueCrew.
[NICK]: So as they were kind of becoming free agents, let's say, that was the time that, we really decided to reconnect and and get serious about what was next.
[NICK]: Yeah.
[NICK]: And personally, having been through an exit myself, I know that transition period and and the point at which you were really out can can be, sometimes.
[NICK]: So so, really, I think maybe maybe another benefit to having three of you.
[NICK]: Obviously, you were able to jump out of the airplane first, and the other two, kept things, moving along.
[NICK]: So, obviously, you wanna fulfill your your obligations, but, no, that...
[NICK]: That's exciting.
[NICK]: I guess that the the other detail that I wanted to make sure we covered, obviously, in the space does...
[NICK]: When we talk about AI, there's a lot of exciting opportunities on the horizon and a lot of things that are also a little bit scary.
[MICHAEL]: So as you're looking, you know, towards these next few years, what what is it that really excites you in the space that you're in?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah.
[MICHAEL]: With the space that we're in, what's what's really interesting is the job boards of today really are still somewhat the equivalent of the classified help wanted ad that was run-in the newspaper thirty years ago, copy pasted onto the Internet.
[MICHAEL]: Now, certainly there's more functionality and there are things that that somewhat make the process easier for candidates, but that's still really how the majority of job boards function.
[MICHAEL]: Here's the help wanted add, put in your your information, or now you can apply with a few clicks.
[MICHAEL]: What that has created is just this massive over index on volume, for all of these employers.
[MICHAEL]: And that's what's really degraded the candidate experience, and that's what really saps that recruiting efficiency.
[NICK]: I don't think it's likely that the process of finding a new career functions in the same way, even looking at a time frame of of the next five years.
[NICK]: There are...
[NICK]: There's so much information from these job boards that is is really kind of kept behind the scenes, but their gold star is delivering volume to employers, not necessarily incentivized to deliver the most quality match right out of the gate.
[NICK]: So what I envision for the process of how people find jobs and how employers hire the team that they need is there's gonna be a much more direct matching layer, where instead of going through the exercise today where if I was looking for a new job, I would go to Indeed or I would go to ZipRecruiter or Google, and I would put in the twenty applications that I think roughly match what my skill set is and what I'm looking to do.
[NICK]: And then that jams up twenty different applicant tracking systems.
[NICK]: There are twenty different recruiting teams that need to be catalyzed to field that application to understand if I'm a good fit to start making calls.
[NICK]: I think that matching layer at a pretty quick clip is going to become agent driven.
[NICK]: So you can almost view your job application process as pretty binary, where instead of going to a web page or a job board and needing to hunt for those, I would simply say, I'm looking for new opportunities now.
[NICK]: The jobs that are a match for what I'm looking for are automatically surfaced to me that I'm going to be qualified for.
[NICK]: Ones that aren't a match for what I'm looking for, what I'm not qualified for, aren't going to be surfaced.
[NICK]: And you can envision the same experience on the employer side where if we really are able to clean up the way that the job search and the application process works, there's much more thoughtful matches made.
[NICK]: And that really simplifies this whole problem of the systems that you need to have in place to simply play defense as a recruiting team because of the volume of candidates that you're getting.
[NICK]: Very exciting,
[MICHAEL]: So, Nick just walked us through his journey from engineer to COO and the pivotal insights he gained from BlueCrew. Next, he's going to dive into the heart of Classet's mission — accelerating the talent acquisition process to improve hiring outcomes. It's crucial because, as Nick explained, speed can make or break your ability to secure top talent.
--- PRESENTATION ---
[NICK]: problem or why so many companies are losing candidates that they already found.
[NICK]: For a quick primer on my background, my name is Nick Jones.
[NICK]: I'm the cofounder and COO over at Classet.
[NICK]: I've been working in talent acquisition for the last eleven years.
[NICK]: I previously was the operations leader at BlueCrew, which was an on demand staffing platform.
[NICK]: Through the BlueCrew journey, we hired over a million w two employees.
[NICK]: And that's what really colors a lot of the context of the challenge that we're trying to solve here at Classette.
[NICK]: Before we even talk about the data in more detail, here are the common denominators that we are seeing extremely consistently, and these are trends that are accelerating specifically over the last few years.
[NICK]: First thing that is extremely common to high volume talent acquisition teams, you post a job and very rapidly, you get buried in candidates.
[NICK]: Of those candidates, a lot of times, the resume is not generating a whole lot of actionable information to be able to determine where you should invest your time as a recruiting team.
[NICK]: There's everything from the AI generated resumes to chronically out of date resumes to no resumes at all.
[NICK]: So you take that huge influx of candidates.
[NICK]: As a recruiter, you start trying to decipher some initial signal from that huge influx of candidates that you got.
[NICK]: And then you start figuring out who you're going to reach out to to actually kick off the interview and hiring process.
[NICK]: All of that takes a lot of time, and that leads to candidates rapidly dropping out of the funnel.
[NICK]: We think of candidates in the same way that a lot of businesses think of sales leads, where as soon as that application is in, you are really on the shot clock.
[NICK]: All of these are working against really running a cost effective and quick talent acquisition process.
[NICK]: For the data behind it and why we call it the seventeen day problem, industry standard that we continuously see, which is referenced in data, it's about two and a half weeks before a candidate is getting actionable information and next steps to move forward into the hiring process.
[NICK]: And your typical high volume job opening, very realistic for that to get over a thousand applicants.
[NICK]: There's a ton of talent acquisition teams that are built around this mandate of contact every candidate within twenty four hours, within forty eight hours.
[NICK]: The challenge is that is still often not fast enough, and the only way to reliably get to candidates immediately after they apply is to scale your internal talent acquisition team to levels that are not economically sustainable for your business.
[NICK]: Well, how we think about this is there really isn't necessarily a shortage of candidates.
[NICK]: What there is a gap in is the speed that you are utilizing to contact them and to get the process moving.
[NICK]: We see roughly eighty of candidates that are already accepting or already moving forward with different opportunities by the time they get contacted by many employers.
[NICK]: Three out of five candidates report being ghosted by employer that they've applied to.
[NICK]: So they put in that application shortly after they get that nice automated, hey, Nick.
[NICK]: Thank you for applying email.
[NICK]: And a lot of times, that is really the end of their journey.
[NICK]: So it's inherently a very poor candidate experience, and it reinforces the behavior as a candidate that what you need to do to get a new position is mass apply.
[NICK]: How we really view the hiring process working versus how this often happens in practice today is you need to be able to get to candidates immediately.
[NICK]: Within the first three days, you need to be done with your hiring process if your goal is to consistently close top talent.
[NICK]: The reality which you see on the far right hand side is that it's just not realistic to keep up with when you consider all of the things that are on the recruiter's plate.
[NICK]: By the time they are reaching out to candidates, a lot of times you're seeing this motion of the candidate isn't even remembering which job they applied for, or they've already moved forward with a different position.
[NICK]: They are already gone and out of the funnel.
[NICK]: So the market is extremely transient, and you have got to be on point with getting candidates into queue as quickly as possible.
[NICK]: So how that how that, plays out in the real world, taking a a actual real life example here.
[NICK]: So this is a frontline role paying a decent wage, eighteen to twenty two per hour.
[NICK]: We have sixty one interviews actually scheduled, and you lose half of your funnel right off of the top.
[NICK]: Half of them aren't even showing up.
[NICK]: So you've already put in a lot of work just to reach out to those sixty one to get them all scheduled, and that's time that the team is never going to get back.
[NICK]: Of those twenty seven that you actually make contact with, you get eight that have actually passed the screening.
[NICK]: So those are the eight against the sixty one that you scheduled that are worth your time that are likely to move forward.
[NICK]: You get five of the eight actually accepting the offer.
[NICK]: But because each of these steps is additional time investments and there's additional delays, you only land and end of the day with two actually hired.
[NICK]: Part of the challenge here is that if you're working in an hourly capacity and you need a new job, that's not a next month, it's not a next quarter issue.
[NICK]: You need to get into a new position because you've got bills to pay, you have people depending on you.
[NICK]: So you can't subject yourself to the delays of how quickly a talent acquisition team is going to work through the process.
[NICK]: So you are jumping forward at whatever is moving...
[NICK]: Whichever employer is moving fastest through the process.
[NICK]: The other really fundamental challenge is the majority of applications, especially amongst the workforces that we serve, majority of applications are coming in after business hours or on weekends.
[NICK]: They simply don't map to that recruiter nine to five.
[NICK]: So you close your computer at five PM, you go home for the weekend, your applications aren't stopping.
[NICK]: They're continuing to come in.
[NICK]: The highest volume application window is actually five to nine PM.
[NICK]: So employees might get off of a tough shift and they decide they're going to start looking for what's next.
[NICK]: There's already a disconnect even if you have an extremely performant recruiting team in the form of, I'm putting in my application in the evening.
[NICK]: At best, I'm not gonna hear anything until tomorrow when someone's back in front of their computer.
[NICK]: All of this is contributing towards applications going cold and not moving forward in the hiring process.
[NICK]: Another big part of the challenge that we frequently see, there's definitely an over indexing towards email communication.
[NICK]: And it makes sense.
[NICK]: It's much more scalable.
[NICK]: It's lower upkeep for recruiters to reach out to candidates.
[NICK]: The problem is in the non exempt workforce, email is not something that is typically really paid attention to.
[NICK]: SMS is the huge driver.
[NICK]: So when we look at our benchmarks for how candidates are being communicated, for every five emails you send, only one is being opened.
[NICK]: But when you're sending text messages, when you're going right to a candidate's phone, orders of magnitude higher response rate.
[NICK]: We then use that SMS outreach to get candidates into a live phone interview.
[NICK]: So it's really those two tandems in channel that are extremely helpful for driving your funnel conversion.
[NICK]: Challenges that does require outfitting your team with the right tools on the front end.
[NICK]: You have to validate that they're plugged into your stack.
[NICK]: There's additional elements of the workflow that you have to have built in.
[NICK]: And if a recruiter is hiring a hundred employees a month, you don't wanna be using your personal cell phone to run the hiring process.
[NICK]: So there's a couple challenges with the way that even communication is happening.
[NICK]: We look at the general stack that many large employers have.
[NICK]: Almost a hundred percent of large companies are utilizing an applicant tracking system, and that's in stark contrast to your mid market and your SMB employers.
[NICK]: We are seeing a big uptick in employers that are using AI in recruiting and a lot more that are planning on doing it.
[NICK]: So the takeaway here is really that the competition is going to continue to increase as more and more companies are outfitting their talent acquisition process with technology to make their process more efficient.
[NICK]: So this really isn't a theoretical thing to consider at this point.
[NICK]: This is somewhat becoming table stakes where you have to understand how you're going to stay competitive with not only accelerating your time to contact, but competing against the other employers that are looking for the same talent.
[NICK]: So that is, in a nutshell, the seventeen day problem.
[NICK]: Every hour of delay, your funnel leaks.
[NICK]: There's inherently a disconnect between when candidates are applying and when the team is able to reach out to them.
[NICK]: There is a gap in coverage to keep your hiring process moving.
[NICK]: So here's how we specifically address this at ClassSet.
[NICK]: We really focus on instantaneous response to candidates.
[NICK]: That is a huge differentiator to be able to get in touch with them immediately.
[NICK]: So if we look at the workflow, and in the gray boxes, you kind of have the analog prior to using a tool like Classette.
[NICK]: Candidate application rolls in at night at night.
[NICK]: That's gonna sit there until Monday morning.
[NICK]: After that, when you reach out to them, candidate might take an offer in a matter of few days, and then you still need to go through your onboarding process.
[NICK]: Each of these is going to cost you time.
[NICK]: The way that our system works is immediately when the candidate applies, we engage with them right away, right where we have their attention at a local maximum.
[NICK]: The framing is, hey, Nick.
[NICK]: Thank you so much for applying to this company.
[NICK]: We're excited to keep the hiring process moving.
[NICK]: I'd love to go ahead and get you on a phone interview right now.
[NICK]: That happens completely at the candidate's availability.
[NICK]: There's no scheduling motion.
[NICK]: When they are interested, that is when you need to be moving on them right away.
[NICK]: This is the problem.
[NICK]: So, again, way the process works, we view Classet as a recruiting copilot, and Joy is the agent that executes that.
[NICK]: So we plug directly into your applicant tracking system.
[NICK]: We don't require any changes to the way that you are currently sourcing candidates today.
[NICK]: We are an agent that lives within your system.
[NICK]: Soon as a new candidate record is created, new candidate applies, we reach out and engage with them right away.
[NICK]: All with the intent of getting them into the actual phone interview.
[NICK]: Phone interview itself, there's also a huge opportunity with ClassNet to drive a much more quality candidate experience.
[NICK]: Part of the challenge working in a high volume recruiting function is that you inherently do have to box in your time a little bit.
[NICK]: I've got fifty screens to get through.
[NICK]: That means I have ten minutes per phone conversation.
[NICK]: You can have a much deeper conversation that an agent is actually facilitating that is working to sell your company and the opportunity to candidates that's answering their questions.
[NICK]: And of course, it's learning about their background.
[NICK]: Then we take that packaged candidate, generate a summary of the interview.
[NICK]: We write that back into your applicant tracking system.
[NICK]: So if you look at what we do at a bird's eye view, your team closes our computers at five PM on a Friday.
[NICK]: When everyone logs in on Monday, all of your candidates are organized in your system of record.
[NICK]: Your high engagement candidates have been screened and they're moving into next steps in the process.
[NICK]: An important call out about how this is structured.
[NICK]: We don't operate through a chatbot type of interface or anything the candidate needs to log into.
[NICK]: It's coming directly into their text messages and then directly through a phone conversation.
[NICK]: What that allow us is obviously the twenty four seven availability, but it really keeps the funnel moving quickly from application into getting into the process.
[NICK]: We are contacting all of the candidates that pass your initial knockout criteria questions that you have attached to the application.
[NICK]: What it produces at the end of the day is massively better conversion into the subsequent steps of your hiring process because it is running so instantaneously while not sacrificing the candidate experience.
[NICK]: How this looks when we get up and running with new customers before you look at, alright, we've got this two and a half week, this seventeen day problem where our weekend applications are gonna sit there.
[NICK]: Our top candidates are continually attriting out of the funnel.
[NICK]: We've got some complex interview questions that we need to ask.
[NICK]: All of that consumes time, and it's...
[NICK]: Comes at the expense of people actually showing up and connecting with the team.
[NICK]: When a system like Classet is in place twenty four hours a day, as soon as your candidates are expressing interest in the role, they are getting engaged and you are the first to really jump on that.
[NICK]: The interviews, we can be extremely in-depth.
[NICK]: We can capture their background.
[NICK]: We can fill in gaps on their resume.
[NICK]: We provide a wealth of information that you aren't going to get from just a paper artifact.
[NICK]: And we want recruiters to be focused on closing talent and really being that advocate, both for the hiring manager and for the candidate, instead of feeling like they're working in a call center around the clock.
[NICK]: That's what we want recruiters to do, what humans do best, not the transactional work at the top of the funnel.
[NICK]: If there are three things to really take from this, speed is your key metric.
[NICK]: If you are really focusing on speed to outreach and speed through the hiring process, you're putting yourself in a better situation.
[NICK]: Second one is you've gotta have a solution for your after hours and weekend coverage because that's going to be the majority of your applicant volume.
[NICK]: And as far as communication goes, you need to be leaning into text.
[NICK]: All of these are native to Classette, but independent of if you use a tool like Classette, these are the three things I am consistently advocating for people to bring into their hiring process.
[NICK]: This is a space I am super passionate about.
[NICK]: Always happy to chat with anyone directly to review what we do, and I love learning more about the challenges that everyone is experiencing within their hiring process.
[NICK]: Thank you so much.
[NICK]: Nick, I know a lot of the executives that are on the call today will have, questions, and I appreciate the fact that you'll be joining us on our next live q and a panel coming up in just a few minutes.
[NICK]: So type your questions into the q and a box that you see in front of you, and we'll do our best to get to as many of those questions as we can during this next live q and a panel coming up in just a few minutes.
[MICHAEL]: Nick's presentation really drove home the importance of speed in the hiring process. Now, in this live panel from our Software Oasis AI Summit, we get to hear real audience questions. These insights will further illuminate how crucial it is to adapt quickly to remain competitive in talent acquisition.
[MICHAEL — CHECKPOINT]: So, one thing's clear—speed is of the essence in high-volume hiring. But with speed, come questions on how to maintain quality and ensure a positive candidate experience. And that's exactly what this audience brought to the table during our panel discussion.
--- Q&A PANEL ---
[NICK]: For everyone that's been with us since first thing this morning, while this is our third panel of the event, this is our second Q&A panel.
[NICK]: That first expert panel was a lot of fun first thing this morning.
[NICK]: I'd like to introduce all of the speakers you've heard over the previous bit up until now.
[NICK]: So we have Prateek Mishra.
[NICK]: He's the chief technology and product officer over at Jovio.
[NICK]: Prateek, welcome.
[NICK]: And next we have Christopher Atiyah.
[NICK]: He's the chief executive officer over at EngTel.
[NICK]: Chris, welcome.
[NICK]: Thanks, Michael.
[NICK]: Next we have Rohit Baganah.
[NICK]: He's the co-founder and CTO over at ASAP.
[NICK]: Rohit, welcome to the panel.
[NICK]: Thank you for having me.
[NICK]: Next we have Sarah Hillenmeyer.
[NICK]: She is the VP of AI and data science over at Payscale.
[NICK]: Welcome, Sarah.
[NICK]: Great to be here.
[NICK]: Thanks.
[NICK]: And last but not least, we have Nick Jones, who is the co-founder and chief operating officer over at ClassEd.
[NICK]: Welcome, Nick.
[NICK]: Thanks, Michael.
[NICK]: So we'll jump right into the questions as we have so many that came in and we'll see how many we can get through.
[NICK]: So the first questions came in for Rohit, so I'll start there.
[NICK]: We have Avery, who is joining us from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here in the U.S.
[MICHAEL]: And Avery is asking, what evidence shows AI coaching changed a manager's behavior rather than just increased usage?
[MICHAEL]: That's a great question.
[MICHAEL]: Thank you, Avery.
[NICK]: So there are a few different ways we actually track this.
[NICK]: and utilization is what I would say is the least important one.
[NICK]: Because for coaching, what's important is that the solution is available to you when you need it, not something that you are required to engage with daily or weekly or even a monthly basis.
[NICK]: It needs to be there when you need it.
[NICK]: So for us, success is tracked based on the number of challenges that were resolved, number of action items that were actually completed, and then the feedback that we captured from their peers and direct reports.
[NICK]: So really it has to be dependent on goal success and really then the perception of the team and the group around them.
[MICHAEL]: And we have seen very significant success already in our deployments, especially in places where we are able to have the manager first set a goal for themselves and the team and then have that goal be the tracking functionality throughout their experience that they have with ally which is our ai solution the next question is a great one this came in from alina and this is for nick nick alina's right outside of detroit michigan so again here in the us and alina is asking which repret repetitive recruiting step should a high volume hiring team improve first?
[MICHAEL]: As far as the repetitive steps, so especially for high volume, the reality of it is it's extremely easy for the role of a high volume recruiter for it to almost feel like you're working in a call center.
[MICHAEL]: There's a lot of very, very transactional work right at the top of the funnel that really isn't benefiting the candidates, candidates and it's certainly not doing any favors to the recruiting process.
[NICK]: I would view the most mechanical work as getting that initial contact established as quickly as possible.
[NICK]: Obviously, we've got our specific point of view on that in terms of we can take it one step further and actually get the initial interview conducted with candidates.
[MICHAEL]: If you're looking for the first place to start, what I would focus on is right when you've got that candidate attention at that local maximum the point at which they're putting in an application those are critical early hours in terms of being successful the next question came in for chris and this comes to us from harper who is right here in pittsburgh pennsylvania and harper is asking who should own employee retention when responsibility is spread across managers and hr teams?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah, great, great question, Harper.
[NICK]: I think it needs to be owned right from the top.
[NICK]: I've always said, as CEO of the company, my job is attracting and retaining the best people.
[NICK]: If you do little else but do that, you could have a very good company.
[NICK]: And I think the reason that a lot of companies struggle is because no one really owns it.
[NICK]: I think a lot of people have some sort of accountability to it.
[NICK]: Your managers, your directors, everyone wants to retain their of people of course however i think we spend a lot of time looking at the bottom line numbers we spend a lot of time looking at you know whether it's revenue your net profit or whatever but i don't know how often ceos or senior executives are looking at the retention numbers of their business um so in my opinion and you know i don't depend probably on the size of the organization but i think you know if i'm a ceo or i'm a vice president overseeing 100 200 people i I think that metric of retention is one that I would really target myself on because I think it's indicative of, you know, so many other good things or bad things that might be happening in your organization.
[NICK]: But for me, it should be, you know, it should be right at the top.
[NICK]: Sarah, the next question came in for you, and I'm just going to pick one because there were several that were very similar.
[NICK]: So I think this is a question that a lot of enterprises at the event are wondering.
[NICK]: So this, the one I'm picking is from Simone, who is in Baltimore, Maryland.
[MICHAEL]: And Simone is asking, how can recruiters justify an AI skill premium when the candidate asks above the pay band?
[MICHAEL]: It's an opportunity to revisit your pay bands, right?
[MICHAEL]: If you go above the pay band for a specific candidate, that causes all sorts of downstream problems with pay equity and could put you in an interesting situation with compression or hiring someone that makes a lot more than people doing the comparable work.
[MICHAEL]: So something to be avoided for sure.
[NICK]: What I recommend is getting data that helps you understand how much that AI skill premium is really worth.
[NICK]: If it is worth, if it seems like it does bump up against the top of your pay band, and there's market data that's giving you evidence that that skill is worth more than what you're currently paying, then consider broadening your pay band.
[NICK]: That can be a tough conversation with finance if those were set way ahead of time.
[NICK]: And then now you have a pay band that's being used systematically across everybody that's in that role.
[NICK]: If you're trying to pull a candidate in and they asking for more than your pay at that level the old tricks still apply Evaluate them for the next level up Maybe that skill actually means that they are more effective than other people in the role and that they could be operating at that next level capacity if they have this key way of doing the job that not everybody else has.
[NICK]: But I would not make an exception to the pay band and go above it without market data and without actually changing the pay band and making sure that that's something that you can run at scale and defend.
[NICK]: Yeah, and it's such an interesting nuance with the rate at which these skills within AI are evolving.
[NICK]: I think so many executives are, it's a moving target that they're trying to keep ahead of.
[NICK]: So really, really interesting there.
[NICK]: The next question came in for Prateek.
[NICK]: This is from Iris, who's located just here in the U.S.
[NICK]: in San Jose, California.
[MICHAEL]: And Iris is asking, what should a talent team redesign before buying its first recruitment agent?
[MICHAEL]: I think that's a loaded question, right?
[NICK]: So I would say before buying any agent or any software, right, they need to first map out their existing workflow.
[NICK]: right instead of just buying a tool because then that becomes another tool which is probably in the list of unused tools right so they need to map out their workflow and then start with you know the probably the place in the workflow which is the most used or most manual which is the most painful right and then buy an agent for that other than just buying the tool so first map out your workflow redefine the roles and that's another aspect of this that before you buy a tool and and having the people trust whether this tool works or not.
[NICK]: You need to preempt that at what the role redefinition will look like once you get those agents.
[NICK]: So you map out your workflow, then train your team, set the expectation, and then get a tool, not the other way around.
[NICK]: Makes great sense.
[NICK]: Rohit, the next question came in for you, and I want to be sure we're taking some of our international questions here.
[NICK]: So this came in from Fatima, who is in Ottawa, Canada.
[MICHAEL]: So Fatima is asking, how can an AI coach support someone immediately before a difficult feedback conversation?
[MICHAEL]: So another good question.
[NICK]: And actually, I think around 60 to 65% of the conversations that we see with Ally are actually conversations that are happening just in time, a few minutes before a call is coming up or something that is going to show up on the calendar.
[NICK]: And it's actually not a planned call that they set up beforehand.
[NICK]: So it's a very common use case for where individuals do like using Ally.
[NICK]: Now the way we have seen it make the most impact is in the roleplay approach, where they actually try out a few different ways to share their narrative for what they're trying to communicate to the end user.
[NICK]: And Ally is able to quickly analyze it and share with them a few frameworks.
[NICK]: And then the next step is to actually practice those frameworks in a few different ways.
[NICK]: But really that's where we have seen the biggest impact in terms of people actually feeling that it helped them have a better conversation.
[NICK]: I think the role play part is way more important in general than just getting content which you read and then ingest and have to practice in real time for the first time on the live conversation.
[NICK]: The next question came in for Nick, and this is from Jamal, who is right in, looks like right outside of Houston, Texas.
[MICHAEL]: And Jamal is asking, How can employers cut time to fill without making applicants feel, and he put in quotes, processed?
[MICHAEL]: It's a great question.
[NICK]: First, I think it's worth considering the default experience that so many employees have when applying for jobs.
[NICK]: So you mentioned you don't want employees to feel processed, but at the same time for 15 out of 20 jobs that the typical frontline worker applies to, you get that nice automated thank you for applying email from the ATS.
[NICK]: And that's really the end of your journey there.
[NICK]: So I take the point as far as you don't want to make candidates feel processed.
[NICK]: And our lens on that is you can actually have a really meaningful interaction with the candidate by leveraging AI tools.
[NICK]: A lot of times, if you look at the composition of an initial screening call, if I need to hire 100 candidates, you inherently really need to box in your time.
[NICK]: I have 100 candidates to screen.
[NICK]: I've got 10 minutes to knock this out.
[NICK]: So what that constitutes is, all right, here's a 30 second primer on the role in the company.
[NICK]: I need to make sure that you check these three boxes.
[NICK]: Now let's get you in for the next round interview, assuming that you meet all of those.
[NICK]: So there's not really the space for candidates to ask their own questions, to do their own vetting on if the role is the right fit for them, if it's something that they're interested in.
[NICK]: And that introduces all these cascading issues with candidates not showing up to interviews with them walking off after five days on the job.
[NICK]: So when it comes to not making candidates feel processed, the way that we focus on the framing is we get it interjecting AI into the process, especially right on the front line of your initial screening call might look a little bit impersonal on the surface.
[NICK]: At the same time, it is a much more comprehensive experience for the candidate where we can focus on what they're looking for, what they need to learn about the role and obviously learn about their background as well.
[NICK]: So it's definitely a paradigm shift.
[NICK]: But when you consider the default that's in place for so many companies, it's a meaningful uplift.
[NICK]: Chris, the next question came in for you, and this is from Tessa, who's joining us today from Manchester in the UK.
[MICHAEL]: and Tessa's asking, what questions uncover whether employees feel stuck or undervalued before they resign?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah, good question, Tessa.
[MICHAEL]: Good to hear a fellow Brit on the line.
[NICK]: I think that always taking a step back from the questions, you need to make sure you regularly solicit feedback.
[NICK]: So, you know, my recommendation is every organization, every six months should do some sort of feedback survey to elicit feedback on whether people are happy or not.
[NICK]: It needs to be a completely safe space.
[NICK]: It needs to be administered by someone that's removed from the employee, you know, not the manager, not someone that might be worried about offending.
[NICK]: that they can give completely and open and honest feedback.
[NICK]: And you need to almost encourage people to give the kind of watch it all feedback and why it's very important.
[MICHAEL]: We not asking you to be negative and complain We asking you to give us information that gonna help us improve as a company If we improve as a company it good for you it good for me it good for everyone that works there So I think having those regular six check In terms of these specific questions, I would be asking things such as, do you see yourself working here for the next two or three years?
[MICHAEL]: What's one area of your job that you can improve?
[MICHAEL]: Do you feel safe at work?
[MICHAEL]: Do you feel listened to at work?
[MICHAEL]: Do you feel that we have a transparent environment?
[MICHAEL]: If the answer is yes or no, can you give examples?
[MICHAEL]: So really making sure that you are able to solicit as much feedback so you can spot when you have those retention risks.
[NICK]: I always recommend that our managers have almost a little bit of a traffic light system.
[NICK]: Green being, okay, this candidate is super engaged.
[NICK]: They're doing really well.
[NICK]: We think they're going to be a long term, they're very happy.
[NICK]: You know, yellow maybe being a bit more kind of like, I don't think they're resigning tomorrow, but maybe they're not as engaged as they could be.
[NICK]: And maybe we need a bit more of a development plan for them.
[MICHAEL]: Maybe we need to assess, are they in the right role?
[NICK]: And then red being, OK, I actually do think that this person is unhappy, could be actively interviewing.
[NICK]: And then if you get your managers to think in that way, you know, I think it will allow you to spot kind of potential retention issues earlier.
[NICK]: earlier.
[NICK]: But the key thing is having those regular check-ins and really soliciting the feedback.
[NICK]: For some of those questions I've mentioned, I think will highlight some of the people that are maybe not as engaged as you thought they were.
[NICK]: Sarah, this next question came in for you, and I think this is really relevant based on where we're at in the evolution of AI.
[NICK]: This is from Felix, who is in Berlin, Germany.
[MICHAEL]: And Felix is asking, how do you tell whether a skill is rare for a specific role or already priced in?
[NICK]: Yeah, so the data sources that I recommend looking at, and if you are interested in ours, send me a note, Felix.
[NICK]: But we'll give you a sense of how common it is for an organization to require that skill in the job that you're considering.
[MICHAEL]: So let's say you're hiring a compensation analyst or let's say you're hiring a recruiter, right?
[MICHAEL]: And almost all of the recruiters that you're interviewing have the recruiting skill.
[MICHAEL]: That's basically why you're hiring them.
[MICHAEL]: Did every job description.
[MICHAEL]: You're not going to pay extra for that because it's a core part of the job.
[MICHAEL]: So when you start to see skills that are more like 10% of companies are hiring for this and they're paying significantly more in a statistically significant kind of way, those are the skills that you want to latch onto and think about as rare and not priced into the benchmark.
[MICHAEL]: And that's for two reasons.
[MICHAEL]: One is that the way that benchmarking jobs happens is that it's aggregated data over a set of organizations or a set of employees at those organizations.
[MICHAEL]: And you get information like what's the median pay for this role?
[MICHAEL]: What's the 75th percentile for this role?
[MICHAEL]: What's the 25th percentile for this role?
[MICHAEL]: sometimes you get the 90th percentile.
[MICHAEL]: If you have a set of organizations, let's say 10% of organizations are paying 100% more just for this one skill, you won't actually see that information in the median, the P75, the P90, because they're all above that P90 line.
[NICK]: So I'd use 10% as a rule of thumb cutoff.
[NICK]: If less than 10% of organizations are requiring the skill, there's no chance that it's baked into your benchmarks.
[NICK]: If more than that, you might be able to see it at the 90th or at the 75th.
[NICK]: Makes sense.
[NICK]: Prateek, this next question I think is one that's relevant to a lot of organizations tuning in today.
[NICK]: This is from Nia, who is in Brooklyn, New York.
[NICK]: Nia is asking, what results would justify moving an agent from simply drafting messages to actually sending them.
[NICK]: Okay.
[MICHAEL]: So the first thing before jumping into the results, right, I would say before, you know, before having the agents take the action, right, you need to make sure that they earn the trust, right?
[MICHAEL]: The trust is always earned, never given, right?
[MICHAEL]: So that is a prerequisite, right?
[NICK]: Then I would say once the agent has earned your trust and you are very confident that it can take autonomous decisions on your behalf, then I would say you need to measure how much time it's going to save.
[NICK]: right you know like if instead of you pushing that button how much time is the agent saving right and that that is what it should justify but you need to be absolutely certain that you know it's not doing something which which you don't want it to do let's always start with maybe internal pilot so let's suppose if it is about sending email so first make sure that you turn it on for your own internal people once you're satisfied then only deploy it for external them.
[NICK]: Rohit, this next question came in for you.
[NICK]: And this is from Zara, who's located just outside of Dublin, Ireland.
[MICHAEL]: Zara's asking, how do you keep a team's habits from undoing an individual leaders progress?
[MICHAEL]: It's a good question.
[NICK]: So I think I would unravel, I guess, or unwrap something in there.
[NICK]: I think, you know, I think the team's habits are more often than not a reflection of the leader's leadership style.
[NICK]: and a team can have pre-created habits if a new leader comes in.
[NICK]: But the challenge always for that leader, even in that situation, is to shift it so it reflects their leadership style.
[NICK]: I don't think there is really a successful team where a team and the team leader have different styles and they're working in divergent fashion.
[NICK]: So for us, one of the things that has been important is to have a dual communication, essentially, and visibility of data.
[NICK]: So let me kind of explain what that means.
[NICK]: One of the important part of our experience is this initial team compass that we do.
[NICK]: Team compass is an assessment where every individual, including the team leader, respond on seven key team dynamics, and there are a few questions to respond to.
[NICK]: And based on that, what we do is we look at the distribution of the score.
[NICK]: What the distribution of the score shows is the distribution between the team members, and then it specifically highlights the team leader.
[NICK]: The reason this is incredibly valuable is because we can often see here where the team is diverging from the team leader in terms of its perspective on what's working or what's not working.
[NICK]: And that gives us the first immediate thing to work on.
[NICK]: And that's what allows Ally to support the team leader to set up a call.
[NICK]: And what even more important as journey continues is as Ally captures data it brings back specific exercises for the team leader to actually do to support the team better and the reason i say it this way is because anyway the team leader should not be creating habits which are disconnected and disjointed from the team their goal is the success of their team and their goal is not success of themselves as an individual team leader.
[NICK]: That's not what their role is.
[NICK]: So this initial transparency on the data and where the divergence is happening in terms of their perspective on the team, that's important.
[NICK]: And second, the feedback loop where as we capture data from the team members to bring it back to the team leader.
[NICK]: And then as team leader defines the goals of focus, bringing that back to the team member.
[NICK]: That's what allows us to make sure that they work in sync with each other and that's always the goal to bring them in sync instead of seeing if the one of them is going to pull or push the other one the next question came in for chris and uh this is a great one um this is from amir who's just outside of dallas texas and amir is asking how can interviewers be candid about a role's drawbacks without losing strong candidates Yeah, I mean, yeah, again, excellent question.
[NICK]: I think one that, you know, a lot of people struggle with.
[NICK]: And firstly, you know, the answer is, you know, what's the you've got to remember what happens if you're not honest.
[NICK]: Right.
[NICK]: You know, and yes, it might detract from some people in the moment.
[NICK]: However, the downside is if you are not honest with them, you know, you will lose them two or three months in anyway.
[NICK]: So I think it's important that people remember that.
[NICK]: I think it's very important to give an honest assessment about the job and the company.
[NICK]: No job is perfect, no company is perfect.
[NICK]: And I think every intelligent candidate understands that.
[NICK]: I think if you lay out and say, look, these are some of the challenges that we're experiencing, I wanna be honest with you about some of the challenges that this role will face.
[NICK]: However, this is why I think it's a very appealing position.
[NICK]: This is the growth trajectory.
[NICK]: These are the reasons why someone could do incredibly well in this role.
[NICK]: This is the impact that they could have.
[NICK]: So I think it's critical to address that.
[NICK]: And if you do lose candlesticks because of that, I'm generally OK with that.
[NICK]: You know, whenever I interview people for my company, I'm very much, you know, we're not for everyone.
[NICK]: You know, we're a great company for these people.
[NICK]: But these people over here, maybe we're not the best company.
[NICK]: And if someone looks at our environment and says, you know what, like, you know, really happy for you.
[MICHAEL]: do it?
[MICHAEL]: Probably not the company for me.
[NICK]: Again, I'm kind of okay with that because they will make that decision at some point after joining our company and I would rather they made that decision early than after we've hired them and invested a bunch of time in them, that's worth both sides.
[NICK]: So directly to answer the question, I think it's important to really present all of the positive things about your company when you're interviewing.
[NICK]: You can't just display the downside, However, my combat argument would be, if you don't do that, you are just setting yourself up for problems down the road.
[NICK]: So it's very, very important to highlight a very accurate perspective on what the position involves, positive or negative.
[NICK]: This next question is a great follow-up, Sarah.
[NICK]: This is from Anika, who is joining us from Melbourne, Australia.
[MICHAEL]: And Anika is asking, when is a signing bonus wiser than raising base pay for an emerging AI skill?
[MICHAEL]: Yeah, this is a great question, Anika.
[MICHAEL]: There are certain skills that really do bifurcate a job or change the pay, the base pay of a job.
[NICK]: So an example I can give you there is if you're hiring truck drivers, if you pay extra for hazmat certification, 5% extra if that truck driver has a hazmat certification, that's a difference in pay that you're likely to persist over years and years and years.
[NICK]: It's just worth a little bit more to have that certification.
[NICK]: See the same thing in security clearances.
[NICK]: You're hiring a software engineer as a government contractor and you need them to have a security clearance.
[NICK]: That's probably worth a persistent extra pay.
[NICK]: When we get into these emerging skills, the pattern is different.
[NICK]: So I can give you a little bit of a time machine.
[NICK]: A couple of years ago, I was hiring folks and I have software engineers and data scientists and product managers, those sorts of folks.
[NICK]: And really, I was looking for people that had good prompt engineering skills.
[NICK]: And I was paying a little bit more if they were really great at that prompt engineering.
[NICK]: Now, everybody has that.
[NICK]: It's not worth the extra money.
[NICK]: So if I had gone ahead and added that 6% into the base pay for those folks that came in with good prompt engineering skills, I'd still be paying that.
[NICK]: It's hard to take that money back.
[NICK]: I'd still be paying that extra 6% year over year, and then it compounds as those folks get raises, and that would be really baked into my system.
[NICK]: Instead, giving a hiring bonus or even a one-time bonus to current employees to say, if you can show me that you've developed this skill and do a successful project, here's a lump sum of money.
[NICK]: That made my offers competitive in a market where that was a tight skill.
[NICK]: But two years later, I've moved on.
[NICK]: Now loop engineering or graph engineering are the hot things, and everybody knows how to do prompt engineering.
[NICK]: So it's not worth that 6% anymore.
[NICK]: So what we see is that the frequency of people and of organizations that are requiring a skill is increasing over time.
[NICK]: And the impact of that skill on pay for the role is decreasing over time.
[NICK]: And when those two lines are crisscrossed like that, and sometimes you can tell at the very beginning that the trajectories are there.
[NICK]: Those are the cases where I would say think one time bonus, think hiring bonus or or current bonus for your current employees, because the market's going to look different in two years and you don't want to persist that that decision for the lifetime of that employee or for the lifetime of that role.
[NICK]: well on that note uh unfortunately we've we've come to the end of our time for this particular panel but i think we got to quite a few questions but i know we didn't get to every question so if you have a question that we did not get to and you'd like to reach out to any of the speakers on this panel directly or to any of the other speakers that you've heard throughout the event or if you need some other um you know help in a different area that big orange button at the top of the site will get you connected and we will be sure to uh to get some follow-up for you uh with that i'd like to thank pratik chris roheed sarah and nick for all of your efforts in presenting today and for joining us on this very lively panel with a lot of questions and answers for our live audience.
[NICK]: Thank you.
[NICK]: Thank you.
[NICK]: Thanks, everybody.
[NICK]: That was nice.
[MICHAEL]: Alright, let's wrap up with some key takeaways. First, the speed of your hiring process can significantly impact your success in securing top talent. Second, the candidate experience can't be overlooked, even when you're moving fast. And finally, leveraging technology effectively is crucial for staying competitive. By focusing on these aspects, you can truly revolutionize your talent acquisition strategy. Thanks to Nick for sharing his insights with us. If you'd like to connect with Nick, be sure to find him on LinkedIn. And if you haven't already, come join us over at softwareoasis.com — that's where all of this really comes together. We'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and as always, take care and we'll see you next time.