From Data to Connection – Using AI for More Meaningful Recruitment: 2024 HR Tech Series - Part 4

John Phillips (00:01)

Obviously, we're in an age of AI and people trying to figure out what does that mean and what does it mean in the context of the workflows that they have. And so the HR technology area, obviously, you're dealing with AI not as a simple process, but as a people process. And so, I think I'm watching everybody try to wrestle with what does it mean to have AI in their workflows. 

Announcer (00:23)

Welcome to Paychex THRIVE, a Business Podcast where you'll hear timely insights to help you navigate marketplace dynamics and propel your business forward. Here's your host, Gene Marks. 

Gene Marks (00:38)

Hey, everyone, and welcome to our last special edition episode of Paychex at HR Tech 2024. I'm Gene Marks, and if you haven't already listened to the first three episodes of this series, you're going to want to check them out. Now, this week, our guest host, Rob Parsons from Paychex sits down on the HR Tech floor with John Phillips from Findem. If you've ever struggled to find top talent, you're definitely going to want to listen in and hear more about how AI is shaking things up. So, without further ado, here's Rob. 

Rob Parsons (01:10)

Hello and welcome to this Paychex special edition video podcast. I'm Rob Parsons live from the floor of HR Tech 2024. With me today is John Phillips from Findem. John Phillips is the VP and GM at Findem, with over 20 years of experience leading HR and talent teams, as well as building HR and talent acquisition products. He has held executive leadership roles at companies like Indeed, Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft. And he is passionate about transforming how companies find and engage top talent. John, thank you for joining me today. 

John Phillips (01:48)

Absolutely. 

Rob Parsons (01:49)

So, there's a lot of buzz this year at the show, a lot of excitement as you walk the floor. What trends are you seeing? What's interesting to you? 

John Phillips (01:57)

Yeah, I think, obviously, we're in an age of AI and people trying to figure out what does that mean and what does it mean in the context of the workflows that they have. And so the HR technology area, obviously, you're dealing with AI not as a simple process, but as a people process. And so I think I'm watching everybody try to wrestle with what does it mean to have AI in their workflows? When's the right time to apply AI? When do you not want to apply AI? What's the human connection? And so I think that's the real trend. I think that's gonna be here to stay for a while as we navigate. But it feels like we're right in the age of AI and people centric conversations are what's happening here. 

Rob Parsons (02:33)

So, I love your history. Just everything you've done around talent and recruiting. A lot of the innovation is being driven by the changing workforce. Millennials, Gen Z, Alpha is right around the corner. What do you see with that changing workforce? What are you seeing today with them, and how's that impacting technology and innovation? 

John Phillips (02:54)

Yeah, I actually think that, well, you know, the good thing about when you look at generations, you can look back before you look forward. And when you look back at the generations, there's always impacted by what's happening socially around them. I think we've gone through eras of where we want work-life balance, and the kind of, the Millennials kind of were the interest of like, hey, my job is not everything, and I want to have some balance from the Boomers, and then you're getting a little bit more balance and flexibility, and that's balance, flexibility and advocacy. It's connection to where I matter, my work matters. And so, I think we are continuing to see that evolve, and I feel like it's marrying our social cultures and they're all impacted by something. So, I think this generation we're in right now, we're seeing this Gen Z and we're seeing the next generation, which is a digitally first, they're consuming more data on a daily basis than we ever did, we as older generations than we ever did growing up. And so we. Those are the things that are saying, well, that's influenced the speed, the expectation of that community. And so how do you embrace that reality of massively consumed data and how do you create human experiences in the workplace is really that moment to say, if you're trying to hold onto a culture from the past, you're going to need to look to the future culture to say, what do they need? What are the expectations, hours, workforce flexibility, schedules? Like, everything is up for grabs right now. To say, like, those that evolve their environments to meet those desires are going to be the ones that win. 

Rob Parsons (04:19)

I've got to think that same thought process applies to the recruiting and the recruiting environment. Recruiting has had to evolve. 

John Phillips (04:27)

Yeah, I mean, look, recruiting, recruiting is on a, it's always the front end of the evolution, because at the end of day, you're trying to connect people to opportunity, and that is a human thing. And all the technology and all the things that go in need to make it more and more human. And so as you're seeing it evolve, it's really the evolution of how do you connect more deeply with more information. So then those human connections are more impactful. They're more connected, they know more about each other. Like all of the things that you'd say a consumer is going through around when they procure anything. A job is more important than that. And yet we know very little about the employment workplace. We know very little about the hiring manager. And data can start to connect those things. And we're starting to see that as a trend in recruitment where it's more than just, can I automate a process? But it's actually more of like, can 

Rob Parsons (05:13)

I make that connection more meaningful as a hiring manager? That's really interesting. It's an interesting dynamic. How does AI come into, into play there? I know Paychex Recruiting Copilot, in partnership with Findem. You know, AI is a big part of that equation. How does, how does AI become a practical tool to help build those connections? 

John Phillips (05:33)

Yeah, so we're thrilled to have this partnership with Paychex. We think we see AI as an assistant, we don't see it as a decision maker. And those are really important things as we go to market. And when we talked about people, how it can impact them, it's really around accuracy of connection. So when I have a set of criteria, things that I'm looking for, is that accurately portrayed in the search? Do I get candidates served to me that not only match those criteria, but also match the environment, also like meet all of those other, what we would call non resume things. So one of the founding pieces around AI is the better the data, the better the outcome the AI can produce. And what we've done is take more of a cohesive, like, look at what data is. We take all public data, we put it into a formation. We allow people to interact with it in a really simple search interface. But what it does is it increases the quality of the match, so that when you reach out and you talk to somebody, that match quality is going to make that interaction way more effective. So then it's just a speed of connection. Instead of going through lots and lots and lots of people that are mismatches to what you're looking for. It's that immediate connection with a solid match. And then it makes that human connection that's assisted by the AI way more effective. 

Rob Parsons (06:47)

I love that. Once again, as a hiring manager, so much of the interview process is finding that connection. 

John Phillips (06:53)

That's right. 

Rob Parsons (06:54)

I'm talking to you because your resume fit. But do we fit? Are we a right match? It's really interesting. Yeah, I've got to think this is going to make a big difference in speed to hire. 

John Phillips (07:05)

Absolutely. So, what we see is the more effective the connection, the less noise in the system, the less people you have to weed through. So, the old post and pray models that are out there where you post a job and you wait for someone to apply and you hope that they're a qualified person, then you get a long list of people that you have to go through. And we're circumventing that whole thing. We're just doing a match and a connection. So, speed, you take something that normally would take weeks just to be reviewing people, and we do it in an instant moment. We just run the search and you're immediately looking, you're validating those things, you're reaching out, and those connections are just made instantaneously. So that's a real speed. Speed matters down funnel, too. What we know about recruiting processes, the longer the time goes, the more candidates you need at the top of the funnel, because they're going to find another thing, they're going to drop out for a lot of other reasons. So speed to hire is important, not only from the labor forces saying, look, you have a labor gap, and closing that gap is really important, but also it affects your cost per hire, it affects all these other things, because the longer time goes, the more costly it is, both from a labor perspective and just a sourcing perspective. 

Rob Parsons (08:12)

It's really interesting, and it sounds like a powerful, powerful tool. You'd mentioned the easy to use interface. How do we make it easy to use? I mean, you're doing a lot here. 

John Phillips (08:24)

Yeah, I mean, this is where AI is super powerful. So, what we've done in our Copilot product, what we have is the ability to do even natural language. So things that used to take a recruiter to do really advanced searches, you can type in natural language. You could say, I'm looking for someone that's worked in a specific environment, just the way you do English. And AI allows us with our data model, since it's so rich, we're able to take that data and turn it into really, really powerful matching because that AI is triggered against a really deep data set that's super accurate. And so that is where AI creates that ability. And so, the simplicity is really these new abilities to interface in, where I used to have to plug in, like lots of search terms, and now I can just write a sentence of what I'm looking for and it's going to be so powerful that it can return really powerful. 

Rob Parsons (09:12)

This doesn't sound like a tool that a business owner with a company with 20 people could normally have access to. 

John Phillips (09:21)

Yeah, that is, that is one of the things that we're most excited about is these types of big data tools are normally reserved for the largest of enterprise with extremely large budgets. So, what we've been able to do is take, you know, millions and millions of profiles, 1.2 trillion data points, and give that to a small business owners. And for them to have that power that normally is reserved to big companies around search is, we're excited to see what small businesses can do with it because they're frankly the most innovative places. And so we're excited, just give them our tool and see how they use it and, and see what, what more they can invent off of it. It's going to be really powerful. 

Rob Parsons (09:54)

Yeah, I suspect they'll be running with it for sure. So, look ahead. Let's go to HR Tech 2029. 

John Phillips (10:03)

Yep. 

Rob Parsons (10:03)

What does the future of recruiting look like then? What does AI recruiting look like? What is just the recruiting landscape look like? 

John Phillips (10:10)

Yeah, the future. Well, there's um, I'm going to project what I hope the future looks like. 

Rob Parsons (10:14)

Okay, that's fair. 

John Phillips (10:15)

Let's be a part of it. Yes. What I'm hoping is that we can get past the fear of AI and the fear of bias in AI and we can actually start getting into understand how AI consists in removing biases. So, if you project forward, some of the biggest fears around bias are worried about what are the things that are exclusionary. With some of the AI, at least the data technology that way we think about it, we think about it as being more inclusive. And so what, the resumes are really bad and the job description is really bad to actually show you what you need. And so we're hoping that the more data that gets in there, the more you can start to show people how to get past those biases. Maybe I'll give you an example. One of the most biased things in any process is the job description. 

Rob Parsons (11:00)

Yes. 

John Phillips (11:01)

It tends to be copy paste from the history. It's defensible against a population. And what tends to happen is searches when it's just keyword based, it tends to just match exactly. It's saying copy paste, copy paste. What we see with AI and the advancement several years from now, as we continue to go, is that that gets equalized. And so, AI can actually help get people out of biases. Maybe it's recommending to an organization, say, maybe a college education isn't the thing that you should ask for in this environment because it's going to open up the talent pool and maybe the AI assistants can start to help us see there's other ways to see learning proficiency than a college degree. The number one predictor of a college degree is the zip code you grew up in. So, like, there's an economic indicator that maybe is something we don't want to use as a primary selection. So, I'm seeing in the future that AI can start being a just in time intervention into those biases and into those things to give hiring managers all the data they need to make a different choice, which is where bias gets removed. So, like, that's, maybe it's a, it's a passion, it's what I hope happens. I'm going to work towards that where I own it. But, but it's some of the biggest fears that we have in the industry, maybe partially where the biggest innovations come. 

Rob Parsons (12:13)

That is awesome. 

John Phillips (12:14)

Yeah. 

Rob Parsons (12:16)

All right, so this is a question I'm asking everybody on the podcast. What are the top three things you would do? Maybe you're doing them at Findem to create a talent first culture, a culture where the people are valued and where people want to work. 

John Phillips (12:30)

Yeah, I mean, there's, it's a, that's a big question because I think that the things that I'm learning about, as you talked about different generations, the flexibility and accepting people in the, in the, in the, in what they bring forward and kind of all of their mastery of skill and is really important for workforce to be flexible in the way they receive people could be flexible schedules could be flexible in culture could be flexible in kind of the way you can accept people in. So, I'm just seeing that trend to say that's something that embracing and creating that human connection in the workplace, especially in a digital world where we're going more remote and all these other things, that longing and human connection is never going to go away. And I think employers that do that well, whether it's digital or otherwise, are going to win. And that can happen at a really small scale. It can happen at a really big scale. But we think the things that we do from find them in other areas is we're trying to help create capacity for more of that connection to happen. So, like, what we would say is, all the time you give back, if you can save 70% of the time in your recruitment process where you're normally sourcing and doing other things, which is what we've seen other people get out of it, go use that time for better candidate connections, better understanding the human on the other side, because that's the workplace and the culture that's going to reside is like, can those human connections be more effective? And that takes time. So, we're hoping efficiency gives that time. And then what people do with that time, we're hoping is a more connected workforce. 

Rob Parsons (13:56)

That's excellent. 

John Phillips (13:56)

Yeah. 

Rob Parsons (13:57)

John, thank you. This was a great interview. I really appreciate you taking the time. 

John Phillips (14:00)

Absolutely. Thrilled to be here. Excellent. Thanks. 

Rob Parsons (14:03)

And thank you everybody for joining us today. As always, please stay happy and healthy. 

Gene Marks (14:09)

Thanks for joining us for this special episode of THRIVE. What a great conversation with John Phillips from Findem. This is the last episode of this special series, but I hope you'll join me next week when we're back to our normally scheduled THRIVE Podcast. And be sure to come back on Thursday for our Week In Review. My name is Gene Marks. We'll see you soon. Do you have a topic or a guest that you would like to hear on THRIVE? Please let us know. Visit Payx.me/thrivetopics and send us your ideas or matters of interest. Also, if your business is looking to simplify your HR, payroll, benefits, or insurance services, see how Paychex can help. Visit the resource hub at paychex.com/worx. That's W-O-R-X. Paychex can help manage those complexities while you focus on all the ways you want your business to thrive. I'm your host, Gene Marks, and thanks for joining us. Till next time, take care. 

Announcer (15:05)

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