Claro and THE AI RECRUITER: Revolutionizing Hiring with Advanced GPT-Powered Language Prompts with Mike Wolford

Brian Fink: [00:00:00] It’s the Ryan and Brian show, a k a recruiting dailies sourcing school with Ryan Leary and Brian Fink. And today we are joined by the one and only Mike Wolfard who serves as the director of analytics at Claro, which is a Wilson h c g company. He is a global leader in total talent solutions. I get to say that Mike is a friend of mine and he was [00:01:00] formerly my boss at Twitter where he ran blue bird sourcing team.

Ryan Leary: Where he ran you Into the ground.

Brian Fink: Where he ran me into the ground.

Mike Wolford: Ah, man. I had Brian train my team. Are you crazy?

Ryan Leary: Let’s be real. Let’s be real

Brian Fink: also, as long as we’re being real. One thing that I do want to call out is that Mike is the author of the AI recruiter. Which is currently a trending topic or trending a title on Amazon. You can get [email protected]. It’s one of the reasons that we invited him here on the program is that we want to talk about the power of ai. First question that I would ask is, Hey Mike, how are you doing? And then tell me, spill your guts about the computers and the machines.

Are they coming to take my job?

Mike Wolford: Hi, I’m good and doing better. And they’re coming to take the monotony of your job. How about that? So if your job is total monotony, then it’s coming for your job. If 50% of your job is monotony, then 50% of your job is being coming for. It’s an automation of [00:02:00] language tasks.

Brian Fink: Okay, so we talk about automation of language task, so real quick, Ryan, I had the opportunity to see Mike present on AI at Recruit dC a great event that happened a few weeks ago. And I know that he’s got Talent 42 that’s coming up the near the end of the month. That’s gonna be a great event as well, where he’s gonna talk about, or what I hope you’re gonna talk about is increased productivity and how. Ai. I think that ai, and this is injecting my own opinion here, I’d love to hear your response to it is, I think AI is gonna make us better recruiters because it’s gonna make us more productive. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Mike Wolford: I agree because it’s going to take away the stuff that requires a lot of thought, time and effort, but not a lot of value back.

So writing an outreach email actually does a good one, takes a considerable amount of effort. This is gonna get automated. Creative outreach emails is gonna get out. Interview scheduling will be automated. Interview approval Pro, [00:03:00] offer approval processes, automated, and I agree that the recruiters who are of the future are going to learn how to use the AI to automate those tasks and then they get to actually do what recruiters, I think, want to do, which is spend their time with people. So you’ll spend your time being an advisor to your hiring manager and a counselor to your candidates. I think it enables us finally, to get back our time to the point we’re able to provide service like, Prepping our candidates for interviews, like that’ll be the sort of thing that we do in the future.

The things that people really want another person to do. So they really want to interview with a person. They really want to be coached by a person and they really want to have the congratulations or I’m sorry, conversation come from a person. And there will be laws around that. Like for example, GDPR already prevents AI from rejecting an applicant.

So there will be things like that, and I think. To your point, the recruiters who learn how to use AI to [00:04:00] automate, like the daily language tasks are gonna be freed then to actually do the things I think recruiters like to do, which is talk to their candidates and develop relationships with their hiring managers.

Ryan Leary: can you define human language task?

Mike Wolford: Yeah, anything that requires two people to communicate to each other through written language, literally anything.

Brian Fink: All right. But when I think of written language so I’m not a coder, but one of the use cases that I’ve used for chat G p t is that I had it write a message to a Python engineer in Python.

And then they, and they wrote back and what have you, and they’re like, was this an automated message? And I was like, no, I use chat G P T to write it. And I was honest with ’em. You’re really talking about creating a golden age of research.

Mike Wolford: Yeah. And I think that’s also important too, as we talk about ethics and the use of ai.

We also, I think, need to, and as industry leaders, we need to take the lead here and disclose when [00:05:00] content is created by ai. That becomes a really critical point on the risk of ai. If everything that’s created by AI is identified as content, then the risk of Fake news and like serious false information goes down quite a bit because you can then see legally like it, it’ll say, Hey, this was generated by an ai.

And then you could say maybe it’s fake. Maybe like an example from recent news was an image of the Pentagon on Fire was circulated online. That was a fake image generated by an artificial intelligence gener, image generator. So if. We continue to not require authentication or disclosure of AI generated content.

We’re going to continue to see incidents like that. So for example, on the book it says, written by Mike Wilford and g PT four, because I wanted to disclose, and I think it’s a very important topic for us [00:06:00] as an industry to discuss and get on board early, that we disclose when we’re using AI to generate our content.

LinkedIn is rolling

Brian Fink: out a email service or an InMail service that’s going to

Mike Wolford: allow you to send InMails that

Brian Fink: are using a, not, I don’t wanna say copilot, because copilot is a coding solution, but they’re going to. They’re going to have an email template, templated InMail thing which I think is probably gonna drop the degree of engagement on the service, but that’s a conversation for another time.

What I would ask is, should we disclose at the end of writing an email and say, Hey, I wrote this email to you with chat, g p

Mike Wolford: t. You’re nodding your head. Yeah, for sure. All I, it’s not a regulation yet, but as I’m watching for example Sam Altman was in front of Congress a few weeks ago and there was a panel of experts from IBM and another ethicist in AI ethicist from, a major university.

And they [00:07:00] were posed, what are the question, like what are some of the things that we should regulate right away? And universally they agreed that. Content created by AI should require disclosure. That is a very important safety measure when it comes to managing the risks associated with ai.

So I’m on board with that and I think, yeah we don’t have the regulation today, but I think as the best practice and as industry thought leaders, we need to get ahold of it and make it, and start using it and setting the example that this is the way to go when it comes to content creation, because, As soon as you don’t do that, then misinformation becomes ex everywhere and it becomes to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from reality because there’s so much misinformation.

What? It’s not really the accuracy of the misinformation, that’s the danger, it’s the volume and eventually there’s just so much volume of misinformation content out there that it’s impor, it’s impossible to tell what’s a real broadcast from a news [00:08:00] network and what’s a fake. Broadcast. So without that disclosure and without that required disclosure, a lot of potential negative side effects can happen.

So this is all

Ryan Leary: fascinating to me, Mike, and I’m curious from your perspective and even, think if you got one, which I’m sure you do. Curious here When articles are written using chat, g p t and as they get better and better, or, books for example or whatever, whatever’s being created through AI chat G P T, if it’s, if everything has to be disclosed, which I’m all for, but if it has to be disclosed, does that change the value of that content?

Does that remove credibility?

Mike Wolford: Yeah, not really. And here’s why. When I was a brand new recruiter, nobody texted a candidate like, you just didn’t do it right Now.[00:09:00] Like text messages are the dominant form of communication on Earth. So it’s not going to be invasive. And it doesn’t have to be, like you’re not gonna be offended to have your interview scheduled by an AI assistant.

That’s not offensive to anybody. The email responses maybe, but I think of it this way. Right now, I probably have over two, 3000 unanswered email messages, right? In my, so would those people rather I continue to ignore it, or they rather get an automated response because those, your coworkers at Claro that you’re, yeah.

No. Like just all the mail we all get, right? Look at my email and Gmail, right? It’s just, it’s overwhelming. It’s already too much for a human to manage. And so things slip through the cracks. And I think. What will happen is AI generated content will become the norm and you will, you’ll become used to it.

So for the moment, it’s kinda like texting. It’s a little abrasive. And for us, like who grew up and have a culture of a certain way and being engaged a certain way, I’m sure there’ll be an adoption phase, [00:10:00] but I didn’t have the internet when I was a kid. My kids grew up with it.

They’re already way be, they were better at using the internet by the time they were eight than I was as an adult. And it’s because they grew up with it. It’s the same way. This change won’t happen overnight to human society. But it will happen because we already talk to each other, via little text messages most of the time anyway.

And this is just gonna be the next evolution of that. What, cuz what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna read it and then you’re gonna tell the AI how to respond. Do you know what I mean? So it’ll be a response, but it’ll just be like, I didn’t take the time to actually chopsticks my finger, I just responded to the email and it wrote the rest of, the details that were needed. I’m scheduling a meeting, I don’t need to look at my schedule. I’m just like, Hey here’s the link to my schedule. Boom. The AI inserts the link to your schedule, does the rest Yeah, that’s that’s what I’m talking about.

Ryan Leary: So it is interesting when you talk about articles, cause obviously that’s what we do here at [00:11:00] RecruitingDaily and on in, in the news portion of what we do on H C M T. We don’t post any articles written through chat G B t or news yet, I’ll say yet cuz I some point we’re going to, but we do write news articles.

Chad, g p t, and we’re trying to wait. I

Mike Wolford: confused. What are you doing?

Ryan Leary: So we’ll take the news that we’re writing, for example company A acquires, company B, this is what it means for talent acquisition. We write that by hand. We’re also writing it through chat, G b T, just to compare, and it hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

And it could be the prompts, right? And, we get better with it. But you can still tell the difference. You can still tell the difference, and I think you’re right though. Over time it’s gonna change

Mike Wolford: For right now, for example, like every time it finishes writing, like whatever it’s writing, it’s like a blurb, like the end is a, it can’t write a transition.

Every time it stops writing, it writes a conclusion. So if you’re trying to [00:12:00] write a multi-paragraph or a multi series event, like that’s why it’s good for email. Emails are rarely longer than 500 words, which is its sweet spot. But if you wanted to write an article that’s 800 words to a thousand words, first of all, the cap limit is typically set on the response to around 500, 600 words.

So getting it to go over the cap limit requires additional prompting. So that’s probably part of it, but also To your point, you’re right, it’s not there today. GPT four is a better writer than chat G P T. So if you’re using chat gpt the free version, try GPT four and see how that goes. It’s 20 bucks a month.

That will produce better results. But to your point, right now, it’s only able to handle, tasks that require 400, 500 words of reply. Anything beyond that is be, is doable. But you’ve really gotta get into prompt engineering beyond that. So this is level one. This is AI empowerment of experts, [00:13:00] I think.

So it’s taking somebody like me and instead of making it, I. A month for me to write an article, which is, my a d process, I can actually sit down and in my focus, the focus time I get that would, I would normally start to write an article and then come back to it and come back to it when I have time.

It makes me efficient enough to finish the article in that one time, and so it empowers me to be faster. And that’s what we’re going to see at large. And I have no idea. I’m excited to see imagine some of the most brilliant human minds empowered with a tool that makes ’em five to 10 times more productive.

What are we gonna get out of that? I don’t know, but it’s pretty exciting. Imagine the very best recruiter that you know, and imagine giving them 40% more time. What are they gonna do with 40% more time? They could use it to, to relax and do something other than recruiting. But let’s say they take half the time that they get back from increased productivity or from, doing the scheduling work and the, the monotony of [00:14:00] chasing down an offer extend, right?

The outreach emails have been mostly automated. Now that recruiter has time to actually work with more people, with more candidates, with more hiring managers, what’s the outcome gonna be? You’re gonna have recruiters who have made two, three times what recruiter, the very best recruiters made 10 years ago.

And then there’ll be other recruiters. Can’t find a job. This is like what’s gonna happen. It’s a huge lever and you’re gonna be on one side of it or the other. So actually

Brian Fink: I want to come to that is that I think Ryan was making a comment about prompts and then you touched on the necessity of understanding human language and writing good prompts.

How does somebody learn how to write a good prompt, Mike?

Mike Wolford: Yeah, that’s a good that now there’s, by the book question by the book. Yeah, by the book. The book has templates. But so first I think you have to educate yourself on what are your options. And the book does that that’s what the prompt, cheat sheet is.[00:15:00]

It’s basically a set of, not instructions, but possibilities, right? Dials. You can control the tone. You can control the voice. You can control the length, right? You can give specific examples. It does well with examples. So if you’re like, I want you to show, not tell, here’s an example of show. Here’s an example of tell, this sort of Watch.

I also watch a lot of YouTube videos on prompt engineering. Some of them are garbage, honestly, and some of them are trying to teach you the same sort of thing, but you learn the concepts. So the very first thing you have to learn is what are the dials, right? It’s like learning to drive. You have to learn what the gas pedal is, the brake, the wheel.

The gears, all this is like a car, but without the manual. So you gotta figure out all that on your own right. But that’s how you do it. The first thing I would do is get the cheat sheet from the book or get a cheat sheet from somewhere. Get a prompt cheat sheet and just first understand what its capabilities are, what are your options, what kind of [00:16:00] content create, what are the dials that you can.

Move to change the content, right? Like voice is an important one, but voice means something very specific. This is where being a writer comes into play and being an expert because somebody who doesn’t know anything about writing is gonna try and write a book, and they’re not going to understand voice or tone and.

As somebody who does, who’s written books, I know like you’ve gotta tell it what voice you want. You’ve gotta tell it what tone to set with the words and what tempo to set with the plot. And so unless you already know those elements of a story, you’re not going to be able to prompt G P T to tell you that.

So this is why it’s AI expert empowerment phase. Like a software engineer isn’t going to be able to use AI or G P T to write a book, but they’re going to be able to use it to, to expedite writing code, which is their expertise. That’s the kicker of where we’re at. So how you learn is you take whatever [00:17:00] area of expertise you have right now and you start going into G P T.

Once you understand what the voice is, and then you start trying to use your expertise and apply it to G P T and see what you can. See what you can create. You can also create your own content, right? This is an a golden opportunity for anybody who does to now be somebody who creates, because if you have an expertise in the field and you’ve just never had enough time to create content about what you do or your expertise now, that now that door is opening to you.

And so to me, it’s really a matter of. How do you view it? Can you view it as a doomsday machine and as something that’s going to destroy a lot of things? Yeah. Or you could see it as an opportunity, right? Like in and of itself, it’s neither good or bad, it’s just something that’s happening. And so as a recruiter, you have the choice right now.

You can either adopt and learn how to use this and then come out on the other side As a recruiter [00:18:00] who spends their time, Managing hiring managers and managing candidates, or you can go do something else. Okay.

Brian Fink: Actually okay. A lot of things to unpack there. About the prompt engineering, you talk about your cheat sheet and you talk about experimenting and creating expertise there.

You touched on coders and developers. How am I gonna know if a developer is legit or not? If they’re using chat, g p t or something like copilot

Mike Wolford: to write code, you’re not gonna know. If you’re in a testing environment, you’ll know. But honestly, it’s not going to matter. And I think this is something that we need to honestly shift.

The point of a test is to prove that you can do something. True. We feel like it’s cheating. We feel like it’s cheating because it’s new and novel. But so to be, if you look back at stories from the 1980s when the TIA 82 or 83 came out, like all the math teachers rebelled, right? Like same sort of thing.

This is [00:19:00] technology. This is how we’ve used tech technology in the past to evolve our society and. We started writing a long time ago, writing and language was our tool, right? Other animals make tools, but what made humans us specifically different is we, our tool was language. And for all of our existence, it is literally the beginning and end of civilization as language, right?

Written history starts when we invent language. So civilization starts with language and it ends with language. And up until this point in history, language has been the exclusive domain of humans, and now it’s not. And there’s no telling how that will impact our environment and change us, but it certainly will.

Brian Fink: I, if we wanted to, if we were so afraid of the doomsday device, we could just

Mike Wolford: unplug the machine yeah, we can’t we’re connected to it. This is the thing, it’s a symbiosis. That’s the other thing to me that’s encouraging. Like when it takes an empathy test, it’s scored nine times higher than a human doctor.

Like it’s not all [00:20:00] bad. Like it’s potentially bad. It could be bad, but it also could be wonderful. Like this is the thing like as recruiters and sourcers, you need to take a serious look at your. Career and think to yourself, do I want to keep doing, this is the future. I want to be a recruiter who does candidate management and hiring management.

If my answer to that is yes, then learn how to use AI and lean into it. If the answer is no, right now is an awesome opportunity to change because nobody knows of anything about AI in any field, and so it’s an opportunity to become a hands-on expert in literally anything that’s going to involve AI right now.

Because there aren’t prompt engineers yet. To your point, right There will be there. And there’s starting to be, and what that means right now is mostly an engineering term, but that will spread throughout the environment. What a prompt engineer will eventually be able to do is be a recruiter, be an HR professional, be a sales professional.

They’ll be able to no. HR

Brian Fink: professional. We are not HR professionals

Mike Wolford: [00:21:00] done. But I’m saying. Sales professionals, marketing professional, a prompt engineer will be able to act as any type of professional. That’s phase two. Yeah. We’re not there yet. We’re at phase one where the experts are the experts.

But phase two is where the experts are, the experts in ai. And that’s an expert in any particular, that’s a lot of expert talk.

Ryan Leary: It is. So you’re saying we’re gonna have a prompt engineer position? Yeah. That’s I would not mind being a prompt

Mike Wolford: engineer. It’s a good job. And not only that is super productive.

I would be bad that job. Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah. And the prompt engineer of the future, like I’m not talking about in the next year, I’m talking about five years from now, 10 years from now, that prompt engineer will be able to be a software engineer. They’ll be able to be a recruiter one day. They’ll, it’ll, any profession.

Once you understand how to get the AI to do tasks, that will be the skill. Getting the AI to do something, to program the ai, to do a series of events and a series of tasks in order and get it correct, that’ll be the skill [00:22:00] because it won’t know how to do it by itself yet, even with all of this information, there’s still a dimension it’s missing that we will need to fill in.

And that’ll be the jobs of the future. So bringing it back to,

Ryan Leary: Recruiting. How will recruiters master chat? G p

Mike Wolford: T? They have, so like one of the articles I just wrote for RecruitingDaily was six use cases, right? So you need to understand, did you really write it? Yeah. I did with G P T. Yeah. I disclosed that, right?

Like I disclosed it right there. I disclosed which parts of it I wrote and which parts, and actually, when you’re writing content, like technical content, that’s more than, say, an email’s length, more than four or 500 characters. As a human, you’re gonna have to get involved in, edit an ad, like it’s just not there yet.

As a writer to be able to produce 1500 words in a row of coherent content, it just, it. You could try and prompt it out. Can

Brian Fink: we read 1500 words of coherent content

Mike Wolford: anymore? Exactly. I’m being very serious,

Brian Fink: right? [00:23:00] So am I. You speak in tweets, right?

Mike Wolford: It’s, and it’s designed for that world. It’s ideal for that world, which is why some of the more complex tasks that can’t be, talked about over a single email, those are gonna continue to exist because it’s beyond a level of complexity of what it can handle right now.

It, if it follows the pattern of all of our technology, that won’t be true for forever, but it’s true today The way to think of G P T is just like if you’re old enough to remember DOS prompts, like you had to put in the dos prompt correctly to get the computer to do the right thing. This is the, I love computers.

At that

Ryan Leary: point, I thought I was gonna be the most masterful engineer, right when I was doing that as a

Mike Wolford: youngster. So GPT four as it is, it’s Ms. Doss for ai. That’s what this is. This is Ms. Doss for ai. And you just got what are the people who, back in the eighties when computers came into the workplace, what are the people like, I’m not learning a computer.

What happened to them? They didn’t have a job anymore, right? Like computers became [00:24:00] everything. And then there became this whole thing called software engineering in a tech department that didn’t even exist before really the eighties. Who had a software engineer in 1965? Ibm, nobody, right? Like very few existed and now there’s millions of software engineers.

It’s the same sort of thing that will happen if it follows the pattern of previous technology. And recruiters just need to first learn what the options are. Second. Identify the tasks that are ideal for automation. And then third, you can actually tell G P T, Hey, I’m a recruiter. I’m trying to learn how to automate interview scheduling.

Can you help me? Yeah. Here’s what I would do. Okay. Can and then just follow work with G P T to work out. Create something that actually is custom and works just for you. That’s the ultimate power of ai. When I was in economics back in college, I remember my economics professor talking to me like big picture.

The 20th century was defined by mass production. The [00:25:00] 21st century will be defined by mass customization. And so that’s what this is. You can create your own tools. You don’t have to rely on a third party vendor to create a interview scheduling tool for you. You can create it yourself just for you. Okay, so is this level of empowerment.

Brian Fink: Whoa. Alright, so I want to come back to that. Does that mean that from a prompt engineering standpoint, that it’s gonna be the revenge of the English majors who really understand you’re nodding your head like maybe that’s a possibility is because yeah, we’re gonna go super

Mike Wolford: low code. Yeah. English will become the programming language or whatever.

Na, it speaks every language. And that’s not something that would G p t was not programmed to be a translator, but it understands the connection between words. That’s what its strength is understanding and mapping out connections. So yeah, if you’re an English major and you’re aware of, terms and words that the rest of it’s just like, [00:26:00] Being aware and being able to read the menu.

If you can’t read the menu, it’s gonna be hard to order. You’re just gonna look around the restaurant and see what other people are having. You’ll be like, I’ll have what they’re having. Versus if you can read the menu. That’s the difference. So if you’re an English major effectively, you basically can read the menu.

So

Ryan Leary: now, All those degrees that we laugh at, English majors, history majors, we do not laugh

Brian Fink: at those degrees.

Ryan Leary: But what, like they’re all gonna become useful

Mike Wolford: now. Yeah. It’s a language based economy is what it will be. And like our civilization is based on language. That was the thing that holds our civilization together is language.

And this is going to impact that. It’s going to be another, it’s gonna be a third party communicator and. Our species is not used to that. Like dogs bark at us, right? That’s about the level of communication from other beings on this planet that we get. And every time we’ve [00:27:00] had anybody say, hello, how are you?

It’s been a human being. And now that’s changing. Now computers are saying, hello. How are you?

Brian Fink: That’s been a, this week as we’re recording this apple announced the the Apple Vision Pro, and the first thing it does when it boots up is it wishes you hello like a traditional max.

So understanding that language, understanding that bridge between technology and humanity, so to speak, using language in that capacity. It makes me wonder, you talked about labor demands as well, that you’re gonna have some recruiters that are gonna 10 x what they do in their capabilities and you’re gonna have some recruiters.

That are just gonna go by the wayside. Is this a moment where

Mike Wolford: recruiters need to

Brian Fink: band together and have some kind of union

Mike Wolford: or am

Brian Fink: I just making this

Mike Wolford: political for Yeah, no, it’s not unwise. I think any group should, any organization, first of all, we probably need a set of standards of practice, right?

Like CPAs do. There’s a. [00:28:00] You’re a cpa, that means something professionally. So should you be a certified recruiter? Should that exist? I think it should. I think it should have regardless of ai. But I think moving forward, there probably should be a group that, says here are the standard practices of talent acquisition as it relates to artificial intelligence specifically.

It’ll be that much of a part of our profession that. It’s worth focusing on, but yeah, absolutely. And not only for protection in the industry, but for standardization of best practice. Do you

Brian Fink: think somebody like Atap or organization like SHRM should be putting out a statement or putting out guidelines for

Mike Wolford: their members, I would hope look to, so SHRM is a little we just had the, oh, hr, right? And then we talked about SHRM. So SHRM is a little off, we are covered under their umbrella, but we’re not really their focal focus point Atap. I’d love to see something from them or another organization. We have a lot of local kind of recruiting communities.

[00:29:00] We have RecruitingDaily, we have other like sourcer of community where we could. Get together and discuss what we want to do. Because what is happening to our profession is what’s happened over the last several thousand years to farming. There are, as a percentage and as a total number of human beings actually farming on this planet has decreased over time.

And eventually, I imagine, like I was talking to somebody who does farming now and they used to go out to the combine and sit in the combine all day and run the combine, but now the combines run from their phone. True. True. Yeah. 20 years ago, they were out on the combine. Today they’re the combine’s running in itself.

They’re sitting on the porch sipping lemonade, making sure it doesn’t run over to the neighbor’s yard and start, taking the neighbor’s corn or, it doesn’t break down. He’s not actually in the machine anymore. And so that, that kind of process is happening to our field. It’s an automation of manual tasks, which means.

There will be fewer people who are experts [00:30:00] who do more.

Ryan Leary: And I think I, I think we’re gonna see, to your point on standards a couple years back, SHRM started with SHRM talent and that event they have is really focused on recruiting. It’s recruiting in the process around it, not necessarily the brass tacks of sourcing, it’s the hire, it’s the engagement, all that stuff. And I would expect over the next couple of years that given their infrastructure, they’re going to be that organization that standardizes that.

Brian Fink: Yep. Gotta get away from hr. Gotta get away from HR somehow, some way. I That’s a, that’s an argument for another day, man.

I got a lot, I got blown up on that when I was like, yeah, recruiting should report to sales or marketing.

Mike Wolford: Yeah, I’m actually feeling the same way. I I wrote something along those lines, and I got blown outta the water too. So don’t feel too bad about it. Like it I agree. We like, and for me, I was, I came up through agency, so it made total sense to me that we’re salespeople.

Like I [00:31:00] was, like, I had a board, I had a bell, like I had sales goals, right? It’s pretty clear I was a salesperson, I was a recruiting salesperson, but I was a salesperson. I agree. I think we are, we’re salespeople, we’re metrics. We’re the only other people. Accountants don’t get metrics on how many bills they pay, right?

Marketing people don’t get metrics on how many people click the ad. They report on it, but it’s not a performance issue for them. The only people who get, metrics on performance and delivery are salespeople, and we get metrics on delivery. So we’re salespeople.

Brian Fink: Okay, so real quick and just a side note and then let’s get back to ai.

I was at an

Mike Wolford: event in Atlanta last

Brian Fink: night called HR Live. It’s put together by Tila Jackson and Tom Darrow. Definitely friends of the team here at RecruitingDaily put together an event and it was focused on HR professionals. And when I made the comment about that recruiting carries a quota, like I had somebody who looked at me like I had

Mike Wolford: two heads and I’m [00:32:00] like,

Brian Fink: yeah, don’t you know, don’t, isn’t there a production number associated with your team?

And they were like, I don’t know. And I was like,

Mike Wolford: shouldn’t there be Right? It’s unique. It’s sales. Sales and recruiting are the only two, two that have those kind of performance goals. Yeah. So

Brian Fink: about goals we’ve talked a lot about how this is gonna affect recruiting. I’m gonna break this out a little bit if we still, are we good on time?

Are you good on time, Mike? I’m

Mike Wolford: good on time. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Fink: Okay, great. That’s awesome. We’ve talked about how this is gonna affect recruiting and we’re gonna allow us to be more talent managers. I view recruiting and sourcing as two functions in talent acquisition. We talked about recruiting. How’s this gonna

Mike Wolford: affect sourcing?

Yeah, sourcing is going to become even more technical. So as a sourcer, you’re going to have to be the one who writes, gets the AI to write the creative email. Because to your point like [00:33:00] you, you wrote, you had it write a code in an email in Python. That’s not something you can do. Like I’m, it’s not something I can do.

So that’s what the sourcer will be doing. The sourcer is going to actually get a chance to do market mapping, and this is what I’m excited about my work at Claro for is like you can know in it, instead of reinventing the wheel every single time you get a search, if you are working in a hospital and it has an emergency room, you’re going to need ER nurses always.

Always. So what you should do is you should know in advance who the ER nurses are at all of your competitors, and you should be track tracking them for job seeking behavior. So this is what the sourcer will start to do. The sourcer is gonna start to actually have time to map out what the talent looks like and they’re gonna say, okay, my recruiters, they, we hire ER nurses for a hospital.

I’m gonna go out and find every ER nurse in a 50 mile radius and I’m gonna keep tabs on them. I’m gonna get their email address right. I’m gonna find out their [00:34:00] expertise and when the job comes open, cuz it will, I’m gonna have the AI tell me which one of these candidates is most likely to respond to me.

And I’m gonna have the AI write the creative outreach email to them. They’re gonna respond and I’m gonna message ’em through and. And push ’em through to the recruiter. I’m gonna tell the recruiter they’ll probably also be responsible for like market intelligence. Okay, here’s what our competition is doing.

So Microsoft and Google and Amazon, they are paying this much money for this position. And we have high standards. So if somebody passes our interview process here, they could probably pass it there and. They’re, if they’re interviewing here, they’re probably interviewing there. So we need, if we’re gonna make an offer, we need to make an offer like this, right?

Like just providing the factual details in and around the market, the candidate specific and. And then once that detail is provided and organized, then the sourcer job becomes to execute against demand. It’s almost like [00:35:00] you become a glorified delivery boy because you’re going back to the storehouse, right?

You’re your inventory. You’ve already organized it, right? So instead of going to LinkedIn, which is basically 400 million profiles, it’s like opening a door to a warehouse with 400 million boxes, right? And then being like, all right, I just gotta sort it. And then you have the machine try and sort it, versus going into a warehouse into the back room where everything is cataloged, labeled, and stored in a specific place, and you’re just like, oh.

Okay. I need, let’s see, emergency room nurses. All right, here’s my list. And you pull out that box and there’s all your ER nurses, right? Like it’s a much more organized and methodical profession moving on. It’s a much more technically detailed and data driven profession. Sourcer are gonna be expected to know the pay ranges for the market.

They’re gonna be expected to already know who the talent is. So when they come to you as a sourcer, you’re not going to create [00:36:00] a search and go out. You’re going to open a file and go through. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think so either. I think it’s an improvement. Yeah. I think it’s

Ryan Leary: A, a I think it’s a big improvement to the profession.

Absolutely.

Mike Wolford: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, like there are real risks and we should talk about the risks and we should talk about hallucination and discrimination and the threat, right? The same way we deal with nuclear proliferation. It’s a serious issue, but it also has serious benefits, right? The lights are on at your place, probably in part because of nuclear power.

So this is the same sort of thing. It is potentially dangerous. It is potentially very dangerous, but it is also potentially extremely beneficial and allows human beings like, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Office Space, but we’re not meant to sit in cubicles and just do paperwork all the time.

It’ll allow human beings to focus on the part of their job that only a human being can do. And that up until now has been things like [00:37:00] writing an email and now that’s gonna come out of, the responsibility wheelhouse, then I think actually human to human communication will increase because that’s the value that humans can uniquely add,

uniquely add humanity. That is,

That is a, but not compassion, not understanding and not sympathy, but humanity. Like it can emote and it’s starting to exhibit kind of behaviors that would indicate theory of mind, so that, that may evolve or may not. What’s theory of mind, bro? What’s that?

That is theory. Yeah. Theory of mind is that was a heavy drive by. Yeah. Theory of mine is your ability to imagine what other people think and feel. So if you see somebody you know, crying on the street, you can imagine that something bad has happened to them. You don’t need to be told. You can I went to Rome and I [00:38:00] saw the Pieta which is a sculpture by Michelangelo. It’s of Mary holding the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. Like you’ve never lost a child, but you can understand what Mary’s feeling. That’s theory of mind.

This is pretty getting

Ryan Leary: pretty deep here. So I have a question on, on, on all these tools that are coming out. Yeah. Everyone’s dropping ai, everyone’s dropping integrations or opportunities to use chat. G p t, what’s your take on all this in the space? I know it’s early, but what are you seeing out there that’s legit or that we

Mike Wolford: should be looking at?

I think we’re in first level of integration, for an end user, for a recruiter or sourcer who’s listening, this is the first level. Then what you should be doing is automating the simple tasks, right? Automating your outreach, automating the writing of a job description. Automate the creation of an interview prep guide for your [00:39:00] candidate.

Automate the creation of interview questions, right? Learn how to do the simple things that require. Anything that requires five, 600 words is a ideal task for automation. And I would start there. Beyond that, it’s going to be, it’s going to get harder to see, I imagine it’ll be like the late nineties, right?

Like the.com boom. Everything will be AI powered and it’ll be a lot of hype. And so for me, I think the next thing to pay attention to as a recruiter and sourcer is as these tools come and they will to really. Evaluate them based on what you were talking about, Brian, which is results and not hype. Cuz everything and everyone is going to be AI powered and so that’s not a competitive advantage anymore.

So if everybody’s AI powered and everybody is AI driven, what you need to listen for is what’s different. And if that difference is what will make a difference to you, [00:40:00] because everybody and everywhere is going to start saying AI powered. Like Excel. Word. Like Excel and Word. Excel and word have been unchanged since the 1980s basically.

And now all of a sudden they’re GPTs in it, right? This is the level of, it’s in Photoshop, it’s in PowerPoint, it’s in ev, it’s in your phone. It will lit. It’s literally already everywhere. It’s already ubiquitous. Now there’s going to be products that will change our world. I’ll see, I think we’ll see a bunch of those, not just in recruiting, but in general, because this is be a boom, right?

It’ll be the AI boom, similar to the.com boom. Bunch of AI companies, bunch of AI powered products. And again, I think for us in industry as an end user and as a recruiter and sourcer in the field, the question is, As soon as somebody starts talking about an AI powered tool, I’d almost turn ’em off because like it’s a given at this point, right?

So what are you do? What are the [00:41:00] results that you’re getting, which is honestly what you’re looking for anyway. And that’s really the question. I think as recruiters and sourcer, we need to evaluate and think critically as these. Tools as an avalanche of tools is about to fall on us. We need to evaluate them critically and say, okay, that’s all awesome.

On paper, what are your actual results? What is this thing actually accomplished? What’s the reduction in time to fill? What’s the reduction in cost per hire? Was the candidate survey, did the candidate satisfaction survey go up? Are candidates happier with the experience they’re having with our interview process?

What’s the measurable out outcome and impact of this particular product, tool, or service, which is the same question you should ask, no matter if it’s AI powered or not, right? I agree with that.

Brian Fink: The results oriented, I think that’s actually one of the things that I’m I know this is gonna probably come to fruition after H R T X which is coming up on, on June the 15th, and [00:42:00] you can go back and watch the recordings of it.

But that’s one of the things that I like about what we’re doing on next Thursday. Is that I’m actually gonna be showing the findings from writing 300 emails to candidates

Mike Wolford: and what that means in terms of their engagement

Brian Fink: And the results. And that the results matter. Ryan, I’m gonna kick it over to you, man.

Mike Wolford: I.

Ryan Leary: Yeah. All right, Mike. So let’s, we went through a ton of stuff here, right? So we can wrap it. And this is a lot of good information, but let’s end it with a question on humanity. How do we maintain humanity in sourcing with

Mike Wolford: ai? Ooh, yeah. That’s good question. Actually, I think it gives us the opportunity to increase it.

First of all, you can dictate the tone of your response. So even if you’re using ai, you can if you’re writing an ai, you could say sympathetic, the tone sympathetic or encouraging or altruistic, right? That’s still you, that’s your intent. And I think one of the [00:43:00] things that it will empower is not all of us are writers.

Not all of us are great at. Expressing what we feel. We know what we want to say, but we don’t know how to say it. And I think of AI as potentially empowering people like that who say, I want to say X, Y, Z I want to communicate this idea, but I’m not great with words. Or, I’m not a writer, or I’m not a public speaker, but this is my idea and this is what I want to communicate, help me communicate.

And the AI then effectively takes the meaning. It understands context and puts it into a form that facilitates communication with other people. So I think that’s how we use it to, to increase our humanity. We take it and we use it as a way to augment places where we’re weak, which is what we use technology for.

Love it. Love it.

Brian Fink: So many different takeaways here. Ryan, that was a powerful question. I don’t have anything

Mike Wolford: To compete with you on that one, bro. I’m, [00:44:00] I got pages of notes, but Ryan,

Brian Fink: you, you

Mike Wolford: stole the show on that, bro. Was that a good answer? I guess so. We’re gonna have to take it.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Good Is good. Is subjective, right? We’ve talked a lot about data.

Brian Fink: Ryan, I’m gonna steal this from you because Ryan usually asks what are three takeaways that are actionable that somebody can put.

Mike Wolford: Into action

Brian Fink: immediately. Besides getting this awesome book, which I’m holding up, that people can’t see that talks about the future implications of AI and recruiting, can you gimme three takeaways that we need to make sure that everybody walks away with and puts into

Mike Wolford: practice?

Yeah. First, if you haven’t engaged, do now’s the time. This isn’t a fad. This isn’t gonna go away. This is a thing that’s here to stay. It’s real. Is it hyped? Is it over-hyped? Potentially, but that’s, is it doesn’t matter. Probably not. It’s still real. Even if it’s over-hyped. Number two learn what your options are when it comes to ai.

[00:45:00] Ask it to show you, tell you what it can do. Ask you what, tell, tell it your, you want to learn how to write and you wanna learn how to use it to write, what kind of options can it provide you? Have it create a table. You can even specify the format, say, I want a table of all my options when it comes to writing with you.

Like what is the option? Explain, create a second Tali column to explain it to me. A third column. Give me an example of a prompt I would write, and a fourth column. Give me an example of an output I could expect. And so it’ll explain tone to you. It’ll explain voice to you and it’ll give it to you in a table.

So that would be, number two would be to learn what the options available to you are and what kinds of tasks, this thing. And then the third would be to identify the tasks that can be easily automated. Some of them have been mentioned. There’s a RecruitingDaily article I published last week, or last Friday, I think it’s a [00:46:00] week ago today.

Was published six Ways to Use Chat, G P T Today, or G PT four. Today was an update from Six Ways to Use Chat, G P T, which I published back in February. So I would suggest that looking at the low hanging fruit as the final outta your desk without the existential stuff, without the stuff that’s coming down the road.

Learn how to automate those six tasks today. Awesome sauce.

Brian Fink: Everybody big shout out. Big thank you to Mike Wilford. We are super excited. About getting in and using everything that you’ve dropped in this conversation. I’m holding up a copy of the AI recruiter as if this was a video podcast, which it is not, but maybe that is coming in 2024.

Who knows. Ry Mike, thanks for making time for

Mike Wolford: us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brian Ryan. It’s always great. [00:47:00]