The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
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- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
The EP 175: State of Hiring: Data trends, Automation, and Fraud risks with Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem
Join host James Mackey and Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem, to explore what’s happening in today’s hiring market - inbound is up 3x, time to hire has grown by eight days, and recruiters are carrying 55% more reqs. They discuss where AI genuinely reduces workload and boosts efficiency, along with the rise in fraud and interview cheating.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
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Hey, this is James Mackey. I'm your host on the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm here today with Steve Vartel, my good friend over at Jim, Founders VEO. Steve, thanks for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00:Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's been a little while since we last connected. So very excited about our conversation today. We put together, I think, some interesting topics of discussion, high impact information that will be very valuable to customers over at Jim. Of course, like my customers over at Secure Vision and anybody who's really tuning into Talent Acquisition leadership role. Really interesting stuff. I think Steve and I have access to somewhat unique data just from our points of impact, the gym, all-in-one recruiting solution for a ton of organizations. And same with Secure Vision RPO firm that works with hundreds of companies. And we'll be sharing our insights that we've been collecting, some really interesting data points. We're going to start macro and then dial in and actually at the toward the end of the episode talk about fraud right now with Intel and acquisition that we're seeing out there. But let's start macro. Right now, we're seeing some interesting economic trends across the United States, Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 organizations. Say mostly Fortune 500, we're seeing a few big players going to some interesting trends in that we're seeing growth, right? We're seeing revenue, we're seeing earnings increase in large organizations, big tech companies, amongst other industries. But what's interesting is that this growth is alongside a stagnant job market on a macro level within the United States, it's really the first time in history that we've beginning to see such a large discrepancy between growth in terms of companies' earnings, uh, but not necessarily additional headcount being added. Right. So the biggest recent example is we see Amazon, right? Like they went through a 30,000 employee layoff cut, a lot of which are knowledge workers. But again, this is at the highest level of enterprise, enterprise work. It's interesting to see there's a few different theories out there. Of course, like we had ChatGPT introduced into the market. So a lot of people are yelling, like AI, AI, that's coming to replace all the jobs. I think it's a little more complicated than that. Steve, if you have any high-level thoughts here on what we're seeing in the market and your thoughts on maybe even dialing in more to AI on how much that might be contributing versus potentially other factors that are potentially leading to some of the layoffs this year, that would be great to hear.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally. So, first off, AI, I think it is replacing some jobs, but only in certain pockets. I think more generally, though, AI is making folks more efficient. And so the place I see it playing out more often than replacing jobs is as we ramp back up hiring, can we get more out of the team we have, the recruiting team we have, by deploying AI just to make everybody more efficient? And we're seeing that in our data for sure. But there are certain industries, there are certain roles where AI actually is replacing jobs. We saw from our data that year over year hiring has actually grown about 10%, modest increase year over year. But the interesting thing is for customer support, customer service roles, it's actually decreased 7%. So most roles across the board, we've seen a slight increase in hiring, but there's certain functions where folks are hiring for less of those roles today. And this is across thousands of Gem customers, typically growth tech companies, large enterprises that use GEM and all of our aggregate data. And my theory on the customer support, customer service side is AI is actually pretty effective at automating ticket resolution. And so you can do a lot of the same work, sometimes even a better job with a much smaller customer support team. But I really think it's in pockets. I think like AI replacing jobs is in my mind, like my personal take, overblown, over-sensation sensationalized. It definitely makes for good headlines that people want to read. I don't think it's quite as pervasive as what people think. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this is coming from two CEOs who run recruiting software companies that use AI enablement, right? We're looking at these things all day and every day. And even on this show, I posted a series called AI for hiring. I invited on the top, a lot of the top CEOs that are building innovative solutions, leveraging AI enablement as well as sometimes attempting other times successful at truly agentic AI that's the replacing human in the loop at a certain step and a workflow. But yeah, like by and large, where I've seen it most effective too is really in that customer support motion. When you're particularly working on a SaaS product and you're you have questions, like the AI responses are becoming a lot more useful and helpful. And I think some customer success teams are using that as the first line of engagement with customers, and then basically operating as follow-up support if people can't get their question answered. And to me, that's a wonderful use case that I think is actually working better than significantly better than the experience of working with a chat bot years ago. Totally. Like way more helpful. But like you have so many other roles though, where it's just not able to completely replace a human in the loop. I think what's happening right now in the greater economy is like this layoffs have essentially, I think, to some extent become the norm in a lot of big tech or huge corporate environments where I wouldn't say they're culturally accepted, right? By people don't like layoffs, they obviously, but in a sense, it's become a cultural norm or a little bit more where companies I feel like they're seeing other folks doing it. It's like just becoming this more consistent thing that we're seeing. Now, one thing to keep in mind, these companies don't have hiring freezes. They're still hiring. It's just like we're seeing like more fluid and faster restructuring.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Even like Facebook, and that they recently cut 500 people from their AI division. Like they're just constantly like scaling, hiring, restructuring. And we're just seeing a lot more of this. But yeah, I think companies are really a lot of these huge companies are trying to figure out can they do more with less? Like this term has been tanged, like jobless growth, right? They're really trying to push and see what they can accomplish. But I don't think that this is AI's taking everybody's job. I think this is just like a shift we're seeing in the market where companies are more aggressively restructuring and they're less afraid to let go of folks or lose folks that might be hard to get back. They're not really looking at it the same way. They're less focused on retention, they're less focused on how it's gonna appear in the news. What's gonna happen to their it's like maybe in the past almost like they would worry, be worried about their stock prices if they went through a round of layoffs. Now is every time they go through a round of layoffs, their stock gets a bump.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, because it reduces their their costs, increases their profit margin. It's interesting. I think maybe I never really thought about it this way, but I think you're totally right, James. I think maybe the last few years have given these large companies the permission to be pretty cold and calculated without any blow buck because it's become so normalized. Layoffs have become so normalized out there, which is that's a sad reality and place to be. I do hope things swing back in the other direction, but we remain in an employer's market right now instead of a candidate or employee market. Maybe we'll just need to see that pendulum switch back for companies to start taking this more seriously.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I I think another thing that I'm starting to have conversations with executives at startup and growth stage technology companies about is what I'm seeing in the market. Of course, they're asking about how much AI is AI really replacing people. We're having that kind of conversation. They're also like, I think some folks are they're watching the economy, they're hearing the headlines, and they're hearing about layoffs and they're wondering about how that's gonna impact people in technology. And my my kind of my thoughts on this are I look back to what we experienced in 2022 and looking at a market correction in technology. And if you looked at the big headlines, the overall economy was doing great. Yet tech was like, man, it was a hard time. Yeah. So tech isn't necessarily tied to the hip. It's not like it's not always aligned with the greater economy. And I think what's maybe interesting to see is like now with interest rates coming down, we could actually see accelerated growth in tech, even though in the overall job market like on a macro level, we could start to see some stagnation or some cooling as interest rates are coming down. Our industry is primarily propped up by investment cash flow, not profitability, right? So money comes cheaper to loan, we could start to see even a higher, a faster increase and more growth at a time when overall economy might be job growth, might be slowing a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's been the biggest dissonance that I've seen and felt over the last few years. And I've truly come to learn that countrywide unemployment rates have almost no correlation to what's happening in tech. And it has a lot more to do with where the interest rates are, like you mentioned. Yeah, the I think the interesting thing is when you look at the nationwide employment rate, there's so many jobs out there that are more like frontline workers, restaurant, hospitality, retail, right? And because that volume is so high, global unemployment and also US unemployment, it tends to be a lot more correlated with those roles. And anything that's happening there can just dwarf what's happening in tech and with knowledge worker hiring because the amount of folks in those jobs are just much smaller by at least an order of magnitude. And so, yeah, I've come to learn that like unemployment rates have almost nothing to do with what's happening in tech, and it's a lot more correlated with interest rates.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I think we're lucky in a sense because we have access to so much information through our customer bases and technology that we can actually get a pulse on like the holistic tech market and the health they're in. And you had actually shared some pretty interesting statistics with me about what you're seeing from Jim customers that I think our audience would love to hear.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally. So we we look at a few different data sets. So at GEM, we've got thousands of customers. Every year we pull benchmarks on what's happening across all those customers in aggregate. And it gives us a pretty unique lens into what's happening in the industry, in the hiring market, especially for tech and for knowledge worker hiring. So think some of the larger enterprises, like the Walgreens, for example, uses GEM for all their corporate hiring, for their knowledge worker roles, and then tech companies, large and small. So that that's the insight that we have into, and probably like a lot of the kinds of roles that the folks that are tuning in are working on and care about. And so what we've seen from our data is compared to three years ago, back when there was the craziness of 2021 leading into halfway through 2022. So, first off, like applications are up 3x compared to three years ago. I think that's probably intuitive to a lot of folks tuning in because people are seeing and feeling it. Teams are smaller, and what that means is each recruiter is managing up to 55% more recs on average. Two stats that might be counterintuitive, but I've got some ideas as to why. It's taking eight more days to hire on average versus three years ago, and it's taking 42% more interviews per hire compared to three.
SPEAKER_01:That's the one that's the hardest one for me to understand. That last uh that doesn't make another theory on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so as I think there's this interesting paradox in terms of what's happening in the market right now because you you think, oh, like hiring managers think, executives think there's this dissonance. They think, oh, hiring must be easier right now because there's so many candidates out there. But then you look at the data and it's taking 42% more interviews to make one hire. And I think what's happening is conversion rates have gone down at every step in the funnel, except for the offer accept rate. But what that means is you're just talking to a lot more people to get to the one hire. And I think part of the reason is because hiring managers and executives think, oh, it must be easy to hire right now. Why don't we hold out and see what else is available? Who else we could get? Could we get somebody even better? And folks aren't leading with as much conviction as they used to. And that's just creating a lot more work in the hiring process or having to interview 42% more people to get to a hire. And I think part of that is just like hiring manager and executive expectations and an increased focus on like quality of candidate and quality of hire in this market, especially with folks not being able to add as much headcount. I think a lot of folks are wondering how can we make every single hire count? And maybe they're willing to put a little bit more work and time into the interview process to try to find that person. Now, whether those expectations actually match reality, whether it's actually doing anyone any good, hard to say. But the net of it is it's actually harder for recruiters right now. Three X more applicants managing more recs. Each rec is taking eight days longer with 42% more interviews. That's a lot more work per rec. And so there's it's a little bit of a perfect storm. Yeah. I think the other really interesting data that we just got like hot off the press, maybe like a month ago. We ran a survey. We surveyed a few hundred recruiting leaders and rec ops leaders just about like their plans for the next 12 months and how they're thinking about growth. Get this 87% of them are planning to grow headcount, but 39% of recruiting teams expect to stay flat or shrink. And I think this ties back to what we were talking about earlier, where folks are trying to grow, but they're not necessarily looking to add as much headcount and jobless growth growth. And then recruiting teams are bearing the brunt of that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this is the jobless aspects, like primarily for the recruiting team. And then but they're still obviously growing, right? Yeah. So those are really interesting stats. I think the eight days increase in time to hire correlates really well with the fact that recruiters are expected to handle more recs at once. I it sounds like too this 3x more inbound, I guess also could be contributing more to the amount of interviews because I I don't know if you have it on this level of granularity, but if it's like are most of the additional interviews at the top of the funnel, like the first round screening call, because maybe folks are just screening a lot more people.
SPEAKER_00:It's a great question. And I actually think that was my other theory. And I it's so cool that you arrived at this yourself too. I think it might be real. I I do think with the influx of inbound, I think a lot of folks are just like tempted to fill the role with all of their applicants. When we know we actually have a lot of data, like sourced candidates are five to 10x more likely to be hired than an inbound applicant. And but when you have a thousand applicants, you're like, why don't I maybe I could fill this with the folks I have and like you're interviewing the best of who's applying instead of the best of who's out there. And so I think that is definitely part of it. I think companies can fall into this trap of I've got all those applicants, why don't I just see more of those through the process? But then it's spending, it's taking a lot of time and it's wasting time on both sides.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's also it's the best. You might have an amazing candidate, but they're like the 800 applicant, and you reach out to them a week and a half too late and they're already down funnel. So it's even if you do have that right one. Well, that's like with the with June, what I'm doing with our June software is June, by the way, has gotten pretty far, it's pretty cool. Like for those two, and it's it's AI screener. So as soon as folks apply, June reach out to conduct like a screening interview just to ensure there's alignment. But it's actually automated scheduling now, too. If yeah, somebody is aligned with the role, June will automatically screen them, set them up with a recruiter. Um or at least recruiters have the option to turn that on, where it's like just immediately they can have a conversation with the folks. So if somebody's the 800 applicant, they can speak to them immediately, which is great. But yeah, the inbound applicants increasing is like that that probably is where a lot of the pain is coming from in terms of I would assume the additional interviews. I don't know though, as you said. Like I just don't I don't know, but that would make sense to me. It's like you're doing phone screens with a lot more people, and you're right. Like, you when you have all this inbound, you might okay. This outbound source candidate fits 99% of our criteria. This inbound is right, this person's right there, they want to speak to it. He's right there, they fit 85% of our criteria. But you know, start-up and gross stage tech is incredibly competitive and unforgiving. Like you need people that are incredibly dialed into the experience you're looking for. It just doesn't, it's really hard to hire somebody that's not a phenomenal fit and have them work out. It's just too competitive in our space.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And I I think that's I think it might be a little bit of wishful thinking going on in the industry where it's like, ah, this person's right in front of me. But then folks aren't doing the math of like, I gotta go spend 20 minutes on a call. And then if I pass them through, like I'm spending 30, 45 minutes of a hiring manager's time, and if then they make it through from there. And I think if folks aren't the right fit, I think maybe folks should be having a little bit of a higher bar at the top of the funnel, is where I'm landing on this.
SPEAKER_01:For sure. Another step that I haven't calculated in a while makes me want to go back and do this now, is the number of interviewing hours per hire.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. That's definitely gone up. Yeah, with the number of interviews per hire going up. And I don't know to your point how many it is. Yeah, I don't know if it's exactly 42% more hours per process. Cause like you said, like I do suspect that some of these interviews are happening like more correlated with the top of the funnel, where like the the screen time might be shorter. But uh yeah, that that's probably the biggest hidden cost that nobody really thinks about in their hiring process is just like the cost of all the time that goes into interviewing. When people think about cost per hire, it's like oftentimes a hidden cost. They're just looking at how much ads they're spending or how much they're spending on tools, how much they're spending on certain events, how much they're spending. If they're they're more sophisticated, they're looking at recruiter salary. But very few organizations are looking at like the cost of how much like engineering time it's taking.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. And that's also it's that's why another reason that folks are probably gonna fall more behind hiring plans is if they're considering more people top of funnel, they're working with they're considering more people top of funnel, they're interviewing more people, amount of interviews are going up. The reality is right, like a lot of times when folks are putting together capacity plans, if they're honestly like above average, they're looking at the capacity of the recruiting team. But like excellent organization, very well-run organizations are gonna look at the capacity of their engineering team. So if they a VP of engineering, they say, hey, you gotta go hire 50 people this quarter, and then you do the math on the interviewing hours, and it's like it's literally not possible. So those are conversations I've had to have with some of my customers where they're like, hey, we need to hire 50, 100, whatever engineers over X period of time. Look, I can give you 100 recruiters, but it's not gonna happen because there literally isn't enough bandwidth on your VP of engineering would need to be interviewing people 10 hours a day and not do anything else for the next two months. Yeah, are you ready? Are you ready for them to do that? No, so there's the that is something that is typically not accounted for. But I would this is like back of Nathane, but I would say in a lot of cases, companies are probably doing like potentially even north of 75 hours of interviewing for a hire. Yeah, it'd be a lot. Easily that's just a ton of uh huge time commitment that's going into it.
SPEAKER_00:Totally. And that's where my perspective, at least, is like when you factor in all those hours, when you also factor in how valuable some of that time is, you've got your most senior engineers interviewing people, your VP of engineering, spending so much time in the hiring process, right? If you really think about the true cost all in of making one hire, it's where like more upfront time sourcing can actually be pretty high ROI because source candidates pass through the funnel at five to 10x the rate. And by spending more time sourcing, we can get that interview per hire way down just because the quality is going to be a lot bigger.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. And so just to give some, I have some stats on that too. So it's secure vision in our customer base, it's like ranging from big customers like Grubhub, a firm, AFF IRM, a fintech company, like a large or interwallet, down to like earlier stage, like startup growth stage. I think around 90% of the hires we help our customers make are outbound. Yeah. Maybe around 10% of slightly more transactional, higher volume roles come from inbound. Maybe that's what's making up more of that 10%. Of course, like we do inbound, so like 10% is 10%. Like it's there's still it's still meaningful, right? If you have to hire 100 people and you got 10 people through it, that is still a meaningful channel. But yeah, like when we're talking with customers, it's this very targeted outbound approach in which you're really learning the ins and outs of an organization and then targeting the right, the exact right fit to essentially mitigate risk, right? It's all about risk conversion and ROI. And you know, it's I think sourcing is very important because it's like I really look at recruiters and recruiting organizations. Really, if in the day is like we're investment managers. And as I try to explain to our customers, it's look, what's your biggest investment you're making every year? Well, payroll, right? It's a lot of customers, it's 10, 20 million. It's a lot of freaking money. Okay. So you better have somebody pretty qualified managing that investment, better know what they're doing because it's like the now. So it's I get our recruiters, and everybody's thinking it's okay. So if we're hiring a senior engineer, let's say we're an engineer,$150,000 base salary, wrap rate$180K, all in. Okay. That's a$180,000 investment that each customer is making, not to mention opportunity calls. So we really got to make sure we're getting an ROI on this individual. And looking at it through this lens of they're making a six-figure investment per hire, six-figure for one hire is a six-figure investment. Yeah. They need to get a seven-figure return minimum out of this individual. So, yeah, we need to be doing out-bound sourcing, be highly targeted. We gotta make you we have to look at it through that lens. And then it's, I think the argument for out-bout sourcing and having senior recruiters and leveraging the best tech and the best services. That's where it really matters, right? It's it's not a place to look for bargain pricing or lowest cost provider, maybe in some old school industries, but if you're in tech, that's the pros. This is the most competitive space in the world. If you want to compete, like you need amazing senior recruiters enabled with the best technology to go out and source.
SPEAKER_00:Totally, totally. I it's been wild to me the disconnect there and just the budgets that recruiting teams have access to feel disproportionately small compared to the the impact and the opportunity cost, right? Like of either not getting the right person into the role soon enough and that opportunity cost, or getting the wrong person into the role, like you called, can be yeah, pretty catastrophic. And when you think about, I love the investment manager analogy because it's so true. Like when you think about at the end of the day, how much you're spending on people costs, and then also the fact that people are the single most important thing that determines whether a company succeeds or fails, yeah. It feels short-sighted to try to skimp on the recruiting process or on recruiting technology or working with the folks on a services side.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's right. So we come in out this secure business embedded recruiting RPO model, which typically working off annual contracts, and these are substantially sized contracts. And not everybody gets it. And not everybody's willing to make that investment. It's like, okay, you're not the right customer because we we're working with folks that really understand the ROI of what we're bringing to the table. Like if you have 12 million in payroll costs like annually, right? Like that's what I'm speaking of. Okay, and you have uh maybe an HR manager that's really never done this before because you scaled quickly, and a couple of junior recruiters. So it's like you got three people in their 20s that don't have a lot of experience and business yet, but like they're managing like an eight-figure annual investment. Like, come on now. Okay, when you put it like that, they're like, oh, wait, for your services, that's okay. We get the price. Yeah, we need to look. If you're gonna be investing 10 million a year in something, let's get it right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01:And so it just changes the perspective, which unfortunately we have an amazing customers that that really understand that. And turns out a lot of them are the category leaders that what they do.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, yeah, same. So good news. Here's like the little sliver of hope in all this. I mentioned that 87% of companies plan to grow headcount, but 39% of TA teams expect to be flat or shrink. Budgets are going up. Most folks anticipate having more budgets to deploy, even if they're not adding additional headcount. Yeah. So there folks are gonna get more investment there, maybe to offset their own the recruiting team growth, whether that's like better technology and AI or working with really great service providers.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's I think we are seeing a little bit more flexibility in budgets from what I'm seeing in the market and just talking with companies than I certainly was seeing a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I forget the exact stats on it, but the in the survey, I think most folks anticipated budgets increasing, even though headcounts not within TA. Right. That's good. That's good.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god. I know that's awesome. Let's dive into fraud and talent acquisition. It sounds like this is something that you're really in tune with right now. And actually, there's something that you're thinking about working on preventing in terms of how you're building technology and product right now. If you could take the lead on this, I'd love to get your thoughts on what you're seeing out there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's pretty wild. It feels like there's a rise of fraud, spam, scam, like just coming from every angle here. Candidates are dealing with it too, by the way. Fake jobs, people trying to trick them into giving sensitive data, folks tricking them into paying for resume services they don't need. There's a lot of stuff happening on both sides, but we can talk about the employer side because I think a lot of our audience, a lot of the folks that are tuning in, are probably more on the recruiting side of the house. It's wild. And it's happening, a huge range of things are happening. I just talked to a customer last month, VP of recruiting, a few thousand employees. They deal with really sensitive data. They've caught 200 North Korean actors, like state-sponsored actors, uh, trying to land jobs in the last 12 months. Have you heard of this, James? What's happening, what's happening there?
SPEAKER_01:I have not heard of this specifically now.
unknown:All right.
SPEAKER_01:So tell me more about that. So what does that look like?
SPEAKER_00:That's wild. It's wild. And actually, the FBI has issued several statements now warning companies of what's happening with North Korea. There's these state-sponsored attacks, basically, where they're trying to get people hired so they can do various things, including building security backdoors or gaining access to sensitive data that they can then steal or trying to steal IP. And it's scary and it's on the rise, and those attacks are getting more and more sophisticated. I think at first they were a little bit more basic, but now it's to the point where they're proxying IP addresses through the Midwest, so you can't even tell what country they're uh dialing into.
SPEAKER_01:So are these like is it these are just uh folks that are based in North Korea just pretending to be based just stealing identity of somebody in the United States or the public interviews?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. The stealing identity of somebody in the US, or maybe they're making up a fake identity, perhaps they're making up a fake LinkedIn profile and stuff like that. But I actually just heard today that it's possible to buy fraudulent identities for less than$100 a pop. With real social security numbers and everything. And so it's really hard. You're getting super sophisticated. And one of the hard things about this is these are real people that are really talented engineers. And a lot of these are for engineers' engineering roles. But I've also heard about it happening for like customer service trolls just because of the access to sensitive data that those folks have, which exposes companies to a whole lot of other vulnerabilities and threats. And they're real people that are qualified for the job. They've got fake identities that are hard to tell. They're masking their IP address to look like it's coming from the Midwest. And so it's becoming really challenging. Some of them are even using a deep to try to be able to use camera on. Pro pro tip, by the way. I think a lot of folks are when they're feeling like something's off, they're asking, hey, can you just put your hand in front of your face? Because that totally messes up the deep.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's smart. That's a good one.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But it's tricky. And that's just one example. There's probably five, six common things I keep hearing about, ranging from at the very top of the funnel, folks using AI just apply to hundreds or thousands of jobs. Jobs because the barrier to entry is really small. Now, I don't think that's like the end of the world. So long as you can have great technology to help find the folks that are the right fit. Maybe it's not the end of the world if like people are applying to lots of jobs. But then there's people that are using AI to misrepresent their experience and skills, to tailor their resume to the specific requirements of the job, but stuff in things that they don't even have experience with or they or that they don't have skills in. And so that is the piece that I think is causing a lot more headaches for recruiting teams because on paper they look great, but then you hop on a call and their skills or experience just very clearly don't match what they say they can do. And so recruiting teams are like struggling. They're like, oh man, I gotta go cross-reference this person's LinkedIn with their resume, try to make sure that it smells like they're actually they can do what they say they can do. And then taking that a step further, there's folks that are mid-process either getting somebody else to do the interviews for them or using AI to cheat on the interviews. And so I don't know. It's the it's happening from all different angles here. It's really start seeming like it's starting to reach a breaking point. But yeah, I'm curious when you talk to your customers, have you heard of some of these things? Are there other things you've heard of, James? Which of these things?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, we've definitely heard of it. We've um one of our largest fintech customers that we've experienced some of this. What one the easier solution is if there is an office or hybrid. Yep. Yep. So it's just, and I actually also read something in the Wall Street Journal that fraud is accelerating in some cases, return to in-person interviews.
SPEAKER_00:It is.
SPEAKER_01:So I think that we're this is a bigger trend at our customers, and it just seems from what I'm reading, also throughout the United States, this return to an office. I think that there's a lot of benefits. And of course, there's a lot we can do with technology, but also to me, this it is a benefit of being in person. Like bringing in folks, and it's not, I know it's nuanced, but people have different thoughts, perspectives, and these kind of things. And there's data that can prove every direction under the sun when it comes to this stuff. But I do see that as another value add of bringing folks in person and having an office and that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, totally. It's a lot harder to pretend to be somebody you're not when you're in person. You just keep going. I guess you can still do it. You can do in Zoom.
SPEAKER_01:I guess you can still do it. You just gotta be really talented.
SPEAKER_00:But uh yeah, so I've heard of that. I've heard of companies returning their interview process to in-person. But then for some remote companies, that's pretty hard because you might not even have the presence. What do you do? I've heard of some folks saying, hey, part of onboarding will be in person, or we get together in person on a regular basis.
SPEAKER_01:That's actually likely that's a good best practice to have, anyway. If you do have an office somewhere, most of our customers do that. If they are a remote culture, they'll fly somebody out for the first week.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think the key is if you make that clear before the interview process even starts, you put that in your job description, you check with people. Folks that are that think they might be able to commit fraud might opt out if they realize there's going to be some sort of in-person component that they can't fool. They'd rather just go spend their time on an easier target.
SPEAKER_01:A lot of the fraud we are experiencing too is actually not quite as severe as what you were referring to. But it's more of we're seeing more people lie just about degrees and employment dates, and it's not like it's stuff that we you have to have a more robust background check process. But we're actually we're seeing customers transition to more robust background check processes and better structure around, like really being clear with people in the first round. Around we do employment verification, we will need to speak with previous direct managers who are still at those previous employers. Um we need to, we're gonna be looking at education verification. I just giving you a heads up. This wouldn't be till offer stage, but just want to give you a heads up that we have a really robust, thorough process. Really smart because we're seeing people lie left and right about college degrees now, like more than ever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think being upfront about that helps deter folks that thinks maybe think maybe they can get away with it and maybe they'll go focus their efforts somewhere else. It's good.
SPEAKER_01:And that's one of the things where I think that sometimes there's a perspective that high conversion rates within your interview funnel are a good thing. But often I think the opposite could be true. If you if you don't hear a response from a candidate that you liked, it's not necessarily you should look into it. Okay, they did the screening round, they dropped out, you don't know why. Dang, I really was interested in that person. But if you're really slowing down on these types of things, and you also very clearly articulate the challenges of the role in the company, that's another big one. You want people who are excited about solving for your challenges, not just excited about the easy stuff, right? You want the people that they hear the worst thing about your company, they're like, oh, I can help. Like that's the type of person. You want people that are excited about those hard challenges. So if you articulate challenges properly and you really slow down on background check stuff, then some people are going to self-select out. Great. So it's you always try to like the recruiters changing in, you always, of course, try to uncover like what else can I be doing to engage top town and keep them in invested. But on the flip side of it, like you should lose some talent based on screening folks the right way, where you think that they'd be you finished the call, maybe liking them, but there's something you don't know. And so because you covered your bases, they felt select out, and you may never know why.
SPEAKER_00:But yep. Totally agree.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's super interesting. I I feel like I learned something the other day with this idea around letting folks know up front that we're gonna go through a strict verification process to talk to previous employers, to do a background check and stuff like that to deter folks that maybe are lying about their school or their experience. That's super cool. I'm gonna take that with me. I know a lot of our customers are thinking about this all day. It's yeah, it's really become such a big process, such a big problem.
SPEAKER_01:It has like Steve, thank you. This is it's always like a ton of fun. And I know our audience is gonna love it. Really excited to get this episode published. So, yeah, everyone tuning in, thank you so much for joining us today. Steve, thank you so much for contributing, and we'll talk to you soon.
SPEAKER_00:Great to be here. Bye, y'all.
