Update: 2024 Candidate Expectations Report is now live!

Recruiting Brainfood

Hung Lee

A look ahead at HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024

Cronofy

Adam Bird

The Recruiting Future podcast

Matt Alder

Visa

Celinda Farías Appleby

Recruiting Brainfood: HR predictions for 2024

Hung Lee 0:00
So welcome, everybody. Welcome to HR trends, forecast folks, I think we're gonna see a lot of these in the next couple of weeks and into the new year. Why not? Because we have got time to reflect on the year that we've had ruminate on the things that we might think are going to happen in 2024. So thank you, everyone, for joining us on this webinar. It's going to be a great show. But bear in mind, all of the things we're going to be talking about, we are going to have a bit of kind of speculative licence, shall we say, but from the expertise that we've assembled in the panel today, hopefully we're going to be able to talk and discuss some topics that we reasonably think will occur in the next 12 months. Okay, so just make sure I want to sort of make sure soundcheck and everything is okay that you can hear us okay, you should be familiar with this tool. It's zoom, of course, if you can see and hear me do let me know in the chat whether everyone can with the audio and video is fine. So the chat should be just a feature at the bottom there. Make sure by the way, when you do chat you send it to everyone rather than send it to hosts and guests. That way everyone can hear and see us all we have no communication elitism on the show. Okay, thank you that even Thank you, Kate excellent stuffs. Okay, let's give some intros. They're ready to role. Let's go with you first Celinda, Celinda. Can you quickly tell us who you are? What you do? Absolutely. Hi, good morning.

Celinda Farías Appleby 1:27
Good evening, everyone. My name is Celinda Farias Appleby, I'm the director of global talent attraction at visa. I've just had my five year anniversary. I'm a recruiter by trade, and I've been in the employer branding, recruitment marketing space for the past 15 years. Super excited to be here. Thanks so much.

Hung Lee 1:46
Fantastic Celinda. And we have not older Of course, months. Great to see you. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you what it is? You do?

Matt Alder 1:54
Absolutely. So I'm Matt older. As you said, I'm the host of the recruiting future podcasts. And I'm lucky enough to spend most of my time talking to the brilliant people in talent acquisition about what's going on in recruiting both now and what we think might happen in the future.

Hung Lee 2:13
Fantastic. When you've got a title eight recruiting future podcast, Matt, pressure on you to get this forecast for on me. All right. We have Adam Bird here as well. Adam, great to see you. Can you quickly introduce yourself who you are what it is you do?

Adam Bird 2:27
Thanks, Hung. So Adam Bird, CEO and co founder of Cronofy. Cronofy is the technology that powers interviews in well over 70, or probably close to 80 applicant tracking systems now. So if you have scheduling into interview scheduling as part of your your ATS, it's good likelihood as we power it, which means we see a lot of the ways and the wonderful ways that recruiters actually manage their interview processes.

Hung Lee 2:51
Fantastic stuff. Let's stick with you with this first question. Adam, as you're a product maker, you're a person that always has to think about what the future demands of businesses and users are going to be, obviously 2023 could be described as the year of generative AI. I don't think there's anybody in the audience that hasn't had a play with this. And some of us have had the chance to even operationalize it into their everyday work. Where do you see AI moving towards in 2024, compared to where we see it in the last 12 months Adam

Adam Bird 3:29
start me with an easy one Hung? Thanks. So I think I think there are two main constituents with AI, there's there's the recruiters, there's also the candidates. And I think there's, you know, the candidates are using AI to rapidly apply for many jobs, we've seen an uptick in the number of of applications. Absolutely. Which is you know due to downturns and people being laid off. But I think there's also, it's easier now to auto apply to more positions, you can use technology to do that, and make that sound sound personal. So I think that's a really interesting dynamic and kind of recruiting because you could end up as recruiters deploy AI to review applications, you've kind of got two AI systems talking to each other.

Hung Lee 4:15
The challenge I think, with with the generative AI as it's implemented right now, is it tends towards the average. So it's great for that kind of blank page problem. Where do I start you know, I need to write a job description for a role I don't know much about but I can start that find the bits and then it's up to the human to try to tailor it to my organisation the themes that I want to kind of the the expert particular expertise and I need but these models are just trained on the data of the internet. So they're naturally going to lead to average performance. So what may lift up kind of low performance to an average level is going to provide challenges for high performers, they're going to have to work harder to differentiate. And therefore in that sort of situation where you're competing for talent, how do you almost make it very, very clear that you're not using generative AI to interact with the candidate? I think one thing we pulled in from our, our research, so we surveyed 6,500 candidates every year, we're in our third year of doing this now, human touch is super important, especially in European markets. So there's expectation around candidates that they're actually speaking to a human. And so the bar for being human has been raised by the use of AI tools. So I think it's gonna be a really interesting transition on what it won't be watching how candidates react to the deployment of AI by recruiters.

Really interesting. Couple of points there, Adam. And Celinda I need go to you with this, because you're obviously sort of in charge of a recruitment team, probably fielding these these high volume sort of experience. Can you what's your experience of it? I mean, do you have you seen an upsurge of applicants, so volume this year? And to what degree have you attributed that towards sort of the use of generative AI by job applicants?

Celinda Farías Appleby 6:21
Well, I got a huge aha moment when Adam was speaking because we have been stumped at the data we're seeing with I want to say like 38% more applications in these last few months compared to the years prior. Usually, these are slower months for applicants. We just started our fiscal year, we have a, you know, less number of jobs are posted. But we're averaging about 200 applications per job post, which is not normal for visa. And I wish I could tell you we're spending a lot of money on recruitment marketing, we just launched EVP so everything is sort of in that foundational mode, that I couldn't say, Aha, is that YouTube or, or, you know, our career site or so forth? So I had an aha moment when you said that when people were applying in volume, but to answer your question, I currently manage all the strategies, tactics and tools at the top of the funnel. And so AI is a hot topic. I mean, there isn't a day that doesn't go by where someone's asking me how we can make the recruiters lives simpler, or the candidates lives simpler. And we are a risk averse company. It wouldn't be a lie to anyone watching if they're here from visa. And so we're doing things in baby steps. It feels sometimes like a ballet. Sometimes like little you know, lighter strokes versus broader strokes. But I am seeing the other sources getting super involved in using chat GPT to, you know, for their comps, or calm rates have gone up ever since people started targeting and tailoring their messaging. And these are the things that I think will when you say average versus high performer, I think these are the things that are going to really showcase next year in our data, which recruiters which sources are having those targeted outreach and how they got there.

Hung Lee 8:03
You know what? That's there's two points there. Matt, I'll bring you into these this in a moment. But just to sitting with this just a little bit. Firstly, AI enablement of candidates. I think that's going to be very interesting to observe, like, have we even got a plan on this? Is there a requirement for a plan, I remember sort of posting something a couple of weeks ago, and a number of comments from other recruiters who say, Hung do companies is a policy? What's wrong with this? And it was okay, there's a debate to be had on that side. But if you can kind of have a dystopian view of it, we can argue that we can probably it's not that hard to imagine that if there is technology that enables candidates to increase the number of applications they can make. And for those applications to be seen to be more personalised, even at scale, then we can imagine that our systems haven't been actually designed to cope with that. That volume. How are you meant to process 200 300 500 applications at some point that will break won't it. So there's one thing we need to talk about. Second thing is the differentiation between average and sort of expertise. Matt, want to bring you in on this? What's your view on this Europe? You've been a media person for a long time you've been a writer, you've kind of been a commentator, journalist. Even I would describe you in some respects, and a chat GPT and generative AI has been probably most applicable towards media creation, hasn't it? What do you see as the this this sort of issue between it averaging out someone who's pretty bad at this, but then being able to produce, you know, plus, copy above average copy compared to someone who's highly skilled? I mean, are we in danger, for instance of losing the quality because actually everyone else is simply got, you know, significantly better with AI. Yeah,

Matt Alder 9:56
interesting question. I want to come back as well on the candidates AI think after I've kind of, after I've sort of talked to talked about, talked about this, I kind of would echo Adams point about it raises the bar about being human. I think I think there's also a difference between now and the future. So now, I think that, you know, one of one of my, one of my favourite hobbies at the moment, it's not really my favourite hobby, but the thing I seem to do quite a lot is spotting when people have written LinkedIn posts using using AI. And at the moment, it's pretty obvious. And very often, it's because they don't normally write like that, you know, and then writing in a very kind of uniform, almost automated, automated style. So what it does is it does kind of raise the bar on things like writing in terms of how do you, you know, learn the craft of writing in terms of standing out, and all those kinds of things. And if you're, you know, if you're an employer, you're looking at your recruitment marketing, it's like, how am I going to stand out, when everyone has access to this, you know, to this kind of this kind of this kind of bar. So I think that's interesting. However, if we move forward into the future, these tools are only gonna get better. So, you know, there will be a time where it will just be indistinguishable, whether someone's using it, someone's using AI or not. I've spent all year trying to get chat GTP to write like me, and I can't get it to do it at the moment, which is really quite frustrating, because it would make my life a lot easier. But, you know, I'm sure that will change in in weeks, months, years, or whatever, whatever, whatever it might be. So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's fantastic recruitment, marketing perspective, but it does put everyone at the same level. So it's like, how do you differentiate yourself? From that? I'm just picking up on the point of the candidates and AI. And again, going back to what Adam said about, we've we are fast approaching a situation where we've got AI talking to AI, and we're trying to recruit people from this from this kind of very, very strange thing. And what I've, you know, what I've kind of said on this, in terms of candidates applying when I came up in the thing I did at TA Tech last week. It's whose fault is it? Is it the AI's fault? Well, absolutely, but we can't do anything about that. Is it the candidates fault? Well, are they not just using the resources that they have at their disposal? We can't stop that. So it comes down to one thing, which is the process, which is the thing that we're in charge of. So it as you say, I think what we see as we move forward is, you know, we have to transform the recruiting process, to assess people in different ways, you know, to automate things in different ways to really to really deal with this, because you can't stop it. And I think that, you know, we'll see lots of companies putting things in place to try and spot AI generated applications, but it just won't work. Because the, the, as I said, the AI will get better and better and better be indistinguishable. So, you know, we need to think about what processes, we have to find the people who are right for the job within, you know, within what's happening.

Hung Lee 13:12
Alright, brilliant. Matt, you've actually set us up for to do a poll on this. So Amy, I wonder whether you could set this up real quick in the chat. Let's do a poll. Oh, we've got another poll. Can we do also another poll shows? You right, this, Amy? But I was just wondering whether we could do a poll on whether the audience feels that AI use sort of candidate use of AI is cheating? Yes, no. And I wonder whether that could just be a quick binary that we could just assess, because I think, Matt, you've raised some really interesting questions. I think there is a this kind of accusatory sort of sense, you know, that sort of wrong to us. Maybe if that line is there, if it's fraudulent, you know, if someone's like, literally pretending to be someone else, and you know, the providing information as incorrect, but I think in story,

Matt Alder 14:00
Which I think is different, but it's kind of in what way is using AI to apply for a job different than employing a CV writer to rewrite your CV one,

Adam Bird 14:08
especially if, if in your job, you're going to be using AI to do the job. Yeah, and this is the thing with like, closed, open book exams actually respect the fact that actually in the real world, people use Google. That's how that's where their knowledge is in the internet. So I think Jacob makes a really good point in the chat about the kind of evidence is for people wanting to deal with automation. And I think there's a as a discussion here around raising the bar to something that is acceptable, there's value in that. But I think perhaps the use of deliberately obviously, automated systems like chat systems, etc. I know we're going to touch on later. Almost making those better. That's a really powerful use of of AI because you can have those conversation that conversational discussion makes far more will sense and it's very obvious that you are talking to the machine rather than an individual.

Hung Lee 15:05
Well let me smooth onto that. Because it is actually, you know, a very relevant issue chatbots they've been around for for some years now online, and you could probably divide in between your pre AI and post AI to a large degree. Because, you know, chatbots, previously, were very much just decision trees, essentially, you know, some predictable FAQs you type in, it will probably not be able to resolve a question for you, therefore, you'll say, Oh, do you want to speak to a human being, and most of us are usually just trying to fly into that, and getting a human being out. But presumably, at some point, we're going to get actually some very valuable information back just from interacting with the automated automated agent there. And it might actually be better for us, and Jacob's, correct there. And there's some interesting research as to why people might prefer speaking to a bot rather than a human being at the very early part of the process, is because it's basically less effort. And we don't want to expend effort on something that might actually not result in us wanting to apply. So for instance, if we were not going to apply for a job that didn't provide us with work flexibility, I don't need to want to speak to a person about that. If the company does not allow it, I want to be able to find out in some way, ideally, on a website, not let's talk to the bot and the bot can tell me the information, I can decide whether I want to invest any more time. So there's a very clear reason why in certain parts of the process, a human being would prefer not to speak to another human being. But let's talk about what chatbots look like when we have a genuine artificial intelligence in there in the sense that it's able to come back with unique responses to the inputs that a person puts in there, it's able to draw out draw information that isn't necessarily deterministic, but it's been pulled back from, you know, what it knows about the recruitment process, or it knows about the company and able to then provide information back? Did you think that's going to happen in 2024? Is, that's still science fiction, Celinda, let's go with you on this one first.

Celinda Farías Appleby 17:09
Go to the woman with the risk adversity legal team, but I definitely see the mammoth companies that the big 25, let's say that have been using chatbot for a long time in that pre AI world down dabbling their feet into more AI driven technology, for sure. But they will account for far less of the company's fr advance. What I will say is we're in a hyper connected marketplace where you go to Amazon, and you expect something in today's shipped at your indoor and you're wearing it oftentimes less, right. And I think as we look at the five generations that are in the workplace, we at least you know, elder millennial here we have grown accustomed to being ghosted, ignored, fighting our way through utilising tools to get through but I don't think Gen Z or Gen alpha are going to tolerate that much longer. And so I see them as Gen z's in our workforce, but they're coming in masses year over year. And pretty soon they're going to they're going to have a stronger threshold, they're going to be we're gonna be talking about Gen Z, like they talked about us Millennials for a long time. And they're gonna want that AI driven. And there shouldn't be a reason for you not to go into the career site and say, I'm a data scientist, five years experience. I only want to work in New York City and a job pop up, because it's not that hard, I think at this point with Gemini and Bard and, and chat GPT.

Hung Lee 18:36
Thank you Celinda, Matt, go back to you on this. Do you have a sense? Like what's your intuition tell you in terms of the overall kind of number of percentage of companies, shall we say that have some sort of chatbot implemented? What is your like conversations kind of give you a sense of in terms of like, the percentage of the of the marketplace that has this?

Matt Alder 19:01
I think it's impossible to say because there's just such a wide spread in terms of career sites, you've got, you know, I did a podcast last week actually on conversational AI in career sites. And you know, there are companies there who have that as the interface and it does everything's Celinda says, You tell that you know, what kind of job you're looking for, and it finds the right place on the on the career site for you. At the end of the scale, you still got companies who've thrown up a page on their corporate site, and that's their career site doesn't plug into the ATS properly. So it's kind of a really, there's a really wide spread. So it's difficult to say, What I would say though, is I think the one of the driving forces behind and again, echoing the point about candidate expectations. It's just like, you know, we're dealing with we've got candidates coming through just expect to find things they want to find, through whatever interface that whatever interface they want to use. But ultimately, I think it's it's more there is absolutely and this would be one of my predictions for next year. there'll be much more discussion and a drive towards personalization in career sites. So we've kind of seen that at the top end in the last few years with career site systems that, you know, serve specific content depending on what people are doing. But I think that the, you know, chatbots conversational AI, takes that to a whole new level gives people that, that that personalised, that personalised experience. And I think it's important to distinguish between, you know, those old chatbots that just were taking that decision tree thing, and you know, what's available now with conversational AI plugging into databases and pulling things and things like that. So I think that, you know, the, the companies who do these kind of things first, they're gonna be all over this next year. But it takes a very long time for it to work its way work its way through the market. But I think personalization, in recruitment marketing, absolutely. One of the things that we're gonna talk about a lot next year.

Hung Lee 21:01
Thank you, Matt, Adam Bird, as a person that tries to sell services to recruitment companies, what do you think? Like, why do you why do companies struggle, for instance, to even implement something like a chatbot? On career pages? Is there is there like, some thoughts that you've got speaking with all of these customers? What's the friction point? Would you say?

Adam Bird 21:22
So I think it's about finding that there are lots of models that sit behind these conversational chatbots. There's something like chat GPT, very general, what chat GPT doesn't do is answer questions. What chat GPT? does, it creates things that look like answers to the question, hence the problem with hallucinations, inaccuracies, etc. So if you're in a situation where you're providing information about benefits, on a job site, you can't be probabilistic about that you've got to put in, there's got to be an element of deterministic, especially matching with someone like Visa, that that's gonna be one of the key areas, you have to be absolutely sure that the answer is correct and accurate. Otherwise, you're essentially making an offer to the candidate, if at the very least, it's embarrassing from a kind of a PR perspective. So I think the kind of the decision tree models are great, because you know what the answer is going to be, I think, when it comes to, so that's a, that's a challenge for organisations to get through and finding the right model that they can trust, that feels conversational enough, but really is just it's kind of natural language processing tokenizing, the communication to the point where actually I can apply that to a decision tree, or actually, I can point to a specific piece of data. So I think that because the moment you don't know what's going on, you don't know what's going on until the candidate says, well, actually, you've told me all these things are possible. So I think that's, that's a big risk for organisations and something that anyone, any say large organisations will see. I think the other challenge is, when he's talking about personalization, personalization implies that you know, about the individual. Now, there's a big cultural difference between, I'm gonna say, the Yolo approach to data privacy of the USA, and the very much not YOLO approach you only live once approach to data privacy in Europe. And so I think personalization sounds wonderful and desirable, until you realise that actually, in order to benefit from that people are going to have to give up elements of their data and privacy. And if you kind of want to know about someone, you're going to have to kind of learn about them from other data sources, you then get into really icky ground with training models on that data and using this is where the kind of the EU AI act is going to be a real challenge to this, because who owns that data? Where should that data be used? What's appropriate use of that data. Everything is in flux. So I suspect there's going to be lots of desires to implement these things. And some models will emerge that will allow us to have a more human sort of language interaction with something that's probably more deterministic. When it comes to something like a job site where you're, you're ultimately negotiating, you're starting the negotiation for a commercial contract.

Hung Lee 24:28
Very, very interesting, Adam, and I think you're right, obviously, we've got sort of different jurisdictions, different cultural practices in terms of data privacy. And you can imagine, we may even have a like a bifurcated experience as a job seeker from one location to the other. But I think the general trend against sort of protecting users privacy is still quite strong. You know, you see, it's getting harder and harder to pull behavioural as sort of data, for instance, it's harder to pull data from different sources to use in a third source. So that could be one of the big friction points between, you know, providing a personalised experience unless you're prepared to, you know, capture that information. As soon as that person lands and have some really amazing UX tickets, collect it in such a way that people are prepared to give it rather than, you know, as we know, fulfilling the promise. Oh, go ahead Matt

Matt Alder 24:31
I was gonna say just just pick up on that point. And, you know, absolutely agree with you on the, perhaps the way that we've looked at personalization in the last few years, and the, you know, the kind of the, you know, not just the a the EU AI act, but there are other one around data privacy, you know, just kind of ends the whole sort of digital marketing, model, round personalization that has been there. But I think when it comes to recruitment, the bar is so low on experience, that even just collecting, giving someone the experience that they're talking to an interface that takes them to the right bit of the site, or shows them the right job, is a type of personalization that we're not even there. So I think that, and I suppose that leads into the candidate experience point, but I just think the bar is so low they're offering someone some kind of interactive experience that they feel in control of, is the level of personalization.

Hung Lee 26:25
That's it silver lining right there for some terrible candidate experience. You can only get better from here. But I think you're right, I'll let you can imagine it being quite a huge improvement if people were able to simply interrogate q website and just discover what they wanted to find. I mean, that's not necessarily a huge amount of magic, per se. But compared to what we experienced, now, we have to navigate through drop down menus, you got to click number of clicks to get to the information you need. It's a convoluted mess. By the way, folks, there was a poll, that's just gone up. Thank you, Amy. On priorities, I don't know whether anybody can see that. I think it flashed up on screen for a moment. But if you can't see it, I just want to, to read out what the priorities have been as voted by you lot. And we're looking at we're pretty well spread, although out in the lead, the two big ones that seem to me to strike out as candidate experience, and data and metrics. So we're going to be talking about candidate experience shortly. And in fact, let's jump to it right now. Because that's a good cue to do. So. The candidate experience 2023 I think it's been in the toilet, I feels like it's gone backwards. And the reason why I'm saying this is simply because my interactions with members of our community that have been on the market, and they've reported back Oh, my God, I can't believe how bad candidate experiences is I know, because I'm on the job seeker now. And so why is this a persistent problem? What do you think it's going to change? If anything, Celinda let's give us the hard truths here. So Celinda, after we go you first.

Celinda Farías Appleby 26:38
And I agree the candidate experience has been terrible. I was doing some career coaching for a little bit in 2018. And last year, I was like, I can't like I'm more of a therapist now. Because it's so hard to navigate and it's more cheerleader job than tactical work. But to answer your question, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that our our fellow recruiters have taken a hit from their career, right. So for the past three years, our numbers dwindle and dwindle, our application rates grow up processes aren't in place. A lot of organisations that have my friends that do my job for other organisations are all going through foundational work since it's been slow. So people are building new career sites getting new ATS's there's a lot of HR technology spend that's going on. You couple that by lowering your recruiter, your frontline, you know people and not having the processes in place to keep up with that demand. That's why our candidate experience is really, really bad. I hope my prediction for 2024 is that we're going to bring more recruiters back whether it's in house or working with agencies, you're gonna see an uptick of more humans in the process. Because I do think that volume of jobs will increase for companies. And hopefully with this resurgence of recruiters coming back. I urge all of our recruiters to bring that energy that they felt like they were being ghosted and just be real human in your own with your own candidates and turn it around because I do think it's going to take real real human touch to change it

Hung Lee 29:45
I think you make a really interesting point Celinda. So we're talking about basically under resourced TA teams that have been overwhelmed by big projects, but also overwhelmed by increased applicant flow. So that ultimately means like less time per applicant. And so you know, without some tooling automation, to resolve that problem, inevitably there's going to be gaps in the process. And I think that's generally the main problem. I know a lot of, you know, rhetoric online is usually recruiter bad, you know, as if it's a, you know, like, just simply immoral or incompetent people doing the job. But it's not a case, it's simply people are overwhelmed. And they have to focus on the things that are unfortunately higher priority, which are, you know, dealing with candidates in processed in hiring managers kicking off dealing with all those kinds of things. And going back and, you know, addressing every single applicant that came through is simply deprioritized. So that's basically where we're at with things on 2023, hopefully 2024 will improve, how will it improve? Why will it improve is it going to improve? Matt Alder your thoughts on this?

Matt Alder 30:57
Absolutely and you make it sound like it's my job to try to improve it, I will do my best, I will do my best. Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, kind of experience is just an ever sort of ever evolving battle. And I think the thing that makes it really difficult, you know, on top of all the reasons outlined so far is is also every year, everyone's expectations go up of what it's like to have interact with a company, we interact digitally, because, you know, the way that we interact with everyone else that we interact with online or on our phones, you know, it's incomparable to how it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and actually, recruiting is still the same. So. So there's that kind of there's that the expectations are always going to move, which, which I think makes it a very difficult. In my view, I'm completely, you know, completely you agree with the humans, humans can fix this, or humans need to be the centre of fixing this. I would add to that, I think that technology has to be the enabler to do that. And I think that's been if we look at all these other places that we get great customer service from, you know, it's technology that facilitates that information. And I think that the, you know, I think it's right about, you know, people don't want to deal with an automated process, when they're talking about something as important as their career. However, they probably do in terms of understanding where they are in the process, what's going on what's happening next, you know, all those kinds of things. So I think that I think this year has been really interesting, because we've seen a lot of recruitment automation come in to frontline, high volume hiring, where people, you know, retail, you know, retail companies, just desperate at restaurants, just desperate to have people, you know, to have people in front of the customer making money. So they can make, you know, they don't lose money. And there's been a lot of automation in those sectors to make recruiting happened quicker. And I think that's a real canary in the coal mine in terms of recruiting automation everywhere else. And I think looking at it optimistically, there's the opportunity to speed up hiring, provide more information to the candidate, and free up the humans to do the human part of that, which is to build those relationships and have those conversations. So I'm actually optimistic about it, because I think we can see where it's going. Now, as with any of this, there's a big spread, it will take a long time. And while we're fixing it, expectations will just get higher. So you know, it remains a challenge.

Hung Lee 33:36
Very good, man. Good to you, Adam. You're a toolmaker. If I qualify there to actually to a large degree, so the candidate experience problem, isn't it? Because it's a scheduling software that's there to improve the logistics of getting people through that flow. Tooling, like do you see significant, improve improvements in how we're using technology to improve candidate experience in 2024? Adam? If so, why? And if not, why, why not?

Adam Bird 34:04
Yes. So obviously, the scheduling is a significant part of the process. But it's not the only part of the process. I think, if we go back to our research, the single most important thing the candidate said was important to them during the hiring process, and 2023 was communication was being kept in the loop as to what was happening. That kind of ghosting is what kills it. And I think we were on a podcast before Hung. Vicki I can't remember her surname was talking about the sort of cortisol levels and the stress involved in the recruitment process. And actually, you got to reflect that this is changing jobs, buying house getting married, having kids that they're like the four top thing so one of the top things, most stressful things in your life, and you have no idea what's going on. You're trying to find that next step. So the stakes are so much higher for the candidate than they are for the recruiter. And that recruiters are doing their best I think they are given the time and tooling they have at their disposal. So we have to make, make it such that recruiters can be the human. So recruiters don't don't get into recruitment to do admin. They're people, people in my experience, because they want to see people succeed and grow and develop in their careers and find the right to find the right people for their company. So I think, I think, you know, I think companies are waking up to the strategic role that a recruiting pays to the success of the organisations as we kind of come out of this recent downturn. The most successful companies will be those that prioritise hiring the best people and putting themselves can have a chance of hiring the best people and the way they will do that is speed, they'll be able to rack to screen process react schedule, get people through the process as quickly as possible that will give them the best possible chance of securing the best candidates. 50% of people have have candidates walk out of a process because it took too long to schedule an interview. It's just like, those companies have just lost 50% of their candidate pool and likely the best 50% of their candidate pool. And so unless leadership wake up to the fact that recruitment needs the support of both the budget for installing it, we're not talking massive amounts of budget, and the budget for the people, so you can provide a great experience, then those companies will lose. So the winners will be those companies that make sure that the can't experience is all about speed and communication.

Hung Lee 36:38
Yeah, and there is obviously great case to be made for automation. It's making the process quicker making it visible. There's technologies that help you do that, you know, the able to publish people's status keep that tracked to the ATS, for instance. So you know,

Adam Bird 36:55
It all sits in the ATS, it's all there somewhere. It's just about exposing it. Yeah, exactly.

Hung Lee 36:59
And right now, the problem we've got is we've got a human being is kind of trying to fetch and carry the information. And of course, they're going to drop it there because that's not necessarily highest priority, or they're gonna miss type an email, or they're gonna forget that email or whatever it might be. So there's got to be way to use tooling. Interesting comment in the chat there from Mia, who is basically Mila sorry, is basically said, she's gone through a process that feels like it's overly automated. Do we have any thoughts on this? Like, what is too much automation? Do you have any theories or any strong opinions as to when automation should take place? And when it shouldn't? And are there rules to it? Celinda your thoughts. Um,

Celinda Farías Appleby 37:46
you know, I have a friend that just went through an interview process, and it was fully automated, they couldn't even do anything without a chatbot. Like, couldn't apply couldn't do anything without the chatbot on their career site. And she was miffed, she was just like, Oh, my God, like, I just want to apply, I don't need a chatbot to walk me through it. And in Millers particular case, I have a rule, you know, I do this for relationship building. And also, you know, in my professional and personal life, if I'm not giving all the details to fully engage you, and it sounds like they didn't provide like contact information, travel costs, then I'm sorry, I can't meet you there. And I know that's really hard when you're looking for a job. I've been there. So I get that. Sometimes you're just like, well, what are the concessions I can make? What are the pros and the cons. But I think if in this stage of the game, if they haven't provided all the details, you need to be successful in that face to face interview, you're not going to be successful in that company. For whatever reason, that may be because you're not, it's just not the right place. That's my opinion, I think I would have, I would recommend that you reach out if you're very interested in the job, and try to identify a human and say, hey, you know, I really want to meet you. I haven't really met with anyone in your recruiting process, what are next steps, but personally, I would walk away, just because I feel that I wouldn't want to work for a fully automated place in the real world. So that would be my recommendation there.

Hung Lee 39:18
Yes, automation feels like automation has a place but when say you're asking me to turn up to an interview, I probably would want to have a conversation with somebody. Before I make that commitment, this travel cost. Maybe I take a day off work, whatever it is, there's cost me to do that. And it feels like there should be some sort of reciprocity in the employee. Matt Alder you want to say something?

Matt Alder 39:39
Yeah I think this really underlines the next big challenge in time acquisition because it isn't really about automation it's about the quality of experience that's been designed around automation. And I think you could automate, you can automate, but you're kind of you need to understand the human experience of it. You know, and obviously in this case, why would I turn up if I don't know, who I'm seeing where I'm going, or all that kind of stuff. So I think that, you know, one of the strategies and skills that will be needed to be developed in our industry, is that kind of experience design, how do we make people you know, feel happy, engaged, comfortable, that they've got, there's a human at the end of this somewhere that they can kind of reach, they can kind of reach out to, and I think things like, things like behavioural science, in terms of understanding, you know, human behaviour, and how we can make things better for people, you know, are really important things that need to come into this industry. And I think that the trouble with recruiting and talent acquisition is, very often we don't look past the technology. So, you know, if you think in terms of recruitment, marketing, when systems that could do, you know, mass emailing, and, you know, engagement, you know, came on the market, for many, in many cases, they will just use the spam engines to spam out untargeted job posting. So, it's that kind of that empathy, that thinking about it, and that creating that experience, which I think is the, you know, is the vital part of this. And that will be my biggest fear about automation in our sector is that won't get done. And we'll see more of this horrible situation happening to the detriment of everyone, the candidates, the employer, you know, everyone.

Celinda Farías Appleby 41:27
I was just gonna say real quick, like, I do think interview scheduling with all of the details. You know, providing where you're gonna meet who you're gonna meet LinkedIn profiles is a wonderful place to automate for the recruiter to have it, you know, for their business as this me, whether it's through the ATS, or whether it's through their outlook, you know, or however they manage your email. So it's unfortunate that this was the the walkaway moment. But I but I do think automation does need all the details to be successful. Sorry, go ahead.

Adam Bird 41:58
No, it's just to say we're talking about experience, I think we're in danger of talking about the experience that we would want. The other way of kind of reflecting on this is that company is making a decision about how it wants to be perceived, and what kinds of people are going to be successful in that organisation. So this organisation said, right, the interview process is fully automated, this probably says they're a very transactional organisation, lots of kind of individual working, not much interaction, that's the kind of someone who's going to be successful in that environment. That's the kind of person we want. We don't want someone who wants to speak to a human.

Matt Alder 42:36
My fear Sorry to interrupt my fear, I completely agree with you. My fear is that that's not what this company wants, areas that they're, you know, setting things up in a way that do that. And I agree with you there are, you know, there are processes that are completely automated like that, but that's my issue is kind of like, are companies making that kind of decision on purpose? Or is it happening by accident?

Adam Bird 42:59
Oh, yeah, no, I believe absolutely agree that they may not be doing consciously, but they are making that decision. And they will, they will attract a different type of person. And that may mean may not may

Celinda Farías Appleby 43:12
not be a thing. Yeah, with Mila. It sounds like she wants human interaction. She wants that. So if you're not getting that, in the front end, you probably will join a less human friendly human, they're not centering their people at the front end. So they're not going to centre it at the at the offset of hire and onboard. Because

Adam Bird 43:32
I think this is the fascinating thing about the recruiting process. It's the first peek someone gets in under the covers of what it's really like in the organisation. And everything that's part of that recruiting process is kind of what is done, not necessarily what is said, it's actually going to speak volumes about how their experience is going to be like at that company.

Hung Lee 43:51
That's a yes, no, though. Because it could was on Matt's point, it may well be just an inadvertent input, like someone's implemented it locally in an incredibly inadvertent effects, that may not actually reflect what's going to be a break, if you like, rather than an intentional execution. What would be interesting is if companies did develop some self awareness, and we're able to design an honest recruiting system that's honest and true to themselves, and then we will communicate that publicly and maybe the candidates can have some sort of taxonomy as to what type of company it is. A perfect world would be okay, this company is totally automated. I know what I'm getting, walk in, get the job done, walk out amazing. Here's one that where, you know, there's a lot of context, there's a lot of, you know, multiple points of contact before I can move forward. Maybe I like that one. So, you know, maybe that's the optimal case. I do believe that will be great because we do need cultural diversity in terms of how companies are and also why not process diversity, right? I mean, there could be certain processes that are optimised for the type of person that's suited for you Um, there's not one size fits all in all of this. But Okay, folks, any questions that you have for this amazing panel, I know you're using chat at the moment is great, please use the q&a function because that we're definitely going to go to that towards the end of the show. And therefore, we'll be able to pick up all of the questions and make sure we don't miss them. As soon as the q&a function if you've got any specific questions you want answered by the crew here. Okay, let's switch tack, folks. Let's talk about diversity inclusion in recruiting in 2024. For this, you know, I've got my own opinions of this, I don't want to prejudice the conversation. But it seems to be that we're getting some sort of like backlash against a lot of the more progressive ideas that we implemented or thought about and DE and I, we've seen that on the media, we've seen that even from the political class in the UK very clearly, you know, we've had a government, we've had government ministers literally come out and say, We want to be anti woke, quote, unquote. So when it gets to that point where

Adam Bird 46:06
I think you will find that's common sense Hung is not anti work?

Hung Lee 46:10
Well I mean, talk to a common sense, they've actually use the term anti woke. But I do think that we're in a point where the cultural conflict sort of kind of existed a little bit outside recruiting is kind of coming into our world. So what is it going to look like in 2024? Do we see this continual trend? Is it going to get more tense in terms of disputes? Or are we going to achieve some sort of consensus Celinda, I'm gonna go with you again, versus that seems to be how we've gone.

Celinda Farías Appleby 46:40
I have a lot of thoughts on this. And primarily, because in my circle of trust, or in my board of directors, a lot of the people I interact with on a daily basis, our heads of DEI, it's a very fantastic company, or I should say were because they have experienced mass layoffs in the past 18 months. I wish I could have the right answer for you on this because it's so nuanced, I sit in a global role. So what I think is diverse the United States is quite different than the diversity we do in our recruitment marketing, or our talent attraction strategies in Europe, or in Johannesburg, or in India, for example. But what I what I can say to you is, I think in 2020, in the United States, many people answering the call of George Floyd, I know there's Geller in the UK, but rest in peace, we came up with these diversity goals, right. And they started at the very top, well, you know, the Amazons, the Alphabets, right, coming up with these very quick responding to the riots in the United States with these diversity goals, and a lot of companies have failed. And when you fail at public statements coming from the heads of your company, somebody has to lose a job, right. And I think that's a lot had to do with what heads of DEI losing their jobs. Not all companies failed. You know, I'm not here to talk about visa, but we met our goals we committed to them, we hired teams to deliver on this. I wish we could say that about a lot of the other companies, I think it was a big job for one person. And I think a lot of people were unable to meet the goals and the demands. And I don't want to put this on recruiting because this is a hiring manager. This is a culture issue. You can have goals for a lot of things, you know, weight loss, fitness journeys, but if the entire person is not accountable when I mean persons when we're talking 20,000 people because your CEO can say something, your public statement can say something, you hire someone that's accountable, but no one else under you is marching to the beat of that drum and supporting that person and the CEOs goals, then you have a culture problem.

Hung Lee 48:46
Yep, very good. Um, so again, just as it puts in historical context 2020 that I do recall, there was loads of commitments, particularly from US companies, wasn't there where they were going to say, even talking quotas, we're talking about when

Celinda Farías Appleby 48:59
we're hiring X number of people that look like X.

Hung Lee 49:03
Yeah, so this is like, explicitly made. Now obviously, that may now be in the historical context, Siemens, if you'd like a peek, where we're at, it's been a slide down ever since the since that moment, the economic challenges I think, have caused companies to really cut back on staff. Clearly, recruitment has been affected by that and diversity and inclusion within that people occiput even more so. So perhaps rolling back into into pre 2020 kind of era. Okay, very interesting. Matt, let's go to you on this. Where do you see diversity in 2024? Yeah,

Matt Alder 49:44
I mean, it's a I mean, this is a huge topic. So it's, you know, it's difficult to give an all encompassing answer. And what I will say is that the, you know, that the business value of diversity is pretty it's become, it's pretty clear in terms of a lot of the research that's there. And I think that, you know, that, ultimately, is what drives things forward with employers and also this generation coming into the workforce that is incredibly values driven and wants to know, what their, you know what their employer stands for. So they can make a decision about whether they want to work there, I just want to focus on two things, because they've come up a lot on the podcast this this year, and they're probably the two things that don't get talked about much in the context of this broader conversation. And they're things that one thing that I think we've seen a lot more of in the last, in the last few years is around social mobility. So, you know, interviewed a number of employers on the on the podcast, who have programmes to take people out of prison into employment, you know, which is a fantastic thing. And a lot of that was driven, it's been driven by a lot of things, but one of the drivers behind it was skill shortages in certain in certain areas. And it'll be interesting to see how that develops. The other area, which hardly ever gets talked about, is neuro inclusion. And I think that one of the things to think about in terms of 2024. You know, in terms of being inclusive in recruitment processes, we've talked a lot about, you know, automation, and assessment, and all these kinds of great things in terms of recruiting, but what I think we have to be very aware of, is that, you know, are some of these ways of working in neuro inclusive, are they are we cutting out, you know, neurodivergent people because of the type of processes that we're putting in place. So, I think, you know, again, for 2024, that's a big consideration. And again, in terms of business case, for Neuro inclusion, I can't remember the stats off the top of my head, but it's something like 20% of the workforce is neurodivergent. And only 3% of those people have actually got a diagnosis. That, that shows that so actually, by being neuro inclusive within your organisation, you're getting the most out of your workforce, because everyone's brain is different. So I suppose that's my one thing that I want to say in terms of, you know, as we move forward towards AI, and automation is kind of is this keeping that in mind? Yeah,

Hung Lee 52:27
very good. And absolutely, I think whatever process we design, one of the biggest challenges is how do you design it in an inclusive way? Because typically, wherever we make any improvements on one side, it's going to disproportionately benefit one group of people and disadvantage, another it's a very difficult problem to solve. Maybe the future should be providing more optionality, like more ways in which people can choose their way in, however, that stretch goal. Adam Bird let's go to you on this? What are your thoughts on diversity and inclusion in 2024, compared to 2023?

Adam Bird 53:03
I think so we've seen the, the removal of the sticking plaster solutions, either kind of the DEI directives to kind of the kind of the missions as it were. And what that revealed is, culturally, organisations aren't set up to do this. Now, I think they're swimming against the tide in a lot of countries that it's very, very difficult to do talk about social mobility, if you're in a, if you're in a country, that is the kind of most socially polarised in Europe, it's very, very hard as an organisation to give opportunities to move people forward, because you're having to move the board an awfully long way. There's so many endemic issues in society that as employers, there's maybe a will, but are there the means can we actually make a difference? And so all we can do, I think, is move the Overton window over kind of acceptable, but what the Overton window can be applied in all sorts of ways. I think this is one of those areas where you kind of reach as far as you can as an employer, but that has to be a cultural decision, not a, like a CEO, top CEO, pronouncement decision. Everyone in the organisation has to and so I think that's where that's what will change is the companies that truly embrace that culturally, will be the ones that succeed in providing an environment where all sorts of people can be successful. And there'll be certain companies that embrace that, and certainly certain companies that turn away from that, and then the balance sheet will decide.

Hung Lee 54:52
Yeah, the really interesting couple of final points there, Adam, particularly about, you know, the fact that companies are embedded into a wider social framework, like we don't operate as discrete units away from that. And it may be very, very difficult for companies to have a policy A that actually doesn't try and with, you know, a polarised society, it's going to basically negatively affect as many people as it positively affects. So it's an interesting question like, What role should employers play in addressing society wide issues. Second point that you mentioned, which I think is very interesting is maybe, you know, even though we might look at diversity as having regressed to a large group over the last two, three years, perhaps one of the benefits has been a lot of the cosmetic stuff has been washed out. And it's a little bit like, Okay, we now see what's, you know, see who's swimming naked, so to say, because the tide has gone out, and we understand who's like, genuinely committed to some of these values. Other ones might have, you know, greenwash, pink wash, black wash, did whatever washing they did in order to get through that particular moment in, in cultural contexts. So the good thing is, we know that people care about it from a job seeker perspective, increasingly, so the younger you go in terms of generational cohorts, so that those job seekers will be able to pick and choose more clearly which kind of companies that they want to interact with. And as you say, at the end of the day, maybe that's what we want, or we're looking for, we want, like, right matches to the right people. I think most people will be more more happy with that, rather than getting involved in the wrong cultural context. Let's see, which can be which we will then walk away and described as being inherently toxic. Okay, folks, we are rapidly running out of time. So we're going to dive straight into the questions last chance everyone who's watching this. If you've got any questions, use the q&a function we're going to do right away. Now. So let's do the first one. Okay. Kaya, Katya. I assume that was not a question, but maybe we'll handle that and kind of experience discussion. Let's go with comparisons. Are there any tools you're using to help automate besides chat GPT? Right? Everyone can answer this one. What are the tools that we're using folks to help us get more efficient in TA, any thoughts on this go to you again, Celinda even though we know a conservative visa, maybe

Celinda Farías Appleby 57:26
We do have a scheduler tool embedded in our ATS. I personally couldn't tell you whom they are, I sit more on the top of the funnel. But scheduling is automated for us. And it's lovely when you're a hiring manager or recruiter to have that there. We're also looking at implementing more automated workflows by, you know, working with eight fold at the top of the funnel to support some of those conversations at the front end with hiring managers. But we are you if you go to our career site, you're not going to find a chatbot you're going to find an email address that leads right into an inbox I manage. So we're still ways away at Visa.

Hung Lee 58:07
OK fantastic. Matt, any thoughts on this? I mean, you know, the conversations you've had today at any recurring themes as to what tools or technologies or categories of tools people seem to be interested in?

Matt Alder 58:18
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think one of the things about next year in terms of AI is just how many vendors are now baking into their solution. So you know, there's a whole nother conversation about the quality of that, and, you know, what you should look for what you should ask for however, you know, I think that, you know, we'll see these kinds of capabilities and all kinds of tools. If you want me to name names, when I was talking about conversational AI on career sites, Paradox are a company that are doing that and doing a lot of recruitment, recruitment automation, in the kind of way that we've described. But I think that what we'll find is that there'll be a lot of automation and AI baked into, you know, the tools that potentially you're already using, as they strive to keep up with the market over the next 12 months. interesting time to be a vendor, I'm sure, Adam.

Hung Lee 59:12
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's leaves a final one to you, Adam. When it comes down to roadmap to Cronofy, all of these technologies flying through sort of, really in consumer hands, where is what's happening with Cronofy in the next 12 months? What can customers expect from you guys?

Adam Bird 59:33
So I think the what's been really interesting about the AI paradigm is that this idea of an assistant that sits alongside what you're doing, because recruiters, the ATS is the system of record. That's what runs the process. That's what the workflow's in and everything else should essentially be subservient to that supporting that process. So what's really interesting about the kind of product paradigm that a lot of AI tools are bringing, is they are kind of augmenting that process. And that's in many ways, how we designed our tooling. And how we think about our products is always like this augmentation of the process, not replacing the process is not a separate tool you go to, in our case to do scheduling. It's just there available to you as part of the ATS. I think there's some really interesting work we're doing internally, which will come out later on the year around using AI but in a generative way, but really leaning into the opportunities around multilingual. Really big concerns over data sovereignty, and providing something and really solving because what's fascinating about recruitment, and the recruitment scheduling is everyone does it as this kind of mentioned earlier, and these kind of weird and wonderful ways. And those weird and wonderful ways, are really easy to say, oh, I want to set up a developer interview with up to but make sure no one has more than two a week, except from Sarah. She's doing two this week. And none next week. Super easy to say you mentioned building a UI to try and describe that. So there's some really interesting opportunities there that the chat interface and using that as a way to kind of drive process to make you almost you talk to your systems and describe the exceptions. And it's the exceptions that the hard bit, it's easy to automate, it's very hard to manage the exceptions. And as we've talked about before, in terms of automation, the most important thing with automation, in my opinion, for a product perspective, is providing an easy off ramp. So you can go manual, you can take the stick, you can do that particular scheduling process, you can do that particular review of that particular that weird turn that turned up in a CV that the AI mispronounce or misattributed, you need to be able to do this without losing any of that, that context. So it's really kind of leaning into that process of making people more performant. And more productive.

Hung Lee 1:02:03
Yeah, very, very good. Okay, folks, we have to leave it there. We are out of time. What a wonderful conversation this was. I'm sure it could have gone on for another hour. But we have to leave at this point in time. I think there's going to be a hard stop so I couldn't get my words out. Thank you. Celinda, for joining us. Thank you Matt, for joining us. Thank you Adam Berg for joining us. Friends. Thank you for watching along. I believe Amy or Kathryn will be sending you a follow up email. We've had four of these episodes this year has been fantastic collaboration will hope to do more of these in 2024. But don't get the chance to say our Happy Christmas Happy Holidays and best wishes the 2024 let me take the opportunity to do that now. Keep well everyone. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

A webinar in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood: A look ahead at HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024 with a panel of industry experts!

HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024

What are the HR and Recruitment trends you need to be aware of for 2024? How can you be a more successful recruiter in the industry as it evolves?

Join Hung Lee and a panel of experts as they share their predictions and reflect on the past year.

This webinar is in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood.

Recruiting Brainfood: HR trends and predictions for 2024

Recruiting Brainfood: HR predictions for 2024