How Can Technology Optimize the Hiring Process?

[Music] hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com this is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace cultures you ride the wave of change and talent management I'm your host Chris Nichols and today we have the CEO and co-founder of humanly Prim Kumar humanly is an AI platform that helps companies become more efficient and Equitable in their conversations with candidates and I am a huge fan from it's great to have you on the show we've been working on this for seemingly months now and just in kind of the the pre-show talk you're in surprisingly good spirits for your Mariners being down 2-0 so you know how are you holding up what's the situation we've got in Seattle well happy to be here a big fan of the show the situation in Seattle is we need to win tomorrow it's been uh 21 years since we made it to the playoffs so I'm happy we're here but I'm hoping we can extend this a lot I'm rooting for you the Astros um were long a foe for my Cardinals and the NL Central and now they're you know they're in the AL West and they're cheaters and so um you know anybody that can knock them out uh that's that's a win for me we're gonna do our best give it a good shot um so obviously humanly um AI Tech um you know there's there's if if anyone does know anything about you um I I think that it's interesting how you got here because you don't have the most traditional background to get into HR Tech and so I'd I'd love to hear about and I think our listeners would be interested in hearing about where your career started and maybe it'll plant some seeds for how you got to where you are today yeah absolutely um so grew up in the in the Seattle area um obviously that that's why I'm a mariner fan um uh so I actually like you know when I so I went to University of Washington um entered my kind of first job search um you know the time was it was 2006 the the tech Market was pretty hot uh Facebook had just kind of entered the market a couple years back lots of jobs to apply to and my my um degree was in informatics um so I I started you know applying to jobs and it was kind of just like a disenchanting process like I spent a lot of time on my resume never heard back um and then I had a colleague of mine and and her and I would go into the same exact interview Loops the companies would come on campus and we'd compare notes and we'd talk to the same interviewers for the same job and it was really interesting when we compared notes uh they would ask us completely different set of interviews it was very inconsistent maybe some bias so they would Grill her maybe a little more on technical skills which is kind of very odd that I would be having a different interview so we realized you know there was just some inequity here just in in the ability to engage with candidates at scale again I never heard back a lot of the time and it just was how the process worked and then when you got to the interview it was very inconsistent so you know as I evolved in my career and and spent some time at Microsoft and products as in HR Tech because I went to Tiny pulse learned more about Talent acquisition I learned that it wasn't that recruiters were necessarily intentionally doing things that weren't great for candidates it was just they didn't have the the tools and and the um you know some of these Technologies to be able to engage consistently at scale with candidates um so that's kind of my journey spent some time at Microsoft really focused on product and data and HR Tech and then went to a company called tiny pulse and the employee engagement space before we before we started when you're at Microsoft you're talking about product development were you working on internal product development tools is that is that where you're working on good question so I actually started um on internal so I when I first started I was actually um on the um account management working with our Enterprise clients I did some operations work but then I settled in within product um and started with internal tools so I was the PM for our Global HR portal so everything from what we're doing from a career content standpoint to internal Mobility Employee Engagement so all the technology that we use for our Global Workforce my team would build and then we'd go out to customers externally and say hey this is how you can build a portal on top of the Microsoft stack on top of you know Azure SharePoint um but then Microsoft got into the business of of HR Tech uh so when I had eventually moved to the product teams and when LinkedIn was acquired one of the my roles in our team's roles were kind of how do we bring this this data these set of use cases into the Microsoft ecosystem them so started in turtle and then Microsoft had a kind of bigger appetite to go external and now now they have Viva and all those sort of investors I think that's a a cool piece because I don't think I don't think most people really think about the types of uh entrepreneurship that occurs especially in an organization like Microsoft right like wait a second you're building tools internally to improve processes right so was there anything that you were building internally while you were there that kind of sparked or maybe you know some of your experiences was there something that you built there or you were trying to build to just solve problems for Microsoft and can you speak to that a little bit yeah absolutely so and I definitely feel there's a lot of parallels between being an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur when I uh pitched VCS for humanly and raised money was very similar to pitching VPS and raising money when we were at Microsoft so very similar deal um uh so yeah one of one of the projects which was probably the one of the most exciting projects I worked at with Microsoft didn't end up um getting deeply external but a project called me at work uh so was a kind of internal um almost Enterprise social network uh and this is before like Facebook workplace and some of the stuff that's out now but it was a way for us to connect with other employees to find out hey is this person in Israel at Microsoft working on the same NLP algorithm that I'm working on in Redmond maybe we should collaborate because we're building the same thing for two different uh parts of the organization so me at work helped kind of bring people together um it was also eventually going to be used for internal Mobility scenarios so if you were in role for three years you're a high performer maybe we'll start pushing you some internal Microsoft jobs because we know you're getting hit up externally so that was uh you know we launched that kind of almost like a Skunk Works Microsoft makes uh this entrepreneurship they have a program called the garage project and others where employees can kind of build things that they think could be beneficial um me at work actually was sponsored by a VP and we ended up getting it to about half the company internally um it ended up getting kind of sucked into what they're doing with Office 365 in general but it was a fun one person that's super cool and I think that you know it's such a great story because because looking now at you as a co-founder of an HR tech product right it gives you an Insight now likely into how large corporations think about how they solve some of these problems right so I'm interested to get into some of that maybe um maybe later on on the episode here but you know when we look at your time at tiny pulse and and what you were doing from Employee Engagement how did you use that to to where did the seed idea for humanly come from yeah yeah so we're working uh at tiny pulse with uh you know thousands of these customers that were trying to solve problems as you mentioned around Employee Engagement around diversity Equity inclusion and belonging how do you kind of take a pulse of of your organization and and make it a place that people want are retained that they want to work at that you're you know not just uh you know that quite quitting is a is a big term right now um you know back then it was more um you know engagement uh uh there's a professor Dr Brooke ultimate I think he was at Georgetown he coined the phrase reluctant stairs so people that are staying reluctantly but kind of quiet quitting that was what we were really focused on avoiding um but I realized a lot of building a culture really starts with you know who maybe it's obvious but who you're bringing in in the first place so are you bringing people if you're trying to build a growing organization um building bringing in more of the same types of folks will keep you stagnant so how are you actually building and bringing in new types of folks that will help Elevate you to that next level um so that's kind of where we kind of started finding that a lot of our tiny pulse customers that were solving these problems a lot of the problems started with hiring and who they bring in um and then we also found they had lots of great tools for applicant tracking lots of great tools for sourcing so maybe they had really diverse pipelines but really that in inclusion Journey the equity Journey the culture Journey starts in your first interviews and what and your first touch points with the candidates even if it's through a chatbot even if it's through automation so how can we really and we didn't see great solutions for those direct conversations you're having with your job candidates so there's tracking tools but not interacting tools um whereas you know and this was you know about three and a half years ago there's a little more now um but we saw in sales and marketing you'd have tools like drift to engage on a website with a prospect you'd have tools like gong once they're in the sales conversation how can we bring that conversational AI to to the candidate experience and help hiring teams be more Equitable and efficient so that's kind of um you know some of the Genesis I felt that a lot of our tiny pulse customers had that Gap um and we wanted to go out and sell for that I and I I appreciate that so much because when I look at the hiring process we've already mentioned some things that are just kind of funny you talk about your resume early on and they in some ways their resumes like the most pointless activity that you do ever right because it's like I do all of this paper and then I put it into an applicant tracking system and it just has to be good enough but I've probably invested hours into building a resume for it to be just good enough to have the chance to get to have a phone screen with someone and maybe I pass a few of the screener questions um to maybe get to talk to actual hiring manager and so what we do is we disqualify so many candidates and yet we have thousands of open jobs across across our most of our businesses right if it's any kind of scaled company you look at the market right now it's October 14 2022 and while you see big headlines of layoffs if if you start really looking there's a ton of jobs that are that are still out there in the market we have way more jobs than we have people um and so but we but every company we try to disqualify as many as we can when in reality we should be finding ways to optimize the recruiting process for candidates right like how do we make it a better experience for us and for them so I'd love to hear you tell the story of what you're trying to do as an organization a human what what processes are you trying to create to make a more human touch through technology yeah so we believe if you know if hiring teams had unlimited time money and resources uh every App application or every you know candidate you would have a conversation with so you would be able to scale can we have that you know conversation with everyone that applies so you're paying in time and money to attract them to your employer brand and then you're only engaging with a very small a few of them and like you said using things like resumes and other shortcuts to see how you can quickly get to a smaller set because you're inundated with this volume um you know I often say tell my marketer hey if if I were to tell you do all this SEO drive a bunch of eyeballs to our website drive a million eyeballs to our website but by the way our sales team only has time to talk to five percent of people that want to buy our product the rest we don't have time to demo um that's kind of what what's happening on on on the town acquisition side you have a lot of interest and I'm not saying every single candidate is a great fit um but a lot of them are or could be for a future job or perhaps they're your customers if you're in a B to C sometimes candidates or you're actually your best customers um I know uh you know at Disney for example the average job candidate that applies spends eight times as much money at Disney park so lots of reasons why you want to conversate with everyone it's just hard to do without the tools so what what we're trying to do through the um you know as we think about these direct conversations with candidates uh we use automation to help you engage with everyone so if you're like one of our customers Moss Adams um you might have 4 000 University uh applicants that apply in a three-month period um Can the next step be an automated chat that goes out to them within 24 hours and says hey thanks for applying let's move you to the next step let's get to know you better let's not just screen you um but let's educate you about what we're doing at Moss Adams and why you should be here so the reason why a two-way conversation even if it's automated is better than you know just a resume job description stuff like that is this is a process where you want to educate you want to give value back and you want to get to know them better and I only I feel that can only happen through a two-way conversation um and then you know once you have that automated chat with everyone that applies the ones that are a good fit get scheduled and our tool will sit in on the human part of it taking notes giving feedback to the hiring team but that's kind of how we see that process working talk to everyone and then have your human time focused um on on kind of those uh conversations that you feel could lead to a higher Joe Buck home is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and time Solutions on the market our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective Talent placement best epic career moves and a more human hiring process we get a lot of conferences HR conferences and so you know the one of the presentations that I do is called are you who used and companies spend so much time talking about hey this is who we are these are our core values we care we're empathetic Etc except for when it comes to the the hiring process and then there's a whole lot less scaring and a whole lot less empathy right and um one of the first slides that I have is uh you know love at first click because the reality is you're either going to fall in love with a company or fall in disgust I guess with a company uh based upon your experiences so everyone knows who Disney is right but the the fact is there's thousands of companies out there that are not consumer Brands and so I'm not going to have that same name recognition of them I'm not going to go to Google and find them by putting in their name I'm probably going to be searching for that type of job and so if I were to compare you know two jobs and and I go to one and I have immediate feedback um and and I'm and I'm talking to even if it is a bot right if I'm talking to something um technically versus you know just dubbing my resume and I'm gonna say wow that was at least an experience uh that was different it was it was more Innovative and I know they have more information about me because I was able to share it so I I love that that part of humanly and and what you all bring to the market maybe um share I I'd love to hear more about the bias aspect uh for him and and what you know how that plays into the system like what are we doing so wrong that we need um conversational AI to help us like what are the kind of things that it can help with yeah so I think it's there's a couple of things one is um you know just being able to to scale the interactions so if you have thousands of people applying it's unlikely that a recruiter is going to be able to call up every single and for for these high volume jobs call up everyone so it helps you kind of expand your touch um there are the other piece is it helps you be more consistent so you can have kind of the same conversation at the at the top of the funnel um not introduce things that might be unfair biased um a lot and particularly we see that coming into play after the point of application there there are some things that happen in the application process of course but once you get into the interview and for the jobs that were where uh our customers are hiring for generally the next step is a virtual interview so a zoom call a Microsoft teams call but we're seeing a lot of very interesting things happening there um and some of them are very simple so you brought up the Seattle Mariners so one of the pieces of data we're seeing is if it's a Seattle recruiter or hiring manager interviewing a Seattle candidate they're more likely to spend I think about a minute more on Small Talk At the beginning maybe they're talking about the Mariners losing to the Astros yesterday or maybe they're talking about something else but the it seems you know kind of um small uh to small talk but but what's actually happening there is there those candidates are given almost an unfair Chance by the time the questions start we can measure that the interview all right interviewer already has a higher Rapport and sentiment with the candidate um and they have less time to actually ask questions so in extreme cases maybe you spend the first like five minutes just kind of talking about that and nothing wrong with Rapport building but at all I think it's a good thing and good recruiters are great at it but giving every candidate a fair shot to have that kind of report building is important so some of the the biases we find have to do with inconsistencies and interview format up not being as structured or I'll end with this but just treating people differently sadly one of our customers they were having a hard time um with their I.T Department it was mainly men it was about 73 Men um the Canada pipeline was very diverse but women were dropping off uh and taking jobs elsewhere at a much higher rate what we found in their interviews is women were getting 12 minutes less to even talk so we can measure interruptions our interviewers showing up on time so I feel to you know to create that diverse Workforce um barely paying attention to what's happening inside those interviews and treating everyone the same as surprisingly not happening all the time there's so many opportunities for bias and we don't even think about the ones that we think about and the ones that are in the news are the ones that you can see the color of our skin right uh or maybe that you can hear accents things of that nature uh you know the the the common uh one of my favorite quotes in my movie is uh from Sweet Home Alabama you've probably not seen it but uh the male lead character says you think just because I talk slow that I'm stupid right and and there are those are biases that we have um you know regionally um in race and everything and the reality is there's so much more than that I mean you mentioned that you went to the University of Washington but if I'm a Washington state grad I'd be like you know he's probably you know uh some wealthy kid from the suburbs and you know he's not going to want to work hard et cetera because we all have these preconceived notions because of our own experiences in life and so yep I love the things that you've talked about around how we help to eliminate some of those things um you know what about like big dreamy things around this is there anything that you all maybe aren't doing just yet that you're or you're working towards like where do you where do you see more ways to eliminate bias from the recruitment process yeah I know it's a great question so I think you know we're starting with the basics so I think on the on the chat side we're keeping things standardized we're not using like gendered language or Aegis language the words you uh use matter so that's where we're starting and then on on the interview side I mentioned some of the standardization pieces but I think one of the things that where we're trying to take this is can we help people what what whatever conversation they're having with a candidate and then maybe maybe even post hire as well um can we measure things like empathy um which which we actually are measuring empathy right now through active listening through leaving time for questions um things like patience um but really where where it moves the needle for me is not just the fact that we can measure this a lot of this is now measurable we can even measure like our are the interviewers looking at their phone a lot or are they really engaging with the candidate um and again the goal is not to get people in front level but organizationally can we just show up better and represent our employer brand better but but to me we're this really adds value is not just having the data but tying its outcomes so can we actually say by doing these things uh you are driving a higher offer acceptance rate by doing these things you're driving a higher sentiment and then I think beyond that is going back to my roots at tiny pulse and working post hire can we plug into these post-hire systems and learn about performance I learn about tenure learn about engagement and say hey the cohorts of candidates you're hiring that end up having the highest impact as employees here's what you're doing in the interview um and that's kind of that whole model is what we're looking at so being a little more holistic but I think being predictive and really tied into outcomes one small example we had a customer that was struggling with with engineer hires and getting them to accept accept an offer not so much a high volume scenario but but it was actually turned out to be quite simple the only part of their employer brand value prop that was correlated to Engineers accepting the offer was remote work and it might seem obvious but they were talking about how great their CEO was or their benefits but by just talking about remote work at the beginning of the call the middle and asking at the end do you have any questions about our remote work policy they notice an eight percent increase in Engineers converting and accepting jobs so sometimes it's just simple stuff it doesn't have to be always kind of some deep deep learning things but you know what that brings up a good point data is all-powerful right like information is power you need information be able to make informed decisions and for years I mean the interview process is such a subjective process and most organizations right like oh we have this list of 30 questions in our question Bank well I might use these four questions all the time but this other recruiter that recruits for the same role might use these 10 questions and and so but nobody tracks anything like that right nobody tracking how often they bring up remote work because you have to be persistent and you have to be um organized in your leadership approach and just historically most organizations have not had that kind of um sense of of objectivity within their da process so I it's amazing you start measuring something and you realize that's not what we were trying to figure out but it gave us a solution to this any thoughts around that or any more experiences that you've had yeah the the measurement is huge and sometimes it's the simplest things right um so like if folks ask me um so let's say we we tell someone hey being more empathetic or being more consistent can help drive up candidate sentiment it can Thrive up conversion so it's not what it kind of sounds vague how do I become more structured or empathetic I might say it's as simple as showing up on time to all your interviews and and in many cases we see like interviews that are you know one of them might start three minutes late it's it just throws everything off so sometimes it's the simplest things that people just aren't aware of until they show that we show them the data saying that hey if it's a junior candidate you're more likely to show up late you're you're actually showing up late a lot to these interviews so sometimes my thoughts will be just look at the basics try and get them right um and then you can start a kind of unpeeling the onion a little bit and getting a little deeper but um yeah I mean measurement is key and you can't change what you don't measure and now you can measure pretty much anything as it relates to how you're interviewing and how you're showing up at least when it's done you can't you don't know why something is happening until you start measuring it and then you are able to start asking questions about it and so um I think what what we often miss out on is just just taking taking note of the fact that we can measure different items and and it's not just about time to hire or um you know cost per hour like let's get let's get into the weeds a bit more let's let's get tactical right like it's okay to be tactical sometimes and so we but I do want to go in and kind of a negative Direction here now so I'm going to put the pressure on you we've heard lots of talk from you know there was the Amazon outcry a few years ago with you know AI in their recruitment process and and you know it was causing challenges with hiring the same type of person over and over again how do we look at how do how can companies trust Ai and HR to be the function that it needs to be it needs to make sure that obviously we're moving bias but how do we make sure that we're not teaching it the wrong thing right because it's all tied to machine learning how do we overcome that and how do companies Buy HR Tech to know that it's right yeah great question and you kind of were asking me earlier about my learnings at Microsoft and implementing internal tooling um and yeah even internally when we're launching a product like me at work and at the time it didn't have a lot of AI but there were certainly you know a people looked at HR as um are there kind of Big Brother elements are we adding bias by adding these elements so there's a lot one can do um so oftentimes I you know when people are evaluating a new tool I I recommend that they write a job description for it so just like you're hiring an employee what are the roles and responsibilities you want for this particular piece of technology that you're going to hire into your organization what skills you wanted to have what background you wanted to have what education do you wanted to have so I have people kind of write it out like that and and I think that there's a lot of things that go into so in our case we're not actually assessing candidates on using a lot of AI it's more so on the interviewer themselves but it's it's one of those garbage in garbage out scenarios so it's very important to understand what data is are your is your AI being trained on um is a company coming in and saying the AI is just going to learn about your company and it's going to base it on that or is it coming with with a lot of a lot of data across multiple companies across multiple types of regions and candidates so I think how you actually train the AI is very important and it can be a little abstract but you can ask questions around like how does it make decisions what is it basing it on um I think anytime vendors get very um vague and it's almost like The Wizard of Oz hiding in some corner and some magic happens uh Magic is not necessarily always good I think explainability is good I think when they're able to say this is why it does this so definitely press on those questions um not not over um you know making sure you're very clear in in what problem you want the AI to solve um oftentimes a lot of vendors make a lot of promises and they act like the technology is going to solve every last problem you bring it in and all of a sudden it's it's not doing that in the way you want it to be but but I think as far as bias there's also you know there's um a lot of ethics vehicle AI practices you can ask vendors what what is your model for ethical AI or what what are the kind of checks and balances in place so we we base a lot of our models on Microsoft has an ethical AI framework um there's third parties that can audit uh tools so you can ask them you know not only do you have a data security like a sock audit but are you audited from an AI ethics standpoint so there's the legal pieces but there's also the ethical pieces so there are beginning to be more bodies that will help companies assess vendors on the quality of the AI and elimination of bias but but yeah those are some of the things I I think about not boiling the ocean too soon and asking a lot of the right questions up front to make sure that they're really doing what they say that's helpful I mean you share some things there that I didn't even know so um we're getting you know near the end of our time here and and I don't mind letting it uh be a bit of an advertisement for you Prem but uh what I would leave it as though for you you know you mentioned earlier getting the right candidates into your into your funnel that the same thing goes for if I'm buying HR Tech right and and I need to have the right tools what kind of position would my company need to be in in order to be ready to buy a tool like humanly what's the ideal customer that needs a tool like humanly great question so um thanks Chris so uh yeah right right now um you know the core way we land with companies is around Time Savings so can we help you uh save time and processing candidates as they come to your website or as they apply through indeed so that kind of screening taking the big list and making it smaller for you scheduling them so if you're having a problem with processing large amounts of candidates scheduling them getting them into interviews we can definitely help with that um as well as like re-engaging the ones that were maybe silver medalists so um if you're getting lots of applicants can't engage with all of them that's the big one and then the other piece of what we're doing um you know in the actual virtual interview um so things like taking notes from a zoom call putting it into your applicant tracking system again Time Savings um so really we land with how can we save you time up front and then how do we save you time in the virtual interviews no taking getting into ATS um and then the next piece is around quality so Time Savings and then and quality is more so you know can you reduce bias um can you um you know attract those candidates that are going to have the highest impact at your company um but yeah generally targeting companies that are hiring support Ops uh sales roles uh health care so high volume in um and yeah we can usually save you quite a bit high volume similar type skill sets Etc probably work very well yeah uh well yep um that that's great and I'm and I and you know I've been through the way that just for for transparency sake for for listeners I we were looking for tools that would help us automate and speed up our processes um whenever I was at endeavis obviously job.com acquired Endeavors and so um was introduced to humanly by a mutual connection had never heard of them um and uh you know that was two years ago we used humanly on multiple projects now um and and we have we definitely definitely see the cost savings the time savings from being able to even hire fewer recruiters right and so and allow our recruiters to do the type of things that they enjoy doing more right like it's nobody wants to do 100 phone screens a day there were 100 phone screens a week right like that's just that is that is mentally exhausting but if I can go through and I can review things and kind of engage it in a more functional way that creates a better experience for the recruiter which is more likely to create a better experience for the candidate still yet um so I I love it I think it's a great tool that's that's my personal recommendation um good people at the organization and and really thank you for coming on now if I was a prospect where would I find you and how would I get a hold of you Prim yeah so you can check out our website humanly.io you can find me on LinkedIn pre-m and my last name is Kumar Kumar um Twitter at Prem Kumar tweets um and you can email me so p-r-e-m humanly.hype but not tomorrow October

15th because he will be at the Seattle Mariners playoff game no Mariners no Mariners hopefully we live to uh fight another day thank you so much for coming on on the podcast uh this has been a great conversation I'm looking forward to getting feedback from all the guests um you will be able to find it on on YouTube Spotify and uh any place that you get your podcast that's a wrap on another episode of the talentside podcast and remember uh success is on the other side of fear go get him folks foreign

2022-10-25 01:06

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