Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Shannon Pritchett, the head of Marketing and Communities for HireEZ. In March, they’ll begin offering generative AI functionality, specifically the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 language model or GPT-3. They’ll pair it with their own machine learning data to help recruiters communicate with candidates more quickly and efficiently.
We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about AI and recruiting, the thinking behind their update and the principles of AI on this edition of People Tech.
Hi Shannon. Welcome. So HireEZ is about to add a GPT-3 powered tool to the product and I’m wondering if you can tell me about that. What’s it going to do? How’s it going to do it? What’s the thinking behind it?
Shannon:
Yeah. We’re super excited to be using the most cutting edge AI technology to better our product. And our whole mission is to make outbound recruiting easy, and that starts with the recruiter itself to make their job easier as well. And our data has shown that recruiters spend on average of 30 to 60 minutes composing their initial outreach to a candidate, and that’s just one candidate. So we saw a huge pain point with several recruiters is composing emails.
Long gone are the days, Mark, when you and I used the source and it was all about who found the candidate first. Now who got the candidate to respond first? And engagement’s always been an important part of our product. It’s one of our core functionalities. So with this new GPT-3 integration, first thing we did was we added actual … Another layer of machine learning on top of it to make it more refined to our industry.
So it’s not the same GPT-3 that you’ll see through the open AI. It’s powered by that, but it’s actually enhanced a little bit more to make it more recruitment friendly. And so it’s as easy as finding and identifying a candidate within our platform. And we have over 850 million candidates our platform so there’s lots of you to choose for. But once you find it, all you have to do is go over to our engagement section and instead of manually composing the email to your candidate and all the drip campaigns that go along with it, all of them are going to be automatically composed for you.
So you have three options now. So you can send as is, you can modify the AI message or you can start from scratch and write your own. So we give you all options, but it’s as simple as the click of a button and it merges information from your job description onto the email and all the drip campaigns as well. So that’s what we’re hoping will save recruiters a lot of time and capture more attention from the candidates, themselves.
Mark:
So how did it come about, this whole approach and this kind of tool?
Shannon:
Yeah. We have a pretty large data science and AI engineer team at HireEZ. And again, our commitment is to make your job easier. And so when the latest with GPT-3, our AI team assures me they’ve been monitoring it for years. I just now started paying attention because I’m not an AI engineer, so I’m not that smart, but my brain suited for marketing. So once that product became available and ready to use it had evolved enough with our team and our product for us to be able to finally go to market with it. So it’s something we’ve been monitoring closely and it’s been on our product roadmap, and the timing is right, especially with all the buzz behind it, to be able to release it to our customers.
Mark:
Now you talk about the buzz behind it and it makes me think, boy, your timing is exquisite for rolling this out. Was that by design or did you just get lucky in terms of the timing?
Shannon:
I think luck has a lot to do with it because we all have to factor luck somewhere into the equation. However, with us, this is something that was going to be released. We’ve been looking at engagement and emails, how we can make this easier for recruiters. But I think with the buzz behind it, that kind of motivated us to release this sooner than we typically would’ve because the market told us the time is now. And with that product market fit, we know it’s going to be well received and executed upon.
You might be thinking, well, why wasn’t this released two, three years ago? One, product wasn’t ready, we weren’t ready. I don’t think the market was ready. But now that perfect storm through luck and timing makes it ready for recruiters to start using. I couldn’t be more pleased with it because when I listen to recruiters and they’re pain points, they have so much on their plate right now. They’re juggling multiple positions. There’s that uncertainty with the economy. There’s the uncertainty in the job market. And so now if we can save them time just throughout their process so they can better focus on something else like canned experience, talking to the candidates, working different positions, or even educating themselves, to us, that’s a huge win.
Mark:
So what will the end user experience be? Do you think that users will notice something’s different or is this all going to be sort of under the hood where they can leverage it but they don’t see it?
Shannon:
I don’t think the end user is going to know because it’s going to come directly from your inbox, and then when they respond to you, it’s going to go back into your inbox. So it’s going to look like a regular email. I think you’re going to see probably a lot more confidence and positivity from the end user and the fact that there aren’t going to be any typos, there aren’t going to be any incorrect information. It’s going to be all right there already fact checked and everything like that based on the information that you know gave us or was in your job description. So as long as there’s that verification process that your job description’s ready to go and your position is accurate, then the messaging should be accurate as well. So it should be a really good experience from the job seeker.
I also want to say, too, that recruiters get put on blast a lot publicly when there’s that mistake in the outreach from potentially getting the name of the candidate incorrect or the company or the position or misspelling a word. That’s when we typically see those images pop up on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, et cetera. I think this is going to completely bypass that. So it’s going to add in that extra level professionalism, which we’ve always had, just sometimes we don’t have time to polish. When I got into recruiting, I didn’t think I was going to spend half my day composing emails. I thought I was going to spend most of my day working with people. And now you had that opportunity to that a lot closer. So embracing AI is really going to help save people lot of time.
Mark:
Okay. One of the things that HireEZ says is that you’ve got a formal set of principles that you use to building AI systems. Could you tell me about that?
Shannon:
Yeah. AI is something that needs to be ethical and we want to ensure our AI is ethical. So we have a governance committee and a system in place to make sure that everything we do is completely going to benefit both the recruiter and the candidate. So there’s remove bias, we make sure that everything is followed, all the governing laws, all the compliance, all the principles. And again, we do our part to ensure that we are being responsible with the technology that we are providing our customers because it’s the people we’re dealing with at the end of the day, and that’s what matters most. And they need to trust that the technology is making those decisions very, very carefully and taking into consideration all the rules and regulations that are out there. And so we follow all that very closely.
Mark:
You and I are in the industry, so we’re aware of all of those sort of backend things that you want these principles to address. Are users thinking about that? I mean, is this a sensitive issue for them that they’re going to be judging products by?
Shannon:
That’s a really good question. I think it depends on the user. I would say the majority of people don’t care too much. And you kind of see that with the way we’ve embraced technology in the past, right? Through social media to mobile applications, to TikTok. And I think a lot of us have that general trust as human beings with what we’re using. And so I think once there’s a violation of that trust, then I think recruiters are going to start paying a lot more attention. And so that actually puts greater pressure on all of HR technology vendors to instill that trust and to make sure that it’s not violated. Because I think it’s there. I don’t want to speak for everyone. I don’t think it’s in the back of their head, but you can’t … There’s no room for error when you deal with people in our industry. And those were the most important assets.
Mark:
Well, it’s a really interesting way to kick off 2023. Have anything else coming up during the year?
Shannon:
Oh yeah. Oh yes. I think 2023 will be the year of automation for us at HireEZ. This is just the beginning. And so we’re really excited for this first release. We’re really excited about the wait list that we’re generating. But there are so many more ways that we can embrace automation throughout our recruiting process. And so you’ll start to see a lot more news come out from us and how we are trying to make your job easier, exactly like I said. And that answer goes back to better data quality, more. And what I mean by more is less and more, so automation. So you’ll see a lot of good news coming from us, but we want to try to automate as much as possible to empower the recruiter to do a lot more.
Mark:
Well, Shannon, thanks very much. It was really great to talk to you.
Shannon:
Thank you so much, Mark.
Mark:
My guest today has been Shannon Pritchett, the head of Marketing and Communities for HireEZ. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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