Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Gal Almog, Senior Vice President of Paycor. He joined the company when Paycor required Talenya, which Gal ran as CEO. We’re going to talk about AI and recruiting, and where recruiting technology may be headed on this edition of PeopleTech. Gal, thanks for coming in today. So, it’s been around three months or so since Paycor acquired Talenya. How’s that been going?
Gal:
Better than expected. Usually, when a big company acquires a small company, there’s some hiccups along the way and challenges, but we’re very happy moving along very quickly. Paycor is selling our product very successfully, so very satisfied.
Mark:
Yeah. It seems from the outside, like the two companies have meshed pretty well. Things seem to be going smoothly. You’ve got product launch coming up?
Gal:
Yes. Paycor has an ATS that we’ve integrated with, and in a month or so when we launch the integrated product, general availability, you will be able to click on a button from your ATS and have candidates sourced for that job automatically, and they will be inside your ATS waiting for you as a recruiter to follow up. So it’s a very cool, seamless integration that brings to the maximum the AI capability to source automatically.
Mark:
And I’m guessing that your two companies fit very well. Paycor with its capabilities, Talenya with your capabilities. How’s it been merging all of that?
Gal:
So basically Paycor, in its previous acquisition, usually swallows the acquired company. So everything goes into the regular Paycor process and management and this and that. In our case, they kept the standalone product that Talenya sold to companies with a different ATS. They kept it intact. So we are selling that product on a standalone basis, and we’re selling the integrated product through the Paycor sales force.
Mark:
Okay. I’d like to shift gears a little bit. There’s been a lot of talk of AI lately, especially in the last couple of months. Can you tell me how does AI fit into your world?
Gal:
Sure. Everything that we do is AI. I think that AI is very loosely used by a lot of companies because it’s a cool term, but a lot of it is not AI. And what we are doing with AI is overcome, I would say, three major challenges. One is the ability to uncover talent that traditional tools unable to uncover. And that is done by, first of all, tapping into a much larger talent pool beyond LinkedIn. We have a 1.5 billion resume database that we refresh for every job with contact information.
But also we eliminated keyword search, which has been for many years the core of sourcing. People sit by computers, enter keywords, and then sift through profiles on LinkedIn and then connect with them. That has been completely automated. And AI discovers talent just by looking at digital footprint that they have online curating profiles, reach profiles from multiple sources for them, and then using the job description to create the initial search.
But then, we found out that about 30% of the requirements are not in the job description, are in the head of the hiring manager or the recorder. And for that, we’ve developed a very unique process where the recorder is asked to rate thumbs up or thumbs down seven profiles. And that process helps us train the algorithm, the algorithm about what you want and what you do not want. And that completes the search. And then, the platform would go out to candidates who are graded according to how qualified they are and how likely to change jobs they are, which is AI as well, and reach out to them through multiple channels to bring them to an interview.
So, AI is the only way to automate that process. If you look at LinkedIn or SeekOut or hireEZ, it’s a tool. You may search beyond LinkedIn. You may have upload job description to create the certain things like that, but at the end it’s a tool used by recruiters. We wanted to eliminate the idea of a tool and say, “You are in the ATS. We have everything we need to know. We need some feedback from you.” 10 minutes, and the next thing you see is you see candidates interesting in speaking with you within your ATS. That cannot be done without AI, okay?
And if you want to use that tool, then you’re going to pay more to acquire an interview. The time it will take for recruiters to find those candidates. And there’s no possibility for them to enter every keywords, and then change a keyword and this and that. It’s hours and hours and hours. And then when they want to contact candidate, they send a message on LinkedIn. Some people answer, some people do not answer. We’ve encapsulated all of that into an AI platform that does it all for you and learns from you what you want and what you do not want. And that’s true AI.
Mark:
How’s the reaction been among users?
Gal:
It’s a mixed reaction. I’ll tell you why.
Mark:
Okay.
Gal:
There’s a lot of fear about AI. If I’m a recruiter and I’ve been using Boolean search for 10 years, then that has been my expertise and claim to fame. I’m apprehensive and even fearful about a machine doing a better job than me in some of those elements of sourcing. So, it is impossible to embrace that kind of technology, but everyone from the first moment it is used, okay? On the other hand, you have users will never go back to using a LinkedIn because it’s so more powerful, so efficient, so effective, especially recruiters who have a lot of open racks that they cannot possibly reach, and they failed because it takes so much time to do that. They turn on AI sourcing and they get double the number of interviews that they used to have. So, we use people who are willing to embrace and use our technology as change agents within organization.
It has a lot to do with the commitment of the manager to say, “Guys, you’re great recruiters, but the whole industry is going into AI. Think about ChatGPT and what the implication would be to people who create content. If you don’t want to be out of our job, you need to embrace it.” And it doesn’t replace recruiters. It does a lot of the heavy lifting that recruiters have to do manually, and makes them a lot more efficient and smarter. But it takes time for that to embrace throughout the entire organization, and the managers need to lead that change.
Mark:
Coming back to the product, it seems like it’s a good time to introduce it. Given all that’s going on in the market. What do you think? I mean…
Gal:
I think it’s a very good time. I was speaking about AI five years ago. Everyone thought that was not significant too early, not mature. Now, I think that the nice thing about ChatGPT is the fact that people got to try AI themself with their own content or on messages, the on pictures. And tell myself, this is for real. What will be the implications of this on my job and my life? And now when we talk about using AI for sourcing within that context, it’s a much easier process. Everyone understand they need to embrace it one way or the other. And we plan to use ChatGPT within our product as well.
Mark:
So, what’s your vision for this over the… Say, medium and long terms, where do you want to see this all go?
Gal:
As far as the technology or the market or…
Mark:
The products or the technology also, whichever you like.
Gal:
Yes, so people are into AI know that it’s a never ending process, because you need to keep training and training and training the algorithm to do what you want. And we are not only training the algorithm on a peer recruiter, on a peer company basis, but we are also improving the quality of the candidate that we send. And that will continue… It is taking us five and a half years to create something that’s really powerful and is working for every type of jobs and things like that. So, that is something that we will continue to do. The other thing that we plan to do. And when I talk about improving this, both the search and the engagement of the candidates for the avatar to know what message to send, who to send it, what time of the day, what day of the week, and things like that so we can get response.
And you can only imagine how personalized we can get the job description page will no longer be a text page. Not only will have more valuable information for you to consider the opportunity, but also there will be a person on video speaking with you, taking through the process, answering questions to make it a really cool experience. So that is another direction we’re taking. But we also want to leverage our technology and data to create additional capabilities to be able to predict what kind of candidates the company should hire based on past experience with different type of candidates, okay? Who stayed longer, who stayed less, what are the likelihood of these employees to churn? Can we move a person who is working in the company for one position to another and give them a career path that’s likely to keep them in the company as opposed to hiring someone from the outside?
It’s a huge thing because the whole recruiting world is based on an notion that, I have an opening. I’m going to look for someone who’s doing exactly the same job in another company, convince them to come over, pay them more money. While I have people with two or three months of training, I can do as good if not better job, and see that as a promotion. We have this algorithm that can predict what’s the next likely career path of a person and offer them and things like that. Mark, the opportunities are really huge, and I cannot disclose everything, but the whole sourcing experience will be totally different.
Mark:
Thank you very much. It was great to talk with you and I appreciate your time.
Gal:
Thank you.
Mark:
My guest today has been Gal Almog, Senior Vice President of Paycor. 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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