They'll have these very big words where really what you're looking for is like, why is my successful company so much different than other successful companies?

Yeah, look, I mean, I'll tell you my own story on that.

Because when I got, again, going back to my start, in this world, going back to the early 2000s, I was hiring engineers on Wall Street, and I was struggling to understand what was making it successful or unsuccessful.

We'd have wins and losses, I couldn't tell what was happening.

And to your point, those were not recorded experiences available as data.

They were just ephemeral, like a person would go into a conference room with a job seeker, they'd come out with a yes or no, like poof, it just went away.

And so I literally, I mean, this is gonna age me a little bit, but I went to Radio Shack, I bought a tape recorder, and I gave it to my team, and for months, they would go into job interviews with a tape recorder put on the desk and record the interviews.

happening today at least, right?

How exactly did that happen? And what was the reasoning behind it and the vision after?

Yeah.

So fast forwarding, you know, quite a few years now, picture this is, I'll start in 2020.

We did that deal at the beginning of 2021.

Okay.

Okay.

So that the story takes place over about a year from March of 2020 to March of 2021.

Like, can you maybe expand?

Do you wanna talk me through which of these concerns are legitimate?

Yeah.

Look, I, you know, it's, people, people have the concerns that they have, and I'm not here to say that they're not legitimate.

I totally understand.

I'm extremely empathetic to these worries, as I started this conversation by saying.

So yeah, you know, we, we've interviewed, we've, we've surveyed many thousands of job seekers and, and asked their opinions and collected lots of data about what are your attitudes and what are your fears and what are your worries about, about these technologies.

And generally, they come under three kinda big buckets.

Is that the sweet spot for this kind of, um, this, this sort of tool, or are there, are there any particular roles where this voice interview works better or worse than others?

Where do you think we are kind of on that spectrum? So very, you know, AI native companies, are they still trying? Are they actually even interested in hiring, you know, entry level grads anymore? Because I'm pretty concerned about them for them.

I think a lot of people, including myself, are as well.

I think there's good cause to be concerned.

I also think we should be careful about making these predictions too confidently about what's going to happen with the job market and AI.

I think we've already, just in the short time that AI has been pervasive in the workplace, gone through multiple waves of declarations from You know, the frontier labs about, you know, all jobs are going to disappear.

No, all jobs aren't going to disappear.

These jobs are going to get bigger.

They're trying to land their dream opportunity, right? What does the new hiring process actually look like for job seekers? Is the first stage having some form of AI interview with a virtual companion from one of these large organizations? At one point, does human intervention actually come into play now in today's market?

Just talk us through some intentional decisions that you made to upend the traditional ATS market.

I appreciate the kind words, first of all.

Thank you.

I'm glad that you like using it, and I'm glad that it feels good to use.

That's very intentional, but it's not really the point.

When we started Greenhouse, we had, as I say, this vision that companies need to change how they hire if they want to get better results.

If they do that and they get those results, it's hugely valuable.

that were built with AI.

So how are companies handling this and what maybe should they be doing?

Yeah.

I mean, definitely a doom loop is not a good thing, in case that wasn't plainly obvious to the listeners.

It's a problem.

But I think the problem isn't AI per se.

It's not that AI is bad.

AI is wonderful in a lot of ways.

If I show up and think I'm going to see a human and I see an AI, probably not a good candidate experience.

In your view, Daniel, who's to blame for that lack of trust, that breakdown in trust when it comes to hiring? Where would this all start?

Yeah, it's less about blame, but I think it is important to understand what's happening and so we can figure out how to address it.

And I think, so let's kind of break it apart, like what's actually going on and why is there this lack of trust and what can be done about it? I think Where that's come from is, well, first of all, if you look at the trends over the last several years, application volumes are way up.

So across our customer base, there's a 412% increase in the number of applications that every recruiter is looking at as compared to just a few years ago.

And those recruiting teams, by the way, are not any bigger.

They're about half the size that they used to be because companies are under a ton of pressure to be more efficient and do more with less.

So you've got this situation where the companies are facing an increasing volume of job applications, number one.

So what matters instead?

Hmm

... for sending out lots of job applications.

I think when you get into these questions that you're asking about, like if people are using AI to tailor their resume to the job or to help them answer interview questions, now you get into these really sticky situations of like, what's actually okay? And I think from job seekers' perspective, what they're saying is, "Look, if you hire me into today's workforce, you're expecting me to use AI.

You want people that are gonna be fluent in these tools.

And by the way, you as a company are using AI to post job descriptions and to help, uh, interview candidates and automate lots of your processes.

Why is it okay for you to use AI but for me as a job seeker not to?" And I think the truth is the rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do at various parts of the job seeking process are very unclear, and they're changing constantly.

So it's easy to point the finger and say, oh, they're cheating on a job interview, and surely that happens, but I think the real issue is how is it that companies are able to identify the skills that they need for tomorrow's workforce, which is absolutely AI-enabled, without having job seekers use AI at all? It's not clear.

I mean, how do you see the solution to that? I mean, what Elizabeth, for instance, just spoke about, the idea of a kind of black box within AI that could be basically driving prejudice or, or bias in some way.

Walk me through this cycle and why it's different from any hiring downturn you've seen before.

It is a really interesting dynamic.

And you're right.

It's bad news.

I mean, I think it came out of empathy for hearing what was happening to so many job seekers who were just struggling to find a job and more like not feeling like the system was working for them.

It wasn't meant for them.

And so they had to kind of fight it or figure out how to hack around the system.

How is that going so far?

Hmm

... for sending out lots of job applications.

I think when you get into these questions that you're asking about, like if people are using AI to tailor their resume to the job or to help them answer interview questions, now you get into these really sticky situations of like what's actually okay? And I think from job seekers' perspective, what they're saying is, "Look, if you hire me into today's workforce, you're expecting me to use AI.

You want people that are gonna be fluent in these tools.

And by the way, you as a company are using AI to post job descriptions and to help, uh, interview candidates and then automate lots of your processes.

Why is it okay for you to use AI but for me as a job seeker not to?" And I think the truth is the rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do at various parts of the job-seeking process are very unclear, and they're changing constantly.

So it's easy to point the finger and say, "Oh, they're cheating on a job interview," and surely that happens, but I think the real issue is how is it that companies are able to identify the skills that they need for tomorrow's workforce, which is absolutely AI-enabled, without having job seekers use AI at all? It's not clear.

I mean, how do you see the solution to that? I mean, what Elizabeth, for instance, just spoke about, the idea of a kind of black box within AI that could be basically driving prejudice or, or bias in some way.

Mm

... and I think AI has a ton of potential to make hiring better, like in so many areas.

I mean, AI is used in a lot of ways to make things more efficient and a lot of ways to sort of take work, but also in a lot of ways to be creative and to support human expression and to analyze writing for fairness and all kinds of ways that it can be used.

And so if you think about the future as a world where everyone's got an AI agent doing all kinds of things for you in your life, it's helping you pay your bills, it's helping you, you know, with your homework-

What kind of advice do you have for them?

Yeah, I mean, number one, good old-fashioned structured hiring is, like, always my foundation for everything.

It's like, make sure that you've got a really clear sense of what your criteria are, make sure you've got a written scorecard that you and your team have agreed to, 'cause then that reduces decision fatigue, it helps people collaborate, it gives you better data to make smart, defensible decisions.

So no matter what you are, an AI, no AI, I don't care if you're doing it on index cards, that's the foundation.

Mm-hmm.

-in order to make that hire.

You have to think about what the job description is.

You have to agree on, like, the salary, and you have to talk about who's gonna do the interviews and what are they gonna ask.

And then, of course, you have to process thousands of candidates and ultimately make an offer and a hire.

All that work happens collaboratively in Greenhouse.

So we're the sort of internal hiring platform that companies use to run all of their hiring.

Yeah.