Evolve | AI, HR, and the End of Empty Metrics with Stan Suchkov

Speaker A: In today's episode of Azure Visionaries, we talk to Stan about soft skills and why soft skills will be so important in a world of AI. Stay tuned. Welcome to HR Visionaries, the show where we discover the truth behind contemporary hr. Ah, I'm your host Benjamin. Join me as I unfold today's talent ecosystem with HR innovators from around the globe. Welcome to the latest episode of Age of Visionaries. I'm very much looking forward to my guest today. Stuff. Dan, it's great to have you.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me Benjamin. Likewise.

Speaker A: Dan, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you?

Speaker B: Well, um, I'm the entrepreneur. Uh, and uh, I remember myself like doing business for more than 15 years and currently I build startup in HR field. Uh, before this I worked in construction development company as a limited partner. So basically I'm like, I do love building new products and work is like my hobby. So uh, uh, currently I live in Spain, traveling between United States and Spain, but mostly in Spain, uh, and expanding my business in Europe and United States.

Speaker A: That's pretty cool. So um, uh, when did you start uh, working in the HR field? What was the Kickstarter for you?

Speaker B: Oh, it's a funny story. So um, I always dreamed about global startup, IT startup and working in a construction development company. As I have already mentioned, I decided to build my first startup and it was a completely mess. So I thought that building something useful for me will be really useful for everyone around me. And uh, we started to build like an app for challenges and for different trainings and nothing worked. Uh, no one wanted to buy our platform or our app to buy subscriptions, et cetera. And I just logged in into LinkedIn and decided to talk with people. Um, what are the most important services, uh, in like personal development field. And thus uh, they led me to HR field and I understood that HR is underestimated and you can build actually a great product in this field. I dived in, started to develop myself, learning a lot of things about hr. What do they need, uh, how current process look like and thus I just started to build our current startup.

Speaker A: Uh, you said something very interesting. So you said that HR is underappreciated or uh, the importance of HR is very often underestimated. Why do you think that is?

Speaker B: Well, basically we are surrounded about, around uh, so uh, we work with people and people should be developed, uh, they should grow and most of them desire to grow, desire to earn more, to m, climb through the career ladder, et cetera. But hrs, these are the people who do A lot of work, but mostly they cannot prove it because uh, when we are talking about KPIs, yearly KPIs, for example, if I'm a sales officer, I just can show to my CEO that I have achieved this sort of revenue or if I'm responsible for production, I can show what we have produced in this year. But when, when we're talking about HR field, you can see the improvements, but you don't have numbers. And that is why sometimes it's really hard for HR to show his or her impact on business processes. And when I'm the CEO and I'm not experienced enough to understand them, fact of human resources field, I just think that if they don't have numbers, maybe they haven't achieved significant results at the end of the year. And that's why um, m Many people state that we don't need to give budgets to hrs. Or uh, they spend a lot, they should spend less. We don't see the result, et cetera, et cetera. That's why I think they state that uh, they underestimated.

Speaker A: I think it's a very um, important um, problem or challenge in the HR space that um. Well, HR very often doesn't speak the language of the business. So um, very often um, one can when escalating. Well a CEO speaks uh, sometimes a different language or very often unfortunately very different language to the um, to the people department, uh, compared to the people department since um. Well they are talking mostly euros or dollars. While um, they may not be so interested in the latest engagement survey, however, they are interested in related sales numbers because they can read into those sales numbers something that's very um, obviously uh, relevant to the business rather than, well, an engagement survey, uh, for example, that's not that tangible, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, you cannot measure it sometimes. And when we are talking about CEOs, you're always interested in return on investments and you're interested in revenue growth year over year. But when HR states that you need to invest in culture, you need to invest in people development, uh, CEO always wants to ask how much will it bring me? How much will we earn investing in this? And it's like, you know, you go to the college or to the university, you don't know how much will you earn, like graduating from the university, but you definitely understand that it will bring you invest in yourself, but it's not like a business. So when you invest in yourself, you don't know the impact, but you know there will be impact. When uh, you decide where to spend your budget, you Want to spend it to the direction where you see how much it will return to you. That's why, uh, it's really difficult for HRS to uh, get more money or just to get money invested, as I have already said, into culture like this.

Speaker A: Um, I think we had a very interesting um, point here. Right? So we all believe that in particular, well, thanks to AI, people critical thinking will be much more relevant going forward. And then at the same time HR still having difficulties, um, well, expressing why they are so important and what their role in the company is. So how do you think HR can change that?

Speaker B: Well, thanks, um, to AI for example. AI can provide you more analytics, more numbers. And I think that adopting and implementing, uh, solutions based on AI, especially when they can provide you more numbers, it's crucial for HRS right now. The more they invest in bringing these products to the company, the bigger budgets they can get later. Because these numbers can show that there are significant improvements, like for example, person had gone through better way of adoption or through online learning in another way. And here are the numbers here, here's what has been improved. And AI can show it working with Big data. So Big data can help you to show, uh, what things have been improved. And if EHRs will start investing their time in understanding how these products can uh, help them to prove their impact, then some things will be changed. Definitely.

Speaker A: What numbers do you think are the most important ones for um, the people department to present to the CEO? So I always um, have a situation in mind where um, well, if I were a CEO, what do you worry about? You have a certain amount of time every day to allocate to different departments. Um, what do you, well, what do you focus on? Very much depends on what you can then, well, use to talk to your board, to talk to your shareholders that my pay as a CEO should increase. So what are the numbers you think hr, ah, should communicate to the CEO in terms of how can I make his life better, how can I make sure that he uh, earns more money, which he definitely deserves?

Speaker B: Well, uh, we can start from the beginning. So first of all you need to hire person. Then you need to onboard and adopt him. Then you need to work on his development. And of course there is a turnover. So people, uh, change places of their work, uh, you get new hires, etc. So the easiest way and m. Maybe you don't even need to use AI for this. Uh, you need to show how your speed of adoption and onboarding, uh, has been improved, uh, or how fast do you uh, hire new people. Uh, the biggest problems come when you are talking about personal development of each employee. And here you should measure the impact of trainings. Measure again, let's come back. Measure the impact of adoption. So if you know, uh, there is a statement that it takes around three months to adopt any new hire and his efficiency in these first three months is 30% lower. So for example, if it takes you around three months to adopt someone and if any platform helps you to increase adoption rate by three times then having a salary of 5k per month. Let's talk about developer in IT sphere. Um, the company um, can save around 3k in three months on each person. Just increasing adoption speed from three months to one month and measuring these values will help HR to show how much they save for the company and how faster the new hire will bring um, the value to the company on a full capacity like this. And we can talk about personal development. So when everyone talks about personal growth etc. But when we are talking about frontline workers, about mid sized managers, you need, they don't mainly care about soft skills development. You need just to get them do their job in the best uh, way and developing them with hard skills is crucial. So if it takes around three months or four months to learn new skills, hard skills, I mean and you shorten this time, then you bring a huge impact for the company. And many like you have currently solutions which can prove that you've increased the speed of adoption, the speed of personal development when we're talking about hard skills.

Speaker A: So the euro or dollar number is key in that kind of discussion then. Yeah, so um, sometimes it's a bit of a struggle right to find the right number since one can of course challenge all the premises. Right. So like in terms of, well 5K. Okay, that makes perfect sense. So I can look up the salary. However, um, the measurement of how efficiency increases is quite often not that trivial. So, so um, how do you think can efficiency be measured best?

Speaker B: Well, um, the best question actually Benjamin, because I uh, think that the HR platform which will find these best numbers to show will be a winner on the market. Yeah, so it works like this. Um, in our case for example, we have an HR platform and we have around 50 numbers which we provide to HRS and they can choose. So um, we measure how people go through online learning in the beginning so like when they are hired and then we measure what things have been changed in three months or in six months, etc. Etc. And we just combine them and measure the difference between them and we see that the charts do use these numbers and we see that they create reports based on these numbers. So um, the changes in each person is the most important numbers. And we measure the speed of learning, the length of answers, the desire to go through another course, completion rates, how completion rates have been changed. And we try to generate big reports with these numbers and we see that they just download them, they maybe bring them and bring to the sales table.

Speaker A: Um, so when you, when you first started measuring, what were the most interesting findings?

Speaker B: Um, the completion rate of uh, mandatory courses is almost 100%. And complete the rate of optional courses is around 10%. Yeah, that's the biggest like findings we can give. Um, actually

Speaker A: sorry, but why is that right? So optional courses are probably not offered because they are irrelevant. But um, why does HR think okay, well those courses make sense. We make them optional however and um, employees consider them as meaningless 90% of the time. Why is that?

Speaker B: The answer is easy. Uh, they're not individual adopted. So for example, you have 100 people and you give them uh, like critical thinking course. It's the same course for everyone but it doesn't work like this. And AI gives opportunity just to adopt course for your specific needs. And that's what our platform actually started to do uh like half a year ago. And we see that we've increased the completion rate up to 30% right now for optional courses because we know your behavior on our platform. We know what content you like more, you like to read on, watch video, you like this sort of tasks or you don't like these tasks. And we adopt each course for each person. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that for example uh, if you have launched course on our platform based on 100 learners, we know where the problem um, with the completion rate stats. And for example we know that if you have answered correctly on the first and second question and you have answered um, you have missed the third question, then probably you will finish going through the course on the second chapter. And we try to change tasks in place, we try to change some wordings, etc. Just to increase uh, your timeline within this course and actually started to work. Uh, and I hope that at the end of the year we'll have an average completion rate of 40% for non mandatory courses. It will be really huge. It's huge, huge number.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, it's um, it's actually quite, quite remarkable. Right? So when uh, I, well I think everyone knows these situations where okay, you have so many things um, on your mind and um, so many tasks to Complete that one very often, um, ignores courses despite actually it's actually quite good content. Right? So um, um, I rarely completed a course and then afterwards thought okay, well it was complete waste of my time. But it was actually like a great impulse. Even if it's not like um, amazing, um amazing overall there are always um, important impulses and uh, some of those um, ideas you benefit from, um, for decades. Right. And therefore I always find it interesting that um, one tends to ignore courses, as you said, that are optional, that are not mandatory. And um. Um, I think actually great if one can, can work on solutions to uh, increase the participation rate for those optional courses.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, you're right. Uh, but you should also take into account that if you're talking about personal development, uh, you don't see the impact the next day. And for you it's really hard to invest your time, uh, especially after the uh, day of work to work on your personal development. Only people who like to achieve, only people who see the path and like you know, um, the end point where they're heading to, they can work on personal development effectively. So uh, in. When we are talking about online education, you need to implement more cases to go through. You need to show like I need to show you Benjamin, how to use the knowledge we have given to you the same day. Only this can help for now I guess. Uh, and that's, that's what happens when you, I mean um, when you buy courses in the Internet and everyone goes through the same text or through the same content, um, they cannot put it into their daily routine and they cannot understand why should they read through it or why should they learn it.

Speaker A: Well, um, when you read, because situations where you in courses, what were your highlights? So stuff you remember, um, that you considered okayish back then but really valuable nowadays. So um. I definitely remember situations for myself where um.

Speaker B: Uh.

Speaker A: Well decades ago I uh, was actually made to participate in those courses. However, in the end, um, those trainings are incredibly useful. So for example, what I still love is the one who asks the questions, leads the conversation and it's like super trivial. Um, but uh, it requires you to completely think a different way. So like, okay, you're providing arguments over argument. However you don't ask a question, then you're not in a situation where you lead the conversation. However to recognize this and to realize okay, that's perfectly right, it's completely counterintuitive. So I try to convince someone I don't know to buy something or to um, follow my argument well, to lead the conversation I need to ask questions. It's not about providing arguments, providing answers, providing facts. It's about asking questions. So that for me is one of those, um, courses I participated in. Um, that it took me a while to understand how true this is. And well, that for me is like one of those pivotal uh, moments I still remember. What about you?

Speaker B: Well, um, uh, by the way, I would like to say that it's a great insight. Uh, I do like

Speaker A: in German, it's actually quite a cruel saying. Um, so uh, one can't literally translate it to English. Um, but it means a bit like, okay, the one who asks leads. And um. Well, in German it makes kind of sense and it sounds, um, uh, quite well. But in English it doesn't sound too well. But I think what I'm trying to say I can get through anyhow. So sorry to interrupt you.

Speaker B: Now for me, okay, the biggest insight, I uh, always do like courses. I always do go through the courses about sales, uh, negotiation skills, persuasion skills, etc. And I like the statement about Zopa zone of possible agreement. And for me this is the biggest insight that you always, always uh, should find Zone of possible agreement with your, like with another person you try to negotiate. And I understood it, I always use it and it helps me a lot. Uh, but there are actually a lot of insights. But sometimes you just don't. You cannot put it in your daily life, these insights and that's why you think they're meaningless. For example, we are now in a really huge acceleration program and we have great mentors, great advisors. They all from like best companies, uh, in the United States. And they teach us how to sell, how to develop the product, etc. And I see other founders, uh, they don't listen to them, um, they think that they have already built something great and only they know how to do it in the best way. And they have paid for this program. So they have given share of their companies for this, for participation. But they don't like to listen for these people. And it's offline program. What can we say about if it's online and if they're optional courses. In our case, people uh, have given between 5 and 6% of their company's shares. And even in this case they don't like to listen for the best mentors ever. That's a problem because they cannot put it like they think that, okay, if I have a B2C product and you're talking about B2B then I don't need to listen about it. Or for example, if you're like, if you teach me how to sell for enterprises and I sell for SMBs, I don't need to listen to you. And when we are talking about education, I mean online, that's the same case. So if you don't see that it can bring you back tomorrow and if you cannot see the case where you can use it, you just stop learning. That's it.

Speaker A: Um, well it's um, well self development and learning. It's um, well when it comes to online content, um, I always find that well there are some people who are super motivated and who are super eager. Uh, and nowadays uh, it's amazing what's available to you to improve yourself. And then there are other people who are very reluctant and who uh, don't make use of those opportunities. How do you think um, one can stop people from overdoing it in terms of like okay, being occupied all the time with self development and do not focus on their actual task. Maybe some of those people need to be stopped and calmed down a bit and then other people fired uh up and to realize what kind of amazing opportunities there are.

Speaker B: Well, uh, actually I can try uh, to answer it in another way. I have a funny story for you. Uh, our platform generates courses and trainings and we decided to make one huge marketing move. We have grabbed a lot of information uh by Y Combinator, it's like uh, uh an acceleration program with the best acceleration program in the world and they have a lot of videos and information how to build startups, how to build marketing funnels, etc, etc and we have uploaded into our platform and we have generated a really cool course and posted in LinkedIn and there were a lot of likes and a lot of registrations into this course and we started to notice that some people started to write down in LinkedIn post in LinkedIn stating that they are proud to announce that they have finished the course uh by Y Combinator on evolve, platform etc. And we logged in into our platform and we have found out that these people only started to go through this course but they haven't finished it. But they posted that they proud to finish. Why do you think these people decided to post it? Benjamin, do you have an answer?

Speaker A: I have no idea.

Speaker B: Tell me because they need confession. They want to tell everyone that they spend a lot of time on self development and when you are talking about people that uh, try to spend their all free time for personal development, uh I think that half of them, they want to tell everyone else that they spend a lot of time on personal development and there are only 10 or 20% of people who do it to grow, to achieve new results, et cetera. If you spend a lot of time in personal development, you don't need to tell everyone about this. You just spend it and you just achieve new results. That's what it's all about. I hope I answered your question in another way.

Speaker A: No, I like that story a lot because it's um. Well, um. Uh, one can see in particular on LinkedIn these days, um, well, that many people put certifications and um. Well sometimes you're wondering, okay, the certification people put. It's like, okay, um, it's a certification in um, I don't know, uh, certain prompt engineering. And you're wondering, okay, so with the next update of um, um. OpenAI, um, this M may be not that relevant anymore. Um, and then there are other self improvement courses which I think are, well, I personally believe are super relevant. Um, um. And what. I'm therefore wondering what you think about this. I do personally believe that um, in the world of AI, it is much more about conduct. It's much more about self improvement in terms of critical thinking rather than technical skills that are relevant for the future. And yeah, wondering what you think about this.

Speaker B: I think that I don't like people posting about new certificates, etc. I would rather like uh, to see that for example, my friend has posted some sort of things like I have decreased turnover by 10% in my company in one year and that's the achievement. Oh my God. Or I've increased uh, revenue by 40% year over year. And uh, I do understand that this guy works a lot and he spends a lot of time on personal development because he has brought huge results to his employee, employee, employer. Sorry. Yeah. And I don't care about certifications and I never post about something like this. The only thing I have posted is that I have received MBA certificate but it was like important to in. To get the salary increase highly. Yeah, but that's the only thing. And I don't like uh, to post like strange general achievements because for example get the second stage uh, of fundraising is great achievement or increase revenue each month by 10%. It's a great achievement or like I don't know, but not the certification. Yeah, so that's what I'm thinking about it. Benjamin,

Speaker A: what do you, what do you think um, people should focus on right now in May or let's say in spring of 2025? What is in terms of self improvement, in terms of teaching yourself? What is your advice?

Speaker B: Uh, I have the same advice each month and each year. So the only thing you can have NDI will not uh, replace it are the soft skills. And the hugest impact in your life can bring the soft skills about people. So like again, negotiation, leadership and this sort of soft skills. And you should always focus on developing these skills and you should always focus on implementing the skills in your daily life. Uh, it helped me a lot thanks to my father. He started to force me learning about soft skills when I was 10, uh, years old. And I'm still developing myself every day. And I see the huge impact right now. Uh, and I don't understand people who just save money and invest them into shares or like in the cryptocurrency, doesn't matter, but, and they invest them understanding that they can take this money back in next 10 years, but they do not invest in soft skills development with the same approach.

Speaker A: Then I have one last question for you. Since we are an HR tech podcast, I'm of course interested in the following. So what are your favorite interview question when you interview people for your company, for your team?

Speaker B: Uh, what will be changed, uh, in your daily work when you will, will um, be hired in our company? So what sort, um, how will you change your approach when you will come to our company? That's the biggest question I'm interested in. That's cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love the creativity around this. So I have heard uh, so many different answers and uh, yeah, it's always amazing to learn about that. And uh, perhaps I should one day write a book with the best um, special interview questions on planet Earth. So that could be like my next project perhaps.

Speaker B: Cool. Yeah, um, I would like, uh, so I don't know if you have read uh, the book by Ben Horowitz, the Hard Thing about Hard Things. Have you heard about it? No.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've heard about it, but I haven't read the book unfortunately yet, uh,

Speaker B: because uh, I don't have time to read a lot. But I have read this book for three times and he provides a really big amount of insights about hr. How to hire people, how to fire people, how to talk with people. It's really useful. And the important thing is that he always shows the examples based on his working experience or on life cases. And I do love this book a lot.

Speaker A: Definitely put this in our show notes. Stan, thank you so much for your time. Was great pleasure talking to you and learning about, well, how to self improve. Um, well, thanks to technology.

Speaker B: Thank you Benjamin and thank you guys

Speaker A: for listening in and see you next time.