185 - Stop Drowning In Applicants with Matthew Stewart

Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders. We've got a great guest for the show today, Matthew Stewart. He has a software engineering background and today is the founder of Talent Sprout, an AI-powered recruiting platform. So we'll learn all about that today.

Matthew, welcome to the show. Hey, Thomas. Thanks a lot for having me. Appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we all know what recruiting is and recruiting platforms, but you obviously wanted to solve this problem for some reason. So let's steep ourselves in the problem of uh today before people find a special solution for this.

What are they going through? Yeah, I mean, recruiters, anyone who does hiring nowadays knows, uh, especially online, you're just getting bombarded with applicants. Uh, especially candidates are using, you know, AI for resumes. You're posting on job boards, you'll get hundreds, sometimes thousands of inbound applicants.

And recruiters are just spending a ton of time sifting through resumes. Half the time you don't even know if it's a real person, you don't see their face. You're kind of just looking at a wall of text on a PDF file uh that's AI generated a lot of the time. And it's it's just hard to uh get a sense of who this person is, if they're real, etc.

And so that's uh the problem that Talent Sprout solves is bringing uh yeah, just saving the recruiters time in the early uh hiring process and helping surface candidates uh from inbound applicant applications. Yeah. So Matthew, are you are we solving the problem here of just across the board, the problems of recruiting and the I imagine there's a big scope of things that can go wrong there. Or are we zeroing in on the specific problem of sort of look, there's just tons of proliferation of like I guess uh slop resumes, if that's a term.

So the resume slop being sent in. And even if that if it's not resume slop, even if it's a good resume, just everyone is empowered to just create a resume um much more quickly and send them out more widespread than they could in the past. So is is it are we looking at a broad scope of the problem, or are we looking at more of a specific range? Yeah, good question.

We're more specific. So we focus on candidate screening. Uh so right at the very beginning of the hiring process between the recruiter and the candidate when they apply from a job board or apply on LinkedIn, uh, our tool, Talent Sprout, interviews candidates automatically. So we basically replace that first round phone screen step for recruiters and hiring teams.

What are the big players missing? Because the thing is, you can have successful startups that come into some space where there's big players who you would expect them to handle this a little bit better, like your monsters and LinkedIn, and and you'd say, my goodness, you're already established. Why is there not a solution uh already that works for folks? But you you clearly saw an opportunity.

Is what are people missing and how close can they get with the other, the big players? Yeah, that's a good question. So, video interview, one-way video interview software has been around for a long time. Uh, but how do talent spreads differ in kind of the the next wave or the next iteration of video interview, one-way video interview software was the conversational AI element to it.

So traditionally, there's been platforms where a candidate would take kind of like a walkie-talkie style video interview where it would pop up a question on the screen and then they would kind of record their answer. And then that uh video recording would be sent to the recruiter, and they would have to kind of manually review and evaluate that uh recording. But how TalentScore is different in kind of the next iteration of the industry with video interview software is not only is the AI able to now have a natural sounding conversation with the candidate, but is also able to evaluate their the candidate's responses in real time as well.

So it handles uh both the conversational element, so it's much better than uh kind of walkie-talkie style interview. And then it also handles the evaluation element as well uh to help surface the strength of the candidate to to the recruiter as opposed to them having to sit through each recording um and evaluate the candidate themselves. Okay, so when we uh take a look at talent spread and you're uh first of all, who is the kind of sweet spot of the kind of perfect customer who should be thinking about this?

Is it large corporations? Is it small? Is it kind of everyone? Um what's that uh target um user here?

Yeah, I think we targeted medium to large enterprises. Uh so we're a fit really for companies that do high volume candidate screening or high volume hiring. Um so if you're a startup, uh you're just hiring for you know one or two roles, or you do headhunting, uh, we wouldn't be a great fit for. But for like recruitment agencies or large enterprises that are hiring for a high volume of roles and are dealing with a huge influx of candidates, that's where our uh tools fit in.

Okay, so um, so I start getting set up with Talent Sprout and I guess the HR department um says, okay, let's deploy this and make let's make our lives a heck of a lot easier. And um we're going to uh do what? Do is it a setup process where you say, okay, here's how we want you to question for these roles, or here's just the roles and it already knows and is able to do research, or here's about our company, and then we end up with a link or something that they click. How does that start coming together for the company that's using Talent Sprout?

Yeah, good question. So we have tools that make it super easy to create your AI interviews. So when you sign up for Talent Sprout, you enter in your company URL and we kind of scrape your website to digest uh the information about your company, to understand what uh industry you're in, what services you sell, et cetera. Uh so no work required just by entering in the URL.

And then when you create a to create your first AI interview, you can just enter in the job description or the link to the job description, and our AI tool will pull that information and create the interview questions for you. Or if you want, you can just go through kind of our simple, simple process to enter the questions yourself. Oftentimes, like recruitment teams will have their own internal templates or questions that they normally ask. And then yeah, once it once you've created your interview, it gives you uh interview smart links that you can then email or share with your candidates directly.

What do you do to stay on top of quality when we're dealing with a very AI forward kind of environment? And you know, do you find that it's um you are required to kind of uh have to police or stay on top of uh the AI outputs or are they pretty reliable? Are there things that you guys do on the back end to modify or moderate the quality of things on the front end? Yeah, that's a good question.

So our AI agent, uh yeah, we have like a structured evaluation scorecard that is in place. So essentially we kind of tune and put guardrails around the AI so that it produces a like reliable and consistent uh evaluation scorecard. And then also the candidate experience. Uh similarly, we put guardrails and instructions in place to the AI so that it's consistent and controlled across a high number of candidates.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, we are speaking with Matthew Stewart of uh talentssprout.ai, talentsprout.ai, uh the number one AI recruiter, higher top talent faster. And so um, and who are the are there target roles that you go for for this?

Is it a standard person at the HR department, or is it kind of universal and you're not terribly concerned about targeting one specific job role within an organization? Yeah, in terms of uh if you mean like the the candidates that take the contribute or uh no, no, I'm thinking on like the user side. So the company that decides to deploy this, is this something you kind of hand off to the HR department and say, or the HR department ask for funding for and say, hey, uh, we'd really like to use this tool.

It's just gonna help everything that we're doing and make it faster. Is it uh is it just an HR lead? I guess whoever is in charge of um this HR process, but are you targeting any particular job role? Yeah, HR operations lead is is kind of the ideal target uh or operations in general manager.

So anyone that kind of oversees the implementation and operations on the hiring side of things is usually uh the decision maker that we try to target. Now, in your space, there's a lot of companies that probably try to do this stuff. Do you find UX in needing to be a differentiator for you at all? Or is is it more about the functionality and the features?

Yeah, I I personally put a very high importance on UI and UX. I think it's definitely can be a differentiator. Um, and like I like to think that we have like a really strong UI UX at Talents Pro, very simple to use, um, strong design. So I think it yeah, it comes down to kind of your personal philosophy a little bit.

Uh, but in terms of this this industry and in our platform, we definitely put a high importance on uh the user UI UX. Do you ever see this uh website, this web service becoming becoming a two-sided marketplace, or is it already to a strong a large degree? Um, you know what I mean by that? So you've got the folks looking for the jobs on one side and then the folks trying to um so building it out into a full two-sided environment, community.

Uh yeah, yeah, good question. Definitely. That's kind of my long-term vision for it. It involves it being more of a two-sided marketplace, including like a job board.

Uh, but we already are kind of because it, you know, we do have a candidate-facing like element to it, of course, where they actually take the interview. So they do interact with our platform on the candidate side. Um, but yeah, I think it's part of the long-term roadmap is definitely to evolve it into a more comprehensive platform that would be uh more expanded into the candidate job board side of things as well. How do you avoid the trap of being sort of lumped in with the LLM wrappers?

And and what I mean by that is a lot of investors, um, you know, during the first wave of AI, they invested in AI startups, and then they came to the conclusion later that it's mainly the function is AI, and there's something thin wrapped around that AI that can kind of do it. And there's a lot of folks competing in these spaces. How do you find opportunities to add IP that is sort of more unique and outside what we all use, you know, we make a product nowadays, you're going to be using AI.

Um, but it is how do you strategize or think about coming up with the unique part of it outside of the standard AI tools? Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is our integrations. So a big part of Talent Sprout is that we integrate with over 50 different ATS platforms and hiring tools. Um, so that's a big value add that we have in terms of the workflow and the integration that you wouldn't be able to get just by using Chat GPT, for example.

And then just providing also like a very streamlined and specific um user experience for this, you know, creating interviews, evaluating candidates, et cetera. Uh so yeah, we're we are built on top of common AI tools, but I think in terms of our UI experience, the custom training and the guardrails, and then the workflow integrations is the value that we're able to provide on top of that. Cool. Uh, what kinds of things do uh does the audience have to look forward to from Talent Sprout?

What kinds of what kind of roadmap do you have ahead of you that people should be thinking about? Yeah, we're really excited at Talent Sprout. Uh so we're we started out kind of with the AI interview candidate screening use case. We're coming up soon in the next few months, uh, releasing an AI candidate sourcing feature.

So a bit part of recruitment as well is to actually source and find candidates. So we're releasing uh an exciting tool that will allow recruiters to use AI to very easily through natural language and prompting find qualified candidates for the jobs that they're hiring for. And then, like you kind of uh alluded to as well, we're getting into more of the job board candidate side things as well in the long term. Um, so we're we started out with the AI candidate screening use case, but the vision for it long term is to be a more comprehensive recruitment platform.

By the way, how is it? How big is your team? Are you a lean, a lean team over there? We're very lean, yeah.

Basically a solo founder, and then I have a handful of uh contractors and helpers that help me out as well, but we're solo founder led or small team. Yeah. Yeah, great stuff. Um excellent.

And so uh talent sprout.ai. Um yeah, just making sure I was reading that right. Talentsprout.

ai, where can people find you personally? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Happy to connect. If you search Matthew Stewart, hopefully I'll pop up and Matthew Stewart talent sprout.

I should definitely uh pop up on LinkedIn. Awesome. Awesome. Great stuff.

Um, cool product, and hope to see you guys reach the stars. Matthew, thanks for being with us today. Thank you so much, Thomas. Appreciate you having me on.