Why Human-First Recruiting Still Wins (Even in an AI World) with Nicole Hirsch

Joel Algee: Foreign.

Joel Algee: What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of Recruiting is no Joke. I'm your host, Joel Algee, and this is the ultimate recruitment podcast that brings you a blend of entertainment, no nonsense insights, and, of course, the latest trends. Join me as I expose bad takes in the recruitment industry and get real with talent leaders to give you an inside view of the industry here on Recruiting Is no Joke.

Joel Algee: Welcome to Recruiting is no Joke. I am your host, Joel Ali. I am, um, as always, super excited. I'm back off the road. You guys will have seen the last few episodes. We were at Wreckfest in Nashville, and now I'm back in my recruitment cave and I have another amazing guest. I promise you guys, this is going to be a great episode. And I know I say that about a lot of my episodes, but this will be the best. So I have Nicole H. With me. Nicole, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here. For anyone that doesn't know you, why don't you give us, like, a quick bio? Like, who are you, what do you do, and who do you do it for?

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, that's big shoes to fill. So let's go. I'm hoping we can get a little tactical here today too. Talk about some real, real stuff.

Joel Algee: So I love it.

Nicole Hirsch: Cool.

Joel Algee: Yeah. Let's get into it.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, hi, everyone. My name is Nicole Hirsch. I have been in recruiting for 17, almost 18 years now. I started off in agency in 2008, and if anyone was in the workforce

Joel Algee: then, what was that like? I just want to get into it. Like, 2008 to start in recruiting. That had to be insane.

Nicole Hirsch: 2008. So hang on, I'm going to make it worse. I was recruiting for mortgage companies in Philadelphia.

Joel Algee: Oh, wow. I can't even imagine.

Nicole Hirsch: It wasn't good. I didn't.

Joel Algee: You were recruiting for, like, mortgage agents? Yeah.

Nicole Hirsch: So hiring underwriters and whatnot.

Joel Algee: The demand must have been crazy.

Nicole Hirsch: It was down, it was up. And I was right out of college. I didn't have any idea what a regular, uh, volume looked like or anything else like that. So that was interesting. So I didn't think I wanted to be a recruiter based on that experience, but I stuck with it. And I did agency for almost three years. And then I went in house. I worked in ed tech. I've worked in marketing tech. I now work in HR tech. I am forever grateful for the agency time. I met some of my best friends in the whole world there. I've worked with many of them multiple times, but I Love the in house gig. I've been doing that ever since 2011 and now I do recruiting in house for a company called Lattice, which is we are best known for our performance management employee engagement technology. We're actually much beloved by our 5,000 plus customers for all of that. And yeah, it's fun. It's cool being on the HR team at an HR company. So that's pretty rad.

Joel Algee: Super interesting. Yeah, that's cool. I'm curious, like when you got into the agency recruiting, obviously like 2008, it's a tough time to jump into anything. But did you know kind of right away when you got in the agency, like, hey, I actually want to go internal or like what was that process like?

Nicole Hirsch: I did not know. I was still trying to figure out how to even recruit and what good recruiting looked like. And what I figured out pretty quickly was that at the time I wasn't a great volume recruiter. I found out that I was actually a much better deep dive recruiter. So the more technical roles, the hunt, the tricky matches, there's not a lot of people in the market who have this skill, skill, uh, set. That's actually where I did a lot better, where I could take a little bit of time. And I think that that made a lot of sense because I was learning and you actually had time to learn through the course of those searches. But no, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I studied marketing. I thought I wanted to go work at an ad agency and then I thought I wanted to go work in education. So I took the option of going in house at an education company as my bridge there. And I thought for years and years that I didn't want to stay in recruiting. And I took a brief stint on uh, doing more of an education job. And then I realized that the reason it took me so long to do that was because I had spent the last 10 years recruiting, building up my career, recruiting every job that existed in the companies that I worked for and building up recruiting teams from just me and one other person to teams of over a dozen. And I said, wait a second, a couple months after I left, wait, I love this. Why did I leave when I went back and never looked back?

Joel Algee: So I love that. Yeah, I mean, look, you can try and get out of recruiting, but it'll always get you back in. Although in the last few years I know we've seen a lot of people exiting the industry because those ups and downs, it can be tough. Particularly right now. We were just right before actually pressing Live. We're talking about some of the major layoffs that are going on. I'm curious, like, you know, you've been around during the Great Recession or. Uh, that's kind of when you started. Does it feel similar? Is it different? What's your kind of feel? Obviously you were in a slightly different position, but you're working internal now. Is it giving you, like, the 2008 vibes in terms of how many applicants you're getting? Like, what are you kind of feeling? And is there a comparison there between that time period and now?

Nicole Hirsch: That's a good question. And this is where we should be looking at history. Just kind of like we should be looking at history and life and be students of what's happened in the past. But you gotta look forward at the same time. When I was doing all of that in 2008, I was working with a lot of people who'd gone through the dot com bubble.

Joel Algee: Yeah.

Nicole Hirsch: And drawing a lot of comparisons and saying, well, this is what was the same and this is what was different. And people want to create connections like they want to see as humans, we very naturally pattern match. So, yeah, we're very naturally going to pattern match. And I think there's a lot of things that are similar. The two things that stand out to me, to your point about applications versus open jobs, that's actually relatively similar, although there's very different dynamics that are going on right now. In. During the Great Recession, jobs were so much more localized. M. Like, the jobs were in the metropolitan areas where the companies were. So I mentioned Philly. The jobs were in Philly, they were in New York, they were in Chicago, they were in Cleveland. Wherever it is that the company was, that's where the jobs were. So there were fewer applications, but there was this understanding that you would by and large be in that place. What's happening now, which is why we're seeing this magnitude of volume change. As much as there's all of this about return to office and whatnot, there's still a substantially higher number of jobs that have the opportunity to be in, even if not fully remote in places. There's a couple of different office locations where, hey, you can be in this office or this office or this office. And that has increased substantially. So that's the one thing. The second thing that I think is it's not the same thing, but potentially similar dynamic in 2012 was when LinkedIn Recruiter came out. LinkedIn existed, but that's when recruiter came out. If I've got my dates right, maybe it was a little earlier than that, but there was this sentiment that LinkedIn recruiter was going to do our jobs, do our recruiting jobs for us. Here we are in 2025 and I don't know a recruiter that hasn't used LinkedIn recruiter, but I don't think anyone would say it's replaced us. And this whole conversation around AI, I mean, look, I hope I'm not eating my words here and you know, someone's going to do all of our jobs for us, but I think that there's this mentality of like, oh, this new technology. Joel, you've written posts about this. I think you wrote one just a couple of days ago about it's not just filling roles, it's about all of these other things that recruiters need to do to be successful. So I think that that sentiment is the same. And then once people realized that, wait a second, I need to adapt to LinkedIn recruiter because this is going to take the power of an agency database or anything else like that, and now I have to harness it. And the better people were at LinkedIn Recruiter. Those were the people that won the wars for talent, as was just up and to the right for like 10 plus years.

Joel Algee: Such a good point. And I think too, with the advancements in AI, at least what I've seen in terms of what recruiters can use, you know, I've seen the evolution too with messaging. So I think about sequencing where five to ten years ago you were setting up sequences, you were kind of ahead of people and it was this magical thing. I can send one message and it will follow up with people. Now everybody's doing that. Now with a lot of these AI sourcing tools, you're able to find similar candidates and you can get an email sent to you with 50 matches for the jobs you're working on. And so it seems like it's kind of easier to find people, but it's this engagement. Like, this is what I'm thinking about. It's like, how do you stand out, particularly if you're not like a household name, like, you're not an Amazon, you're not a Google, you're not a meta, you're not a brand that everybody knows. Like, how do you stand out in that noise? How do you engage people? How do you stand out in the inbox? When I think of, uh, my own inbox, I'm hit up by salespeople, I'm hit up by retailers, I'm hit up by random solopreneurs that are starting Newsletters. My inbox is insane. My LinkedIn inbox is insane. It's like how do you stand out? Or like what do you think some of those keys are? Particularly for those brands that aren't as recognizable, like you're looking to reach out to someone. How do you stand out? And just how noisy things are.

Nicole Hirsch: The noise thing is so real and if anyone and you have a lot of folks who work in recruiting who are listening here and I'm assuming that most people know of that, that LinkedIn, other inbox, but I try to stay

Joel Algee: out of there because yeah, I love that inbox.

Nicole Hirsch: Oh, horrible. Uh, so standing out is tough. And I rarely worked for a household name kind of company so that's always it. The first in house job that I had. All of our marketing dollars were spent on our custom like market, like building our customers up. None of it was for employer brand. Like we were intentionally in the background of our customers which meant anything that was employer related. It was all coming from the recruiting team, every last bit of it. So I feel that big time.

Joel Algee: And uh, that's kind of what you get in agency too, right? It's like you're necessarily even able to say sometimes the company you're working with or it's confidential. So you have to figure out a way to get out of that, to get away from the noise.

Nicole Hirsch: I think in that so hot take on this spicy uh, take maybe don't use AI like honest to God, this is the everyone is so inundated with AI slop. And by the way, I am pro AI. I think that the amount that it can do for us as we harness it is already so incredible. And the use cases that we have and this is not the place, this is the place to be human, to be personal. This is potentially more geared to my folks who are not doing like the big high volume recruiting because I can imagine that this would be different. But I go low volume, really high quality, really high touch. This is funny that you brought this up. I felt like we planned this and we absolutely didn't. I was actually looking at my own personal InMail metrics because as much as I've been in a recruiting leadership role, I've been carrying wrecks and they've largely been, it's, it's largely been leadership roles but I've had IC roles early in career, mid career so I've recruited all of those in the last couple years. My current company, Lattice and I don't use AI for my outreach. I customize the message. It's Human. It's personal. I say who I am and what I'm about. I talk a little bit about what the hiring manager is about. I have a much higher response rate than average. I have a much faster response rate. So you can see in LinkedIn how quickly prospects are responding to you. I have a higher response rate on average. And the other thing is leaving it open ended, it's less about you have to talk to me right now kind of thing. And that all of that urgency that comes with things like marketing emails or spam M emails that it's like, you got to talk to me right now. And it's more about relationship building than anything else. And that's the thing that's stood out. And every single InMail has something that's personal about that person. Right? Whether it's where they work, whether it's about a skill set, whether it's about some progression that they've made, because some LinkedIn profiles have a ton of information and some LinkedIn profiles just have where they work, or it's about making that personal connection. And that's actually the thing that gets to be a little bit more fun is looking for who you have in common or who at your company you have in common and saying like, hey, like we both worked with Joel at ah, so I worked with Joel at this company and you worked with Joel at that company, creating some of that connection and adding some of that, like you are actually paying attention to them. Because the thing for me too, I've gotten those outreaches before. The outreaches that are spam, I ignore the outreaches that are real. Even though I'm not looking to leave my job, I will respond to them, I will call them, I will say I'm not interested, but let me connect with people in my network. It's so clear who is making an effort and who is actually like looking at my profile. And by the way, what I'm talking about does not take a huge amount of time.

Joel Algee: No. Uh, that's why I always wonder. It's like, okay, so I think about, let's just like map out a day, right? Like you got eight to ten hours of working. Okay, I get my sourcing, my messaging done in 15 minutes. Like, what exactly am I doing? Okay, maybe I'm doing some screening calls, but it's almost like sometimes it's like, why are we trying to speed things up? Like, what else do we have to do? And then it's just a race to the bottom then as well. So I love that. I love the intentionality behind it. And I think that's how you keep that human in the loop. And I think with something like outreach, it's so critical because it's like you're representing your brand, especially with what you're doing too. In like HR tech, they could be a buyer, you know, they could be connected to someone who's a buyer. I love that too. In terms of thinking about it open ended and then also thinking about, okay, maybe they respond and say I'm not a fit, but if they trust that you're real and you're genuine, then maybe they introduce you to someone else as well.

Nicole Hirsch: Absolutely. I get that actually more often the further in my career that I have gotten and I remember I'm thinking of my first agency boss, then I moved to a different boss. I'm remembering like, did you ask for referrals? And how I was like, how do you get referrals from this? You know, from m. Someone who I don't even know. And I get it now. Right. And I, you know, it's because you. It's like a. What's in it for me? And you have to think about what's in it for them. And yeah, I get referrals from people all the time. They're like, hey, this sounds, um, I'm actually starting a new job next month. But I actually know someone who would be cool, great for this if you are that compelling. And I wanted to add on to what you were saying. Yeah, I'm representing my company. I'm representing myself too.

Joel Algee: Yeah.

Nicole Hirsch: Uh, that's my LinkedIn profile that they're seeing. And as much as I've been with companies for long periods of time, we don't work in 40 year stints anymore. We work in like totally 2 to 10 year stints at the absolute most. So you're still representing yourself and I love that. Uh, best recruiters who I know, everyone thinks that Rolodexes have gone out the window and maybe to some extent they have. But when you are operating with this like high integrity, human, personal touch, people remember that. Let's say you change companies in a year from now and you reach back out to someone, think about how much they recognize your name.

Joel Algee: Yeah.

Nicole Hirsch: And if they had a good experience with you. So yeah, you're representing your company, but you're representing you as a person too.

Joel Algee: This is huge across the board too. We were talking about in another show I was on the critical, important right now of being curious about AI But I cannot get away without thinking about how important intentionality is. With relationships, with connections with humans. Because it's just something that's not going away. And it's like in everything that you're saying, intentional with your messaging. Right. You're trying to create that real human connection. But at the end of the day, like that, as recruiters, whatever area you're in, if you're looking for a job, if you're a salesperson, if you're in hr, whatever field you're in, that ability to connect with people and that network that you have to me is just becoming more and, uh, more valuable. And it's like, it is kind of like your brand, but it's also your network as well. And it's like this culmination of both of them together. I'm curious, like, obviously, I love that approach, by the way of with outreach getting. Not being so AI reliant. And I'm, um, 100% on board with you. What are some areas that you are excited about? And you mentioned, like, AI is helping you in a lot of ways. Like, how do you. I guess, assessment, where you use AI in your process and like, when you're working with your team, how are you looking at, like, okay, how do we implement and what are the processes we're looking at actually using AI in so we can get better with some of this human outreach.

Nicole Hirsch: Totally. And this is where it's like, how do we. Like I'm always thinking, how do we keep the relationship first? Because recruiters have such hard jobs. There's so much to do. I think about. I probably shouldn't love these, but I love the memes that's comparing recruiters to other workers and how, like, recruiters will. They're at the hospital and they're still like, taking a call and they're like, will you accept this job? Right.

Joel Algee: And the wedding day.

Nicole Hirsch: To wedding day. Yeah. Uh, the whole shebang there. So it's.

Joel Algee: I was. I worked on my honeymoon. I'm sad to say it, like, isn't that sad? I closed a deal, though. It was nice.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah. I get some grief for my husband on this as well. But it's like, really? And I'm like. I'm like, I know, but there's the amount of times that I've been on my old school wired headphones, pacing around, gesturing as I'm on the phone and

Joel Algee: he's like, it's a couple's massage. What are you doing? Closing a deal.

Nicole Hirsch: Leave me alone. Exactly. I'm closing a deal. Closing a candidate. Exactly. So I think about all of the areas of recruiters jobs that like, you think about like what gives recruiters the energy and the enthusiasm and what makes them feel, oh, this is just a drag on my time. And yeah, it's important, but you know, so for those things I think about. And by the way, it's not AI, uh, interviewing. It's not. It AI interviewing might happen. I'm.

Joel Algee: Have you seen my post this week about this too? Like where? I don't know. I won't get into that. You're not a fan of the AI interviews? That's interesting.

Nicole Hirsch: I'm not a fan of the AI interviews yet. I just think the technology is not there yet.

Joel Algee: Okay.

Nicole Hirsch: I think it could be. We'll see. I'm actually hopeful. I implemented video interviewing through a non AI, but just video interviewing, which was. Took a ton of change management back in like 2016 and no one was doing that and I got a ton of slack for all of that. So we can talk about all of that.

Joel Algee: But I bet you. Well, it's look, that's one of the. You want to go trending on anywhere you want to go on in like recruiting hell on Reddit, just tell everybody that you instituted one way video interviews that people hate that I don't. Which like, I kind of get it. But then I'm also like, I don't know, sometimes I think people over. People kind of overinflate things a lot. I don't necessarily see that big of a deal with it, but I know people don't like it.

Nicole Hirsch: Well, let's stay on that for a second. So the one that I implemented in 2016, we had a very narrow use case and we were hiring basically inside salespeople and the amount of time that it was taking us, we were behind hiring for that role for literal years.

Joel Algee: Wow.

Nicole Hirsch: And it, uh, was behind before I got there. It was behind when I was there. There uh, is. I worked with one person on my team in particular and she started off as my intern, became my like recruiting coordinator, junior recruiter. And she has a brilliant operational mind. And she was the one who was my partner in setting this up. And what we did was we were like, how do we make this really high touch? How do we make this great experience for our candidates? We recorded professional videos with our CEO, our head of sales, okay. Managers and ICs throughout the sales organization, people from the HR team to do intros about what our company was all about. Intros about what our sales organization and the values of that sales organization were and what you would get from, from a career at the company, we had managers and ICs and HR people recording the questions. So that way it was this like, very like, high touch experience, even though it was one way. So this is the type of thing that takes a ton of setup. So we had to almost like, go slow. We went so fast the year we got it done. And we got a ton of positive feedback from candidates. And it was actually more inclusive in a lot of ways because instead of candidates needing to do interviews during our working hours, which was all East coast time, 9 to 6 or what have you, we had people who were working retail jobs or had family responsibilities that wasn't going to work. They could now do their interviews any time of day. They didn't need a, uh, laptop they could do it on. Just record it on their smartphone. And we had a handful of situations where someone was like, I was just so nervous. We're like, okay, like, here you go. And it was. I think I can count the number of times we did that on one hand. And I think it was even less than that. And we gave people the opportunity to rerecord. We got all of our hire, like the first year we implemented it. Cause we had it kicked off in like the beginning of a calendar year. I told you, we were behind for five years straight. We got all of our hiring done by August that year. And great response from candidates. Our quality of hire went up. We still had recruiters, actually, like anyone who passed a video interviewer, the recruiter would still call them and say, like, hey, got your video submission. Just wanted to confirm a couple details for you, see if you had any questions for me. But then she was able to knock out dozens of those calls in a day because they weren't scheduled phone screens and they were just quick touchpoint calls where she was still building the relationship with them. And people loved it. They were like, this is great. It's not a really heavy interview process. So it's an example of something that's not a high, but it is some automation.

Joel Algee: Well, that's what I'm interested about though, because kind of what you described, I'm like, those are a lot of the arguments for like an AI interviewer, right? Like, you get thousands of applicants and you have an AI kind of screen. Then the recruiter can go into those calls with a little, you know, they can kind of dig a little bit deeper in person. So I'm curious, is it just like you don't think the tech's where it's at or. I guess I'm curious there because That's a lot of the same arguments for the A.I. uh, interviewers.

Nicole Hirsch: I think the A.I. will get there, but I think that the tech is just. I haven't seen anything great yet. So I'm hopeful that it's going to get there very shortly. And then here's the other thing that's a factor here too, which I hate having to say this because I'd rather just go fast and figure stuff out. There are also regulations that are coming out at the state level around automatic decision making where by AI the candidates have to have the opportunity to opt out. And I think that there's probably going to be some. There's going to be regulation coming. That means there's usually litigation that's coming. I haven't seen enough of the safeguards that the providers of the AI interviewing And again, I could be wrong. I haven't done an exhaustive look at all of this. So I.

Joel Algee: There's so many. I mean, it's like we were just at a conference and there was, I think, 105 vendors, and I want to say at least 60% of them were AI interviewers. So it's like there's so many.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah. So it's like I want someone to come m at me in the comments, tell me that I'm wrong. And I would love to be wrong about this. But as, uh, recruiting professionals, right now we need to rely on the folks who are creating the technology and distributing the technology to help us with safeguards around the regulations that are coming. You think about something like gdpr. And GDPR was a really big deal for a long time. And now every applicant tracking system, in order to be GDPR compliant, has all of the safeguards in it. It's all built right in. Yeah, it's built in that I've seen yet to any of these AI interviewing things yet. So I think we also have to be. It's this combination of I think the tech's got to get better, the rules are rules, but at the same time, I think we got to be a little conservative at this moment in time when everything is so new. Like, I'm not going to be the one to say to be on the front page of a newspaper or to have a lawsuit or something like that, because we said, let's just go for it. So that's my big wish, my call to action for all the folks out there who are building AI interviewing. I think it's got incredible potential, but we gotta do it right for the candidates, first and foremost. And we gotta do it Right, for the recruiters, yeah.

Joel Algee: And I think jumping into things, it is a dangerous game as well. I mean, I've already seen a couple of the AI interviewers trending on social media because people are smart, you know, how to mess with things and kind of make you look bad within it. And so I think it's being smart. I think my hope is that the tech does get there. And I think in this moment in time, one of the biggest challenges is there's a big supply of a certain type of talent and there's just not that much demand for it. And I think like I've seen it for a number of years with recruiting. I mean, it's just such a good example where I saw it firsthand. I was recruiting recruiters in 21 and every recruiter I talked to had eight offers and they were making so much money working remotely and they're like, I'm not interested. And then it was like literally in a six month span, same recruiters are reaching out to me, my recs are getting low. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know. I'm going to do a freaking out. And now it's kind of just spread to different areas. And so with these corporate positions we're now, like you said, one of the big differences between 2008 and now is it's just way easier to apply to jobs and everything's gone online. And now it's even easier to put together a resume because you got ChatGPT, so you've got these like AI smart job seekers and they're clogging up the system. And so I think probably the biggest thing I would be excited about with any type of AI interviewer is I just imagine a world where you apply for a job and I love that. Opt in, opt out. But I love the idea of like kind of forcing people to think a little bit more about the jobs that they apply to. So we can just kind of on both sides, get rid of the numbers game. Because the numbers game right now is just not helping anyone. And when I coach job seekers, I tell them like, hey, you got to apply to more jobs than you think.

Nicole Hirsch: Oh yeah.

Joel Algee: Which adds to the numbers game. But it's also like, you can't just tell a job seeker, hey, just apply to five jobs a month, you'll be fine. They've got to keep the volume up because it's competitive. But then at the same time you've got to balance that with the quality. Like you still have to apply to jobs you're qualified for. And even the misinformation out there about, it's like, qualification isn't, can I do the job? Qualification is okay from the hiring manager's perspective, how much of a risk is it going to be for them to bring you on board? And unfortunately, they're looking at, what have you done? What have you done in the past? Because their boss is going to say, why did you hire this person? And if you can't show on your resume you've done similar work, it's tough. So I think if AI can promise, like, a solution that helps candidates be more effective and helps recruiting teams, I'm all on board for it. And to your point, it's what we don't want is just like people to get lazy and go and just let AI kind of take the wheel and start selecting people. I think that's the danger there. And I don't think that would happen intentionally. I see it more of happening as like, hey, we're just overwhelmed and this is a solution to help us not be overwhelmed.

Nicole Hirsch: Oh, I could not.

Joel Algee: Something's got to change, right?

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah. I think the don't let AI take the wheel is perfectly put. So I'm curious, like, have you seen any really good AI interviewing yet?

Joel Algee: I've seen a couple tools. Like, what I really pay attention to with any type of tech as well is just, like, the people behind it. So, like, I'm more interested in, like, people who genuinely care and then people who don't. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of people just in tech in general. They're in it for like a quick acquisition or they just want to be rich. Right. And I'm not saying, like, making money is bad thing necessarily, but I listen to a lot of, like, hey, I've heard candidates are really struggling, and it's really struggling. And I've heard recruiting teams are really struggling and I want to create a solution to, like, help. That's what I'm listening to, behind the tech. And to be honest with you, I think a lot of the tech is kind of similar. Like, I've seen the voice AI interviewers. I've seen kind of the classic chatbot type type things. And I think from the candidate perspective, it's really interesting because I think a lot of recruiters assume, like, oh, all candidates, they wouldn't like it. But I've interviewed real people and it's really 50, 50. I hear a lot of people saying, I feel less judged with technology than A human, because they might have had experiences with humans where they felt judged. And maybe the recruiters on there, like, they can hear him taking notes and being like m. And they're feeling judged and it's like, then they're like, well, a robot's not going to judge me in the same way. Where I think most people think for a long time it was like, well, the AI is going to be super biased. But what I hear from Candace sometimes, like, maybe it won't be as biased as a human. So I don't think there's like a one way solution, which is what I think is hard. And like, to your point, even with your team, like you're thinking about, okay, what is painful for you as a recruiter? What are the things that you don't enjoy doing? What are the things you are good at and you enjoy doing even that. I think with recruitment teams, like, I know some people who love, like, I don't know, taking notes and they just, like, they love taking notes. And I know other people who hate taking notes. I think with some of these tools it's like trying to come up with things that are flexible, that work best for the individual. And it's like, how do we kind of bake in some of that customization? Just to know, like, okay, this is actually probably better for this person, maybe not so great for that person. So my rambled way of saying, like, yeah, I don't know, there's a lot and a lot of changes. Uh, what are you paying attention? Like, how do you keep yourself upskilled with this? Because I know a lot of times people are saying like, hey, stay curious with the tech, stay up to date. How do you do that?

Nicole Hirsch: And you also asked me that. I didn't answer you as directly because I went on a, you know, a tangent on video. So about what I'm using. So I'll bundle those together. And I think you're right too. It's. There was one that came out and there was someone who, I think I looked at this person's LinkedIn profile and they had worked in tech for like six months and said that recruiters were going to be obsolete in six months. And I was like, stop. Yeah, uh, I don't think that's right.

Joel Algee: So anyways, yeah, especially when you set like just a tip for any vendor, if you're selling into a space, probably good to not say that you're just going to make everything obsolete within the space. Like just a general, like at least lie and say this is going to help you and be better. Right. Like, I literally met with those. A really big thing at a conference. There was someone who was walking around, they're like, yeah, recruiters are going to be replaced by next year. And I'm like, dude, you're at a recruiting conference.

Nicole Hirsch: Know your audience.

Joel Algee: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well put.

Nicole Hirsch: So in terms of how to stay up on it and in terms of what we're actually doing, we implemented Bright Hire two and a half years ago. It took some change management. I, uh, would have a riot on my hands if we ever tried to remove Bright Hire. We love the AI notes. We also love the metadata that tells us talk time in terms of like interactivity ratios between the recruiter or interviewer and the candidate. Is there any bias that is existing in terms of male or female candidates getting more questions or fewer questions or different questions, things like that? Which has been awesome. It now gives interview coaching insights to people. And if anything that's like, sometimes it tells me good job. And I'm like, that's pretty cool. I'm getting coached on interviewing and I don't really get that much at this, at this point, so I'll take it. But that's something that works really well because we have structured interview processes, competency based interviews. Everything is built out in our ats. We have faster and more complete scorecards. I have my entire executive team filling out scorecards in our applicant tracking system. That has never happened to me before and they have been awesome about it. And I'm going to attribute a big part of that to Bright hires Interview intelligence, the other thing that we're tinkering with and trying to stay up on. Right.

Joel Algee: By the way, I love that because I think sometimes I've heard people get critical with the note takers and I'm like, no. Interview intelligence. That's where the value is. Because then you can train and you can keep people accountable and you can help them get better. Can you talk about that more versus like just the. It's a note taker. Like, it's not about the note taking, understanding, like what's going on in the interview anyway. I, uh, wish that was talked about more.

Nicole Hirsch: It should be talked about more. And it gives us when there's more data there. I mean, we've been using it for two and a half years and the thing that we've been able to put together is like an actual legitimately good quality of hire assessment. And by the way, I know quality of hire can be a little debatable, contentious even. And I don't think There is one perfect way to measure it. But what we are able to do because we have all of this data from our interviews now because we've got the scorecards, but then we also have transcripts, right, from our interviews and we've got under 2% opt out rate. We do over 7,000 interviews in a calendar year kind of thing with our recruiting team of five. So wow. All interviews, right? That's, that's the recruiters interviews, hiring manager interviews, coding team interviews, everything we can now link. What strengths did we correctly identify in the interview process? What areas for coaching did we correctly identify in the interview process? Not just the recruiting team, but the interviewing team too. And I say areas for coaching because there is no perfect hire. We'll stop. No one. And I, uh, your. The thing that you said, Joel, is so accurate about people need to have done the exact job in order to get hired. Which is. Can be lazy hiring in some points of view, sometimes my own as well, of like, as opposed to seeing the potential in people's progression of work experience. But that's another totally story for another time.

Joel Algee: And I was just saying that as a point of like that it's just again, people want to do the easy way, they don't want to take the risk. Right. So that's like what they default to a lot of the time. But like you said, like being able to identify potential, understanding who are those future people who are going to do great things. It's very hard for people to nail that though within recruitment, which is what I found. It's like we just default to what have you done? Have you done it before? Great.

Nicole Hirsch: In the.

Joel Algee: Have to think about it.

Joel Algee: Yeah, exactly.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, yeah.

Joel Algee: Can you bring your Rolodex along? Because that's what's going to make you successful in this sales role. It's like, okay, perfect.

Nicole Hirsch: It's like hiring accountants right out of Big four. It's because that, because it's signaling, because Big four has all of the training and the structure and everything else like all the controls in place already. So it is what it is. But all that to say the interview intelligence piece and pulling together quality of hire, we can now actually assess that with a much uh, higher level. And we're pulling in 90 day reviews, which we do through Lattice's own performance management tool. And we're matching those things up and that allows us to come back and iterate on our interview process and say, hey, actually we're doing pretty well in this area or hey, we're actually seeing a pattern where there's something that we're missing in our interview process. We can iterate on that and improve our interview process because we have this interview intelligence that we. I think every person who's recruited for a year or for 10 years or for 30 years has had incomplete scorecards. And the interview intelligence tools just bypass that completely.

Joel Algee: I love that. Even, uh, I just think of interview training in general. I think that was one of the things I noticed just getting into recruitment from initially it was like, how come I'm asking the same question over and over and over. It's like six rounds of interviews and why do you want to work here? It's like people just default to the same questions. I just think, yeah, this is where interview intelligence can come in. You can figure out like, are we asking the same questions over and over? Do we need to ask different questions? Who do we need to train up? Who's a really great interview? Who isn't? And it's like, that's how you get better. And that's what I love about. I love that more than anything. And yeah, it's nice not to take notes, but that's not the actual value of this stuff. Which.

Nicole Hirsch: Bonus. It's a bonus.

Joel Algee: Yeah, it's a bonus.

Nicole Hirsch: The other thing that I would say that has been. I don't want to say it's been a thorn in my side ever since I was started in in house recruiting, but I think about weekly updates and you think about on a Friday and Friday is such prime time in recruiting in so many ways of like, you're trying to get an offer out before you know you're running a debrief, you're trying to get an offer out before the weekend, the candidate maybe has a competing offer and then you're thinking about the rest of your rec load and sending out your weekly update to a hiring manager or a department head or an executive or whatever it might be and the time that it takes to pull data. And some applicant tracking systems are getting way better at this. And there's other tools out there like GEM and so on and so forth. And I think that they're great and I think that they're getting better all the time. That's the other thing, by the way, that's different from the Great Recession is that the tools that recruiters have at their disposal, I have never seen anything like it. And there has been an explosion of tools. There's some slop out there too, but there's so much more that's available to recruiters. But we're Doing some experimenting with AI is actually building uh, bots, agents, whatever you want to call it. In Slack, which is the primary chat tool that we use at my company and we're pulling reports out of our ATS and having the agent take care of writing the report and automatically populate

Joel Algee: it to Slack, you have it too where like a hiring manager could just ask a question and get kind of like an answer and an update from an agent or uh, we're working on

Nicole Hirsch: that, we're training it on that now because we care more about them getting the right answers like not hallucinating and things. We have that set up for our recruiters to be able to pull things

Joel Algee: like yeah, the search is going amazing. You're like, it's not though. You're just doing the chat GPT thing where you're just being nice to me.

Nicole Hirsch: Right. We've got other things set up where recruiters, we have this agent set up where recruiters can retrieve salary ranges, salary tier. So as opposed to saying like what geographic tier is Ann Arbor, Michigan or what geographic tier is Phoenix, Arizona, it'll just. And like looking at where that is on the map is that 50 miles from another major metro. We've got a wiki that has all of them listed out. So it just returns all of that and then going and looking in the compensation system and seeing like this job family at this level and this tier and it just returns all of it for the recruiters when they're just on the phone so they don't have to go triangulate information that took some training and obviously that comp data needs to be accurate. It can't hallucinate something like that. So our next step is creating more like recruiting wiki self serve for our hiring managers. We're really close, really close.

Joel Algee: So do you think you'll have somebody responsible for like the quality assurance on that at some point or like I guess how do you kind of manage that?

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, that's the question mark, to be honest with you, because when you're training the data it's like, okay, that's one of the reasons that we haven't released it to hiring managers yet is because right now we've got a bit of a control that it passes through the recruiter to just kind of spot check it before it gets pushed to the hiring manager or the department head.

Joel Algee: Yeah, which is why I think we were talking all that hype about AI, uh, replacing recruiters. There's obviously a lot of fear out there about AI replacing all these different job fields. And I think what I've seen is you still need that knowledge base. You still need the people who just know and can just sniff. Okay, that's good information. That's bad. Information like that is still so valuable because the reports of the hallucinations and just wrong information has actually been going up with a lot of these tools. And at the end of the day, you still need to be a subject matter expert. And that's why it's important still to just know. There's still so much value in that. And I think sometimes people are overestimating or they're underestimating the value of just knowing what's true and what's not. It's still so big. And I've also noticed that and I've seen the studies around just people getting lazy with AI. And I was thinking about that today with the Google search where it's like you just type it in. It's like, now we don't have to go look for the answer on the website. It just tells you what the answer is. But that's just a scary thing to think about, especially in recruiting where it's like you're just going to take the word of AI that summarized a resume and said that they're a good fit for the job descriptions. Like, no, like you got to call the person and talk to them. So. And you still got to be able to sniff out like whether someone's like real or not or whether telling the truth. So there's so much value in that that.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, there's actually a really good study that Josh Burson just, he's on BBC. I'm just double checking to make sure I get the percentage right. But something like 45% of AI queries are resulting in erroneous answers. And it's because the more crazy, which it's like starting with law of small numbers and it's like, oh, 2% error, but then it's getting magnified in these LLMs. So there's all sorts of interesting things about. Okay, what is that going to result in for, uh, companies that are creating these AI agents? And like, how do you create guard rails and things like that? I'll send you the article. It's actually I was reading through it and I was like, it's something that I feel like we're intuitively understanding and this quantified it. And I was like, whoa, cool.

Joel Algee: So it's good. It doesn't. Honestly though, I'm like thinking the other day, I'm like, where are they getting all this data? From like, well, they're getting a lot of the data from like the Internet. And I'm like, what does the Internet prove to be like that accurate? I'm like, I don't know. Anyway, obviously there's a lot of good information on there. But if they were like, we trained our LLM, um, on like scientific papers, I'd be like, oh, I trust that. But then when it's like, yeah, we trained our data of Reddit, I'm like, Reddit ever. It's like, it's helpful sometimes, but there's also a lot of weird stuff on there. Like they drag recruiters through the dirt all the time. I don't want that being what the data's trained on. So, okay, so interview intelligence sounds like some of these interactions. Are you doing anything? And I know we're kind of wrapping up for time here, but are you doing anything candidate wise? Uh, what's your thought with kind of overall candidate experience? Surely there's a lot of lot we could do better. Like what are some of the things that you're doing? It sounds like you've got some pretty good processes there. But just curious, for other recruiting leaders or even just other recruiters, what are some things that you're seeing on the candidate side of things as far as candidate experience?

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah, this is where, I don't know if this is spicy or not, but it's the non AI answer. And I think that AI has the potential to be so powerful in so many ways, but you've got to have just bulletproof foundation. Right? Have your ATS clean as a whistle in terms of like how you have things set up and all your email templates, if you use a scheduling tool and so on, and make sure it's clean, consistent stages across your entire organization so you can do really good reporting. And that's when you can start to layer AI on top. But from a candidate experience perspective, forgive me, this is a bit of an old school answer, but. But the two most important things are prepping candidates for interviews and picking up the phone and calling them in between their interviews. Not like in between, like, oh, you've got an interview at 1:00 o' clock and then later at 3:30. I'm saying like from one stage to the next.

Joel Algee: Yeah, it's agency right there.

Nicole Hirsch: Yeah. And I mean, I think half the people who have worked on my recruiting teams have come from agency and half of them have come from in house in terms of like how they've come up. And that is the one thing you pick up the phone and you talk to them because that's the other thing that, like an AI or a fake candidate. If you are building your relationship with your candidates, all of my recruiters know right now the likelihood that their candidates are going to accept our offer or not. And they, they are. Right, Right. And I'm not saying we have a perfect offer accept rate. Ours are way higher than industry benchmarks. You know, we're consistently above 85%. We're usually over 90% offer accept rate and so on. And we're really fortunate for that. But it's because we pick up the phone. So like from a candidate experience perspective, the way to differentiate yourself is do what other people don't do. Like sure, you can send an email and you're going to have some candidates who are going to prefer that. But pick up the phone, have a conversation, be real. Like people are craving that human connection. So true that for them you are going to be. For my in house recruiters who are out there, you're actually going to work with these people right at your company. This is your future coworker.

Joel Algee: Yeah, I think past guests that we had is actually recently passed away. Matt Lavery over at UPS like led the whole hiring for them. And one of the things that always stuck out to me, like we're talking just Canada experiencing just like transparency, communication. He'd always just say like every single. And obviously with UPS, they're a massive company and they have so many customers. But he's like, every single candidate is a potential customer so we need to treat them that way. And what I'm going to take from this is treat everybody like they're going to be your coworker. Because likelihood is, you know, if they have a top M candidate, they will be. So you're going to see that person at the, whatever you have like your annual retreat golfer, you know, And I think it's like those types of mindsets, like we sometimes just need to refresh because I get it, like I've done those memes before. It's like the best part of recruiting is the people. The worst part is the people. But it's like people are people. And it's like sometimes we just forget. And it's like I know how corny it is when it's like don't forget behind every application. As a human, it can be corny, but the reality is it's just true. And I think sometimes I love recruiters. We get beaten up on both sides. Like the hiring manager blames us, the candidate blames us. Like we just get blamed. But it's like, we have to, like, not get jaded by that. Just remember you said, keep in mind this person is going to be someone you're working with. Or it's like Canada right now. Maybe three years from now or four years from now, they will be working with you. Or maybe you move company and you move to their company. Like you said in the beginning, you have your own brand. Someone's like, oh, that's a recruiter that ghosted me. Now they work for us. You know, it's like, what brand are you creating again? With all that being said, I think there's always. This is where it's just like having just empathy and grace for people and being like, all right. And just being honest with yourself. Like, yeah, okay, maybe I made a mistake and not getting. That's why I think on social media, sometimes we gotta play like, hey, we're humans too. Like, sometimes we do make mistakes, but are we able to admit that and, like, own those things as well? It's just being human that's being real.

Nicole Hirsch: The transparency. I love being real. Transparency. I don't have the answer right now, and that's. I'm gonna get you the answer. But, yeah, being real. Being human. Pick up the phone.

Joel Algee: I love it. My big takeaways here. I think I'm just gonna. I've got a training coming up where I'm gonna be helping a team out with some outreach. And I'm like, use AI sparingly. Like that. First contact, the more human, the better. Especially nowadays. I see on social media, it's like, the more real content you do, that is what people are looking for. It's kind of crazy.

Nicole Hirsch: So you're giving away my secret sauce here, Joel?

Joel Algee: Well, you're giving to everybody now. Everyone's. No one's going to be using AI. All these AI vendors are going to be pissed. Uh, but, Nicole, what's the best place for people to find you? Where can they find out about opportunities, about Lattice as well? Where's the best place for people to go?

Nicole Hirsch: Come find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find. NicoleThompson Hirsch, even though I just go in Nicole Hirsch Nowadays@lattice.com we're pretty cool. So there's a lot of cool stuff that we're doing. We actually have, I think magical is the only way to describe it, AI agent that we've deployed. So it's pretty incredible. So come check out lattice.com lattice.com careers we'd love to hear from you.

Joel Algee: Oh, Guys, as always, if you're listening in the show, you want to connect with Nicole, just be patient. She's not hanging out on LinkedIn all day like me. So be patient and then just say, hey, heard you on the Recruiting is no joke podcast as well. That always helps out. And as always, guys, if you go to www.therealrecruiter.com, you can find some more resources. If you reaching out to me, I get a lot of messages as well. So just be patient. But I appreciate all of you guys. And we'll be back next week with another episode. Not as good, but still pretty good. But, uh, Nicole, again, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Great conversation. I'm sure we'll go back and listen to it over and over and hopeful be able to meet in real life soon.

Nicole Hirsch: Love it. Thanks for having me, Joel.

Joel Algee: All right, we'll talk soon.

Joel Algee: Thanks so much for tuning into. This episode of Recruiting is no joke. If these conversations resonated with you, don't forget to hit the follow button to stay updated on our latest episodes. To stay connected with me, head over to therealist recruiter.com it's your go to place for more content, connections and a deeper dive into the world of recruitment. See you next week.