AI and the Hiring Game, Part 1

[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC] LEANDRO CARTELLI: On the one side, candidates are excited, anxious, super vulnerable because it's their livelihood, it's their future, and it's their purpose and what gets them out of bed every day. And then on the other side, the business leaders, the hiring managers are super stressed, super impatient. And they do have also the pressure of delivering value and results for the business. And recruiters are standing right there in the middle.

JILL FINLAYSON: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and EDGE in Tech at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. EDGE in Tech is part of the Innovation Hub at CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education arm of the University of California at Berkeley. This month, we're looking through the eyes of the recruiters to see how AI is rewriting the rules of hiring.

With hundreds of resumes for every role and too few recruiters to review them, algorithms now decide who makes it through the virtual and actual door. It's efficient but also impersonal. Candidates are ghosted. Culture gets reduced to keywords.

And the job search feels like a numbers game or playing the lottery, where the odds are stacked against you. And even if you make it through the first cut, it feels more like a transaction than a conversation. In this episode, we'll explore how AI is transforming recruitment, the opportunities it creates and the challenges it leaves behind, and what it means for the future of work. To talk about this, we're delighted to welcome Leandro Cartelli, founder of a staffing and recruiting agency specializing in connecting US businesses with top Latin American talent.

With nearly 20 years in recruiting and talent acquisition across global corporations and high-growth startups, he brings a unique perspective on building high-impact, data-driven talent and strategies. Above all, Leandro believes that people and their experiences are the true drivers of business success, helping companies scale smarter and faster with the right team. Welcome, Leandro. LEANDRO CARTELLI: Thank you for having me, excited to talk with you today.

And I love that intro, so many interesting things we're going to cover today. JILL FINLAYSON: Exciting times. Here we go. A lot of people have applied for jobs.

A lot of people have even been on the hiring side. But they haven't been a recruiter. So when you think about the role of the recruiter today, what is it, and what does success look like? LEANDRO CARTELLI: When I think about a recruiter's role, it's really multidimensional.

It's no longer about - and I believe it never was, but less so now, not about feeling safe, but rather, creating a lasting impact in the organization. Did the people we found, attracted, and hire, did they stay in the company? Did they grow? How are they performing?

What is their impact to the business? Are they happy? Are they fulfilled? And I think, typically, my view aligns three perspectives - on the one side, the candidate's goals and aspirations.

On the other side, the leaders, the hiring manager urgent need, because talent is always urgent for business. And then the company's longterm strategy. And I think when those are balanced and, ideally, in harmony, then recruiters are really the ones that are building sustainable value for all three parties. And I think the role is about being business advisors.

It's about, many times, we're not feeling well. We need to ask hard questions. We need to challenge the business. We need to be drivers of change and ask whether we need a role or not, what the trade-offs are between the market and the business.

People think about a recruiter like someone that reads the job description, turns around, sends a few messages on LinkedIn, and then has one interview and puts candidates forward to the hiring manager. And it's truly so much more than that. JILL FINLAYSON: It's interesting. You talk about not just filling seats, but this three legs to the stool - the candidate experience, the hiring manager's experience, and the strategy for the company.

How do those align, or how do they compete against each other? LEANDRO CARTELLI: Well, it's funny. So on the one side, hiring managers are typically thinking short term, immediate need, whereas if you think about the business, we need to think about longer term. And so, unfortunately, many times, what happens is, there's a need in the team - whatever it may be.

Let's say, marketing specialist, SEO specialist. And we need to go and find this person. And that's what we need for the next six months or the next year. And that's fine.

Businesses change very quickly. Now, where is the company headed? And what will the strategy be within two or three years? It's hard to know, especially now.

But we can still think about the longer-term vision. And so trying to balance that, I think it's typically a place of friction. And then on the candidate side, on the talent side, it's where it gets tricky. Because candidates are thinking about doing exciting work, also fueling some basic needs, compensation.

The work comes at the very base of the Maslow pyramid. You need to fuel some basics there. But then how does it connect with the purpose? And what will this look like in the long term as a career strategy?

And so it starts creating friction when urgency beats relevancy, when it beats longterm strategy, longterm need, and value for the individual. And many times, where it also creates some friction - and I think this is something we've talked about, and it's important - is on the cultural part. Many times, businesses or hiring managers, leaders need something urgent. And they focus on the hard skills they need and they neglect everything else, which, is the right person for this organization, for this team?

Is the culture the right fit? That's where, also, candidates need to make sure they assess the company appropriately as well. It's not just one sided. It needs to be a two-way street.

JILL FINLAYSON: So it sounds like there are some real concrete drawbacks to this sort of expediency bias. I need to get somebody in here tomorrow And that short-term thinking doesn't necessarily get you the right hire. LEANDRO CARTELLI: Absolutely, absolutely. And it's always been one of the biggest challenges.

It's, well, what is the trade-off? Because many times, recruiters are measured on that. Recruiters need to fill roles quickly. The business pressures them.

And so, many times, unfortunately, they neglect - some of the things, they already know. They know that person might not be right. But they're getting pressure to put candidates in front of the business and move them through. And that's not good, not only for the hiring manager or for the candidates.

It's not good for the business. And I always say that the way to think about this is, it's going to be a lot more costly losing someone within the next six months or a year and making a wrong hire rather than waiting for two weeks. Yes, it's hard to wait for an extra few weeks. We know it.

But it's definitely going to be a lot worse if, because an extra week or two, that you get someone on board that's not the right person for the role and for the team and for the company. JILL FINLAYSON: So what is the true cost of a bad hire? LEANDRO CARTELLI: There's definitely an actual economic cost. There's a lot of money that businesses lose when they make a bad hire.

There's a lot of studies that put it between 100 and 200% of the annual salary of that individual. So that's the obvious cost - the recruiting fees, the time you lose, the time you invested in training them, onboarding them. But then there's other costs. You lose momentum.

There's opportunity costs. There's cultural erosion. And so having a bad hire could set back a project a month. It could impact your sales pipeline.

It could delay a product launch. And it could hurt a client relationship. And so, especially for high growth and fast companies where, basically, time is everything, that can make a big difference. You want to move fast.

But then that can be the difference between capturing an opportunity, capturing more market, launching a product, and losing all of that. And then think about the impact for the rest of the team. It impacts team performance. It generates disengagement.

There's an impact in reputation as well. So it's extremely, extremely dangerous. There is a report from Gallup that talks about how teams with higher turnover because of this have between, I think, 20% to 40% lower engagement rates. That's huge, right?

So, yes, there's money involved. That's the easy metric. We know it. But there's a massive impact that goes beyond that.

JILL FINLAYSON: I love the term you used, cultural erosion. That's a great phrase. And it really speaks to the lasting impact that a bad hire can have. And that, to your point, is especially dangerous in high-growth startups, where culture is everything.

You're trying to get the right team in there. So you talked about, expediency and filling seats as one metric that recruiters are judged by. What are some of the other metrics that you track to judge your own success? LEANDRO CARTELLI: Yeah.

So I have my own sort of data framework for this. I think there is a foundational metrics, which are typically operational. So they provide an understanding of how a recruiting process is working. So think about that - so time to hire, the sources from which candidates come from, offer acceptance rate, cost of hire.

All of those are operational. Those are, for the most part, measured and the ones that people are very familiar with. Then I would say the next layer is what I try to call diagnostic metrics or data points, which really enable us to start connecting the dots and going deeper into what's working from a team perspective and how to optimize strategy. So, for example, what is the candidate experience, the hiring manager experience, the time to hire but connecting the dots?

So time to hire and source - OK. So do we move faster with candidates that apply directly, that are referred by us? Where are we moving faster? What does the recruiter productivity look like and the conversion throughout the entire funnel and how that's impacted by other variables, like, for example, diversity?

Are male candidates or female candidates moving faster or slower through the process? And so you start looking at everything that's below the water. And then I think the next layer, which is, to me, where all teams should get to, it's really what I call the impact metrics. And the reason why I say that is, these are metrics that impact the business.

So we start connecting talent acquisition or recruiting to the broader business. So, for example, what is - and we were talking about this. What is the new hire retention rate? What is their tenure?

Do they stay longer? How long do they stay? We have all the attrition. And if we do, is there any commonality between those?

Are they coming from certain channels? Was it because we rushed through the process? How many people interview them? And how did we assess, for example, their competencies?

Then how that all connects to performance and ratings, speed of promotion. The cost of delay - many times, we talk about cost, which is very important for businesses. What is the cost of having and making that balance? Roles that continue to be open for a long time - and we actually need those roles if they continue to be open for such a long time.

And so those are all metrics that really go beyond the operational ones. What's interesting is, it takes time. But market data tells us that roughly 50% of businesses are not effectively measuring a lot of this. So organizations, large corporate need, small businesses are simply not measuring this, which is - maybe if you're a small business, your hiring is not frequent.

You hire one person every couple months or maybe a handful. That makes sense. You still want to look at it. But it makes sense that maybe you don't you don't have such a robust way of measuring.

For large corporate companies that hire hundreds or thousands of people every month, they should absolutely be measuring all of these. JILL FINLAYSON: I'm glad to hear you bring that up because I was going to ask that question, is, who actually has that downstream visibility into data? Because I talked to somebody who was at a fairly large company. And they said, once they're hired, I don't get any data.

So I don't know if they stayed. I don't know if they took another job in six months. And that affects, to your point, the hiring sources. And being able to see those patterns sounds like it would be super valuable for recruiters.

LEANDRO CARTELLI: Absolutely. And I think it's a reality that, unfortunately, it happens with large corporate businesses, teams working in silos. And so you think about HR and, oh, the HR team. But within HR, you have the people partners, and then you have the talent acquisition team.

And then you have talent development and diversity. And there is a lot of nuances - compensation. And so there is many teams. And many times, the dots, they just don't connect with each other.

They talk. They address business needs. But there's a lot of times that, unfortunately, they work in silos. And that's when what you just described happens.

To me, one of the things that we've been talking in the talent acquisition or talent industry for a long time is really the transformation of the function. So for the most part, you typically have talent acquisition on one side, talent development on the other side, performance separately. And many of us believe that we need to continue to move towards a world where there is a single talent function that encompasses all of these. Because the journey starts with the first contact, and it ends when someone leaves the organization.

And many times, it doesn't even end there, because you have alumni or alumn programs to stay connected with talent. And so what we see happening is, there's a huge disconnect between the conversations during the transaction process and then what happens when we measure performance and then how we support the development of that individual. And so there needs to be a cohesive strategy connecting all of that. We talked about what your purpose was in the interview and what inspires you.

That's information that not only the leadership should have, but also we should be considering when we think about development of that individual. And when we talk about the role of the individual in talent acquisition, we need to understand how performance will be measured afterwards. We can't separate those two things. And so it's something that, many times, doesn't happen.

And these organizations have their analytics teams and data teams, and they're really pushing the agenda on this. They're helping connect those dots. There are technical limitations. So technology sometimes doesn't play in our favor.

JILL FINLAYSON: It's somehow disconcerting that what we're recruiting for isn't necessarily what we're judging performance on. LEANDRO CARTELLI: It is. It is. But it happens more often than you think.

And I get it. Businesses are - we're always chasing and addressing some kind of urgency, something that needs to be resolved today. The problem is, we focus a lot on that and not really the long term. And I think organizations many times need to take a pause and really reflect on that and make changes.

And I think sometimes, they do. And I love it when it happens. But many times, they don't. And that's eventually what we're talking about and what we see with turnover, with disengagement, quiet quitting, with so many other trends and so many other things that are happening in the market.

JILL FINLAYSON: Well, you bring up a good point, which is the emotional side of this process and this activity. I imagine recruiting can be quite stressful. You're caught between these very hopeful candidates, worried, anxious, and the hiring managers, who need to get the job done, don't have time for interviews. So what's it like to be in that middle position?

LEANDRO CARTELLI: It's hard. I think recruiting and recruiters are one of those roles and those professions where, when you're constantly all the time being pressured - dealing with opposite pressures. On the one side, candidates are excited. They're anxious.

People are super vulnerable when it comes to this process because it's their livelihood, and it's their future. And it's their purpose and what gets them out of bed every day. And then on the other side, the business leaders, the hiring managers are super stressed, super impatient. And they do have also the pressure of delivering value and results for the business.

And, yes, like you said, recruiters are standing right there in the middle. They have to balance the urgency of the business with the empathy towards candidates. And also, they're people. They're human.

And so they absorb a lot of that. You care for the candidate, and you care for the people. And I've never met a single recruiter that doesn't care for every candidate they talk to. And so it is a bit of a emotional compression.

They're getting compressed from all sides at the same time. It is expected. And by the way, recruiters are measured on the experience they provide for candidates, how we coach our hiring managers, protecting the employer brand, which, many times, it's hard because you might not have feedback for a candidate, not because you don't want to provide it or you just decided not to do it. You have the business not giving you any feedback.

And you're chasing managers, like, hey, how did the interview go? How do you want to move? And they don't respond, or they don't know. And so on the other side, you have the candidate that's super anxious and looking to get feedback.

Unfortunately, the perception from the outside is you're just reviewing CVs and putting candidates forward. And it's so much more than that. And I think that's part of the problem. There's lack of empathy for the recruiter.

JILL FINLAYSON: So when you have candidates come back to you and say, why didn't I get the job? What do you do? LEANDRO CARTELLI: Well, so I think there's a couple of things. First, ideal world - and what I try to do and what I think recruiters always have to try to do - is just be honest, transparent, and provide the feedback.

So whatever that may be, just tell people. Sometimes it's hard. And I think many times, the challenge is, you don't have the depth of information and data from the business that you need. And so they come back to you and say, hey, yeah, I talked with these three people.

I like this one. Let's move on. And you're like, well, what about the rest? What happened?

Was there something about their experience and their skills? Was it more of a soft competency issue? Was it a fit with the team? What happened?

And many times, you just don't get the feedback because, like I said before, talent needs are urgent. The business is always on a rush. They don't have the time. And so we need to try to provide, first, always as much feedback as possible.

The other thing that I would say we need to do is, well, if we don't have feedback, let's just be honest. And this is, many times, hard to hear from a candidate's side because it's very standard. It's your blanket response, like, well, the business decided to move forward with someone else they thought was a better fit for this role. Is that the best feedback you can provide?

No, definitely not. Is that what someone wants to hear? Well, they never want to hear they didn't move forward, whatever the reason is. Now, would it be good if they get some more information about what was it about their skills or their experience?

Yes. Do you have that information? No. Then that's everything you can do for them.

And that's going to the previous point also about, well, they get caught up in, that's all I have and the feedback that I can provide and then candidates going, well, it would be good if next time, you provide better feedback. And yes, I agree. Recruiters also have their jobs and their needs, and the hiring managers are their stakeholders. So there is a point where you just can't continue to press on them for that.

And so I think it's about being honest, being transparent. And the other thing is, many times, you might not have feedback because there's no updates. Ideally, try to keep that candidate informed about that as well. Hey, I don't have any news.

This process is taking a bit longer. I'll keep you posted. Set the expectations. And that makes a huge difference.

It's one thing that a candidate's undergoing a process and they don't hear from the recruiter for two, three weeks. And it's extremely different if, after one week, they get a message saying, hey, we're still here. It's taking longer than expected. We're sorry.

As soon as we have any feedback for you, we'll come back. Well, that's a whole different thing. And I would say that's something that we need to do. There's a lot of technology that supports that nowadays, which is great.

It's not always implemented in the right way, which is not a good thing. But that's what I would recommend. And for candidates, I'd say, for people undergoing a process, I would say, many times, it's just patience. We've all been through that, the anxiety of going through a recruiting process for a role that we love for a company that we aspire to work for.

But sometimes it is a case of patience. And that's a trait as well. It talks about our ability to manage that anxiety, which, by the way, it's a positive trait. Now, if it's been two weeks and you haven't heard back, yeah, definitely send a message because there's something going on there, and that's not on you.

JILL FINLAYSON: Tell me about the relationship with the hiring manager. What kind of influence does the recruiter have? What kind of role do they have with this client of theirs? What are those dynamics like?

LEANDRO CARTELLI: That's a great question. So I would say it definitely depends on the organization. And maybe we can also divide it in three, situations and contexts and maturity levels. The more mature organizations are really what we should aspire for, is recruiters being considered as an advisor.

So that's when hiring managers are open for feedback. One of the first conversations they have is with the recruiter. They have an idea, a need. They talk to their people partner.

And they see the recruiter on the table and take feedback on, what does the market look like? How should we go about this? And they're open for the questions and to being challenged. They're typically very quick to respond to the recruiter.

It's a very agile and dynamic relationship. And many times, I think what makes for mature organizations, this a great partnership is when leaders take the guidance and advice of the recruiter when making a hiring decision. And that's the ideal world. Now, does that happen always?

No. And I think what happens in the middle is organizations where recruiters are valued in terms of their understanding of the market, but really not through the decisionmaking process. They're advisors when it comes to what the market looks like, what the market needs, whether the value prop is competitive. So they can provide feedback on that, and that's considered.

But when making a decision, they're just not given enough room. And then I would say at the bottom is those where recruiters are order takers. And many times, it happens that they don't get responses from the leaders. They get short messages.

This is what I need - no feedback, no feedback on their follow-ups. I think those are the three typical layers or maturity levels. I've oversimplified this. Now, what happens is, for organizations that hire all the time, many times, recruiters need to earn that higher level through time, through experience, through value deliver for the business leader.

Because if you have a business that's hiring often and a lot, then this is one of the most important and most valuable relationships for a business leader. Because they're talking to that recruiter all the time. And so it needs to be dynamic. They need to understand each other, see eye to eye on many things.

If not, that breaks very, very quickly. For organizations that hire a lot, then recruiters are working with a lot of different leaders. And it's very hard to build that rapport, very hard to build that relationship. And it really touches on the culture.

If the organization has the right culture, that won't matter, even if they don't have that relationship built throughout a strong foundation of daily work and collaboration. But if the culture is not there, if there's not a deep understanding and understanding a lot of value given to the work that they do, then it's going to be what we described before, an order taker getting no feedback, just chasing hiring managers, asking for - not even feedback, but even asking for availability.

A lot of times, processes get delayed because leaders don't have an open slot to meet a candidate. JILL FINLAYSON: Yeah. With talent being both the most expensive but most critical piece of a company's budget, you would think that the recruiters who have this nuanced understanding of the company and its culture would be really valued. But oftentimes, we see that recruiters are the first to be cut in downturns.

And I'm curious why you think they're the canary in the coal mine. LEANDRO CARTELLI: I think the problem is, recruiting is often perceived as the delivery function, just a delivery function. And it is true, it is the delivery function because we deliver talent into the business. But it's so much more than that.

It shapes the employer brand. It sustains talent relationships, creates pipelines for future business needs. And so when the delivery component of the function slows down, companies, like you said, tend to cut recruiting. On the one side, it reduces cost.

So it makes sense. Well, I won't be hiring at that level on that speed anymore. Why do I need so many recruiters? Unfortunately, when this happens, they lose the opportunity - and many times, because they don't see the value at that stage, they lose the opportunity to refine our production strategies or nurture possible talent, engage with talent pools.

And so now what happens is, then the market bounces. Businesses are unprepared. And they basically scramble. And we actually saw this post-COVID.

A lot of organizations just expanded recruiting teams. It was crazy. And then suddenly, we saw a lot of growth, companies needing to even double headcount. The infrastructure was not there.

The team was not there. The processes were not there. And so I think the issue's that companies scale or build TA teams without a longterm strategy, just to solve current talent needs. And so recruiting teams expand in good times.

They shrink in bad times. It's treated as a bit of a temporary capacity and delivery function because, well, if you're not hiring why do you need it? And it needs to be built as a strategic capability. Investments need to be smart in the right way.

Many times, it's even better not to grow your recruiting team but just partner with an external agency. And I'm a big believer in that. And this goes against what I do for a living and my business, because we're an agency, and we're staffing business. We support companies with finding amazing talent.

Having said that, I'm also a big believer in that if you have a recruiting team, your recruiters are definitely going to be the best people to bring the talent because they're sitting there on a day-to-day basis with you. They understand the culture because they live it. They know what the hiring manager needs because they're talking to them all the time. They understand how the business operates.

By the way, they've actually hired the people that came before the next hire. And so they know the team, and they know what's going to work well. But if you're going to hire 200 people for the rest of the year, and then next year, you're going to hire 50, well, just don't build the team for 200. Build it for 50 and work with an external agency to cover that.

Or just hire an extra person and have them work on strategy and creating value that's maybe longer term than just what we're going to hire next month. JILL FINLAYSON: Leandro, this is such a great primer into the world of recruiting. And we would love to do a deeper dive into how technology is reinventing the recruiting process from your side and the candidate experience. This is probably the right time to pause, and then we can have you back next time to break down the changes that we are seeing.

In the meantime, please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this Future of Work journey with us. And make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find a variety of courses and certificates to help you thrive in this new working landscape.

And to see what's coming up next at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit edge.berkeley.edu. Thanks so much for listening.

And I'll be back next month to continue our Future of Work journey. The Future of Work podcast is hosted by Jill Finlayson, produced by Sarah Benzuly, and edited by Matt Dipietro.