Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hari, I thank you for joining me. I haven't seen you in a while, but I know LinkedIn's been busy.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: We have been busy. It's as fun of a stretch as I've seen. We have been busy and, you know, it's just cool to see the world change.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Yeah. So before we get into LinkedIn, hiring assistant and all the great things going on there, just really quick tell everybody a little bit about your background and how you got to LinkedIn.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: So yeah, first, nice to see you and hear, at least hear many of you. My name is Hari. I work at LinkedIn. I work on the team that helps people get a job and learn a skill, which is what we call talent solicitous. Anything around the world of job seeking, hiring, learning, skilling, anything around there. I joined God, I can't call myself an entrepreneur anymore, but I joined Fund Purchased a small company called we created it, which is a startup I had in 2014. At that point, I'm sure it's not method that many of you have heard of, but it was the IMDb of products. People could come in and say they helped make this pan or they helped make, you know, this can or they designed this app or whatever it was. And just like IMDb, you come in and say how you helped create it. And we had started selling some recruiting products on top of it. And LinkedIn obviously being a place that values that I did professional identity, values that ability to get opportunity from it just felt like the perfect landing ground for it. And it's been a fun run since.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: No kidding. Yeah. Explosive growth. And I think Everybody knows what LinkedIn does and how big LinkedIn is as part of Microsoft. So we're going to talk about hiring assistant primarily today, right? Not other products.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Wherever you want to go, Josh. I always enjoy.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Well, I'd like to ask you a million questions, but I know that's one of the things you guys want to talk about. Let's start at the sort of the high level. From your perspective at LinkedIn, what do you see as the client issues or the market needs in the, in the recruiting and hiring and staffing part of the world?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Sure. Well, maybe I'll just start with, you know, I, I have the pleasure of talking. Oh God, it must have been thousands and thousands of recruiters since I've started this role and even some stuff where we created it. You know, it's funny there, there's. We'll get into the logic of it, but I almost see it always as two parts. I'll start talking to people about the job. And you know, they absolutely start lighting up at this idea that when you give someone a match, when you change their career, when you get that note that says, hey, I couldn't have done this without you, it is such a special feeling, and it's something that not most jobs have. It is this feeling that you made an impact and changed someone's life and you could see it and feel it and you understand how the company changed and how they change and person after person, I remember, I remember these grins. I remember how they light up in that moment. And then of course, I'm in the product of selling them products and you know, they start talking about the day to day and. And there's this one, one of the first recruiters I met, she said this line to me. It's never always stuck with me. It's I love my job, but I hate my day. And they start going through the grind of, oh, well, I gotta go into search and then I copy and paste this in my ets and then I go into the screening call. And a lot of times the person is like knowing the first five minutes it's not gonna work, and they just start going through this arc and the energy and the emotion and like all the process starts kicking in. And you can see that that moment of connection keeps them going through that process. But those moments of kind of what we call getting from the billion to the one, that's kind of a grind. And so I always felt the pain point for this role is everyone knows they could be doing more on the candidate experience, more getting those candidates ready, maybe more onboarding them, getting those people up to speed. They know that's where the effect, like where that benefit for the company is going to come from and as well as where that, you know, where the candidate is going to have the best experience.
But they spend all their time on the other stuff on what I call the left side of chart. Kind of starting by screening applications, making sure that people can schedule those interviews, cutting and pasting information back and forth. And so hiring assistant is our attempt to solve that problem. Hiring assistant, what it wants to do is be your hiring assistant wants to take that process off your plate so that you can spend more time making sure the experience is better and you can make sure you get the right candidates in.
And that's where LinkedIn hiring system came about.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Well, let's talk a little bit about what it is, because, you know, the interesting thing about you guys is you have in a sense, because of what LinkedIn is you are a sourcing system, a talent intelligence system, as well as a recruiting and selection system, and then really a system that can go through the whole funnel. Explain to me kind of what you guys built. I know a lot of people on the podcast have probably heard of Hiring Assistant. Maybe some people have it. But tell us a little bit about what you built and how you decided to build all these things, and then we'll talk a little bit about the sort of the marketplace and, you know, the application areas for different companies.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: So Hiring Assistant is just exactly that. It's designed to be an assistant that helps you as a recruiter hire. And one of the most joyous parts of this is, you know, I've been working on it for over a year now, and I remember a few months ago, people started explaining to me back like that they were like, oh, this thing feels like a partner. This feels like something that's actually helping me do the job. And it was a very special moment to kind of see it come to life. Now, kind of more specifically, I thought it very much in terms of kind of a flow, if you think about where, and I know it's not this simple, but it helps kind of lay out how we started thinking about the product. If you think about what happens, you have a billion people on LinkedIn. And from the very beginning, what you're starting to do is you start doing an intake to understand what you actually want to do. And there's a series of kind of subtasks under that. You have to reach out to your hiring manager. You have to understand what the role is, you have to understand the talent market. Then you're going to go start sourcing and looking at people and looking at applications and understanding how to best go after this. And then there's kind of the messaging to screening part of the flow. And what we started doing is saying, okay, where can we start with those pain points and start unwinding it. And so all three of those pain points, from how we're doing intake, calibrating against the flow, to how we're actually doing sourcing, how we're looking at evidence and understanding how these people are, right, trying different sourcing strategies as well as the messaging and screening portions, hiring assistance can be added to any of those parts and help you basically save time against those by using AI intelligence to do a smarter intake, to calibrate better what you're looking for to source more effectively. So it's not only limited by the human eyes, you can understand all the different kinds of evidence this Might be right again for the world as well as how do you make a much better message and a much better screening. Now I'm going to kind of jump to one thing which is I know there's a lot of AI companies who are saying that like I get it, I'm like well aware of it. So now, like I said, we're over a year in. We've had hundreds of companies start to charter this stuff. It's now live to all kind of English speaking kind of users. There's a couple stats I want to send to you because they're real and I think it's really important to kind of.
So, so we're hearing on average customers are saying four hours per role, they're reviewing 62% fewer profiles and we're seeing a 69% improvement in in mail rates. So let's start with kind of what I said. This thing should help you find better candidates and it should help you kind of message and screen them. And on both of those we're seeing pretty step function gains in productivity. And it's really tremendous to see because we know at the end of that people are now able to spend more time on the candidate experience, more time in the right parts of the interview flow, more time getting the people up to success. And I think this has been a process that we could have, I'm very glad to see starting to improve.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: So one of the ways I think of it is in some ways it's the combination of a whole bunch of tools that somebody would buy if they didn't have LinkedIn. Right? Because you'd have a sourcing tool and then you'd have a sort of a job description generation tool and then you'd probably have a email CRM tool and then you'd have an assessment process and then you'd have an interview scheduling tool and on and on and on.
Is that correct?
[00:07:23] Speaker B: I think that's so, yes. I think it helps with many steps of the system and often there's vertical solutions against all of them. My read on how we've been thinking about this product is the way software is being created, the way tech is being created is being, is changing. What matters now is its ability to be a partner to you, to find intelligence that matches your needs and more importantly, understand the data of the entire labor marketplace to make that whole system work. So, so like super concretely, I think it would be strange to be sourcing for something you really want, but not be able to include that in the message or the screening so that you're only finding that downstream. That's inefficient. It's strange for me to have a hiring manager say you want something calibrate into a separate system and then try to translate that into a sourcing flow. All of that intelligence is just that intelligence. And there's a layer of tissue that needs to connect. And that's where. If we started approaching this from, how do we make the right AI assistant? I think we ended up with a very different kind of product that is starting to work where maybe others who went after it in verticals had trouble getting those.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: And if you're. If you're doing. If you're. So does it's one of the. I just have sort of a few questions that I haven't seen it for a while. Does it source people inside of your company as well as people outside of.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Your company, so in your internal mobility as well as external? Yeah. So if you, as, you know, if you. Or maybe you could basically allow.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: I'm not a recruiter, but I've seen lots of demos.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Oh, fantastic. If you look at this product, you're allowed to basically have an internal mobility filter. And that filter allows you to now use that intelligence against anyone who's opted into the company if your company so chooses. So, yes, you could do internal and external mobility on the.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: So for. For these big companies that are buying general recruiting tools, it's sort of the Eightfold type of stuff. The gloat or internal mobility kinds of tools, all of the selection and candidate experience tools all the way down to now. What about the interviewing process? How does it help with that?
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Great. So, you know, openly. I don't. I spend so much time thinking about our members and customers. We built this in such a way. I don't know exactly where it stands.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: You don't know who these other companies are. Right.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: So I will leave that to you and our very smart customers to help us kind of determine where we fit to. Your second question on interviewing.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: I think the reason I asked is because now there's a whole range of AI interviews, automatic avatar, different forms of.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: I would, I think about interviewing. I think it's one of those processes getting unbundled in this world a little bit. So the very first thing that happens when you're. Especially when you're going after great talent, people don't want to jump immediately to an AI interview. I think most recruiters I talk to would acknowledge that the most important thing first is see how to get that person in. So we offer something we call a digital screener. Once you're allowed to come in over InMail, once you've made the connection, a recruiter can add the digital screener and ask some basic questions. Because one of the most frustrating parts is, you know, someone comes in both on the seeker side or the higher side and in two minutes they know because of some geolocation issue or visa issue, it's not going to be a fit. And asking a couple of those over tech saves everyone time. And so the very first thing they could do is come in and add this digital assistant. The it's completely transparent to the seeker and they can have a conversation about it. Now most importantly, social AI is something very new and I'm really proud of how we built this. Both sides have complete transparency and both sides can say, hey, is it okay if I just talk to the other person? Because there's a real human at the end of it and therefore it doesn't feel like I'm talking into kind of an empty, you know, I don't know where this stuff is going. It's a real human and they know where it's going. The second part of interview is really important is a lot of times when people start the interview process, they want a mock interview. And if you're every job on LinkedIn.com right now, if you go look, if you, you're a good fit for that job, we'll offer that mock interview and people can come in and start getting ready for it and ask questions. And that's a big part of making sure we also provide signal noise. We're giving the right applications to the right person. Then the third step of this product is, you know, there's going to be a real in person interview. And that may be some questions that are automated and not. But I don't, I'm not the. I believe there's definitely going to be a process in a real inhuman interview. And that's a part of the process that I hope will, you know, continue to stay in human. And I think that's something that we're seeing in our system too. We want to make sure the right people get into the company so that they can spend the right amount of time making sure they're a cultural fit. That's generally the way we've been approaching that space.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: What are the, what are the parts of the market that you think it's not a fit for? How like would companies use it for high volume hiring? For executive search. Search.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: I mean, what for hiring assistant. Now we've seen it all. We have, you Know, take a great company like Siemens, you know, we're hearing that from Siemens there. They can now source five or more candidates in 10 to 15 minutes, minutes with hiring assistant. And, you know, that's a very, very big deal. Yeah, we're hearing from staffing companies. One staffing company told us they saw a 20 increase in revenue attributed to this. So we're hearing from staffing companies, and then we've been hearing internationally, we're seeing companies like in Australia that are actually telling us already that this thing feels like a partner. And so we're seeing it all across the board. When you integrate it with your ats, we obviously hope that intelligence accrues to some of your applications that come in.
And so we believe that this is like, like I said, it's a new way of thinking about their product where there's so many different workflows. This is an intelligence piece and underlies it all. And obviously, we're kind of proud that LinkedIn recruiter works for many, many different kinds of organizations. But more importantly, LinkedIn itself, you know, it's got everything now. We have over a billion people. And I think that speaks to kind of the testament that many, many people are choosing here to find their jobs.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Do you. Do you consider. Do companies consider LinkedIn an ATS at this point?
Do you feel like that's part of your market?
[00:12:58] Speaker B: It's so funny, when I look at the prom and I think, you've known me for a while, I always think about it, about pain points. I never think about in terms of internal systems. And I think the truth of that is when you think about a product, you gotta think about, what pain point am I trying to solve and what's the right track around it. And so I never think of it like, are we this or are we that? Cause I think it's very defining. And if you live in our world of tech changes so rapidly.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Like, what's a search engine now? I don't know. Like, I mean, is it this or this? And so I feel like that often, if you want to be one of those companies that hopefully has, you know, kind of staying power, I really think it's important to make sure you think about in terms of pain points and not. I live in this kind of box because the boxes are always going to change.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Let me ask you maybe a little bit more, less of a product question, more of a general market question. It occurs to me from all the companies I talk to that many of the traditional processes in recruiting, picking a job title, picking a Job level, creating a job description are being disrupted by the speed at which everything is changing. And so, for example, with our tool Galileo, which is not really an end to end recruiting tool at all, it's more of a support system, you can go in and start a job descript, start a job sort of creation, and then it'll look out at all sorts of job descriptions of other companies and kind of aggregate for you. What, especially based on the city, look at competitors that are hiring for that role. What, what do you see at the LinkedIn side on that part of the system? Because I think one of the problems with talent acquisition is some of it, and we've done research on this, there is a fulfillment center tactical role that talent acquisition groups play that they don't really want to play full time. They want to be more strategic. They want to get to know where these jobs are going. They want to know, you know, maybe we shouldn't be recruiting this role, even though the hiring manager thinks they need this role. What is your sense of that dynamic change and where, where, where are you going? Cause I know you're so good at thinking about these problems. I want to hear where you want to go.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: I'm gonna start by just thinking about the job seeker and talent and I'll explain our thoughts there and then it'll make sense how we're thinking about it from the hiring side of the marketplace. I saw this stat the other day and it was job seeker confidence is now lower than I've ever seen it since April of 2020, which is right around Covid. And so it's unclear what's happening in the labor market, but the perception of what's happening in the labor market for most seekers is that it is, you know, time to have anxiety. And I think that is the reality of how talent is approaching the job market right now. So when we saw this, what we did is we started looking at our job search tool. And again, I'll tie this all back into how it fits in the hiring in a second. But most job searches on the Internet, if you go, you see a box, rectangular box, and you could put in a title and a location. And that's how job searches worked. And what we said is, look, in a world where everyone feels like they're not sure if their title is going to fit in that box, they don't know what title to look for. There's so much confusion. We started just opening up to a much different semantic oriented search, which is a complete rewrite of our entire system. This isn't like it sounds easy when I say it's a rectangle. It was a ridiculously hard task. And now when you come into that system, you can come in and say everything from, look, I'm looking for a job working or learning AI, I'm looking for a job with a mission to Mars. I'm looking for a job, you know, where I can kind of work, work with gummy bear technology, whatever you think is the right job. And we will surface up a series.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Of jobs that two hour lunch breaks.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Or, you know, you pick what's important to you. And it is crazy because I have seen step function gains in our precision, our relevance, even our usage of that product because people are getting jobs that are more meaningful for them. Now the second step about that, of course, if you're going for a job that might have a wider aperture, you need to know how you match. So we created a little deeper on every job application says how you match. We look at the profile and the job description. We created these custom interviews. We made sure that you can now navigate that piece of the world. And I, to me, I've been talking and you've been talking about this idea that job titles are kind of moving to skilling. For a long time I felt for the first time there was the technology that worked. Like now anyone can come into any job you can understand and you can get a match. And again, this has been one of our more engaging products we've ever launched. Like, I'm really, really proud of the results. So what does that mean if you're a customer? Well, you come into hiring assistant and you describe the job.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: And nearly always people would say, well, I'm coming in and I need to hire an exact account executive. I need to hire a product manager. Nowadays, when I'm probably like one of the super users of our hiring system, I approach it really differently. I come in and say, I need someone who's built a semantic search system. I need someone who understands these kind of relevance stacks. Do I care if that person's title engineer, founder? No, I don't care. Like, I just want someone who's done this. And because the hiring assistant can now look across all of our data and understand evidence rather than just do title matching, it says, well, okay, Hari in this particular role used this, he's used this relevance in this particular resume that was submitted to this company.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: He was able to basically have this publication around this. It could see the evidence you are getting a different set of candidates than you would if you just did a Title match. And that to me, this idea of like kind of skills based hiring and looking at evidence against it is what's unlocking a lot of the labor market right now. So to get your original touch and I, I'm kind of not no longer like, you know, moving on from hey, this is going to be a world where we're not sure what titles to hire for, et cetera, to encouraging people to say what do you really need done? And it sounds crazy, but I don't think people are great at that. I don't think even hiring managers are great at articulating the work that needs to be done. And I think that is an emerging skill. As the bottleneck changes from finding people that you have to kind of be constrained in this to what do I actually need to do? I think the people who are more capable of articulating that and really understanding that are going to find the best talent and that's just going to be a huge part of kind of improving time to fill in many of the other.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: I completely agree with you, Hari. One of the research studies we did recently showed that about 75% of the TA leaders believe they are not given the opportunity to actually craft the job. They're being told what, who to hire from a hiring manager who probably has no idea what's really going on in the job market. So there's a lot of opportunity for recruiting departments to give this freedom to their recruiters and then of course to their hiring managers to educate them that, you know, just because you think it's this job title, maybe it's not.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: I completely agree. I think the ability to really help like as, as HR moves and develops, I think the ability to be a thought partner to understand what is going to be required in order to get the job done and how to articulate that's going to be a massive emerging skill. And I think that's something that a lot of recruiters have and it's going to be their moment to show that they can do that.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: So now, now that this is, I'm sure this product has been developed for a long time because it's, it's so integrated. What's next for you guys? Can you give us a little peek? Because you have so much insights into many, many things going on in the job market.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: It's such a great question. So hiring assistant in its own right has a pretty ambitious roadmap against it. Part of that roadmap is of course to make sure that we continue to have the right kind of integrations and the right kind of workflow in it, but a lot of it is continuing to just make sure that the intelligence layer continues to improve as well. And again, that's a new part of how we think about it. How do you just make sure it sounds easy? I just take a model and I have it. Look at this thing. I would encourage anyone to just go and try to search for someone you know on, on ChatGPT and you'll see that sometimes little things like the articulation of how you put into a role or you know, how I think through if this person is going to be a ma. Those things really.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Let me stop you for a sec. There was this announcement from OpenAI about searching for jobs for candidates who know AI. I have no idea what they're doing. You probably know. Do you see them as a potential competitor to you?
Where do you see them in this whole equation?
[00:20:44] Speaker B: You know, I had a chance to read it, but I haven't kept in very close touch with it. So I probably don't have anything. But you know, the one thing I always think about when I see these things is it's really important for us in our team to just do. We've been around for a while, we've had many people who have thought and entered the space. As long as we just keep making sure that members are first priority.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: No, no, I'm with you. In fact, Google tried it, Facebook tried it. It's complicated.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: So I mean it's a hard space and it's much harder than people realize, you know. Yeah, it's a very hard space.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Let me ask you another question that's been dogging me for quite a while and I think many companies have spent a lot of time and money on this and that's this idea of building skills taxonomies. And when I first got ear of this and I've not been a huge fan of it because there's many, many aspects to hiring people and what you call this skill versus what you call that skill. You could have debates about it for months and you know, maybe it's not even worth having the debate. And companies did a lot of that manually and then they thought that their HCM systems would do it for them automatically, which of course they didn't. And then they started buying skills libraries and then they started buying Skillz Tool. You guys in the meanwhile have been building and integrating your skills taxonomy and harmonizing, harmonizing it between learning and recruiting as I understand it. Is that correct? Where do you think this is all going and is it time to let go of that project and let the system do this for you.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: So, two thoughts on it. The Skills Taxonomy was created by an organization usually to solve at least two problems. The first we talked about it is this idea of how do I navigate an organization by title? Again, I think a lot of that is we used to say it's going away and it was more theory. I can look at the product today. It's very different to how the user interface works. I think much more people are realizing that it, you know, people have these capabilities, the title change, technology is changing, the workflows are changing. I think that pain point is probably disappearing. The second reason was you have to have some ability to communicate some of that expertise in an organization. So you said you were navigating, you know, if I came in and I said we were like an MSR2, what does that mean here and what does that mean there? There's a whole. So what we've been doing in our Career Hub product is we launched a new product actually recently, Career Hub. And it was kind of extending the idea that LinkedIn learning should be not just a place you can learn skills today, but a place you could build your career going forward. And what in Career Hub what you can do is you could bring in whatever knowledge or taxonomy you have and we basically make a connector into our system there. Thereby, if you wanted to say, look, I have some data how people are moving my organization, but I'd love to combine that with LinkedIn data. It becomes a lot easier. And if I'm coming in, I'm looking for a job and I don't yet know the vocabulary you can use LinkedIn job. If I do know the vocabulary, I can translate a LinkedIn internal job into this. And I feel like that language translator piece was just something we had to build. I don't think it's necessarily how you know. It may not be something that the world continues to have to spend this much time on based on item one, but I recognize a lot of companies have it. There's a lot of internal job.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would like to sort of celebrate the fact that manually creating Skills Taxonomy maybe of coming to the end and end soon or almost thanks to you guys and others. So thank you for that. One more thing that's I hear constantly from companies is the floods of resumes coming from AI job seeker tools. Literally to the point, I'm sure you've heard this where people post a job and in the middle of the night and there's a hundred resumes within Two minutes from people who may not even exist. What do you guys see there? And what, what, what?
[00:24:14] Speaker B: It's. I mean, I think, you know, it's funny, I think some people say, oh, you know, there's so many resumes coming in that I don't need to find talent. I hear the same point you do, which is the problem is more signal noise. I'm not getting enough signal still, but now I even get more noise. So let's just go into the two things that I think are driving and how we're, we're going ahead and do it. We're going to fix, like, we're going to make sure our stuff works. The first is, must have been over two, two years ago now we launched this idea of verified identity. And I think we're probably around the exact date on this. I think we're probably one of the largest verified identity sources on the Internet. And we want to make sure that people can look at a LinkedIn profile and say, is that person have, is that person real? That person actually work there? And anyone who goes to that little badge next to your name on the profile, that's becoming a real thing for us. And I think we saw kind of that corner coming and that was a reason that we really started to spend time on that. So now we wanted to make sure that these folks are real. The second thing you're doing, if you go to any job right now, you'll see this thing saying, are you a good match for that job? And you can hit, you know, show me a little bit more. And we'll tell you where we see like there's evidence and where there's not. And we can redirect you to say you should either update your profile or maybe redirect to these other kinds of jobs. And we are seeing that already start to show some differences between what we call a high quality application and not. And so we're starting to see that, starting to shift where we feel we can, we can do this now. What we never want to do is be kind of in the business of blocking someone from an application. I recognize that's a really important thing. And companies want that. They want the pulsate of applications. The final thing I will say is with hiring assistant, some of that work where you might be able to say, look, I'm looking for this, and basically use that intelligence in order to recommend something to spend more time on. There is some work there that we've, we've launched and we're alive with as well. And I think there is a reality that there, you know, there's a bunch of people who are going to put things into your career side or ats, and it's just going to flow. There's no fuse limits on that. Right. And I think customers getting smart on how they want to start thinking through that is a really good thing.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Well, you've done a lot. One more thing that's a little bit of a different topic. Hari so I've known you for a long time, and many of the people at LinkedIn for a long time, usually guys like you that worked at startups go to work for big companies, they last three or four years and they say, okay, I'm done with that, let me find the next startup. I, I just went through Asia. I don't know if, you know, I just spent a two week tour with you guys over there. The, the people that I meet at LinkedIn seem to love their jobs. They seem to be having a lot of fun. Their retention and engagement level is extraordinarily high for a big company. You're still there. What is it about the culture of LinkedIn that makes it so successful? And I'd like you to be honest, because I think everybody can learn from whatever it is you guys do because you feel it when you go there. And I've always felt it when I walked in the door.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: It's a wonderful place and I really mean that. And I'll give you the two reasons I've @ least been able to think about it. The first is we really do hire for this idea that you care for this vision and mission of creating economic opportunity. And that keeps you here through the ups, through the downs. I mean, you, you and I have seen the labor market go up and down. There's been good days and bad days, but it keeps those people here and fighting to make these things better. Yeah, it's, you know, you could always kind of say, should I do this or not? But if you're motivated to keep going after that problem, you stick around and you fight through those hard times. I think we've done a phenomenal job. There's two, it's very much a place where if you believe that, you never feel like you're out of integrity. And I can't put that in, like, I've never been in a conversation here where if the decision was, how do I create economic opportunity, how to make a buck, Everyone knows where we're headed, Everyone knows where we're headed. And it makes every decision and many things easier. It's also completely integrated business model. It's not like we're doing this and then like, you know, I'm going to get someone a job, but I got to find another way to like secretly make money. I always think about this. If I do my job and I help people get jobs and I help people learn skill, the revenue comes in and that ability that you have people who are mission oriented and then you have a system that lets them be mission oriented. I just have never been able to find many places like that in the world. And I think about startups all the time, but that is such a special thing where you can go and do something you think is important. For me, I think this is important.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: There's something more.
I don't know what it is. There's something more than that. It's something about the freedom, the flexibility, maybe the forgiveness, the motivation, the inspiration. I don't know.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: It all starts with that vision and that belief. And I feel, feel like, honestly that becomes like a shared set of values. And to your point, a lot of the other goodness start from that. At least that's my perspective. But it is a really, really wonderful place.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Okay, so the last question, which is the one that everybody keeps asking me is, isn't AI going to replace recruiters? So all of your friends that you sell and make these products for are all worried about whether they're going to have jobs. What's your perspective on that?
[00:28:50] Speaker B: I've been pretty clear since day one that I think the recruiter job is not going anywhere. And otherwise, I mean, I'd be obviously not wanting to spend time on this as well. So let me give something I just read the other day and you might, I don't know if you saw it. Do you see all the stuff on radiologists that are coming out?
[00:29:02] Speaker A: No.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Okay, so radiologists was like the quintessential job that everyone.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I know it was expected to disappear.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: We are, we have radiologist. Unemployment has never been lower and salaries have never been higher. And let's understand what's kind of going on. One, there's a lot of studies on this. It's actually. I'll send you some papers out.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: You.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: You'd get super into, I think.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: A radiologist job is different than the task of kind of looking at a scan. That's number one. So even if you're getting more efficient at the task, at looking for the scan, you need someone to do the rest of this work. Number two, there's a lot of latent demand for really big people. You know, there's a lot of things that people would like, where should I send this or not? But as the cost falls, there's more and more people who would like to do this. Three, there is really a belief that this is, even if this is good, 85, 95% of the time, the evals are there. For someone who needs to review this and make sure it's right, that's kind of what we expect as a society.
I think that's a great analogy for recruiters. You know, that the recruiting task is not just sourcing. There's so much work in terms of how you spend time with someone to bring in the right talent that's involved. That's that thing that brings a smile to people's face.
Number two, you know, there's lean demand for recruiting because we know every job in the world wouldn't mind a recruiter. If you ask someone on the street like, hey, you're small, do you recruit for you? Of course they do that. Then, number three, we know that there is more and more that recruiting can do, right? We know there are more and more kind of ideas that they can grow into. They could. We know there's a better onboarding experience. We know there's a better career experience. We know there's a lot of.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: There's other things they can do when the administrative work is taken away. You know, one of the. Here's a story for you. I don't know if this, if this helps you in your role, but many years ago, I was interviewing the head of recruiting for Hess Petroleum was an oil company and a very incredibly smart guy. And we were talking about the shortage of PhD petroleum engineers at the time. There's only two or three thousand of them in the world, and they're all jumping around from company to company. And I was asking him, you know, what have you found? Is the data or information that defines a really high quality hire in that very rare talent pool that you need? Because that was. Because they're very data driven, I was expecting to give me all sorts of statistical analysis of, you know, it's. It's the degree multiplied by two thirds of their experience, multiplied by how many countries they've been to or whatever. Because, you know, none of that stuff made any difference at all. The number one factor that correlates to the most high performing, high retention hires is the recruiter. The great recruiters are the ones that hire the great people. It had nothing to do with any of those other statistics. And I never forgot that conversation because recruiters have this human ability to find a match between a person and a company and a job and a role and a manager, that's very sort of not AI. You can't do it with AI. It's really a very human thing. So, so I, I think you, you're. I certainly agree with you. I don't think recruiters are going away either, but I'm sure a lot of them may, may like to hear your opinion. So thank you for sharing that.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: It's amazing. Again, I know you have such a tremendous audience who listens to you. Josh, anyone's listening. If you feel like there's a. If you're trying hiring assistant, we'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear from you on any other piece of the feedback too. And Josh, thank you, man. You've been, you've been working for us for a while and me for a while, so it means a lot.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: Thank you too. Okay, well, thanks for joining me and I'm sure people will reach out to you.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: I look forward to it. Thanks, Josh.
[00:32:16] Speaker C: Really, it's really up to you, Josh.
There's going to be a lot of noise on platform and a lot of excitement that week, so bringing this conversation into that I think could be behooving. But you're absolutely the decision maker when it's best for you and your audience.
Nothing. Hari is under embargo, but on the 21st is when we will be launching everything.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Okay, I'll get it done for the 21st.
[00:32:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Okay. Thank you, guys. Hari, great to see you.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: I'm seeing you in San Diego, right.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Josh, I can't come because I've got to go to something else that week, but.
But I am going to go to the LinkedIn Asia conference next year if you happen to be coming to that.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: Maybe you got the invite before me, so hopefully we'll see you there because.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: I was just over there with them. Sorry.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: I'm glad you spend time.
[00:33:03] Speaker A: All right. Well, anyway, and I'm serious about LinkedIn, you guys. There's something about the water you're drinking or something that just really seems to.
And I think people see it.
[00:33:12] Speaker C: We're lucky to work here. We're really lucky to work here. I really do feel that gratitude. Everything you said, Josh. I really feel it.
And I've been here eight years and I do just feel that gratitude every day. It sounds cheesy, but it's really true.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Great. Okay, thank you. All right, see you guys later.
[00:33:28] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you, Josh.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Bye.
