Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: One of the things we loved about the Copilot when we first started experiencing it was this idea that it was looking at people in a three dimensional way. It gives you a view of people that's not two dimensional like a resume and a view of jobs that's not two dimensional like job descriptions. It recognizes that people are a mix of literally hundreds of thousands of skills and attributes.
Hi, this is Josh Berson. Welcome to the what Works podcast where Josh Burson company analysts talk with innovative HR and business leaders about what's really working in talent, technology and the future of work.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Kathy Andress, SVP of Research and Global Industry Analyst at the Josh Burson Company. I'm excited to speak with Tim Best, the CEO of Recruit Military, about how AI can transform recruiting to help both job seekers and employers. Tim, it's so great to have you here. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Kathy hi, glad to be here.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: I'm so excited for this conversation. As we get into it, tell us about yourself first and tell us about Recruit Military and what it's all about.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: My background before being CEO of Recruit Military I was active duty Army. I served as a little bird attack helicopter pilot in the 160th soar, transitioned from there having never really heard of recruiting at all and found myself moving into the recruiting space like a lot of veterans. And I've served as a private equity CEO in this space for our organization for a little over 12 years and then helped lead Recruit Military, which is an amalgamation of a number of different brands from our space that were brought together via M and A over the past 15 years. It led us through a management buyout of the business back into an employee owned investor owned organization where there's a pretty large group of our teammates who own this veteran owned business Recruit Military today.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Wow. So what does Recruit Military do?
[00:01:58] Speaker A: We're a connector. We connect employers with military community job seekers and we get out there and execute that mission every day by really delivering a suite of products and services that bring those audiences together. We run world class career fairs across the country. We run over a hundred of them a year and then we actually have our own proprietary virtual career fair technology which we launched last year. So we're able to really help employers reach veterans across the country, but also across the globe and we're able to service members and their families who are overseas in remote locations and that's been huge for us. We also form connections via placement services. We have the world's largest veteran focused job board where we help employers and Job seekers engage digitally. We have a full suite of employer branding products and recruitment marketing products that help especially more sophisticated employers really execute building their brand in front of the military and veteran community in a really pretty awesome way. And we run some other bespoke events that specialize in veterans with special educational backgrounds, like our MBA veterans event that we run every year. And then Kathy, probably one of the most exciting things that we launched over the past couple of years was our partnership with Findom to create an AI enabled tool to really help bring what we do as a connector into this AI enabled era. And really excited to talk about that more today.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. So to summarize, what recruit military, does you really help veterans find corporate job placements and organizations to find these highly qualified veterans that could have a great corporate career, Is that right?
[00:03:41] Speaker A: That's exactly right. Each year we work with thousands of employers and our goal is to to make it easy for them to connect with our community and then to continue to evolve our products so that translation becomes easier and more effective, leading to more and more hiring outcomes.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Wow. Do you have any numbers how many people are connected or find jobs? It must be a big number. Do you have that?
[00:04:06] Speaker A: It is. And because of the scale we work at, we'll be again in Dallas at and T Stadium holding a career fair. There'll be probably a hundred employees there and probably five or six hundred veterans. And some of those employers are small business businesses who love the idea of coming in and finding that right hire right there in the area. Others are Fortune 50 companies coming in and it's a part of their overall veteran recruiting program. So the scale is quite large. One of the things we measure very closely is what we call connections. And again, we really look at ourselves as a connector. And in 2025 we created over 600,000 connections. We between employers and military community job seekers.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: That's so significant. Wow. 600,000 connections. Usually when you think about the corporate environment, how many people you hire usually don't hire 600,000 in a year. But making these 600,000 connections, and maybe not all of them are going to result in a higher rate. But making these connections, helping with that translation, with making those connections. Wow. And what an impact that has on organizations as well as on veterans, of course, as well. And you know this of course firsthand. You lived in that and worked in that environment too. So wow. Really, really amazing. That's fantastic. So tell us a little bit more on how this journey into the AI age has been for you. Where did you get started. How did you even realize you wanted to jump in?
Start with the beginning. What kind of business benefits or what business problems were you trying to solve as you were thinking about AI?
[00:05:37] Speaker A: I love that question. We want to be listeners first. And so we go out of our way to listen to employers, to listen to job seekers, to listen to transition professionals, to get understand on where they're going and how they want to be brought together. And you know, there's a lot of aspects of a veteran's successful journey. That's why we partner with great brands like DAV who can bring in other really important aspects on road operations of that journey. We focus on that connecting. So that's really where we hone in our listening. And about six years ago, our CTO again named Mike Frankham and I started getting focused from some of those listening sessions on what we called skills based hiring.
And we really believed that was what was coming. We didn't know exactly what that was gonna look like. So I really tasked him with being outside of the walls of recruit military, working with other technology leaders, being at events where there's a lot of these kinds of conversations going on, frankly, following a lot of great analysts like the Josh Burson Group, wanting to make sure that we could continue to develop our products in a contemporary way. Being honest, we didn't see the Gen AI movement coming six years ago. When it did, very quickly we realized we weren't wrong. It just was a much more accelerated version of what we were expecting. We had been engaging with a number of technology providers at the time, a couple of which which focused specifically on veterans in kind of skills based matching. And we were a little frustrated that we hadn't found one that understood the employer side in the veteran space. Kathy there's a lot of incredible organizations doing work on behalf of the veterans, but at scale, if you don't understand the employer's problems, there's only so much help you can provide. And we want to make veteran recruiting a normal part of any organization's hiring process. We don't want it to be a special project. When it's a special project, it's never going to be at the scale that it can be.
So Mike was doing his diligence and in 2024 he started engaging with Heather from Findam, Hari from Find, him and the team. And he actually reached out to me after spending some face to face time with them at HR Tech and said, tim, I think I've found the partners. And I said, okay. Why? The two headliner reasons were they Understand the employer side and what they've built is really compelling. But they also seem to have values that are aligned with ours and they want to solve the problem for the right reasons. And I got very excited because I don't see Mike get excited very often and quickly. That led us into a really cool conversation that turned into a partnership, the Veteran Talent source in 2025 that has really ushered in a new product area for recruit military and frankly for our community.
And it really supports our other products and services in a really cool way. And we're excited to see how our customers continue to embr it and bring it into their processes.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: So what is the Veteran Talent Source? Tell us more about that and how does AI play into that?
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Sure. The Veteran Talent Source is a version of findom's Copilot. It's an AI enabled tool that basically on a single pane of glass brings in the capability for a talent team to have a really elite sourcing capability. One of the things we loved about the Copilot when we first started experiencing it was this idea that it was looking at people in a three dimensional way. It gives you a view of people that's not two dimensional like a resume and a view of jobs that's not two dimensional like job descriptions. What I saw very quickly that I loved was it recognizes that people are a mix of literally hundreds of thousands of skills and attributes. And Kathy, why this is so important to veterans and to our community. I'll just use myself as an example. I was a helicopter pilot and the community I was coming out of had some of the best pilots on the planet in it and some of the most incredible operators on the planet. But I wasn't like a lot of them and they're not like me, but we were doing the same job. And the Veteran Talent Source and the Findom co pilot, what it does is it recognizes there's more to a person than what's on their resume or to use veteran lingo, what their specialty was, their MOS in the military. And it says who is Tim best based on all of his skills and attributes and then what their tool does so well. It surfaces that in front of recruiters and talent leaders in a way that they can understand.
They don't need to know anything about what an 86 little bird attack helicopter pilot was in the military. They can see why an AI actually helps them understand why Tim has been surfaced for this role that they're searching. It's a game changer when it comes to translating and getting through those transferable skills issues.
And then you add to that, Kathy, that the Findum copilot continuously is enriching profile so that you know who Tim was when he transitioned 25 years ago. If I was in someone's ATS, they're going to have a completely different view of who I am today. And you know this from the world you live in. Every employer is different. Their problems are different, their needs are different. To just go to an employer and say, hey, we have this incredible new sourcing solution. That's great. A lot of big brands don't need more people at the top of their funnel. They need to do a better job of understanding how to look at all of their inbound applications and become more efficient with those to do a better job of regenerating all of the talent that's in their ats, in their company. And they have no idea. And so find them, put all of that in one place. I have a team of people across the globe, many of which have been in this industry for 10, 15, 20 years. None of us have ever seen a tool like this. And so being able to go into a co innovation cycle with them and do something that really begins what I think is the biggest shift in military community recruiting since I've been in the industry is really special.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Wow. Fantastic. So let me just summarize that or clarify how this actually works. So a recruiter, for example, of one of your employer partners, would they use that solution? Would they use the talent source from Find Them basically, to say, I have this hiring need, this position basically, that I need to recoup for, and then it would find veterans, basically, and then also explain why this veteran is a great candidate for that. Is that how it works or how do people engage with it?
[00:11:55] Speaker A: No. That's right, Kathy. And I'll give a real simple example. Let's say one of our Fortune 500 customer of ours, their jobs are all in our ecosystem. They're in our ecosystem. And we have what we call a my recruit military environment, which is a really cool way that they can engage in all of their events, all of that in one place. The veteran talent source is within that environment.
So when one of the recruiters has a veteran talent source license, they can simply click on a tile of one of the jobs that they want to work on. AI breaks that down into more attributes and skills than you could ever select yourself as a recruiter, Then it executes a search and you can very quickly and easily adjust that search. Or you could do nothing and let the copilot suggest the top 50 matches for you. And this is where again, the single pane of glass is so effective that recruiter can then do a few calibration reviews to make sure it's their understanding. The AI will help it understand why this veteran with this background is a fit. They can even ask the AI, hey, tell me more about what a machinist mate in the Navy does and why they're fit for this role. The AI will do that. It has 30 years of our data and experience and everything that's up in our brains developed into it. And then that recruiter can very quickly, using this incredible personalized campaigning feature, go out and create real customized messages. The tool will create these customized messages and make that outreach to those job seekers to then create that list of interested job seekers to begin the recruiting process. It's in a matter of a few button pushes. What would have taken days can be done with the veteran talent source.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Wow. And some of the things, even if it had taken longer, you probably couldn't even do, as you said, right? Because you could probably not decompose the job into so many different attributes and skills, even if you try it for days or weeks, because some of the things you just can't do. It's so fascinating. Do you have any insights or any data on better quality of hire or better matches or more responses on these personalized messages? Or do the employers share that with you or is this more employee aside Question?
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Yeah, and I wish I had come a little more prepared to give the exact numbers, but I'll call it qualitative information on this. Good. Specifically on the personalized campaigns. And this has been a really interesting learning for me. And just as a way of introducing this as we began this partnership and we're really looking at the future with where the agentic versions of these products are going. One of the things that I hear a lot from people who are not yet fully on the adoption curve for this technology is the depersonalization that happens with AI.
And what I've seen is the exact opposite of that. These personalized campaigns that they have built will produce better and more personalized emails. And I think it actually produces a better experience. And so now to get to the qualifying information, one of our subject matter experts, she's our lead csm, just ran a class for our company, just updating them on what we're seeing and what we're hearing from customers. After the first six months of our VTS launch in the personalized campaigns, we are seeing open rates on those emails in the 80 and 90% level, which is unheard of.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Yes, it's unheard of. Yeah.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: And then our click through rates when we post the link to the job in there are five times what we would see on normal click through rates. Wow. And so one, this is great for employers. Right. But you know who else this is great for job seekers, because what that means is they're being delivered meaningful opportunities. It's not just what they're used to now, which is apply, never hear anything back, and get spammed with all kinds of jobs you're not interested in. This is proving that technology can create a much better experience for both audiences.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. Those numbers are really unheard of and really amazing. We all get These spams from LinkedIn or other places right. Where you get, oh, you should be interested in this job. I'm like, not even close to what I'm doing. Something that's not even in the same area at all. So having that good of a match, as you said, creates much better opportunities for the veterans to. Too fantastic.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: It does. And Kathy, if I could add one thing on that too.
Part of our vision we mentioned, we want to take veteran recruiting from project level, make it a part of every recruiter's every day. And one of the things that we know that this technology over time will help solve is when you're transitioning from the military, you don't understand the job descriptions very much at all as a transitioning service member. And likewise, the recruiters don't understand you. So there's this constant feeling of I'm applying, but I'm never hearing back. And we know that putting this tool in the hands of recruiters will reverse that process eventually to a level where the problem won't be that I'm applying and I'm never hearing back. I'm getting inundated with recruiters that understand me. And now how do I really hone in on what I want to do?
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Which would be a good problem to have, I'm sure, because an abundance of suitable opportunities.
That usually doesn't happen to any job seeker, let alone veterans, I'm sure. And the AI could probably help with that too. Right. It could help narrow it down and help you prioritize because it understands you pretty well as well. Wow, that's really fantastic. As you got started with AI, what was most challenging? What problems did you have or did you encounter any problems or anything that you needed to get used to? Any challenges that you encountered there?
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah, they were largely internal. And first was we had to move very quickly on this. And part of that was the partnership objective and something this big, this was a complete product change for us and a complete rate card change. So even internally, just building the change management cycles and going through that as a team, that was challenging. And our team is flexible and adapting, you know, but still, this was big and our team did an amazing job of it. And I'd say the biggest challenge was when we did launch. Our business development team did an amazing job of putting the work in and the training and developing vocabulary and expertise on how to bring it to market. But when we did, I think what we ran into quickly was our process was introducing all of our products and services to a demo process and we were demoing this tool that is amazing. And all of a sudden we introduced a much more complicated conversation and a really compelling tool into our sales cycle that none of us were really ready for what that was going to look like. For the first couple of months. You go through those early periods and you're wondering, oh, did we do this a little too aggressively? We got through that after a couple months and it was exciting to see us get through it. And then the one other challenge is small and mid sized businesses, they're more likely to jump in and try this. I had one of our strategists that works with large customers say something that I thought was perfect when we were talking about enterprise adoption of this sort of tool. And he said, everyone's talking about it. Nobody is casually adopting AI in big companies.
And I thought that was really brilliant and I think speaks to really the environment we're in right now.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: That's definitely true. But you did and you adopted it and you have now a new offering, basically a totally new revenue stream, a new business model, which I think that's what the big power of AI is really about. It's not just about making things faster, but doing things that you could never do before and creating new value. And that's a big upside because we always hear about, oh, doing things cheaper and productivity. And that's the small opportunity. The big opportunity is something like you're doing, which is really amazing. So I love that this created new value and new opportunity for employers, for veterans, and for you, of course, for your company as well, to bring something so valuable to the market. What lessons learned would you share with the listeners as they are thinking about starting with AI and maybe thinking about how AI can create more value for their organization?
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Sure. Well, if the listener is a job seeker, which I guess according to surveys, over half of our country will be this year. I talk a lot on my LinkedIn channel about the different ways that I think job seekers can leverage AI to be a better and more effective job seeker. The employers. I would really encourage companies to find a partner. And this isn't a pitch for any of the organizations we've talked about today. Let's be realistic. You're not going to find the perfect solution today. The plane's being built as it's in flight. Find a partner you can trust and that you can grow with and where your inputs and your feedback are going to be part of their design and evolution philosophy and get on board. I actually really believe that finding the right tech partner, bringing in the right tools can create happier employees by creating better lifestyles, better output. I think all that's possible. That's my vision for how this technology evolves. And I'd love to see employers really embrace that.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: That goes so well with how we are thinking about superworkers. Right, because we're saying rather than AI is taking your job, AI is going to actually help you have a much better work experience, do much more meaningful work, and use AI to supplement and support you on the things that you usually don't like to do and are not all that great at as a person. And the AI is good at some different things than the person. Right. Our human capabilities and the AI capabilities are not actually overlapping too much, as you said before, like all the data and digesting all of these data pieces and knowing all of these attributes, for example, that's something that a human could never do and we're not good at. But then when you have, for example, the conversation as a recruiter, maybe with a candidate, with a veteran, there's really no replacement for that either.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Yeah. It's this. Not fighting with the AI, but using the AI to amplify what you're doing. Better work life, better happier life, more well being, all of that.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Kathy, I couldn't agree more. And when you coined that super worker phrase, when I read that, I think it was in October or November, it was like a light bulb because I really think that's how responsible and leading organizations are going to really think about this kind of technology. And I'd love to see that moniker just expand and be talked about more. I think it's the right path.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: I love that. Oh. So what's next for you on this journey of using AI in your business and for veteran talent, source or other areas? Where are you going?
[00:22:12] Speaker A: Do we have a couple hours? No, I'm just Kidding.
In short, I would say that we're really excited to bring the next version into the marketplace this year, the agentic version. And ultimately, we believe that the ability to overlay some really great customized agent support on top of jobs has potential to be the solution that employers have been looking for from the beginning. Having been in this space a long time, what every employer wants is to really say, here's my job description. I just want to talk to the right people. The more friction you can reduce from everything in between those two things, the happier employers are going to be. And I think what is being developed with the intelligent job posting and the agentic kind of delivery of all that is game changing. So for us, we're going to continue to focus on listening. Not everyone's ready for that sort of thing. A lot of employers are early in their thinking around AI adoption. There's still employers that this isn't the way they want to do things. And then there's extreme adopters building their own agents. We want to make sure that we can bring veteran, the military community into their ecosystem in whatever way works for them at the time, and help them evolve in the pace they want to evolve. And I think when we get through this year, I think we'll have the whole spectrum covered. I really do.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: I agree. I mean, we say this year is the year of enterprise. AI or AI goes enterprise. And I think you said it too, those use cases for employers specifically are so important and especially with agentic success solutions, they're really a game changer. So I'm excited what 2026 brings and it sounds like you have big plans too. So I'll be following you and making sure I keep up to date with all your success there. But thank you so much, Tim, for your time and for sharing with us how you've used AI in creating new business value, really for your organization. So thank you.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: Thank you, Kathy. And thanks for the work you and your team do to help provide us with all the information out there and the best practices that help guide our thinking.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Tim, all the best.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: You too. Thanks, Kathy.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Thank you.
What an inspiring conversation with Tim west, the CEO of Recruit Military, and how he and his team connect veterans to corporate employment opportunities using AI. Tim talks about how they created over 600,000 connections between veterans and corporations using AI, which in turn helps companies find highly qualified people with military experience and veterans to find jobs in the corporate world that fit their unique capabilities.
That's possible because the AI is fine tuned to surface time series data and labeled by experts who understand the military world. If you're in a corporate role, think about how this AI powered approach could work for you to find that needle in the haystack and engage these candidates in a much more personalized way. Thanks for listening to the what Works podcast. Until next time, keep finding what works in your world.
