Anita Missirlian (AM):  Welcome to our Deep Dive on the Tech Landscape for Talent Acquisition. Today I am talking with Jeremy Henderson, who is the Director of Strategy and Product at Matchfield. Jeremy has been in the staffing world for over 20 years and is particularly focused on the digital and AI side of business.

Welcome, Jeremy. How are you doing today?  

Jeremy Henderson (JH): I am doing great, Anita. Thank you for asking.  

AM: Why don’t we just dive right into it. And I’m gonna start with a pretty obvious statement here. Like every other role, every other function, companies and how they hire have changed dramatically with the increased use of AI. 

From your perspective, are you surprised by what you’ve seen in terms of changes over the last 12 months when it comes to talent acquisition? 

JH: Yeah, definitely. It’s the weirdest experience I think I’ve had in the last 20 or so years in this, you know, because the adoption curve, the general adoption of it, almost matched the perceived impact.

It happened so super fast and it was so accessible that I think it permeated every nook and cranny of every job and function and strategy that exists in and around the staffing and talent acquisition sector market, whatever you want to call it.  

AM: You said something interesting there that I want to dive into just a little more, that the rollout or the application of AI and the adoption of AI was really, really quick, which you don’t often see with new technologies.

Is there any reason that stands out in your mind as to why that might have been? 

JH: I think it’s just so intuitive. There’s something so appealing to, I think, one, the idea of… the novelty of interacting with something that feels extremely competent. Hallucinations aside, the stuff it knows and can tell you and the advice it can give you and the fact that it is able to leverage, honestly, incomprehensible volumes of language-based data across every language globally is appealing in its own right. And then it just sets the imagination free. It’s so easy to get a login and to start asking it silly questions.

And that, I think, that’s the point of entry for a lot of people, but as it’s sort of matured and its adoptions increased in the last six months, eight months, you see so many new businesses cropping up that evidently leverage the efficiencies that it affords. Having all those smart  people working at your behalf, just with some simple instructions, is a really powerful idea.

And I still don’t think… there’s something extraordinarily powerful behind it that I don’t think anyone fully appreciates yet. You’ve heard it referenced, it feels a bit like the dot com thing where it came out and it was obvious how impactful it would be long term.

And surely that’s ended up being the case. But there was this trough of disillusionment, this section, like historically a failure where the perceived value and the realized value just didn’t connect. And there was a bit of a breakdown that costs lots of people, billions of dollars, etc, etc and I’m sure some version of that is likely for AI adoption. But nevertheless, you have to be a participant. It’s not going anywhere. 

AM: Yeah, definitely but let’s put AI aside for a moment here. If you think back over the last 10 years, are there two or three other changes to talent acquisition that you think have helped to influence and shape where we are now? 

JH: Yeah, I think talent acquisition as a central function that is increasingly competent and responsible for delivering business outcomes, that’s hit some kind of maturity as far as I’m concerned. To me, you know, it pains me to say it to an extent, because I’ve spent a career, more or less, on the outside of internal talent acquisition, they’re the whole – talent acquisition, engagement, nurturing, management, everything around that is increasingly internalized.

And it looks to me like it’s a proper category of professionals who sit amongst the rank and file of the most important people at any company at this stage. So less and less dependence, reliance, openness to partnering, even less and less benefit in partnering with external firms.

When it’s obvious that it’s the internal champions, the internal talent acquisition teams and human resources teams who — they’re in the right place, they know the brand, they know the company they’re working for. They have got many more, sort of, personal relationships, which is like the connective tissue of company culture.

And there’s just a — I think I see less and less demand for certain types of external services or third party services and a dramatic increase in demand for other types of third party services, which I think we’re, I don’t know, maybe we should discuss at some point in this call as well. 

AM: I think actually that leads into the next question, really, because you’re right, there’s definitely an increasing shift away from that third party service, at least how we have historically known it.

So what are the other trends you’re seeing when it comes to digital, when it comes to AI, and how much they are changing and shaping things? 

JH: Well, unfortunately, like in many of the recent conversations I’ve had with talent acquisition practitioners and leaders it’s a little bit about inertia.

There’s this plethora of opportunities to have a positive impact on their business from candidate engagement to branding, to recruitment, marketing, to automation, to introducing AI. There’s so many different ways to think about meeting that goal of connecting your firm with talented people and moreover, maintaining those relationships and working on retention. 

It’s almost as though there’s too much choice. It’s too hard to know what the right solution would be for a given talent acquisition leader. And as a result of that, in this moment, especially with all the hype around AI and increasing fragmentation in the various tools that you can use coupled with privacy and DEI requirements, it is an extraordinarily noisy space at the moment, and I don’t see it really getting less noisy. 

So I think it’s in there that I can really empathize with decision makers who are probably, well, I don’t know if they’d want to admit this or not, but struggling to decide on what’s signal and what’s noise in the current sort of state of the union, as far as TA and HR tech is concerned. 

AM: And from your perspective, because I mean, you have a little bit more of a unique perspective in that, you know, you’ve been working with Matchfield for 10 years now, and it is one of those third party agencies. So are you seeing Matchfield’s customers or prospects asking for different features, asking to be using Matchfield differently than they were even two years ago? 

JH: Yeah. So we sort of built Matchfield as a service or as an offering that could live somewhere in between a really traditional RPO, which is a company that outsources all of or most of their recruitment processes, and a traditional contingent firm, which is like, here’s a job, give me a candidate and, you know, we’ll do an exchange.

We thought that Matchfield would be the kind of offering that gets rid of some of the baggage that comes along with contingent staffing, but offers a bunch of the benefits that an RPO has. And so we’ve sort of positioned it in this in-between space, between those two offerings. And what we found in the last, whatever, four and a half years, is through customer discovery with paying users, past users, happy users, not so happy users and everything in-between, that just became this lens through which we could see how diverse the wants and needs of a given talent acquisition function are.

From a jobs to be done point of view and from a use case point of view, we’re always surprised at how different organizations conceive of the benefits of a Matchfield, kind of digital RPO, pay-as-you-go offering. And the requests we get from them to reconceive how they might want to use it as a part of their personal ambitions as talent acquisition leaders or managers or whatever they might be. 

AM: Do you anticipate more significant changes as we go deeper into the AI, deeper into the tech and all the changes that, like you said, every industry is experiencing. Is Martchfield immune? Is Matchfield really excited by it?  

JH: Yeah. I think…  I don’t know, much like many of these new AI startups or matching startups, you got to see the growth and the fragmentation of point solutions in the TA tech / HR tech landscape is… it’s exponential is probably a stretch, but it’s close. 

It’s like from a handful to many thousands with billions of dollars invested, that signals a lot of interest and a lot of excitement around the way HR and TA manage their impact and deliver value for their organizations.

Do I think Matchfield as a standalone offering sits in a category of its own in that sort of really crowded space? Probably not. And I also don’t think many of those other incumbents will hold their relevance or… sort of product fit or product market fit over the next year or two as the models around AI continue or as the LLMs continue to improve, as the feature sets continue to get better and better and as we really, probably, strangely start to contend with, what I think is the only thing or one of the only things AI can do, which is almost facilitate artisanal, in person experiences in the same way that humans can.

So it’s almost like, if you want to get ahead of this curve, in my mind, it’s to try to find ways to build community, to facilitate events, to kind of work on more purpose driven, mission driven ideas in collectives, rather than trying to compete for… I heard… I love this… I heard the CEO of… I want to say it’s Hayes… in a presentation the other day saying you got to use AI because if it takes you 45 minutes to write a resume and it takes us 45 seconds, we’re going to kill you.

It’s this idea that some way, somehow, there’s a real competitive advantage in being able to more quickly format a resume. And when I look at that, I don’t personally think there’s, long run, any competitive advantage to be had there at all. Because this technology is so accessible and so affordable, if everybody has access to it, then the time to full adoption and the competitive advantage to be had by adopting or not adopting, that window is going to close really quickly. 

To get out ahead of that, we really need to be thinking about how we build community and create value together. I can see a world where our organization focuses maybe more on community building and more on upskilling and more on providing value in ways that aren’t contingent on the traditional mode of staffing services, but more focused on helping ourselves, of course, and our stakeholders, but our partners out there in the world, our talent acquisition friends and HR managers and everyone in between to digest and contemplate the impact this technology is going to have on them and on their organizations. So maybe get away from that CEO’s idea of if I submit a resume faster than you, I win.

AM: So, obviously, you touched on it a lot, the efficiency and those gains. But the other thing I want to talk a little bit more about that you did mention a couple of times there, is that idea of community.

When we talk about talent acquisition, and I’m thinking of community, I have to think of the candidates. And I have to think of the candidate experience. For a long time, candidate experience, from what I saw, wasn’t necessarily the top of priority when it came to talent acquisition. It was, you’ve got so many resumes, you’ll just fly through them. How the candidate was experiencing that hiring process from resume submission, all the way through to onboarding, it just wasn’t the top of the priority. Not say that people didn’t care. It just might not have been the thing that they focused on. 

I have seen a noticeable shift in that attitude recently. Why do you think this is getting more attention now compared to five years ago? 

JH: I don’t know. I think this is the.. I don’t, I’m not studying on this, so I don’t…  None of this comes with a warranty. My feeling about it is that there are fewer and fewer genuinely skilled workers who have to fit into a kind of labor supply and demand arrangement that requires you to really, seriously, consider the candidate experience. And I think that’s just a tough pill to swallow. 

So it ends up being important to design fluid, flexible candidate engagement and onboarding experiences, in more of a general volume kind of hiring type of application, because that’s, frankly, where lots and lots and lots of the jobs are, and we see that in our own industry.

If a candidate has a skill set that is scarce and your organization acknowledges that and there’s a value associated with acquiring that skill set as a part of your strategic goals or business goals or whatever, then you treat them a certain way. You just do, it’s like… you’ve got to treat certain candidates certain ways because there is a supply and demand quality there. 

In an environment where it’s more of a volume high arrangement, or you’re filling up warehouses with workers who want to do shift work or gig work platforms where it’s the jobbers of the world or the task rabbits or anything in between where you really are trying to create a positive experience for them. But it’s really not about, in my mind anyway, not about creating long term, sustainable, gainful employment.

It’s more about designing a user experience that gets them ideally to the job on time, safely. And then, if and when circumstances around that don’t work for them, you have an alternative candidate who can just as easily step into that spot and kind of keep business going.  

So I think there’s weird labor market inequality stuff going on. I think there’s a weird skills alignment challenges, like the types of skills that are really in demand or skills that have existed for six months or maybe a year. And I would say there’s also maybe, related to that idea of equality and income equality or lack thereof, there’s a general sense that from a corporate responsibility point of view, it’s advantageous to communicate that you care a lot about people  when I don’t think in the economic sense that that bears out. 

But that’s me. I’m being a bit cynical. I just… I don’t, I just don’t know truly how important candidate experience ends up being when push comes to shove. Even as I say it, I’m like, what are you talking about? Like that, that can’t be true. That’s just the sense I get is how can it be so poor all the time?

Just go to Reddit, have a look at the way people feel about the recruitment process, almost. And then I have a look at the amount of time, energy, and investment made by companies in proving that candidate experience. Yet it remains sort of intractable and difficult. Why is that? And my sense, it just has to do with the basic brass tax of the value of certain skills over others. 

AM: But then, I mean, to your point about on Reddit, on social media, there are pages and pages and posts and posts of people complaining about the experience they’ve had and not wanting to even interview with a company because of how poorly they were treated. Candidate experience does matter. It absolutely affects the company’s brand.

And… technology, the AI side, that seems like a really simple, in a way, fix. You can put in those digital touch points to help improve that candidate experience, give them communication about the role, give them updates on what’s happening. Things like that. Those are super simple,  but then it comes back to what you were talking about before. 

There’s a need for a human element still. So, is maybe that part of the challenge? Is that companies can put a digital fix on it, but it doesn’t actually improve the candidate experience because there’s still no human element to it? 

JH: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. You’re wading into seriously philosophical waters there.

I don’t know. Like,  it’s true. Hundreds of thousands of complaints about how bad the candidate experience is… an individual’s experience with an employer and application process might be. At the end of the day, truly, how much does that matter? And how measurable is that? And what are organizations willing to do about it? Seems to be a stumbling block.

I don’t know. I’m all for creating connections and meaningful work. I totally get it. It’s really, really important to treat people with dignity. And of course, it makes sense. You want to have a person not complain about how bad the application process was with you.

We did a webinar not that long ago about candidate ghosting on both sides and why that’s happening. And it’s, to me, it feels somewhat insane, unsolvable, but something that both parties, the consumer of labor and the seller of labor, should be kind of actively working at managing. And I suspect that’s where we need to operate.

We’re not looking for wholesale perfection. We’re looking for incremental and continuous  improvements on how we think about candidates and the experience we provide for them and how we couple that like long run impact with the performance of our organizations from a human capital point of view. And I’m not saying that’s easy. Those are just a whole bunch of words, but I suspect that’s…  you don’t solve this.

As we say, I think it’s a tension to manage. And I think that tension is just writ large at the economy level, not just here or with any single employer.  

AM: Last question on this one: In your opinion, does technology help or hinder with this problem?

JH: Both for sure. Both. Yeah. I  cannot imagine… if we just go back 20 years to 2005,  I remember, it was like people got Facebook and LinkedIn started to happen and whatever.

And I, honestly, I quit my job in a staffing company right around then, because I was like, staffing’s obviously toast, there’s just no value in what we do if people can connect online. But since then, recruiters ended up almost building LinkedIn for themselves and staffing agencies underwent enormous growth, as did the corporate talent acquisition function at the same time.

So, did it help or hinder what exactly? It created a bunch of growth for everyone. And it seems to have given way to really fragmented…. I think with anything, there are benefits and there are drawbacks and you never really know what those drawbacks are until you’ve sort of looked back retrospectively.

Like, well, where were we and how did we get here? It always seems like there’s some decision you made that got us to the place you’re at. It’s almost never in some ways as bad as you, depending on your point of view, might have imagined it would be. It’s almost never as good or the same as you imagined it would be.

So I think we’re in a similar moment now with this current state of privacy and big data and artificial intelligence and, and, and. You hear the cynics say it’s going to take all of our jobs and the optimists say, no, it’s going to make our jobs better. And I’m sure it’ll be, like everything else that seems to happen, some combination of the two. 

It’s going to dramatically change the way we need to think about working. No doubt about that. It’s already doing that. That’s just obvious. It’s gonna place a lot of onus on people to really think about the work and the meaning associated with that work with their eyes wide open as to the capabilities of some of these technologies and the ways in which they can render some of the less important, less human, less strategic work, maybe more redundant.

So it’s kind of… stop thinking about how you can make more phone calls faster. Stop thinking about training your recruitment team on your industry in the same way that you would have before, with conference rooms and explaining stuff that way. I don’t think that’s really going to be super valuable with the power of these LLMs.

And also, I think the demographic of people moving into the workforce are not old, like me. They grew up this way. They understand managing their lives and relationships and everything in between. They have a huge amount of trust in the screen that they’ve got in front of them, for the most part.

And as a result of that, I don’t think they’ll observe changes in the way they work as being a big change. I think it’ll just be the experience they have and it’ll be up to folks like us who are maybe a generation older to constantly be thinking about how do we keep up with this dramatically improving technology?

AM: So you touched on there about, you know, the people that are entering the workforce now, they are people who grew up with the screen, they are much more adaptable.

For the rest of us who did not necessarily grow up with the screen, what are the skill sets or competencies that you would recommend developing or focusing on to help those of us that are not screen people to help them better navigate within this very changing landscape of ours?  

JH: Yeah. Something that I’ll just, I’m going to center it around myself because it’s just easier.

Something that I personally feel like you’d want to work on to be able to safeguard your role, your impact, your future, is on sort of synthesizing the changes in the world around you and being able to communicate. Contextually, what those changes kind of mean, and with the rate of change we’ve got, I think it’s even more important to be as… almost you need to be even more concise today than you needed to be two years ago, much less 10 years ago around taking the environmental circumstances around you and translating those into specific insights or opportunities because the landscape’s changing so fast. 

It’s that acuity and that talent for communication seems like it’s getting even more important all the time. So that’s something I find myself continuously challenging myself on. And obviously, as this interview will illustrate, it’s a work in progress. 

The other stuff I would say is, you probably should start making investments in understanding the way GPTs function at a minimum. Forget LLMs and the architecture of these neural networks and whatever. That’s not, in my mind, just for the average person to imagine they can just do. There’s a bunch of skill and a bunch of education or experience that you need to really make the most of that. 

But certainly, superficially, start to get how you can leverage these tools to upskill, to do more work better, faster, to save yourself time, to… the use cases are almost infinite. So just kind of get in there and start trying that out. I would give that advice to anyone. 

And the third thing I would say is try to… I don’t know how to say this really…  If your job is mostly made of things that you discover a GPT can be instructed to do at least 75 percent as well as you would currently do them, then it’s your job, I think, as a matter of self preservation and as a matter of creating stakeholder or shareholder value for your company, to look further up the hierarchy of impact that you might have.

Don’t spend half your day doing tasks that a GPT can help you do in a 10th of that time and really seriously use the rest of that time to dream big, start thinking about innovations that, if you had 80 percent of your time back, ask yourself internally, what would you do for your company or for your boss or for your colleagues or for you and your family with that time?

AM: Final question for you, Jeremy: What are you most excited about right now?  

JH: I’m super, super excited about some changes we’re making to our business model and to our platform that are entirely focused on empowering our stakeholders, our external partners, talent acquisition, HR people to do more with less, to upskill, to become more strategic partners in their organizations.

And, of course, for all of us to be able to continue to fulfill our mission and trying to connect as many people as we possibly can in meaningful work.  

AM: That sounds like quite a bit to be excited about. Thank you so much, Jeremy, for your time and your insights. You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about and I’m sure everyone watching has a lot to think about as well. So hopefully we can have another conversation soon. 

JH: Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, we’ll talk. Thank you.