AI Innovations Transforming Recruitment with KJ and Shehzad of Joveo
•Brian Fink, Ryan Leary, and Shally Steckerl
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00:00 | 09:24
Can you imagine a world where your career application and hiring process is driven by artificial intelligence? Our guests, Kshitij Jain "KJ" and Shehzad from Joveo, are here to help us envision that reality. We'll dive deep into the intriguing concept of augmented job descriptions, discussing how they can enhance a candidate's first impression of a potential employer. This isn't your typical recruitment chat – we're all about turning the dial up on quality, making job postings meaningful and weaving in diversity every step of the way.
Special mini series recorded with Oleeo at HR Tech 2023 with hosts Ryan Leary, Brian Fink, and Shally Steckerl.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the floor here at HR Tech. It's me, brian Fink, and joined by Shelly Stekrel, and we are coming to you live from Olio's podcasting booth on the floor at HR Tech in Las Vegas. We are super excited today because we are joined by KJ, the CEO of Jovio, and we're also joined by his head of customer success and marketing, shazad. Welcome to the Big Show guys. How are you today?
Speaker 2:
Great guys, how are you doing Outstanding?
Speaker 1:
I like that Outstanding, I like that energy that is going to be contagious. So real quick to go ahead and get our conversation started. One of the questions that we talked about like you know, we're just kind of getting to know each other a little bit better is we wanted to know a little bit about what you see as the big trend coming down the pipeline to ensure that candidates have a great experience. Any thoughts?
Speaker 2:
So you know there are many things that can be there, so I'll just pick one, and one that has caught the attention of the entire. Talent acquisition professional at work is the job description.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
That's a place a candidate jumps off into an action of application and that has been an off-the-go place. It is not diversity-friendly, it's not gender-neutral. The job descriptions are often too long or too small.
Speaker 1:
I agree with that.
Speaker 3:
I agree with both those statements To distinguish here we're talking about the job posting.
Speaker 2:
Yes, we're talking about the job description, the job posting. So job description and job title are part of the job posting.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so the job postings, you're finding them too long.
Speaker 2:
Too long, too small.
Speaker 3:
Or too small okay.
Speaker 2:
And just not the right. It doesn't represent the company's employer brand effectively and with the chat GPT-4 that's coming in right, there's a lot of intelligence that's got built in on how to write it in the right way and incorporating that would make a meaningful difference to the experience, the first impression it makes about them prospective employer they're talking about.
Speaker 1:
And about that first experience. How do you and your team make sure that candidates have that good first experience when they come into contact with a brand?
Speaker 2:
Great question Is it our problem to solve? Not really, but can we solve it? Yes, this is truly a thing that requires a massive change in management in the entire talent acquisition ecosystem, where the practitioners, the recruiters, the hiring managers have to know how to write a good job description, and that's Mount Everest. You can try it. 99.99% of the company will never get to that.
Speaker 3:
Writing is hard.
Speaker 2:
Writing is hard. You tell me about it, I suck at it.
Speaker 1:
But that being said, write every day. Write every day. It's a muscle that you've got to exercise. Doesn't get easier. You're in marketing, you know this.
Speaker 2:
But you know people aren't like that. We have to serve the masses. So what we do is we are the people responsible for distributing those jobs to the job boards. We are the last point where you can make any change. So we take it upon ourselves to say let us augment job descriptions and the job titles. I've seen someone writing a job title as senior product leader who searches a senior product?
Speaker 3:
leader.
Speaker 2:
Nobody Right. I've seen job descriptions which are 1,200 characters and still does not talk about the company and the culture and the benefits. It just keeps on going on and on and on. So let's take it upon ourselves to say we have the AI and it's not just we. The world has the AI. It's there for everybody. Use it, deliver to it, show the difference, have a meaningful impact, show the conversion improvement down the funnel, application completion. And you know what we have noticed is, with the right job description, what you attract are quality candidates, because the people who are desperate and active, they won't really care what a job description is They'll apply for it.
Speaker 3:
They'll apply for it, yeah.
Speaker 2:
So you see there's a down the funnel, long term upliftment, the talent acquisition practitioners, and see how that is over there. That's just my two cents.
Speaker 4:
And I think just to add to that. I mean ultimately everything in our space is about the candidate.
Speaker 1:
It should be. It should be.
Speaker 4:
And you put the candidate front and center. I think all the conversation around AI and diversity and inclusion and the candidate rediscovery ultimately the experience that you're giving to the candidate, right from the job posting in the description itself, all the way to making sure that the candidate is applying to the right job and even if they're not matching their skills to those job descriptions is where it's all going.
Speaker 2:
You know I was talking to one of the thought leaders and one of the great minds in the industry who's a practitioner, and he said that of all the people they hired, 50% of those never applied to the job they had got hired for. Now, could you not just change the kind of experience a little?
Speaker 3:
bit. Did they apply to another job or they just didn't apply they?
Speaker 2:
applied to another job, they got hired for another job. Now this company was smart enough to find that candidate and put him the right job. But now think about it right Candidate experience, ai. Could we not match the right job to the right person and say, hey, this is the job you have the highest likelihood of getting hired. Right at the point a person is going to start to apply to the process, or at the end of the apply process, and say this is what we do, and we have seen that about 70% conversions and I'm talking more compared to about 70% to 10% conversions right, if a candidate is not right for the job, 70% more conversions that happen because the candidate is actually applied to the right job. That kind of goes with the statistic this company was giving us.
Speaker 1:
Sure, sure, and I think I can understand that by letting people feel their purpose and their goodness of fit and things that go into that nature. As we talk about goodness of fit, what do you and candidate experience? You've mentioned generative AI and that's come up. Do you think that candidates are using generative AI to apply to jobs and, if so, what's the repercussions to recruiters?
Speaker 4:
I think that's an excellent question there's, and it leads to further questions about the authenticity of the candidate and how they present themselves as they talk to employers. Yes, candidates are using AI to create resumes and they are using AI to create responses to standard questions that employers are asking, and I think, as we move forward as an industry, it's going to become more and more challenging to distinguish the authentic nature of the candidate from what's come out of a chat GPT. However, there can be ways to do that with technologies that allow for deeper real-time assessments, video interviewing, things like that. As we start baking those into talent sourcing processes, integrating them into recruiting marketing platforms, the change will happen.
Speaker 2:
You know? An interesting thought, right, we have four people sitting on this table. They look different Now. Have you seen Star Wars and all these? Where?
Speaker 1:
is Ryan Leary when we're talking about Star Wars. So real quick for those of you who are just tuning in Ryan has never seen Star Wars and it makes my skin crawl and it makes fun of Jawas and Ewoks. He talks about them in like, in intermingling terms. And please continue your example about Star Wars. I am so glad that you are here for this.
Speaker 2:
Every week and me and my kids have to watch the Star Wars movie, so every soldier out there looks exactly the same.
Speaker 3:
The Stormtroopers, the clone troopers, yeah, yeah, everybody looks the same.
Speaker 2:
Do you want your candidates to look exactly the same? No personality, no character, everybody's AI-driven robot. No, what AI can do is can give you a lot of meat, but the spice, the character to your application, what you write, has to be yours. So use AI to augment and candidates do not understand that they're trying to do a lot of it and everybody's going to look like a cooking-er.
Speaker 3:
I just had a very creepy thought. So the interview questions are being designed by the chatbot and the candidate is using the chatbot to answer the questions. So we have chatbots answering chatbots. Who's paying attention to what's actually, you know, happening between the like? The chatbot is asking the questions and the chatbot's answering?
Speaker 4:
the questions. It's kind of like you build a wall and somebody's coming up with a ladder right, and then you build a bigger wall and somebody's coming up with a bigger ladder, so that thing that we've seen in spaces like cybersecurity, I think that's going to come up here.
Speaker 2:
Why hire anybody? Let the chatbot hire. A chatbot, that's right, true that?
Speaker 1:
Well, gentlemen, I've really enjoyed our conversation today, shaly, and I appreciate you stopping by. Thank you for sharing the story a little bit about what the team at Jovio is up to and your thoughts on generative AI in the candidate experience. I hope that you'll have an excellent rest of the convention. Want to give a shout out to Olio for sponsoring us today. Y'all have a great afternoon and tune in to the next episode. Thanks so much. Music Playspurpose. Well, children's Nights at Home Park. Имousse, beenboid, kolio, lnfish, proäng Services Be doorway for seventeen days].
