Harness AI for Business Problem Solving
Learn how to navigate market trends, overcome AI adoption challenges, leverage AI to solve real business problems beyond automation, and hear an inspiring journey from HR exectuvie to female founder.
In this episode of the HR Leaders podcast, join Barb Hyman, Founder & CEO at Sapia.ai, as she shares her inspiring journey from HR executive to female founder.
Barb also provides insights on navigating market trends, overcoming AI adoption challenges, and leveraging AI to solve real business problems beyond automation.
Episode Highlights:
Her journey from HR executive to founder and CEO at Sapia.ai
The challenges of being a female founder.
How to Navigate Market Trends and Overcome AI Adoption Challenges -
And How to Leverage AI to Solve Real Business Problems Beyond just Automation.
Discover what emotional salary means – and how you can motivate employees beyond pay.
Great recognition is more than just a thank you program. By leveraging frequent and meaningful recognition, Achievers drives business results that matter to organizations like retention, productivity, and engagement. Our platform makes it easy for employees to recognize each other anywhere, whether in-office, remote, or on-the-go.
The Achievers Workforce Institute reveals that two-thirds of employees have one foot out the door in 2024. The top reason for job hunting? Better compensation. But money isn’t the whole story. Employees are seeking not only monetary salary, but emotional salary too.
🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Barb Hyman 0:00
EHRs who use AI will replace ones that don't like that is definitely going to happen. It's a huge source of power for you as an individual and as a team and as a company, you kind of owe it to the business you're doing your job if you lean in and be curious, someone very clever and famous many years ago said, you know, coined the phrase that all disruption comes with fear. You know, we don't know this because we weren't born then. But when they first introduced the car, they had people on street corners, shooting rifles in the air to warn the pedestrians that there was this car traveling at 20 kilometers an hour that was coming. I think AI you know, the media have done a great job. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned. And people need to be really Scriveners and you know, they're agreeing regulation in this space.
Chris Rainey 0:42
Barb, welcome to the show. How are you?
Barb Hyman 0:44
I am pretty damn good.
Chris Rainey 0:46
Nice to see you is. It's always a pleasure to see people in, in person. If like, we don't do it enough these days now.
Barb Hyman 0:53
I agree. There's an energy that comes from being in the same room with someone. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 0:57
And people are probably catching the accent as well. So you're not from London?
Barb Hyman 1:03
No, I'm from Australia. Yeah, so I am. I'm a bit of a nomad at the moment. Probably that'll become clear later. Yeah, but yeah, in the UK. I thought it was spring. But I gotta tell you, it doesn't feel like spring. No, it's
Chris Rainey 1:16
always like this is rain. Rain, rain. And that's that's about it. So where are you? Where are you based now? On A Plane. Like you're like in a same story? Yeah.
Barb Hyman 1:28
On a plane. And I think the one piece of advice I want everyone to take away from this interview is never fly from LA to London. That is the worst is a long jetlag go from New York to London. So tip for the audience or sudwala
Chris Rainey 1:41
It was you saying LA to New York, New York to London. Yeah, dude. Wow. That's crazy. I would rather do that. So stop off.
Barb Hyman 1:47
It is worth it. I mean, he doesn't want to stop off in New York. Anyway. So to be fair, we all of
Chris Rainey 1:51
our events that we do are in New York, we've never done the long one yet today. So it's 12 hours, right?
Barb Hyman 1:57
I can't even remember I'm trying to put it together a Shane's trying to get my
Chris Rainey 2:01
co founder Shane's trying to convince me to do a lot of trips out there. So now my squat on one.
Barb Hyman 2:06
Yeah, I noticed long as Australia. I'm about to jump on a plane for 21 hours. Oh, wow. Yeah. But it's great to be here.
Chris Rainey 2:12
So when you're not on a plane, where are you? Melbourne, Australia. Nice, nice, but works taking you all over the world. It is. It
Barb Hyman 2:19
is fun. That's exciting. But I miss my I miss my puppy. And yeah, looking forward to going home.
Chris Rainey 2:25
Yeah. Tell us more about your background and the journey to where we are now. Well,
Barb Hyman 2:31
I mean, it's it's I'm keeping most of it to myself, because I'm going to sell the rights later, when I retire. It is quite a frigging story to how I landed here. But the short story is there is about I can tell I really. This is my fifth career. Being a founder and CEO. I've never been a founder and a CEO before. So it's my first time at that I've been doing it now since 2018. I started my career as a lawyer, and decided pretty quickly that there wasn't
Chris Rainey 3:00
going to be enough for me. I've heard that so many times. You know, what
Barb Hyman 3:03
can I say it is the best degree to do for what I'm doing right now. Because firstly, if you're an HR, there are a lot of legal issues that come up. But in the world of AI, it's so important. They understand the governance that's required when you're using AI privacy laws. And, you know, you're obviously engaging in MSA negotiations. So it's been absolutely necessary, I would say almost for what I'm doing now. So I did law, when did an MBA and decided to shift into management consulting at BCG and worked there for five years, 10 years actually. But in between, I had three kids and got to a point where I really didn't want to do the travel anymore. And so I was moved into offered the chance to be head of HR VCG APEC, and from there was recruited into the CHR role of the REI group, Rei group is mostly owned by news it's really the cash cow for and he's got a really interesting digital business and I was hired by the former CEO of Microsoft APAC Tracy fellows, a Canadian who is a really incredible person, I learned a lot from her. And that was my first stint in in a sort of a digital environment. And then my experience of both organizations really led me to build this because I could see that people are the most important thing for most companies, even though they're not on your balance sheet, but the tax of actually bringing them in. And the cost of that, particularly the opportunity cost of so many hours being spent by people leaders, hiring, which means you're not going to deliver, you know, effectively what the business needs. And then the bias that holds us back from seeing talent, because we know mirror hiring is a real thing. Yeah, so I just figured there had to be a better way and also fundamentally, I think that the human experience of going through that was not very human.
Chris Rainey 4:48
Yeah. On your percent. What was the moment for you that you were like, Okay, now I'm gonna go sell this company and tell us a bit more about the company actually, the name of the company and and What are you doing now? Yeah,
Barb Hyman 5:01
so cp.ai, which is a combination of two really important thematics to our product. One is the homosapien, the human, how do you put the human at the center of everything you think about building? And the other is obviously AI. And you know, how did I come to this, it really was from seeing the lack of solutions to a really systemic problem. The inefficiency, the productivity, suck, or tax on people, the limiting factor of humans being the ones that drive that process and make the decisions along the way, I had no idea when I was, you know, at the time, I introduced workday and culture. And they were both seen as really leading edge technologies. Yeah, for the time. And you know, ironically, as CHR OHS who might be listening to this, I'm sure they receive the 20 ATMs a day, from people touting, you know, products that are AI based, I never received one like it just didn't exist. It certainly existed before generative AI, you know, somehow the world seemed to, you know, have woken up to the power of AI. And it obviously existed a long time before that. And so I managed to convince another mad person, because you have to be mad to be in a startup, you really do this your whole life, you know, relentlessness just takes on a whole new meaning. You know, I have a family, I have a puppy. But really, I feel like I'm married to the job. And that's because it is the best job I've ever had. It's incredibly creative when you're working in tech. Yeah. And, you know, he was from culture. And he was the chief data scientist, he built the data science team there. And we just made a couple of bets. We just thought if we could figure out how to hire people, you know, assess interview coach, through really beautiful experience that people trusted. You know, that's the ultimate outcome, how are we going to do it? Well, we decided the chat was the medium through which people will live and engage. And even then, there are books like sleeping with their smartphone, you know, and you could see with my kids who are now teenagers 20s, that everything in their life is through the smartphone or through the phone. And I don't know what the latest rates are of ownership, but pretty much it's up and up. Yeah. And my daughter is upstairs, and she'll text me. She woke up down the stairs. Yeah. And then booty, to his credit, could see that language has a lot of signal when he was a culture. And the real insight about the culture was in the verbatim, not in the scoring. And I don't know if they're doing anything with an app. So you know, when you do an engagement survey, and they say, Why tell me why, you know, describe how you feel, that's when you really learn the tone, the culture, the vibe, when people are filling out a multi choice questionnaire, there's not a lot of richness in that there isn't a lot of data. But at that time, even I think Google had 10,000 People working in the space of NLP that was before Bert was produced and deployed by Google because they were the obvious, the early innovators in the space. And he could see that language was rich and seen. And if you think about us, as humans, our whole life is about communication. And you're inferring so many things about me from what I'm saying, and how I structure my, my story. And we thought, well, could we do that? Could we use language and languages also, if you source it from the right place, it's very pure, if and particularly if there's no personal personal PII in it. And so we experimented. And it took us two years to build a product and the most important, investment is the time to create the dataset. So the problem with a lot of AI today is that it's built on third party data, ie resumes, ie social media, or human data, which is even worse, and so you cannot control for bias. And so people legitimately should be worried about any AI that is using third party data. You know, when it comes to Gen AI, I would say by all means, experiment with it, and play with it and use it to give you a productivity gain on any part of HR that doesn't involve people decisions. Yeah. So you know, you can go to Gen AI and say, write me a learning and development program for this. But if you're using it to create job descriptions, I think that's very risky, because you've got to remember that all of that data is from us and revised.
Chris Rainey 9:05
Yeah, I was smiling because I was thinking about something that happened last night. Like my my daughter did a drawing and she asked me if I could animate the character and we are not gonna say to our platforms, but I was using a couple of our platforms.
Barb Hyman 9:18
I think that's a safe use case. But but my
Chris Rainey 9:22
my wife's black and my daughter's mixed race, and it kept making her white even though we
Barb Hyman 9:28
use Gemini because you know, they've run into we challenged recently of
Chris Rainey 9:32
Robin her actual photo and it's still kept making every time even when I was prompting it it kept the hair and only when I really really strong prompts did it actually getting wrecked it just my wife and I would just both me like wow, okay, well, like really bias.
Barb Hyman 9:54
Then you're using it to really create something. And that's all evaluated is the other area you know, which is very different to say, I'm giving you all this data, you know, all of our engagement survey results, summarize it for me and give me advice. And that's a pretty, that's a fantastic use case for it, you know, what's the risk from that? Really very little, if you want to search as a chro, you know, tell me which of the best CRMs? Or how do I make an informed decision about CRM, and it'll come back and may have, we've tested this for us against our competitors. And it's not perfect. But the best thing about it is it helps organize your framework. And often that's where people don't put enough time in is what are we trying to solve for by using this technology? And so it helps you build almost the start of a business case around that. And so I think there are many in HR and in organizations, it's it's definitely going to displace a bunch of roles. Yeah, but it's also going to create space for people to move into a more elevated, you know, job. And so, you know, the biggest blocker I find is people's fear of their job going but actually, you're evolving to a whole new like a Maslow's hierarchy, a whole new level of self actualization when you're starting to rid yourself of you know, resume screening and can't believe how many people are sucked up in phone screening. And imagine what your life will be like, then you'll be spending more time in the business and that's a much more rewarding place to be. Even
Chris Rainey 11:18
today, Tom, my chief marketing officer, we are hiring for new role and we were going through the resumes on LinkedIn, the heat shortlisted and as at why are we still sitting there spending two hours doing this? Yeah. I mean, yes, we have to do it. But I was like, LinkedIn is pretty powerful solution when you don't see any like, okay, shortlist is based on very generic criterias and, and filters, but I'm like, we're still spending hours and hours and hours and hours of time. So I
Barb Hyman 11:47
think the really important like my advice to you would be What are you looking for? Like, what is your culture? What is your DNA? I think we overemphasize, or overweight expertise. And there's plenty of academic research that says that past performance does not in any way, predict the future. And, you know, think of all the undiscovered talent that's out there, that could be great, because they don't call themselves a marketer. And marketing today is so different to what it was five years ago, I was
Chris Rainey 12:13
having that same conversation. Yeah. And some of the people we have spoke to was very outdated, traditional marketing, not my, he said to me, Chris, what you think marketing is isn't what the and I was like, Oh, when I explained my what I think marketing wasn't, and he explained it, we were far upon that. Oh, wow. Okay, that's already we've already we've already, we've made a mistake already. We like we're not even putting the right details out there ourselves. Yeah. As well, we excluding all those people do you're talking about that don't happen as traditional. Like,
Barb Hyman 12:42
I'm a good example of this, which is, it turns out that I'm really good at sales, I mean, the selling to VCs, to raise money, or selling to prospective talent, to convince them to come on this match journey, or maybe having common side conversations, or Chr. O 's, but no one would hire me in a sales role. Today, I've got no sales on my resume, I had no idea that I was someone who really loved that journey that you go on. And so, you know, I could have had a very different career to what I've had, because I had no idea that there was something that I was good at. And no one would see me as potential in that space. So I just think as early in your career as possible, you know, as a 22, year old 23, if you can know yourself, and then think in a much more creative way, you know, where can I apply those strengths? If I'm someone that loves ambiguity, or I love hustle, I'm really competitive, why what doors does it open and I, I think back to the days when I did law, in those days, everyone went for discipline, you know, my parents, were going to get a degree and go into it a discipline. But that doesn't exist anymore. And you're closing your mind to so many other spaces that you could explore by pigeonholing yourself into a function. I
Chris Rainey 13:46
felt quite lucky in that sense that like, I definitely went to school. So I got a job at 16 that's helped. My mom was a single parent with four kids. So I had no choice but to get a job. So I never really put myself in a box. I just was like, I need to do whatever jobs is whatever necessary to pay the bills, right. And I got to be a chef for a couple of years. And I got to work in for as an assistant to a judge in a high court in London Bridge. I got to taste like loads of different things. And then when I got into sales, I was like, Oh, I love this. They can pay if nature of it. The fact that like, as a first time I ever fell in love with learning because I was like I was realizing the more I was learning the more deals I was closing. And a little post it note said the more you learn, the more you earn, on my PC monitor, and I became obsessed. It's the first time I truly fell in love with with learning because I could see how it was impacting my life and my mom and my brothers and sisters. And I find being an entrepreneur is the ultimate version of that you're constantly there's never there's always something that I'm having to learn and grow it. Like my friends always say my mum says to me all the time growing up she's like you never stick to one thing Chris you get really good at it. And then you stop once you've mastered it. I'm like That's why Because for me, it's the journey to get really good at it. I love. You know, I always use the skateboard analogy because I used to skateboard Like, I literally would have to fall over 1000 times before I land that trick. And when I land it, it's almost like, oh, what's next? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. That's how I feel about it. Yeah.
Barb Hyman 15:18
Kind of an impatience to go into the next thing. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 15:21
and Shane's the same we I found, we're very lucky. We noticed I was this was six years old. Somehow, we still powerful each other, as founders. And he has a similar mindset. And we kind of both push each other to be better. It's very rare thing because a friends you can do running.
Barb Hyman 15:39
I think that combination of learning and problem solving. You know, I've hired a lot of salespeople, some have not worked out, that is really the combination that has, in the HR space, I think you really need because you want to learn about you. You're not selling the product, it's like, tell me about you. What matters to you? What would success look like in 12 months? What would your boss have to see for you to be like, wow, this person is incredible. You know, you're getting a promotion, you're getting a raise. And that endless curiosity about your world, your challenges. where you're at in your career, combined with the ability to then try and problem solve, you're not talking product, you're not talking your technology. I think that's just so critical. Like I don't like being sold to, but I'm always open to a conversation where someone can help me think through a problem, or they're a useful sounding board. And so for me, you know, I'm the best salesman in the company. But that's because I'm not a salesperson. You know, I'm just really curious. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 16:37
I'm just I think I'm just saying, I've had actually even one of my coaches was like, you just stop selling, like, Why do you keep selling something I focus on being the CEO of and I'm like, no, no, no, no, you're
Barb Hyman 16:47
always the primary salaries? Yeah, I have a startup. Yeah. Like no,
Chris Rainey 16:50
like, yeah. And also, I love it. So I got to your point, it's more of a conversation. It's more curiosity. I literally just had a call with a podcast guest has nothing to do with sponsorship opportunity or a sale, it ended up turning into sell, I was advising how to invest is by smoking budget for the year and what would work for them, as well. And it was like I was, but I genuinely wanted to help them. There was no intent of like, I need, I want you to work with me. And just out of having those type of conversations, naturally, people want to work with you. And they feel like you're being genuine, as well. Like, there's been times where I'm like, actually, we're not the best fit. Yeah. And I mean, we're not the right fit. Yeah. Yeah, he was so surprised. How would you meet because what does spend money, we had a big haitch HCM company, you all know, the I can't say the name. They basically tried to buy the whole year of the show of the podcast.
Barb Hyman 17:42
And then wow, that would have been attractive check to underweight the year it was
Chris Rainey 17:45
but it was almost like selling my song. Like, this is the x show, the HR leader show now Yeah, but hey, we're gonna give you x. And they were literally like, almost offended that me and Shane were like, This was early days when we really could have used the money. I don't know if they're at people,
Speaker 1 18:03
either US base, but sort of everything's for sale in the US, you know, one of those analysts in that space has just come out on LinkedIn and said, You know, I feel like there's a lot of unacknowledged promotions here that, that sort of, I wouldn't say corrupt, but probably shouldn't be disclosed. And, and I really admire him for doing that. Because I think trust in HR is the most important quality to build in your culture. And a trustful culture is a culture that people want to be in. And they want to exceed their own expectations, and they want to talk about to their friends. And I think there's a big connection between transparency and trust. Yeah, particularly AI is one space, by the way, where the regulation is going to if you can't provide explainability on what is actually going on here. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? What's happening along the way, from an EU AI perspective, you won't be compliant, because they've already said that AI in the context of employment is an area that's there's a high risk one. And so how do you, you know, you don't want to tick a box, right? You want to actually create a fundamental culture and value set and principles that all rely on trust. And so in the days of COVID, when people were scraping or monitoring behavior, based on technology use to see whether or not you're working. I honestly find that really a heart and a lot. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 19:26
it's just my wife had a software on her computer. She works for a large finance company, which we were mentioned. And every half an hour it timed out. So basically, if you didn't press a key, it showed you're not working. And she was so stressed. You have a look. We have a young daughter. Yeah. And those times are still working, you know, where you go. But there was a time where we were in the car and was going to get some food for Robins and no food in the house and I had her laptop on my lap and she was like, can you just press that every five minutes? And I'm like, Yeah, I'm going to have food. See ridiculous, like this system allows, like, This is crazy. Yeah, your boss and your boss and on the cause they would say this many hours and he wasn't here between this hours. What are you doing? The opposite of trust? Yeah. So what terrible culture?
Barb Hyman 20:15
Yeah, I think you've got to default to trust as well. Like, I think assuming that people will do the right thing. You know, the other thing in HR, I've always sort of railed against his policies, and often policies come about because one person did something stupid, punish everyone. And yeah, and instead of going and saying, you know, Hey, Chris, I just want to talk to you about that behavior. Everyone has to suffer from that. And policies don't create compliance. No one's gonna read a policy. No, they just create, I don't know, barriers to really being yourself. And they stop people from having the right level of management conversations, they probably should have
Chris Rainey 20:45
recycled us and them mentality. Yeah, we've got the policy between you. And the so you mentioned obviously, about how the product started. But now you're kind of at the intersection of AI, ar, ar, you talk more about that? Yes,
Barb Hyman 21:02
I probably should have been more explicit about what we've built. So what we ended up building was a truly new category, which we call smart interview, which is the ability to understand people deeply through language. So in five questions based on structured interviewing, which is a science, we can discover many different things about your personality, your competencies, your skills. So all of the soft skills, power skills that we all see are so important in today's world,
Chris Rainey 21:25
the power skills, yeah.
Barb Hyman 21:28
And the alternative way to do that is a human to do an interview, which obviously people don't scale. So if you're a really large business, that gets a lot of candidates coming in, how do you know that you're not missing out on someone great. The other part that's limiting is humans aren't going to call you and give you feedback, unless you're, you know, at the CEO suite level. And their feedback will probably be Oh, look, we love you, but you're not a culture fit, which is extremely frustrating for people. Or you can use traditional SATs or psychometric. And I've never found those experiences to be human. So it is extremely disruptive to a lot of different sectors to the assessment space, to IPOs. Because IPOs model is all about people. And obviously, we're changing where people spend their time. And it is, you know, a genuine innovation that no one can replicate other than maybe Amazon because what you need is it's not so much the algorithms that are the IP, which we built, or they were fully vertically integrated machine learning system is actually the data. And the challenge with so many tools is that the data is not pure enough, it is from us. It's from social, you know, one of the experiments we ran in the very early days, when we're trying to figure out whether this was going to work is our data scientists lead scraped 2 million tweets. And a lot of people on Twitter self declare their Myers Briggs profile. And so he wanted to see whether you could predict an element of MBTI, based on your tweets, and it was highly, highly predictive. So we knew that there was signal they call it in language. And we actually wrote a paper which we published at that time, Twitter was not owned by Elon Musk, but it was still quite a contentious platform. And that papers said that if you use generalist data, generalized information to build a model, you will naturally create adverse impact. So people don't tweet the way that they apply for a job. But no one's going to use that kind of language. And Twitter is not representative of the whole community. So you're feeling good on two fronts. And I think people don't think hard enough in HR, like, if there's one thing that you do is you be extremely scrutinized about the data. And, you know, companies that are building machine learning models based on surveying and a common group and then HR saying, These are the good ones. These are the bad ones, can you you know, build a model based on the good one, you're just embedding your existing bias because for sure you've been biased in how you've hired and you also can't explain it. And you have to provide explainability in this world. So I think so that's the science. It is peer reviewed, published leading journals like Robert was presenting a Nami, obviously, the really smart ones in our team are doing that. But what's really been game changing is and I remember when we pressed the button and first tested it, is I always felt like, well, why don't I get something out of this, like, what's in it for me, and I want to learn and people have this insatiable desire to learn about themselves. So you
Chris Rainey 24:11
mean a candidate, the candidate, okay, and,
Barb Hyman 24:15
and I want to feel hurt, I want to feel understood. And so we took the insights, the understanding we have about the individual, and we created a way to provide insights on their personality and coaching. And this is all randomized. It's based on you know, reviews by IO Sykes, and when we first built it, we only had one version, right? And we tested it, and everyone in the team was terrified. I still remember being in there, it was literally a garage and go, we've just got to do this. We've got to do this because it was so radical. No one creates automated feedback, why people are terrified about it. And the first customer to go live with Qantas and conscious has been with us for five years and a pretty conservative organization and they just felt so passionately that they Canada to their customers and So, you know, we said, look, we can always turn it off, if we get a lot of feedback, because we ask for feedback. And people go, this is ridiculous. This is bullshit. This isn't me, I don't trust it. But it is absolutely the winning feature of our product. Now, you know, other businesses are starting to do that. But the other part that almost created our culture is obviously, you know, in the beginning, I used to see every bit of feedback that would come into my feet. And it would, it was just phenomenal how much people value knowing themselves. And to have that insight to go, I'm now going to go in, in an interview with you and I, I can express who I am, you know, a lot of people don't know themselves, and they don't know how to share that. Yeah. And we're saying it in a really human way. So you know, we use language, like, if someone was really high in humility would be, you know, your voice deserves to be heard. Make sure that you, you know, you speak your mind, right, like everyone's voice does it. So it's in a very nurturing way. And the funniest feedback, you know, my mom's always said this to me,
Chris Rainey 25:54
by the way, what's that? They know, they're going to get that going in or do like a surprise, they do that I think transparency is important. So how do you position How do you present that to them on the way so
Barb Hyman 26:03
the way it's presented, you know, whether we're in a, an HR is or not, it's look, we believe everyone should be given an interview, we want everyone to be given a fair chance. So this is blind, and untimed, which is how we really impact on those who identify with a disability and great, it's super valuable for neurodiverse. And a lot of people don't want this, they don't want to sit across from you. They're terrified. Yeah, it's astonishing to me how many people get really scared, even by human to human. And then it also says, and the best videos that you're gonna learn from this, we want to honor your time, and you'll receive something just for your eyes only, which invites you to know yourself, and, and we hope that you'll value that, you know, learning it's growth, did
Chris Rainey 26:40
you measure the, the, the increase in the amount of people that actually went through the process after you change that?
Barb Hyman 26:47
So I don't remember what it was before, because it was something I push really aggressively within the team. Like you've got the science team, who were deeply conservative, and then you've got me who's like, bucket, let's do it, you know, see what happens, right? We can just turn it off the,
Chris Rainey 26:59
the increasing completion? Well, we're
Barb Hyman 27:01
about 92%. Wow. So that's pretty unusual for us. You know, we don't call it an assessment, by the way, it is a structured interview. So we call it an interview
Chris Rainey 27:11
assessment also has like a baggage attached to it as well like this. Yeah, it's not Yeah, that needs a rebrand, agree, to rebrand as well. So just like very simply, what is the process they're going through? What are they doing?
Barb Hyman 27:23
So you'll probably live in a workday or SuccessFactors environment, and almost immediately, it'll come up and say, Look, either you'll click on a link, or they'll send you a link, and it's Nope, you know, you don't have to download anything as a candidate, and you start this journey. And so let's say join the juice who's just gone live. And for them, you know, they have a challenge on turnover, because people don't realize it's a really tough job, right, you're cleaning, you're on your feet. And so part of what we're doing is we're creating an opportunity for you to learn about the organization, almost communicate to you. So Chris, here's a video really brings to life what our people feel what makes this job amazing, and what makes it tough. And so no one's going to read a position description, or a JD, I think they're a waste of time. If I was you, I just like my delete them all. But the chat, you know, it's visual, it's obviously branded. It's, we track how many people watch the videos, people love to learn. When you're doing it in more specialized roles, you'll have high managers with videos and saying, I'd love you to come and work for me, this is who I am. So you're feeling like you're having a conversation, and eventually we'll add a generative component to that, then you'll go through the questions, the company has the option to ask any other questions like team working rights, the idea being that you're only asking the candidate to one thing, right? You're not making them go through five different steps, and you don't need any phone screens. And then the final step, which is optional, is look, we really care about diversity. We'd love it if you could share how you identify now, that has been amazing. 98% of people will share that when we first started to do that, which I don't think is anyway, what you get an ATS is when we first started to do that. And we added disability do you identify with a disability? People would say yes, but I want to box to share with you what it is. People today are really comfortable to say I'm someone with a head injury. I'm someone with dyslexia, because they want you to know how to care for them, how to support them. So that kind of blew me away. Because again, HR thinks, don't ask people that it's really uncomfortable, but we're in a different generation to mostly HR, I want to tell ya, they want to express themselves, they want to be heard, they want to be understood. And then within about 510 minutes, everyone, every single person, whether it's a million or 500,000, we'll get back this report that says, learning is growth. You know, we want you to use this to help you and your career. And we capture feedback from the chat. Capture feedback from the what we call the my insights mindset. And it is something like 99% positive sentiment on the chat people are, wow, this is really cool. It's really easy. The obvious things you can imagine. I mean, Anything's better than the current state of how you apply for jobs. So in some ways, the only way is up. And the feedback on the personalized Insights is sometimes just so moving. So funny, like my read is to my mom, and she said I've been telling you that for 20 years. And this is kind of like, you know, wow, this is have at home ads, they get
Chris Rainey 30:01
that regardless whether you don't exactly forward with them to the next stage or not exactly.
Barb Hyman 30:05
And then what the company gets is we're matching you to the profile of success. Now something really important for anyone interested in AI, is you don't want to be starting with machine learning models, you want what's called rule based models. The rules are, what are you looking for, I'm looking for someone whose high medium low on these things. And it's not truth. It's an assumption of what success is. But the important thing is that the company decides, and it's a great way to engage the organization on the change journey. So you have to get your business leaders into say, with join the juice, did we actually used our tool to crowdsource from the hiring managers, what do you think makes a great user? Because they know Yeah, they know. And if you just roll down a tool to is not going to, you're not going to get great adoption. And that forms the basis, it creates transparency, and then the organization gets a match score. But more importantly, they get what we call a new resume, they get this deep profile that says they're easy cognitively to digest strengths and weaknesses a bit of a flavor of the person, their interview responses. And so that is the I guess, the critical document intelligence there
Chris Rainey 31:05
alone. But just know a video involved. We have added
Barb Hyman 31:09
video, unfortunately, I'm not a fan of video, even though we've got it. So we added on to the end. So if you think about a funnel, yeah, so some companies want to look at the video because there's you know, even though COVID destroyed the bias, that I need to see you to trust you to do the work so that except for the case of your wife,
Chris Rainey 31:26
so the reason people want it, it is a reason you don't want it is because it's basically allowing companies to just do creep into that habit. Well,
Barb Hyman 31:34
if we've removed or bias by the beginning, you're adding it in at the end, you're creating risk, that we have an amazing set of insights. This is what most HR is sort of gobsmacked by is that we can track your applicant diversity, race, gender, etc. We then show you what the machine is doing. And then we show you what your people are doing. So you now have visibility of all you know, Chris and his team, he seems to be hiring less than his fair share of, you know, people of a certain group and Bob over here is doing a frigging awesome job. I'm gonna go and chat to Chris and find out why. So transparency creates accountability. So now you know where this is happening within your organization. And that is that is the power. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 32:13
and you've got the data right there. Yeah. Interesting. So okay, because a lot of companies I see going video heavy in your space.
Barb Hyman 32:22
Well, you certainly can't use video AI anymore. Not since regulation came out a few years ago in the US, you can't use video AI. I mean, facial recognition. Is it basically illegal in many states in the US? Yeah. Because you can't explain it. So if there's a video that's observing all this stuff about you, it's going to be reading all that is highly predictive, which is really well, but you can't explain what it's looking at. And it's been shown to be heavily biased in terms of how it processes it bit like what you experienced with your wife, and child. But I just want to share one thing because we're in a video next week, new video has this conference. 60,000 people there like crazy, these tech conferences. I'm not going out. Our data science team is going out labs team. And we're launching what I think is the massively disruptive technology, which is we've taken llama, which is from Edo. And we have fine tuned it now building large language models yourself is extremely expensive reason,
Chris Rainey 33:15
by the way. So sorry to interrupt you purely from
Barb Hyman 33:18
the dimension around accuracy. Fairness, okay. You know, we tested chloroform anthropic we obviously tested bar. And look, I'm a huge admirer of Jana Kuhn. And, you know, I think I think he's a high integrity, obviously, brilliant, I feel almost embarrassed to him saying that, because how am I to judge someone like that. But that was a decision made by our ethics team internally. And if you build your own own language model, just to give you an idea of the order of magnitude costs, right, building your own LLM is like maybe at $4,000 per, let's say, 1000 tokens at $4,000. Fine tuning, a large language model is $1,000. So we can't afford and most companies couldn't afford in the HR tech space to build your own MLMs. Having said that we have around cheating so we can detect if you're cheating. Right from chat, GBT. But so what we're launching is this tool. That is the ultimate it, it interviews, it evaluates it scores, it explains in a coaches. So if you think about traditional competency frameworks, or anything where you're trying to understand people, and they're trying to understand themselves, and everyone learns at a very deep level, we felt that so why would you ever invest in a talent management system again, because anything which enables both parties to get better intelligence is better than just one. It's presented through a natural language interface, instead of getting a deep report that someone at Korn Ferry has written and it's costed a lot. You're gonna get this in your hand. And so my vision for the company is that we are giving everyone on the planet their own personalized AI, career chat chatbot and, you know, we've sort of explored how do we get this in the hands of students? How do we At universities, they're all just frigging too conservative, and not really a bastion of innovation. And you know that to me, it's going to change the world. Wow.
Chris Rainey 35:11
That's huge. Imagine I can imagine like, I always get a question from younger members of the family when they leave school and be like, What do I do? Imagine them having something like that exactly. Where they could have a conversation and be like, yeah, these are things I enjoy, what careers are
Barb Hyman 35:24
just, I mean, my kids are gone through these tests at school, and it is sort of a cake, you would be I think my daughter got your big, great invents management, it's like, really, like very specific. Remember
Chris Rainey 35:33
those kinds of things? Yeah. Yeah. You don't know what you want at that time. And it's always gonna change, right? Yeah, exactly. To our point at the beginning of the conversation about your career, right, you started your career in one directory, and it went to another like, I've done seven, I've had probably 700 Plus stitch rows on the show. And probably, we worked out the other day, it was like 20, something actually chose a career in HR. Yeah, every single other one, found their way, there somehow. But having a support and guidance like that as something early on in your life, or any stage allows, to be honest, to be to give you that kind of guidance is very, very empowering. Gonna tell
Barb Hyman 36:10
you, the only reason I'm here is that, you know, we had International Women's Day the other day. And, you know, it's amazing saying from a woman, much wiser than me that, that women succeed in the company have a lot of good women, and a few good men. And I can tell you that I wasn't gonna do this, but I had really great people who said, you've got to do this. And what I would love is if we could unleash this sort of awareness of what I could be, you know, we have such an imbalance of money going to women and money going to any minority. And I think, I think, you know, some of it is obviously biased, but also, you know, I have so many young women coming to me looking for advice, you know, a girl who did a law degree, and she said, I want to go and be a judge's associate. I said, Why do you want to do that? Why don't go into sales? Like I encourage everyone to go into sales? I think it's such a great learning ground. Yeah. So how do we get more people to see themselves in a different way? You know, and imagine how their world would change? Yeah.
Chris Rainey 37:03
Sales is a superpower. Honestly, for me,
Barb Hyman 37:06
it's listening. It's people, right? It's understanding people. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's,
Chris Rainey 37:11
it's got bad rap, though. It's funny, because whenever you tell people, you're in sales, or you're in sales, it still has that still has that? Well, I think you
Barb Hyman 37:18
could solve problems. Because that you got to have that mindset. If your mindset is sales, reframe it, I think you're not going to get the deals. But if your mindset is, I solve problems, can I solve your problem?
Chris Rainey 37:27
I wish I had that loan a couple of years, like seven years ago, when someone asked what I do I solve problems.
Barb Hyman 37:33
I mean, they'll probably think you're a banker, because
Chris Rainey 37:38
yeah, potentially solve problems. What you mentioned, as being a female founder, what's the biggest challenge you face as a as a female founder? I
Barb Hyman 37:47
actually think it's more about me. Look, I definitely think this bias, absolutely there is I just published something recently, Financial Times published something, there's clearly bias. And you know, there are men, hiring men. And I mean, just look at some of the decisions that have been made by different VCs. But I gotta say, I just, it's taken me a long time. And I Evan flow with just the confidence to know that it's on me, and that, that that's a good thing, not something to fear. And I think I had a difference for the board. That was completely undeserving, I hope my board don't listen to this. They're great people, but they really have no idea what we're doing. And I I'm the I own it, and that can feel quite scary. And it just to really have the confidence to claim the space that I was in. It's I took quite a few years
Chris Rainey 38:32
to build the confidence. Yeah. Interesting. What What message do you give to other female founders that are early on in the journey or thinking about going on a journey having been for
Barb Hyman 38:42
I say, don't get VCs involved? You know, look at Canva. Right, Melanie Perkins is incredible. Canva is one of the most successful companies in the world. Now, you can bet that, you know, she structured their investments and so on to a point where they can't exit her. I'm sure there was a point in time at which they maybe thought Melanie couldn't do it. And they needed someone else who would probably have been a male, right, who's been there, done that before. And, you know, she kind of backed herself. And I'm sure she made some critical decisions along the way. But if you're not reliant on anyone else, and you're not needing anyone else, I think avoid getting other people involved. You know, I think there's this incredible pool and attractiveness of VCs, like all these VCs telling amazing stories, and I got $100 million at x valuation like how many companies that just disappear. So don't don't like gut don't go for sort of, you know, vanity metrics, like this VC invested this much. Just focus on what you believe you need to do for the business. And I think there's a lot of seduction around being connected to VCs, I would rather take money from high net worth. Any day, then from a VC. You kind of sell your soul a bit. Like I don't have those kinds of VCs, by the way on my on my register. I mean, I cannot tell you there are just so many crazy moments when it's So I'm keeping it for my, you know, for when I retire, but I remember being in conversations with in the early days, and an investor said, you know, what does your cap table look? Like? I said, What? The cap table? What is that? I had no idea what it was. Yeah. And, you know, I guess there was so much I didn't know, I couldn't worry about all these things, right? Yeah. Then tomorrow, there were more things I didn't know. Like, every day, you're learning just an insane amount, an insane amount, you almost don't have time to be self aware about the things that you don't know. And you just have to let yourself it's almost like a, what is that a trust for? And I think the other thing that's really important, is, we're too much in a bubble. In our business, you know, I get to meet a lot of people externally, because I'm always talking. But I don't think I do it enough. So I think you've got to try and find a bit of balance and not let your whole life be sacrificed to and realize, you know, I've always believed that innovation comes from difference. So get out, you know, speak to different types of people and completely different sectors and that it kind of gives you perspective, and that's healthy. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 41:05
no, I love that. I appreciate your honesty. That's the foremost not many people will be will be that honest. And I feel like some of China's success is in is in our scrappiness in a weird way, like, we didn't have a business plan, we still don't have a business plan, in the sense of like a traditional business plan. When I remember when we met someone who was considering investing from early days, he was like, give me your business plan. And we were like, I don't have a business plan. But we know exactly how we're going to achieve it. Because we were doing it for 10 years it before for someone else. But we kind of like MVP everything. Go for it, like put it out there build build as you're we're kind of like jumping out, you know, the analogy you're saying was using sort of the jumping out the aeroplane and and building?
Barb Hyman 41:52
We're doing now Yeah, we did that for the first three years. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 41:55
we're still doing that. And I also I choose to be in that in that zone. Like, we always kind of talk about seeking discomfort. And that's where the magic happens. If anything, when I get to settled and everything's going to Well, I'm like what's wrong? Because that's when you realize you're not really innovating and challenging and burning yourself, there is a balance, because obviously, for me, I've pushed it too far in the past and has impacted my mental health. And I've gone way too deep down. So this is a sort of sort of a sweet spot in the middle, to be able to get
Barb Hyman 42:28
your wife involved in the business as well. No. So when she's good, I think to have someone that brings you back to a different world.
Chris Rainey 42:34
But now she's also just started quit her job and started her own company. Right. So that has actually created a very interesting dynamic in our relationship, which was we're still obviously struggling, but we're working on because that's a very two entrepreneurs. Yeah, husband and wife entrepreneurs is tough. Yeah, it's really tough to be able to the energy with, you know, young family, five year old, yeah, today, but I want her to I'm really excited for her to go on this journey, as long as she's sacrificed so much over the last seven years for me to do this, that I think is excited for her. Yeah,
Barb Hyman 43:05
it will be interesting, given that you're in the seat, and have been for a while to just observe, does she experience something different, like being female, I'm seeing
Chris Rainey 43:13
interest over I've listened to some of our calls, because I've just in the background, and the way that like when she's pitching and the way to think some of the things and the language that's used towards her is like, not degrading, but like, I see the difference. I can hear the difference in the way that she's being spoken to, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Also, as a black female leader, there's almost like this. Sometimes we've gone to meetings where like, I can see surprise on people's faces. Oh, you're you're black
Barb Hyman 43:44
or clearly people say that, like Larry David.
Chris Rainey 43:47
I can see like, they're surprised that she's the founder of clay. Wherever it she's black or not, wherever she's a female, I can see some initial shock value, whatever
Barb Hyman 43:58
is grabbing the bias that we all have. Right. And that's why we are really bad, right? So
Chris Rainey 44:02
that thing. Yeah, I can see. Oh, you're the founder. I've never had that. Yeah. No one's ever said to me, Oh, you're
Barb Hyman 44:10
the founder. Yeah. She's like an assumption that you're entitled to that. Yeah. But
Chris Rainey 44:14
as long as I'm white male, I don't get that. Shane had it before because he looks so young. Because he looked at me, he's like, 16 years old. Yeah, but that's a little bit different. We've had that a lot actually, over the years is like, like, in order to be a founder, I have to be really, really old and have gray hair. Apparently young, like even my CEO when I quit my job, said who are you to quit your job, you can start your own company and immediately started to sue me and Shane within a week. Wow. I gave you 10 years of my career and the reply. You get I think you want to see those things of motivation that we took that as a sign that we are valued.
Barb Hyman 44:53
I gotta say, you know, this is probably not a good thing, but I do find that proving people wrong has been a real power. Oh, send motivate me, I love it. Oh, if I can show you, I'm gonna do that
Chris Rainey 45:03
you really love about that story. About two years later, they hired me and Shane to advise them. And the company that purchased them, they reached out to me and Shane to partner with us. And I was like You do realize the company you just purchase is actually currently suing right now. And they were like, why? He was like, why? Like, I don't understand. I was like, literally, there's no reason why, like, we left and started a company, they didn't like it. They got scared. And he immediately just, obviously, wherever call them and said, This is ridiculous. Why are we spending money on this? And then not being a customer of ours? That was a really cool moment to go to walk back into the office and see all those people and now they're like, we're here to advise, advise you on you're showing you how you should get in front of HR executives. Yeah. as well. An irony. That was a fun moment. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we spoke a lot about AI. Right. But we are starting to see some some blockers in the market in terms of the fear, and some other things. What are your thoughts and perspectives on that?
Barb Hyman 46:11
So someone very clever and famous many years ago said, you know, coined the phrase that all disruption comes with fear. And, you know, we don't know this because we weren't born then. But when they first introduced the car, they had people on street corners, shooting rifles in the air to warn the pedestrians, that there was this car traveling at 20 kilometers an hour that was coming. And there was a lot of fear. And when I think AI, I you know, the media have done a great job, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned. And people need to be released greatness, and you know, there's growing regulation in this space. But I think the reality is, it's not going anywhere. And you know, there's that phrase, now, the CHR O 's who use AI will replace the ones that don't like that is definitely going to happen. And it's a huge source of power for you, as an individual and as a team and as a company. So you kind of owe it to the business, you're doing your job if you lean in and be curious. And you know, I did a session with CPAs today here in London, and it was all about AI fluency. Where do you start? And, you know, the refrain that I'm constantly saying is, there's no such thing as an AI strategy. So if your board or your CEO is saying, What's AI strategy, there's no such thing as an AR strategy. What there is, is an AI governance strategy, which you gotta get going on, like today, collaborate with the head of privacy with legal or to figure out what are the parameters? What are the principles? Where are we going to encourage people to embrace it? And you can't, you can't control it. I've heard of many organizations, where they're mandating no one in the business can use general I mean, forget it, you can't do that. So you have to help people by defining some principles, so that they can self assess, right? And because it's moving in such pace, like where is it safe? Where is it less safe, and put a whole lot of different examples of there, it's, it's completely safe, in my view, to fit all of your engagement results in terms of verbatim and say, Can you summarize this until so we should? I mean, we're doing that at the moment, and there's no risk, and then we take mumps. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's like, it's freaky, right? And
Chris Rainey 48:09
crazy to see, right. Well, I remember people are crisis, we're just during this period, we've got we're doing. So if a review is gonna be I'll get back to me in a couple of months.
Barb Hyman 48:18
Completely different. So yeah. And then it's, it's unsafe to use it to write job descriptions, because it's using the job descriptions that we've all created, you know, as
Chris Rainey 48:26
people does, and one of the main examples everyone keeps showing? Well, that's because
Barb Hyman 48:30
it's so easy, right. But it's also very risky. And most job descriptions are written by us. And we're biased. I mean, this technology that exists just to devise it. I think the other thing is just the fear of what's this gonna do to my job. And I think that's where, you know, the best way to deal with like, we had this discussion before we started, you know, what's on the other side of failure? And what is on the other side of family? There's a fantastic podcast interview between Tim, what's his name that famous? Yeah. And oh, my goodness, is it amazing African American comedian, I have to find it and share it with you can put it in the notes. And just so I listen, yeah. And it's quite a few years old now. And any awesome and he said, There's nothing on the other side of fear, what is it? What's going to happen, you're going to die and lose all your money. And it's this, it's a mental a lot of things hold us back, really just in our mind. And I think instead of shutting it down, and you can't do that anymore, like our world is surrounded by AI. And the big thing in recruitment is we're going to lose the human touch. Well, frankly, humans don't scale. And how is that that principle serving you now? Like if I went interviewed everyone that applied for a job, would they go wow, it's incredible. I mean, they definitely wouldn't. So AI can be more human than humans. I mean, you see that with generative AI. And so almost put your assumptions to one side. And then imagine, imagine, like putting aside technology, imagine what a A bit like what Airbnb did when they first started, imagine what a 10 star experience would be like, for a guest. And I don't know if you've ever heard that podcast, it's really brilliant. They, you know, it would be like I was the Beatles, and everyone's at the airport. And, and so put the technology away, don't buy tech, right, solve really meaningful problems and be aspirational in who you want to be and how you want to turn up for your people. And then think about it. So technology that can help us do that. I think us in particular is very overstocked. People have so much tech, but how much impact is it having? If you've invested in CRMs? Are you therefore not spending any money on job boards? If not, I think you haven't really solved a problem, right? And many companies are spending hundreds of 1000s on really awful experiences on job boards. They buy CRM so that they create these talent pools, is it working? So I think there's so many billions of dollars, it's gone into HR tech, and there's so much tech, that they just end up buying tech, and they lose sight of what really matters. You got to own your space own what matters to our business? What's going to move the needle in an order of magnitude way. Like if you're proud of the fact that you're now automating the scheduling of a million interviews. What if you have that? What would that do for the business? What if you reduce it to a quarter of a million? Now you're starting to talk about real business value, not the automation of something that's a massive time. So. So I I tend to be quite provocative because I think it's really lazy to buy Tech, I think what you really want to measure yourself on have we made a difference? Can we see that? Can we measure that? Does the business see that?
Chris Rainey 51:32
Starting? Yeah, it's starting with a problem that you're trying to solve. Like, I feel like you're right, people just buying the technology, don't figure it Jen, like fall in love with the problem. Yeah, all of that. Do you think this is a moment in time for HR leaders to harness the power of AI and lead their organizations, they
Barb Hyman 51:49
have to, they have to, and you know, we talked about HR finally gets a seat at the table with COVID, now's your chance to get a seat at the table. So you think about a business that's got 70% turnover versus one that's got 20%, that's going to really start to impact on sales. So suddenly, the one with 20% is going to race away. Because everyone knows that high turnover creates significant impact on revenue. And it creates more high turnover. So suddenly, you're actually creating, you know, enormous amount of whitespace, between you and your, your nearest competitor. And you have to be really conscious of that. Rather than, you know, can we automate phone screens? Now that might be useful? Because you can use those people for something else, but start with what really drives value to the business?
Chris Rainey 52:34
Yeah. What do you think the role of the CFO look like in the future? As we move more and more to this ai ai first world? Well,
Barb Hyman 52:42
I think, you know, no one that least 10 years ago, joined HR to work with technology, you joined HR to work with people, everyone would say that yeah, yeah. And it's about what there's a big risk component of your role now managing the intersection between data, technology and people. And, you know, I almost think I don't know if everyone in the world has reviewed the Netflix culture deck like I have, I think it's the last truly before SAP or the last truly great innovation in HR, because it just changes the whole way in which you think about culture. And, you know, creating a sort of a freedom in a box, the box being the principles. And so this is a moment where you've got to, you know, sort of down tools, and start really investing in understanding the business, the business strategy, what's happening in the business, that's going to impact downstream. I also think that with generative AI, and intelligence and chat, most of the tech tools that you invested in won't be around when it makes no sense to have five different tech tools that deal with five different journeys. You know, it's not, it's not a straight line, people. And, you know, even things like, how do you nurture alumni, if you're losing a lot of people, you know, do you invest in them when they've left? Because people, people want to work at places that they like, and everyone always thinks the grass is greener. And, you know, our head of engineering Johnny, funnily enough, he left after about 18 months, he said, I think that the people we've hired in engineering are old school. They're seeing agile as a noun, I'm out of here. And he's really young. He's incredible. He's like a racehorse, you know, unbridled, right, and he wanted to invent, create move, at pace. And we took a step backwards when we hired someone who just had grown up in a mature tech environment and was bringing a lot of structure that as opposed to just kind of much more risky experimentation. And then he came back, because actually, it wasn't so great on the other side, and, you know, it's very expensive to the business to just churn through people. So how do you think about holistically what does it look what would it do to the business if we could spend less on the whole process of you know, in and out managing, etc. How do we get to a point where in retail for instance, we never need to hire a manager again, because we can see that talent. They love what they see they're seeing more stable teams, they see the freedom to grow, you know, AI that gives people agency, it's not for the HR. I think that's the key mantra is you've got to use AI in a way that gives the individual agency, it's not for your HR function,
Chris Rainey 55:18
it's gonna be quite big impacted on frontline workers. Say, in terms of one of the challenges, you just mentioned, retail, it just sparked in my brain of how companies show up for their frontline workers. Yeah. And now using a similar way to be able to connect, where a mobile app, for example, with their frontline workers using AI. Yeah,
Barb Hyman 55:37
absolutely. And I think if, if you could engage in a conversation, and the business could see that you're someone that would be an incredible store manager. And then they come to you and say, Hey, we've got these openings, you know, this is all my chat. And you know, what, you actually look pretty good in that area, versus five people put their hand up, you know, across five stores, right, and they may not be the best people, but they're kind of sitting here in front of you. So let's go with that. Or else can't be bothered, we're gonna go and hire externally, a lot of people say it's easier to hire externally than it is to find internally. And that changes your culture in a fundamental way. You know, I think the fact that you have something like Gen AI, and it's sort of learning at your fingertips, I remember when I was a CHR, oh, invested in Ninja. And the idea was, just give people access, and they'll go and do it. But you know, what, I don't think people have time. I'd rather actually have a conversation prompted by the chat that says, you know, you know, Chris, you'd be really good at this. Have you thought about that? Shall we have a conversation here, and I can help you better understand your strengths, guide you through that process, you know, the AI career, but like, wow, what would that feel like? Because you know, what, your managers probably shit. You manager doesn't know you doesn't have any time. You know, people join organizations, they leave managers. So suddenly, you've got this augmentation of the whole manager experience coming through chat like that. That's incredible. So, you know, and that's very human, right? What's not human is not getting anything. Zero
Chris Rainey 57:01
was yeah, no reply whatsoever. And also to your point is probably prompting things that you've never even thought about opportunities, never thought about making connections around skills that you have that are transferable to a completely different role that you'd never even would have fought, if it wasn't prompted to as well. So I'm going to be powered by all that data, to be able to make those suggestions.
Speaker 1 57:22
But also the other thing, I think we're we want to go right into the employee journey, right? So imagine that you just say, you know, forward slash in Slack or teams, help me learn, the chat immediately goes and has conversations, because you're integrated into workday with your peers, your reports, comes back, and they're going to be more honest, because they're not saying it to your face. And it can have the intelligence of probing like, Tell me more, I'd love to learn about that. Because again, most managers don't have the capacity, or the skills to do that. That's a hard thing for the individual to give up with feedback. Now you're getting back something in, you know, maybe it's a couple of days, because you need people to have time, you're you're getting the summary, your peer group really sees you as awesome as this. And this is an area to dive deeper. Would you like me to give you some tips? So everything's controlled by the individual? And it's AI that gives you agency? And then you say to the person who's given the feedback, Hey, would you like us to delete this data in the system? Or do you want to hold on to it in some way? No doubt people say delete it. Right? So the full control is in the hands of the individual, empowered.
Chris Rainey 58:22
So many, many careers, especially my early career felt like I was just like, waiting for someone to give me permission to succeed. Yeah.
Barb Hyman 58:30
That's a great blog, blog title. You should write that story.
Chris Rainey 58:34
Yeah, yeah. I feel like that you're also sitting there waiting for a tap on the shoulder for that promotion. I never ever felt I never at any point in those 10 years, felt empowered. I was truly in charge of my career. And my
Speaker 1 58:44
Yeah, and look, you know, no one's gonna discover you, right? Like those people in my team, even. You know, we say your career is your responsibility. You own it. And, you know, I used to think that someone will notice I'm working really hard, and I'm really talented, but it never happens. Yeah. So I think anything where you can really give people the power to, to know themselves and to learn in a scalable way that is delivered through natural language is very significant change in the way that we think about
Chris Rainey 59:13
work. Yeah, it's an I could talk to you forever.
Barb Hyman 59:16
We originally I know, I feel like we've got a bit beyond half an hour,
Chris Rainey 59:19
but I was enjoyed so much. Like, I don't want to stop off. Before I let you go. Like we've covered so much. If there's like one thing you want to leave the audience we have put off pine piece of advice. What would that be? And then where can people connect with you and learn more about Sophia?
Barb Hyman 59:33
Yeah. So I think if you're a CHR you know, you're in a leadership role. So lead on the on the journey. Before, you know your team are probably three steps ahead of you already. Where can people find more look, I do. I don't go on Twitter, but I'm on LinkedIn a lot. And I have a newsletter where I tend to just speak from my, you know, speak what's on my mind. And I think I like to be a bit of a provocateur to the industry. And so that's The good place to stay in touch with me and and then we have, you know some really great starting books for you and your team that are not about us. They're about what do you do in this world of AI? You know, start that learning journey. Amazing.
Chris Rainey 1:00:14
And for everyone listen as always, those links are below. Check out the newsletter. We'll also probably grab it if we could grab some of those Books eBooks. Yeah, down below. Absolutely grab Deb. I appreciate you coming. It's really nice to meet you in person. Likewise appreciate your candidness I appreciate you sharing your insights and journey with everyone here. We're all on this journey together. I just tend to this is so fast paced that honestly many of the people listening it's hard to keep up Yeah. as well. Yeah,
Barb Hyman 1:00:39
yeah. And just but you just got to get in there. You know, like you said, what's on the other side of facing into your fears, you know, not much probably empowerment, and curiosity being sparked love
Chris Rainey 1:00:50
that. I wish all the best until next week.
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Victoria Klug, HR Director Eastern Europe at Beiersdorf.