How AI Is Transforming Hiring (And Recruiters’ Real Role)
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Heidi Barnett, President of Talent Acquisition at isolved, about how AI is reshaping recruiting and why candidate experience now matters more than ever.
Heidi shares her journey from marketing into HR tech leadership and explains why the best recruiters today act more like growth leaders. She discusses the shift from sourcing to screening, why resumes are becoming obsolete, and how AI exposes broken hiring processes.
The conversation explores how TA teams can reduce burnout, partner better with CHROs, and reimagine hiring from the ground up in the age of AI.
🎓 In this episode, Heidi discusses:
The shift from sourcing to screening in hiring
Why resumes and degrees are becoming less relevant
How AI frees recruiters to focus on human connection
How CHROs can reduce TA burnout and drive hiring success
Why recruiters must now design marketing-style candidate experiences
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Chris Rainey 0:00
All right, let's jump. Let me, dude, let me take a drink real quick. Yeah. Oh, I love that. You definitely got a big enough bottle. That's good. Yeah, I always say it to everyone else, and I always forget to drink water myself. You'd think after 1000 episodes, I would have like a HR leaders branded bottle.
Heidi Barnett 0:21
Oh, Chris, why do I get nervous on these every time it's just get nervous. You're not scary or
Chris Rainey 0:28
anything. Just think about this. Yeah, I've never done a day of in HR ever, and I speak to the best minds in HR. So imagine how I feel like sometimes, there you go. People don't realize that I'm like, sitting there with like, Dave Oric, and he's like, closing me on everything, and I'm like, want to just die on the inside. I'm like, like, and he me and him. I've known him since I was 17. We have a running joke where and off camera, which he he's like, if whatever difficult question you ask me, whenever we do a show, I'm gonna ask you back. He does it at like, conferences, like, in front of 1000s of people. So I'll be interviewing him on stage, and he'll be like, What do you think, Chris? And I'm like, like, like, what's the top trends you see coming? HR? And I'm like, No. And then he starts smiling, because, like, an in joke between me, I hate you, Dave, but I love you at the same time. Yeah, me nervous. It's just a conversation. All right. I think that's how we got this far, just by having conversations. Yeah, it's true. No one's expecting you to solve all of these problems as well, even though you're called isoft. So that would be, yeah, cool. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Amazing. Heidi, welcome to the show. How are you?
Heidi Barnett 1:37
I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Chris, good to see
Chris Rainey 1:40
you, good to see you. So before we jump in, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself personally, and then your journey to where we are today, sure.
Heidi Barnett 1:50
So my backgrounds in marketing, that was really my entry point into talent, and it turns out that hiring and talent, you know, have more in common than people realize. So started as a content writer in HR tech, moved through marketing, became sales leader, and then eventually became CRO and I was an early member at applicant Pro. And so it was really fun to kind of grow up within the business and then eventually became CEO. Served in that role for three years, and then led the team over into an integration with our I solved company, so now I'm the president of talent acquisition solutions at I solved and really I have a passion overall for hiring in that, that marketing mindset. Personally, I live in Utah. I have four kids. I'm a wife. I love being outdoors. Utah is a great place for it. We have tons of incredible things to do any time of year. So right now we're in our hiking era. You know, in a couple months here, we'll be in our, I don't know, skiing era. It's just a beautiful place
Chris Rainey 3:01
to be. Just keep going and make me more jealous. Why don't you? I know, I know there's me sucking the city in London, and you're hiking and skiing. I'm not jealous at all. Come see me. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's, I'm going to be calling you being like, how do you manage four kids? That's going to be my first that's going to be my first question, because I can deal with, I'm barely dealing with one. So, I mean, four, you're gonna be my go to my mom raised four kids on her own. So I was like, wow. Now, as an adult, I appreciate it. You're like, even you don't even think about it, right? But as an adult, you're like, Yeah, this is pretty tough.
Heidi Barnett 3:37
This is pretty tough, yeah, especially I'm in I have teenagers now, and so it's funny to almost stare back at. Like, all the qualities that kind of make you crazy about yourself are reflected back in your children. So it's extra exciting.
Chris Rainey 3:51
It's a different set of problems now, challenges. I love your background. I think it's so complimentary, right? Like, I think now thinking if you said you started in marketing, right? And I think now, now more than ever, that's playing such a critical role in this position and as companies and even HR functions. I was just interviewing a chro today, and I was like, what some of the new hires you're making in your own team? And he's like, we're building out a marketing team within our HR function, right? Right? Because they need content. They need an online presence. They need to reach people where they're at right, which is social media. And that's something we just didn't think about like, you know? And I think even during like the pandemic, communication became so critical, and HR kind of rose in that space, really, to be the voice of the organization. So how has that helped you in your current roles that you're in now?
Heidi Barnett 4:46
Yeah, for sure. I think one of the things that you know as you talk about really, we're starting to almost have to create marketing experiences within recruiting, right? And so this is a stat that I read away. Back, 49% of job seekers would turn down an offer due to a poor candidate experience. And so instead of for our recruiters, kind of being gatekeepers almost and keeping out the bad, we're almost having to create an experience from a candidate perspective, right? We're almost a candidate experience designer, as you start to allow for AI to deploy some of those repetitive, you know, grunt work type of things. Yeah, we really start to be able to have more opportunity within influence and messaging this candidate experience. It's truly crafted to be able to help the candidates to want to come work there, because this truly is their launching point right from the jump, like your job ad says more about who you are than possibly you know your new hire training. And so getting them animated and excited and in the door, I think, can make a really big difference. And so what we'll start to see is, I believe, is that our top recruiters, the ones that are really performing at a high level, will start to look more like growth leaders. They're going to have to focus on conversion and and retention and those things that really matter. And it's not so much again, about this gate keeping.
Chris Rainey 6:13
Yeah, and I think we've, there's been a lot of concerns in the recruitment space about AI and that replacing recruiters. But to your point, I think AI now frees them up to do that.
Heidi Barnett 6:23
Yeah, yeah. And I don't, I really don't, you know, we'll look back on all of these conversations in five years and we'll be like, remember how we thought, you know, this wasn't going to be a thing. But I really don't believe that it's going to replace our recruiters. I believe that it's really going to free them up, to focus on the people. And you know, we talked about this just in another conversation we had about everyone's desire, I think we'll feel more of a desire of people to connect, more realistically, more inhuman, though a lot of that we're going to seek for that authenticity, because we're living in an AI world. You can you can scroll LinkedIn. You're like, ai, ai. Oh, this one feels authentic, whether it's using AI or not. You know, it's different. But I think we're gonna crave that more, and I think that we'll see that in our hiring experiences as
Chris Rainey 7:13
well. Yeah, I feel like we're going for full 360 in some ways, where we started with more of a human focus. Earlier in my career, we had this huge way of technology, so we went that direction. And now people are craving, again, the human experience and connection. And we're back here again. It seems like a cycle.
Heidi Barnett 7:36
Yeah, I think covid did that to us, too. Think about covid, you know, we were all in some ways, I was excited to be back working from home fully and and having more time at home and with my family. And then as soon as the world opened back up, there was all this pent up demand, right? We all wanted to go the movies. We all wanted to go to dinner. We all wanted to be out with our friends. And so we saw that in the hiring craze as well. I mean, just just as soon as things open up in 2021 22 like we just had this boom and all these people needing to hire. And so I feel that in a very, very cyclical way of people wanting that more human, authentic touch. And so as we can create those experiences in a hiring in a hiring environment, we're going to win out. Our people are going to connect with us more.
Chris Rainey 8:21
Yeah, hiring itself has gone through so many massive shifts over the last couple of years. Ai, is just a new one coming. What stands out to you in terms of how companies are approaching talent today that's different?
Heidi Barnett 8:34
Yeah, a couple come to mind. The first one is, I really have seen in the past year in particular, maybe two, that we have a shift from this need for sourcing to a need for screening. Right before we were in a scarcity mindset, we were really trying to draw out more candidate flow. And I think in some ways it became a vanity metric, almost like a warm blanket we'd put on at night and just be like, Hey, look at all my candidates. This is so great. However, now we're seeing an overabundance of candidates, and the quality is off as well. And so we have this flood of candidates. We have layoffs announced every day. We have easier to apply functionality. And so, you know, it's not uncommon for someone to sit down in an hour and apply, apply, apply to 100 jobs and then not have any idea what they applied for, what it is they're working on. And so that flood of candidates is really forcing us to start to look to now, what right how do we handle hiring from this abundant standpoint, and screening is going to become the new bottleneck, but also the most critical pieces of our tech stack, or most critical pieces of our hiring process, I think is going to, is going to be this screening component you're going to, you know, with, with some of the things we deploy, we encourage a video interview, because you can watch it and within seconds. Now this is not a right fit, rather than, you know, scheduling the call and getting them on the call and feeling like you need to. Then 30 minutes, you're able to more quickly move through some of those things. I think your assessments, your skills testing, again, will become one of those things that becomes really important in the screening process. So that's the first one, Chris. I think another one that's interesting to think about is we used to have the kind of this, like post and pray mentality. We would write our ad, we would post it, and then we'd all pray that the right candidates would come through. And I think again, similar to what we were talking about with the growth leadership mindset, we're starting to see us need to become more performance based, almost like performance marketers in how we're recruiting right our job boards are now run more like PPC. You're paying for candidate flow. You're paying for visibility. You're paying for this quick match on these platforms. And so your ads have to convert. They just have to convert, and they have to convert the right people, and not in a way of gatekeeping. Again, we're not trying to keep them out. We want to cast a wide net. But I think that here you're going to see more story like opportunities. You're going to see, you know, making sure that the things that matter most are at the top of the ad. You know, all those things are going to help us to convert similar to marketers. And so I think that we'll move more from this post and pray mentality over into that performance marketing. And then we're seeing that shift from resumes. Resumes used to be the only thing you know. You walk in with your resume and hand them to the to the hiring manager. I think we're going to see more soft skills coming into play. People are going to be looking more for that hire, for potential, because AI can be the AI is helpful for candidates, just like it's helpful for us on the recruiting front. And so all sudden, all of our matching is going to become, I don't know, everyone's going to figure out how to match their resumes over and so resumes, I think, are just going to become less and less important, and people are going to actually start to look more for the skills that are important and matter to them in order to be able to grow their businesses. So those are just a few that that have really, I've seen like pain around or watched as we get hired internally as well. Some of those themes are coming out in that shift.
Chris Rainey 12:06
Yeah. I mean, we could do a whole show on every one of those topics, right? I'll start with the last one, because it's fresh in my head. Like it almost thing seems crazy that the CV is still around, right? Like the idea that the words that you write on the paper is a reflection of your capability and what you can apply, because then it becomes who can write the best CV? Exactly, right? Whereas, like, I'm not good at that. You know, I struggled with reading and writing my whole career, but I'm an expert on execution in all of the areas and skills that I have. But you asked me to write a good CV, I'm probably not going to get caught. Yeah, every job I've ever got is actually been where I've been quite into my first role, and I've been headhunted based on my skills, not based on my CV. Yes, to your point,
Heidi Barnett 12:54
yeah, it is. It is interesting how much weight we put on that CV and that that resume in our lives. It, I think it's just something that we've always known, and so we tend to, like anchor onto these things of well, what do you mean? You don't have a resume, you know? And I have, I have a daughter who's we call her an emerging adult. She's 18, she's just going out into the workforce, and she didn't have a resume. And every job she applied for required it. So of course, we sat down and wrote one, and she's like, This is crazy. I don't have any experience, right? And so it became this big barrier for her being able to actually apply for and so anyways, she's got a couple jobs now. She's got one she starts this week, and I think it will really help in being able to give her more of those skills to be able to grow,
Chris Rainey 13:39
yeah, but I think now we have the data technology, and most companies are moving towards a skills based organization, skills based approach that will now become the common the you know, I think we'll move more and more towards that as you start to even remove hierarchy and functions and even job towers. I feel like in the future where we focus on skills, and this is the task and project. What are the skills that we need to bring together to achieve that? As opposed to a CV, which is very linear by design, CV puts a CV puts you in a box. It does right? So you have so many skills that are complimentary across, could be applied across any part of the business, but the CV is literally putting you in a box. And if you have a CV this broad and in different areas, then you're too broad, and you don't fit any box. And then there's kind of an interesting ones. I'm really excited to see how companies and solution providers in the space start to reimagine this to be a skills based approach, because I think, especially you the age of AI and technology, those hard skills are going to become easier and more accessible, whereas the power skills, as I don't like to say soft skills, but the power skills, yes, are going to be even more important things like critical thinking. We wish we all. Spoken about a little bit in our last conversation as well. So it's gonna be interesting, you know, and it will be how this evolves. And even count, even platforms like LinkedIn, which are very heavy on click here, titles and CVS and stuff like that. Back to your first point. Though, we've got this flood of of we've made it so easy to apply that people are applying not just multiple jobs, but they also are applying for multiple jobs in the same company. Yes, after I saw, I mean, one of the situations Was there someone recently that applied for 30 jobs in the same company, right as well. How are you seeing companies overcome that challenge, or how are you approaching that and figuring out, okay, who is the right person to do that?
Heidi Barnett 15:50
Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, we had this experience for ourselves as well. We posted a developer job, and typically we'd get, you know, 2020, ish qualified candidates in a week. And we felt pretty good about those numbers. If you look at them statistically, that was really great from a conversion perspective. Just our most recent one, we posted, we had 125 applicants overnight, and most of them are qualified, right? Things are wildly different, and so I think it's tricky trying to discover who is that right fit and who isn't. And so some of those things we're deploying, you know, our AI screening tools have been really helpful for us to be able to see first who is the best fit, and then, as we click in, it gives you more of an opportunity to view these things are working and these things are, these things are maybe, like a strong point for them. Maybe these things are things that they need to work on. So, you know, a little more of what you're getting into. I love, I love a hiring assessment. We use one with a benchmark, and so it allows for us to take a look at, you know, especially if we have someone in the company that we love, that we'd love to clone. I'd take 10 of Sarah, right then. I want to put Sarah as a benchmark so that I can put everyone up against her to be able to see, oh, look, you know, Chris is a 75% fit of Sarah. Let's take a look at what this looks like. I think this is going to force us also, as we've talked a little bit about, maybe a traditional route isn't the one that's going to get us the proper candidates that we're looking for. And so I think it's going to push us a little bit more to look at those things. I like to use the example of like a barista at Starbucks. You know, they're used to all of these different like, types of drinks and hidden drinks and Tiktok drinks or whatever, and they're making individual drinks for all these people, I want that person talking to my customers because they're used to, you know, navigating different changes and a lot of those different things. I want them as if I'm a credit union. I want them as a teller at the talking to my customers because I know that they're going to help them navigate their individual situation in a way. So starting to see if we can map some of those, I think that the assessment can be really helpful with that. And I think really just changing our mindset around what it is, what is that we're looking for, rather than, I want five years of experience, plus, I want, you know, a degree or whatever that degree is, I think we're going to start having to look more openly find really good fit.
Chris Rainey 18:27
Yeah, did I tell you my background, how I got my first job I've ever seen? I don't think so. Yeah, so very quickly, because the audience probably heard it about a million times, 1000 episode, I think you'd appreciate, and it's become 20 years later, it now is the norm. So I got my job at 17 by just literally walking up to some people in a pool bar that looked like they had a really fancy suit once, then I need a job. Like, that's literally and I was like, 17, and I was like, they're like, You have no idea what we do. And I was like, Yeah, but I was like, Yeah, but I need a job, and you guys look like you make great money, which is my young, naive teenage self. So long story short, I got invited to an interview. I just had a web link, so I had no idea, apart from what this company did, I even know what a role was, and I go there, and no one had informed the hiring manager or the HR team of why I was there, so no context. And they said, you know, you need to yourself experience and a degree for this job. And I was like, Well, I obviously don't have two sales experience, and I haven't been to university, and I went through the whole screening process, and I did like, an assessment and all that stuff. And then hours later, they were like, Yeah, you know, can't give you the job. You don't meet these criterias. And I was like, before I leave, can you explain to me the correlation between, like, a really successful sales person and a degree? And they kind of just looked at each other and had no arm. So whatsoever. So I was like, so you don't need a degree to be good at sales. And I Oh, no. But you know, I was like, Okay, last and they're like, Christian, it's not gonna work out. You gotta leave. And one more question, like, oh my god, this kid won't leave. I was like, you've mentioned multiple times during this conversation, you have a world class sales Academy. So why do I need to use that was experience, right? And again, they just was like, oh, like, no answer whatsoever. So I was like, if you don't need a degree, and you've got this incredible Academy and I have the willingness to learn and grow, then why can't I work here, right? And long story short, they said no again. I then offered to work for free for the summer, and I was there, and I was there for 10 years, and I became global VP of sales, and sold the company to Gartner, right? And like the day that I left the business, 10 years later, when we sold, they still hadn't changed. That really, no, it's just crazy, right? Like, and to think where we are now in our conversation that's going to come. They're going to become the normal, right? Like you shouldn't if you're only hiring when you someone's got a degree or the perfect experience, and you're not looking it through the lens of skills, and do they have the growth mindset, right and the hunger to develop, then you're missing out on it entire pool of talent. Yes. So is, are you seeing companies really starting to make the shift?
Heidi Barnett 21:39
It is really difficult for people. I think that the the ones that are their leadership is is forward facing, forward thinking. You're going to see more of that. It's interesting. A lot of startups are the ones that can bend some of those rules. I feel like our larger organizations are the one
Chris Rainey 22:02
Heidi sorry turns up stuck in our ways around. Sorry turns up the internet's cutting out. And is anything else you got? Anything else you got open?
Speaker 1 22:16
No, everything is closed. Here.
Chris Rainey 22:20
It was okay up until a minute ago, and now it's cutting out. Just in case. You got your accounts open.
Heidi Barnett 22:27
Yeah, I've got that. I closed one more. So hopefully everything are you? Am I hearing me now?
Chris Rainey 22:33
Yeah, it's just like, it's jolting. It's like I hear everything. I hear every like, five words, and then it disappears and it comes back, and I don't know why. Okay, let me give me one second. I'm just going to make sure files. I mean, we've got one gigabyte per second internet, so I don't think I'm going to quickly check.
Heidi Barnett 22:53
Give me one second my I have a little hub too here. Let me just check that. We'll be
Chris Rainey 22:58
right back. All right. Cool. Sorry. I never you
Chris Rainey 23:41
one sec.
Heidi Barnett 23:43
Okay, I tried mine as well.
Heidi Barnett 23:53
Okay.
Chris Rainey 23:56
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I can hear you, great. Yeah, I checked on our side. It's definitely not there, but I don't know what. So I don't know what. It's not on your side. No, we've got one gigabyte up. We've got, like, a dedicated line. So I check, checked it, but let's carry on. It's kind of seems all right. Now, let's
Speaker 1 24:14
carry on. If not I can, I'll try one more thing. Maybe I can just hop on my hot spot. It looks like I've got quite
Chris Rainey 24:19
a bit of Well, it seems to be back now, so I don't know why, yeah, so sorry. He was in a flow, but it was like, every other word was like, No,
Speaker 1 24:27
you're like, let's just stop. Yeah, even
Chris Rainey 24:30
when I was trying to tell you to stop, it was giving it. It was coming to you 10 seconds later. This is why you probably heard it earlier. Anyways, it doesn't matter. This is what happens with the Internet. We're talking about all these evolutions, and we're just trying to get internet to work right now, which is ironic. Where were we? I said, I Okay, let's start from again, because then the team can edit this perfectly. So based on that, how far are companies still. Stuck in that old mindset of this, of the of the CV, of the of the degree, how far do you think we are on the journey?
Speaker 1 25:11
Yeah,
Heidi Barnett 25:13
so you were that's, can you ask that question more time? Let's try it again. I just switched to my hotspot. I hoping that that will be
Chris Rainey 25:19
helpful. Oh, I was wondering where you disappeared to. Yeah, if you want to ask
Heidi Barnett 25:24
that question one more time that I think might be better just to get us
Chris Rainey 25:29
Yeah, no, let me just ask you if it way, why do you think that companies are still struggling to move away from the degree?
Heidi Barnett 25:40
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think a lot of it is mindset, Chris, I think it's just what we've always known, right? And I think that there needs to be more people asking the same question that you were asking, Why do you need a degree, you know? And where we see a lot of our startups don't require it, right? Because they are more fluid, right? They're more used to challenging the norm. And so I think some of our larger corporations are really going to struggle. And so that's one of those things. When we look at our job description, our job ad, we really need to be asking on those are these actual requirements? Is this going to make somebody the best fit? You know? And if we look at those people that we would love to clone? Where did they come from? What is their background and experience I had, I had a manager who was came to me with a job description, and I was like, this is beautifully written. Would you have qualified for this job?
Chris Rainey 26:33
And she said, No, I love that. You would. She wouldn't have
Heidi Barnett 26:36
for that job. Yeah. So it's, it's tricky. I think we just need to change our mindset around it. That's truly, I think, where it starts.
Chris Rainey 26:44
The other thing is, as well as people, if you do that, people opt themselves out, and they don't even apply, right? Because you put you, you think by putting all of that in there is going to be of the benefit, but actually you should kind of scare away sometimes talent, because it's like all of these requirements, and if people see maybe one or two that they don't, they don't have, or they don't feel like they're capable of, they're like, aren't even going to apply. So you're also doing yourself a disservice by doing
Heidi Barnett 27:13
that, especially females. Ai, yeah, yeah, especially females. And I think we can try to change the female mindset around it and say, You're, you're a good qualified candidate, but I think that we need to, we need to just exclude those things that don't actually matter for the job. You know, even when we put the nice to haves in there, people view them as as true requirements.
Chris Rainey 27:36
Yeah, you can put it nice to have, but they don't read it that way. No, they don't. So one, of course, I want to ask is, how can CHROs better support their ta teams?
Heidi Barnett 27:47
Yeah, I think this is, this is a really important one. I think we've seen a shift in a lot of our TA teams. They're, they're leaner than they've ever been. You know, they have more requirements for data that they are providing to ch arrows and other leadership. And so I think what they're feeling is a sense of overwhelm, right? And so I think it's overwhelmed by the process, overwhelmed by the requirements. And so I'm not saying to relax those requirements, because we need to be moving faster and doing more and being more in alignment with strategic initiatives. But I think that a lot of what the what the burnout is often tied to, you know, manual processes, or, you know, the manager. Hiring managers are a major problem in TA, in our TA world, because we're expected to quickly get the job ad live yesterday, get it out there, start to get candidates back. We put them in front of hiring managers, and they don't move forward, right? And I get it, people are busy, but that's statistically where a lot of our time to fill lags sit with the hiring manager. So if CHROs can help influence that in any way, to help our hiring managers do their part, it's just going to make things so much easier. It's almost like, Have you ever looked for a flight, Chris? And you're like, Okay, I think I might have found the right flight. Let me check with, you know, the team, or check with my family, check with my spouse, and then you come back two days later. You're starting over,
Chris Rainey 29:13
right? And the flights more expensive,
Heidi Barnett 29:15
more expensive, and the speeds are worse. You're now in the middle of the plane, in the back or middle seat in the back of the plane, right? Yeah. And so it's the same thing. I feel like with recruiters, they're especially because a lot of our recruiters are hiring for multiple they have multiple jobs that they're hiring for. And so if the hiring manager takes a long time, they're essentially starting over every time they have to look at it. And so the more we can help them with that, I think will make a big difference. And then really, I think evaluating the tech stack around AI, I think that there's a lot of initiatives coming down for our TA professionals where it's like, use this, use this, and it's not things that will actually help them. We started with a job ad writing tool because. A lot of our TA professionals aren't writers, right? They're not marketers. They don't know how to put this out there. And so a tool that could make it so that instead of them going and copying and pasting and competitors, they could actually write it right there, and in something that took, you know, traditionally, 30 to 60 minutes is taking five to 10. Now, those types of things are the things that we should look for from a CHR CHRO perspective, to really try to drive down and help them where they want to be helped. You know, I read a story just the other day about how a lot of AI is taking away the things that we love to do, especially the creative side. We don't want the AI to create, necessarily our decks for us, our PowerPoint decks are, you know, some of those things from a marketing perspective, what we want them to do, what we want to do is really help us with the mundane tasks that we're digging through and consistently, um, working on.
Chris Rainey 30:53
Yeah, it's like that. They're, they are high value, but they are time intensive. Yeah, definitely. And I think what people think job description as an example is very trivial, but when you think about it one the time, but also the nuance of now the agent being able to understand the culture, the values, the tone of the organization, and having that consistent now, right? So if you've got a huge organization and you're putting jobs out a lot of time, they kind of like, don't look consistent, because obviously people are writing them right with AI now you can create a little bit of consistency so it has context, and you're set, and you're sharing the same brand and message, you know, consistently across all your job ads. And I think that in itself is huge. It can it can say, hey, maybe, have you thought about saying this a little bit differently, because maybe there's some bias in there, or maybe you're using some words that are really, you know, focused on men, like words masculine, yeah, exactly. So all of those things as humans, we have our back passive backpack of beliefs and our bias that we don't we are unconscious of that will just naturally. I still read ones on LinkedIn where I'm like, Oh my God, has no one read this? Like, how did this go out? So, so, so that also is part of it. I don't think people think, oh yeah, writing a job description, but it's way more than that.
Heidi Barnett 32:24
It is way more than that, yeah. And I think that you're starting to see our job boards really reward for authenticity, yeah. And also, you know, interactions with the candidates, so the candidates click on it, it gives signal that it's relevant. If they stay on your ad for long enough and they actually click to apply all of those things show relevancy and the job boards are rewarding for it.
Chris Rainey 32:46
Yeah. In terms of moving forward, where do you see the biggest opportunities that aren't currently tapped into when you look at AI in hiring? Where do you think this is going to go? We're starting with some low hanging stuff right now. But where do you think we're going to go with this in the future?
Heidi Barnett 33:05
Yeah, so I think that AI is has a really interesting way of, kind of exposing the cracks, right? And I think what it's going to find in the hiring space in particular, and sadly, because this is my world, is that there's layers of legacy processes that are going to put be put under pressure, right? A bad hiring process is going to, you know, become more exposed, because going to be easier for us to move in a lot of different directions. And so what you know, things that have been easily ignored, like our our poor job ads, or like bottlenecks in the process, or even like unclear screening processes, or what happens after that, all of those things, I think are just going to be put under pressure for us to really start to, I don't know the AI is going to add that additional pressure. So we're going to, I think what we'll need to be paying attention to here, going forward is like, where the friction is? So is it hard for our candidates to move forward? Is it hard for our recruiters to really move people on? So start there with the AI, you know, start with where is that friction, you know, what? What is it that we can remove? It's almost as though you have an assembly line that you're sending folks through and figuring out where that friction lies and really starting to unstick those things. I think if you can explain how hiring decisions are made, or adding more context to those, your actual hiring process is going to make it a lot easier for the AI to do its job, right? And so I think that the more that we start to expose the different areas where we're experiencing friction, that's where we're going to find our biggest gains, overall in the AI world. And I think that a lot of it, we just need to stay focused through this process on the future. Nature of AI is, is take is not the people, right? We want the people aspect of it still to be there. We want to free up our people to do the people things. That's why, when you talk to any HR person, why are you in this field? Or how did you get started in this field? They say, I wanted to work with people. I was motivated by people. Or sometimes they started out as like an admin, and then eventually found themselves in this accidental role. But I think a accidental role. But I think a lot of times, those that actually choose HR, they're choosing it for the people, to be with the people and to amplify a human experience. And so let's let ai do those things amplify that future experience. But I think it's a lot of it is we're just going to have to open up our minds and change our mindset around being able to change how we look at hiring, how our processes are built. Some of the things we talked about with the resume CV, all those, I think it's just going to be, how can we get better? What can we do? What do we need to do in order to treat this as a strategic initiative? And we do it in our technology stack, we should do it again in our hiring as well. It's really kind of open that up. So that's really what I see happening in the world of AI. I think we're going to see that massive exposure to bad processes and things that have been excusable for a long time.
Chris Rainey 36:12
I think I'm agree with everything you said. I think one of the things I'm noticing, if you had bad practices and processes, AI just amplifies that. Oh, so, right. So it's like, when you saw during the pandemic, if you had like a bad manager, and then you did, then they were managing remotely, it amplified how bad a manager they were, and if he was a great manager, it also showed how great they were. It just amplified that as well. But I felt like this is a an interesting kind of moment in time where we have to revisit every part of the candidate experience and a hiring experience, and just reassess every moment that matters from all the way through. And I know many companies that are going through that process right now and revisiting their tech stack, their processes every Yes, how they communicate? How do we create this? Make it more hyper personalized? It's a really exciting time.
Speaker 1 37:08
Overwhelming, overwhelming
Heidi Barnett 37:10
for sure. Yeah, I think that's it, Chris. I think we're gonna see two camps. I think we're gonna see people that work to automate pieces of their existing kind of legacy process. And then you're going to see another camp of people who want to actually build it from the ground up, utilizing AI. And you're going to see that there's going to be more of a divide. I think right now, you're seeing them side by side, but you're going to start to see it divide more as as people, those that built it from ground up will be utilizing it fundamentally through that candidate process, rather than, you know, picking and choosing the things that they're wanting to automate.
Chris Rainey 37:44
Yeah, you can't just add AI to your current systems and processes. They weren't designed that way. Yes, it's saying, again, it's kind of good analogy for remote work. People went remote and they tried to do that with the same systems and processes away. It doesn't work. You have to right start from companies that got that really early on, that started from scratch, and was like, Okay, how do we reimagine this from the ground up for this new world that we're living in, or in this case, this new technology? They're the companies that are winning, right? And it's painful, and you have to go for it, but that's what. That's what. But the alternative is more painful because you're going to lose candidates, you can you're going to have a terrible kind of experience, right?
Heidi Barnett 38:28
We're going to burn out your recruiters so your employees aren't going to stay because of that experience that they had over time.
Heidi Barnett 38:41
That's exactly it. It's more of like this. Slow down is crazy. A lot of our a lot of our leaders believe that, sorry, my internet. A lot of our leaders believe that in the next three to 10 years, we'll see the impact of AI. And that's just wild. I mean, with grok four being released yesterday, like things that we thought were never imaginable are now going to be projected to happen by December. Like things are rapidly speeding up. So this slow down to speed up. And when it comes to AI and recruiting, I think is an AI in general, I think we just need to do that build from the ground up. Yeah, and really reimagine it. You.
Chris Rainey 39:19
There's no better time to start than today. Yes, if you think that you're gonna there's no plan to start. Just get started. Because whatever you get started, whatever you build now, in three months time, is gonna change, so
Heidi Barnett 39:34
exactly, but you'll have that basis of understanding of like, okay, we tried this and this worked and this didn't, you know, but that's it. Get started. Get get, like, roll up your sleeves, get your hands in it. It's it's going to make a huge difference.
Chris Rainey 39:46
Yeah, Heidi, before I let you go, if people want to reach out and say hi to you, where's the best play for them to connect with
Heidi Barnett 39:51
you? Yeah? Probably. LinkedIn, yep, find me. Heidi Barnett, on LinkedIn, that's probably the best place. I'm very active there, posting. In. And also I love the DM so if you want to reach out, I would love to connect and chat. I've had a couple people ask for help with jobs, and I'm happy
Chris Rainey 40:08
to help with that site as well. And where can people check out? Isolved.
Heidi Barnett 40:12
Oh, I solved. Isolved. Hcm.com, that's there's tons of information there. We've got webinars and all sorts of things. So yep, that's the
Chris Rainey 40:19
best place, amazing. Well, look super fun chatting with you. We could have talked forever on this and yes, obviously a topic, which, of course, is front of mind for everyone listening right now. And I appreciate you sharing some really good, practical ways that are being used, but also your personal experience as well, living and breathing every day because you're on but you're on both sides, so it's actually very interesting perspective. But thanks for coming on the show, and I wish you all the best until next week.
Heidi Barnett 40:42
Yes, thank you so much, Chris. Have a great day. Bye.
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Heidi Barnett, President of Talent Acquisition at isolved.