How AI Makes Coaching Accessible Beyond the C-Suite
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Will Leahy, VP of People at Greenhouse Software, about how AI is reshaping employee development and the democratization of coaching.
Will shares how Greenhouse is leveraging AI tools like Kona and dynamic learning pathways to create personalized, in-the-flow training at scale while maintaining a strong remote culture. The conversation explores why the future of HR isn’t just about technology, it’s about using AI to amplify human connection, learning speed, and cultural cohesion in distributed teams.
🎓 In this episode, Ryan discusses:
How to build personalized training at scale in under 3 minutes with AI
Why traditional LMS models are too slow for today’s workforce
How AI can push learning to every employee, not just the top 5%
Why organizational agility depends on real-time, adaptive L&D
How to meet learners where they are with SMS and Teams-based delivery
Greenhouse is the only hiring software you’ll ever need.
From outreach to offer, Greenhouse helps companies get measurably better at hiring with smarter, more efficient solutions – powered by built-in AI.
With Greenhouse AI, you can generate stronger candidate pools faster and source high quality talent with more precision, streamline the interview process with automation tools, and make faster, more confident hiring decisions with AI-powered reporting.
Greenhouse has helped over 7,500 customers across diverse industry verticals, from early-stage to enterprise, become great at hiring, including companies like HubSpot, Lyft, Trivago, Crowdstreet and Gymshark.
Will Leahy 0:00
Well, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you? I'm doing well, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I feel like we spoke
Chris Rainey 0:06
so many times, but we're only now doing the show. I know,
Will Leahy 0:08
I know. I don't even know where to start. I feel like we've covered a lot,
Chris Rainey 0:12
so good luck. Be honest. Have you been avoiding me? Is that we have canceled a few times,
Will Leahy 0:20
you know, or me, but we're here.
Chris Rainey 0:21
That's actually a joke, but it's true. Who is it? Who's avoiding who? No, no, yeah. Well, we're here now. We're here now. Well, first of all, guys, I've never met someone who's got color coded books that all happen to be white, so that's a new thing for the show that you just bring in to the table.
Will Leahy 0:37
I'm keeping this plant alive as best I can. It's, it's a it's a fight, but we're doing okay.
Chris Rainey 0:42
That's an achievement, like aI I've tried, and the only thing I could keep alive was a cactus. And they're literally made to survive any environment, any environment, yeah, we even, even fell off the shelf one time, and the the pop shattered into 100 pieces, and all of the soil went everywhere, and I replanted it, and it still survived.
Will Leahy 1:03
Maybe we should embrace our inner cactus, indestructible, resilient.
Chris Rainey 1:08
Yeah, but I have walked past the shelf and scratched myself quite a few times as well. So, but it lasted three different, four different offices in 10 years, and is still, is it still going? So now it's been re homed, and it lives with my co founder, so And whenever I come over to the house, he reminds me, and he shows me the cactus every time with pure joy, and it lives. It lives above the sink. So he can't forget. Once a year, once again, once once a year, is barely surviving as well, so the fact that you got a real plant behind you, yeah, I've got the studio plants, and I feel bad that they're not real, but I'm just not great. They're not no, then had me fooled there. The funny thing is, I had IKEA on the show, and immediately the HR leader was like, those of those are from Ikea, right? And I'm like, yeah, good that you like. Clearly, you know your business
Will Leahy 2:05
very well. I work at Greenhouse, so maybe I should know that too.
Chris Rainey 2:08
Yeah, one thing I was impressed with you guys, and I'll shout out to the team, when I was at unleash you, you built your greenhouse booth, which obviously was a greenhouse, and all of the plants were real. So you didn't giant. You had a giant plant wall with the greenhouse logo, and you had a whole company come in that planted real at the inter I mean, it makes sense you call greenhouse. You kind of got to go all in. But I was actually surprised that the entire wall was living for a conference. I was like, and then they take it down and take it back and keep them alive. And I was like, wow.
Will Leahy 2:43
So just I did not know that. Did you know that is new information for me? Oh, really, yeah, I was, I'm about to Slack the marketing team and be like, well done. I am impressed.
Chris Rainey 2:52
Yeah. And people came by the booth and were like, like, attendees of the conference were like, Wow, that's amazing. Like, it actually drew people in to understand as well, including me. So it got me. I filmed me. Actually, I did look they were in my vlog. I vlogged it, and was like, Oh, this greenhouse. And then, yeah, so I'm impressed. Well, so by now the guests listening probably know you're from greenhouse, but we should probably do an intro, given a bit of background yourself and sort of the journey to where we are now?
Will Leahy 3:21
Yeah, I'll try and keep it short. Currently at Greenhouse, I'm a VP of people there. I lead some teams I'm really passionate about. This is engagement, performance, HR, business partner, internal, comms, people, development, all things that actually my team name is the people success team, and so I've tried to model it after a customer success Type Team, which was a past life job that I had, my team gets here and thinks about, what will it take for the human beings that have signed up to work at this company to have the best years of their career here? And that's basically our North Star. Everything we build, design and do is dedicated to come together and make that happen. And so I think that's a pretty cool job. Yeah, I spent most my time in tech. I've had a few different stops along the way. I got my start. And I think you and I talked about this, I got my start in a tiny Mom and Pop recruiting firm. Yes, I had an actual mirror in my cubicle written in Sharpie. It said, smile and dial on.
Will Leahy 4:20
Oh, yes, we did speak about this. I was making 125
Will Leahy 4:24
I think was the number.
Chris Rainey 4:27
Oh, man, we got the phones,
Will Leahy 4:29
and I that was an interesting I mean, I wouldn't trade it because it was honestly the hardest job you can imagine and have. And I had a Rolodex I'm calling on a piece of paper. No, I know. So you have such respect.
Chris Rainey 4:43
These kids have no idea. Well, we're like, we didn't even have computers, let alone LinkedIn. When you talk about, like,
Will Leahy 4:49
Yes, I was so this, this is true, and I'll get back into this. I was presenting at a conference two days ago, and we were, I was taught it was about AI, and it's about how AI. AI is disrupting the HR space. And I did a whole spiel on that, and I said, you know, one of my points is recruiters have an easier job now. And then I felt like that old man on the porch, because all of a sudden I found myself saying, you have an AI that's building your job description. What you know? So I had to, like, reel it in a little bit. And then ultimately, I went to work for LinkedIn. So that was a big stop in my career journey, probably the most important one, where I was going from company to company, helping them stop recruiting the way I was recruiting. And said, you can use social media. I was at Shell and like all these oil and gas companies, they're like, wait what? My God, here, let me show you. Did that for years, worked at Hulu, built their talent function, worked at GoDaddy, built their talent function. And then one of my favorite stops was I worked in a rocket factory for Virgin. So you're probably aware the billionaire space race I was working for, there's basically
Chris Rainey 5:55
just two of them. It's like that, there's just two, basically, right,
Will Leahy 5:59
there's, there's two, and they're kind of, you know, it's such an expensive endeavor, and people are like, I don't know if I want to pay 250k for one ticket to go up into space for 20 minutes. So it's a small market of people, but we were building rockets, and that was cool for
Chris Rainey 6:16
a while. Yeah, I can imagine that must be fascinating. No, no free rides. As an employee. You know
Will Leahy 6:21
what's funny, no free rides, but you get a referral bonus. So if I find someone willing to spend the 250 I get a cut of Who do
Chris Rainey 6:28
I know we launched? Yeah, who do I know? There's, you know what? To be honest, I've got quite a few people. My rotor decks I could have used. It
Will Leahy 6:35
causes you to reflect on your network. And I was like, I'm not sure my networks where I need it to
Chris Rainey 6:39
be. I need to level up. I do my network river, but I feel like the experiences that you mentioned early on, like you said, you wouldn't trade it, because it's what created, you know, carved out who you are today. And the same for me. I spent 10 years in that environment cold calling, you know, couple of hours on the phone every day, 100 plus dials, you know, a roll of decks. And like these old books that you they would publish every few years that had, like the Rolodex of every like switchboard of large companies by A to Z, and you just go through that, and that was it, right, you know. And you're doing fax, you're doing deals via fax machine, and, you know. And then, if you were lucky, four or five years later, you ever you had a computer, and it was a luxury to have an email and a computer as well. So, I mean, I started doing that when I was 17, so it was like, pretty cool. So what now, when we fast forward to what we're going to talk about today, is it's almost unbelievable. Honestly, it's hard to even fathom where we've gone from there to even just a step that LinkedIn took to to bring that marketplace in one space that I bought LinkedIn early on, I still pay 14 pound a month. Have like the legacy LinkedIn, and I remember the first time I messaged on LinkedIn message. Michael Dell Deuel. Michael, yeah, and he replied. And he replied, No, he did. He replied to me on LinkedIn, and I was like, because I was like, Hey, could you connect me with your chief people officer, because I was trying to sell to to them. And he was like, Sure. And then I remember, and he connected me. And I was like, Oh, my God, I am one step removed from anyone I can just that, just that, just changed my whole universe. I can't explain so much anyone listening right now, like this whole entire company I've read, every single guest has ever been on this podcast, 80% probably a past where people I just DM on LinkedIn, and yes, maybe for every 100 messages 10 replied. But who cares about the other 80? Sorry, 90. It doesn't matter about the 10. No one remembers the ones that don't reply, right? You know as well. So it's absolutely incredible, and with AI now it's just taking it to a whole nother world. And I love your point about people success is that what you said, yeah, people success team, because forever we've been trying to look at our employees and through the similar lens as our customers and creating those hyper personalized exactly experiences. As soon as you said, that immediately resonated with me and with AI. Now we have the capability to do that at scale, right, yes, within context, and meet people where they're at. So how are you thinking about that you kind of you seems like you're a little bit further ahead in your thought process, maybe even before the technology. So how are you transitioning that into your practices and your processes that you have in place now.
Will Leahy 9:45
Yeah, okay, so I could talk about this for the next like 14 hours, so I'm going to try and reel it in, because it I'm become, I'm locked in on this. I really am. I did, I did presentation about this earlier this week, right? I basically said, here are my. AI, bold statements about what is happening right now. And I won't go through all of them, but I'll just say a few of them and see what you think and get your action. One of them is that coaching is now democratized because of AI. And in my opinion, coaching has been fundamentally broken for decades, not I'm a certified coach. I believe that it is a useful tool, but it's extraordinarily expensive. It is only reserved for certain people at certain times, typically the top people in an organization. And the I think the part that's actually broken is, let's say I'm your coach for the day, Chris and you have a difficult thing that happens at work. You wait a week for a meeting and you explain it to me. Great, cool. That's interesting. Hey, go and try this. I can't see you. Go try it, by the way. You're gonna go try it. I'm gonna be out at the beach somewhere, and then you go and try it. And something happens. You wait a week, you come back to me and like, How'd it go? And you're like, explain it to me. So it's like a game of telephone, and it's still effective, that's why people still do it. But could it be way more effective? Yeah, so now coaches are ubiquitous. They're in this meeting, they're in my slack, they're in my email. I finishing one on one with someone on my team, and by the way, we have this capability at Greenhouse, and I finish this one on one, and the coach is like, hey, remember your goal about not dominating in meetings and talking more a percentage? Remember your goal about asking more questions? Here's how you did on that. You asked three and I'm getting this real time coaching that is everywhere, and now I can actually bring that to my real coach, the real human coach, and they have such a better amount of data and examples and this, this goes with sports where it's like, if you watch someone shoot a basketball, you're the coach should be there to be like, Hey, do this fine tune this. That doesn't exist in corporate coaching, but it does now, and that is, I think, one of the biggest growth levers that we're going to see period in the HR space right now. So that's one of them that I talk a lot about.
Chris Rainey 11:58
Yeah, keep riffing, man, keep going. I'm with you on that. I mean, there's not much to add to that, but the answer is yes, I agree, and now we're democratizing access. Yes to that right at scale. To your point, it was expensive. It was time. There's time restraints, etc. It wasn't me. It was personalized to an extent. But can you find a coach that really matches who you are and that you can relate to that's quite, that was, that's quite, that was always quite tough, totally, to create to my background, my lived experiences, etc, but I always find the same thing. It's like, I need coaching in the flow of work and life, in the flow of work, right? Not, we're not, we're not, not a week later or next week in my check in for and it's always on, right? Because it's the agents are constantly learning, and they have the connections to your calendar, to your email, to your zoom calls and transcript transcriptions, all of that nuance and context, no matter how smart the human being or the coach is, smart enough to gather all of that and be able to process the data, and then, and then where it gets really exciting, and I don't know if you're doing this yet, is you're then connecting that back to the business priorities and strategic objectives and making sure that your coach understands the culture of the organization, the strategic priorities and your skills and competencies, etc. So now it's also providing you feedback in the context of the business to help drive those objectives, if that makes sense, and that's a lot of information in of information.
Will Leahy 13:43
It makes no it makes per it makes perfect sense. And people are wondering, oh, is it weird to have an AI, you know, bot, or whatever you want to call it, join my meetings and provide me feedback. Is that weird? And there is still a comfortability curve that's happening. And what we found at greenhouses, within 48 hours, people are like, man, whatever you know, it's like, people are used to it, and this is ingrained in our interview process, and it is becoming more normalized, particularly in the tech industry. I actually bought a AI coach product in 2019 it was the first one ever, and I piloted it when I worked for Virgin, and it was so bad I had to turn it off. No, I'm sure it's great now. So no
Chris Rainey 14:26
events were only so advanced. Wasn't
Will Leahy 14:29
ready? Yeah, ready. But I've been trying this and wanting this because I've, I've been just salivating for someone to fix this problem that I believe is happening with coaching. And I'll blow your mind a little further. So I'm an advisor at a company called sure people, and they're revolutionizing the psychometric assessment space. So if you've taken Strength Finders or disc or Hogan, which I'm certified in, all those, if you want to know where my Hogan results are, which, again, I love Hogan, they're right here in my desk drawer, and they're not in the flow of work. So what psychometric assessments are doing is saying, Great, we were going to give you this beautiful self awareness moment. We're integrating with Slack. We have an AI overlay. So I'm going to chat a message to you, Chris. I see your personality profile, and it's going to help me craft my language to you in a way that's going to resonate. I know you don't like details. I know you're a visionary or I know you like details, I know you like, and I'm now able to communicate with you virtually in a whole different way. And then I'm getting coaching on top of that. I mean,
Chris Rainey 15:31
yeah, oh man. I mean, that's a that's a game changer, and I'm assuming the individual themselves can set that so correct, right? So because, like, I'm very much. Don't come to me with data. I mean, don't I'm a creative person, right? So that's a visual, visually. So if you want to explain something to me, you better have some visuals. Yeah, if you send me just bullet points, or you communicate with me just for an Excel spreadsheet, I need to understand the story, the vision, you know? And, yeah, I'm with you, man, like, where someone more analytical is going to be completely different as well, and the fact that you can build that in, and it can do at scale, and it could probably the AI can probably suggest, based on that profile, this is how you should write it. And it could Exactly yeah, and generate the message in the tone that and the way that, oh, man, the possibilities are endless. And this is the thing, right? Like, what is the coach? Can you say? What the coaching tool is? You're using a greenhouse.
Will Leahy 16:28
Yeah, there's a few and that we actually so one of them that we worked with is called Kona. They were just acquired by 15 five, which major performance system. And that tells you something that tells you that these large scale performance companies are looking at this and saying, Okay, we want to integrate this into our larger system. I know lattice is working on their AI and that's, that's what you're seeing, either acquired companies like this being acquired, or there's, they're spinning these things up with their internal AI teams and hiring AI talent. And it's, it's, happening, and you're seeing a lot of these companies like kindred minds. Is a great one that you should check out if you're interested in this AI coaching. There's a few others, but there's no shortage anymore. They're popping up everywhere.
Chris Rainey 17:12
They're everywhere. So one of the things quickly that we're launching with Atlas, our own agent that we built with HR executives, which is launching next month, is our dynamic learning pathways, so you have so you have all the capabilities that you've just described that we've built in there, which I'm really excited about. I'm probably gonna get in trouble even talking about this
Will Leahy 17:32
right now. I wanted that. I want that. But
Chris Rainey 17:35
basically what we've built is, after you get that feedback and you have that coaching conversation, you can click a button right at the bottom of the AI chat that says learn, and it goes into learn mode, and it starts to ask you some level setting questions. And then, based on that level setting questions, it understands you know where you are at your level of skill, competency experience, and it builds you a learning pathway specifically designed around that. But this is the difference between other AI course generators that are all out there, where you throw in your content, it generates our platforms dynamic. So depending on it will generate the first module. Based on those questions. It will bring in our content, your own content, your own learning materials in the company, within the context of your organization, align with your policies, etc. So any thing it's generating is within the context of your organization and the individual. So already, that's a game changer. Just that part, it will generate the first learning module, and it's basically interactive and practice based. So you having a conversation with the coach. It's giving you feedback. It could be, you know, how do I have a how do I give feedback to an employee right practice, it gives you a little feedback just how well you did you can do as many times as you want, and then based on how you did in the first module of the learning pathway, it will only then generate the second module, right? So it's hyper personalized to individual, but it's still upskilling the employee on all of the important areas that your organization wants. So if you created 10 learning pathways for, say, a manager Academy, it will cover all of the areas, but the second that manager clicks on it, it starts to become hyper personalized to them, and it's delivered directly within slack and teams, so straight in the flow of work, you know, not another, not another app, and all of the modules and everything can be generated inside of slack and teams. So that's something that's taken us a long while. I'm interested. Great, yeah, but because the temptation was to, let's just put like, what LinkedIn learning does? You got the LinkedIn learning course with an AI assistant attached on the side, but it has zero context of who you are. Don't
Will Leahy 19:42
get me started. I got a whole spiel on this. I'll go for it. Jump in. Go. Well, okay, so the first slide of my my spiel that I do, says E learning is dead. It's the first slide. Great. We agree on that e learning is dead. Imagine a world where you. I become a better negotiator. Just you and I were about to we're about to go at it. We're gonna be and so I'm like, Well, let me watch a two hour e learning on negotiation. Tell me how I'm gonna do in our negotiation. Not Well, I have a distinct fear of not being able to help my children with homework. I don't know what it is, but have this weird fear. I'm like, I don't know what this is. So a couple nights ago, I was on Gemini said, Gemini, can you teach me algebra? And Gemini is like, Okay, sure. What's your level of skill? What do you want? I was like, just start from the beginning. Work me through it. Like, okay, let me give you an entry level little piece of content, and then give you a problem. I'm solving this problem. It's like, good, you got that right? Make a little harder for you. I did start this at 9pm it is 2am I'm doing algebra, and I'm like, what has happened? But it was Cust. It was just
Chris Rainey 20:46
bringing Exactly, yeah,
Will Leahy 20:48
and I was having this conversation, and then it's, I was like, I'm done now. It's like, Cool. I'll check in with you tomorrow. That was better than my Algebra teacher. But clearly, because I thought I was bad at math my entire life,
Will Leahy 20:58
I'm like, maybe I got something going here. The way you learn, right? It's
Will Leahy 21:01
totally Now, if for what you're talking about, to have a flow of work AI that is built to do that, but in a better way, that is the future. I would not want anyone to sit in an E Learning ever again. It has to be 100% personalized to where you're at. Then what we're talking about, you overlay the coaching information, you overlay your psychometric assessment, you overlay your company goals, your your leadership behaviors that are required at that company, all that's filtered in, you can grow, I want to say, at 25, 30% faster rate. So you're gonna have employees that are becoming better faster. That's a huge deal. That's a huge deal.
Chris Rainey 21:38
Yeah, like we, we've looked at even just companies we've piloted with now, like we're upskilling employees 80% faster. Wow, right? Because there's, there's no longer this, you have to take this 20 module course. What if you could do it in two right? And because, when you based on the level setting questions, I may have more knowledge on it than you, right? Or vice versa, so I don't need to do the entire 10 modules to know. And also I can say, and this is how I personally, this is one of our biggest challenges, which we kind of did to ourselves, is I didn't want to launch this until you could actually have the option to choose how you learn. So for example, you can be in the entire learning pathway, just voice and just talk to the agent. You could do it just text. You can turn all the documents, and it will generate all of them into podcasts so you can
Will Leahy 22:30
which I just did that? Oh, it was, it was insane, because I'm a runner, so I was, yeah, I'm doing a presentation on ai, ai, help me. I want to know what's hot. What's hot right now, multimodal, AI agents, I wonder what's hot. Put that in a 30 minute podcast for me. I'm gonna go on my run, and I'm running listening, and it sounded so real. That's unbelievable.
Chris Rainey 22:53
Notebook, LM, did you do it through? Notebook,
Will Leahy 22:55
no, I did it through Gemini. Gemini is deep research. Gemini got that as well. Now, yeah, yeah,
Chris Rainey 22:59
yeah. Notebook, notebook. Lm, is unbelievable. Like, if you ever tried that before you can, like, upload, I uploaded like, a World Economic Forum research paper the other day, and it spat it out with two people having a conversation about, right, exactly, and I'm just, like, losing my mind. Like, I can just
Will Leahy 23:15
go for no Chris. It's no Chris. Let's be real. Yeah, they can never be Chris. But it was something,
Chris Rainey 23:20
yeah, yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you for a wrap up is like, how have you always maintained at Greenhouse a company culture and the team cohesion being fully remote, because that's an ongoing challenge that everyone I speak to faces.
Will Leahy 23:35
It's extremely hard. And anyone that says they've got it figured out is not being honest. It's super hard. And you know, you have a people experience team. You prioritize events and in person gatherings, and you work really hard to create flash bulb moments of connectivity and through series of different mechanisms. And then you measure it through your engagement circuit, whatever you get the data, how we doing? And it's just this constant bat. I want to say battle, because that sounds intense, but it's just a constant thought process of how you do it. And people are changing. You have an in person event used to be everyone's going it's harder to get attends to that stuff. People are becoming more insular. And the longer you work at a remote company, I think your mind and body adapt to needing a little bit less of that. So being really intentional and seeing attendance and what events are working and what's not, we basically just said we're going to give Departments budget to get their teams together a certain amount of times per year. We found that people like to meet with their teams, or they like to meet in these large group events. And you know, that's good. You want engineers meeting with marketing people. But that's actually not what's giving people energy right now, and so you have to just follow the leads a little bit. You have to put budget towards it. So we shut down most of our offices globally. That gave us some real estate budget, and you got to flow that back in some way into the people experience virtual stuff. We measure it like crazy. We. Have integrated our people experience team to our inclusion, diversity, equity, allyship team. So those have come into one teams because we see that as a really important connective team. And some of our events are really geared towards that. Others are just like a Halloween costume contest. Let's do that and have a winner. We have a bonus leads our recognition program, so that's our virtual way to get some good energy and recognize you spend your points on, like, real gift cards and stuff. So we're just launching a new swag store. We're trying everything. And then we ask, Hey, how you feeling? How are we doing? And you know, you just, yeah, try something else. I
Chris Rainey 25:35
love that you've always got to be constantly experimenting, right, and trying new things. But I like the fact that you put the power into the you're empowering your managers to be able to do that with their small teams. Because in reality, that's kind of the best way and to maximize that budget. AI, it's great to get everyone together maybe once a year, but in reality, you need those moments that matter for the opportunities for those teams to to celebrate, to build trust beyond the walls of work. And really, you know, build that the relationships that they need totally, as you say,
Will Leahy 26:10
a lot of the stuff that we just talked about with integrated flow of work, Slack stuff, it's actually helping a lot. Anything that you can do to give someone a tool to collaborate better virtually, whether that's clean AI or Gemini or, you know, Slack, even zoom, what tools you choose matter a ton and helping people use them. Well, yeah, it's a we just invested a lot and just actually have a goal to be the best remote company on Earth. That's my goal. That's my North Star. You're
Chris Rainey 26:44
already looking at it through the lens of people's success is already because you change the lens completely how you look at everything. Yeah, and we could do, and that's why we could do a whole eight hour episode on this. If you had to say one, what's the biggest challenge, though, that you had to overcome
Will Leahy 27:04
when you think personally, professionally, greenhouse, no, I
Chris Rainey 27:06
mean and in terms of maintaining the company culture, team cohesion, whilst remote, like, what's that been the biggest challenge you've had to overcome?
Will Leahy 27:17
I would say we're in a competitive business. Companies don't need multiple hiring platforms, and we are out there grinding, launching new products. I don't know if you always did a partnership with clear, and we're trying to fight candidate fraud, but the point of that is that landscape is changing. AI is amazing, but now we've got five zillion spammers to jobs
Chris Rainey 27:41
created as a new thing, right? Like, yeah, it's only a month ago, candidate, I mean, a couple of months ago, candidate for didn't even exist. And now, like everyone I'm talking to, everyone I speak to, we're talking about, how do we we create, we solved one problem, correct, and created another
Will Leahy 27:57
one, another one. Fighting AI problems with AI is what's happening right now in our business, and so being first to market, innovating, doing that virtually, bringing the right people together, having the right operating rhythm to maintain our market leadership position and get in the trenches against our competitors. That is, that's what I think about every day, and putting the right teams, the right mechanisms, the right collaboration tools in place that allow us to go in there and compete and win consistently. That's the people success, whole thought process, and it's not easy, but that's the lens,
Chris Rainey 28:31
dude. Ai we need to do part two, because running out of time now, but we just scratched, literally just scratched the surface. But before I let you go, what advice would you have for those HR leaders tomorrow, because they're coming into a completely different world that we started in. What advice would you give to them? And then we'll say goodbye.
Will Leahy 28:50
Okay, this is I like to have advice that's really practical and easy and not pie in the sky. It's something you can actually do that will help you learn and figure out the landscape we're in. Get some live demos from these companies that are innovating. Go reach out to kindred minds, AI coaching or Kona, or go talk to your if they have an AI tool with something you've already invested in. Just get the demo. I mean, with what you just said you're launching next month, Chris, they will show they'll be really happy to talk to you. By the way, you don't have to buy it, but you will learn and more by doing that
Chris Rainey 29:24
and asking questions. Yeah, you're right. Like, just ask questions during it. Even I do it and I'm building my own companies and get on course and ask questions.
Will Leahy 29:35
That's the way to learn. And you might buy one. You might buy one. Also, you got to push your company a little bit to get comfortable with it, to pilot it, to try it. You know, some of us are in person. Some of us work in regulated environments. Some of us I did when I worked in a rocket factory. It would have been way harder to go in and demo and try some of this. So you have to push and try or even do it in your personal time, but don't get left behind. Start doing it now. You can't ignore it. It's happening. I. And that's my only advice. And if you need help, I'm on the journey
Chris Rainey 30:03
too, you can reach out to me. Yeah, where's the best place? LinkedIn. LinkedIn
Will Leahy 30:07
is a great place to find me. Just look for this face. Type in will Leahy, you can't, you can't miss you can't
Chris Rainey 30:13
miss me. Is there any more ladies on there? Have you checked? Is there any more ladies on LinkedIn? There are
Speaker 1 30:17
several, really. Oh, they're all Irish. Okay, okay, yeah, they're all Irish
Will Leahy 30:24
for the most part. And apparently I say my last name wrong. It's Lehi. Every time I go to Ireland, they're like, it's leaky. I
Chris Rainey 30:30
found out from a distant relative that I hadn't connected with that my family name was actually supposed to be pronounced Renee, not rainy. And I was like, being told by someone else that my name is wrong. And I was like, That's
Will Leahy 30:45
Willie. He and Chris Renee closing out the podcast.
Chris Rainey 30:48
We sound way more important now we've changed our names. Melissa, I'll get you a little outfit as well, like a green
Will Leahy 30:58
I want a monocle. I want a top pattern with the whole deal.
Chris Rainey 31:01
Next time, we'll do a fancy dress episode and just confuse everyone fancy here. And we won't even, we won't even reference it on the show. We'll just like be in, like the outfits, and not even just pretend that nothing's different.
Will Leahy 31:14
Nothing would bring me more joy, Chris than that. And if you're honestly willing to do it, I'm in. No, I'm
Chris Rainey 31:19
not joking either. We'll make it happen. Well, listen, man, I appreciate you coming on and always fun. I'm glad we finally recorded this time our conversations. Yeah, and wish all the best until we next
Will Leahy 31:31
week. Awesome. I appreciate it, Chris, and hopefully we'll chat again soon. Thanks, man.
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Will Leahy, VP of People at Greenhouse.