How AI Will Transform Recruiting by 2026
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, Anoop Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO at SeekOut, joins to discuss how AI is redefining recruiting, roles, and the future of work.
Anoop shares his journey from Stanford professor and Microsoft executive to leading one of the fastest-growing AI talent platforms in the world. He explains how AI agents are already transforming recruiting - automating 70% of repetitive tasks - while freeing humans to focus on relationships, creativity, and strategy.
He also unpacks how CHROs must prepare for a future where AI and humans collaborate as equals, why recruiters will evolve into true talent advisors, and how to experiment safely with AI to stay ahead of the curve.
🎓 In this episode, Anoop discusses:
How to use AI to make hiring faster and more human
How AI agents are changing the recruiter’s role forever
Why CHROs must redefine work before AI does it for them
What the future of AI-human collaboration will look like in HR
Why every company should start experimenting with agentic AI now
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Chris Rainey 0:00
And it Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you? Thank you. Excited to be partnering with you,
Anoop Gupta 0:05
Chris, I know, and we got to bump into each other at HR tech,
Anoop Gupta 0:09
yes, yes, that was cool. I caught you slacking off and putting a lot of food in your mouth.
Chris Rainey 0:17
I mean, you mean, you mean stuffing it in my mouth between podcasts, yeah, I feel like i It's the first time I've ever been to Vegas. I lost weight because I was too busy on the show floor, walking around. I think one of our team members, JC, is actually producing, I think done like 40,000 steps in one day. Yeah,
Anoop Gupta 0:38
you know, meeting between the rooms and the floor show.
Chris Rainey 0:42
Yeah, that's a lot of stuff before we jump in. You have such an interesting background and career, could you give them on a bit of an insight into your background and journey to where we are now?
Anoop Gupta 0:55
Sure. So I'm a geek and an entrepreneur. Chris So I came to the country, and 1980 I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD. I was lucky. Then I was a professor at Stanford for 11 years, and at the birth of the Internet, actually, at 95 I did my first startup, which was on streaming media, you know, which we is doing now. And it used to be 56k modems, and that was really exciting. And that company, we extreme, got bought by Microsoft in 1997 and I spent 18 years at Microsoft in a variety of roles. I was at Microsoft Research. I directly reported to Bill Gates as this technology advisor. I ran the Skype and exchange businesses, which has teams now. I led global technology policy for the company, emerging markets, education, so a large variety of things, which really gave me a perspective even with Bill Gates, you know, what is the core problem? What's the core bottleneck? How do you focus on that? You know, as we see with talent, and then, you know, in 2015 late, you know, find a co founder, and we spun out again, and we did something else, but pivoted to talent. And here we are, you know, eight years later.
Speaker 1 2:24
So you're telling me that because I did the first few 100 episodes of the podcast on Skype, and so that was your team.
Anoop Gupta 2:29
Yes, yes. Okay,
Speaker 1 2:32
so when the audio and video didn't match the voice, I could blame you. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, how many joking? What an incredible journey to where we are now, and obviously we were your co founder and CEO at seek out so give on a bit people that may be not aware of the business, give them a bit of an overview and background. Yeah,
Anoop Gupta 2:54
one of the things I wanted to add to the background was that my PhD was in artificial intelligence and high speed implementations of that. So, you know, been familiar at Stanford, Andrew Ng and all the people you know, they were colleagues that are there and at Microsoft. So you know, AI is not something new. Of course, the latest, you know, transformer technology, it has surprised everyone, but come from a deep perspective, you know, on what is to be done there. So the interesting place we find ourselves today, Chris is, you know, for the last eight years, we had built a talent acquisition tool you know that is used by Microsofts and Amazons, and you know all of the tech companies that is used by the defense companies and pharma companies to source and find candidates and engage with candidates to make hire, but it was a tool that got put in the hands of the recruiters. Okay, with the new revolution that's happening with AI and AI agents is an exciting time where you can take a lot of the repetitive and boring work that goes into recruiting, you know, source, all the candidates, research all the candidates. You know, message, all the candidates, screen all the candidates. A lot of that part, AI agents can do faster, more efficiently, in many cases, with better quality and what the human recruiters are still needed, and a very important role is the human part. Uniquely human, how do you talk to the hiring manager? How do you understand the nuances? How do you be an expert and tell them you know what is workable or not, and what are the talent pools look. Like then, you know, interfacing with the candidates, and relationships with the candidates, selling them. So that's the new world. So I feel I've been part of two revolutions happen, and now, when the AI is happening,
Chris Rainey 5:12
that's incredible. I mean, what, as someone who's been so close to this from the very you know, for many, many years, what was the, maybe biggest surprise to you, did you see this coming where we are now? Or could, or could you never imagine where we
Anoop Gupta 5:28
are now? I could have, I don't think anybody imagines. You know, one of the guys who got the Nobel Prize was Jeff Hinton, yeah, you know who did the llms. So he used to be a professor at Carnegie Mellon when I was a student there, and he was working on something called the Boltzmann machine. Anyway, what people did not realize is how far and what it could do. And that is why, you know, he resigned from Google. He said, You know, I'm afraid of what Gen AI might be able to do and what it means for humanity and jobs and everything else. So it was quite unanticipated by the founders of this movement.
Speaker 1 6:14
Yeah, you mentioned it a little bit. But what does this mean in terms of what role will AI agents play versus the human recruiters, because now the lines are being blurred.
Anoop Gupta 6:28
Yes, so you know, I'll actually start broadly and why this is so relevant for CHROs and VPs of TAs in five years, okay, there will be AI agents and humans and companies. AI agents might be doing a lot of role, 50% of what people do, maybe. And the roles are going to get redefined, and the CHROs need to be thinking about, you know, what is the redefinition of the roles? What are the new things, you know that people are going to do and the agents are going to do, you know, as I talked to some of the CH hours of the leading companies, you know, that is on their mind, but at the same time, they're looking inward and saying, How is the HR organization going to change? Right at HR Tech, we had the CHR of IBM talking about how they redefine the roles of the HR bps, and how we, you know, then net promoter score went for negative to plus 75 and the change so they're delivering better I similarly thing for talent acquisition, things are going to change, right? The roles are going to change. We are going to have leaner I believe talent acquisition organizations that where the humans, the recruiters, are being talent advisors, really, as I said, interfacing to the hiring managers, and, you know, really understanding the nuances of the roles, the whys and the whats and preferences. And similarly, you know, with the candidates going there, and, you know, selling to them, building relationships with them, saying why it matters. So that's going to be the difference, because 70 plus percent of the job that a recruiter does today, the boring part, we might say, but really important, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know AI agents are going to do, yeah.
Speaker 1 8:39
Are we already there right now. Is that, or are we? Is that, or are we a couple years away from that, or we're already there?
Anoop Gupta 8:47
I believe we are already there. And you know what we are doing at seek out spot, can already show you how that part happens. You know that said we are still in a learning environment. Chris, so what I'll say is, you know, it is, you know, this whole notion of forward deployed engineers, and there is a lot of nuance and processes to what ta organizations do today, how they interface to hiring managers. When do you submit something to them? And so there's a lot of process there. And then, you know, if you're dealing with inbound candidates, you have to say, here's the compliance How did the human review? What was the process? Have you kept the logs and the tracking the records so that you know when somebody comes you can answer the questions. So a lot of those things are coming through, and we are learning, and there is a certain amount of hesitancy from organizations, how to jump in, how to start. How do we dip our toes? And you know, that is where I would encourage. Rarely, every CHRO, every ta leader, to start dipping their toes.
Speaker 1 10:05
Yeah, into it. I can imagine also there's some fear, right? Like when you're chatting with ta teams, is there some fear there that are going to be replaced in those conversations?
Anoop Gupta 10:16
I think there is a fear there about the teams, but I think there's also excitement. You know that there is excitement, and what can be done if my people don't have to do all the boring stuff, and they can do the really important stuff. So I think there is genuine excitement, because I think it's when it is a win for the recruiters, because they're not doing the junky stuff. And many of them are not fond of it, not good at it. And they can say, I can focus on the things that I really care. It's amazing for candidates today, for candidates, you know, the people who are applying, it feels like a black hole. I send my application, I'm one of the 1000 I never hear back. I feel unqualified. You know, they're bogus ones too, but they're good ones, qualified, and they want to say, you know, I want to hear back with AI. We can get back to everyone. We can have a screening and a conversation with everyone. So, you know, the candidates win, and there is a reaction. And those who don't care about an AI applied it, they won't respond. So, you know, they don't care. Anyway, the organization wins, because there are so many hidden gems, you know, amongst the applicants and things and what you can do. So the organization wins, the recruiters, you know, when and doing what they love and what is uniquely human, and the candidates
Speaker 1 11:44
win, yeah, that. I mean, that was my next question. What is the biggest win that this is going to provide for the candidate experience? I think you kind of answered it already, like bringing back the human into the loop and focusing on the conversations.
Anoop Gupta 11:57
Yes, yes, yeah, to do that, and to be able to do that at much larger scale than we do. And I'll tell you another story, Chris, just you know, so let's say you're trying to, you know, everybody's trying to hire people with AI skills and things like that, the people who are the best, they don't bother updating their LinkedIn profiles. You know they are visible. So almost 80% of the interesting set of people are not visible when you just look at their profiles. So what you have to do is, even when the person has the potential looks interesting. You want to have a conversation, you want to get this CV, you want to have conversation, to discover that they are really good, and maybe you can attract them to the company. So it becomes really important we get beyond the LinkedIn resumes in some sense, you know, LinkedIn profiles and go deeper with people and with a wider set of people to deliver us.
Speaker 1 13:12
That's really interesting. I mean, it's always interesting because it feels like we've gone full circle back to how we started, like in terms of the human conversation, that's how I was interviewed. That's, you know, when I first started, 20 years ago, we lost a little bit a bit of that. We went to down the technology route, and now we kind of, technology is now freeing us up to, kind of, to have those conversations and have more meaningful connections.
Anoop Gupta 13:37
So I want to clarify one part. So I think the conversations humans is important, but AI conversations and exploration is important too. Because, you know, as a human, if you have 100 conversations, and each is half an hour or whatever, your time goes away, but AI can have meaningful conversations. Not perfect, but it can have meaningful conversations. You can make sure that you're consistent. You know, AI is less biased, and you know you need to do the bias audits and everything else, because the AI, when you see a transcript, it doesn't care about what my accent was, you know, it doesn't care about what I look like in trying to determine so there are many advantages of looping in AI into the loop. It gives you the flexibility of when you do the interview, or, you know, the screening, or anything like that. So you can do it at midnight, if that's what's your preference, and when you have time available. So we got to look at them as a whole, you know, sure that we are taking caution in not introducing bias and but also leveraging the strengths that the modern systems bring.
Speaker 1 14:56
One of the big challenges I hear every day from the CH. Row some and TA teams that I chat to is that they're very they're overwhelmed with so many providers, providers in this space that are not now all trying to sell them their new AI agents and solutions. What questions should they be asking to make sure that the companies, whether it's yours or others, that it's the right fit for them, because they're just overwhelmed. You know, we were both at HR tech, there was like 50 companies claiming to be the next best thing right to solve all of your problems. As someone who's doing this work every day with customers, what questions should our audience be asking themselves, but also providers to make sure there's a right fit, yeah.
Anoop Gupta 15:44
So my So, one is, there are agent AI is coming in two forms. One is, if I'm providing you with a tool, you know, LinkedIn says, you know, hey, we provide you an AI, you know, hiring agent. So you have to say, what are the things that are going to enhance my people? So we, a lot of people who come under agent AI are what we call our CO pilots, okay? So they are like the GitHub copilot, the Microsoft Office 365, copilot there. The general thing is, you know, you're saying, How do I make your people more productive? 10% 20% 30% and things like that. When you the other is, you know, more these agent take AI services in some sense, you know. And then you say, hey, the improvement can be 200% not 20% it can be 300% 500% the number of players who are looking at that in an end to end, age much less. So I think people should, you know, we are one of the very few who are looking at it end to end. But that's the some of the things that the TA organizations have to do. And they ask Who else has done it and how you tried, because what happened with paradox and things you know, the agentic AI on the frontline worker side, has already taken off in terms of the savings and everything else. And the question is, what happened? So, you know, look at the pedigree, look at the product, look at the customers. I think that's the best thing, because in today's marketing world, everybody claims
Speaker 1 17:35
and that's the problem, right? How long does something like this take to deploy with an organ within an organization.
Anoop Gupta 17:43
So I'll give two answers. The simple is, you know, getting it into an organization is easy, you know. So you have to connect to the applicant tracking system. You know, that part is easy in the kind of, you know, delivery that we are trying to do, learning the culture and the nuances, you know, can take two to three months before you start becoming fully productive. For example, you know, one of the organizations we are working with, they have a whole cultural criteria on that, that they have to love the company, and they have dealt a lot with the inbound candidates who love it, and that was a screening criteria. Our people would send them candidates who are very qualified candidates, but because they were outbound, there was no guarantee that they're going to love you. Got to sell to them they're going to love you, right? We didn't find out until quite a bit down the road, or they, in some sense, trusted only a certain set of companies, if you found a qualified person outside of those companies. So there are a lot of processes that are there, and that can be, you know, three months time frame. So I think pilots should be three months to six months is what you should do, okay? Well, you rarely expect, you know, the transformation to show up
Speaker 1 19:13
and within, say, if you roll out three months, what measurements are you looking at of what success looks like. How do you measure success?
Anoop Gupta 19:23
So the success metrics, you know, are the way. So you say, we submitted some candidates, you know, and this is empowering to the recruiters. How many were accepted by the hiring manager? How many accepted, you know, the ratio accepted from the hiring manager went to a full loop. You know, how many got offers? And then, you know, how many hires mean? That's the ultimate metric. But there is a lot of gap, you know, in the company, why you get a hire or something? We can't control that. There's a lot of, you know, what's your brand? What's your thing? So they. Many factors, but the simple, these pipeline metrics that you can have, of the major stages you know you get means those are some of the metrics you know that one should look at.
Speaker 1 20:13
Would one be time to hire? Oh,
Anoop Gupta 20:17
the time to hire is certainly, you know one of them, so you know how quickly you're moving? Yeah, through these metrics, because both speed and quality, I guess I was focusing on the quality.
Speaker 1 20:28
Yeah, no, no, it's fine. Yeah. I think it has to be a combination, yeah, of both. And I think that's a big challenge, because you probably heard this within your community, that now companies are having another challenge. Where their ATS is. It's making it so easy for a candidate to apply to. They're getting 1000s of applications, right? Sometimes the same candidate applying for 10 jobs in the same company. Are you? Are you seeing that as well? It's something I'm
Anoop Gupta 21:01
hearing absolutely absolutely we are seeing that. So, you know, that's where AI and what we are doing with Agent AI really helps. So, so I'll tell you, you know, and there are legal compliance in EU, in New York, in Colorado, California, all those kinds of things. And how do you handle it? So here's the process that we are using and recommending to our customers. So you get 1000 applicants, you know, we have a rubric, and the AI can go through and all the rubric, you know, in two hours, and say, here are the top 10 candidates. You hand them to the recruiter, and you say, the very same day. And you messages very same day. You know, talk to them. Don't lose them. Speed is important. They feel good when you get back to them quickly. The remaining 990 we all send them a screening questions. You know, there's a form based screening. You know, do you have the right visa, salary, goal, location and back to Office code. And then we also say, you know, here take some screening questions. What happens is, 900 of them. Don't even bother taking them. So the unqualified you filter out. But the important part is, you gave them a chance. Yes, from the compliance and legal you said you got the same chance as everybody else. You didn't respond within a two week window. And that's for real disposition. The 90 who do take the test and complete, you know, it is not so hard for the recruiter to screen them, because they have been scored. You know, the answers. You this thing, you know, thumbs up, thumbs down, and you and you can find some real gems out there. So I believe you can solve the 1000 applicant problem. And then actually, one of the things, again, where the systems become very important, Chris is every company has different rules on when you can re engage. Some heavy thing that you know, if you are rejected in the last six months, we shall not consider you. They might even look at the reason so when you design the systems and the workflows, those details matter. Okay? And you can take care of them,
Speaker 1 23:26
and you're designing that on a customer basis, to be bespoke to them.
Anoop Gupta 23:30
The logic of when you can you know who you can reach out to is customer dot, customer basis, and the platform allows you to do that, okay, but the general notion you know of how we do and then when you do all of this, you keep data and logs and transactions of everyone. If somebody who was rejected comes out to you and says, Hey, I think your AI rejected me, and then he said, No, there was a human involved in every decision, and if you didn't reply, you know, in two weeks that were given to you, then it's up to you.
Speaker 1 24:10
Love that that's so important, right? Because we're not going to mention names, but we've seen many companies get in trouble for this recently. Recently, right? Just made headlines. Well, I want, I want to go flip, flip it in a different direction for a second. What does this mean for people in there who are young folk in their earlier in their careers, in terms of, we're in the age of ai, ai. You know what? We don't really know what the future of jobs looks like the world. Work itself is changing. What does this mean for a young someone just entering the workforce? What advice would you give to them? Because it's kind of like the Wild West.
Anoop Gupta 24:54
So it is the wild west and the. We, we know lots of things are going to change, but we don't know exactly what's going to be and what the reality is going to be. So, you know, it is a deep question for a what major Should I take? Yeah, what? What should I do? So the best that I am hearing is that there are two kinds of attributes. One is ability to learn, being curious, being experimenting. Those are all very important things, right? Because if you don't know what's going to be, you know you got to have flexibility to go wherever you are, and there are, you know, areas that teach you certain kinds of such skills. Okay, there is a work that got done and why computer science even is relevant in many ways with what's called computational thinking. Okay, the whole focus of that, what does it's not about coding. It is when you look at a problem, can you break it into smaller problems? Can you pull the smaller problems and say what the interfaces ought to be so you can build layers on top of each other, you know? Can you say, how are you going to test a solution for robustness? And think about that. So any problem that, what are the right abstractions to use? So, Chris, it's very, very fundamental, because those things with in our world of white coding and everything else, if you can't think logically, if you can't break it apart, and you can say, you do this, and I'll do this. And you know, here is the clean way we're going to separate. So I believe such skills are really, really important. So two sides, curiosity, ability to learn, open mindedness, dealing with ambiguity. Going with the flow is one dimension, and there is a lot of ways to learn it. The second is, there are some logical ways in which we process things. We build systems, we do and without knowing computers, computer science is a good way, because, you know, that's what we call them, teach you in terms of efficiency, but in very language specific way. There are many of these abstract concepts that are so highly relevant to everyone.
Speaker 1 27:32
Is I completely agree with you, but I think it's pretty worrying, right? Because our current education system doesn't operate that way. It rewards the ability to memorize an answer and write and write it down. That is the measurement of success, right? Can you memorize this? Write it down? Now? Now you know, now you understand that how to implement that, which is obviously not the case as well, and in school, I actually, I think I've told you this before, I never I left school, so I never spent much time in school, and got my first job at 16. And all of the things that made have made me successful in my career, where it's that curiosity, kind of basically the things that you described, even when I'm working with my development team, my engineers, I'm always looking at how, like, how we can break this down and structure it, etc. I don't know how to code, but I'm working with them to build it out, right? Yes, none of that in school was rewarded. You know that curiosity and was seen as, oh, Chris is distracted, whereas I'm always questioning, but why do we do
Anoop Gupta 28:41
it this way? Yes, you're an amazing you know, you've been so successful and in interviewing people and talking to people, getting to interest because you're curious, right? That is that fundamental thing of you shines through in the conversations you have with everyone, and that is so important.
Speaker 1 29:06
But what does that mean for people coming out of school and university into organizations,
Anoop Gupta 29:13
to learn it along the way? Just as you're saying, you know you didn't learn it at school, but you learned it. You know, life will teach and apprenticeships, and when they are in jobs, and when they're going to do that, they're going to learn, it is just that, you know, it's not going to be the school knowledge that will be the most handy. Or that's where you end. You know, that's where you start.
Speaker 1 29:36
Can you give me example? And I'm putting you on the spot right now of a customer that you have and a success story that you and the team are very proud of, to really bring this to life for everyone listening.
Anoop Gupta 29:50
Yeah, so you know, we have a customer. I don't have permission to name them, but you know, their communications and their gaming. Anthony, they decided that, you know, they need to do a lot of hiring in San Francisco versus, you know, where there are a lot of deep machine learning and other kinds of engineers. And they had the option of building a team in house, you know, hiring contract recruiters, other recruiters, and the other was, you know, to partner with us. So when there is a surge in capacity, you suddenly need somebody, you know, that is one of the situations, you know, where we can be very helpful. And they decided to partner with us because the speed with which we could deliver the broad spectrum out where, you know, the very broad reach outs that we could do to find the candidates that is there, the so both the speed and the quality aspects, you know, that we offered. They partnered with us, and we've been working very closely with them, and, you know, delivering success. But this is also the place where I was telling you there is a lot of nuance to actually driving success, and it takes time, and it doesn't happen overnight. And I was giving the example where, if you're going outbound, you can't expect them to love the company. You have to sell the company, yeah. And all the rules that we need to be, you know, being following there, yeah.
Speaker 1 31:40
And for them, what was the key? I mean, of course, getting candidates. But when you reflected after what was perhaps some of the challenges they faced early on in the partnership, and what were some of the things at the end that they were really proud of.
Anoop Gupta 31:56
The end is, you know, they had certain hiring goals, and how we helped them meet the hiring goals. You know, with a quality bar, is the success that you see. You know, there was also a goal in the sense that, are we looking broadly enough? You know, there was a lot of things that you did inbound, and then when you go to a new place, then inbound is not good. Referrals are not working as well as they worked in the past. Places where we were, because you're in a new area, you have the challenge that when you're in the Bay Area, you are not fighting for the same everyone is fighting. And there's so many amazing companies that are there, right? Yeah. So, so it's, it's a work in progress, still, I would say, but that is how we do, you know, for example, the the other example, even, I'll give them a much smaller Madrona, is a VCM coming to you from their offices today, because they have a CEO Summit going on, and they needed a specialized data scientist for figuring out who are the other companies they could be investing in reaching out to very unique skills, and we could find them, and they were, you know, obviously confused. You know, how do we find out, you know, nobody lists that on their profile, and we could figure out the best candidates in two to three weeks and make the hire in six weeks. And this was over the Thanksgiving holiday season and a lot of other things were happening. So that is where we can find unique people and deliver quickly.
Speaker 1 33:42
What makes you unique to all of the other competitors out there?
Anoop Gupta 33:49
I think what makes us unique is a few things. So one is, you can't build such a system if all you have in some senses. You know, here I go on LinkedIn. I source on LinkedIn. We have, you know, eight years of experience building a tool. We have a billion profiles we integrate with this thing. They, you know, all the ATSs. We have some of the best, you know, search engines and talent insights and everything, and that forms the foundation of everything else. And the reason why all of the who's who in tech and defense and pharma and consulting our customers, because we have really optimized that okay, then you say, Okay, how do we search? And then, you know, we started early on this whole agent AI journey. And given the, you know, the people in the company, our background is from Microsoft's and meadows and the, you know, places. So we are deeply tech, and we are doing but it's not just tech, you know, that we are building the people side. If you say, what's the challenge? Challenge. You know, being in the services business is a very different thing. Yeah, that is there, and we are learning along the way.
Speaker 1 35:09
Yeah, I appreciate that. Something you spoke to me about four I want to touch on is talking about why the talent movement needs to be a board level and C suite imperative. Why is that so important? Elaborate on that.
Anoop Gupta 35:25
So we are broadly ever, you know, known. So I'm seeing so many companies, and you know, it is true that people are ones who make the company right. People are the critical the second thing I'm seeing throughout, because I talked to so many people, Chris like you, is everybody's looking at AI talent. Everybody's saying, How do I redefine the talents? You know, they have vision. This is what I want to do. But all of those ideas and implementation of it comes from people, accentually, it off 11,000 people a few days ago because they said, we need the right people. So it is all about having the right people in the company to accomplish the mission vision strategy that the C suite has decided to implement, yeah? And if you're not getting those people, if you're not retaining those people, you know you're toast.
Speaker 1 36:29
Yeah? Yeah. This is a really random question. It may sound stupid, so just bear with me. Can you ever, could you ever see a future that you're sourcing AI talent for companies?
Anoop Gupta 36:43
Yes, okay, so the way to think about AI talent, you know, we're talking to in the future, you know, you'll be hiring people, but you'll also be hiring AI agents, right? So then, if you're hiring AI agents, the question is, how do you decide which of the AI agents? And in our case, there might be many companies offering recruiting agents, for example, right, that can partner with your team to deliver the results. And then you have to select for my company's environment. You know, what is the thing? The easier part becomes, unlike an individual, just like in Yelp, you have restaurant ratings, you know, you can have agent ratings. Been there, try to work with this agent. It worked really well, you know, this one was buggy like hell. So I think there will be reputation. So it is a little bit like product buying in something, yeah, you know, but it could be also agents that that have experience in certain ways.
Speaker 1 37:50
Wow. It's kind of mind blowing to think that there may be a future that I'm interviewing for, a role that an agent is interviewing for.
Anoop Gupta 37:59
Absolutely the screening process, you know, is an initial interview with an AI agent, you know. So the based on hiring manager, the AI agent asks you, you know, tell me about a project that you did that require this, this, this, and you answer, and then it says, Tell me more. What was your role? How did you have to collaborate? AI is totally capable of, capable of doing that today. And in fact, you know, and I talked about the large numbers of AI screens, that is how the AI screens happen today, and they tell you a lot, okay, about the person. So then you say, you know, should the human also come in and spend time? Yeah?
Speaker 1 38:52
Well, I think one of the big differences, like you said, though, is those questions are going to be the same across everyone at scale. You have consistency. You have the data, something that we could only dream, yes, of doing before. The problem we're going to have a new is that all of those AI agents, if you have 1000 they're all going to reply to your next stage. They're not going to forget. It's not going to be just, it's not just going to be 90 or 900 will reply. So we have to figure out what that looks like when you talk about this topic, right at conferences, events or in your own circles. What's one thing that people aren't talking about enough, but they really should be?
Anoop Gupta 39:38
Let me think about that. I think what people one thing I feel that people don't talk about enough is understanding the carefulness and the nuance of. What succeeds in your organization? So if you, you know, I'm going to go a little bit of the deep end. You know, companies like Palantir, etc, succeed because they go deep into the company, understand their process. And then when you're putting AI agents, they say, how are we consistently delivering the results? What's the data security? What's the compliance? What is everything else before we go and see the results? So setting up the right expectation, setting up the right partnership, understanding this is going to take time, but it is essential. But it is essential to the eventual success, because it's gonna happen.
Speaker 1 40:48
You can't it's like trying to build a building without a foundation.
Anoop Gupta 40:52
Yes, yes. So you have to do that foundational. You have to take those steps as a chro, you know, to all of the CHROs and talent leaders you know in your audience, my message is quite simple. This change is coming. This is going to happen. It is not so hard. Please take, you know, steps and time to experiment with the new technology. Read the new technology and the companies you know that are coming up that experimentation is low cost. You know, if you look at the you have $200,000 for a loaded cost of a recruiter or whatever else you pay. See, if you're spending $100,000 to experiment, you will learn so much in the context of your own company, not on somebody else's experience. Your company is unique, and you will learn in the context. And then when the CEO comes knocking at your door to say, hey, you know Chris? What are you doing? You know about AI, we want to see. You can say we tried. Here is the experiments. Here are the results. Here is how we're going to do it differently, because this is going to happen, and learning has to be happening inside the organizations. You know, bearing your head in the sand. Yeah.
Speaker 1 42:24
I mean, that's quite a big shift for HR and most of the organization, but I think especially HR, where in the past, they've been very you know, we everything's planned to the T there's a lot of guardrails around less risk adverse, but we can't do that. We need, we need to be, you know, failing forward and creating an innovation hub within the function that we have an understanding, that we need to experiment.
Anoop Gupta 42:54
Yes, yes, yes. I think that's really, really important.
Speaker 1 42:58
Yeah. Listen, before I let you go, where can people firstly, reach out to you, if they want to connect with you, and say hi, where's the blessed place? And then where can they learn more about the business?
Anoop Gupta 43:10
So LinkedIn is a great place to me, and you know, you can find me there and connect with me. And the other is just my email is anoop@seekout.com so you know, you can reach out there. You can go to our website and register for a demo. But I am personally, you know, because these are the early stages of all of this, I am more than willing, personally, to engage and, you know, discuss our experiences and how they can successfully experiment and deploy
Speaker 1 43:46
amazing Well, listen, I appreciate you, Newman, a pleasure to get to know you, and I'm glad we finally got to do the podcast together, and excited for what you and the team are doing. And I wish you all the best until we next speak. You.
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Anoop Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO at SeekOut.