Beyond The Code

Maulik Sailor (00:10)
All right, guys. Welcome to this podcast. I'm the founder of Notchup and today I'm joined with a lovely guest, a very incredible panel that I happen to...

discuss key topics quite a few times now actually. And this is a new season of the podcast that we are doing at the Notchup. We done last year, we done about 12 guest, 12 episodes, which was more engineering focused. But this time around, we're going to mix both engineering and the HR as part of our webinars and the podcast and everything else so that we can bring perspective from both sides.

Today, I've got three wonderful guests, Anita, yourself, Matt, ⁓ and Priyam, ⁓ with a range of experience from startup to scale up, building all sorts of different teams, ⁓ in-house, external contractors, ⁓ freelancers, and all the mixed tech that you can imagine. ⁓ But I'll let them do all the talking. So why don't we start with first our guests introducing themselves? Why don't we start with you, Anita, first?

Anita Pagin (01:22)
Well, I'm located here in Silicon Valley and in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for a very long time, about 25 years in talent acquisition, recruiting and people strategy. And this is an interesting topic, especially right now as AI is not just emerging, it's been emerged. It's hotter than hot right now and really taking a stake into how we're

We're leading our people in teleacquisition efforts.

Maulik Sailor (01:57)
Max, would you like to go next?

Matt Karp (01:59)
Sure. Well, thanks for having me and excited to see everybody. So I'm Matt Karp. I've been running a HR consulting firm for the past two and a half years, mostly focused on AI and how to bring it into different companies and use cases. And before that, I was head of HR for some startups and excited to be here to talk about everything AI.

Maulik Sailor (02:23)
Yeah, and last but not very least, Priyam, you know, welcome to as a panelist on this one. You know, you have some big news to share. Would love to hear that. But why don't you start introducing yourself?

Priyam Jain (02:32)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Hi, my name is Priyam Jain. I've been ⁓ in the tech kind of Silicon Valley area for the last about ⁓ eight to 10 years as well, starting off kind of in the agency recruiting space and then been part of small startups, some very unicorn startups as well. ⁓ And my first one, I guess my bread and butter really lies in scaling teams and building out processes. So I was the second technical recruiter at my first company last

to a last company, which was a very small autonomy company. was leading, recruiting people, HR. So kind of being that people team lead there. And now most recently I've joined Applied Intuition ⁓ as an IC because it is a very large company, really hoping to make some changes here and scale the company. So that's my thing. In the last also six months or so, I've started my own community group called AI in HR and recruiting, which is really, again, kind of very similar to what we're doing here. try to...

bring industry leaders or just ⁓ individuals like ourselves to talk about how AI is really impacting the people team space, specifically for HR, ⁓ ops, and just things like that. So I'm really, really glad to be here kind of continuing that topic.

Maulik Sailor (03:40)
Cool, wonderful. Thanks a lot, everybody. Now, there are a range of topics we're going to cover today, but generally, me being a founder within the HR tech, I'm not sure whether I'm at HR tech or not. I started mainly as an engineering productivity and eventually it started overlapping with the HR space, right? But operating within this HR space, generally you hear in the market that this crowded space, it's like...

tools and things available for everything that you can imagine, right? But we still think that the HR tech overall is broken, right? What do we mean by that, right? ⁓ Let's start with you, Anita.

Anita Pagin (04:26)
Well, in general, my take is that there's a lot of tools and we've overcomplicated things. And when things break, then we need to pull in the humans to fix it. And there's a lot of things wrong with the process, but I don't really feel like it's serving where the true frictions are. I almost want to say, when you get back to the baseline of what the Y-companitor preaches, let's build something delightful.

And with that is starting with something useful, but it should also be kind of fun to use. And we've moved away from that, it's typically we have a lot of these great tools on the market that are getting a lot of controversy in the market because they're also kind of imploding. There's a lot of bias in these tools and things going haywire. And right now we all talk about like, AI is going to take our jobs, but they're not because they're actually

imploding. You know, it's not really actually building trust, but that there's lies. think the problem is that we're trusting these systems more than the humans and we're not actually serving the real issue of fear. And the real fear is what if we miss hire? Well, we need to get back to the baseline of how do we resolve the feeling of fear emotions. And that's where.

people and talent could really be leveraged.

Maulik Sailor (05:58)
Okay, cool. Priyam, anything that you're seeing?

Priyam Jain (06:02)
Yeah, I kind of agree with that. I feel like there's just so many tools out there, especially now ⁓ being in this space and doing a lot more research on it. ⁓ They're kind of solving for like one small problem versus looking at a larger picture to solve for like all these AI sourcing tools. we'll find the best candidate. Well, then I go and talk to these account execs or founders and I'm like, well, how are you solving this problem from an AI perspective of now everyone is using chat GPT or Gemini.

to really align their resumes with keywords and now the sourcing tool is not effective. it's not like we really have to look at the larger picture that we're trying to solve for. Keywords is not gonna get us that best candidate. There's a lot of other attributes as part of being in talent acquisition that are just as important. And I'll give you an example of that is because like currently, I mean,

Maulik Sailor (06:38)
you

Priyam Jain (06:52)
I literally am completing week three at apply. So it's still early on, but our first, ⁓ all of my recruiters that are doing first screen, we're not assessing for technical, we're assessing for, you a culture ad? Are you going to be a good fit? Are you ready for the environment that, you know, is applied? And I think most people are assessing for that in first call. So how is the sourcing tool assessing for that? So it's, that's why I say like hiring tech is broken because

there's no hiring tech, like the entire concept of recruiting is currently broken. And I'll add to that.

Maulik Sailor (07:18)
Yeah, and Matt. Yeah.

Matt Karp (07:26)
What a segue. Everything's broken. What are we going to do? Yeah. It's hard not to agree with both of you. And there's so many tools out there. And from an HR perspective, you're getting hit on LinkedIn every day with, there's this new tool. Check it out. Check out this new AI thing. It's going to save you x number of hours. You're going to save this money.

Priyam Jain (07:29)
Yeah, exactly, right?

Maulik Sailor (07:29)
You

Anita Pagin (07:30)
Everything!

Maulik Sailor (07:31)
Yeah.

Anita Pagin (07:38)
the

Matt Karp (07:53)
It could be true, but often I'm already using five other tools that are sort of limping me along. ⁓ So to add another one is actually gonna add a lot of work to my play. ⁓ The other piece that I really agree with and think is interesting is ⁓ ultimately what we're trying to do is reduce risk when we're hiring in talent acquisition. And people are scared these days. Companies are really nervous about

Maulik Sailor (08:03)
Thank

Wow. ⁓

Matt Karp (08:22)
who to hire, they're not expanding as much as they were in 2021 or ⁓ so. So people are risk adverse and

then we add in these tools. And what I've found, I don't know if Priyam or Anita have you seen this, but I'll get all the way through with a candidate and they'll be perfectly aligned to the job description. And someone will come in, maybe an investor will say, by the way, I got a buddy that you should interview.

And they'll hire that buddy, no matter what my talent system said, because they trust their investor. They say, you know what, this is the safer thing for me to do, is to hire that person. So it's really fascinating topic of like, is it tech? Is it human emotions? How do we deal with all this?

Maulik Sailor (09:11)
Quite an interesting thing about deciding that. I think from my observation, I'm relatively newer in this space compared to you guys. ⁓ But I made two observations. Some of the HR tech tools, they started offering one specific

feature and then they eventually grew to like a full HR platform. Like Rippling, for example, is a great example. Deal, for example, for that matter. They eventually become big. And now they're trying to do everything when it comes to HR stack. And that's where you start losing that, hey, you know, is this tool even more relevant anymore? Okay.

Priyam Jain (09:49)
Well, yeah, let's not get started on rippling a deal. was going to say I saw Matt smirking a little bit there. But I think the problem, well, I haven't really worked with deal as much because I think they started, me if I'm wrong, I think they came after rippling. I'm not sure what the who started first or who came first, but I won't get into the legalities of what's going on in the real world around it. for me, I think the biggest thing about when it comes to like

Matt Karp (09:54)
Yeah.

Anita Pagin (09:55)
You

Priyam Jain (10:14)
HR and I'm calling HR tech including talent acquisition as a part of it. think people ops and people is the new word. ⁓ but I think the thing is like harping on Mark Matt's comment, you can only also have so many tools like you can have like 10 different tools and then try to incorporate and then implement and then integrate with each other. So they're pulling data and then if you're if they're not seamlessly integrated with each other, your data is going to be so skewed that you're looking for anything right.

Anita Pagin (10:28)
night.

Priyam Jain (10:40)
So it doesn't really solve our problem when it's not integrating with all of the other tools that we're working in. like having two or three big tools is what leaders are looking for. They don't want a gamut of like 10, 11, 12 tools. And I think the thing that happens is a lot of them start, I think the newer smaller companies are doing this a little bit better where they're doing a product growth versus like sales growth. like you have a product they can really talk about versus

I think in my opinion, and I've worked with rippling before as well, and currently I'm as a user, ⁓ it's very sales led. Like, hey, this is what we can do. What can we do? What can do? And then when you get in the product, those features don't exist. And then there's, it's like, okay, well, when, when is that actually getting rolled out? So like the sales growth from an HR perspective isn't ideal because we need this now. Actually, we needed this yesterday. So giving to us in six months, like it's not going to help us when my

my hiring is currently broken, right? So yeah, my dad

Maulik Sailor (11:39)
And then

you

Anita Pagin (11:41)
to add to that

is Ripley looks really pretty. It looks really, really pretty, but I'm going go back to it needs to be useful. And there's like, if you go to the other end, there's an applicant tracking system called Lover. Very useful, but not pretty, right? But Lover has gotten very, very far because they have been very intuitive and useful. And it's higher manager friendly, which speaks the language to the TA and PeopleOps world.

Priyam Jain (11:44)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (11:44)
You

Anita Pagin (12:10)
Right? So there's something to be said for that is like, yes, you want it to be pretty. do favor a little color, but the end of day color is optional. I want it to be useful because the end of day I'm tying my talent strategy to the revenue and the business model of the organization.

Priyam Jain (12:18)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Maulik Sailor (12:31)
Cool. You know what? That's an interesting observation. And something I was going to say, the other side of like, you know, the thing and deal doing everything you have this old school, like, you know, Oracle, HR, you know, SAP ERP and all those stuff, right? Which is very old school, very clunky, maybe great product about 20, 30 years ago, but they're stuck in that, you know, they have managed to get the enterprise client there. They're deployed there and

their pace of innovation is fairly slow, right? ⁓ But now the companies or employers don't want to change them because they are invested in it. They have all their employee or people data within those systems. And if they want to deploy a new tool, they will be like, yeah, but you've got to work with this tool, you the old tool. that is, integration is very, very difficult with those tools, right? So now there's a dilemma, you know, in my opinion, from employer as well as from TA perspective that

Maybe the newer tools may get you a better experience and a better outcome, but you may not be able to use that. And you are forced to use something which is clunky, which worked 20 years ago, it still works, but not in the newer context of what's happening around.

Anita Pagin (13:39)
Mm-hmm.

Let me give you an example of what you're talking about is there's LinkedIn recruiter. And while I love LinkedIn recruiter, it's also getting very pricey and it doesn't have enough of the features that I want to see. Right. But then I use something like seek out for sourcing and I love seek out and it rides right on top of LinkedIn recruiter. So I can use on top of each other, but at the end of the day, we only have so many dollars in my budget. I'm always going to pick LinkedIn recruiter.

Maulik Sailor (14:09)
Mm. Mm.

Anita Pagin (14:18)
and seek out how to go, right? Which is unfortunate. When you could force a company to migrate everything to one platform, such as a Rip Lane or Augusto or a high Bob, whatnot, then they're going to be invested and everything else has to sit on top of it. In fact, like a single sign on is going to be very, very appealing to us, but that doesn't even exist anymore. Right? And so

Priyam Jain (14:18)
Okay.

Maulik Sailor (14:18)
Mmm. Mmm.

Anita Pagin (14:44)
That's really imperative, but anything over and above that has to sit on top or integrates on top, that's going to be optional. And when those buy decisions come about, then we're needing to replace what we already have. It's not something that's going to be added on. So if I already have gem, I'm going to need to no longer want to work with gem to add seek out, if that makes sense.

Maulik Sailor (14:58)
Mm.

Correct.

Priyam Jain (15:07)
Correct.

Right. Well, I use GEM currently, and I think GEM is probably one of the better tools from sequencing and building projects and really getting nitty gritty in terms of like tagging and from a CRM perspective, like you can really go back and do a lot if you import your candidates correctly into it, but not anyone, no one does that. So you're not really, sometimes we don't understand the capacity of some of these tools and what they can really offer.

⁓ But the other example to that, you know, I need to give a great example from a talent perspective, but like from an HR perspective, you know, like, workday does great things from an HR as it's great for larger companies, you know, but I don't want to use the talent side of workday, like, you know, and it's doing something good for a reason. ⁓ Yeah, it has its own clunkiness and problems, but from an HR as and data perspective, like it's good. ⁓ And you can do so much with it in terms of

all of your benefits and policies and anything that you need to do from HR admin. It's a great tool versus some of these other tools that are still catching up.

Maulik Sailor (16:16)
Right. I want to move a little bit in a slightly different direction. AI obviously is making a waves everywhere, know, all aspects of everything that we do, you know, whether it's engineering, ops, marketing, whatever, you pick it and there is some kind of AI tools out there. Right. Now with AI, you know, mathematically is a mathematical system, you know, is a rule-based programming eventually.

You know, you might have heard terms called hallucinations in AI, which means the output that is produced by AI may not be accurate. Right now from a child perspective or hiring perspective, you know, with all the diversity inclusion, you know, discrimination and everything else going on. You know, what do you think? How do you deal with this biases? First of all, that they could introduce into your process, right? What do you should be looking out for?

Anyone want to take it first? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Karp (17:19)
I'd love to hop in there. Yeah, this one's really fun. ⁓

Priyam Jain (17:19)
I let Matt go first at this one.

Anita Pagin (17:25)
Yeah

Matt Karp (17:25)
Ultimately, what I always advise is to have a human at the end. So who is responsible for the output? You can use AI as a tool, but you gotta have somebody there saying, you know what, I vetted this, I'm responsible, and we're going from there. ⁓ That's what I've been advising all my clients. The other piece is...

I love AI systems that link to original documents. So the AI will say, you know, hey, I'm AI, I make mistakes. And you can have that at the bottom and you could, but you can put in the employee handbook and it can ask questions about the employee handbook. And then it'll link to that section where the employee will be responsible for actually going and being like, all right, what does the language actually say? Am I, is it accurate? So the AI tools are starting to get better with that. had, it took about a year or so for that.

that linking to come in. ⁓ But now I trust them a lot more because you're able to verify where the information is coming from a little bit easier.

Anita Pagin (18:28)
I think that there lies the problem is that as a society, we're trusting AI a little bit more than the human and it should actually be the reverse. And let's use the Workday example is there's an outstanding ⁓ case right now on discrimination and age discrimination and color. And ⁓ it's been out since 2024, I believe. ⁓ And

It's a reoccurring issue, but Workday actually takes no responsibility of it. They're claiming that this is the system and the humans need to be responsible for the outcome. And I feel like there is actually a storyline there that we really need to hang on is that we're using these systems as if it's the solution and it's not. It's part of the workflow.

It's part of the system and we do still need the humans to be doing the checks and balances. But if we're putting all of our trust in the systems before the humans, then that there is the issue. And we're putting trust in systems that are still learning to be honest with you, because these models are still learning, but these models are built by the humans. And really what we need to start to embrace is recognizing that

Perfection does not exist. We need to normalize imperfection and that we're going to have these things arise and be a little bit smarter about it.

Priyam Jain (20:04)
Agreed. I think they need to be a valuable resource ad versus with, mean, there's always going to be human oversight. And I don't think we're in the near term. I feel like I can't say like that's going to be the case. Obviously in the future, I can see that happening. But as they need to be a value resource ad where it's like a human that can do the job well without needing a lot of oversight. Whereas currently, I don't feel like that's the case. And I'm just adding to Anita's point.

in all of what we talked about even earlier from a sourcing tool perspective, like we always have to make sure like who is getting stack ranked, who is like a better candidate, why is a better candidate? Is the sourcing tool now being able to evaluate for AI wordings and the way the sentences are written? Like that's going to be, in my opinion, that's a new phase of like all these sourcing tools as well. Like, can you determine if this is human written or this is chat DPT written, for example, right? Because every resume is starting to sound the same and

So I think for me, like, again, like it's, it's not a, in the near term, there's always going to be a human, a human oversight and that's going to be required. I feel like in our job, that's always going to be the case. We are a people team at the end of the day. If I, when I'm extending an offer and Matt and Anita can speak to it and AI cannot do that. Like I am literally being like, who is that decision maker? your family. Okay. Like, what are they really looking for? Your words, your modulations.

I feel like that's still a very long-term thing from an AI to do. And for the individual on the other side to feel very comfortable with that. Like it's not just like us as the people delivering that it's like, how is the candidate and employee experience going to be? Like that is something that we also have at the same time have to keep in mind. Like, am I, right now, am I going to feel comfortable like negotiating an offer with, with an AI? No, probably not. They're not understanding where my pain points are. Whereas a human...

will and you know, we see that right now. So yeah, I think it needs to be a valuable resource add requiring minimal oversight. That's when it's going to become a good product.

Maulik Sailor (22:10)
Yeah, something you pick, you mentioned Priyam over there, You know, keyword based matching or keyword based filtering and all, which is what a lot of ATS system tend to do, right? Now, if you go a little bit deeper into that, like why ATS would do that, you have a jobs back with certain keywords, you have a CV with certain keywords, right? ⁓ And I have seen personally in my like, you know, working life before, many times recruiter, we say, okay, make sure you have this keyword in your CV. Otherwise we'll not put your CV through, right?

⁓ To my mind, in this world, I don't think there is any place for the CV itself, ⁓ as well as the jobs back, in my opinion. Why? Because, first of all, the companies are evolving. They're changing a lot more faster than we can think, particularly startups and scale-ups. ⁓ You are hiring somebody to do a certain job or certain task,

But within a few months, that job fact or that task or that role will change. It will evolve as you are evolving as a company or as a team. So then the job spec, which is like a static version, doesn't make sense anymore. It has to be a dynamism behind that. And that's not something you can capture within a piece of paper.

Anita Pagin (23:27)
So Malik, the job

description and resume is a signal. It creates the need for the conversation, okay? It's important because it actually does help us calibrate for the alignment of the role match to the candidate. And it's really truly only important if the candidate and organization are unknown to each other. Now, if...

Maulik Sailor (23:32)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Matt Karp (23:36)
you

Anita Pagin (23:53)
AI was able to be really smart and crowdsource all of our networks and actually cluster to a finely tuned, like these are the roles or organizations that have open roles for you that are matched for you. And by the way, that does not exist, but if it did, it would make a lot of money because people like myself and Matt and Priyam, I'm guessing would want to jump on that because right now we're in a market that is like referral driven. It's who you know.

Maulik Sailor (24:09)
Mm.

Mm.

Anita Pagin (24:23)
And they can speak so much better than what our resume or profile could show because they can actually say, they can pick up the phone and say, I'll tell you all about this candidate and what they've been doing and then why they were so successful in their role here at this organization. And that brings credibility that the resume or job description or LinkedIn profile cannot give. It's actually interesting to me because our LinkedIn profiles have reviews, but we don't put that into like a currency. And.

It should like there should be a currency to how someone's footprint not only grows, but also the reviews, how much they contribute and post their articles contributed, things like that. That should be a currency that actually speaks to their ability and capabilities more so than what they can write on a job description. If you talk to people and you, especially those who land new jobs.

they will probably tell you they spent very little time in their interviews talking about whatever they wrote on their resume. If the conversation was organic enough and aligned, they're talking a lot about stuff that actually never landed on the resume, but they had to put just enough onto this document to get seen, just to give a signal to say, I want to have a conversation with this candidate or vice versa.

But I say vice versa because it's equally important. We're missing a whole candidate experience here is you've got to attract the candidate to the organization too. It's not just going to be employer led here. The candidate, you know, there are still a lot of candidates withdrawn from, you know, selections these days and turning down offers. And so that's important to note that you do want to have a talent brand and the job description is part of that advertisements, part of that billboard to attract candidates to the website.

Maulik Sailor (25:51)
Hmm.

Anita Pagin (26:13)
to show like, yes, they're actually hiring. And that's a valuable point because I talk a lot about reverse recruiting and that's finding a role. Like it's kind of a go-to-market strategy, finding a role that's not even on the market, like a hidden job market. And people say, well, why is this useful? And I'm always saying like, because you want to get ahead of it before it's posted so that you're seeing, and that's important. And that's one of the frustrations right now in this market today is

Maulik Sailor (26:29)
Mm.

.

Anita Pagin (26:42)
There's thousands of candidates.

So by the time it's posted, they already have a few in mind. Right. And so that's where the candidate wants to get their signal in or vice versa. The employer wants to get their signal to a top candidate before they post it. So that's where you're right. The job description may not have much merit, but it does.

Maulik Sailor (26:48)
Mm.

you

Priyam Jain (27:05)
It's still a baseline to build from, right? And that's what I think. I think like, it's just a way to like find, find those key important base things that you need. Like if I need someone with C++, like I need to put that on my job description to track that candidate. But from then on, if you can't talk about what the challenges are, what those future projects look like, which you talked about, like, Hey, is this person going to be fit for my next two to five years product line and my like product roadmap?

Maulik Sailor (27:05)
Okay, cool.

Priyam Jain (27:34)
then obviously that's what the interview process is for. But I feel like there is some baseline needed, which a job description and resume give how well they give now that's a nother story. How well they establish that is a whole nother ballgame. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (27:49)
I again want to throw a cow ball to all of you. Okay. Now we talked about reference here that, okay, if I may want to, know somebody in this company, I may want to get myself hunted within that, right? Similarly, a lot of time, you know, you want internally, you have a lot of referrals coming in in the company. And you would also hear terms like, okay, hire for the culture and so on. Right. However, that is a Harvard study where it says that hiring for culture is probably one of the most, ⁓ you know,

Anita Pagin (27:54)
Thank

Maulik Sailor (28:18)
like a disguised way of discriminating people, right? And this I have faced. So one of the clients we have been working with, they had a job spec, we had the perfect candidates for them, and they could do everything that they could do, like technical tests, everything passed. They rejected the candidate only because they're like, yeah, but he's not from a particular culture and our existing dialoquists are from that culture, right? There was no other reason given to us, right?

Priyam Jain (28:45)
That's

like a built-in bias coming in, but a culture fit or add is important in terms of are they going to work well with my team? Are they going to integrate seamlessly with my team? And are they going to continue to encompass what we're building together? Like, but yeah, just having a preconceived notion that is a bias that is

Anita Pagin (28:49)
Right.

Maulik Sailor (28:49)
Got

it.

Priyam Jain (29:14)
always there in every single person, but how do you work on that? There's so many trainings around. feel like it's just, it's another issue to solve for, but it's just really hard.

Maulik Sailor (29:27)
Yeah, do you think AI has a play here?

Anita Pagin (29:31)
I think so. ⁓ but very little. It's, it's interesting because there's so many organizations, they have yet to define what their culture actually is. They've also yet to define what their talent bar looks and feels like. And they've yet to actually define what their candid experience looks and feels like. And I kind of feel like if you can't actually speak on those, you can't really speak on.

if there's bias or not and plug in AI for that. Now, somewhere in there, we should be talking about values and mission. But what also none of us have said outright, and I'm just going to be bold and say it, is a lot of these conversations of assessing culture, it's also because there was maybe a role, a person in that role in the past, or maybe several people where they did not hit it out of the park. There were things that

Maulik Sailor (30:12)
Hmm.

Anita Pagin (30:27)
Now that it's open, they're trying to make sure that they don't have another challenge. Or maybe it's because that person wasn't ready to scale them to the stage that they're at now. And so now they're looking for a skill set that's a different fit in the culture. It's looking ahead as opposed to what we need right now. And so that's a different way of saying it too is culture is very, very, there's a lot of shades of gray. And so we have a hard time defining it. So we say culture.

culture fit, culture add. And that's where, again, resumes come into the playing field because then people feel at risk mitigation. They say, well, this person went to this school, so I feel a little bit better. Or this person worked at this org and they've scaled it to this, I feel a little bit better. But if we could just put the resume upside down and have a very good conversation, make it collaborative, and actually do an assessment, not an assessment like a test.

Maulik Sailor (31:15)
you

Anita Pagin (31:26)
but like a technical assessment or collaborative assessment where it's free form, where we're not following frameworks, we're not following any playbooks. We're just having a collaboration and free form of, is a problem that we're seeing at our organization today. How would you solve it? And that's taking critical thinking. Now, AI can help brainstorm in critical thinking, but it cannot solve the problem.

Maulik Sailor (31:26)
you

Cool, wonderful. Let me another part of this whole HR tech or the talent acquisition stack. One segment that I'm currently witnessing a lot of change is basically technical writing or take home test, right? Few years back it was very common that OK, here is the task, go home, do this once you are ready, you know, will take you to the next stage, right? ⁓ But right now we know that a lot of candidates tend to cheat on it, right?

Even during the live interviews, they are like cheating. You they're having an AI answering the questions or generating the responses for them. Right. What do you think? Do you guys still use webbing, remote webbing or take home test as part of your process? What are you guys looking out for?

Priyam Jain (32:41)
you want to tackle that one first?

Matt Karp (32:42)
Yeah,

got two things I want to add to this. One, I think everybody should be paid if they're being asked to do these assessments because I don't I think that's not normal in our culture. But I think if we're someone to do five hours of work, they need to be compensated for that. That's unfair that we're not doing that. So that's that's like I feel very strongly about that. And I don't see any companies going that direction at the moment. The the other piece

Yeah, no, I'll just leave it there. I'm curious about that for you guys. Have you... Have you experienced that? So we're asking people to do work.

Priyam Jain (33:17)
If-

Anita Pagin (33:18)
I'm pretty passionate about that topic too. I actually wrote an

article about technical assessments and I post down to LinkedIn some maybe over a month or two ago. And I gave some recommendations of where technical assessments can go. So I invite people to go find that through my profile to go for a deeper dive. And I even include a sample email or like language as to how you can.

use an AI policy so that if you're feeling like you need to put some guardrails on AI usage that you're able to do so. I actually have a stance that you should use the technical assessment or take home assignment as a day in the life of the organization. And it should be an open problem. So it's open for critical thinking. So while you could use AI again as your brainstorming partner, it can't solve it. And if you have a way to

take that conversation and then take it to the on-site or by video to actually press them further, then you're verifying. You're actually verifying the technical assessment usage and seeing how their thought process is being applied here. Whether they do 30 minutes or eight hours is on the candidate. I do think it's a good idea, like Matt says, to pay. But whether people are going to take 30 minutes or eight hours,

It's then about the critical thinking. And that's something I think that's the value here. Not so much of did they get it right or wrong, because there's been so many times that candidates get almost there if they just had a nudge. And I feel like that nudge is important because in real life, it's not always about right or wrong. We have nudges, have collaborations, we have room for mentorship.

Priyam Jain (35:06)
Yeah, I've pushed back on that a few times. So I've had companies in the past where we did each role, each company, each team's take home assessment and vetting culture and not culture. shouldn't say culture. Style is very different. So what they're asking for, right? So when I've done certain ones that required a lot more time where it was like, Hey, you're actually putting, you're doing something that is going to require about

Maulik Sailor (35:24)
you

Priyam Jain (35:28)
you know, maybe six to eight hours ⁓ of time. I will give them a week to two weeks. Like I've pushed back with

hiring managers on that. Be like, listen, people have full-time jobs and they have a personal life and we need to accommodate for that. So I will always tell candidates like, please, we expect you to put in an hour or so every day. That's up to you how you want to divide your time, but I'm going to give you a week, week and a half that seems possible.

If you do require extra time, do let me know. But I always want to make sure like what happened. Like, did you just wait till the end minute last minute? Because that also talks about your priority. But if you need an extra day, like I'm always towards the end, I'm just writing up my document. That's fine. I'll give you an extra day. So that's a different one. But you know, I've had technical assessments where we're really assessing for cognitive, like how are you thinking outside the box or purely from a coding perspective, which I do feel like

can be really useful in certain cases where if I'm hiring for someone who's a really valuable and strong coder, I don't wanna waste the hiring manager's 45 minute technical screen prior to doing that because their time is just as valuable, if not more for the business, right? So I feel like there's a lot of good tools out there that will, so we currently like there are certain things, like current and in the past we've done like a 45 minute, that's all it takes. It takes about 40 to 45 minutes.

Maulik Sailor (36:35)
Thank

Priyam Jain (36:52)
it will record your screen or record yourself. I've seen a lot of AI guidelines that have come out where if we're doing even a phone screen that's virtual, you can't use headphones because people will put on AirPods or something and the AI is speaking, but they're answering, so you can't really tell what the headphones are connected to. So there's been a lot of conversations, which I do see a lot more AI guidelines on different types of assessments that are happening. They'll look for...

If they're working on a coding assessment, for example, they'll see their eye contact to see like, it moving? Are they referring to different thing? So I actually am very passionate about that in the sense of making sure my students take the time beforehand. Like this is the type of question that will be will be asked and making sure the question is just not.

you know, it's useful. So luckily the good thing that we're doing ⁓ at my current company is like all the questions being asked are very relevant to the work that they're actually going to be doing. It's not just a standard lead code, right? ⁓ And so like, hey, please assess for this. Take 30, 40 minutes prior, ⁓ you know, just whatever you need to do to get acquainted. And then when you start, unfortunately you can't stop. Like I make sure the introduction says all of that so they are ready to go.

Maulik Sailor (37:55)
Thank

Priyam Jain (38:06)
And if they're like, I'm sorry, like I just wasn't able to get through it or I read something wrong, I'm gonna give them the benefit of doubt depending on where they are, what happened. Like we're humans at the end of the day. So I think clear directions ⁓ and pushing back with your hiring managers on what they're looking for and how valuable and cognitive it is is just as important. But I do see value in them and defining those guidelines.

Maulik Sailor (38:17)
Okay.

Priyam Jain (38:32)
is going to become more and more more important as we continue in the AI world.

Maulik Sailor (38:37)
Wonderful.

Matt Karp (38:38)
I

actually like it when candidates use AI. think it's, I've wanted on almost every job description at this point. If they don't know how to use this technology, now if they use it to the point where I'm like, what are you talking about? You're just regurgitating something that I clearly understand you don't know what you're talking about, that's a problem. But if you use it as if you're like a manager and you say, hey, go out and get me this information and I'm gonna.

Priyam Jain (38:55)
Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Karp (39:04)
distill it and I'm going to present it ⁓ in a really coherent way and I got it to you really fast and really clean, why are we punishing someone for that? So there's a lot of mixed feelings in that space.

Anita Pagin (39:12)
Right, right.

Priyam Jain (39:16)
there.

Yeah, I think it's also a little bit sometimes can be like, is it them like they think outside the box first before utilizing AI to build on their thought or did they just come back and then are really good speakers who made it sound like their own so they that nuance of like figuring out is is where kind of that ⁓ like we're kind of stuck in the middle of that, right? That's what it feels like.

Matt Karp (39:33)
huge.

Did you see that new study that came out where cognitive decline if they go to Chachi Pati first versus I don't know how true what yeah I didn't read the full article but it sounded like if you think about a problem and then go to Chachi Pati your brain neurons are gonna fire a lot more and that makes sense to me.

Priyam Jain (39:43)
Yes.

Maulik Sailor (39:45)
Mm-hmm.

Priyam Jain (39:48)
Yeah.

God. ⁓

Maulik Sailor (40:00)
Okay, we've been talking about a lot of concerns here, biases, take on tasks and all those things. Where do you guys see the opportunities with this whole new AI world? Where do think it could be the most impactful for you?

Priyam Jain (40:19)
That's a big question.

Matt Karp (40:20)
Yeah, I think it's going to change every single job. I think I have 50, maybe 60 % of all of our jobs in the over the next five years. I think everything's going to change and we're going to get more responsibilities in a different way. We're going to lose a lot of jobs that we have right now. That scares me. And like, what is that going to look like in the job market? We are going to gain some and we don't know what they are, but that's where

Anita Pagin (40:44)
Bye.

Matt Karp (40:49)
I think it's gonna take away, there's an example I give at IBM. They implemented in 2017 a HR bot basically. So they were well ahead of the game. They were able to take 600 HR folks who were attached to executives and shift them to strategy. And now the executive goes right to the bot first for how do you transfer this employee? How do you do the little things? I think that's gonna be across the board in every department.

things like that is gonna change. So we'll see, I'm curious.

Anita Pagin (41:25)
Yeah. I think it's going to be valuable in upskilling and learning and development. Cause I think every single one of us is going to have to upskill and learn new skills and this new era of AI and how it's going to change the scope of our roles. think where I'm the most concerned is not on us, but like the new grads. Like if someone was to ask me today, like Anita, what would you say or suggest that I tell my son or daughter, you know, to study when I, when they go to university, I wouldn't know like.

there's not a major that really stands out to me. But if I was asked years ago, I would have said this, this and this. Now there was like an entrepreneurial study. I would say that because I feel like that's where people are headed. However, the failure rate of entrepreneurs have also gone down. So I feel like we need to come up with something that kind of studies the market a little bit more and gives a little bit easier entry for especially like the new grads because

As I think, especially at the talent acquisition, I love, I've always loved campus or current. I've always felt like the universe relations, not only is it a pipeline, but it's always so fun to see the interns every year and to give the projects and see what comes out of it and the fresh perspectives. And that all that's kind of going away. We've already seen in the last five years, the intern programs shrinks since COVID. Now it's almost negligible. I mean, it's really.

It's hard to see where it's going to be in the next five, 10 years.

Priyam Jain (42:57)
I tell the people the same thing. Like when I'm talking in my community group or people come for any sort of advice, I'm like, just try to upscale yourself as much as possible, whether that's just talking to more people and see what they're doing. Just try to get out in the community a little bit more. We're all learning from each other as well. And learn about these new tools. Don't write something on your resume. Actually know what the tool is because let's be honest, like you're not going to get the job if you've just put something on your resume, right? And so I'm like just...

try to do demos, learn about it, ask questions, because that's gonna make you knowledgeable where you can answer questions like, hey, what are your challenges that you're facing in recruiting right now? This, this and this. Okay, well, you know what? actually ⁓ spoke to these two tools, which I feel could be a great value add for you. Have you talked about them or thought if they could be a good fit for your company? So even if it's as basic as that, try to upscale yourselves, really focus on data. feel like...

I feel like recruiting and HR is really getting heavy into data to see, cause we're not measuring for efficiencies in the past. We're only now measuring for efficiencies now that we've implemented AI. So now of course it's like, Hey, it's going up. But like, is it really going up? Like, do you know where it was prior? So getting yourself really familiar with data, I think is very important. Like your pass through rates and a lot of companies just don't do that. Well, the data is very skewed. So I feel like a lot of those areas is going to be.

very important. And yeah, I don't think I could tell people like what to go to school for anymore. I think like we got to wait like 10 years at least to figure out how the how the dust settles. But at least in the Bay Area, a lot of people are going to be impacted because we are in the center of technology, right? This is where everything grows out of. ⁓ We're going to see that explosion first, whereas the rest of the world sees the ripple kind of over the years, in my opinion. So

If you're an engineer grade, just maybe don't come to Silicon Valley. Just go somewhere else because those companies are still going to need engineers where here AI might be doing a lot of that.

Maulik Sailor (44:59)
Okay, cool. I would love to continue as much as I can, but I know you all are busy. We are coming towards the end of our hour. And before wrapping up, would like to ask you all, if you, let's say, put yourself in my position like a founder, and if you were to come up with one tool, one solution with the use of AI that you could do to make your life easy, what would it be?

Anita Pagin (45:29)
of that question.

Maulik Sailor (45:32)
It could be internal facing, external facing, employer or candidate facing, whatever. It could be compliance, whatever.

Priyam Jain (45:39)
It would be internal for me, but I don't know if there's one tool because there's so many like broken verticals or things missing in each vertical, whether that's capacity for hiring or whether that's like efficiency for hiring or failures for hiring, sourcing for hiring, ⁓ engineering teams recognizing their needs and skills gaps for hiring versus business needs, right? There's just so many.

things that are cracked that I'm not sure if there's an encompassing one tool. And if there is, I feel like it's really far. And I feel like that's where a smaller companies that are doing pieces of it, ⁓ those acquisitions will come in to kind of start encompassing that into one big large tool. ⁓ So I can see like a company like Workday in the future called something else that they are solving for seven out of 10 of the problems that the people team is facing because they've

maybe done acquisitions, smart acquisitions, but of the smaller companies because there's only so many small companies that can withstand that time too. But I don't think there's one encompassing tool. There's just so many different areas that are currently cracked in my opinion.

Maulik Sailor (46:47)
Anita?

Anita Pagin (46:48)
So founders, they tend to always act like the roof is on fire today. And so they've, because of that, they tend to only focus on the problems today in their current view. And those fires emerged because we didn't put the systems in place back when. And that starts really putting in the right talent very, very early. Like your first five, 10, 50, 100 hires are the most critical for this reason.

because the fires today really point to the decisions we made six months, one year, five years ago, right? And so my recommendation is getting the right people in early from a strategy level and systems thinking, including bring your people leader in, bring your talent leader in early, like early, early, early, before you feel like you need them to set those ground, the recruiting foundation and getting all this set up.

And then really focus on what the skills are needed for the roadmap tomorrow, not today, because that ship has sailed. Like we'll solve it. Don't you worry. But that's the thing is we worry like just today. But what we need to do is, is work on the talent needs of tomorrow. When I say that, I'm sure my peers are going to shake their heads is, is there.

the job rep comes in and it's always about like, need this yesterday. I need this person to solve this problem right now today. And the reality is by the time we find this person and then we get them started and onboard, it's like three months later. And then, and then we're solving for something else six months later and guess what? We no longer need them. And then we're doing layoffs and these poor people are being yo-yo through the marketplace. Right. And so we have to focus on

six months, one year, two years, three years, five years down the road and what we need for that problem to be solved. And that's where the fear lies because we're uncertain. We don't quite know, but there is certain things that we can figure out knowing enough about the product of where it's moving. And it allows us to make pivots and recognize we're not perfect, but we rely on the team and potential to figure it out as we go. when that roof

comes on fire again and we can solve the problem for yet the next today, we have the potential and the right people to say we can solve it, we've laid down the systems.

Maulik Sailor (49:23)
anything good.

Matt Karp (49:24)
Yeah, yeah. First of all, I see a note in chat. Can you hear me all right? there? Okay, good. You asked if there was like one thing for a founder to do, and right now, I think the number one thing to do is create a culture of curiosity within your company. ⁓ And then from there, the actual physical thing to do is create an internal bot with your data right now. Like it's so easy to...

Maulik Sailor (49:29)
Yes.

Matt Karp (49:52)
have a chat GPT folder for marketing or to use Gemini and to take that unstructured data and then have the curiosity of your team talking to it, thinking through like most of time people don't know what their company is doing half the time. So out of there everybody's complaining about silos and now we have the full opportunity to say hey this is what marketing is working on because you can ask a bot and it'll tell you exactly what the last five marketing campaigns were.

Anita Pagin (50:07)
you ⁓

That'd be so cool.

Matt Karp (50:24)
We have a real opportunity here to reduce those silos if people are curious. So that's my two cents.

Maulik Sailor (50:32)
Wonderful. Thanks a lot, guys, for wonderful tips. before we write this, I promise this is the last one I'm going to ask. What would be your top tip for any hiring managers out there who are currently scaling?

Priyam Jain (50:39)
you

Maulik Sailor (50:50)
Let's not be too mad.

Matt Karp (50:52)
Sorry, I was hoping someone else would answer me. What is the top top what?

Maulik Sailor (50:57)
What would

Anita Pagin (50:57)
Top take.

Maulik Sailor (50:58)
be top tip if you have to give one tip to any hiring manager?

Anita Pagin (51:00)
One, two.

Matt Karp (51:01)
Top tip.

I would stop being so scared. don't, nobody knows what's going to happen in the world. So, you know, like just go for it. And I want to see more. I want to see boldness again. I miss it.

Maulik Sailor (51:09)
you

Anita Pagin (51:20)
Adding to what Matt's saying, the fear is real right now. And it's starting with the founders. We're leading with fear and it's seeping down to individual contributors. And that's not the way to lead an organization, but it's also how we're leading our society right now. Globally, is a, fear is just such a big thing right now. And I see it everywhere. I literally was in a forum the other day. I'm like, wow, people are cracking right

They're really cracking. And this is a real phenomenon. Like I see it on LinkedIn. It's toxic. It's people are cracking. ⁓ And I think we need to like get back to being vulnerable and just showing like, Hey, this is what I'm afraid of and talk it through because that builds trust. Being vulnerable and talking through builds trust and

It's a right to say, you know what, I really, really, really want to make this higher and I really like this candidate and I really want to move forward, but I'm afraid. And to also say, you know, I'm afraid too, but let's go for it. And if it doesn't work, then we'll brace for it when it doesn't. You know, that's okay too, because sometimes the candidate also says it's not working later and it's, it's a mutual decision. Let's not like worry about the what ifs.

Priyam Jain (52:43)
to add to that, I think it's important to take some risks, calculated risks, essentially, because I feel like at some point, there is that ⁓ attrition rate and ROI of like time spent for hiring and all that and resources, like resources are time and money that the the TA team has spent and then the engineering team has spent on that individual candidate. So I understand that risk is important. like, let's not. My tip is like, don't if you find a good candidate that is hitting eight out of 10, and it's like,

let's be honest, like 10 out of 10, probably impossible to find, but that's what they're looking for. Especially in the macroeconomics right now, what I feel like is if you're finding a really good person, hire them because I think the mentality right now is like, I think there's someone better out there and then we lose that opportunity. So my biggest tip is if you find someone, bring them on because it's probably going to be harder to get them engaged after because you've moved on from them and they've landed somewhere else. So think the biggest tip is

Find the right person that you don't think like there's someone better out there. This is not a dating game. you know, let's not, let's not make it speed dating. Let's like, if you're finding someone like try to build that relationship, like vet them throughout that interview process correctly. And then, you know, let's, let's close them.

Maulik Sailor (53:58)
⁓ Thanks a lot guys for wonderful tips. Great discussion about the HR stack in general, the biases, the remote assessment, what should we, the things that we should be looking out, where the opportunity lies, ⁓ what should ⁓ progressive TA teams do in this world of AI. I think that was very insightful discussion from all of you.

⁓ And thanks a lot for making this time ⁓ and being the first one, first guest on our inaugural ⁓ HR panel. So thanks a lot. And thanks a lot for putting trust in me to run this. ⁓ So I think it's about time we wrap up. We are doing well on the time. So I'm glad we managed to wrap this within the time we had. ⁓ And once again, have a wonderful Friday.

Anita Pagin (54:41)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (54:56)
and looking forward to having more panels with you guys.

Anita Pagin (55:00)
Thank you. Yes. Happy Friday. Thank you.

Maulik Sailor (55:03)
Thank you. Thank you. Happy Friday. Enjoy your summer. Thanks a lot, Thank you.

Matt Karp (55:04)
Thank you. Happy Friday.

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