How to Complete an AI Transformation in 18 Months with Rebecca Carr, CEO at SmartRecruiters

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Rebecca Carr, CEO at SmartRecruiters, about how she's led a complete AI transformation of her company over the course of eighteen months. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) So I was really excited to talk about this topic today of how to complete an AI transformation in eighteen months. Super excited about it because that's a bold statement. But I wanted to start with first, what is SmartRecruiters, and what problem do they solve?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:00:33) Sure. So very simply, the vision of SmartRecruiters is to make hiring easy. Sounds simple, very hard to do. As you can imagine, going through a process as an applicant is tedious. It's a black box. Usually, you have to fill out a lot of forms. People don't get back to you. I was actually saying that I looked at the data a couple weeks back, and something like only 30% of applicants actually receive a response from a job application, which is kind of crazy because think about that—thousands of people that are going and applying and then just never hearing back from an organization. And on the back end of the system, hiring managers who really need to bring talent into their organization have to learn a new system, enter in data. They're getting all these notifications, and all they want to do is do their job and do their job well.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:01:25) And so SmartRecruiters is the technology that sits in between those two personas and is essentially facilitating a much more efficient and insightful workflow so that candidates can find great jobs and hiring managers can find great people. And so they call that an applicant tracking system in the world of software and business applications. But it's not nearly as sexy as what I just described. I'm going to go with the first one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:52) No, that makes sense. Yeah. I think they call them ATS or whatnot. Yeah. I'm sure that acronym will pop up a bunch in this interview. But, yeah, I've been on both sides of it. And, honestly, I was on the applicant side at one point, and I said, this is so annoying. I'm just going to create my own company. And so I just created my own. It's easier for me to go find a client and to start a business than it is for me to apply for a job.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:02:16) Yeah. So, and I'll be honest with you, the number of people applying to jobs now with agents is fascinating. So 58% of all applications are actually being completed by agents or have been augmented by an agent, which is a crazy high number, actually, when you think about it. People applying to thousands of jobs in ten minutes versus taking thirty minutes to apply to one. So the sheer reach of an individual is significantly higher, and that's even carrying through to prescreening. Just the other day, we're hiring for a bunch of back-end engineers for the company. And in the first couple hours, we posted and got maybe 15 applications. And six of them were not real people. They were agents just sort of masquerading as a person. And then one that we actually interviewed was an avatar that came on to the Zoom and was answering all of our questions. So it's pretty interesting to sort of see how candidates are reacting to that really tedious experience and going, I don't want to do this anymore. So here we go. Let's use tech to do it for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) It's two different intelligence systems both taking path of least resistance. Right?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:03:29) Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) So for our audience, mostly CTOs, CIOs, VPs of engineering type people, why should they care—other than, you know, the people having a good experience with their company—why should they care about the recruiting technology stack?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:03:46) Yeah. Well, so a couple things. The time it takes to hire is far too long for actually what's being done in that workflow. If you think about one day, one week, one month, six months that you go without a specific skill within your organization, you're just losing opportunity to accelerate, innovate, and grow your business. It's usually like, if you think about it, I am building a new product. I need to go hire six additional developers in order to do that. I have made that decision two weeks ago. I wish I could snap my fingers and have six amazing developers that were already totally ramped on my tech stack and could start building that. But what actually ends up happening is I go through a workflow. Someone opens a job. It takes two to three weeks to be approved. We post the job. We get a couple applicants. The recruiters go through their prescreening workflow. So six weeks later, I'm interviewing the first one. Then I'm going through the motions. They need to find time in my schedule. I then select one. They have to give notice at their other company. They start three months later, and then I have to ramp them for three months. So an idea that I needed to get started on right now, especially in this market where the pace of innovation is moving exponentially, businesses are scratching for additional growth. You're actually having to wait to deliver the product that you thought of six months in the past. And 50% of that is just trying to find the right people. So experience is one thing, but also just sheer business growth, profitability, acceleration is hindered by talent today and the systems that sit in the world of finding and nurturing and bringing that talent into your organization.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:05:37) And I'm trying to take that three months and make it very, very tight for people. So, yes, ramp will still need to exist. Although AI is facilitating faster ramp as well for developers today. I want to be a piece of solving that problem for organizations that just need to move with a lot more agility in order to react to the market. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that in six months, the market might have already changed and your strategy might have changed. And you don't have any inputs to understand if the one that you decided on two weeks ago was actually the right one to react to the market that you knew at that moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) Yeah. Or someone else already solved the problem because they were smaller, leaner names.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:06:23) That too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:23) Yeah. That too. So I think it's brilliant that—correct me if I'm wrong—you're a product person that became CEO. Is that right?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:06:31) Yes. Yeah. I like to talk about how I've noticed sort of the rise of the non-founder product CEO is definitely something I've observed in the market. I was just eight, nine weeks ago acquired by SAP. We officially closed. And my direct competitor in the same thirty-day window was acquired by Workday. And my other direct competitor, another recruiting tech person, was acquired by Workday six, nine months prior. There's another acquisition that happened right around the same moment in recruiting tech, all of us product CEOs. I think there was sort of a decade in there where CEOs that had more revenue or go-to-market-centric backgrounds were sort of at the helm because a lot of what you were trying to do was just trying to sell with significant resource and investment into a market that was consuming product really, really fast—the growth-at-all-costs motion. And I think when the market pulled back in 2022, 2023, there wasn't as much spend going into go-to-market. There was a lot more focus on efficiency and how inexpensively you could acquire a dollar of a customer's money. And a way to do that more quickly was to just have better products. And so I think boards really shifted their mindset to tech-centric CEOs to go, what level of differentiation are we going to bring to the market so that people just come to us? And we don't need to be using all these tools and all this marketing and these huge events to attract people at the brand level. We want people to come because we genuinely have the product that they need. But who's going to tell that story? Product and engineering CEOs. And so I think there was really a shift there. And I am a piece of that shift, and so were many of my competitors in the space, all of whom had successful exits in the last year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) So that timeline, the '22, '23 to today, that's the—is that the eighteen-month AI transformational journey we were hinting at earlier?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:08:41) I'd say ours started in 2023. I think we took 2022 to go, what just happened to us? Woah. Woah. Something's not right. Something's not right. And I think everybody saw a lull in sales. Everybody, I think, struggled to find the growth and profitability that they needed to be successful. We shifted. We had done a larger RIF actually at that moment, and we decided to exit some bigger pieces of our organization. We divested in a larger product line of SmartRecruiters. And we looked at the market and said, one of the things that we're not doing enough of is investing in AI. And we have what I call AI fairy dust that sits across our platform. Meaning we've got little pieces of AI, like a Gen AI job description generator. Not difficult to build, not very impactful, but we do AI. We'd been doing a lot of that in order to sort of demonstrate the right behavior. And we said, that's not going to actually make hiring easy, though. If we want to make hiring easy, we're going to have to really become an AI-native solution. And so that meant taking the roadmap that we had today. We threw it out the door.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:10:13) We said we're not going to invest in any of these capabilities anymore. We are going to take three months as an R&D organization, and we're going to, what I called, sharpen the ax. We're going to get rid of tech debt. We're going to prepare ourselves for AI-assisted development. We're going to organize ourselves in a way that's super agile and lean and can be iterative based on the feedback that the market gives us. And we're not going to do one release to our customer base. We're going to just call it all off. And while we're doing that, our product organization is going to go sit with ten, twenty, fifteen customers in all different industries that are going to help us design what an AI-native recruiting solution will ultimately look like. And so we did that. At the end of that three months, we launched a new product. We said, this is what we're going to go build. It's going to take us nine months to go build it, and we are going to be here on June 1st of next year, and you're going to be able to see, consume, and use that product. And so we went into super development mode. We built lots of new incentives around our R&D team. So we gave them compensation incentives in order to deliver on an extremely accelerated timeline, and all we did was build that new product.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:11:35) And that new product told a very different story. And I would say that given that our enterprise customers are so centric to who we are, my first fear was, oh no, we're not going to give them the feature that they've been asking for. We're not going to be able to sort of check the box that we promised to them six months ago. But when we told them the story of what we were doing and why we were doing it, their feedback was honestly shock and awe and excitement. And, wow, thank you for being bold. This is what I needed my vendor to do. And they embraced it, and we got zero complaints, zero churn from our customer base, just a ton of excitement. And, actually, our growth numbers over the twelve-month window that followed were entirely from customer sales, not from new business sales. Because customers were like, this is amazing. This is exactly what I wanted you to go do. Go do it. And so I'd say that it's been about twenty-four months now, but eighteen months was—you know, six months back is sort of where we ended. June 1st is sort of the end of our eighteen-month journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:56) Did you have any technical challenges along the way?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:13:00) I think the biggest technical challenge that we faced is not really a technical challenge, but a P&L challenge. We needed to be able to do this with relative efficiency, and we needed to be able to do this without blowing up our hosting budget because we still had to be a profitable organization. And so AI is expensive. Deployment of AI is expensive. And we had to get very clear about sort of how we wanted to use different LLMs or different products on the market in order to facilitate some of these interactions without just sort of being spend everywhere in order to get the same outcome. That was probably the largest issue that we had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) And then what did you learn going from product person to CEO? How they're different?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:13:53) I would say, first of all, the AI sale is different from the SaaS sale. So you have to invest a lot more in the positioning of an AI product. What value is it going to deliver to your customer? And frankly, the SaaS payment model—this subscription kind of model that has worked for so many years—is not going to work in this new world. The way that we think about growth had to be much more outcome-centric. So we actually changed our pricing model to be per hire versus subscription-led. And we did that in an effort to sort of drive experimentation. People weren't willing to just jump at this perfect AI product. They wanted to actually understand what value it could deliver to them, and we had to make it very easy for them commercially to do that. And we had to retrain our entire sales team on how to think about selling that way. And I underestimated that a little bit because I thought people are going to buy great products. No problem. And I think I have a different level of appreciation for sort of what that sales process needs to look like, especially at the enterprise level.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:15:14) I'd say the second is not really something I learned because I was a product CEO, but just because I was a CEO for the first time too. Transparency and context are king. Your people need to understand exactly why you are making every single decision. So I woke up one morning and I said, every Monday morning, I am going to post a video, and it is going to tell everybody exactly what I'm working on and what is important to me and why I'm prioritizing it and what I need from them. I'm going to have a set of OKRs that is consistent across every organization. We, as a company, have one singular objective this year. And there are eight KRs that drive it, and every single person in this company is going to understand their role in one or many of those KRs. And I am going to repeat those KRs every single day and remind them as to why it's important that we do this. I would like to think that I'm probably—well, I think it's actually an incredible value and principle as a CEO to be transparent, but I lean aggressively into it. We have executive team check-ins and we have notes from those meetings. I publish them to the whole company. This is literally, you are watching how the sausage is made right now. And people understanding transformation and what's going on and what's happening around them reduces fear. You see way more hand raisers that are like, I know how to solve that problem. Let me help you solve that problem. And I got the right behavior. I got true unity and alignment at the core. And if I didn't have that, I don't think transformation is possible because you need to move as a unit in this moment. And so I invested very deeply in communication, internal comms, open office hours. I do office hours with every employee in the company. No staged questions multiple times a month. And it's a full hour. And people are like, why—how are you thinking about this? I saw the notes from this meeting. Why do you think about the mid-market? And no one has fear that they're going to lose their jobs.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:17:20) They have fear that if they have anything, they have fear that they might not be able to take the change if it keeps going at this pace because the pace is so exceptional. They think, "Okay, this is coming. This change is coming. What role can I play in the next iteration of this organization or this strategy?"

(Rebecca Carr at 00:17:41) And they're much more adaptable as a result.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Which is actually an area I wanted to talk about. You guys do things differently there. You have a constant—your org is constantly changing. The structure is constantly changing. People have new jobs very frequently. Can you tell me about that?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:18:01) Yeah. Yeah. So specifically on the R&D side. Like, there's some roles that are just always there. Like, our AR and AP teams are doing the same thing every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:13) You want to keep them stable. You want to keep them nice and consistent.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:18:17) Yeah, some things. R&D, though, is like so cool, what we do there. So basically what we did is, and it's like a running joke, but every single year we like rethink R&D. So last year in particular, we said, "Okay, here we are. We're in October. We're going to do what we always do. We're going to change R&D. But this time, we're going to change it in a way where you know it's always going to change, and this is how."

(Rebecca Carr at 00:18:47) So basically what we did is we looked at our roadmap. We only do a six-month roadmap. We don't do a multi-year roadmap. We have a three-year product strategy, but we change our roadmap every six months because the market is changing. We can't set something for a year. We don't know what's going to happen in a year. So we have a six-month roadmap. That six-month roadmap, we organize around a set of six themes, like basically jobs to be done: schedule, operate, chat, screen, things like that. Every single one of those groups has an engineering leader and a product leader that is aligned to them. And within those themes or those jobs to be done, we have squads.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:19:32) The squads rotate every two weeks on a rotating two-week basis. The squads are like pods, essentially, of front-end and back-end development. Sometimes there's AI specialists depending on the job to be done. A product manager and a product designer. So we have very high product designer to product management and engineering ratios, like almost one to one to four basically right now. Those squads rotate in a two-week maintenance mode. Clean up your stuff. Fix bugs, address technical debt, all the like, because we expect quality from every single squad. There isn't like a cloud ops team that we throw over the fence to. So two weeks there. Two weeks, discovery.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:20:25) Every engineer, every product manager, every designer, all they do is discover their next set of stories. They talk to customers, they go through design reviews, they do scoping on new features, no coding. Rotate in next, two weeks later, start developing that feature, get feedback, iterate on the feedback. The next week, go do maintenance, do discovery, build next set of stories, iterate on stories, and they rotate every two weeks. And those developers—so those squads are just moving around these themes like this all the time in subsequent order because there's four squads in every single one of the themes.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:21:06) And so you're constantly, every two weeks, just getting new features from a different squad. And then if you are a new engineer that's coming in, you rotate into multiple squads so that you're learning sort of what that particular set of microservices that are owned by that squad are. And you're getting an understanding, and then you find like a formal home. And then six months later, we change your theme. You get all new microservices, and you do it again. You just keep doing it over and over again. So we'll reorganize components around themes. So you as a developer might own scheduling for this six-month period and all the microservices aligned to it. And six months later, you might own permissioning. And it just gives us like way more fungibility across the team because maybe we want to invest really, really, really deeply in this one piece of our product right now.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:22:05) And we don't want four squads. We want ten. But we don't want to have to ramp the ten squads because nearly every squad has had nearly every microservice. We can just literally put ten in a rotation on those services, and we can just speed up the development delivery of that particular piece of the product exponentially, despite the fact that there's a lot of people working on it because they're essentially rotating into each of these streams of work so that they're not stepping on each other. It is different. Our engineers love it. Our product managers love it. We get higher quality products because there's actual time to discover. Engineers are talking to customers. They're not just receiving a set of requirements.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:22:56) They're coming up with great solutions. Everyone becomes a product manager. And when we have to close a gap really quickly, it's no issue. We just move new squads in, and they understand why. And they have a set of things that they go and solve for, and they deliver those, then they go back to solving a different theme. Like maybe, you know, three months later, six months later, whenever it is that they were rotated in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) How did you come up with this?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:23:25) So I have an amazing CTO who's been with me for a very long time. He was also one of the original developers of SmartRecruiters, product engineers for SmartRecruiters. He actually owned all the scheduling components. He's been with us thirteen years. I have an amazing head of product who was a founder herself and has built products and sold them.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:23:49) We studied a lot from other organizations. We invested deeply in an agile coaching team. So we have a—we actually have a—we don't call them agile coaches, but we call them continuous improvement managers. And they sit across all the jobs to be done, and they basically make sure the machine works. Like, work is effectively distributed and organized.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:24:17) They did a lot of studying themselves on different organizational designs, and we created this mashup that we sort of threw out there as an idea thinking maybe this won't work and we'll have to change next year. It ended up working brilliantly. But yeah, a lot of smart people in a room is the short answer to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) And this was decoupled from the AI transformation, right? This was a separate thing that happened before?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:24:48) No. We did it in that three-month window where we basically—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:58) How did you get the board—well, the board, or I'm assuming that you report to as a CEO—how did you get them—you're like, "I'm going to do some wild west stuff. It's going to be kind of great." How did you get them to agree to that?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:25:09) How did I get them to agree? This I probably shouldn't say this on a live podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) We can edit anything. By the way, if you say something you don't like, we can edit.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:25:19) No, no, no. I actually want you to add that in because I didn't ask.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) You just did it.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:25:26) I just did it. Smart move. Like, I didn't ask. Well, so a board is super smart people. And they sit around a table, and they think about strategies and they have different objectives. They do not know how to run companies. They know how to advise companies. They aren't operators. And some of them are. That's not fair. Some of them are, and some of them are very good at operating. But what they care about is the outcome. They want growth, they want profitability, they want results. It's my job to come up with how we get there.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:26:02) And so I did. I just came up with how we were going to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:06) I like you more now.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:26:09) I really think that's like one thing that, to our point about product CEOs, we, I think, have a bone in our body that craves innovation, bold activity. Like, especially people in like product leaders of startups. Folks that are creating the next new big thing. They're like, "You know what the market demands. I know my personas better than everyone. I know how fast the market is moving around me. I don't have time to ask for permission. I just have to build great things." And is there a risk to that? Sure.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:26:48) But like, what was going to be the worst-case scenario? They tell me not to be the CEO again, and then I go, "Okay. Well, good luck." And the best-case scenario is I literally have multiple term sheets, and I'm being acquired. And they're like, "Whoa, this is exactly what we were looking for. We just wanted an exit. And you did it by selling a vision to one of the world's largest companies that needs that same vision from us." So sometimes, especially in this market, go big or go home is sort of what I said to my team. And we sat around a table.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:27:24) And I think Michal at the time, my CTO, he looked at me and he was like, "You're really going to do this? Like, you're just going to tell us to stop coding the roadmap, and you're going to go tell customers, and you're ready to take that heat?" He's like, "You're saying that, but in theory, you're going to make us go back and do it." And I was like, "Nope. We're not going back and doing it. We're just doing it." And he was like, "Are you sure? Like, are you really sure?" And I was like, "I'm sure." He's like, "This is awesome."

(Rebecca Carr at 00:27:53) And he's like, "I feel like I just started a new job at a new company." And this, after twelve years at the time of being here, I needed this. He needed it. My engineers needed it. Like, the monotony of just going through the same feature roadmap. Like, that energy, it was only going to last so long, and I needed it for an eighteen-month window. And so I was not going to disrupt that. So I just sort of threw myself into it. We immediately saw results.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:28:29) And so the board didn't really push back. They were like, "Okay, cool."

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) Was this uniqueness into your culture and how you're doing things—was that a big part of the SAP acquisition, or did they just sell the product and they're like, "We just want that product"?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:28:40) I think it was both. It's a good question. I think like—and I should say, we reset all of our company values during the AI transformation, like that three-month window too. So we said, "Like, we have to be a different company right now, so here are our new values." And I expected some attrition of certain people that maybe didn't want to lean into those sets of values at the time.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:29:04) We saw some people that left. We also did things like we implemented quarterly performance reviews, and we started to put people on a bell curve. And it was like, "You're going to know if you're showing up the way we wanted you to in this moment." And we got way more out of people because they were very ambitious. And so when SAP came to us, one of the things they were really impressed by was just the bar for greatness was super high.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:29:36) They wanted to pull in some of those practices around calibration and engineering and engineering performance management and predictability of roadmap. And talent is a big piece of that. Like, they saw that we had been able to do that, and they wanted all of that almost as a microcosm within the greater SAP. So yes, I absolutely think that was a piece of it. We also had a product that they needed and they wanted.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:30:08) And it wasn't just the AI product. Like, the foundational product from the past was something that they really needed and wanted. And as a result, it moved very quickly. I mean, start to finish, we were three months of acquisition. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:26) Yeah. Those M&A people are smart, though. They're super sharp. So those continuous improvement coaches, were they figuring out how to do engineering performance management when you everything up to these squads that cycle? Or who solved that?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:30:40) It was definitely Michal, my head of engineering. He had sort of a plan in his head on how he wanted to do that. The one thing that the CI team did, that we call the continuous improvement team, the CI team, did a lot of pulse checking at the squad level. So one of the things that they'll go do is they'll go do like, they'll run retros. They'll run squad surveying on how their collaboration is playing out.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:31:11) What team dynamics are restricting any one squad from performing at a higher rate than another? One thing that we realized is then we compare squads. We understand almost their engagement score per squad, and we figure out, are there certain people and personalities that just work better together? And they measure this religiously, and they report back to us on, "Hey, you know, this squad two under the operate group is having a really hard time. And here are the attributes of that squad that are just not playing out effectively.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:31:50) And here's why, and here's our recommendation on how we need to change it up." And so that team spends a lot of time getting in front of poor performance by measuring the success of a group proactively and then changing that group or making recommendations on how to change that group so that you can get the best out of every person. And then performance then becomes much more skill-based, I would say, and to the structure of the quarterly reviews.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) That is awesome because you can have really talented people, but if they're organized incorrectly, like, you have super direct communicators with somewhat passive people, you can get some really awkward moments. And so monitoring that, that's fascinating.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:32:39) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Okay. So will jobs even exist in five years?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:32:46) Oh, yes. Here's my favorite topic. Because I like to be—here's my bold product person coming out. My God's honest opinion is that they won't. And but when I say jobs don't exist, I don't mean that the construct of work or the construct of opportunity won't exist.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:33:05) Of course, people will have to contribute to building new things and making key decisions that are going to accelerate businesses forward. I think what won't exist is this construct of a job description that says, "Here are your responsibilities. Here is the timeline that you're expected to do them on, and here's the link that says 'apply' that you go and say, 'I want to be committed to this full-time job for the next several years.'" The reality is that work is far too dynamic to support that in the future, and especially as organizations have to exercise a much greater level of agility when they think about their own growth strategies or their own profitability strategies. This idea that a person needs to dynamically adapt with an organization will have to exist.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:33:57) And by putting people in this container that is a job description, you set this expectation with them that they can expect only that from the next week, month, year, many years. And that's just not what organizations are going to be looking for. Now do I think that it will turn into something as simplified as gig work? No. I actually think gig work is the extreme of sort of this traditional jobless society, but it is much more transactional, and that you're doing one thing, completing one thing, and moving forward.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:34:35) I think that work itself and being something like a project manager or a podcast host or a CEO is not just one thing. It's many things for obvious reasons. And so I don't think that can be as simplified into these singular gig-type motions. But will I think it be somewhere in between traditional employment and gig work? A hundred percent.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:34:57) And I think maybe it will be called projects or opportunities or work, but job is just too static for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) And I know you inside of your organization have built tools to move teams around and do all sorts of interesting things. Are any of those on the road map to be available to customers? Are they gonna be able to use that? Is it already that way today?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:35:21) So today, we still support, and all of our customers still use the traditional container of job or position when they're doing hiring. I think where you're gonna see some evolution of the road map is really around workforce planning and this idea that as I learn how your business is evolving, so maybe especially I work for SAP. So in the SAP world, we're looking at your financials. We're looking at your HR data. We're looking at all these things.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:35:52) We're watching you deliver a certain result. We theoretically could then make a recommendation to you that this is what your future workforce should look like. And these are the types of skills that they should have. And by the way, based on our assessment of the market, here are the locations, the cities, the companies that you should be sourcing from in order to find that workforce.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:36:20) And that workforce will look like this from a leveling standpoint, from an experience standpoint, from a marketplace standpoint. So maybe it is that you only hire three—you hire three people and five agents to do that same job. And so we would help supply those people and or agents to you. That would turn hiring into much more of a conversation and less of a what is in the industry, we call it post and pray. Like, you post a job and pray that you get people that apply.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:36:56) It would be less of that and more of a dynamic dialogue around here's what we think you need. And by the way, here are the five people in the world that have that skill and are engaging with us and you could talk to right now. Then we'll facilitate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:13) Yeah.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:37:13) That way you can start talking to the expert, build the trust through the conversation, then you're comfortable bringing them on board.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) So as you were describing all of that, what I saw in my head is—is SAP making agents? Like, they have many companies. They're such a large organization. Do they have portfolio divisions that are making autonomous agents?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:37:33) Of course. Yes. So they have an entire business AI team that just works on business AI products. They have a persona called Joule, which is sort of their agent persona. I have an agent persona as well for SmartRecruiters. It's called Winston. Winston and Joule are friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) Cute.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:37:55) Yes. So Winston and Joule are friends, and Winston and Joule will engage and share information with one another in an effort to inform a decision. Now SAP also has some pretty cool products which let you as the customer build your own agents that then talk to Joule and Winston.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:38:17) So you as an organization might have a very specific task that needs to be delivered within the construct of business applications, and you could create an agent and assign that agent tasks and give that data that the agent either collects or leverages to decide the ability to connect with the likes of a Joule or the likes of a Winston. And then some of those activities could thus pass into some of these other product lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) That is amazing. Was that a pre-acquisition that you did, Winston, or after?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:38:52) Yeah. We did it pre. It was something that we realized was the perfect moment because recruiting is, in my opinion, the perfect appless experience. Everybody likes to say that they care about hiring, but the reality is they care about finding someone to help them. They don't care about the process of hiring as a hiring manager. They don't want to log in to an applicant tracking system and provide their feedback or approve a job or look at all this benchmark data or build an onboarding plan. They want other people to do that, and they want the critical decisions that craft that narrative or that experience for that employee or that candidate to just be pushed to their flow of work. They want it in Slack. They want it in Teams. They want it in WhatsApp. They want it in SMS.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:39:38) And so hiring is like this huge, deeply constructed workflow within a lot of organizations that gets very little adoption despite the fact that it touches every single person at a company. And so we thought, what a better way to start with sort of an appless journey in a conversation is through an agent that meets you in your flow of work and collects information. And that's sort of how we came up with the idea to just go full bore that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) Is it a situation where you can just—if I'm a customer, I can just talk to Winston. It'll develop the entire job description, post it, push it out, and then just bring me back stuff. So it's like I'm talking to Jarvis from Iron Man?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:40:27) Pretty much. That's right. I'd say you certainly have to say that you're looking for something. So you need to tell Winston that you're looking for a type of person. Winston will craft the job. You'll have to approve it. Winston can then source and publish that job. And then when people apply that are good matches, they come back through the app, and Winston scores them and says, here are the five people of these 100 that you should speak to. And in some cases, depending on how much you use Winston, Winston will have a prescreening conversation with that candidate to collect data about who they are, what they're looking to achieve, yada yada yada.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:12) That's interesting. Can I give it personality traits I'm interested in?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:41:17) Mhmm. Skills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:20) But can it go—I know it gets a little sensitive when we start getting into personality traits, but I'm an entrepreneur. And I have found that the balance of how people process emotions on a team is so critical, and it's always unique to that team. So sometimes I'm like, look. I need a person who listens really well to be added to this team, or I need a person who's overly direct to be added to this team.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:41:40) Sure. Yeah. You can absolutely feed it things to look for or screening questions to ask. So it might not evaluate that they're an active listener, but it might ask them a question about active listening, which is then transcribed and scored as a good or a bad answer about active listening. So it will do things like that.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:42:01) I will say one of the things about personality, and I'm gonna digress for a second because I found this really cool app. So there's a company in the HR tech space called Choral People. And the CEO, I met through my network a while ago. And they're doing something pretty cool. They're saying to every person in an organization, take this personality assessment. Now a lot of organizations do personality assessment. I even did the Enneagram for my team too just to sort of understand them. But this assessment then, based on the results, gives the result to a hiring manager or a team member that Rebecca has these types of traits when she's in a strength position versus a high stress position. You'll see these types of attributes come out of Rebecca, and it will tell you how—it will inform the manager or the team member how best to work with Rebecca when they see these types of interactions.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:43:23) Now where I think they took it to the next level, which I thought was cool, is they have embedded in Slack the ability for you to—when I'm speaking to Joel and I'm having a conversation and I'm maybe giving Joel feedback, it will actually pop up and say, you should say it this way in order to make Joel receive that information in a positive and productive way. And so it will actually use GenAI to provide an alternative way of speaking to Joel in writing to make that relationship more efficient and productive and positive. And so I think a lot about how an activity like that or a feature like that could be brought to the hiring workflow.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:44:17) As a good example, as an interviewer, if I'm having an interview with you and I'm in a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting, could something pop up and say, based on that answer, you should double-click in this way in order to see if their answer actually translates to the behavior that's closest to your team dynamic. So double-click on that particular point. Double-click on that point in order to actually get the best out of the conversation. Most people are horrible at interviewing. Absolutely horrible at it. What they do is they end up becoming friends with the person, and they're like, oh, they're a perfect fit. They're not. And then if they don't actually get along or there's something about the way that they're engaging, it doesn't sit as well even though the person might have perfect skills. And so if there was an agent actually asking you to—or is prompting the right type of question in the interview, would you actually have a less biased and a more productive conversation with somebody. And these are the types of agents that we're thinking about buying right now or building.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:45:08) But we have our screening ones will have written conversations with people, and we'll sort of do that where they'll double-click on answers that feel a little less full.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:08) I love that. I love the assist—real-time assistance. Like, I wish I had that in my marriage. So I ask Grok all the time. I found this out about three months ago. Three months ago, I found out that I can talk—Grok's my personal favorite just for my own personal life. But I found that I could say, hey, I want to get this point across to my wife, and it'll tell me based off of all the stuff I've trained it on how to best communicate with her. And the way that we found this is, we went to a marriage coach. It's like, if your marriage is good and you want it to be great, they have these coaches for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:43) And they were explaining to us the different ways that we see things and how we communicate, and I was like, this is—I would normally roll my eyes at this, but I'm like, this is so helpful and useful after being married for 10 years. And so we've both learned a whole lot about each other, and now now I've learned, like, oh, I can go to Grok and be like, frame it for Michelle. Like, I wanna communicate this to her because I love her. Like, how do I do that?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:46:06) And it's been easy. Well, you should create yourself a Joel GPT. I have a Rebecca GPT. Like, I mean, my chiefs of staff, my assistant, they use Rebecca GPT all the time to reframe documents or emails or messages that I send to the company and Rebecca-ify them. So that they—like every single tone and emoji and inflection. Like, it's—or the quotes that are used in any sort of press or media just is an articulation of something that I said in the past in my tone, in my pace, in my—all the above. Like, it's totally worth going and creating if you don't have one already.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) Am I interviewing the organic life form Rebecca right now or the deep fake?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:46:57) Yes. Although I probably will feed this podcast to Rebecca GPT so that my team could use some of it at some point in time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) That's funny. That's funny. Oh my goodness. Okay. So we talked a little bit about the jobs changing and how they'll change over time. You mentioned briefly a little bit about this appless experience. That's with the agents. But what's the future of SmartRecruiters? You just got acquired by SAP. You've got your Winston talking to their Joule. You've got—like, what does the future with SAP look like?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:47:33) So I would say it looks like a lot of different things because SmartRecruiters will still remain an independent entity for some time. And so we're gonna have our own brand and road map and are gonna continue to invest in all things recruiting tech and innovation. So Winston, as I just mentioned, is going to continue to evolve. We're introducing voice interviewing. We've got a whole lot of things around smart prompting to hiring managers, integrations around data insights. So you as a hiring manager could ask a question about your application flow or your time to hire or how hiring is going in a specific location, and we're gonna be giving you that insight via conversation versus dashboarding. So all of that continues.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:47:58) But now we have this amazing dataset that is the suite of SAP. And there's something pretty amazing there that we can offer our mutual customers that is this incredible feedback loop around things like workforce management, evolving your workforce to reflect real-time performance, integrating recruiting insight more deeply into financials, spend, HR datasets, and allowing the agents within SAP to study that information and make business recommendations on how you should plan or strategize within your business. Tons of really cool stuff that you can do around the interactions of Joule with performance reviews.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:48:59) So like, if I'm reevaluating Joel's performance, and I love sort of how he has delivered a certain result over the last 10 years or five years, how can I then replicate Joel? And what should I be looking for? But I have not, up until this point, had that data because I have been a standalone recruiting tech vendor. Now that I'm a part of SAP and, specifically, SAP SuccessFactors, their HR product, there's so much that I can then learn from employee success within an organization and feed that back to what great recruiting should look like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) I love it. I would be an idiot if I didn't ask you. You're like the queen of hiring and recruiting and all of this stuff and very, very sharp individual. The number one hiring tip for technology leaders out there, what would that be?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:49:50) Oh, so I have found that over the last many years—so technology hiring would be our—I'm gonna go with product and engineering hiring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:58) Yeah.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:49:59) The one thing—the one question that I have always had the most amount of success in understanding if someone is a fit is I ask them to tell me—I ask the candidate to give me an example of negative feedback that they have received about themselves and their performance and tell me what they did about it. You would be absolutely shocked how many people go, well, I'm just a really high performer. I'm not sure I've gotten a lot of negative feedback. And that—I would say self-awareness in this moment is probably one of the most critical skills to evaluate for because the organizations are adapting so quickly that if you, as a contributor to that organization, don't understand your own impact, where you're falling short, where you're not, it's very difficult to move that ship faster.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:51:19) If there's one skill that I just will not allow my team to not give me feedback on is how self-aware is this person. No matter what their job, no matter who they are, what experience that they've had in the past, I have found that if that skill is evaluated well in this moment with this type of technology acceleration, you usually get better performing teams. And so it's not like a tip the way you would think from a system. It's more of a—I have found that in the ability to deliver my organization with the agility I have, the one thing that is consistent across all people is self-awareness, and it's something that a lot of people do not evaluate in interviews.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:37) Ooh. Alright. Do you want me to share mine?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:51:37) Sure. Go ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:40) I'm too direct. I learned this really early on when I first started hiring people and working together with others, and just very, very direct. And then I subsequently found out later in life, maybe about five to seven years after I figured out how to be softer intentionally, that in the Israeli culture, everyone's incredibly direct. So now I've got a bunch of Israeli tech friends and military too. Military culture is incredibly direct too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:07) So yeah, it was just learning, being self-aware, learning about what that feature is, and then knowing if I'm in this situation, I can soften it. If I'm in that situation, I can just be unfiltered.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:52:18) Well, my head of product is Israeli.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:21) Oh, is he? Okay. Oh, so you're direct then. You like directness.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:52:24) Well, actually, sure. People tell me I have to be more direct over Slack sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:29) Oh, really? Okay.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:52:31) No, I mean, I think transparency is super important in this moment. There's a lot of people that are looking for work, that are looking for that next challenge, that haven't found a company that they love. The worst thing you can do in hiring is string them along. Like, if you know it's not gonna be a fit, I actually have gotten into the best practice of just telling people in the interview.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:52:55) Like, hey, this was a great conversation. You're not a great fit for this job, and this is why. Versus letting them wait five days and then letting somebody else that has no... That is very kind to do that, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:08) It's quite kind.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:53:08) Yeah. And what ends up happening is that I oftentimes go, but you know that job, that company, or this other job in our company, you should talk to someone about that. And like, here's what I actually think you'd be a good match for. I think a lot of people assume they're a good fit for certain types of roles.

(Rebecca Carr at 00:53:30) And what they don't understand is that that role is maybe perceived differently within that organization, and there's another title or another manager that would be better serving of them. And sometimes if you break up with them in the moment and then redirect them, they end up having a good experience, and they, in some cases, are hired into roles they should have applied to in the first place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:52) That's great advice. Well, Becca, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Rebecca Carr at 00:53:57) Great. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:58) We did it. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:17) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.