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Episode 103 - Special Guest Question with Jeff Neumann from Bullhorn
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Episode 103 with special guest Jeff Neumann from Bullhorn
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Transcript
Introduction and News Sponsorship
00:00:08
Speaker
proudly brought to you by Bullhorn. This is the news for the 1st of April 2025. I'm Adele Last.
Rebecca Hartshorn's Career Move
00:00:16
Speaker
Rebecca Hartshorn, RCSA Industry Leader of the Year Australia for 2023, has joined UNU Recruitment Partners as Chief Operating Officer based in Sydney after most recently working in executive roles at Launch Recruitment for nearly five years.
00:00:31
Speaker
Craig Sneesby, UNU's Brisbane-based founder and CEO, made the announcement on LinkedIn last week. ITCOM co-founder Damian Ross was hired as Launcher CEO in June 2024, displacing Hartshawn, who transitioned into the newly created Chief Customer Officer role, from which she quietly departed in December last year.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hartshawn originally joined Launch in early 2020 as Chief Operating Officer. Hartshawn is currently the Vice Chair of the RCSA NSW ACT Region Council.
Non-Compete Clause Policy Changes
00:01:02
Speaker
Last week's federal budget included a big win for the recruitment industry, with the federal government announcing it will ban non-compete clauses for most workers, earning less than the high income threshold, currently $175,000 a year. According to the government, more than 3 million workers are covered by such non-compete clauses.
00:01:21
Speaker
Non-compete clauses have traditionally been used to restrict highly skilled employees and executives from immediately departing their employer to switch to a competitor, but a government review found that some employers weaponised them to discourage low-paid workers switching jobs.
00:01:36
Speaker
The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said non-compete clauses were holding too many Australian workers back from going to better paid opportunities or setting up small businesses, and that millions of Australians were tied up in this unnecessary red tape.
00:01:50
Speaker
The Productivity Commission had calculated the change, designed to come into effect from 2027, would add about $5 billion dollars to the economy, Chalmers said, and other modelling found it would add as much as $2,500 a year to an individual's wages.
00:02:05
Speaker
Australians shouldn't need a lawyer to go to a higher-paying job, the government said. Even when non-compete clauses are legally unenforceable, they can lower worker mobility. The government said it would consult with the business community further before legislating the announced changes.
Political Announcements and Candidacies
00:02:21
Speaker
Founder and CEO of Melbourne-based Safety People, a division of Arnold Group, Glenn Arnold has announced he will stand in the upcoming federal election as National Party candidate for a Victorian Senate seat.
00:02:32
Speaker
Established in 2002, Arnold's company provides recruitment and staffing services in the areas of occupational health and safety, workers' compensation, injury management and return to work. Arnold Group has been a long-term member of NPA Worldwide with Glenn a past APAC president.
00:02:48
Speaker
Based on the Basque Coast, south-east of Melbourne, Arnold is president of the Inverloch Surf Lifesaving Club. In a media release, Arnold said, I understand the challenges that regional communities face, from cost-of-living pressures to deteriorating infrastructure and environmental challenges like coastal erosion.
00:03:05
Speaker
We need urgent government action to secure regional infrastructure, and I'll be a strong voice in Canberra to ensure that regional communities get their fair share. Victorian Senator and Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Bridget McKenzie, said she's thrilled to have Glenn join the party's Senate team.
Awards and Recognition
00:03:20
Speaker
Talent has been named a finalist for the Trailblazer Award at the World Employment Confederation Annual Awards. The RCSA nominated Talent based on the company's Contractor Experience Program.
00:03:32
Speaker
All WEC award winners will be announced at a gala on 9 April in Cape Town, South Africa. Building industry apprentices who complete their training will earn $10,000 in bonus wages after the Labor government confirmed an expanded incentive program in last week's federal budget.
00:03:51
Speaker
The Commonwealth will provide nearly $627 million dollars over four years from 2025 to 2026 for the program as it entices more young workers into the housing construction workforce.
Industry News and Launches
00:04:03
Speaker
Those young workers will receive $2,000 payments at 6, 12, 24 and 36 month intervals and at the completion of their apprenticeship. The ACTU applauded the policy which doubles the incentives currently available to apprentices in many construction related fields saying will help meet the government's goal of building 1.2 million homes in five years under the Homes for Australia initiative.
00:04:27
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Master Builders Australia also welcomed the review recognising the challenges that employers face in attracting and retaining employees. Labor shortages are currently the biggest handbrake on fixing the housing crisis, said Master Builders Australia Chief Executive Danita Warne.
00:04:42
Speaker
A new recruitment industry news service, HireNote, has been launched. Designed to fill the gap left by the closure of shortlist, HireNote will deliver exclusive news, analysis and thought leadership from recruitment experts and business leaders.
00:04:54
Speaker
The independent platform has been built by Melbourne-based recruitment industry marketing consultant, Georgia Mandarino. HireNote is designed to serve as a central hub for industry updates, events, and as a recruitment industry job board.
00:05:07
Speaker
HireNote currently offers a free forever subscription to their blue tier access until the 30th of June this year. And for advertisers, a month's free advertising when they support the platform with a three month plan.
00:05:20
Speaker
Visit hire, H-I-R-E, note.com.au for more information. Raven's Recruitment and the National Australian Pharmacy Students Association have signed a new and innovative memorandum of understanding designed to support first-year pharmacy students by awarding scholarships to selected individuals to attend major pharmacy conferences and professional events.
00:05:45
Speaker
Heidi Deriz, General Manager of Raven's Recruitment, said in a media release, we have a deep and long-standing history of supporting pharmacy students and collaborating with the NAPSA on this new scholarship is something we welcome.
Hybrid Work Benefits and Events
00:05:59
Speaker
The ADECO Group, the second largest global staffing firm, last week announced the launch of a new company backed by investments from both the ADECO Group and Salesforce. The new company, which was not named, is entering into a strategic partnership with Salesforce to help organizations build an integrated workforce of humans and AI agents.
00:06:19
Speaker
It aims to enable senior leaders to strategically plan, deploy, and manage both human workers and AI agents at scale. It comes after Salesforce announced in December last year that the ADECO Group will be using Salesforce's Agent Force AI agents to scale its own recruitment workforce.
00:06:37
Speaker
The mission of this company is to strengthen and secure the full potential of humans with AI, Dennis Moshul, CEO of the ADECO Group, said in a press release. Hybrid workers are taking fewer sickies than those who are forced to work from the office,
00:06:53
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leading to wellbeing and productivity gains according to new research. A survey of 4,000 hybrid workers and executives from across the US and UK by the International Workplace Group found that more than a third took fewer sick days than when they worked from an office.
00:07:10
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More than two-thirds were experiencing fewer stress-related health conditions and just under three-quarters said that working flexibly meant they were able to access preventative healthcare treatments. Of those surveyed, 80% say they had a better work-life balance and reduced anxiety thanks to hybrid work.
00:07:27
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On the other side, three quarters of CEOs said there was improved productivity after a switch to hybrid working and 77% saw increased employee engagement thanks to this.
00:07:39
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Tickets are now available for the 2025 Australian Rec Gala featuring the RCSA Industry Awards, where the winners of 12 categories will be announced. It's on Thursday, the 22nd of May at the Star Events Centre in Sydney.
00:07:53
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Early bird pricing is $270 plus GST per ticket, with discounts available for tables of 10. Early bird pricing finishes on Friday, the 11th of April.
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All details at rcsa.com.au.
Leadership Changes and Special Guests
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dot ah u that Sorry, Adele? Oh, breaking news. Breaking news just a hand.
00:08:16
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Adele's just advised me. Charles Cameron has resigned from his position as CEO of the RCSA to stand as a Labor Party candidate in the upcoming federal election for the marginal federal seat of Monash, currently held by the Liberal Party's Russell Broadbent on a margin of 2.9%. Wow.
00:08:35
Speaker
Knock me over with a feather. And that's the news for April Fool's Day 2025. I'm Ross Klenit. Stay tuned for Question of the Week with a special guest.
00:08:52
Speaker
Welcome to Question of the Week. Del is in transit today, so she's not joining us, but I'm lucky enough to have a special guest. I'll ask my special guest to introduce himself. Jeff, hello.
00:09:05
Speaker
How are you, Ross? I'm Jeff Newman. Thank you so much for having me. I'm SVP of product marketing, and I'm responsible for Bullhorn's Go-To-Market globally.
00:09:17
Speaker
Excellent. And where are you coming to us from today,
AI in Recruitment
00:09:20
Speaker
Jeff? From Boston, Massachusetts. Boston. And apart from Harvard University, what else is there in Boston that we should see? Because I've never been.
00:09:30
Speaker
ah The city's great. it It has a little bit of everything, especially if you're a sports fan. Boston ah sports fans are fanatical about all their sports. So basketball, baseball, football, hockey, it doesn't get much better than Boston.
00:09:47
Speaker
Wow. Well, I think I would be right at home because I love sports. Hopefully one of these days I'll get there. All right. Well, we met face to face last month at Bullhorn Engage. So congratulations to you and the Bullhorn team. You must have been thrilled with the way the event went.
00:10:04
Speaker
Thank you. Yes. Engage Sydney was really a fantastic event. our Our events team did an incredible job putting it together. And it also happened to be our largest event to date. And so we're really proud of both the the community that we're that we're building over in Australia and just the the strength of relationships with our customers and partners in the region. So it's really, it's um it's something we're really proud of.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, you should be. Certainly the feedback was exceptional. And of course, my my concern is that you're raising bar every year. So people's expectations get higher and higher. It's like, well, what are they going to do next year to beat that? and it's ah you know It's a tough ask for Annalise and her team.
00:10:48
Speaker
It certainly is. But a challenge we'll take on happily. Excellent. Well, i look forward to the 2026 version. All right, let's get stuck into question of the week. So Jeff, the question I have for you, what advances in AI assisted recruitment should agency recruiters know about and prepare for?
00:11:09
Speaker
It's a great question, Ross. I think in general, the rate at which AI is advancing in recruitment is actually astounding. um If you look at what really hit the market, not much more than really a year ago, it was really basic generative AI, right? And everyone flocked to ChatGPT as this new and and an an incredibly exciting technology. And since then, it has really blossomed into an entire ecosystem of
00:11:40
Speaker
Lots of different technologies that either leverage similar capabilities like generative AI, um but it's also moving into areas of voice and picture recognition, um even even being able to do more complex tasks like screening.
00:11:58
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They weren't possible just six, eight months ago because the technology of the voice assistants weren't strong enough to be able to kind of replicate a human to human interaction.
00:12:11
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um Where I think things are going and where I think a lot of companies are going to be investing over the next 12 months is really around agentic AI. we see a huge opportunity to really leverage this technology and these capabilities to replace more and more of the traditional kind of process and workflow.
00:12:32
Speaker
um And I think it's giving companies the opportunity to make some really strategic decisions as to where and when they want to apply AI to really help their people. And, you know, it's it's kind of our philosophy at Bullhorn that AI isn't really there to replace people, it's to enhance them. And that's why, like,
00:12:51
Speaker
not to Not to sound salesy, but our tagline is, you know, more profits, more placements, same team. um And we think that really the the the advancements of AI is,
00:13:03
Speaker
companies can really look at what they do on a day-to-day basis and even look within their existing user community, their user base at the desk level and figure out which technologies they should give to which users in order to help accelerate what they do and make it easier to kind of go through, I'd say, the administrative tasks.
00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah. Ultimately, what what customers are are looking at Bullhorn to help them do is is allow them more time talking with people.
00:13:36
Speaker
Right. And building relationships. I mean, that is that's what our our industry is built on. And so if we can take out there's no there's no agency that I've met yet that says I want to hire people to type on keyboards and put information into ATSs.
00:13:52
Speaker
And so the more we can help people focus on what they really want to do and makes them do best, that's really what's going to be exciting. Okay, great. So let's start with the recruiter and then we'll perhaps talk about the owner. So the the desk level recruiter, what what at the moment can the AI assisted platform do best in enhancing the productivity of a desk level recruiter?
00:14:20
Speaker
I think right now with current technology, I think the the most benefit that I've seen the desk level recruiters get is in true generative AI to do a lot of the everyday tasks that take a lot of time, whether it's scheduling interviews, whether it's sending emails, whether it's creating proposals, whether it's, um, uh, um,
00:14:47
Speaker
summarizing notes and past activity, ah whether it's helping to improve job descriptions, all of those things that that that force people to sit in front of the keyboard and type away, all that can be done with almost a click of a button.
00:15:02
Speaker
And the beautiful part about where this technology is advancing is um I think if you were to look at how people were thinking about generative AI, call it even eight, nine months ago, everyone thought that they had to have their own custom large language model in order to do what they, they were looking for.
00:15:22
Speaker
But the realities are the data sets that these models have been trained on is so extensive and so expansive that really customers have their choice now to pick any large language model, roll it into an assistant style, um,
00:15:37
Speaker
a i an AI product, and the users can just simply ask a question, give a command, get a quick response, and go on their way. So to that point, given Bullhorn's drawing on a huge amount of aggregated, anonymized data, what's your data telling you about the low-hanging fruit what What are recruiters going for? what What generally are they finding the easiest to action in terms of AI assisted recruitment?
00:16:09
Speaker
It's a great question, Ross. I'd actually like to answer it in two parts. um what What our data is showing us in terms of where they're using it are lots of the use cases and examples that I just gave.
00:16:22
Speaker
We think that is probably both the lowest hanging fruit the easiest to drive adoption and it's showing the highest rate of return because the the the quality that is coming out of a large language model today is so far and and better than what was, say, even a year ago that recruiters are really appreciating how quick and easy they can get those tasks done.
00:16:49
Speaker
um However, but our large aggregated data set, which we actually refer to as a sea of data, um because we think that for really training some really advanced AI that's
Automation and Recruitment Efficiency
00:17:02
Speaker
very specific to recruitment, especially in like ah matching models and being able to help find the most relevant or important candidates that that are most likely to be placed,
00:17:13
Speaker
um You need that sea of data, which is specific, enormous and actionable. um And that's also ah one of the unique competitive differentiators that Bullhorn has is we have over 25 years of data, not just of candidate profiles and of jobs, but also the outcomes as well.
00:17:33
Speaker
And so we have a unique opportunity to train our models differently to actually look for what are all the different attributes and variables that actually are most likely to lead to a placement and help recruiters focus in on those candidates versus just the ones that may have the right set of skills on the resume that happened to match the job description.
00:17:56
Speaker
So to that point, no doubt Bullhorn's got some very long ah term customers. Do you have a particular customer business case that might highlight how effectively a customer has taken the advantages that the Bullhorn platform's been able to provide and turn it into significant productivity improvements?
00:18:16
Speaker
Absolutely. but're We're seeing um We're seeing great examples of ah ROI literally every day. um There are so many of our customers that are being really innovative innovative in how they're using AI.
00:18:30
Speaker
um Just as an example, we have one customer. Every time a job order comes into the system or vacancy comes in, there are a collection of assets that they create each and every single time.
00:18:42
Speaker
They always want a public job description so they can market the job. They always want a set of pre-screening questions and they always want kind of an interview template that can be followed by the recruiter when they're actually on the phone.
00:18:56
Speaker
Now, typically someone has to go read the job and manually type those out. They're actually combining automation with generative ai to do that automatically.
00:19:08
Speaker
And so when a vacancy comes into the system, those three assets are automatically created instantaneously for the recruiter. So as soon as they look at the job, they can not only see ah recommended set of candidates right off the bat, but they also have those three assets right at their fingertips to get started.
00:19:28
Speaker
Well, that's um when I think... when I was running a desk, how much time that took and to think that that's done instantaneously now that's, wow, it's just got the potential to make a ah massive, massive difference. That, well, it's like, it's a pretty exciting time. What, what can we expect in the next couple of years, Jeff, without giving away any commercial secrets?
Future of AI in Recruitment
00:19:55
Speaker
I'll have to be careful here. um I think that if we look towards the future right now, the world that we live in, there's a pretty there's a pretty significant differentiation between I'd say assistants and agents, right?
00:20:10
Speaker
Assistants are typically where the user is in, say, a prompt style experience where they're asking a question or giving a command and it's and they're getting a response back.
00:20:22
Speaker
And then you have agents which are kind of meant to be autonomous and they run on the user's behalf. And the way that we see customers thinking about them separately is the assistants are really designed for the desk level and the agents. They're kind of doing more at the agency level where they're applying the agent across a broad set of characteristics, whether it's a certain cohort of ah candidates or certain jobs or for particular clients.
00:20:48
Speaker
Ross, I think you're going to see those things merge. And I think you're going to see them merge in a really unique way where where recruiters are going to have more opportunity to just tell the system what they want.
00:21:01
Speaker
And at the same time, the system is going to have more context of what they're trying to do and give them options. And so i think i think what you'll see is where recruiters can simply just almost interact with an ATS in a chat style window.
00:21:18
Speaker
where they're just either typing or just speaking um with natural language, and they're just directing the system what to do. And it doesn't matter whether it's Gen AI or it's agents or it's models or it's whatever it is in the background.
00:21:34
Speaker
It just knows how to do what that the recruiter is looking for because it's been taught all similar skills so that it can actually replicate what a human does.
00:21:46
Speaker
And the intent, again, is not to replace someone, but it's to give them that that added benefit of efficiency where they can just say, find me the best candidates for this job, and they get a they get a response of the top 10 candidates. Okay, I'd like you to go pre-screen candidate one, three, and five, and the system will just start A whole automated workflow it'll move them through a virtual screen, it can score them provide summaries, give a full analysis of the conversation, and then they can even set up rules where they can decide only candidates that meet a certain criteria.
00:22:26
Speaker
get to schedule interviews. And so the recruiter is spending less time, again, manual tasks, typing information in, they're being more directive on what their day-to-day looks like, and they're spending more time just talking to people day in and day out.
00:22:40
Speaker
Ultimately, that should all lead to more placements. That's pretty mind-blowing.
Conclusion and Future Outlook
00:22:45
Speaker
Well, Jeff, I really appreciate your time. I look forward to our chat in a year's time after 2026 Bullhorn engage and seeing what Bullhorn have come up with then. It's yeah very exciting times. Thanks again.
00:22:56
Speaker
Appreciate it, Ross. See you next year.