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How Joshua Siler Built a Recruiting Platform
6 Plays12 days ago
In this episode of Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Joshua Siler, founder and CEO of HiringThing, to explore how frustration turned into a 15-year SaaS journey.
Joshua shares how his background in marketing automation led him to build an internal hiring tool simply to escape email-based recruiting chaos. That side project eventually became HiringThing — now used by thousands of companies.
They discuss naming a SaaS product, growing through multiple market cycles, mentoring entrepreneurs through SCORE, and why building something better often starts with refusing to accept “this is just how it works.”
This conversation is a reminder that the best HR tech often comes from outsiders who see inefficiencies clearly.
About Josh:
Joshua Siler is the Founder & CEO of HiringThing, the award-winning recruiting platform that enables thousands of companies everywhere to tackle recruiting challenges. Joshua is highly focused on delivering great technology, and brings both an engineering and product management background to HiringThing. Prior to starting HiringThing, he served as the VP of Technology for a relationship marketing agency where he designed marketing strategies and innovative software solutions for clients. When not building great software, Joshua can be found building in the woodshop and volunteering with his local SCORE chapter.
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Transcript
Introduction to Joshua Seiler
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello again, everyone. Welcome to today's Fireside Chat, Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Here we talk with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes. My guest today is Joshua Seiler.
00:00:23
Speaker
Josh is the founder and CEO of Hiring Thing, the award-winning recruiting platform that enables thousands of companies everywhere to tackle recruiting challenges. Josh is highly focused on delivering great technology and brings both an engineering and product management background to Hiring
Joshua's Career Journey
00:00:40
Speaker
Thing.
00:00:40
Speaker
Prior to starting Hiring Thing, he served as a VP of technology for a relationship marketing agency where he designed marketing strategies and innovative software solutions for clients.
00:00:52
Speaker
When not building great software, Josh can be found building in the woodshop and volunteering with his local SCORE chapter. Thanks for joining us today, Josh.
00:01:03
Speaker
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, of course. We chatted with ah with Tevis Paxton, a member of the team on the show a little while ago. was a great chat. Got to ah learn a little bit about what you guys do.
00:01:15
Speaker
So you set the bar kind of high. Yeah, yeah. Well, Tevis always does. So I'm happy to follow in his footsteps and do the best I can to share a
Mentoring and Entrepreneurial Insights
00:01:23
Speaker
little more. um I'd love to hear a little bit about what you do with SCORE. How did you get involved in helping small businesses ah you know in your community?
00:01:34
Speaker
ah Well, so I've always been an entrepreneur and I really just enjoy the process of starting and growing businesses. And the last time I did it, it stuck. So I didn't get to do that anymore. Right. So I've been with Hiring Thing for 15 years. I don't get to start new businesses anymore. And so to scratch that itch, I was living in Colorado at the time. I started working with a local small business incubator to just kind of share some of my insights with brand new entrepreneurs and small businesses. And I found that really rewarding. You know, I kind of get to live vicariously through other entrepreneurs and hear about what they're up to and help them kind of brainstorm how to take it to the next level.
00:02:12
Speaker
and And so when I moved to Portland, I was looking for another opportunity to do that and started getting involved with the SCORE organization. And they're a great organization. Basically, it's volunteer mentorship for small businesses. And so I've worked with everything from a crypto entrepreneur to a local taco truck to Somebody doing a closed startup, all sorts of different businesses I get to work with. And it's really enjoyable to work with different different folks and find out what they're doing.
00:02:40
Speaker
That sounds kind of interesting, being able to kind of take your engineering and product perspective to retail. or Yeah, exactly. And it you know I've done the the finance and I've done the sales, I've done the marketing, so I can really you know take a 360 look and some of the things that maybe you know they haven't been in business for a long time, or they've been in a totally different field, I can kind of help perspectives from maybe a different way of doing things.
00:03:11
Speaker
I love that. And I love talking to to other tech you know founders and and learning about kind of how they got where they are. So I'd really like to hear more about your journey, um you know talking about pre-hiring thing and also you know that whole journey. what What path brought you to creating the company and going in the direction that you did?
Origins of Hiring Thing
00:03:34
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to talk about it. i So I started as a software engineer. And I was kind of building some of the first online hosted applications and a lot of in marketing automation is ah what I was working on for for many years. I, you know, I did a little business intelligence, a little this and that along the way. But really, that's where a bulk of my career was spent in in marketing, marketing automation.
00:03:56
Speaker
and And I really enjoyed it. For me, it was always the the building of the thing was the the most exciting thing. ah And so you know i ended up being VP technology at an agency. And of course, we were always hiring. And I was really just frustrated with the process there. you know I would get an email full of Indeed resumes as attachments and have to like manually sort through all those. It really painful. And you know when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? So i'm like, well, i'm going to build a better system to manage this and started tinkering with a better way to do it.
00:04:32
Speaker
And over the course of a couple of years, I ended up with a pretty robust kind of internal application that we were using to manage hiring. And at some point it kind of occurred to me, okay, you know, this really could be its own thing.
00:04:45
Speaker
And so I reached out to the local SHRM group. I got some beta testers. They started using it and loving it. And then at that point it's it said, okay, time to raise money. So I went out and started talking to angel investors. And eventually spun that out into its own company, which became Hiring Thing.
00:05:03
Speaker
I love that. I love how you keep her you know referring to it as you know it it ah developing that thing and it kind of became its own thing. And now it's Hiring Thing.
00:05:15
Speaker
how he had Tell me about the genesis for the name. What made you come up with that name? Oh, boy. you know ah So I worked in an agency. So we had all sorts of processes for brain name work, right and which usually involve long meetings with whiteboards and 10 people in the room. and you know So we did kind of an exhaustive ah review of a bunch of ideas and spent you know a bunch of time kind of crossing things out and The hiring thing is the one that stuck. you know It's ah its a little playful. And you know we're going to market in a time when SaaS was kind of reaching its its boom. A lot of companies weren't using SaaS software yet, but it was clearly established as something that was going to be ah the future of software. and And so we wanted a little playful vibe at the same time, really clearly communicating what we're doing. And that's what we ended up with.
00:06:14
Speaker
I love it. I think
Building Software Solutions
00:06:15
Speaker
that's awesome. So before we kind of get into, i think, what hiring thing is and who you work with, I'd just be curious to hear in general what attracted you to working in in tech, but kind of more specifically, what brought you to that sort of The ah HR, right? I mean, you worked at a marketing agency and you were building some things to help solve this problem with your, you know, obviously your your ATS, right? But there were a bunch of different things I would imagine. You had listed a few of them, right? That you were working on.
00:06:47
Speaker
What made you kind of go all in on that space? Well, my passion was building online software. right, and database-driven applications. And that is really always been the thing for me. You know, I started work right when the internet started happening. And that was, you know, the first software I built ah was not online, but then quickly, you know, I was but mostly building online software. And every day it was kind of a revolution in software, or something new. And that was just really exciting to me. So I really gained a lot of expertise in building online software web applications.
00:07:22
Speaker
And so that was really my focus. And I was not an HR expert. In fact, quite the opposite. I was just frustrated with the way the ah HR stuff worked and the HR experts were doing things and wanted to build something that did it better. And so for better or worse, that probably helped me. right I'm an HR expert now, 15 years later. right yeah i know a hell of a lot about ah HR. But at the time, I was just really looking to apply my skills as a technologist to a problem I was having and make it work better. And that was my passion. And, you know, I, uh, I always liked running companies. I always wanted to run a company. Uh, I had run a couple others before that, you know, got acquired or fizzled out, uh, over the years, you know, we all have that string of ups and downs. And, uh, and so I wanted to do it again. And this was a problem that I had a solution for that looked like it could be universally enjoyed by other companies. And so that's kind of what took it to market for me. you know, it wasn't that I would knew all about HR and was an ah HR expert. It was more I saw a problem and ah I knew that I could use my skills to do it better. and And that's what led me down the path.
00:08:30
Speaker
And you did it internally. And I find a lot of tools really a lot of incredibly, you know, successful startups are are built out of some sort of, you know, internal development to solve the problem that they're having where there aren't solutions in the market to solve that.
00:08:49
Speaker
right? Once you figure out you build something internally that seems to work incredibly well, you figure that, you know, there's probably a lot of other companies or systems, right? They could wind up benefiting from that. So, um, yeah, beyond building internally, you know, I find one of the biggest markers of success for software companies is building their initial thesis around somebody's real problem and, uh, and building a solution in place with the business flow. And, It's much harder when you think you've got a great idea and you build the great idea and then go sue you who might buy it. Much more difficult to take software to market that way. And, you know, there's been successes, but also a lot more failures, you know, ah and the companies that I do see succeed are the ones that build software to solve someone's immediate business problem. And it's used for business stuff from day one versus as soon as we're done in 12 to 18 months, then we'll be ready for someone to use the software. That's much more difficult to find that product market fit for.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah,
Exploring Hiring Thing's Features
00:09:48
Speaker
that's fair. So tell me, tell us all about hiring thing now. Give me, give me an overview of what um hiring thing is all about. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, at the core, we're recruiting software. So we help companies post jobs online, manage applicants, hire great employees. That's what the software does for folks. And it has a a zillion little features. you know We've been under Active Development for 15 years. We've got every little edge case under the sun kind of managed in the platform. And we do that for, ah you know we have some 20,000 customers with access to our software. And works great for that. But on top of that, we have an additional level of complexity. We offer our software as a white label solution, which means that other companies can take our recruiting platform and embed it in their software under their own brand. and create an integrated experience. And this works really well for us. you know Our partners are kind of the lifeblood of our business, and we really are focused on helping them have a great recruiting platform as part of their offering so that they can worry about their core focus, their primary value proposition. And we can help them make sure that they're competitive when it comes to comparing features to maybe what their you know their competitors have for full stack back office.
00:11:07
Speaker
tell Tell us about some of these. but Now, we don't have to name names if you don't want to, but tell us about some of these partners. What is what do what do they look like, you know the majority of the folks that you tend to work with?
00:11:19
Speaker
So you know a number of different types. We have HRAS companies that maybe have a payroll solution, and they don't have recruiting. And their customers want more full-featured ah HR software, so we can help them fill that gap with recruiting. Also, we work with vertical SaaS companies that are maybe filling a need for a particular vertical. And they say, we do everything for your vertical. Well, one of those everythings is recruiting, right? And so if they're more focused on maybe the warehouse operations and the service delivery or something like that, but they need to have more ah HR capabilities, we can help them fill that kind of gap.
00:11:58
Speaker
And then we also work with the hr solutions companies that maybe do a services and software combo where they're delivering a you know a pile of value to a company and they want to be full service. We can help them include recruiting in that service offering and they can use our software to help them deliver on you know a bigger kind of recruiting package.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah.
AI in Recruiting
00:12:21
Speaker
So, you know, I'm curious and, um you know, I obviously saw ah the booth at at HR Tech. We were able to connect there. And so much of so much of that content, it was enormous. And so much of it was about AI and the adoption of of this kind of technology and so many of these platforms.
00:12:44
Speaker
um I'm curious, like how does or does hiring thing, has it started to incorporate that kind of technology as part of your software solution? We have. Yeah, absolutely. And that's moving really quickly. It's certainly becoming a basically a required part of business-to-business software these days. And so we have ah we have a number of AI features today so that people love.
00:13:08
Speaker
ah One is AI job descriptions, so you can click a button and i'll write a job description for you, which works really well. And you know you can tweak it and kind of chat with AI there. But that's something customers been asking for for years. They wanted a you know a big library of all the job descriptions available. And this gives us the ability to deliver that ah really easily.
00:13:28
Speaker
We also have ah AI pay rate range exploration. so you can put in a title and a location and we'll use AI to help you kind of bracket what the pay range might be for that role. And then we have AI resume analysis. So you can click on any applicant and we will take their resume and the job description and have AI do an analysis of how well this particular applicant meets the points required in the job description.
00:13:54
Speaker
So that kind of helps you sort through all your applicants. And what we're finding is that AI is really changing the recruiting landscape right now in in unpredictable ways. right So companies are using not just our customers, but a lot of ah companies are using AI to write their job descriptions.
00:14:13
Speaker
And applicants are using AI to write their resumes and companies are using AI to match resumes to job descriptions. Right. So where where does it end?
00:14:25
Speaker
You know, one of the interesting things is that ah companies are getting more and more applicants with perfectly form fit resumes now. And that makes it really hard to kind of sort between applicants. yeah You know, there are tools that allow an applicant to apply for a thousand jobs. And why wouldn't they? There's no incremental cost to them.
00:14:43
Speaker
Right. You're looking for a job. Why wouldn't I apply for a thousand jobs? Well, you can pay an AI tool to craft your ai resume and send it to a thousand companies. And so companies are getting into dated with with these applications. And it becomes more important than ever that they have a tool that helps them kind of sort through that stack and find the the right application. You know what this looks like in the long term is hard to say, but it's it's changing really quickly right now.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that, first of all, i can see how that would appeal to so many people and be incredibly useful. I know that some HR leaders are are cautious from a lot of the, you know, from the new technology. Do you think you think that HR leaders are, you know, if you had to make a general general statement here, tech ready, particularly when it comes to AI? Yeah.
00:15:34
Speaker
Oh, well, with AI, I mean, no one knows what the end game is here. So I don't think if anyone says they're tech ready for exactly what AI is going to bring, they're not telling the truth because no one really knows where this is ending. there's ah There's a lot of factors at play that are all changing really quickly. And sometimes they're at odds with each other. So it's difficult to predict where that's going to end out. You know, I think that there's ah there's definitely some adaptation that has to happen as things are changing really quickly. And You know, traditionally, yeah ah HR has been a status quo kind of function within companies. It's been done this way and we always do it this way. And ah that kind of mentality is not serving companies well right now with the way how quickly things are changing. You know, there's a lot of questions about how these AI tools ethically should be used as part of the hiring process. Right. Right. Because do we want does anybody want ai evaluating whether the right fit for a job? No, you want a person to look at your application and consider you. And it feels very dehumanizing to just be weeded out by ai but
00:16:34
Speaker
that's where it's going, right? And there's already lawsuits against companies for using AI for yeah recruiting. And, ah you know, that's going to continue. That's not going to suddenly stop because of these lawsuits, but it's going to evolve. And where that turns into, at anybody's bet. I could see a future where maybe the planetary supercomputer decides where you work, right? and You get an email one day and said, you've been reassigned. Here's your new job. And we've determined this is the right job for you. Right. And maybe it's always right. So people just go along with it. I don't know. You know, that that's, that's wild speculation, but you know, you can see it.
00:17:09
Speaker
Can you imagine that world? I, it, and it, it makes me wonder like, you know, maybe not even this idea of being tech ready. Um, you know, I think that certainly we don't know, right. We don't, we don't know what that end game is, but, um,
00:17:28
Speaker
just the hurdles, you know, that a lot of organizations, you know, might have by adopting tools that are so heavily reliant on AI, right? So you start to have this disconnect where, you know, individual contribution, right, is...
00:17:44
Speaker
or can decrease to some extent, right? With the reliance on on AI, where's that middle ground? Do you hear people who have
Ethics and AI in Hiring
00:17:55
Speaker
concerns? what What are the next steps for, if you can even share, you know for hiring things and how it embraces what you know more it can even do with sourcing, right? Beyond just you know the resume, you know creating the resume or analyzing those type of things, you know there's...
00:18:14
Speaker
I mean, there's a there's a ah buffet of of directions you could go in, right? Yeah. Well, we certainly have an active line of development in moving our AI stuff forward, right? And absolutely, we have to because it is becoming an expected part of the stack.
00:18:29
Speaker
But we're also cognizant of the fact that you know companies can get their social license revoked because of AI right through lawsuits and negative press. And there are some of our customers that said, I don't want any of that. I've turned turned all that crap off. So we actually have a global AI switch that turns it all off for a customer if they want it all off. Now that's becoming less of a thing as people just realize that it's a reality, but ah you know we have to walk those lines really carefully. There's some real questions around, for example, bias. And you know we know that bias is baked into every company, regardless if you say, oh, we're not going to be biased. Well, you know there's there's something there because you're people and you're evaluating other people and you just you come at it from your own particular lens.
00:19:16
Speaker
And you know it's it's forcing some kind of nuanced, more nuanced discussion about what bias actually means and what kind of biases are structural, what kind are inherent and how do we manage those? Does a completely unbiased AI exist? Is that even possible? Is that even desirable?
00:19:37
Speaker
ah Those are questions that we really need to to root out because there's going to be a legal framework yeah around using AI in recruiting and hr at some point. It probably won't be written by law, but it'll be written by precedent from you know lawsuits that come through and and no one knows what that looks like yet. So it's it's encouraging some healthy debate, but you also have to be careful. you know I think it's really easy to develop an AI recruiting tool that really isn't going to last because it ah falls afoul of various laws and various social norms and would really quickly create some negative kickback. Really easy to create that.
00:20:17
Speaker
It, it yeah on a sort of a tangential note, it makes me curious, you know, when it comes to the the resume analysis, right? we have We have a job description. We have resume analysis. We want to bring people on our team who have the requisite skills that we need to do the job that needs to be done.
00:20:37
Speaker
But there's an enormous culture component, right? Every, every person, right. That we bring into our organization brings a little bit of culture with them, right? Every, everyone that leaves organization takes a little bit of, and takes a little bit of culture with them.
00:20:53
Speaker
And um is it possible? you, is it possible now or do you see it being possible in the future where these tools can account for things like that? Or is that where that human element is really still needed?
00:21:10
Speaker
I think, I mean, the human element is absolutely needed, right? And if you get a random person dropped into your team that no one from your team has talked to or looked at, and they are a radically different type of thinker, or they do things radically different than the way you do it, then, you know, that's probably not going to work out, right? If you take someone who is incredible at working at a command and control organization off a three ring binder, and does everything by the book, all the time and they're really great at that, they might be a perfect fit for some jobs. But if you have more of a free organization that is about you know kind of personal ownership and things are more fluid all the time, they'll they'll crash and burn really quickly.
00:21:53
Speaker
ah So you know those kinds of things absolutely have to be taken into account and personal conversations are really the only way to discover those. you know, if you try to cast classify and categorize the things that make somebody fit from a culture perspective, it quickly devolves into some really heated discussion, right? And we've seen those in society over the years with DEI coming and being maybe a little bit out now. Those are still relevant though. and you know, for a while people were deriding, oh, culture, that just means you're looking for another Stanford bro to join your team, right?
00:22:27
Speaker
And that absolutely was the case in some times, in places, and absolutely was harmful in some places because you don't want to create a monoculture. You want a diversity of opinion, but you also want people who fit in with the way your people work, the way you want your company to work. And how we walk that line, I think, is is really complicated and very nuanced. And You're right. It comes down to people. People need to be the ones who are deciding it. You can't automate that kind of chemistry discussion away.
AI's Invisible Integration
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah. How do we empower the ah HR leaders, the practitioners, the teams to get really fully on board with how they're using. Because one of the things you mentioned, some people, which I thought was really interesting, some people just don't want any of it, just shut it all off, right? and Some folks might use some of it. It scares some people, right? There's a lot of folks who have concerns about it. they'll There's a lot of folks who simply want to use as much of it as they can,
00:23:24
Speaker
um you know, because they see the value in that. How do we empower those folks to just fully, you know, to kind of get on board with all of these things and try it and use it and see how it can help?
00:23:37
Speaker
Well, ah what I see the most effective AI deployments today are the ones that you don't even know AI is involved. And I think that that as a software designer perspective, that's really the goal is to have it be invisible to you and it just smooths everything along and makes everything a little better. And you don't know that it's AI.
00:23:58
Speaker
ah You can't do that right now, right? Because people need to know when AI is involved because AI can make mistakes and people need to be more on on edge to evaluate those mistakes. But there's plenty of places where AI doesn't make mistakes very often and works just fine and is chugging along behind the scenes to make everything a little bit better in really subtle ways. You know, like your phone will give you a little summary of the text messages you've received last day. Right. It's useful, you know, like kind of, oh here's the, I got 10 messages in the family chat, but it's about so-and-so's birthday, right? i don't need to check that right now. That's useful and kind of invisible, right? You know, you kind of know it's AI at some level, but you're not like, oh, what's AI telling me now? It's just your phone is giving you a little summary, right? And so I see it becoming more of a blended, seamless part of our lives rather than something that stands apart. And that's probably where the adoption comes. I think there'll be AI deniers probably till the end of time, right? Like the Luddites back when the the you know weaving looms came out, like there's going to always going to be deniers of people that hate the new technology and don't want anything to do with it for better for worse, right? why you know They can have their opinion, they can live their life without it, and maybe their life is better if they keep it out of their life. Absolutely. But I think there's no question it's going to be much more pervasive going forward.
00:25:21
Speaker
i I like that. I mean, t one thing I'd love as a ah ah huge takeaway from this, I mean, I feel like that needs to be framed and memed inside of of LinkedIn or Facebook is, you know, this idea that when you don't even know it's there, like that is going to be, um,
00:25:44
Speaker
that's It's already the case, right? Yeah, but it's going to be more and more. It'll be under everything and we just won't notice it it' until it breaks, right? And then tell exactly something will explode. I think we still haven't had our you know ah big AI catastrophe. yeah yeah It's probably inevitable.
00:26:02
Speaker
At some point, something is going to go terribly wrong because AI was running the show and it made a mistake. But we are we you know we haven't really seen that yet. Or maybe it's happened and people aren't aren't you know telling us that what happened exactly. But yeah you know those kinds of things are going to happen. But I think eventually it's going to be completely invisible and seamless.
Evolving Hiring Challenges
00:26:24
Speaker
Getting back to what hiring thing does, you know i'm aside from some some obvious, I think, knowledge gaps when it comes to tech, you know what do you see... As the biggest you know challenges in in hiring today, you know, is it is it different for different kinds of organizations or different sizes of organizations, worker classifications, locations?
00:26:47
Speaker
Give me kind of your assessment on what you see as some of the biggest challenges. Well, it's certainly changing really quickly. And we've seen a big sea change from over the last few years, just in particular in the how hot the labor market is. So we look back at 2022, kind of post-COVID, we were having a huge boom. Companies could not find people. They were desperate to hire. We had a 40-year high in the number of openings available. And so really it was, how can I get more applicants? How can I get more applicants? right Those were the things we were hearing. The job market steadily cooled. And last week, you know Jerome Powell, head of the Fed, said that job creation is essentially zero in this economy. And so what we're seeing is that companies are posting fewer jobs and they get way more applicants per job than they did before. Now, this is compounded by these new tools that allow anybody to apply for everything all the time. Right. And so the big thing people are fighting with today is why every time I post a job, I get so many applicants. How do I find the right person? right And in a tight job market where there's fewer jobs, we're seeing a rise in people going back to networking. right they Or they want to they want to have ah people that they have references for that they know that they've talked to. right And so they're looking, like in our system, they'll flag those applicants as referr referrals
00:28:14
Speaker
sort those at the top the list, right? I want to know who is referred because I have 10,000 applicants, right? How do I know which ones to pick? Well, the one that gets recommended to me by someone is is a clear is a clear winner in that kind of environment.
00:28:28
Speaker
And so that that that's a big part of it is just figuring out how to deal with this new situation where instead of having a hard time finding anyone to apply, you have way too many applicants and making sure you have a disciplined process to manage that.
00:28:44
Speaker
Well, that was going to kind of be my next question is, what do you think some employers are doing right you know when it comes to hiring? I mean, we obviously have some challenges. you know Do you see trends that make you sort of optimistic for leaders that are building this workforce?
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to be really intentional about what you're looking for. And ah you know in the past, they'd see more like, okay, we're going to open this role up and let's see what type of folks apply. And then we'll use that to inform what might be successful in this role, right? Because they're just, they're looking for someone who's smart and a go-getter and fits with their culture and we'll hire that person, right? There was more of that.
00:29:23
Speaker
Now it's more people are looking to really tighten up the criteria and say, okay, well, we need to make sure we have these skills. We need to make sure we have this kind of experience level. You know, they're, they're,
00:29:37
Speaker
David Price- documenting and then trying to stick to that list, because it helps them weed through all the applicants right and they can. David Price- more intentional about exactly what they want for specific roles and maybe look to find that exact right person, where in the past, maybe it was a little more open.
00:29:54
Speaker
which is unfortunate, right? I wish there was more job creation. I wish there were more opportunities for folks right now, but it looks like we're kind of hitting, ah and hopefully it's a nadir of the business cycle, right? And it's ah it's all up from here. There's a few things that could change in the economy that might suddenly tighten up the labor market, and I'd i'd certainly welcome that. But as it stands right now, employers are looking at kind of ah being spoiled for choice. And when they open up a new role, they can really look to find exactly the right person for that.
00:30:24
Speaker
So how you know, I guess what ultimately then defines, you know, how hiring things roadmap, like how, what are the challenges that you see in the workforce that lead you to build solutions for some of these challenges, right? I mean, obviously when there's, when folks are inundated with so many, clearly, right. It needs a solution that can help do some of that matching for them. And I think you guys kind of nailed that. Well, what do you see in the next two to three to five years that,
00:30:53
Speaker
that you're building to, you know, hopefully address some of those things that may, you know, that folks, I think, you know, in the future are going to be, you know, dealing with.
00:31:05
Speaker
Well, certainly more ai screening is going to be part of the solution. And, you know, much to the chagrin of recruiters out there who, you know, over the last few years have have seen the number of those folks out there go down, although they still have an important role to play. yeah But, ah you know, that's going to be a more automated in the future. And how that works exactly, you know, we're trying to be part of that solution. and We have a lot of folks thinking about it and talking about it. You know, i ah fully automated selecting what employee is probably quite a ways out. ah But is it headed that way? It may very well be. What we want to do is make sure that we're leveraging AI to kind of help you work through these processes in the most efficient manner. without falling afoul of what would be considered proper and appropriate and respectful. And that's a hard line to walk. We really have to be careful about that.
Remote Work Leadership
00:32:00
Speaker
So speaking of leadership, I'd love to hear a little bit about what you think may be like the next, you know, a little bit about the next generation, right? our Are today's leaders...
00:32:11
Speaker
setting up tomorrow's leaders for success and, and, and what should today's leaders be doing to shape tomorrow's leaders? Maybe this is some stuff that you deal with in score a lot, right? If, if a lot of what we're doing at hiring thing is all pre-hire, how do you talk to other business, you know, ah business owners, operators, and leaders about, you know, what that looks like in the future?
00:32:38
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. You know, there's an interesting divide ah between we've always been a all remote company. And so that really shapes our culture and my and my approach to leadership. But I definitely see a divergence there. You know, I think we've seen a little bit of push to return to office with companies. Remote's not working. We want to get people back in the office. And part of that is driven by, you know, the high cost of empty offices and maybe some desire to unnaturally trim their workforces. But still, you know, there's some leaders really speaking out against remote. And that goes against kind of how we manage and what we want to do. But I definitely see where it doesn't work for some companies and and some folks.
00:33:16
Speaker
and ah And so, you know, I think that you can manage companies different ways. There are companies that are more command and control and give a lot of very specific direction to their employees on how they want things done. yeah you know Part of that is having people where you can see them and and creating a structure for them that kind of steers the way that they work.
00:33:42
Speaker
Being all remote is different for us, right? And you know I believe you should find people who are willing to take ownership and give them space to have that ownership and measure them on outcomes and output versus, you know, how long they're working at their desk or how many meetings they've been in, that kind of thing. You know, it's just a little bit different culture when you're all remote than when you're in person. And I i see advantages to both. I think for some young folks, ah they maybe haven't benefited from an office environment. They haven't collaborated with folks as much. And it could be hard for them to be sitting at home and just interacting with their colleagues through little postage stamp all day. Right.
00:34:24
Speaker
ah But for a lot of people, they really love it. And, you know, for a lot of our employees, it's a major benefit of working from hiring things. We're all remote and, you know, we give you kind of personal ownership of what your work is and let you run with it.
00:34:39
Speaker
And ah so, i you know, I see both sides of it. It depends on what kind of organization you are and what kind of employees you have. ah You know, I think, ah leaders need to be cognizant of what kind of company they are. And in some cases, they need to put more structure and yeah embrace that and do that. And in some cases, you know you need less and you need to empower your employees. And I think that that walking that line, especially when we're talking about this kind of work from home versus work in the office debate is is a big part of that.
00:35:09
Speaker
I'd love for you to maybe... Give us a little bit of an idea of some of the things that you do to build that culture with a remote workforce, because it's challenging, right? You don't have everybody around all of the time.
00:35:22
Speaker
You know, if ah if if some business leaders, right, or some some folks maybe that you work with at Score or even through hiring or or seeking some advice on building that remote culture, what do you tell them?
00:35:37
Speaker
Well, I can tell you what we do. And, ah you know, that's that's probably the the best direction I have. ah You know, one is that we we try to do company-wide participation in in strategy.
00:35:48
Speaker
And so rather than having strategy be top-down, we want it to boil up from the bottom and get ideas from everywhere. So we have, ah you know, our strategy processes we do a couple times a year, really every department, everybody participating in some way and where they think the strategy should go. and using that to inform kind of what our our direction is. But what that does is gives everybody little bit ownership for it. And, you know ideally what I want is every team team member to feel complete ownership of what they do.
00:36:20
Speaker
And rather than being handed, like, here's how you need to do it in an exact way, we say, here's the outcome we want from you. ah You get to choose how you do it, but, you know, get it done.
00:36:31
Speaker
And I think that that... that kind of ownership really enables people to ah feel some pride in their work and also hold themselves accountable for it.
00:36:42
Speaker
The other thing that we like to like to do is have an environment where team members can hold each other accountable in positive ways, right? But, you know, you have to have checks and balances. And one way to do that is to have, you know, time cards and and really specific kind of accountability frameworks that are top down. And another way to do it is to have an environment where everybody's success is interlocked and people are kind of encouraging their counterparts to hold up their part of the bargain. And that works really well for us.
00:37:13
Speaker
It's like um you know creating this this creating this culture essentially by giving folks ownership over you know essentially organizational responsibilities, right? So everybody's got skin in the game for everything.
00:37:28
Speaker
um rather than just being told what to do. I love that. for For this next generation, right, or or maybe even not the next generation, because it's it's honestly not that far off with the the way that the technology is you know so rapidly changing.
00:37:43
Speaker
I mean, would you say that maybe there's different kinds of skills or competencies that leaders are going to need to be effective? You know, we... business or technology or social skills or creative skills. And it's rare to find that leader who has everything the way that, that you know, that the way that technology has been, um you know, ah adopted recently, would you say that that's even more important now than ever? Do you think that, you know, leaders can still get by on um extremely charismatic social and creative skills?
00:38:20
Speaker
but Well, it'll certainly help. And those are ones I don't have. you know I don't consider myself a highly charismatic leader by any means. So we all have some gaps that we're you know trying to fill. ah But you know I think it it it has to be some level of adaptivity to how people work, because I think that that that's probably one of the big social debates we're having right now is what does AI do to people's work? right And we know that it's taking a bunch of people's jobs and kind of making them less important to the economy, right? We've seen kind of software engineers and content writers and designers, you know, we've seen their work kind of be taken over a little bit by AI. Not that there's still a place for them and they're they're valuable, but, you know, that's a little bit of a concern. I think there's a lot of people who maybe shuffled papers or updated spreadsheets or things like that that are finding themselves maybe out of work because of AI and you know, that's obviously not fun for them. ah But, you know, we should, I think we should definitely value someone who uses AI to get a bunch of stuff done, right? Because that's using the technology to the max. And we should also look at ways that people can contribute to the people portion of the work, right? And, you know, maybe there's ways that AI is taking over the automation and the you know punching buttons and updating spreadsheets in a way that frees us up for being more people oriented in the way we interact and work with each other and in corporate America. um you know I'm speculating at this point. I don't know what's going to come. and Nobody really does.
00:39:58
Speaker
But at the end of the day, you know the economy only works if people are working and people will find a way to work and provide value. And what that looks like is bound to be different than what it is today. So ah finding and recognizing those changes and then exploiting them, those are the things that gonna help future leaders really succeed. is What does the future of work really look like with it changing so rapidly right now? um TBD, but if you can get there first, then it's gonna give you an advantage.
00:40:26
Speaker
I'm going to ask you for predictions. You can't do the TBD. I need real predictions here from you, Josh. Right.
Future of AI and Leadership Skills
00:40:35
Speaker
or what do you see What do you see coming down the pike?
00:40:39
Speaker
Oh, real predictions, huh? Yeah. ah Well, ah you know I think we're a little bit of a bubble with AI, right? And you know at this point, a lot the AI companies are promising levels of investment in AI that you know if you add them all up,
00:40:54
Speaker
exceed the GDP of the country, like they just don't make sense. Right. There's not enough, not enough compute that we could build that could match some of the things that these companies are saying. And we see that in the stock market, right, a huge valuation. Now, how long does it take a bubble like that to collapse or normalize? Well, that could be ah tomorrow or it could be a long time, right? It's hard to say. But it is the bubbles are market distortions, right? So we're in a little bit of a market distortion where all eyes are on AI and that's the thing everybody's building. But you know AI doesn't feed anybody. AI doesn't build houses. It's not really part of the real economy. It's an enabler. that enables us maybe to feed people more effectively. Maybe it enables us to build homes more effectively, but we still have to mine the metals, log the woods, build the houses, farm the land to make food, right? And those things aren't going away. So the real question is, okay, once this AI bubble,
00:41:52
Speaker
does its thing, what's AI's real place in the economy, and how does it help us really enable those things that are actual production? That's the next phase. And I think that that's where kind of the the winning begins for AI is, okay, it's one thing if AI builds five new data centers. It's another thing if AI builds me a house.
00:42:14
Speaker
And when AI starts really building houses, that's when that's when it's really going to be impacted. Yeah, I like that. what do you think What do you think that your work is going to look like? you know i mean, to address these changes, do you see hiring thing moving into different avenues? do you see your work changing at all?
00:42:33
Speaker
Oh, well, certainly it already has, like I said, in in the last couple of years. you know The focus has been, definitely our focus in the past is more like, how do we get people more qualified applicants, right?
00:42:43
Speaker
Now it's more on how do we help people find the most qualified of all the applicants? And then as AI kind of per goes into LinkedIn and Indeed and these companies are they're promising, they'll find you the best applicants, right? And so sourcing is really maybe less of a less of important for companies like ours. And we're more focused on optimizing that human part of the interaction.
00:43:08
Speaker
And to your point, humans have to be involved, right? There's no magic AI button that's going to tell you if someone is going to fit in with your team or your organization. There's still an intuitive sense that we get and we have to talk to somebody and multiple people have to talk to somebody. And that's an important part of bringing a new employee on is letting the team talk to the person, getting some consensus on who the right person to hire is, right? You can't really have AI do that for you and then expect that person to drop in productively into your company.
00:43:40
Speaker
And so what we can do as ah you know a software company is focus on helping people optimize that human part of the process. Like how do we get everyone scheduled and how do we collect their feedback and how do we make sure that we're making the right choice based on the human interactions we've had before we you know send them off to become part of your company.
00:44:00
Speaker
I like that. Making it human.
Leadership Advice and Conclusion
00:44:03
Speaker
um To wrap up, you know, I love asking this question, you know, if a business leader kind of comes to you from advice, well, this actually might be a very, risk this might not be an if because you give advice all the time. You know, if ah when when a leader comes to you and asks you for advice on how to really kind of get it right,
00:44:23
Speaker
when it comes to implementing and leveraging technology and the hiring process for their organization, right? You just, you have one second or, you know, a couple seconds with them, you're in an elevator up to the top floor and before those doors open and they walk right out of there.
00:44:38
Speaker
What is that one thing that you'd tell them if you have time? Oh, that's a tough one. preker what You know, i want I want to talk with them a little bit first to discover what the real problems are. And You know, at the end of the day, it comes down to what's your biggest problem?
00:44:55
Speaker
And ah what's the thing that's slowing you down? What's going to make you go faster? And then focus your technology on solving that. I mean, again, ah technology doesn't, is it it's an enabler. It's not necessarily the end thing, especially when it comes to ah HR. I mean, it's it's there to smooth the way and help you make it happen faster, better, easier. And what I typically look for are you know the big pain points. You're not finding somebody or it's taking you too long or it's you know ah the productivity is low. You just can't get a bunch of positions filled or you're hiring the wrong people. or what's What's the real pain point in your organization? and And then look for a solution to fill that specific issue.
00:45:38
Speaker
And so that could be, it could be applicant tracking. It could be something like performance management, right? you You don't feel like you trust people are getting things done and you don't feel like you're letting go of the people who are not succeeding quickly enough or you're not keeping the high performers. You might want a performance management solution or you might feel like, ah you know, that your old paper process for time tracking isn't really working and you really need to get a handle on that. Okay. You know, there's some great mobile time tracking tools that you can deploy really easily that'll help you solve that problem.
00:46:11
Speaker
ah But, ah you know, there's there's a wide variety of software solutions out there, especially if you're a smaller business. You're not going to implement all of them all at once, right? Maybe, you know, if you're an enterprise, you might have every single category of HR software out there, and that might be 10 or 20 different software packages, right? If you're a smaller business, you're just not going to do that.
00:46:33
Speaker
And so it's important to look to where you can get the most leverage from a solution. And you do that by categorizing where the problems are and where the most time savings, the most business benefit you would get by solving, and then you go there first.
00:46:48
Speaker
I love that, right? I mean, people problems are not always just people problems. They are time problems, performance problems, hiring problems. They can be a lot of different problems. And until you really identify what that is, um it's going to be hard to really solve that problem. Yeah, there's a class of HR solution for every every conceivable problem, right? You're You know, you yeah, there's a solution out there, whatever your problem is. But you got to really know what what you're trying to solve for and what is going to be a successful outcome. I think, you know, before you even you look at any software, you should be have a really clear definition of here's what I want the post implementation future of my company to be and have a really good picture of that.
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you so much, Josh. I appreciate you being here with me today. Appreciate all the time and appreciate all of your insight. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Well, for all of you who are watching or listening to this episode, thanks for tuning in to Mustard Hub Voices behind the build. Subscribe, like, share, and comment. Be sure to check us out at mustardhub.com to see how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge.
00:48:02
Speaker
And sign up to get started with Mustard Hub for free while you're there. Until next time.