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Every person in the company desires, in terms of their ambitions, what their drivers are for subscribing to your work product and doing that level of discovery and then being able to matchmake that with the work product that you need and you want to offer as a company. And that entire process can be augmented and driven heavily by AI, I believe.
B
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process, policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host, Josh. Welcome to the show.
A
Glad to be here, Darren. Thanks for having me. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.
B
Hey, you know, when we talked, I said this could. This is an interesting thing that we see going on around hiring and HR and Gen AI's effect on all these things. But before we dive into that, everyone on that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show. And every superhero has an origin story or a background story and they're always fascinating. So Josh, what's your background story?
A
Well, I've got a fairly non traditional HR background story which is, which is exciting and I think, yeah, uniquely positions me in this space from like more of a position of passion that comes from some time in the military I spent. When I was 18, I joined Fresh out of home, left my parents, much to the dismay of my mother, who did not want me to join the military. But I went and studied at West Point equivalent in Australia, which is called adfa, based in Canberra, did a business degree there, very much enjoyed my time in Canberra, then transitioned to battalion life in Brisbane and all over Australia, where I was in the infantry for 10 years leading soldiers as an officer and kind of made my way up through the ranks, so to speak. And then I got to a point where I was a bit, I guess flat when it come. When it came to the military, mainly the, the bureaucracy, the hierarchy, the. The experience was quite repetitive and it was becoming less and less aligned to what I wanted professionally and personally. So I became. I started dabbling in marketing because I was interested in communications and.
B
Oh, interesting.
A
Yeah. And. And I eventually joined tier 11, which is a company I work for now, which is a pretty big pivot from. From the army life, being part of a US fully remote digital marketing agency doing media buying of all things from them, from infantry officer to media buyer. And then that company kind of rose through the ranks as well. And now sitting on the. On the head of HR seat, have been in that seat for a few years and have really done a full circle in Terms of military life, I'm now dealing very much with people hiring, culture, team building. You know, I. I did do the tertiary kind of HR education. But I'm sure we'll discuss today, you know, how. How that has helped and how that I think hasn't helped. And personally, you know, I love. I love gardening. Gardening is, like, my outlet. Really, really obsessed. Yeah, really obsessed with. With getting out there and into nature.
B
All right, so what kind of gardening? Like vegetable gardening or flower or exotic or.
A
Oh, mate, it's all of the above, you know. Really? Oh, yeah, I've got. I'm. I'm an eclectic gardener. I. I like to just throw things in the ground and see what happens.
B
See what happens.
A
All right. I spent, like, eight months growing an artichoke. I didn't realize it took that long until eight months later, I was like, what's wrong with this thing? And then suddenly I got one piece of fruit, so vegetable from it.
B
Yeah.
A
So that was a very savored dip that I made.
B
At least you didn't try and grow a pineapple. That's two years to grow a pineapple.
A
Wow. Is it.
B
Jeez. It is. It's two years.
A
That's crazy. No, I'm. I, I'm. Yeah, I'm big into it. I think it's. It's. It's really good to have something where you can lose yourself in. And I often find myself just wandering around the garden.
B
Just.
A
I'm. I'm not at the point where I'm talking to my plants yet, but I. I do. You can see.
B
You can feel it coming, right?
A
Yeah. Yeah, I could feel. I've got this pool, this pull towards my plants, this relationship I've been developing, but.
B
Yeah. All right, let's. We. We can make this whole episode about gardening if you want, but I don't think our audience would listen very long. So let's dive into this phenomenon that we're seeing right now with hiring specifically around hr, because we kind of touched on that when we. When we first talked. And. And we're seeing it kind of globally right now. Um, there's a stall in hiring, and right now is the time when people are supposed to be hiring. This is the, you know, September, October, this is. These are the months that people hire.
A
Right, Exactly.
B
And it's slower than slow out there right now. Right. Are you seeing the same thing I'm seeing?
A
I'm seeing the same thing. I'm seeing the same thing. I mean, I. I do in house recruiting for tier 11, so I'm personally invested and active as a recruiter and is leading a team of recruiters as well. As with Super Hired, this recruitment agency that we've started up as well, I'm seeing similar patterns. You don't need to look far online or even in person talking to peers to see the levels of frustration and discontent that exists from both sides. From candidates not getting any luck, the experience being completely degraded now to having. Having been forced to use AI to create resumes at scale in order just to get a hint of interest from companies. Yeah, yeah. And I'm seeing it as well from the other side as well. Like, you know, this, this onslaught of volume from the candidate's perspective is inundating recruiters to the point where they are being forced to use similar AI tools. And I think it's completely unsustainable. I think it's diluting the ability for people to find good talent for the right role. And I think that's key. It's. If you consider hiring is really the essence of a matchmaking process, that's really what's. What it should be. And that's what's at stake here. We're diluting the ability for candidates to be paired with the right opportunities for them and for companies to identify what the opportunities that they're putting across the table and how to identify who the right person is for that role. When we inject the level of AI into the mix unsustainably and we can get into what that means, it's just completely degrading the experience on both sides and reducing the quality of hiring.
B
So this remind when you were mentioning that the first thing that popped in my head was online dating and how many of those photos are Photoshopped? Oh, right, yes, right. And that's the same thing with matchmaking. When we have resumes now being Photoshopped right by AI to match the. It's hard to determine what you're really looking at from a recruiter where that recruiter is the person on the other line swiping left or swiping right. Right. I mean, that's what we're.
A
Right. And that's exactly. It's a good analogy because that's what we've. That's what we've essentially created here in this, this paradigm now of hiring. It's. Recruiters are forced to be surface level. I know recruiters don't want to be surface level because someone who actively wants to recruit, I believe at heart, is someone that genuinely wants to connect with someone and identify if they are the right fit. For them as the company or you know, they want to curate matchmaking. That, that's essentially why this whole modern.
B
Modern day matchmaker is a recruiter. I love it.
A
Right. And you know, if you, if you were to take a very surface level dating app that is, is vanity based, it's based on pure, you know, what you see rather than what's under the hood, you know, akin to kind of speed dating potentially. Yeah, it's, it's not based on long term fit, it's not based on long term relationships. You know, if you're going and using dating apps for a specific purpose, it may not be for a long term relationship. It may be for a fling, for a short term fling or a hookup. You know, it's, it's, that's not the type of mindset and the type of approach we should be having to hiring. So why are we treating it in a manner that's akin to some of these apps?
B
Aren't there sometimes when I just want to hire someone for maybe three months, let's, I mean that happens too. So I think there's some possibilities with hey, I just need someone for three months to help me get through something. Maybe it's not long term, but some of it is long term. So using different tools for different purposes for sure be valuable here. Right?
A
I, I agree. However, I would, I would say that when it comes to, when it comes to that, what, what we're ultimately need to be focused on, what we're ultimately need to be concerned with is just being completely understanding and clear on what the work product is that you're asking for and you're creating and what you're putting across the table. The company should know if it's a three month fling or if it's a indefinite marriage that they're putting across the table to candidates. They are responsible and accountable in the recruitment process to know exactly what the opportunity is they're putting across the table. And therefore with that level of transparency, they, the candidate should be able to ascertain that's not the right fit for me because I'm not after a three month fling. I'm after a long term sustainable commitment. The problem is, is that a lot of companies don't do that level of due diligence to understand whether it is a short term fling that they need or a long term commitment. So agnostic of that type of discovery, they just post a job, put it out there and they realize after the fact that, that they only needed this person for three months and that's what's unsustainable. And I think when it comes to AI use, it needs to be a supporting effort. It needs to be an augmentation of the level of due diligence that both sides need to be doing in terms of discovering what their ideal work product is that they want. And that kind of gets into this work product as a philosophy, a kind of mandate that's been picking up steam in HR as well.
B
Explain that a little bit because I, I don't, I don't fully understand that terminology of course.
A
So the, the, the definition and I guess this movement of work as a product is basically applying product management, product design principles that we obsess over, rightly so, and apply in great detail to our external clients and customers that are the core revenue generating stakeholders for our businesses. It's about applying those principles internally to the employees. And consider considering the work that is done internal to a business as the core, one of the core products that a company should design intentionally, should market intentionally, should produce intentionally, and monitor and ensure that there is transparency and understanding as to why people are subscribing, employees are subscribing to that work product internal to the business. If you consider the fact that 60 to 70% of many companies, I would say the vast majority of companies is payroll, is to do with expenditure around people, why are we not applying the same due diligence, vigor, rigorousness when it comes to designing the work experience than we do with the external clients that, that you know, that we obsess over?
B
And is that because that's just somewhat considered overhead? And it's like, hey, they're lucky to have a job type of attitude that the C suite has or yeah, I.
A
Think, I think it's institutionalized, very traditional thinking from that that hasn't fully shaken out from industrial era, you know, HR methodologies and just general scientific management principles of the time that are slowly degrading but are still heavily institutionalized. When you look at credentialism like this fascination with people going to university and getting degrees as a measure of success or as a measure of their likely ability to perform in a role and also this obsession with skills as well, Just because someone hasn't has a skill or a degree doesn't correlate with their ability to perform. It's highly contextual. Someone's ability to be in a workplace, in a team and add value is extremely subject to the conditions of the work product and how that's being intentionally designed or the lack of intentional design. So when you have someone in a Context, such as a company that has a leader like you mentioned, that doesn't see value in people, that doesn't put intentional design in place, that potentially has fractures in leadership. Tools, processes and systems are not supporting people's ability. Or you have other forces at play that are degrading someone's ability to actually apply their skills. You get in this paradigm where you may have someone in another company that can perform very well and has done on their resume, but then comes to your company and completely and completely bombs it. Completely bombs. And people instantly look at the person as the problem and say, oh, that was a dud. That was a bad hire. That was a dud. Apple. Incorrect. I think companies and leaders have an obligation to be accountable and to take extreme ownership with designing the internal work product to be able to unleash the capability of people. And that starts with understanding what your subscribers want, what every person in the company desires in terms of their ambitions, what, what their drivers are for for subscribing to your work product and doing that level of discovery and then being able to matchmake that with the work products that you need and you want to offer as a company. And that entire process can be augmented and driven heavily by AI. I believe.
B
I, I like where you're headed here because you're, you're throwing an apple, you're, you're turning the apple card over and you're putting peaches inside the apple cart once she's put it back up. Because what you're saying is what we've been doing all the way down to education, because I think education falls in this as well, is we're, we're, we're creating people that we can easily replace.
A
Right.
B
Or we thought we could. And some of the words that you're saying sound a lot like Edward Deming and what he believed and what he taught. But you've taken a step further saying, which I think is beautiful, I want to explore this more. We need to change the way that we work so that we can take advantage of people better and get more work out of people by changing the process, changing the way that we work. Instead of go sit in your cube and do what you're told.
A
Exactly.
B
Which is what we learn how to do in primary school. Right.
A
And it's, it's, it's actually ridiculous. Like the schooling is, is another assembly line esque.
B
Oh yeah.
A
Experience where we treat humans as inputs to production, to a production line. Right. It's. And look, it's a hard thing to solve for because it's we're talking about creating an experience and an environment where it will need more intentional design, more resource, it will require more discovery, it will require a high level of tailoring and uniqueness and a consideration that humans in and of themselves each want to subscribe to something different. And when you break it down and take it to the nth degree, what you're actually asking and demanding is the fact that you don't just have one work product, you've got a work product for every person at your company.
B
Oh yeah.
A
That needs to be properly matched with the person on the other side and their desires for what type of work profile they want. And I think the eureka moment for me was when I was seeing this level of kind of dysfunction across the industry. And then I started reading and getting engrossed in this concept of client centricity and just customer success management as a philosophy. Yeah, CSMs and how to be effective client success representative, you need to be heavily invested in discovering and understanding your client base and their pain points, their needs, their desires. Teresa Torres is someone that I follow very closely in this space and she advocates for a continuous culture and an environment of continuously discovering and understanding your, in this case, your employees and your subscribers. So that fundamentally changes the paradigm of how managers should be deployed in companies as well.
B
Well, and, and what's interesting about that is that costs money and takes time. And I think without generative AI or AI's help, it actually is pretty hard to do. Because how, I mean, we're already seeing this, especially in high tech. Managers are managing, you know, 20 people. I mean, how do you manage 20 people and go that depth, in depth with them that you're talking about without any help? I just don't see how you can do it.
A
Yeah, that's a challenge. And I think, I think we ultimately need to. It's not, it's many paradigms that need to shift. I think ultimately it's the paradigm in which how we manage traditionally needs to change and this concept of management needs to shift. And I know there's a lot of nomenclature and a lot of movement and people that talk about, hey, you know, hire the best people, then you don't need to manage them, you know, and whilst that's true. Yeah, yeah, well, exactly. And you still do because you need to manage the work experience, you need to manage the design of the work so that they can be enabled to operate with little involvement. Right. So it's almost like you're not managing.
B
I like that approach. That's better than managing people Right.
A
It shifts the narrative shifts from managing people to managing the work production and designing the work product, which involves all of the sources of influence that allow that person to do the role. So you're not managing the person, you're managing around the person. And you're basically a project manager, product designer that is now very highly emotionally intelligent, leveraging AI and augmenting AI and generative tools as much as possible to help with this discovery process. You're mapping opportunities, you're creating solutions, and you're removing obstacles and empowering people to deploy themselves in a way where there is a match between what the business needs in terms of that work product and that right person for that role and ensuring that the gaps are always understood with regards to what the company needs and what the person wants in that seat.
B
Do you think good managers already do this innately or.
A
Yes.
B
Are these new skills that have to be built?
A
I think good managers naturally gravitate towards wanting to understand the work experience and the environment, how they, how their people operate, and will naturally be inquisitive as to how to reduce barriers to people to step into how they want to perform in their role. So I, I think the best managers do this already. I think it's a case of how do we change the paradigm so that this is the normality and how do we do it in a way where we can leverage technology to augment it in a way that it's scalable?
B
I like the scalable thing because, yeah, this could be a very difficult. I mean, you could get all your best managers in a room and try and train people, but I mean, companies have tried that before and it never works great.
A
Exactly. That's. Yeah, that's, that's a hard thing to, to navigate because when you're talking about massive shifts like this in terms of how people lead and manage, you're also talking about the need to arm those people with the abilities to hold these conversations and to navigate this with their people as well, as well as themselves having to learn these new approaches. I think Dart Linsley is a big name in this space that's working directly with managers as his go to like North Star, as the primary change agents in being able to drive movement like this in organizations. And I think that's sound because I think those are the people that are going to be able to enforce and drive change from the bottom up in organizations. Because I think when it comes to enterprise and large companies, there's too much institutionalization that exists. It's almost like you need to work from the bottom up. And you need to start small and create case studies and a cause for change. And that's where Kind of Super Hired is really focused on initially starting out. If you were to break out this philosophy of work as a product across the entire employee customer journey as you would with a client, Super Hired is really just the front end at the, at the moment it's sales, it's marketing, it's. How do we define help companies define what the work product is. Instead of launching straight headfirst into hiring and throwing out a job spec and be like, oh yeah, we need that person. Let's get them in right now, tomorrow. It's like, no, slow down. What do you actually need? Let's analyze, let's do some discovery, let's build a solution and opportunity space. Let's really see who you need, let's map it all out. Let's build your right work product and identify who the right person is for that profile. Then we go into marketing and selling the work product which actually also involves facilitating candidates to do self discovery on what their right work, right work profile is. I don't, I still don't really understand why I do what I do and what, what it truly, truly drives me. I actually need to do some self reflection, but I think we all do.
B
Did you see, do you see then a potential for. Instead of resumes flying around instead now I go to a website. Let's say you're hiring someone and you have the work product you know, you've got all laid out how you want. Instead now you're going to ask like a survey, a questions to see. Well, well that's going to slow down how many places I can apply to.
A
Yes, it will probably good, right?
B
I mean, because you're not going to get nearly as many candidates.
A
That's, that's exactly what we're working on at the moment in terms of a tool and an approach and an experience from the candidate's perspective. The company's perspective isn't too difficult. I mean you can have them as a captive audience, you sit down with them, you do the discovery, you facilitate the conversations. The candidate side, especially now because people are being trained to pump out all of these resumes to ask a candidate to hey, slow down a second, give this a bit more time, conduct some self discovery, jump into this experience. It's a sudden shift from the expectation.
B
Well yeah, because they're, they're looking for a job because they don't have a job or they're trying to upgrade. So there's this time crunch there's this pressure that they're feeling to get a job quick. So I gotta spread as far and wide as I possibly can. I think that's what's happening.
A
That's right. And the, the opportunity here that exists is to stop them where they're at, alert them to I guess the opportunity that exists with regards to if they did slow down and conduct some self discovery that we can help facilitate. You're going to learn more about yourself and what your true drivers are. And not only that, we'll be able to help you find opportunities that fit this right work profile that we can co create with you because we're doing the same due diligence on the other side.
B
I see what you're. So you guys become a dating matchmaker, right? Just like, just like the, there's, there's different dating sites out there, right? The ones that you just throw up your profile real quick and then there's others that ask questions and they, and they build a psychological or a dating profile based off of the questions that they're asking. So you're a higher end matchmaking service for jobs, for people looking for jobs. I love the idea.
A
Essentially, essentially what we're trying to do is take things really back to first principles and inject a high level of discovery into both sides of the equation, the candidate and the company. And really with both of these stakeholders truly understand the drivers that are at play. I'm not talking about surface level vanity metrics like credentials, skills. I'm talking about context. I'm talking about drivers, emotional drivers, deep seated desires, core, core things. And the challenge there is, well, how do you find that information out and how do you drive that level of clarity? And that then is now leading us to develop an experience and a suite of tools and an approach where we take the candidate and we conduct a combination of qualitative and quantitative interviews, surveys, some kind of gamified activities and really allowing the candidate to reap value from it regardless of whether they want a job now or not. But designing an experience where Darren can log in and you can say, you know what, I've never really taken the time to think about this and you know, there's no barrier to entry here. I can just jump in and I can just conduct some of these questionnaires and think about like Myers Briggs or Colby Cliftonstrengths, you know, these type of surveys, but in a manner that's a bit more engaging and a bit more fun and less dry and that gives you, gives you instant Kind of instant orientation as to what your ideal work profile is leaning towards. The more data you put in, the better it gets. And this is where we start getting to the space of AI augmentation and generative AI. And you can conduct interviews with AI agents, you can conduct things that are a bit more story based. If you want to type things out, there's a whole plethora of different options for you to input the data. But ultimately it's building this nucleus of who is Darren? What does he want? What are his drivers at work, in life? And we work with the candidates to build that profile out. And when we have opportunities that arise that say, wow, there's a massive correlation here between what this company wants in this specific context, the challenge that exists with the speed of the organization, the type of leadership, the culture that they've got, the opportunities that exist just naturally as part of the role, and the foreseeable future of this company's trajectory. All of these things get matched with the database and, or the people that were the candidates that we're talking to at that time. And it allows us to have much richer, deeper, meaningful conversations that ultimately leads to better quality of hiring because we're not matching surface level metrics, we're matching deep seated ambitions around the desires which.
B
I really, I really like this because it's better for the, the person looking for work too, the potential hire, because the engagements are deeper and higher quality quality than, you know, 30 minutes. What's your favorite, you know, what's your worst quality? I mean, come on, those questions.
A
I know, what are your top five?
B
I work too hard. Yeah, that's right.
A
Like what's your, what's your weakness? My weakness is sometimes I do everything too quickly and then I'm just, I'm like the best at everything. Yeah.
B
So I really like this approach. It does slow things down a little bit, but I think in the end we'll speed things up. Meaning I'm going to be more thoughtful. I'm not going to send out 150 resumes, I'm going to be more targeted. Right. If, if everyone starts moving this direction, you'll have those deep conversations, you'll have a better engagement with, with your employer from the employee side. And the opposite is going to be true as I'm going to get employees that will last longer and that I get the most best work product out.
A
Yep, spot on that. I mean that's exactly the, the hypothesis and the methodology there. And you mentioned something interesting. Then you said, you know, like it will slow things Down. But, and I think that is exactly the pain point that exists right now. It's, it's speed. We need speed to hire. We need, we need to close these deals. We need people in, we need. And this obsession with speed and tempo when it comes to recruitment is exactly what's at the core of what is breaking it. Because it is at the heart a human, it should be a human to human endeavor where we're understanding the person at the core. Because we're dealing with humans, we're not dealing with inputs to production, we're not dealing with assembly line components. We're dealing with living entities that have emotions, that have empathy, that have desires, that have varying degrees of situations that change week to week. And when we, when we box them in as numbers and inputs to production, then we over commercialize and, and we treat it like any other project and like intangible commodity asset that exists. And when we do that and then we get someone in that we rushed and we realize, oh wait, this is actually human. And you know that they've got all of these different variables with regards to how they're going to perform in our context. And then they're not a fit. And then we wonder, we wonder why it keeps happening. Right? And you know, this whole notion of, you know, higher, slow, fire, fast. I think it was Jim Collins. I think he's, he, he's quotable for that. But that's essentially really what we need to live. But a lot of companies, a lot of leaders, a lot of teams struggle to do that because everything is, is manifesting the opposite.
B
Yes, exactly. Yeah, I was going to say, we all know this. If I have open wrecks at the end of the year, they go away. So I gotta hire, I gotta hire these people or I lose them. And I've seen that time and time again, a bunch of bad hires at the end of the year because if I don't use the budget, I lose the budget type of thing. Thing. We've seen hiring out of control at times. And now hiring has come to a screeching halt, I think because there's a lot of uncertainty out there and like you said, AI is writing a lot of resumes and recruiters are using AI to read a lot of resumes now. Right. And it's, it's, it's a mess is what it is.
A
It's a. Yeah, it's. And, and that the level and the amount of hype that exists is crazy. Like I was reading the other day, I think it's juice box, juice box. AI is the new kid on the block. I mean, there's lots of kids on the block when it comes to recruiting and AI tools right now in HR. But they got a $36 million Series A funding round, and I was like, wow, that is a lot of money. And I went and looked at the product. It's a cool product. They've done a great job. However, and for context, what it does is it basically does what LinkedIn Recruiter does in terms of sourcing candidates. Right? You put in some parameters and it gives you a list of people that fit those parameters by scraping. And basically a database. A database means nothing when you still got a broken recruiting process. Right. It doesn't mean anything when you're still not conducting matchmaking and discovery.
B
So bad data out.
A
It's like you could have all the candidates in the world. It doesn't mean anything if you're not conducting the due diligence to determine what you actually need and what any of those people actually want in their work product. So you're just peddling faster, $36 million faster. And that was just the cherry on top. When I saw that, I was like, you know, it's just the epitome of investors wanting to jump on the bandwagon. And, you know, looking at the background of these individuals who started this company, you know, credit to them. They're smart guys, no HR background, no hiring experience. They're tech founders. And you wonder why we live in a world that has broken paradigms that keep getting manifested and perpetuated because we're not doing the discovery. I mean, even when designing a product, you need to go do discovery with the people that are in that space to actually design something that's sustainable. And what we're doing now is not sustainable. It's actually detracting from the experience of candidates and companies that are doing hiring, and it's making things worse. So there's actually an imperative here, a strong imperative for the sake of everyone that will eventually need to look for a job, another job. There's an imperative here to address this.
B
Well, I think you hit it right on the nose, and I'm really anxious to hear how things go. If people want to learn more about what you do, Josh, and. And how do they. How do they reach out to you?
A
I'm on LinkedIn and, you know, I, like I said, I work in House at 211 and we're starting Superhiyad AI. So we're going to get. We got some blogs cranking there, so feel free to reach out and DM me. I love talking about this stuff. I could talk about it for days.
B
So no, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
A
Thanks Dan. I appreciate the time. It was great.
B
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Episode: AI Is Breaking Hiring: Restoring Human Connection in HR
Host: Dr. Darren Pulsipher
Guest: Josh (Head of HR at Tier 11, Co-Founder of Super Hired)
Date: October 21, 2025
In this episode, Dr. Darren Pulsipher tackles the growing challenges and opportunities AI brings to hiring and HR processes, particularly how the influx of AI-driven tools is eroding the human connection at the heart of recruitment. Alongside guest Josh—a former infantry officer turned HR leader—the discussion explores how organizations can restore real matchmaking in hiring, apply intentional work design, and shift toward a more "work as a product" philosophy that considers the ambitions and drivers of both candidates and companies.
"If you consider hiring is really the essence of a matchmaking process... we're diluting the ability for candidates to be paired with the right opportunities... when we inject the level of AI into the mix unsustainably."
— Josh (07:12)
"Recruiters are forced to be surface level... That's not the type of mindset and the type of approach we should be having to hiring."
— Josh (08:27)
"If you consider the fact that 60 to 70% of many companies... is payroll, is to do with expenditure around people, why are we not applying the same due diligence, vigor... when it comes to designing the work experience?"
— Josh (12:44)
"Someone's ability to be in a workplace... is extremely subject to the conditions of the work product and how that's being intentionally designed or the lack of intentional design."
— Josh (13:53)
"You need to manage the work experience, you need to manage the design of the work so that they can be enabled to operate with little involvement."
— Josh (20:10)
"You're not managing the person, you're managing around the person."
— Josh (20:47)
"We're not matching surface level metrics, we're matching deep seated ambitions around the desires."
— Josh (30:22)
"This obsession with speed and tempo when it comes to recruitment is exactly what's at the core of what is breaking it. ... We're dealing with humans... when we box them in as numbers... we treat it like any other project."
— Josh (32:26)
"A database means nothing when you still got a broken recruiting process. ... You're just peddling faster, $36 million faster."
— Josh (35:37)
This episode dives deep into how AI is disrupting—not always for the better—HR and hiring practices. Both host and guest argue for restoring the "human" in human resources by redefining jobs as bespoke, thoughtfully designed products, and encouraging a return to real, meaningful matchmaking enabled (but not defined by) technology. Through intentional process, deeper discovery, and strategic AI augmentation, organizations can get closer to solving their biggest people problems—and create workplaces that unleash both value and satisfaction.
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