Brainfood Live On Air - Ep391 - Evolution of Talent CRM's

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast – Ep391

Brainfood Live On Air – Evolution of Talent CRM's
Date: July 4, 2026
Host: Hung Lee
Guests:

• Yazad Dalal (Chief Growth Officer, Jovio)
• Andrea Lungulescu (TalentCrunch)
• Alla Pavlova (Community Builder & AI Trainer)
• Rudy Bauer (CCO, We Are Developers)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Hung Lee and panelists explore the evolution of Talent CRMs (Candidate Relationship Management systems) and the future of talent communities in recruitment. The discussion ranges from the normalization of AI, challenges and tactics in building genuine talent communities, the intersection of community management and recruiting, and how agentic AI could enable recruiters and organizations to foster true engagement beyond traditional "pools" of candidates.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

From AI Hype to Normalization (00:20–02:42)

• Reflections on RecFest 2026: Less hype, more realistic conversations about AI in recruitment.
• AI is becoming embedded and normalized; “under-hyping” is increasingly favored.
• Quote:

  "Maybe AI is becoming normalized. It's kind of like in the same way, the Internet... we stopped talking about things being digital as being anything significant because of course, it's digital."
  —Hung Lee (02:27)

Talent CRM Reimagined – Jovio’s Vision (04:11–06:43)

• Yazad Dalal outlines Jovio’s autonomous, agentic recruiting platform, emphasizing AI agents that manage the entire recruitment workflow—attracting, engaging, screening, and scheduling candidates, even running interviews.
• A shift from static “talent pools” to dynamic “AI talent campaigns” driven by always-on, personalized engagement.
• Quote:

  “We’re not even using that [CRM] word as much anymore. We're referring to it as AI talent campaigns.”
  —Yazad Dalal (06:24)

The Eternal Struggle: From Talent Pools to Communities (09:47–16:39)

• Most companies have vast, dormant candidate databases ("talent pools") that are inactive and rarely nurtured.
• Andrea Lungulescu:
  • Candidates don’t want to be in a “pool”—a database you query—versus a true “community” where people commune and interact.
  • The lack of segmentation and meaningful engagement leads to missed opportunities for building value.
• Rudy Bauer:
  • Passive talent communities are tough because job seekers want to leave the phase quickly.
  • Genuine engagement needs understanding, empathy, and value, not just storage.
• Quote:

  “Nobody wants to be in a pool. They want to be in a community.”
  —Andrea Lungulescu (16:39)

Community Management vs. CRM Marketing (17:43–19:49)

• Skills needed to run a genuine talent community differ from traditional CRM/database marketing.
• Community requires ongoing leadership, compelling communication, and turning “lurkers” into “commenters/creators.”
• Segmentation, personalization, and ongoing value exchange are critical.

Identity & Community Formation (22:24–27:19)

• People rarely self-identify as “job seekers” for longer than necessary; communities built on enduring identities (profession, hobby, shared interest) are stronger.
• Companies are more successful when building or sponsoring communities around identities, interests, or products—rather than only around their “talent brand.”
• Alla:
  • Quick-fix “hiring events” are short-lived; communities need content and consistent engagement.
  • AI can assist with content management, reminders, automated welcome/farewell messages.

AI’s Role in Talent Communities (30:01–38:47)

• Rudy Bauer:
  • At “We Are Developers,” AI processes 60,000+ hours of community-generated video and blog content, slicing it into micro-moments and personalized playlists.
  • AI breaks down language barriers, making content accessible to a global audience.
• Andrea Lungulescu:
  • Uses AI-powered CRM tools with segmenting, personalized outreach, and data enrichment.
• AI enables at-scale, tailored engagement, but implementation is still limited by budget/tech access in small communities.

Leveraging AI for Personalization and Scale (40:31–43:29)

• Future CRMs (AI talent campaigns) enable recruiters to go “wide” and “narrow” dynamically—identifying broad pools, slicing by niche needs, and then customizing outreach at scale.
• AI agents allow unprecedented levels of personalized communication and rapid iteration/testing of engagement strategies.

Where to Build Communities? (49:17–55:41)

• Multiple platforms: Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit—no universal hub.
• Go “where your people are” vs. forcing everyone onto new platforms.
• Community builders must navigate shifting preferences, platform fragmentation, and privacy/etiquette around recruitment in third-party communities.

Events, In-Person Connection, and Perceived Value (62:08–64:43)

• For hard-to-reach or in-demand talent, companies may need dedicated “talent community managers” or "talent relations experts."
• Valued tactics: in-person and virtual events, star guest speakers, advisory boards, giving first (knowledge, connections) before asking.
• Budgets and buy-in remain obstacles.

The Future of Talent Community Management (59:22–66:51)

• Community-focused “talent relations” or “community manager” roles are emerging, especially where competition for elite or niche talent is fierce.
• Long-term engagement, genuine value, not just transactionality, creates stickiness and positive sentiment—even if hires are few.
• Own the relationship: companies must weigh whether communities “belong” to the org or the builder, and accept that community is, by nature, both fluid and ephemeral.
• Quote:

  “It should have been a job a while back already.”
  —Andrea Lungulescu on dedicated community roles (65:02)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI Normalization:

  "Maybe AI is becoming normalized. It's kind of like in the same way, the Internet... we stopped talking about things being digital as being anything significant because of course, it's digital."
  —Hung Lee (02:27)

• On the Community vs. Database Mindset:

  “Nobody wants to be in a pool. They want to be in a community."
  —Andrea Lungulescu (16:39)

• On Community as Identity:

  “You don’t want to be like a professional job seeker. This is not sort of anybody wants this so they don’t identify to it but they will identify as a developer.”
  —Hung Lee (22:24)

• Platform Fragmentation & Pragmatism:

  “If somebody has already done the groundwork and the basic work, meet the people where they are and add value to them.”
  —Rudy Bauer (50:13)

• On Career-focused Communities:

  “Maybe we should have a degree of friction on community discovery... a little bit boutique or a little bit artisanal.”
  —Hung Lee (56:33)

• On The Necessity of Community Management in TA:

  “It should have been a job a while back already… I was always extremely fond of candidate experience. Always. Regardless of AI, no AI.”
  —Andrea Lungulescu (65:02)

• On Letting Communities Flourish:

  “If you hide [your talent community] in the living room, I think they probably will have problems later on. The best is to open up all the doors, all the windows, let them smell and breathe what's coming in, what's going out, and then really put them on, on the window board and say, okay, try to fly now."
  —Rudy Bauer (61:19)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• AI hype to reality, RecFest reflections: 00:20–02:42
• Jovio’s autonomous platform & redefining CRM: 04:11–06:43
• Dormant talent pools vs. vibrant communities: 16:39–19:49
• Can job search be a true community? Identity challenges: 22:24–27:19
• AI tools for segmenting, personalizing, community content: 30:01–38:47
• Future of talent engagement – agents, personalization, scale: 40:31–43:29
• Platform choices, aggregation challenges: 49:17–55:41
• The emerging role of Talent Community Manager: 59:22–66:51

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Takeaways

• AI is enabling new forms of talent engagement, but human nuance and trust-building remain irreplaceable.
• Community and relationship-building are fundamentally different from contact database management.
  They require empathy, ongoing value, and a sense of belonging or identity.
• The fragmentation of platforms and identities means there’s no “one-size-fits-all” community.
  Successful approaches meet people where they already are and deliver consistent, non-transactional value.
• Expect to see more dedicated talent community and relations roles in sophisticated companies.
  Especially where the talent is highly competitive and relationships take years to cultivate.
• Ownership, platform, and the evolving nature of recruitment communities remain open questions,
  with implications for employer branding and the personal brands of recruiters themselves.

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For listeners and practitioners:
This episode offers a rich, nuanced perspective on how CRM technology, AI, and true community-building principles are colliding and evolving in the world of recruitment. The lessons and challenges laid out here will help talent acquisition leaders, recruiters, and HR technologists to reflect on their approaches and upgrade their strategies for the coming years.

Transcript

[A]

Is that there'll be consequences.

[B]

Yeah, we need. Everybody needs a little motivation. That's the thing.

[A]

You need external motivation. I think intrinsic is great, but sometimes you do need extrinsic as well. So the combination of the two, I think is probably where you're going to get to. Good stuff.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Anyway, welcome everybody, to Brain Food Live on Air, bringing it to you every Friday. No fail. Me and Yaz just reminiscing because we caught up yesterday a. In a field in. In. In Stevenage, where we were both at the. The annual pot. Potlatch of Talent acquisition, which is Wreckfest. So brilliant event there and great to see Yaz. Even though as we just talked, we only had a very brief moment.

[B]

It was brief. It was brief, but it was good to see you too. I think overall a good event. The gods blessed us with decent weather and I think, uh, a good combination of learning some great speakers yesterday. Very pragmatic speakers. There was a lot less hype at RecFest. I think this AI, AI everywhere kind of hype is.

[C]

Is.

[B]

Was a little bit more subdued. I felt.

[A]

I felt that as well.

[B]

And.

[A]

And did you. Do you think that that's a maturation of sort of the. The discourse, so to say, in the sense that we've. We've stopped, we've moved beyond being dazzled by AI and we're now forensically examining, okay, where can it be best used? How is it best used? And we're optimistic, but we're also a little bit stronger with the critical analysis as well now. So we're a little bit more used to, okay, is this really working? And we're asking that question more. And that, I think, is accelerating the conversation to a more mature point, I think.

[B]

I agree. I agree. And I like that even. Even the organizations that are using AI in their technology, or if they're even using Jovio as their technology on the back end, there's a number of agencies like YOKE or Havas, people. They weren't leading with AI. And I think, you know, I was listening to a lot of the conversations with practitioners. I think they appreciated that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

They were leading with the human element. Of course, it's backed up by capabilities that are modern, that are of 2026, which inherently means there is an element of artificial intelligence. That's true in our platform. I think that's true in. In a lot of the technology companies today. And so under hyping is probably the better move now.

[A]

Yeah, maybe AI is becoming normalized. It's kind of like in the same way, the Internet, we stopped talking about things being digital as being anything significant because of course, it's digital.

[B]

And now, of course, let's say transformation. Stop saying digital transformation. I remember those days exactly.

[A]

Yeah. And I both old enough to remember that. And yeah, maybe AI is getting to that point as well. All right, listen, everybody. Welcome to the show. Me and Yaz are going to get into this conversation as we already have. But before we do that, let's make sure we do some sound checks, make sure everyone here is okay. Folks who are watching this on crowdcast, let us know whether the audio and visual is okay should see me and Yazad Dalal on screen. We are also blasting this out online on a number of LinkedIns as well. So if you're watching this on LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, Rob Walker's LinkedIn or anybody else's LinkedIn do let me know in the comments there whether the audio and visual is okay. I've been promoting this LinkedIn Live kind of deal for a long time, but it's, it's one of those things where I think I feel like one of those biblical preachers, Yaz, you know, you just got to keep preaching to the unconverted. They're not converting. But I'm going to keep going because I'm a believer in LinkedIn Live, folks. Keep doing it. Okay, brilliant. Thank you, Rudy. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Michael and everyone else. That's brilliant stuff. Okay, Yes. I know you don't want to talk about Jovia. You're this type of person, don't say it, but you are sponsoring the show and we do need to know a little bit about jovial, where you guys are at today. And in fact, what are you doing in this sort of space about CRMs and you know, did you have a solution there? So can you give us a quick high level, what is jovial today and where does the technology impact on what topic of conversation we're having today?

[B]

Absolutely. So first of all, hi everybody, I'm Yaz. I'm thrilled to be here with Hung, and I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at Jovio. Let me break that into two questions. Okay, so what is Jovio? And then specifically as it relates to CRM, we are over the last eight years, constantly evolving. We've started as an AI based company eight years ago when nobody was really talking or using that phrase as much as they are today. But where are we today in July 2026? I can tell you that Jovio is an agentic recruiting platform. We Think it's the first of its kind where TA leaders can very simply define their hiring goals. What is the role, the volume, the location, the timeline. And AI agents on our platform handle everything that follows. That means attracting candidates across channels and engaging them conversationally, screening them, scheduling interviews and even running the interviews and doing all of that without manual handoffs between tools or platforms. So it's not a suite of AI assisted features. It's genuinely a recruiting platform or an autonomous recruiting operation that executes the entire hiring workflow for our clients so that their teams can focus on the important things like decision making rather than logistics and administrative stuff. So that's the platform that we've built and, and we're very excited about it. And of course folks want to learn more about it. They can go to jovial.com I know we're going to talk about CRMs and, and talent communities today. I think, you know, there's a lot of research that we've done on this and excited to share it, hung with with you in the audience. But I think as it relates to how we are thinking about CRM within Jovio as it sits in our agentic recruiting platform, we think of it more and more as AI talent campaigns rather than a static list based outreach. And that if you're able to use natural language to search your talent pool, kind of search your talent pool the way you would describe a hire to a colleague and have that search then be an always on re engagement of your existing talent because an agent is running it for you while you sleep. That's kind of how we're viewing the future of CRM. We're not even using that word as much anymore. We're referring to it as AI talent campaigns. So hopefully that answers both your questions.

[A]

It does. And you know what? I need to use it. Yes, it's simple because I consider myself a use case here because I Recruiting Brain foods has probably 100,000 people that in some way or form pay attention to a bit of content, a live stream, podcast, newsletters, whatever. It is totally unmanaged, right? Totally unmanaged. The only thing these folks get is an email from me once a week or you know, this live stream just popping into their feed. I would love to be able to, to just be a little bit more intelligent and a little bit more like high touch with some of these folks. I'm trying to do it manually, like I know tons of people, but none of my inboxes work anymore. Right. Because they blow up. So I miss tons of stuff and then people Think I'm, you know, ignoring them or whatever it is. And I have. I am doing that, but not like consciously. It's simply because the sort of. It's like, like the Matrix, every. Every sort of inbox cannot be managed. So I definitely need some sort of agentic solution that's able to. Hey, who are the active people that seem to be liking every week? Who are the people that seem to be re promoting this? I should like tap them up and say, hey, thank you. Basic level, right? Basic level customer. Not even customer care, but it's almost like just a nice thing to do. And so, yeah, I'd love to see whether that solution might exist. But that is the topic of the day, folks, because talent communities and talent talent relationship management has been a topic within recruitment for a very long time. Like, how do we activate a big list or a database of dormant records? And how do we make it into something that is actually a dynamic, a community of people that actually want to be there? If you think about all of the companies on the planet that have accumulated candidate records, every single corporate enterprise right now, I guarantee you, has a database of 500,000 email addresses that's sitting there outside of GDPR compliance, or any kind of compliance is literally on a database or a spreadsheet somewhere. And nothing's been done with it other than maybe someone discovers it and then mail merges. A big outreach and say, do you want to still be in this thing? And it's like, can we do better? And what I wanted to do today, folks, is to bring in a bunch of people that basically are experts at community management. So these are people that have grown audiences, grown communities, developed sort of very strong, I think, community awareness. They know basically how to build communities. And the question is, how do we use that knowledge? What do they think? What are the ways in which modern technology, AI and agentic AI, how can that help with the process? So that's basically the topic of today's conversation, folks. And I'm delighted to bring some of these guys on because they're some very smart and important people. So let's do that now. We're gonna go with.

[D]

Let's try.

[A]

If I'll get everyone on together. Let's do this here. Rudy's coming on, Andrea's coming on. I think Alice here. Oh, my God, this is so sticky.

[B]

Why do you always switch to an American accent when you're frustrated?

[A]

I don't know, man. It's always, oh my God, I'm so Americanized. I can't help it.

[B]

Tomorrow you know, tomorrow is our Independence Day hung.

[A]

It is. Is it really birthday? It's a tragedy for the British people, man.

[B]

I don't think any of them cared.

[A]

It's such a trauma for the Brits. They can't handle it.

[B]

Tax revolt that happened in Boston all that time ago.

[A]

Yeah. There's a really interesting podcast episode. I don't know whether you watch. The rest is history. I think it is.

[B]

Oh, yes.

[A]

But they. They actually started to talk about the Declaration of Independence as a British civil War. And their take on it was, hey, listen, can we take it this from. Can we celebrate this day from a Brit point of view and see where we're at? And I thought, you know what, that's an interesting way to try and look at it. Okay. Whilst we've got these people on screen here, let's just say some intros, I'm gonna try and get Rudy on. We've got Andrea here, of course. Andrea, wonderful to see you. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do?

[E]

Yes, I think. Well, my name is Andrea that's on the screen. I lead TalentCrunch, which is, by now, I think, Germany's probably largest talent community. But I'm a practitioner at heart, so it's a community in talent led by a practitioner who still works in talent. The second thing I do is I lead a consulting business for talent acquisition, B2B 2C. And I'm also a human being. Right. I think I'm also here in the capacity of a human being, part of a community, not just leading a community.

[D]

You.

[A]

Yeah. Fantastic stuff. Perfect person to bring into this play because there's so many things that Andrea has done. It kind of resonates a lot with. With a little bit with my journey, where it's kind of like not maybe by design, but it's emerged.

[E]

Right.

[A]

It sort of. It happens. And then you've had to learn how to do it all and it's like, okay, I think. I hope you don't mind me saying, but I consider myself always like an enthusiastic amateur rather than a professional person. Right. And I think you're the same. Right. It's like, okay, we just try to figure it out.

[E]

It's definitely a hard product.

[A]

Yeah, it is. It's not something you design, but this is great to get you on. So I've just shared Andrea's LinkedIn on chat stream. Make sure you follow her there. We have Ala Pablo over here, oftentimes co host, but herself a wonderful community organizer, creator, and also person that contributes within other people's communities in particular for recruiting as well. So this is even more maybe sharper to the point of where we're going. So Allah, wonderful to have you here. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do?

[C]

Yeah, thank you so much. Super happy to be here. I know why Andre is screaming in the chat because Andrea Han and me, we were all nominated for the community Builders in Spain and Barcelona so we couldn't make it. But so nice to see the fellow nominates. We all lost. We are the losers. But we all own in one call. Hi everyone, my name is Alla Pavlov, I'm based in Amsterdam for almost for four years I've built like community from scratch. I built communities for recruiters, for sourcers, for emergency communities like you know when you need to solve a problem for humanity. If anyone is interested, happy to tell you it was in 2020, you know the reason in 2022 as well. And I'm by day recruiter trainer creating AI trainings for recruiters by by vacation. Somebody who likes to talk to people and to get them together to solve some kind of problem. Super happy to be here among these amazing people.

[A]

Yeah, great to have you here as always. Ala, we have Rudy Bauer here as well. Rudy, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your day because I know you have got a mega event coming up next week and we'll give a bit of plug of that in a moment. But Rudy, quickly introduce yourself. Who are you? What it is you do, sir?

[D]

Yeah, my name is Rudy Bauer, I'm located in Vienna and I'm the CCO of We Are Developers and We Are Developers. We started a couple of years ago building up a developer community with the very pragmatic aim for companies to really have the chance to reach out to passive talents. I think that was the basic idea. So really getting in contact and staying in contact and building a kind of relation with a target audience that was heavily looked up back then and still is heavily looked up by companies. And I think that was a pragmatic idea. At the end of the day we became the biggest developer community in Europe. I think we in the meantime became also a huge community in, in in the US and this year we are having our We Developers conference in Berlin next week with approximately 15,000 people coming there and another one in September in San Jose, California where we expect 10,000 people and a smaller edition than in Bangalore in India in November with around 3 to 5,000 people.

[A]

Yeah, pathetic. Bangalore, 3,000 people. What are you doing? There, you know. But yeah, brilliant. I've just shared the link to we are developers, by the way. I do believe tickets may still be available for that. And I think I've got comp tickets, don't I? Really? I can't even remember, but I think I do. So I'm going to make sure there's a last minute push for that.

[D]

I sent you, I sent you a message a minute ago in this, in this channel here. And I have a special offer for you today. So it's 10 more tickets for you to raffle out during the this show.

[A]

So yeah, perfect, perfect. Folks, if you're in Berlin or anywhere in Germany or commutable to Berlin over the next three days, I think it's a three day event and you want to go to I think one of the best sort of conferences in tech around. We are developers World Congress on 8th, 9th, 10th.

[B]

Is it?

[A]

Or is it 9th, 10th, 11th, one

[D]

of the 8, 9, 10.

[A]

That's it, get yourself there. Okay, cool. So these are obviously three people that know about communities and, and this is the topic we want to talk about, talent communities. This is the idea of, hey listen, we've already got the candidate. You know, this is where you've advertised with a huge campaign. Okay, You've hired, you've hired three people. We actually you've acquired 300 cool people. What typically happens, they sit in your ATS and you forget about them. Right? That's the, the general situation. We've never fixed this. I don't think how, how can we understand why we were never able to keep candidates engage once we've collected them? Is it as simple as fact? Is it as simple as they've applied for a job, didn't get the job, we've got nothing else to talk to them about. I mean, what's your theory on this? Like, why have we not got to a point where we've been able to do this? Any thoughts on that, Andrea?

[E]

In my opinion, I've and I think Yaz used the, the word talent pool earlier. I think I would start there. Nobody wants to be in a pool. If they want to be in a community, a community is as well. Allah already wrote in the chat is a place where people should have a reason to engage with each other and they feel comfortable engaging with each other. So I think we treat that as a database. A database is a place which we query, right? We go and look for stuff. Whereas a community is a place that kind of communes, right? They horizontally integrate with each other. They feel the pool to communicate and connect with each other. And when we are in an organization, if I remember from my employers, we all had talent pools and we did nothing with them. And it is hard to come up with ways to approach this. I think AI can help, but we can discuss this in a second. I think we potentially are slightly shortsighted or we don't totally understand the difference between a database of candidates and a community, especially a community of practice potentially.

[B]

Andrea, I wanted to ask you a question on that because you know the a system of records or a database is like as you're saying, is a static pool and they're not really able to interact with each other or even frankly interact with the owner of the pool. And one of the things that we are thinking about a lot and I wonder what your perspective is. Is it a different skill set required between being the marketing person who manages the CRM and the community manager, the community owner who is driving themes, creating messages, being compelling but sometimes provocative in order to turn lurkers into creators or at least commenters? Is that a different skill set required?

[E]

Ala already wrote something in relation to CRMs. One thing I would maybe consider is segmentation. I potentially additional skills are required, right? Because what I mean by segmentation is you would address the individuals, for example, who go for your engineering roles and you have your finance roles, your accounting roles, etc and imagine that these individuals have to be engaged throughout time. They would want to be allowed to also get something from you. So you give them something before you ask something of them. And that giving could be as easy as a webinar that some expert in your organization from accounting, for example, runs for these individuals. You don't ask nothing of them, you just allow them to be present in there. And if that requires an additional skill set, yes. But to manage this, I think I would assume that someone with basic marketing skills and an understanding of individuals and communities in general and how they individuals interact with each other, especially if the community is online. That could be more than enough. I'm curious we can go a bit deeper into this, but I think Allah and Rudy probably have opinions on this too.

[D]

What I want to add is I think it's very difficult to build up a talent pool. I think we never got that because honestly I think changing job and being in a talent pool because that's the reason for being in a talent pool is and was and probably ever be for the rest of our lives pain in the years because I think nobody likes to change job. I have never found an expert there. So the people I think they are always in a stress situation and I think the only thing what you, what they really need during changing a job is somebody taking them at their hands and guiding them through. And I think if you look on response times, if you look what's happened. So nobody wants to stay in a talent pool. I think nobody loves it. And to, to answer the second part of the question or yes, your, your question, I think my comment on that is what we have done at we're developers, we really have put it separate. So we have our developer relations team, they really understand the community and they guide the rest of the organization to do the right thing. So the guide marketing, they also have got a waiter. So if somebody's waving with a big check and I want to see CEOs, I'm bringing in the money with the guys. So if somebody's waving a big check and people wants to be on main stage, the developer relation team still has a kind of a weight on the can say no. That's not interesting for our community. So we don't bring this guy on the main stage. So I think it's important to really stay extremely close with the community. And I think that's probably the biggest differentiator that I see.

[E]

I quickly remembered something from one of my previous employers. I think it is the only employer that I have seen. I was part of it and it was quite a few years back, maybe six, seven years ago. They have a very strong technology department and inside the technology department they were running internal meetups. We had strong communities inside the organization and these communities that were very proprietary to the company would also go outside. They would connect with us in the talent acquisition department and we would have had these talent pools. And what some of these internal communities would do, they would showcase their work to these individuals who were living in the talent pools. But again, first of all, to be able to do that, you need to understand if the individuals that you're trying to segment and keep in your records are even interested in that in the first place. Right. Because Rudy is completely right when you change jobs and that's probably your first reason to end up in this pool in the first place. At some point, it may be a case of you not even wanting to have any contact with this company. So your processes also matter a lot.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. A couple of things surfaced up really interesting here, so thank you. Contributions so far. Firstly, very interesting to think about whether it's possible to build a community around a job search because people probably don't identify as a job seeker. Right. I mean it's that it's a temporary, we hope it's a temporary phase for most people. Like we want that to be over. You don't want to be like a professional job seeker. This is not sort of anybody wants this so they don't identify to it but they will identify as a developer. You know, I'm a developer. They call say this or as recruiting has a professional identity. I am a recruiter and. And maybe you have identities that are outside of profession. That's stillnesses could sort of get together as group. You're a supporter of. Of Newcastle United or you are a person that likes a certain particular breed of dog. You're a dog enthusiast of some type. So you might then identify strongly with that thing that is kind of permanent with you. And from there maybe a community can emerge. I guess I'm exploring the concept of is identity. How important is identity to the creation of community? Is, is that like an important thing? The person walking around has to think I am this. And then you can build a community around that thing. Which may lead to what Randy's saying here at the end. Like is it actually impossible for an employer to build a talent community in real terms? Because do people identify as a so, so tightly with a brand? Some people might, I guess you might say you're. You're a Tesla person or you might say you're an Amazonian. I, I guess you could but it seems to me that only employee existing employees would do that and not someone who isn't a current employee. And you know, maybe that's the, the core root of the reason why companies so far have not been able to create communities effectively and basically have not degraded but they've never evolved the pool to the community because you could, you couldn't. Couldn't do it because no one identifies that way. Any thoughts on this?

[C]

Yeah, to be honest, I do have an answer for companies how to. How to do it. So there is, there is a recipe. Let's see what you think. It's something that I've noticed some tech companies are doing. They don't run specifically community for hiring but based on the interest say if you're following as you mentioned like Tesla or let's make another example like Spotify. And you, you're part of the community that likes the product and then the community managers who are specialized in this, they just drop the events and they take out from this community fresh people who wants the job right now. Because communities can be either long term or short term. Short term is the Events that can be around you. The current events, this some like dates, hiring dates. It was called something like this. It's very successful for a quick fix but then these people are gone so you can't keep them and they're not interested in your updates at all. But if you do something like if they interest in your product or even like sometimes I see company has nothing to do with entertainment but they have a community. The company main business is biotech but they have community for gamers so they just for it. So one of the ways for companies to also like don't build your community, maybe sponsor other community because they already did the job. So you can, you can support them as well in, in, in recruitment. It's very difficult for us to be community builders because we are, we have the job full time job as recruiters. If somebody say hey Allah, like build a community of C developers. Ye. So how can I do it in terms of the time, not in terms of the like you know, community itself. I can gather these people together like Discord. I can find them there slack or any other things but I don't think recruiters are particularly their job. So we are good at finding people but probably the next thing that needs to be done is these people need content. They need to be in some vibrant environments that it's life. Han, I have amazing example how you created community in one minute it was a discord. So Han decided to open Discord. You remember you just said that you, I mean it was so massive, hundreds of people joined immediately like okay, so and then yeah, then I think you decided to do nothing about it.

[A]

Where I need AI is where I needed Jovio maybe.

[C]

Exactly. So the next step is like to create a community. No problem. To get even people. No problem. But then I think yeah is where I can get help from to get content, to get reminders, auto replies, you know, all these nice fancy messages to welcome people. I remember I was handcrafting them so now I can have the boats welcoming, saying goodbye and creating you know this nice environment. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to see how AI can help inside the community that we can build.

[A]

Yeah, really good. So basically what Alice saying here is that a community launch is easy. Just set up a space, right. And recruiter is pretty good at identifying people so we could find them and then say hey, join the space. Brilliant. You got just a big surge and then the problem starts because what are you offering people and can you consistently do that? I think all of us have actually been sort of members of Communities that we're all very excited about initially, but it wasn't able to be sustained because the person who was organizing it or moderating it simply couldn't give any more. Like it was literally they ran out, they underestimated the effort level required and as you say, Allah, for someone who's currently operating full time in a recruitment job, probably hasn't the bandwidth to do it. I'm sure it's one of those that sort of inherently becomes the job. Andrea, probably you'd agree with that. I'm kind of in the same way. There's no way I could hold a normal job and I'm not even doing much community. I'm just like sending stuff out. So. So yeah, maybe we need this developer relationship type person or you know, a community manager. Literally a job of a community manager, that is whose focus is to represent the community to whatever organization is paying for it all, but then make sure that it's looked after in some way. And we've seen evidence of that from, from we are developers. Okay, you talked about AI Alan. I want to just sort of get everyone's thoughts on this. Like how does AI and agentic, this agentic moment help with this? Because I think all of us inherently think, oh my God, we need the human. You know, of course it has to be human heavy. And we agree with that. But AI probably can help in a lot of ways, right. Without necessarily damaging the relationship we have with the people we've got. Any thoughts on how that, how AI can work? Rudy Bauer, go to you like how does it work? Have you thought about it and have you actually done anything? Like we had developed this community, I

[D]

think we were heavily thinking about what, what could we use AI on in our. Within our community. And we found a really, I think we found a really nice way and we're going to launch the service I think in parallel with, with, with the congress now. I mean what happened at We Developers? I mean we ended up with 60000 hours of YouTube content that was produced from the community for the community. So we had a, we got a nickname from some developers out there. They called us Netflix for software developers. And at the end of the day this was amazing, amazing amount of content. On the other hand, I think it was unconsum consumable because 60,000 hours, you can't watch it. I mean honestly you don't find anything because whatever you look up, you end up with a kind of a bunch of a big playlist with 45 minute videos. And what we use the AI for and I think there's. With amazing results we sliced it down to the smallest unit that we're currently using is moments. So AI we smashed everything through AI and I was filtering it and squeezing it down to moments which could be 30 seconds or 1 minute or even 2 minutes of content. And if you now go to the platform in the future you can just put in a kind of a quote. You can say okay, I'm Max, I have this kind of experience, I want to develop myself into that in that direction. And these things puts together out of all the 60,000 hour content and 7,000 blog articles, it puts you together and personalized individual playlist with all stacking all these elements together. I think that's one of the big, big advantages that we see where we really can tailor made kind of playlists for our community members. And the second thing where we are playing around with because I think that is even we are living on a planet with, with a couple of hundred languages. So I think taking this language and translation advantage is also where we see a kind. You can make all content, even if it's produced in German or English or Chinese or whatever, you can immediately translate it to every other language. And I think that is opening up the world. So I think it's really breaking down barriers, it's really breaking down silos and it's really helping to, to enlarge the community and offer much better level of service. I think that's the two things that we found usable currently.

[A]

Yeah, really good Rudy. So firstly a kind of a healthy community might naturally produce and share a lot of content, right? Yeah, because there's lots of stuff going on, there's like everything is being shared, the chat itself is valuable and so on.

[D]

And honestly, Honestly I was asked a couple of, I think a year ago a journalist asked me what we are really doing and then I was asked, I started thinking and at the end of the day I think in the meantime we are really more or less hosting stages because the content is not even produced by us, it's produced by the community members, for the community members. So we are just building and giving them stages. We are building, giving them a platform where they can put the stuff. But then I think you need to really compile it in the right way and you have to put it together and you have to break down all the barriers and the two main barriers. It's on one hand it's too much content to be consumed, on the other hand it's the language problem. And I think that is two mainstreams where we see that AI could really add value.

[A]

Yeah, really good. I love that. So basically harvesting. Harvesting is the wrong word because it's not like you're stealing it, but it's basically synthesizing the information as naturally shared in community and then giving the people the value back in a way which is. Which. Which you. They weren't able to achieve themselves as well as, I guess, platforming people who do contribute so that you give them the audience. Right. So. So that makes them feel. I think it's more encouraged.

[D]

I think that's the three elements.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Okay, Andrea, your thoughts on this. You're running this active community. A lot of it is manual. I know you're buzzing around getting involved everywhere, which is fantastic. But at some point, you know, we need like sort of digital Andrea, don't we? I mean, have you. Have you thought about using some tech here and to help you with it? What are your thoughts?

[E]

Yes, and I thought about it twofold because I think some of the folks in the audience would be interested more in the company community. And I think that issue or that topic is solved differently than the community community. A community like Talent Crunch. Yes. I need support on that front. One thing I can tell you, and also maybe it's helpful for you, I started using a CRM which has MCPE connector, right. So I can use it with Claude. I need to put in the effort first to clean. To build my CRM cleanly. So I need that time first. But after that I can use the MCP and I can use Claude. My preferred one is Claude to mine and actually work through my. Through my CRM and all the data that I have access to. And that's one thing. The second thing is here is a matter of cost because the talent community, like TalentCrunch is completely. Is built pro bono. And whatever money we have, we. And we get from sponsors, we have to invest or reinvest or spend on events or so on and so forth. But what I do find is I work really well with, or well enough, I say, with people. So at the moment, before I get my hands on more agentic AI, there is a lot of support from the community members who are volunteering to support the things that I do do with AI. For example, the entire website, everything has been vibe coded. Everything that is now live for TalentCrunch has been vibe coded. That's me, Claude, and Lovable in a love triangle. I guess that ended up in a beautiful website with all the content to what Rudy said. Very interesting. The One thing I hope I can do more of, I use granola to record. I use it mainly in our executive events, so very small events. But whenever I had the chance to use it, it's really beneficial because it gives us the chance to then create content from that which then goes and lives on the website or on the blog. And this gives access to people who have not been in the room to conversations they might want to look into. That's another way to use tooling and AI and there are many other ways. I have a lot of ideas as you know, hang. Sometimes the complications come from simply access to tooling or financial implications. To be perfectly honest, I do want to address the parallel though on the companies side because as an organization I felt in my really my last role was a smaller organization and they wanted to do this talent pool situation and yeah, but how are we managing? It was always a question and I think right now we are so fortunate to have access to tools we haven't had our hands on before. And I remember it was phenom, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, they engaged, I don't even know how many millions of candidates right over a period of time because they were building this automated personalized outreach. So you segment your talent pool and then you create personalized outreach. And now this can be done at scale, nicely, properly. You can build an amazing onboarding tool, an onboarding chatbot. You don't even need to have necessarily your community manager handling every single case. You can build this, this chatbot with your company's information, your roles, whatever it might be you want to put in there to help them on board into the company community, so to speak. You can have data enrichment, right? There are so many tools that help you enrich data. So when you have that, you can find out about these individuals, what they are interested in, what they are spending their time on and help them in that direction. And not to mention matching, I think matching to events. They don't even maybe have to be your own company events. But imagine you give someone from the bottom of your heart or from your kindness of your heart, information and access to things like for example, VR developers, right? And maybe you have a connection with VR dev and you are able to provide them with hey, maybe we have a raffle, you can get a ticket. And all of these things can now be done with the support or entirely by artificial intelligence, which is phenomenal. So as a company, as an employer and someone who values every single candidate that ever walked over your recruitment first step, I think that the opportunity is tremendous.

[A]

Yeah, I love that and I love just the concept of look, it's just you can't just think of it as servicing jobs to people. Like if you could reposition it a little bit and say, look, this is a career development sort of community or this is a place where it could be a wellness community. It could be anything that helps this person do whatever they want to do. And then you're the organization that's just giving them that support going forward. I can imagine people might be wanting to hang around there or at least be happy to be sort of in contact with you in communication and occasionally there'll be job opportunities. Of course, maybe, maybe one of the ways to do it is to give priority job access. Like I don't know whether you've seen Greenhouse, good example that built, starting to build databases. Right. Of a candidate side and they're basically saying, you know what? We're going to give not priority access. But I think candidates are able to like select their optimal company and if they say hey, I would totally interested in this company, that company will get like a very early view as to which people are most interested in them. And of course they're going to go to them first. So I'm thinking, okay, maybe the, the world that we, we have right now, which is everyone charging into everything, which is creating a huge amount of noise to everybody, no one likes this. We instead go to a much less noisy moment with the use of AI, whereas in fact the candidate is able to find, connect to opportunities with companies that they're most interested in. And then companies can reflect that back and say look, we, we generally want motivated people what for us specifically and then have that dialogue. And I can see maybe sort of a community playing a role in that basis. Yaz, your thought, any thoughts on this?

[B]

Man, I was going to say on that last point, LinkedIn is doing something similar as well where you can opt into which are the companies. You know, if you're a low intent candidate, but you might have a high intent for a particular employer, in other words, you're really happy in your job. But you know, if my golden employer calls, I'm going to. So I think that's, that's a smart move as well because the, it also helps candidates feel seen. And I was thinking about what you were saying Andrea, around how, how do we ensure that through AI or through technology that the messaging or the approaches that as candidates we're getting feel like they're for us? I mean the ridiculous example of course is I'm sure every one of us that's on this call and listening to this call has received outreach for a role that has nothing to do with your background. Nothing. You know, I'm not a software engineer. I've had people reach out to me for software engineering. It doesn't even make sense. They've looked at nothing in my profile anywhere on online. But I think one of the, one of the things that we're hearing a lot from employers is that they're excited about the opportunity to do things that they never did because it was so time consuming before. That can now really go deep. And one of the, one of the concepts and I would love to get the reaction from, from this group is if you have that community pool, if you can go really wide because that pool is ostensibly very large, then go really, really narrow and do it through natural language. Hey, I'm looking for someone with these skills. Go really wide again in the personalization and then course correct. And what I mean by that is go wide. Here's the whole community go narrow. I'm looking for this very specific set of attributes and if that results in too large a group, I want to go even more niche. Then go wide again in personalization meaning if that yielded 50 people, each one of those 50 should, should have a message that's tailored to them and their background. Now that's incredibly time consuming. But if you have an agent doing that work, of course you're there to monitor. If you have an agent doing that work, then it's not time consuming. And the last part course correct that of course it may make mistakes or it's going to try things. If it learns purely just, you know, what's getting most engagement. It's not AB testing. It's like A, B, C, D, e to the 50. You have 50 different examples, different attempts that you can do. It learns from that. Then the next sort of blast that you put out again even more personalized but skewed towards what was most effective. And I think this go wide, go narrow, go wide in the personalization and then course correct. No one has ever had the physical human bandwidth for that. And I think that's where agents play a big role. That's, that's a lot of this is the concept behind our AI talent campaigns, but it's based on what practitioners and leaders have told us they need.

[A]

Yeah, I think this is, this is really interesting because on the one hand community building, let's say that is not employer branding related or not employer led. I think we've got a handle on how to do that. It's like, okay, this is the sort of thing you got to do. But it's the different challenges, okay, how do we translate those lessons to companies that actually want to try and build this stuff? And as you mentioned, yeah, some of the, some of the technology available today will go some of the way towards identifying the people you need and lowering the effort level for the human being to do all of that. In the end we want to connect, we want to have conversations, we want to be seen. As you mentioned, we want the relevancy to be there. All of that right now defeats a human being because we don't have the bandwidth. So hopefully we can, we can use tech in this way.

[C]

We can actually use the old school but very, very working way is surveying people like to run a survey, just ask them what they want to do. So let's say you have a group of people that only came for a job. Only if you will get the job, most of them will not get it right. And then it's a community. So we can repurpose them by giving them let's say opportunity to, to put the status in their profile. Let's say not actively looking, just hanging out, just curious or please do not disturb. Only like, you know, when I'm open, I will be open. So to have this kind of, you know, indications of my status is very helpful. Like you know, in the COVID times we had the bracelets only like a fist bump or hug or something else. So I want to have something like this, you know, like LinkedIn has it hidden for a purpose. Of course you don't want your recruiter to know that you're looking for a job. So that's why everything happens behind the scenes but in the community. So we can be very open what why I'm here and then making a survey and then based on that, create the channels for people. Hey, this is the channel for those who didn't get the job but they're interested in the company events. This is the channel for. I don't know anything else. Like I think a very special thing that this community can get is ask me anything type of things like the access to the person from the company. I love Spotify. I want to talk to people from Spotify. I will get into their community and they will try to see this person. Like for example Ruijie, it's via developers they have joker like the, the golden person is Joe Romero. So he's a gamer. Everybody comes to see him and he has court community. He Plays with people online. I don't know, once a week, once in a month. But you have access to special person. I would just stay in the community if I have this fan base girl situation. And you know, so that's, that's, that's my thoughts.

[A]

Is it dependent on how like B2C the brand is? It probably is, isn't it? Because there's certain companies out there that will maybe inherently struggle to build a talent community. So say if they, I mean it's the, there's some advantage of being high scale. There's some advantage in having a product or service that distributes widely to that community. I mean there's a reason why talent communities evolve primarily in tech from my angle, is because a lot of the services that the tech people were using come from these businesses and they ended up becoming okay. It makes sense for us to make friends with these people that are using our products. And does the same thing apply outside of tech? I'm not sure. Does the same thing apply to small businesses where, you know or less powerful brands where maybe people don't have, have that sense of okay, I, I use this product, I like this product, therefore I like the company. Any thoughts on that?

[D]

Honestly? Honestly, I think it, it's not a question of, of does it just work for tech people or developers or for any anyone else. I think it works for humans. I think you need to treat them with respect, you need to take them serious and you need to deliver value to them. And I think that because one of our founders, he started a kind before he founded We're Developers, he had the marketing natives in Austria. So it was a marketing communication communities with marketing people. And there at this time, and I think it was just another angle at this time it was very difficult to find a job in Austria as marketing guy. And he brought people together where he really was helping them to find jobs in a way that he brought them together with people from marketing, with marketing leaders, with marketing heads, with CEOs of companies. And they were building a kind of a community was more or less built as a mentor system. So it was really the first step was okay, there was CEOs from companies were the mentors and doing mentorships for young natives. And I think that was the first. I think you need to think what adds value to these guys. I think that's the important question. And I think it works for nurses as well as it works for recruiters, as it works for hospitality as it works. It could be we are developers, it could be we are recruiters it could be we are nurses. It could be we are hospitality. So I think we, we played around with it and we found a kind of a working model for every single kind of area.

[A]

Yeah, really good. Is there an argument to say I want to talk a little bit about sort of where we, where we locate the community, because some communities, you might want them to come to you. Like you have a domain, you've set it up and you know, they need to come here. Does it sometimes make sense to put the community located in a place that, where they already are? I mean, I think. Yaz, you mentioned Reddit, right?

[B]

I was just gonna say, is Reddit the answer or is there, is there a negative aspect to that? Because I'm also very curious about that. There's the forum, you guys are probably familiar. There's a Reddit subform called Recruiting Hell, which has some insane number of millions of users on it.

[A]

Any thoughts on that, guys? Like, would you put a community on Reddit? If so, would you start it up yourself? So you control the registration and you're. The person has to, you know, there's a power in, there is value, or do you just join one or support one that, that's already in existence and you say, you know what, these people have already built this community is very helpful. We want to be a citizen in that, maybe a senior citizen at some point and perhaps your sponsors support it in some other way and we could recruit from, from that if we get privileges. And the general concept of sitting in a big, big place that you don't control. What are your thoughts on, on this?

[D]

I'm personally extremely pragmatic. I mean, if somebody has already done the groundwork and the basic work, meet the people where, where they are and, and add value to them, I mean, if you can add value, it doesn't matter where you fetch them. I think you can fetch them everywhere. I think because if, if you have a really unique value which you can add to this community, I think they will anyhow stick to you as well. I think the rest is just a kind of a basic setup. I mean, if it's already there, you don't have to build it.

[E]

Maybe it also doesn't have to be either or. Right? I mean, you can also be in a place which has been. And that's the beauty of a community and not a lead funnel. Right. I'm very particular about these words because I think after I started, started building Talent Crunch and I realized that a lot of this word is very thrown around. Right. And right. Or Wrong, I don't know. So one of the most beautiful things I noticed with Talent Crunch, which at the beginning gave me extreme FOMO because I thought I'm losing my people. I would see groups of, they're called Crunchers. This is someone in my community who came up with the name Crunchers and now they're all called Crunchers. And you would see people who are very active in talent crunch go in groups, they became friends, right. And they go to other communities. And at the beginning it creates a massive sense of jealousy in me and fear I'm losing my people. And then I realized no, that's actually the beauty of it. So one thing, you can build spaces for them or at least that's my experience, where they feel comfortable to interact. And I tested some, some are working, some are totally not working. But if there is a space already somewhere else, already built with more, maybe more power, more stability, other access to other resources that I. We are unable to provide and so on and so forth, it's beautiful to have that space for them as well and collaborate instead of compete.

[C]

Yeah,

[D]

fully agree.

[C]

I think it's so difficult right now in, in a way to be in one place, right? So you, you kind of need to be in a lot of places. When I was trying to build community in Discord, I faced the problem that not everybody's using Discord and then you have to drag people there. So with Slack similar. So somebody is not using, it's difficult. And WhatsApp is something that I've noticed that is still alive and there's still people like in a building communities. I have nothing against WhatsApp but it's just like, you know, I don't know, I see a lot of interesting and fresh communities in Telegram so there's a lot of, of activities happening there and automation etc. So I think that there's. If you join somebody's community, especially let's say if it's developers community, you need to ask if it's okay if you do something there. Because if you start scraping emails and then you know, email these people, so it's a dirty job, so we should not do that. But then it's very difficult to manage as well the value that you taken from the community that you joined. If I go to group and Discord and let's say I post the job post there, I don't know if anybody actually clicked and came back or anything like this. So it's. I do see that there's still no good solution for, I don't know, like A global talent community or something like this. I do see how your newsletter is the place that everybody knows and you have this, you know, updates on. Oh, this is the older podcast. This is all the. I don't know what, what else you have like events in the industry. I do think that if we would have also this are the communities that you can join. So we need that. So we need to know how to find the community. Even I like the company, I'm not always knowing how to find, how to follow them. So I'm not kind of giving the answer. I am sharing the concern that I personally don't see the easy way to join any community I want. And I find it also difficult to manage all the platforms where people are around like, you know, so switching between different tools. So it does look like CRM could be very nice decision and especially if it has purposing and serving and you know, you can be there as much as you want and we'll just say LinkedIn is the place where we all hanging out. But can we chat more there? Can, can we be more in communities there? So Facebook, I don't know. Facebook is kind of what my grandmother's using, so I feel like a little bit embarrassed. So.

[B]

But Ala, I think, I think your point about these different channels also because it varies so much by geography and you know, of course LinkedIn is not truly universal and WhatsApp tolerance or even preference is quite high in Latin America. You know, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, we do a lot of recruiting for clients in those markets or in East Asia, Southeast Asia, it's actually the preference. And email is, you know, email is dead and, and that's regardless of generation.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. With email, it's very hard to get somebody attention. I received 200 emails maybe per hour, so. And I have AI to check it and I don't do it anymore myself. I can't. It's just like it's not sustainable. So. But yeah, that's a good point about location and geography.

[A]

Yeah, very, very good. And also we talk about the, the like a mega aggregate of communities. And I'm thinking, okay, yeah, someone's going to do that. Probably won't be me, but because you can probably do it with, with, with AI, right? You can just scrape it all and then just have someone just constantly look at it. But then it got me thinking, hang on. We are also thinking, I wonder whether we should have a degree of friction on community discovery and we should maybe have. It should not necessarily be that easy to just Click a button and join them. All right, so there's something a little bit about communities, maybe is always a little bit boutique or a little bit artisanally where, you know, you don't just go on Google and say where the best coffee shops. You need to wander down the street and just check a few things out, you know what I'm saying? And you need to basically go into a few bad coffee shops and, you know, be disappointed in your purchase of that stale pastry and then say, okay,

[B]

that's not the one.

[A]

And it's part of the experience. Just identify the place that actually you have found that's amazing. And also tolerate the idea that that place will one day shut down and, you know, people will move on. Because I think all communities are ephemeral in a way and none of them are permanent. Right? Whether the community is existing in one space or even in 1,1,1 domain. Facebook, classic example. Once upon a time, you could not be not on Facebook, right? You had to be on it to be in touch with news, your friends, everything. Today it's like, it's a. It's a legit choice to want to do. But I don't want to go in it, like, and you don't. All right, so mostly most of the time. So things change really quickly. And we're in this weird position situation today in 2026, where I don't think there is a universal place where people go for community because there's places that people are ethically have problems with. There's places that a lot of people don't feel safe in. There's other places where it is safe but boring. And it's like we haven't found like that particular place where all things can be discovered, but maybe not. That's not a bad thing, I think. Okay, folks, we're coming to the end of this show, but I want to just do a quick forecast forward as to where we think talent communities might end up. Do we think basically a recruiter companies might carry recruiters that focus purely on community management. So I've got this. Someone came up with this theory. I don't know who it was, but basically they're saying, look, what's going to happen is we're still going to advertise, but all the advertising inbound that's managed by AI, Right? Because we can't just have a human being sitting there and being overwhelmed by all these Malcolm coming through. However, there's always going to be people that we want to particularly be hiring from, you know, high value, high demand. Skill sets. And there may be a sort of a reason why we have a recruiter that's going to spend a lot of time cultivating relationships with those folks and not necessarily pipelining them because the highly skilled in demand oftentimes are not looking for work. You can't process someone who is in this way. But you might need to want to start a conversation with them two, three years before the, before the fact such that you're able to have a conversation when the time comes. Now I was just thinking, okay, is there a future where a lot of recruitment, or at least a percentage of recruitment becomes more like community management? Particularly for companies that, you know, like to snipe, like to hire these like elite type of individuals. Do you think basic community management becomes an official type of function within talent acquisition? Rudy Bauer, your thoughts on that?

[D]

I finished a podcast episode today and it's going live. I think it's going live on Monday if I'm right. I was talking to Jackie from Border Media and she has the role of a talent community manager there if it comes to tech positions because they found out that they are not first thought if developers are looking for jobs and said, okay, we have to treat them very special and they've really put her in this position. She's really taking care. She shows up a little at a lot of meetups. She really tries to get in touch and stay in touch with these guys and she really understands what they are looking for and I think it definitely makes sense. So if it's very difficult to find the right people and to attract them for your company, I think it definitely makes sense and I think it's one way of solving it and I think it's a very clever way of solving it because it's the same thing what we do with our developer relations team. We really have guys to understand what the community wants, what they need and what they're looking for. And honestly that is what we, we are giving to them. And we stopped. Final sentence from I said we stopped sending out a marketing made newsletter to this community. What we send out to them is more or less a link to collection. And we have, we're heavily discussing that because at the end of the day we are rerouting them away from our community to other communities. But within that, okay, this is makes sense. It makes sense to really provide them what's going on in this business. And even if that leads to they are showing up at other communities because we sent them there with the link. Yeah, I think it makes sense and it's clever. And it's adding value to them because we are really helping them to, to stay informed and stay relevant.

[A]

Yeah. So it's almost like you can't just have them and then gatekeep their common connections. Everyone else. No, you need to give them. I think it's like.

[D]

Yeah, I think it's like growing your own kids. Yeah. If you, if you hide them in the living room, I think they probably will have problems later on now. So I think the best is to open up all the doors, all the windows, let them smell and breathe what's coming in, what's going out, and then really put them on, on the window board and say, okay, try to fly now. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I love that image. Thank you. Rudy, your thoughts? Allah, do you see a future where this happens where, you know, companies that want to be the preferred employer within a certain community, they end up building this thing. And Randy, by the way, made some very interesting points like is the lemon worth the squeeze? I think he's saying, you know a lot, but we talk a lot about it. But at the end of the day, is it worth for companies to throw resources at this for what may be a small volume of hires at the end of the day? What are your thoughts on that? Allah?

[C]

Yeah. If you're trying to hire very special talents, let's say somebody that you're targeting from special companies you do need, there will be a role for that. So. And I do like to call it talent relations expert. So thank you, Rudy. So. So that's. That sounds like a very good title and a nice job to do. And I was thinking about a few things. If you would like to stay visible, you need to run events probably it could be online, it could be in person. In person, connection is always very nice. Once I met Rudy, so I forever think he's so hilarious, his sense of humor. You don't see it online, so. But I know him. Thank you. Sorry. When it comes to. Comes to visibility, I think if you create event at least like once a year, that's as a company you run, everybody can come in, everybody knows it's. It's something they remember. Or again, online events that you invite star speakers and all these people from other companies that come into you because they're interested in the same topic, you invite, I don't know, Wozniak. And everybody comes to listen what he has to say about technology. And you are, as a company, everybody knows that you did that. And so your name is constantly in there. I was doing a very interesting project when we were for one client, I was head hunting top level engineers and what we've done, we didn't offer them to be, to hire them. We offered them to be part of the small group and we call them like advisory board. And so we were giving them very difficult some, you know, things to solve and they were all discussing not no competition and that's made it so powerful. So you can think about different scenarios like get people together for a purpose. Like to be a speaker to be. To come to your company to give a talk on very specific topic. You can have a very fancy name for your conference that you run once a year and like everybody comes in because they know it's you. So I do think recruiters are the ones who knows the right people but not the ones who probably have all the budget. You need to have a budget for that to get the events. And I don't think that anyone in HR allocating any budget for events for recruiters. I would need a budget to invite a nice speaker to get attention to organize this kind of community gathering. So that would be the question for me. I don't think recruiters can do it and there is a lot of nice things that you can do for, for candidates but we do need money for that.

[A]

Yeah, really good. Thank you very much. Ala. Andrea, final word to you. Do you see a future where a talent community focused job becomes part of what recruiters do or. Actually no. It's going to be sourcing still because it's at the end of the day, you know you're going to get more hires that way.

[E]

It should have been a job a while back already. I wrote it in the, in the chat already. This is my, it's not necessarily it is my opinion but it also is my wish because I was always extremely fond of candidate experience. Always. Regardless of AI. No AI I think we won't probably have a choice, much of a choice. Everybody will have access to. Not everybody. A lot of us will have access to more or less the same powerful tools to source. The candidates will get the same or similar beautiful personalized by an AI message at some point things. If we don't do something to stop this in the way it's currently going, we will probably need at some point to shift offline. And you, you all probably feel this, that people are tired. We are tired. It's a lot. Right. So people will want to shift a bit offline just like they want to interview you in an office to see if you're in flesh and blood and if you're a human it will be similar. I believe from the candidates perspective. They want to see you in flesh and blood and understand how you feel in how are your people feeling, what kind of individuals you're building around. So what Allah said is extremely valid in relation to a conference or anything like that. And I think building like executive Search is built is extremely intelligent. I don't understand why we wouldn't do similar things for roles which are not necessarily executive. Because these people will pull. Maybe you won't hire them, maybe a competitor of yours will. But they will always remember where this connection started from and this compounds and this will be a moment where there will be a payback. So yes, I would love to see that role existent. If people have the opportunity to build that role for themselves in the company. Don't wait to be promoted or given that job, just do it. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[E]

Ask for forgiveness later.

[A]

No, absolutely. And that leads us to a question I don't think we can answer, which is who in the end owns the community? Is it the employer that you're working for? Is it you, the person who's building it? And is there such a future where the person might actually be transporting community around to employers? I mean, wouldn't that be an interesting thought bubble to think about? But we have to come to the end of this show because over time I just wanted to say thank you everyone for watching. It's been a brilliant conversation, lots more to think about as ever. I always judge sort of the quality of brain food lives thinking, look, have I actually got more questions and answers at the end of it? And I do because it means the brain is being stimulated and we've got loads more things to talk about, no doubt on this topic. Let's thank everyone for joining, particularly Rudy Bauer for coming on screen. Great to see you. I'll see you next week, sir. Alla Pavlova, great to see you. To see you also thanks for dropping in. Andrea Lungulescu, great to see you also. Hey, I think me all you might be going to. We are with the developers but if you are, then I'll see you there and I'll see you in Brilliant. Okay. Yes. The lal. Thank you so much for being co pilot. Brilliant to see you. I know you've been tired because it's a massively long day yesterday but yes, we can have a little bit of a rest and a nice tea for the rest of the weekend. Okay, that's about it everyone. Thanks for watching, see you later.

[B]

Thanks, Hong. Thanks everybody.