Time to Hire

EP 30 Matt Corbett on Navigating AI's Massive Recruiting Transformation Without Getting Lost in Complexity

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In this episode, Matt Corbett, President at ZRG Embedded Recruiting, joins Lamees Abourahma to discuss the transformative effect of AI on the recruiting industry. They examine the benefits and challenges of integrating AI into hiring processes, the importance of balancing technology and human touch. Matt also shares insights on how organizations can successfully navigate the turbulent seas of AI-powered recruiting. This is a conversation you won't want to miss.

This episode helps talent acquisition leaders strategically navigate AI implementation, balance technology with human touch, and avoid common deployment pitfalls.

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Welcome to the Time to Hire podcast from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association. I'm Lamees Abourahma and today I'm joined by Matt Corbett, President at ZRG Embedded Recruiting. 

In our conversation, Matt and I discussed the transformative impact of AI on the recruiting industry. We explore the benefits and challenges of integrating AI into hiring processes, the importance of balancing technology and human touch, and Matt shares insights on how organizations can successfully navigate the rapidly involving landscape of AI-powered recruiting. This is a conversation you won't want to miss, so let's dive in. 

Well, welcome Matt. We have Matt, president of ZRG Embedded Recruiting, and we are talking about AI and recruiting. I do want to set the stage, Matt, just to remind us of some of the milestones in the modern history of technology. So when I think of some of these milestones, I think 2007. And you might remember that's when Apple introduced smartphones with their iPhone. And 2022 is also a milestone. That's when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. So if we think of recruiting specifically, we can think back to the day when recruiting was picking up a landline court phone and making cold calls. You talk to younger people who probably wouldn't even know what a landline phone 

Matt Corbett

Yeah,

 Lamees Abourhama

We've evolved and there is a lot of evolution and progress in technology and recruiting. So let's start with how AI specifically is transforming recruiting today.

Matt Corbett, 

First off, thank you Lamees for having me on this. It's a fascinating topic. Perfect timing for it. I'm afraid I'm going to have to answer that question with: it's a simple question with an incredibly complex answer. I think with AI today, people are looking for simple answers to complex questions, and there simply aren't any.

The only way to think about how AI is transforming recruitment is that it is going to transform it massively. It's begun to transform it a little bit, but it will change it in thousands of different ways, because recruitment really isn't one thing. Although we look at recruitment as one thing, it's really not.

Recruitment within executive search is different from an internal recruiting team, is different from a contingency agency, is different from an RPO, is different from a temp agency, is different from an interim business. Each of these are doing recruitment, but the methodology, the deliverables, the ROI, the margins—they're all different. The use of technology for each of those six different businesses will be completely different, and the use of technology within each of their clients might be completely different. It's evolving rapidly, but it's going to change everything.

Lamees Abourahma 

I love how your response reflects on the complexity of recruiting and AI within recruiting as well. Let's take it to benefits and some of the advantages that you see employers can be reaping from more AI adoption in recruiting.

Matt Corbett

Okay, so we talk about advantages, but can we talk about negatives as well?

Lamees Abourahma 

Sure.

Matt Corbett,

The advantages, I think most people would agree, speed is probably the first advantage. The second, I think, is data gathering. When humans are doing a lot of recruitment, you just lose a lot of information through leakage, or not putting it into some sort of system or collecting it. Data gathering around AI, you're capturing everything. You have a lot of transparency. You can look at their system and see how people are answering, how they're active, their response times. You can get a lot of data around transparency.

And I think lastly, you can track and get a lot of workflow progress by using AI. Speed up the process, get instant responses, but do it to hundreds or maybe thousands of people simultaneously. So I think those are the massive advantages.

Of course, there are disadvantages. It's a balancing act. Some would argue the human experience with AI, if a candidate wants to move really fast, working with an AI agent might be fantastic. You can schedule an interview instantly. If a candidate wants to work with a human but their only choice is to work with AI, the experience plummets, or a candidate might even opt out of the process because their only choice is AI.

So it's very much a balancing act, and I think the answer comes down to: you can't solely use people, you can't solely use AI. The real beauty here is finding that balance between the two.

Lamees Abourahma

I feel you answered my next question, because I was going to ask about the human touch, and how you might be able to balance the advantages and using AI for all its benefits, but not losing that human touch in the process.

Matt Corbett

And I think again, there aren't simple answers to complicated questions. There are some roles where you don't need any human touch. There are some roles where you need almost entirely human touch. There are some roles where the beginning of the first third of the process might be pure AI, and then the next, the middle third and the final third might be all human.

Inside a company, if you're hiring 20 of something, you might use AI for most of that process. If you're hiring one of something, it might be almost entirely human interaction. The level of the role changes the degree to which AI is integrated within the process.

Again, AI should allow us to use better interaction more efficiently, because we can free up the time for better use of human interaction in the interview process by using AI to take away some of the mundane, highly automated scheduling interactions. Can they send this information? Let's automate those processes and then take full advantage of the beauty of human interaction.

Lamees Abourahma 

Very well said. You touched on this as well, Matt, in terms of challenges or risks that employers should be aware of when integrating AI or technology in general in hiring processes. What might be some of those?

Matt Corbett

I think the biggest risk for me is to think about AI the way you used to think about deploying a piece, an application, piece of technology. So you might think about in the old days, okay, I'm deploying an applicant tracking system. I turn it on, I invest in the implementation, and that's the end of it.

With AI, it's not really programming, it's learning. So with AI, it is a constant iterative interaction. If you're deploying AI with your company, you're constantly tinkering. So you have to think about it completely differently. It's more of an adventure with AI that requires interactivity and constant learning and tinkering and improving, versus the old days, when it was just turn it on and let it do its thing.

Lamees Abourahma 

I'm going to just piggyback on some of the challenges of adopting new technology for employers, and one of those is cost, because technology doesn't come free. It's an investment when recruiting is not a core function for that organization. That takes a lot of convincing the procurement. We've done a really nice webinar recently, and we had a head of procurement on the webinar, and there's cost is not the only thing, as he mentioned, but it's definitely a big consideration.

I'm going to tie that into why an RPO might be an excellent partner, a great partner for employers when they're considering upgrading their technology solutions. Do you want to pick it up from there and help me make my point?

Matt Corbett

It's a fantastic topic. I think the first part is that a lot of companies, if they really invest a lot of time in investigating and choosing an AI vendor, by the time they've exhausted that process, if they've followed the traditional process of choosing a historical piece of technology, by the time they've chosen an AI solution, it's obsolete, because the speed of development is so rapid.

Also today, if you're committing your entire business to one piece of AI technology, the ecosystem of AI is moving so rapidly that you can't possibly predict that this is the best solution for my company in six months' time. Because although you have this layer of a sort of general purpose technology, depending on which one you choose, the number of solutions that are being deployed on top of it, you know, literally hundreds per day.

I think at the latest number, there are 1700 potential TA solutions globally around AI, and it's going up by something like 18 to 20 a day. So how do you possibly predict what my business is going to need in six months from now?

So we're really in this sort of experimentation stage. You can't take too long to pick one, you just got to pick what's available that you think is the best. Deploy it. Learn, adapt with it, play with it, improve it, while constantly looking for something else in the marketplace that might be coming over the top of it. Sort of embrace the early-stage innovation ecosystem that we're in, and don't look at it as, "Hey, I'm going to choose a piece of technology, and I'm going to commit three years to it, four years to it, five years to it," like we used to maybe have done in an application era. That doesn't apply anymore.

Here's the best example I have. Deep Seek was launched toward February, and it changed the world around AI because it was so affordable. As of today, I think Alibaba has announced their AI. It's one month later, 30 days later, and now Alibaba stock is jumping today. Similar capabilities. Stock went up 10% yesterday and today, much lower processing power, so much stronger performance, with lower capacity to absorb energy, much more affordable to deploy. That's 30 days difference. And this is not an application—this is a core GPT layer.

Lamees Abourahma 

Yeah, the pace is fascinating.

Matt Corbett,

You have to just sort of embrace the experimentation stage we're in.

Lamees Abourahma 15:29

The point we want to go to next is why an RPO makes a great partner for employers, and that point would be, don't invest internally yourself into technology, because an RPO brings not only people and process, but they bring the technology.

Matt Corbett

Yeah, it's that point, plus it's also that an RPO works with multiple companies, so they have the ability to see how a piece of technology can be tested and used in multiple environments. Different countries have different regulations. In America, different states have different regulations. So using one, if a company chooses one piece of AI, they might be using that across different states, each one with different regulations. Different countries each have different regulations, so it's a different regulatory environment.

An RPO can be looking at multiple technologies simultaneously, deploying them across multiple companies and seeing how they perform. Also, inside companies, perhaps there's a compliance or a regulatory requirement inside a company that an RPO provider can deploy technology for that an internal company couldn't so quickly.

Lamees Abourahma 

I want to move to one of my favorite topics. I love examples, and I'm hoping you can give me a real-world example of a company that has successfully implemented AI recruitment.

Matt Corbett

I will, but I'll take the name of the company off.

Lamees Abourahma

Yeah.

Matt Corbett

It's a company that we work with that deployed conversational AI. We were their partner to deploy this technology, and it's really an illustration of how you have to work with the technology and continue engaging with it as it learns to improve its performance.

You first deploy conversational AI. I think what everyone doesn't talk about yet around AI is the candidate experience. Some companies are deploying that a candidate's only choice is to use conversational AI. I think you should give candidates a choice whether they want to use conversational AI or not use it. They can choose between a human or a piece of technology.

The way you explain that is different, the questions you answer are different, and we've seen different percentages of candidates accepting or not accepting the conversational AI based on the questions it asks, how it's presented to the candidate, how you've explained the use of technology within the candidate experience.

The biggest lesson learned there is that, although it's very exciting for companies to use AI and it can be very efficient, the candidate pool hasn't yet accepted it as a viable alternative to a human experience through the interview process.

Lamees Abourahma 

Interesting.

Matt Corbett

Yes, a company might say this is terrific for productivity, but let's also think about whether candidates want to go through the entire process with zero human interaction.

Lamees Abourahma 

And as you were just saying, things change rapidly. So even that candidate behavior might be changing.

Matt Corbett

The candidate adoption to be on the receiving end of AI changes for the role and changes for the function and changes for the level. So you can't just roll out a piece of AI technology across a company using the same solution to building a sales team or a finance team or an engineering team or for an individual contributor versus a director or a VP.

Lamees Abourahma 

So that sounds like it's adding to that complexity of hiring, another level of complexity, and trying to balance the employer brand with all of that. So you must have a fun job.

Matt Corbett

The most important thing is that you engage with it. You learn with it. You're open-minded to it, and you don't expect simple answers to complex questions. But by tinkering with it, by practicing with it, by constantly working on how you deploy and what you deploy, the benefits can be massive.

Lamees Abourahma 

That takes us nicely to the next question about the future of AI and hiring. Again, that future can be in six months. But what's your vision, if you will, for how AI and automation in recruitment will be evolving over the next—fill in the gap—I was going to say five years, but...

Matt Corbett

Anyone who thinks five years is...

Lamees Abourahma

Agree

Matt Corbett

Not possible, maybe a year tops. On the positive side, I think what AI is amazing at is making connections that aren't obvious to humans. AI may be able to look at a candidate through their interview experience, compare that to every open role in the company, and make a connection to a role that a recruiter might not know about or might not be aware that it's a better fit. It can make those connections in terms of someone's background, or pull in data from someone else's background, and add that to the entire experience around deciding whether we should hire this person. It's their exposure to data and their ability to make connections in data that AI is spectacular at.

On the negative side, because AI will change labor so rapidly, there will be repercussions. There will be jobs that are made far more productive and more efficient, therefore maybe we'll have some unemployment to wrestle with. There's a debate about whether AI will create new jobs, which I'm sure it will. And how do we balance that job market changing? I think that is really based upon the regulatory environment of the labor market.

America is the most open, free, unregulated labor market, so it's the most dynamic and probably has the highest likelihood of navigating this adventure very well. There are other labor markets that are in far higher regulatory environments, and they probably might have a very difficult time with a very rapidly changing labor market driven by AI. So I think that's probably the most important topic that no one seems to be really wrestling with.

Lamees Abourahma

Very true. To be determined, I guess. So I'll close with this question, Matt, and would love to hear your advice for organizations that might be hesitant about adopting AI for hiring. What would you tell them?

Matt Corbett,  

You can't be hesitant. You have to engage whether you like it or not. Humans with AI will outperform humans without AI. I mean, that's not even just in recruitment. It's not like recruiters with AI. It's humans with AI in every role, every function, every industry, every category.

So engage with it. Learn with it. Be open-minded. Don't look for simple answers in complex situations. Look for the nuance and the subtlety. Be open-minded that we're literally 10 minutes into a 24-hour cycle of technology evolution. Don't try to just solve lots of different problems with one solution, because there's a lot of subtlety and nuance here.

Be open to try new technology, but be open to replacing technology, because we have to be able to rip out AI as easily as we put it in, because the solution ecosystem is evolving so rapidly. There's this fascinating thing happening right now, this sort of GPT arms race, the idea of all these new general purpose technologies that are coming out. They're having much fewer parameters, so therefore they're much more efficient, much lower cost, and that's really terrifyingly going to accelerate the innovation even faster.

Lamees Abourahma

Well, a fascinating topic and good conversation. I'll wrap it up with wrap it up with that last question unless you have any other thoughts and I would say to be continued as Technology keeps evolving Probably have a different conversations in six months from now.

Matt Corbett

I'm 100 % sure of it 

Lamees Abopurahma

Very good anything else you want to add before 

Matt Corbett

No, thank you very much for the conversation it was lovely to chat with you again

Lamees Abourahma

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Time to Hire podcast from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association. Give us a review wherever you listen to the podcast and always stay connected, stay engaged and stay informed of what's happening in the talent and recruiting world by tuning into the RPOA, the place to go for RPO™.