Renata Bernarde (00:21)
So I think where we could start is with you sharing with us how you became the founder of an AI powered recruitment tool and what led you down that road.
Troy Sultan (00:36)
Yeah. I actually grew up in the recruiting world, but like most people in recruiting, ⁓ there isn’t really a degree for it. You don’t really grow up often thinking I want to be a recruiter. When I grew up, you, many of us from the industry say we kind of tripped and fell into recruiting. actually was working on a startup of my own in college and recruited a couple of advisors that,
music streaming service that was nearby. wasn’t a lot of startups in the area that was fairly successful. And, ⁓ long story short, when that first startup wasn’t working out, they, they asked me to kind of jump on the ship with an undefined role at the time at a company called groove shark. And, ⁓ I I joined as like a general ops person, ⁓ like an untitled ops person. And, ⁓ I was asked like a month or two into the job.
Renata Bernarde (01:28)
Mm-hmm.
Troy Sultan (01:34)
Hey, the board had a meeting. We’ve decided that recruiting is our number one priority. need to, you know, triple the size of the company. Your name came up. What do you think? And I had never heard of the word recruiting outside of like a college football context growing up in Florida. And so, ⁓ that was my first foray into recruiting, learned a lot on the fly. I was highly under qualified for that role, I would say, and got to face a lot of what are really
Renata Bernarde (01:46)
Mm-hmm.
Troy Sultan (02:01)
big challenges as a recruiting team that’s typically under resourced and under budgeted and probably not as influential as we’d like to be inside of the organization. And, ⁓ would ultimately get hired at Google years later to join their people ops function where I got to sit on under a team called staffing services. And I got to learn a lot about candidate review, ⁓ how Google thought about screening candidates and.
Did some really interesting experiments around like resume data and then would leave with a long time desire to go try to solve one of these problems. And we founded our first recruiting software company in 2016 called resource.io. was a outbound sourcing automation platform for, for sourcing teams and recruiting teams to prospect, into candidates at other companies and, ⁓ bring them into their hiring pipeline. And we sold that company to gem in 2021, who is our biggest competitor because
We had built some of our own software internally to manage our own interview process and candidate experience, which we were really passionate about at the time. And to make a really squirrely story short, we got more excited about that internal tool than our core business got our biggest competitor to acquire the company and let us keep just that tool. And kind of at a nine AM the next morning after signing the paper, we woke up and we were guide and guide is focused on automating a lot of things for recruiters so that they can deliver a better candidate experience.
Renata Bernarde (03:31)
Okay. I want to share something with you that I’ve been thinking about a lot. If you think about the LinkedIn experience, right? There is basically just one platform that we all belong to. I mean, you have all the social media platforms, but they are not the professional platform of choice. If you’re in the corporate world or even, you know, startups and so forth, you usually join LinkedIn and you’re expected to be on LinkedIn.
It’s almost like they have this monopoly on us. On the other hand, we have applicant tracking software and a whole range of AI tools that recruiters can sign up for. And there is no monopoly there. Like there’s just so many different ones. Why do you think that is?
Troy Sultan (04:21)
There are a lot of structural challenges, I think, in recruiting and recruiting tools. I also think that things are changing quite a lot, but in general, something that we’ve noticed over the years is that if you can attract candidates as a, as a tool or a platform or a, a business like LinkedIn, if you can be where the talent is the other side of your business, which is typically where you’re
business model is selling into companies, selling that talent, access to that talent. That’s actually quite an easy problem. The challenging problem is attracting the candidates. And I think since LinkedIn has amassed such an immense set, a data set of candidates and candidate data has become sort of the de facto resume, if you will, the public resume. As a result, LinkedIn has a really sticky business because ⁓
Renata Bernarde (05:13)
Mm-hmm.
Troy Sultan (05:18)
companies need access to that data to find the talent that they need. And LinkedIn often has the best pool of talent. And there are a lot of network effects when you grow a business like this, it’s quite hard to stall it or compete with it. And I think maybe one day we’ll see some rise of competition, perhaps in what we would consider maybe the resume of a 2.0 or maybe if, if LinkedIn is ⁓ the first
internet resume, then what does the next one look like? And I’ve done a lot of thinking on that too. And I think perhaps it might look quite a lot different. Maybe it’s even something that’s not written by, by you. Maybe it’s something that’s written by your peers that you’ve worked with in the past that have a more objective view. ⁓ but I think maybe in a world where we can get access to new data on the way people actually operate instead of the way that they kind of just state in one dimension.
what they’ve done in the past, we might end up with some sort of competition to LinkedIn, but so long as the resume is the initial source of truth for talent, think LinkedIn will have a pretty sustainable business.
Renata Bernarde (06:14)
you
Okay, that’s good to know and interesting to think about what you see is in the future. I wanted to go through some of the struggles that candidates feel they have when they’re applying for jobs online. And then I want to go into sort of more of a quick fire true and false style questions. I know we discussed this before and I think it will be such a good episode for people to listen to as they…
understand how to operate with those different ATS systems or applicant tracking systems. So the first thing that comes to mind, and it happens every day for me because I’m a career coach, so I see people all day every day, is that fear that job seekers have that their resumes are not being read by humans. They’re being read by bots and it’s all about matching the keywords. You know, I don’t know how to do this. It just doesn’t sound right.
and then I get resume sent to me, there’s just a bunch of keywords and they’re completely nonsensical. Is that true?
Troy Sultan (07:35)
think this is largely a myth. I think there’s a little bit of nuance and there is some degree of filtering happening. But more often than not, I don’t think it’s the ATS. In fact, in 15 years almost in talent and working on the inside of many applicant tracking systems, I personally have never seen one that actually has this feature that everybody speculates about. Now, some of the very large ones that surface
Renata Bernarde (07:37)
Okay.
Troy Sultan (08:03)
or service very high volume roles like in the Fortune 100 or around there. They may have some features around this, but some of the modern ATS is that most of like the tech companies you and I have heard of that we might be interested in applying to, they’re not really using this technology. I actually think a bigger fear is that no one’s looking at the resume. It’s not software looking at it nor a human. And I think
Renata Bernarde (08:30)
Yeah.
Troy Sultan (08:31)
You know, this was surprising to me when I was at Google. remember going to Google with a primary motive of seeing behind the curtain of what I thought was a world-class hiring operation. What I learned was
Google didn’t become Google because they had a good hiring operation. Google had a good hiring operation because they were Google. Google had this immense magnetic brand for talent at the time. And as a result, they didn’t really need to have the world’s most buttoned up recruiting process. so Google, though, over the years invested more tech because they had the resources in their own recruiting software.
And ultimately built their own applicant tracking system. And as a company that custom built their own ATS for their own process. And it was pretty fantastic as far as ATS is go. Most people don’t say that about any ATS. It was pretty purpose built for Google. ⁓ and I spent a lot of time in it and it, again, it was Google, the search company, the semantic search company that, that ranks the internet, right? They didn’t have any such feature, nothing even close. I think we’re starting to see new tools now in the age of AI.
that ATSs are launching or planning to launch, where they’re using AI to kind of stack rank inbound applications. I worry more though about the perception from talent teams and recruiting teams about a low value in inbound applicants and a higher perceived value if they go outbound and prospect somebody for example, or get a referral. So I worry more about the strategy as a job seeker.
Renata Bernarde (10:08)
.
Troy Sultan (10:13)
I’m skeptical about the primary strategy being just simply submitting applications in the first place. I like to say that should be your last resort.
Renata Bernarde (10:21)
Yeah, I love your answer. It’s perfect. You know, in one of my group coaching programs a couple of years ago, we had a Google HR employee in the group and we learned so much from her. And it’s nice for you to be sharing it here on the pod as well. Okay, so I want to sort of dig deeper and ask you the following question based on your answer. Are you also saying that people are applying
and nobody, not even bots, are looking at the resumes. So is that because there are too many applications, so they sort of have a cutoff date and they will look at the first 40 and not look at the rest?
Troy Sultan (11:05)
Yeah, there’s kind of a lot going on behind the scenes you’ll find if you start to really inspect these recruiting operations on the other side of the application portal. A few common patterns that you might see is that for one, there isn’t really a barrier to entry for somebody applying for a job. So as I often like to share ⁓ the following example, at Google, who had millions of applications per year.
We would look at like us a gen sweet roll, as we called it a general software engineering role. was like one of the most evergreen roles at Google. ⁓ if you went and sampled a random, ⁓ 10 applications that had come in for that role, you would see that, and this is a little bit reductive, so I’m building a caricature here, but it was essentially true. You would see that, you know, eight out of the 10 inbound applications were
Starbucks baristas with no software engineering experience at all or equivalent. And the other two were, ⁓ you know, random chance that there was some relevance. So over time, the people on the other side don’t have the infrastructure to find a needle in a haystack. And so they build a lot of strategies to avoid that channel of leads, if you will, and instead look or prioritize referrals.
or prospecting outbound on LinkedIn or another strategy on email, just to find people that they know are qualified and try to persuade them to come interview. This is risen as a priority in the recruiting team’s preference stack. Now things are changing. think as there’s a lot of misconceptions, I would say about where, or I should maybe not a misconception. I think there are maybe there’s a lot of speculation about what AI might do to
applications with regard to resume parsing and stack ranking and filtering. I actually think that there might be a lot of benefit here. I’m kind of not very strongly held on this opinion, but I think there could be a lot of upside as well, which is to say, if I am a pretty relevant candidate for a role, I might get. Prioritized by the software, ⁓ in a way that gets me in front of eyeballs.
where I otherwise never would have gotten in front of any eyeballs because that’s simply that entire channel is getting ignored by the recruiters, not because they don’t want to. I think this is another big misconception in recruiting is that as candidates, the status quo is such a poor experience. We don’t get a lot of transparency. We don’t feel a of empathy. We feel we’ve entered a black box often when we hop, when we go through a job search. And by and large, it’s not because recruiters are bad people.
It’s because they really don’t have the capacity and infrastructure to be the people they really want to be to everyone.
Renata Bernarde (14:05)
Yeah, that’s a good point. And what about potential bias and screenings that are heavily reliant on technology? mean, we know, you know, let’s not forget that there are biases when it’s just humans doing the recruitment. We know that that can happen. But I think that the concern is the biases that are coded into programs. What do you think about that?
Troy Sultan (14:20)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I would be quick to bring up the point that you just brought up, which is something I think about a lot, is biases is, it originates with humans and we haven’t figured out how to iron out that bug in our human operating system. And so we face this no matter what’s on the other side of our application process is kind of a sad reality, but one nonetheless, I think AI, you know, I’m not an expert here, but
I do believe that a lot of the bias that exists and has been more or less researched pretty well at this point in AI, its origins are the data set that it’s trained on, which has bias in it. So I do think that there is no antidote that I know of to this problem, bias in the hiring process, but I do believe there might be potential solutions in the future.
that AI can contribute to that actually could help us detect as humans where we might be bias ourselves or help us ⁓ course correct or force us into the Mooney rule more rigidly or any of these tools and frameworks that force that can correct for our bias might actually help. Certainly though, it’s not perfect and there’s probably quite a lot of risk in letting AI fully control things. So I think we’re big believers that guide and
I’m a big believer in using a software plus human approach.
Renata Bernarde (16:04)
Okay. And with that in mind and all of the other things that we’ve discussed so far, I will tell you what I’m known for. I’m known for conversions, right? So I like to think that people that buy my course or work with me, they don’t have to apply for 100 jobs to get one interview. They can apply for less than that and have higher conversions.
⁓ And the trick is to, in my view, gamify the application so that you start seeing patterns between your experience and what’s being asked, and you start sort of ⁓ narrating those patterns in a way that can be read well by both bots and humans and they can quickly understand. But until people…
work that out, either work with me or some other coach that has similar ⁓ IP and ethos. They find it really frustrating because they see themselves in the role. They find that they are perfect for the opportunity or a very good match, but they’re really frustrated because they don’t get any feedback, nothing. ⁓ Do you think…
There is a lack of education from the professionals out there about how to apply for jobs. mean, there’s so much free content. Here I am with this podcast telling people these things and still, you know, it seems like it’s such a hard thing for them to do. Is the system broken or should we be educating people more about how to be successful in applications?
Troy Sultan (18:00)
I certainly think the common conceptions about how to run a job search, even some of the most intuitive pieces of it, are broken ⁓ in many ways. And so I do think there’s a major opportunity to educate job seekers on how to actually run an effective job search. And there are core tenants to that, that as you said,
will reframe what success even looks like to a candidate, starting with understanding what they want, understanding what role the employers are playing, understanding that the people on the other side of the interview process are often under trained and ill prepared and not very ⁓ equipped to do the job of interviewing. And so the signal that you might get from a rejection, you might want to discredit quite a lot or
The number of applications that I send out or companies I apply to is some metric that actually matters. In fact, I might argue the fewer you apply to and the more deeper you go in positioning yourself for each, ⁓ the better. So a lot of our common conceptions about what might constitute applying for jobs. think even that, that phrase ology, I almost have an issue with. ⁓ I think applying is a very kind of passive connotation and I think you should be.
proactive and outbound like a salesperson who has one product to sell and you are the product you are selling yourself and you need to find a way into the companies that you want to work at and be rigorous and Strategic and there there’s a process one can follow So I do think education plays a big role I also think there is a lot of elements that are broken about the system and in many ways they’re related You have to be more strategic
about your job search because the process is largely broken. And so I think these go hand in hand, maybe one day we’ll have perfect AI that just knows what I’m good at better than I do. And it knows what the company needs better than they do. And matching is magic. But today, companies don’t really know what they want. Often the job description isn’t necessarily representative of what the actual hiring manager is looking for. And one thing you said that got me excited because I, I think it’s a
a major blockage in the mind of candidates is thinking that the is as a candidate and don’t get me wrong. I spent almost 10 years of my life in two companies with the same mission to help people find work they love because I think it’s so important to a life, ⁓ a fulfilling life. And the candidate experience has been a major focus for us because we think it’s so deficient and it’s so frustrating to go through a job search but
to go through an interview process and not get the outcome you want and assume that you are perfect for the job or that you know what this company needs better than they do is a very questionable position. That’s like going on a date with somebody, feeling like you showed up great and they just decided you’re not a fit for them and you feel like they don’t really understand maybe how great you are or that how good this could be. Well, you can’t really, you’re not really in a position to say that, right? You, you.
The only person that can say who knows what they want is, is this other person. So I just think there’s so much reframing and misconceptions here that education can truly help iron out and mindset. would say the appropriate mindset going into a job search can make or break it. It is like the biggest component of the process. think.
Renata Bernarde (21:39)
Troy, you’ve just described my online course so much better than I ever did. Thank you. Listen to Troy and go check my website. Okay. Now, I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t know, you know, from high school onwards, I think that there could have been more ⁓ done to students and people in universities and doing that. I teach master’s students on career planning and design and
And I know that some universities in the US do it as well because I follow that, academics, but I think it’s so important and it’s not an extracurricular activity. It’s part of the degree. You’re spending so much money and time doing your master’s degree. You might as well do my elective or an elective that is similar to mine to make sure you milk it for all of its worth.
Troy Sultan (22:37)
It’s not worth anything if you can’t go apply it, right? So it’s actually staggering. It’s a staggering point that every university on the planet doesn’t have a core componentry of its curriculum that is teaching you how to ⁓ run a job search with the skills they’re helping you acquire. Because if you get the skills and you’re fantastic, but you can’t actually ⁓ bring the ball across the goal line, well, it’s for not.
Renata Bernarde (22:39)
Exactly.
Well, thank you for that. It really validates the stuff that we’ve been doing here. All right, let’s go through true or false style questions for you. And I think a lot of people will benefit from your answers. True or false, Troy, if you don’t use the exact keywords from the job ad, the system will automatically reject your resume.
Troy Sultan (23:26)
false. It’s more nuanced than that.
Renata Bernarde (23:27)
Okay,
explain.
Troy Sultan (23:30)
⁓ as I mentioned, it’s, it’s often the case that it’s really up to humans looking at your resume on the other side. And if, ⁓ if it’s not a system these days that is doing that matching some of this newer tech that’s coming out, it’s going to be more sophisticated than using just a one-to-one keyword match. It’s going to be looking at correlations and background. And, I would be authentic is my advice in your, in your resume and, be concise and be a good storyteller and trust the process.
Renata Bernarde (23:38)
Okay.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, what about this one? AI recruiting tools are removing human bias from hiring decisions.
Troy Sultan (24:10)
Gotta go with false.
Renata Bernarde (24:12)
Yeah, so the bias is still there. In different ways, isn’t it? Yeah.
Troy Sultan (24:15)
Yeah, I haven’t seen a solution to bias. It’s evolving,
it’s shifting, but yeah, I haven’t seen like the magic solution to human bias, certainly not yet.
Renata Bernarde (24:25)
I’m going to give you an example of something that was done and then undone. There was a big ⁓ software company, well known worldwide, people know the brand, and they developed this system and it took away age and it took away even the university where people graduated from, but it added ⁓ facial expressions.
So all of a sudden you are removing the bias towards gender and towards the status of the university you went to or the college you went to, but you’re adding the bias towards maybe neurodiversity or some cultures and the way that people use expressions when they’re being interviewed by video. And that was then.
you know, an outcome that they didn’t expect and it didn’t work out. Have you heard of something like this before?
Troy Sultan (25:23)
I’ve heard of various ⁓ popular stories, including the bias that ended up in Amazon’s internal ⁓ AI experiments. And there’s kind of like a graveyard of failures. I don’t think that means that technology shouldn’t keep trying because as we mentioned, the status quo is that humans are biased and we’re on the other side and we’re imperfect and we’re trying our best. But ⁓ maybe we can find a solution one day, at least for course correcting a little bit.
Renata Bernarde (25:50)
Okay, all right, this next one is one that I really want to know. Once an application is submitted online, there is no way to influence your chances further.
Troy Sultan (26:01)
Ooh, hard false.
Renata Bernarde (26:03)
Yeah. Okay. How come?
Troy Sultan (26:06)
I think the, the most likely way to get a positive outcome is all of the stuff outside of the application itself. So that might be stuff that you do before, and it certainly can be do stuff after, but mapping the company, learning who the hiring manager is speaking with peers in the job to learn more about what it’s actually like there to determine ⁓ how you might position yourself.
getting positioning yourself to be an employee referral with somebody through a handful of strategies. So all of this networking and hustle, if you will, creativity, the strategy will not only get you a bit farther, but it will signal to the company that there’s more initiative and creativity, which in itself might set you apart.
Renata Bernarde (26:54)
Okay, okay, good. I usually recommend people do things like that before sending out the application, but I’m with you. It’s never too late.
Troy Sultan (27:00)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Many people will apply and then go ask for advice. They’re not hearing back. They’ve already applied for the companies they like. And so there’s still things you can do, but I would have to agree with you. Most of this should be done upfront.
Renata Bernarde (27:14)
Okay,
awesome. Okay, most AI-powered systems can’t read PDF resumes accurately.
Troy Sultan (27:26)
Mostly false, I would say, but, um, rare, possible, but I would, I would always stick to simple formatting.
Renata Bernarde (27:28)
Yeah.
Yeah. So ⁓ are you a fan of Word instead of PDF or does it doesn’t matter?
Troy Sultan (27:40)
I’m not, I would just use a clean PDF and not put too much fancy like visual design, just make it really clear text-based, be great at storytelling. Most ATSs will read PDFs just great.
Renata Bernarde (27:46)
Yeah.
Okay. One of the things that is concerning to me and it’s getting worse in 2025, have found personally anecdotally with the people that reach out to me for consultations is the use of Canva with that style of one page where there’s like boxes and that worries me. Do you agree?
Troy Sultan (28:12)
Why does it wear you?
Renata Bernarde (28:13)
Because they would have like a box with their education next to a box with their experience. And it’s not like you would do in a simple word format where it’s just one thing after the other sequentially.
Troy Sultan (28:26)
Yeah, it would depend on the details. I think it’s just always about how to most clearly tell your story. In fact, I would typically like personally these days, I would be optimizing for what’s most human readable, not what’s most machine readable.
Renata Bernarde (28:38)
Okay.
Okay, good. All right. So in that case, the canvas format would work. Yeah.
Troy Sultan (28:42)
Get some feedback, share it around what sticks out. I
think Canva can work because in Canva you can create really simple things. You can create complicated things. I would always focus on the content over the design. don’t think design goes too far of a way unless you’re applying for a creative role, in which case it might matter.
Renata Bernarde (29:00)
Yes. A couple of years ago, I met ⁓ a lovely girl and she said she just got a job. And I said, where? And she said, Canva. And I’m like, well, you use the Canva format. And she said, of course I did. Well, that’s the only ⁓ exception to my rule. I usually tell people not to use the Canva format only because I’m afraid, especially because I’m giving advice for free here on this podcast. And I don’t want people to overdo and do something really.
Troy Sultan (29:12)
Yeah, yeah, totally. That makes sense.
Renata Bernarde (29:30)
complicated and convoluted using Canva. All right. ⁓ It’s better to apply quickly than to wait and tailor your application.
Troy Sultan (29:43)
I would say false.
Renata Bernarde (29:43)
That’s a tough one in the
US because in the US things just move so fast compared to Australia.
Troy Sultan (29:47)
They move fast. Yeah. I
would still say probably false. There might be a middle ground where it’s better to be really thoughtful about the approach to applying and apply to fewer companies. And maybe you can still optimize for speed since there’s not a high volume of them, but I don’t think the like move fast and don’t tailor at all. I don’t think that’s going to provide great results, at least not in roles that are competitive.
Renata Bernarde (29:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. What I often do is preload the work with my clients so that they have a lot of templates and things ready to go, including chat to be T prompts that they can use so that if they find something, they do a bit of research and they can send straight away. But I don’t believe sending it within the first 12 to 24 hours makes a difference. I think usually when I was recruiting, those were the worst applications.
Troy Sultan (30:39)
Yeah,
I don’t know that.
there’s going to be hiring process that opens and closes in a matter of a couple days. So the first few weeks of job that’s opened, everyone will probably get a look. Maybe if you’re qualified in the worst case, you’ll be a little bit behind a few other candidates, but it’s a big company. There might be multiple roles and there’s just a lot of nuance there. So I wouldn’t generally recommend just the spray and pray and move as fast as possible approach.
Renata Bernarde (30:47)
Yeah.
Got it. Awesome. A referral will always override what an AI system decides.
Troy Sultan (31:14)
I will say generally true. think referrals are excellent tools if you can get them. So I would almost always optimize to get referred into a company, even if you don’t know anybody there and there are ways to do that before I just applied cold.
Renata Bernarde (31:31)
Okay, good to know. And what about Kova letters? I’ve noticed that some ⁓ ATS systems don’t allow you to include them anymore. Are they still relevant?
Troy Sultan (31:46)
I’m going to speak. Yeah, I’m going to. I will speak from a very biased corner of the universe, which is like high tech software companies. I think they’re largely irrelevant. I don’t think they get looked at.
Renata Bernarde (31:47)
I love them, by the way. I used to hate them when I was a candidate, but as a coach, I love them.
Aww,
okay. Well, I think it’s important too that you had the disclaimer about the high tech. I think that there will be other roles where it could be important. All right.
Troy Sultan (32:14)
Yeah, yeah, totally.
It’s also a great exercise for learning how to tell your story. There are a lot of benefits to doing it. I just haven’t seen a lot of evidence in tech that they get looked at.
Renata Bernarde (32:21)
Yeah.
Got it. All right. The most qualified candidate doesn’t always make it through the initial screening.
Troy Sultan (32:33)
Definitely true.
Renata Bernarde (32:34)
Yeah, yeah. What about automated emails and ghosting are just a reality we have to accept now?
Troy Sultan (32:43)
They are a reality. Sadly, I don’t think we have to accept it. think by and large, yes, the economy shifts, companies gain a little more power, unemployment ⁓ dynamics change. We might feel a little unempowered as candidates. I still think companies are fighting.
Renata Bernarde (32:47)
Okay.
Troy Sultan (33:02)
large, massive cultural shifts in what humans expect. ⁓ And that will bite them in the end and continues to bite them. I do believe companies on the tip of the spear know how important candidate experience is. Even if they can’t deliver up to their standard, it’s largely because they don’t have the infrastructure. It’s not because they don’t have a desire.
Renata Bernarde (33:28)
Yeah, I agree. I’ll try. This has been so fantastic. Are there any sort of misconceptions that we haven’t discussed yet that you might be thinking about and want to share with the listeners?
Troy Sultan (33:46)
The one I might leave job seekers with that we did touch on briefly, but I would really challenge job seekers out there to.
Apply directly as a last resort. Try to find more creative ways and make contacts, network your way into someone at the company who can help you, help you navigate the process and then ultimately aim to get referred in by someone. ⁓ or at least hit that dead end before you cold apply without any sort of warmth there. I think that unfortunately the sad reality is it’s not the most high priority channel.
for the recruiting teams that you might be applying to. And thus, no matter how many applications you send, ⁓ you just might not see a very high conversion rate.
Renata Bernarde (34:37)
Okay, okay. And as somebody who works with recruiters and works with automations and all of that, what does that mean to you? That that human factor of connectivity and the warmth you mentioned is still so important. Does it make your job harder?
Troy Sultan (34:58)
I believe that as long as humans are being hired, and it’s not AIs that are being hired, I believe humans will be necessary in the process. I believe that from both sides. If the team, the person, the candidate will land on as a human team, well, they’re going to care about the human-ness of the candidate. And if the candidate is joining a bunch of humans, they’re going to care who and what those humans are like. So
Software and automation ought to elevate and connect to those people more meaningfully during the interview process. So we can both assess for better fit and get more signal. And unfortunately today. Recruiting teams and even candidates on the application side are bogged down in a lot of tasks that are not engaging with other humans. It’s scheduling interviews, rescheduling, finding the right people to put on the interview panel.
balancing across a large set of interviewers, training interviewers, a lot of stuff that really can be done well with software, which can elevate humans to spend more time doing this. This is what humans do great that software can’t. And in my view, software should aim to create more of it.
Renata Bernarde (36:13)
Troy, I think this is going to be such a great listen. Thank you so much. Tell me how people can reach out to you and what type of people should be reaching out to you and your business.
Troy Sultan (36:28)
Yeah, our business services, you know, any growing recruiting teams that are feeling bogged down in the minutia and want to provide a better candidate experience. ⁓ you can find our company at guide.co guide.co and for any job seekers out there that, ⁓ find anything that we’ve talked about today, helpful. I share content regularly a few times a week on my LinkedIn. Just search for Troy Salton or Troy Salton and guide. ⁓ I’d make a job seeker series of a couple of minute video clips.
throughout the week with just tips that are top of mind that I’m noticing in my day-to-day job that might be helpful for job seekers. So it’s a big passion of mine. ⁓ And if you’re interested in ⁓ hearing a little bit more about some of those insights, just follow me on LinkedIn.
Renata Bernarde (37:12)
No, we will put the links below in the show notes. Thank you so much, Troy.
Troy Sultan (37:16)
Thanks so much for having me, this was great.
