Recruiting Operations: Jeremy Piker on Fixing Hiring Now

Key Topics

• Recruiting Operations Before "RecOps" Was a Word
• The AI Resume Overload Straining Recruiting Operations Today
• Why "Upload It to ChatGPT" Is a Recruiting Operations Liability
• How AI Should Actually Support Recruiting Operations, Not Replace Them
• The Seven-Round Interview Problem Breaking Recruiting Operations
• Recruiting Operations Break Down the Same Way in Every Industry
• The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript With Jeremy Piker

Recruiting Operations Before "RecOps" Was a Word

Fifteen years ago, Jeremy joined a tiny national staffing branch inside Randstad, right after it acquired Vedere Placement Pros. His team ran hiring for Bank of America across the country — a job that, at the time, nobody else in the industry was structuring the way he was.

The comparison stuck because it was accurate: consistent service, regardless of location. To get there, Jeremy's team had to invent the job before it had a name:

• Built dedicated operational roles when "recruiting ops" wasn't a title anyone held
• Designed a workflow from sourcing through hire through quality-of-hire tracking
• Replicated that model across Randstad's broader business

That structure — recruiting operations as its own discipline — is exactly what today's TA leaders are being told is a new idea.

The AI Resume Overload Straining Recruiting Operations Today

Every recruiting operations function is built on an assumption: a human can review the applicants a job generates. Jeremy says that assumption just broke.

Run the math and the problem compounds fast:

• AI-polished resumes make weaker candidates look stronger on paper
• The same AI tools let one candidate mass-apply to hundreds of roles in minutes
• "If you take those two numbers and exponentially add them at 30% each, the number of candidates applying to every job is way more than any recruiter can physically manage."

The result, in Jeremy's words: "everyone looks like a CEO even though they're a recruiting coordinator." Recruiting operations built for a trickle now has to survive a flood.

Why "Upload It to ChatGPT" Is a Recruiting Operations Liability

The instinctive fix to resume overload — dump everything into a generic AI tool and let it filter — is the one Jeremy and Jonathan both flag as reckless recruiting operations practice.

Jonathan put the risk bluntly: "You have everyone's, throwing us 'Hey, upload your job description and resumes to ChatGPT and we'll filter everything,' and you'll get sued is the result."

For recruiting operations leaders, that's the warning sign to build screening workflows deliberately — not to outsource judgment to a tool with no accountability for the outcome.

How AI Should Actually Support Recruiting Operations, Not Replace Them

Jeremy's actual use of AI at Randstad points to a very different recruiting operations philosophy: augment the recruiter's conversation, don't automate around it.

He used AI to digitize senior recruiters' institutional knowledge so junior recruiters could ask sharper questions on calls they'd normally have run on checkboxes alone:

• Keyword matching is repeatable — AI can own that part
• The recruiter's time should go to the conversation AI can't have
• The goal is a recruiter who can discuss a CPA's actual job, not just scan for the word "CPA"

The Seven-Round Interview Problem Breaking Recruiting Operations

Ask Jeremy where recruiting operations breaks down first, and he doesn't point to sourcing — he points to what happens after volume hits: interview loops that keep growing because nobody trusts the process anymore.

The cost compounds on both sides:

• Hiring managers absorb interview coordination on top of their actual job
• Candidates lose engagement waiting through round after round
• More rounds get added specifically because the underlying system isn't trusted to work

Recruiting Operations Break Down the Same Way in Every Industry

Across tech, finance, and healthcare clients, Jeremy saw the same recruiting operations failure pattern repeat — regardless of industry, regardless of company size.

His diagnosis reframes what most TA teams assume is an org-chart or headcount problem:

For recruiting operations leaders evaluating their own stack, that's the actual audit question: not "do we have the right people," but "does the workflow itself hold up under volume."

The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript With Jeremy Piker

Introduction & Jeremy's Path Into Staffing (00:00–02:00)

Jonathan Duarte: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone, got a great guest for you today, Jeremy Piker. The best way to say this, because we haven't had anyone like Jeremy on thus far, but Jeremy has come up through Almost, I guess you'd call it industrial staffing. From Randstad. And so this is gonna be a great opportunity a little bit, learn a little bit more inside about how big staffing works, but on the granular side of he's been able to see all the problems multiplied over and over again at scale from small companies to big companies. So Jeremy, w- welcome to the show.

Jeremy Piker: Thank you very much. I appreciate it getting connected here. My life's been a little bit crazy with a transition and moving from Colorado, but it's nice to be able to sit down and talk with you.

Jonathan Duarte: Oh awesome. So how'd you start in staffing?

Jeremy Piker: Yeah, staffing. Honestly, it's really funny. A lot of people I talk to in staffing kinda said they fell into it. They [00:01:00] just ended up at a staffing company looking for a job at one point and then they've grown within the organization. For myself, it's something I honestly pursued. I was working in retail management at the time. I had a regular customer that used to come in the door, and I used to believe I, I learned my customers one minute at a time. They'd come in, buy their cup of coffee, we'd chat. And I had a customer who approached me at one point and told me he was running his own staffing firm and he was looking to expand. And at that moment I wasn't ready to quite take that leap of faith into something I, I didn't quite know. But I thought about it, it planted this kind of deep seed in the back of my brain. And so when I decided I wanted to get out of retail work and looking for a more kind of stable job and something that wasn't always had me on 365, 24/7, I started looking at staffing companies. And I started applying some roles, and I applied to a job at Randstad. At that point they had just acquired Vedere Placement Pros, and they had this tiny little national staffing [00:02:00] branch. And this was 15 years ago or so. Honestly, it was an outlier. Everything else within national staffing here was just local branches all scattered across the US, but not a lot of kind of a, a network that was behind it. And so I was hired for this team that was doing national staffing for Bank of America, hiring a lot of mortgage positions just prior to the mortgage crisis here, and that's how I got my foot in the door.

Jonathan Duarte: And then what I know you said it was a little bit different from, traditional staffing at the time. How do you define that, for our team member, listeners who are TA teams- Yeah ... who may not really understand the difference? Because, there was the retail staffing light industrial offices- Yeah, no,

Building the "McDonald's of Randstad" National Staffing Model (02:00–06:00)

Jeremy Piker: no. Exactly. I honestly, I don't use this as the, a negative by any means, but one of the analogies I used to use when I'd explain to people what we did is I referred to us as the McDonald's of Randstad. And the fact that- Our goal was to be able to [00:03:00] provide the same type of service here regardless of where you were hiring. So Bank of America, for example, has offices scattered across the US, and when you're working with isolated localized branches, you're working with independent people, independent locations here. But one of the things that my organization, my group was able to do here was to work with these large enterprises across the US here from a top-down, which really allowed me to get a better sense of the types of people that they were hiring regardless of that local market. Figuring out what worked in one area and how we could scale that to across the company. So when they would come to us with job orders here, we were able to support them regardless of what their need was, but in a very consistent manner, rather than having- ... to work with independent local branches.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah, and that, so it's it's interesting. It's almost like a scaled version. And now I... the analogy of McDonald's makes a ton of sense because it doesn't matter where you get [00:04:00] your Quarter Pounder, it's still a Quarter Pounder.

Jeremy Piker: Exactly ...

Jonathan Duarte: but there's nuances in the hiring team, and enterprise still, every company still has that same thing, is the same role as an accountant you know- On paper, it looks the exact same.

From Recruiting Ops to the AI Resume Flood (06:00–11:00)

Jeremy Piker: Yep.

Jonathan Duarte: Inside the culture inside the tools they're using- ... how they respond, what the inside... if you're a KPI company, totally different matrix. And was that, that version that you started up and you were working in, 15 years ago, did you say that became normalized or a new, new-

Jeremy Piker: Yeah Entity? Very much it was Wild West at that moment. At the time, it was even before the time of like e-signatures existed. And so in order to hire on talent on a national basis, as a recruiter, I was sending out FedEx packages that we were putting together, overnighting them out to talent and having them sign their I-9 paperwork, sending it back, and we'd have to scan the documentation [00:05:00] physically back in. And so because of that, it allowed us to really focus a lot on the operations of that team and how that was gonna ultimately scale. We created roles, like operational roles. At the time when I was first hired on, there was nobody doing the operational side of the work. Here as a recruiter, I was responsible for both sides of the- Yeah operations, the hiring, a little bit of all. But then we realized as we were looking to scale, we needed indibe- individual operational experts, and we need to set up a workflow essentially that aligned with from the A to Z, from the beginning of hiring, the sourcing part of it, all the way down to the hire, and then maintaining that quality of hire. Once somebody's out to work, how successful are they on that assignment here, and how does that continue to look in the long term for them? So we were able to build systems that ultimately Randstad used to replicate some of the positions that we had created, and the workflow design is something that ultimately scaled [00:06:00] across the entire company as they look to continue to expand this model that was relatively low cost, but was able to provide a consistent service for the customers.

Jonathan Duarte: Wow. And so that was... tru- truly that's amazing because you j- you just don't... This, and this is exactly why I do the podcast, is to find people like you who have been and seen. This was the scaling of recruiting 15, 17 years ago, and now we're talking about "Oh, do you have a recruiting ops person?" A- as if it's something that's brand new. It's like, no, you guys were doing it 17 years ago.

Jeremy Piker: No,

The Rise of Trusted Networks Over Noisy LinkedIn Connections (11:00–17:00)

Jonathan Duarte: Ab- You built the underlying role. Yeah

Jeremy Piker: Yeah, absolutely. That was a... it was ultimately about designing systems that helped our team succeed, but helped our customers succeed here. And I think one of the hurdles in a lot of organizations here is they get to be really large and those individual roles become very siloed. And actually one of the things I'm think I'm excited about with AI and some of the new [00:07:00] technology that's coming out here is I do feel this compression reoccurring here. Teams are running thinner, they're running leaner, and instead of having individual people be responsible for just one sector of the business or just one section of the business here, cross-functionality feels like it's gonna be more critical and more important to someone who can see all the steps that are happening along the way. Maybe they're a subject expert or a subject matter expert in just one section of the business here, but it's their ability to understand what the domino effect is and what the upstream and downstream impacts of what they're doing and how they connect with that larger picture. And I think as organizations are compressing right now due to the technology, it's gonna be a much more critical skill set in the future.

Jonathan Duarte: I wanna deep dive into this one because I think this is critical for any TA leader regardless of the size you're in the company, or somebody in recruiting who wants to go into leadership. [00:08:00] Or if you're a recruiter and truly a workflow person, the... I swear this is your moonshot time because if you understand recruiting and you understand workflow from, as you mentioned, top of the funnel, bottom funnel, and backwards, forwards, this is the time that... This is your time to shine.

Jeremy Piker: No, I absolutely agree. No, I was just saying I absolutely agree with that here. I think for a long time we hired people to do a repeatable task really well over and over, but it's the wild west again. Honestly, it feels to me the industry is at a moment that is back when I first started, with Randstad at that point, is we're first looking at these models saying, "How can we design these to s- be efficient, to maintain quality here, to meet the end goals that we're trying to meet, and what is this gonna look like for us?" And everybody's having those same conversations right now. It feels like there's an opportunity to step back from... quite frankly since the internet [00:09:00] age we've done nothing more than digitize resumes here. I think there's a lot more that's out there, and I think there's a lot of people that are starting to have those conversations. And I do think it feels like kind of that wild west when I first started in. And I'm really excited obviously about that potential change and how that's gonna drive the industry forward.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, 'cause I agree with you. 'Cause it's... it's so easy to look at LinkedIn and everyone complaining about the, the volume of AI resume slop. And I use that term and we'll talk about that in a second. And then also job seekers and other people complaining that, "Oh, I'm not gonna take an AI interview because I don't like it." And but there's no, no one's... Everyone's looking right in front of their face to try- ... and they're like, "Oh, this is broken." It's like they don't understand the context of it. Which, I'm, I'll probably have to put a LinkedIn post out about this because I just think it's just continuously going on. But we'll add this, is that with [00:10:00] AI there's really just two components going on in the industry. AI made it easy for job seekers to make their resume, m- resumes look good, as they should. Yep ... but that also means they often look better than they actually should because they don't- ... clearly define their experience. And so if I think something probably 30% to 60% of resumes are being AI written, even if it's low it doesn't matter j- because here's the other part is now candidates have AI to post to and apply to hundreds of jobs instantly. If you take those two numbers and exponentially add them at 30% each, the number of candidates applying to every job is way more than any recruiter can physically manage. Absolutely. And so we've hit a wall- Everyone has hit a wall as a recruiter, even up into executive roles, 'cause everyone looks like a CEO even though they're a recruiting coordinator, [00:11:00] right? Yep. We're in this spot like, okay, everyone's hand in front of their face, how do we solve it? And you have everyone's, throwing us "Hey, upload your job description and resumes to ChatGPT and we'll filter everything," and you'll get sued is the result. So how, how- Yeah, that's how we do

Jeremy Piker: the back end right now. There's some repercussions that are interesting to watch as that comes through, and I think we're just starting to graze the surface maybe at this point of what that's gonna look like, but.

Where AI Should — and Shouldn't — Change Recruiting (17:00–23:00)

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And I think... So that's, so imagine so this is the, if we say this is the river that's happening right now and knowing your sense of, hey, this is what happened with Randstad 15 years ago, and we experimented a couple things here that started working, we started gaining traction. What are some likely expectations you'd see of how this thing's gonna change?

Jeremy Piker: I think right now, and I'll run with your river analogy here- Yeah ... because I'm a huge fan of analogies. But I think what we're seeing right now is a rise of the lifeboats, [00:12:00] honestly, is this, this current is flowing- ... it's flowing fast and- it's not carrying anyone where they need to go. And the reality is I think what's happening is people are starting to build lifeboats right now, and a lot of that's what I'm seeing come in is small communities and groups of people. There's a lot of noise, this rushing river running by you here. You need to survive it. And so people are starting to look in small groups here of trusted partners. I think that's the biggest hurdle that we're seeing, is it's hard to know what's fact, what's fiction and you're definitely talking about that with, resumes, on both sides, honestly. I think the employer's equally as culpable in this situation here as the job seeker in leveraging AI to write a job description or however that looks. But the question is that even the reality of the role? What's this role looking like in three months, six months? How is the culture of the company shifting with all of the changes that are coming through? There's a lot of just noise. There's a lot of questions, and no one can seem to figure out an answer. But I, I, what I do see happening right now are [00:13:00] smaller communities that are coming up within this. There's some that I'm participating in myself, and quite honestly some of the most exciting, engaging conversations I'm having right now are happening in these small group forums where it's me and, a handful of other people who are other leaders in the industry from different sections of the industry in parts that I've never even had the opportunity to tap into, and starting to have conversations about what that future's gonna look and how to resolve some of these underlying issues.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. What, how... If someone wanted to find groups h- well, let me... How, talk a little bit more about the groups and then how you met up with these individuals- Yeah ... because I think this is a really critical time for this, is, authenticity. We're seeing more and more now it's, it is the only source of trust- as AI gets bigger and bigger. So building your personal brand around and building your connections is gonna become... and not just, "Hey, I connected with 1,000 people on LinkedIn last week," but [00:14:00] authentic, "Hey, oh, you need some help with staffing? I understand this. Call Jeremy," yeah. You we need that as leaders, as, and even as job seekers. It's gotta be back to the people who know you, who can help you, and you can add value to. And if you're not willing to add value, then this isn't gonna work anyways.

Jeremy Piker: Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Honestly, one of the first things I got involved with, it was a job search council, actually. My time at Randstad came to an end last October, and I'm looking at the world around me and I'm seeing all these people and I'm seeing the complaints on LinkedIn from both sides here of everyone struggling to align essentially the right employees to the right jobs. And it seems really obvious, and I don't even know where to start. So I joined a, a job search council, which I moderated the group here, and there were six of us here talking about the market, talking about the job search, and each of us came from a different background. I was talent acquisition. There was someone from human resources. We had a, a Harvard MBA, [00:15:00] data researcher and a data scientist. A- and so this collective kind of came together to take a moment. We met on a weekly basis to talk about how we're building resumes, how we're applying to positions, what's working for us, and what's actually not working with us. And every week we would meet up and we would talk about the hurdles that we were seeing out in front of us and how to be able to navigate them a lot more. But it was this authentic connection. Everyone had their own roles, own responsibilities. You had to come to the call prepared to talk about what you were doing. There was a individual accountability for each person, but we showed up as a group to be able to compare notes, to understand- ... the reality rather than listening to the noise that was out there.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I think it's so easy to just get sucked into, again, your hand in front of your face if you go on LinkedIn and you're gonna doom scroll on career stuff. I mean-

Jeremy Piker: Absolutely ...

Jonathan Duarte: ugh. I- Yeah. No, I mean-

Jeremy Piker: Especially now with the videos. Now. Yeah, that's the thing is it just shifted from there. I think that was my first kind of insight to saying that, "Hey, there's something [00:16:00] here in, in these kind of groups of people." And I think about- I don't know, I think about traditional communities where everyone had a, an individual role, but they were part of a larger collective and how organizations operate, and it started leaning more into that. For me, I think my most interesting growth happened when I started, like you said, more genuinely networking here. When I was taking time to meet with people like you, but to jump on a call and have a real conversation about what was happening rather than kind of that surface level kind of vapid communication, but really being able to dig in a little bit deeper. There's been some conversations I've been in. Just a couple weeks ago we were talking about in this collective here, which is called Proof of Concept actually. They've been doing a bunch of sprints. Chris Patten, who used to be with SIA he's overseeing this here. But we jumped on a call talking about beyond the resume, and there were, I don't know, a half dozen people from different parts of the industry again here. One a large former, McDonald's talent acquisition [00:17:00] leader here, myself someone from the VMS and MSP space, some independent owners that were doing their own thing. But a, a group of us coming together in more of kind of a think tank type conversation about what does this look like moving beyond the resume? We know the resume is, feels like just a lot more noise. To your point, you're talking about Everything looks great. And when everything looks great, nothing is great here. And how do we start to discern this here, and how do we move beyond the current concepts and kind of structures we're locked into, and what's gonna be the future that's gonna be able to build to be more successful for the employee and for the, employer?

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I, I know we could go on for hours on this topic. Yeah. But then let- let's go back to, we had to transition in the late '90s to applicant tracking systems. Yes ... most of that was forced on us all by two things, which was the flow of resumes. Most everyone was applying by [00:18:00] email so you couldn't... it was just one email box, resumes @, acme.corp. ... And then OFCCP came involved and said, "Hey, if you're a big company, we need... you have to go through these structures." And then we just had Monster and CareerBuilder just sending tens of thousands of emails to you because you paid them as a check for quantity versus quality, which- That concept has never changed. Why? I... that's a whole another podcast. But where do you think, like in, in, from your experience in Randstad in the last couple of years, and, we started seeing AI starting trickling in towards your, in the last two years. Where do you think it's gonna change staffing?

Jeremy Piker: Oh, there's where I think it might change staffing and where I hope it might change staffing. When AI was first handed to me and it started to be integrated into my work suite, I, and I [00:19:00] was- remember talking to a colleague here about saying that like this feels like it's gonna be a paradigm shift of how organizations have functionally been able to work. I started using AI to digitize knowledge of senior recruiters helping my junior recruiters to be more- ... successful in their screenings and in their initial process, but it was never about removing the people, it was about allowing the recruiter to have a better conversation. I think a lot of times, and we've all had the conversation with a recruiter where they're just going off the check boxes here, saying, "Yes, SQL. Yes" and they're just hitting all, all the experience that the individual has here. But for me, that's relatively easy to do. Keyword matching is something that is a repeatable task that honestly AI can probably do. So can we elevate the recruiter to have a more engaging conversation? As a recruiter, I don't always know, I don't know the intricacies of a CPA's job by any means here. I've never [00:20:00] done that. But using some AI, some better institutionalized knowledge, I can potentially hop on a call with a CPA and be able to ask better questions from the get-go about the nuance of their role, why they do what they do, how they do what they do, rather than just checking boxes. So for me, I really do hope that's gonna be the future of hiring, is that we're gonna start to have better human-to-human conversations, more authentic conversations, rather than those robotic recruiting check the box conversations.

Bringing Your Whole Self to Work (23:00–27:00)

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. So on, on going down the same v- this same vine on authe- authenticity and upskilling the recruiter to get to the, the meats and potatoes- Yeah like the culture, which we've been, we've been going through check boxes 'cause it spells SQL have you used it in the last 30 years? Yeah ... to I, I saw this great post on LinkedIn a couple months ago from a recruiter who said- I [00:21:00] got most of my placements an exec- in, in executive recruiter because I asked one simple question of everyone that I placed. "What's the most important thing to you in your career?" Has nothing to do, "I'm an accountant, this is the kind of company I'm looking for. This is a software," none of that, but that w- "What's your next step? For you, Jeremy, what's your next step?" And th- everyone would just, the whole bar would change and be like I'm in security and a lot of people think I'm into security, but I'm really an entrepreneur and I wanna be able to grow." And then you're like, "Now I got the candidate. Now I know what role, and I can find out if they're gonna be a good fit or not." That's the stuff that you're not gonna get in the resume, and those are the questions we c- we can get to recruiters and help them to [00:22:00] understand how to elicit in those calls. And an AI, could possibly be able to pull this thing off, but I think we're gonna see it... This is gonna take a long time for that to happen. So but I- yeah ... still think it's that, it's the conversation and getting to the motivation why someone is interested in moving or not moving, Yeah, I think- it's,

Jeremy Piker: it's

Jonathan Duarte: because you can't- ... it's really cool to use the tools to do that ...

Jeremy Piker: you can't separate the human from the work. I think we all like to pretend a little bit that there's some sort of magic wall in between our personal and professional, presences. But the reality is, for me even just my own experience, I was always my most successful when I could show up as my best self. I could be curious, I could ask questions, I could build something new. When I had that autonomy and had the opportunity to do that, that's when I was successful. It wasn't when I was just doing a repeatable task over and over here really well, but it's when I had the opportunity to bring who I am. Because I'm a very curious person naturally [00:23:00] in life. It's not something I turn on and off. There's no switch that occurs at work, and sometimes, just being able to have a platform where I can work with a team, where I can ask a lot of questions, dig in, probe deeper, I can kinda start to see the little pieces underneath the puzzle. But that's how I operate in my daily life here. And I think that's one thing that we often don't consider or don't take the time to really acknowledge, is that human aspect of it, is we aren't robots here. We're not AI. We can't switch things on and off. And I think trying to figure that out here, of not only what you did, but why you did what you did, what type of person are you more holistically, and how can we bring you into the organization and allow those parts of you to thrive? That's why you're an entrepreneur. And we were talking about this earlier is that's where your space is here, where you have that autonomy to grow. It's because it's fundamental to who you are.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah. All right, let me ask in the last couple minutes here, Where do you wanna go? Are you thinking about going... Do you wanna do [00:24:00] staffing in getting to that world and I- or do you wanna get into enterprise or do an operational reboot on someone's talent acquisition? If someone said, "Hey, this is Macy's," or another major retail, would you wanna go in and with a team who wanted to do a complete rebuild or a vendor? What, what kind of piques your interest now that like you've seen it all happen. Yeah. What's that next step for you? Like, where's the most interesting spot in your mind right now?

Jeremy Piker: Honestly, the operationalization, honestly. I think it's... I don't know if it needs to be an entire rebuild depending upon what that system- Yeah looks at here, but I think it is that opportunity to step back and say, "What are we doing? Why are we doing this here? Is the technology working for us? Is it working against us? If it's working against us here and it's not solving the problems we need to solve, what is new and how can we rebuild this?" Because I think there is just so [00:25:00] much opportunity right now in that space. You don't need a... And I've heard others talk about this quite a bit here, but you don't need a giant tech stack anymore to solution for some of these things. There's a lot more ad hoc opportunity to build something here that's gonna be able to fundamentally shift how we're working. So for me, it's That's where I get excited, honestly. That's where- Yeah ... I get really jazzed and I love to talk about, is when I have that opportunity to come in, ask those questions, and really look at the fundamental workflow and the operations of what we're doing, why we're doing it here, and what we can do to make sure that's serving the purpose that it needs to serve.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, that's... it's cool. You w- And in my experience, there just aren't that many operators who know the workflow backwards and forwards. And y- the process is gonna be different for every company. Yeah. But generally the same. We know your HR tech stack. Your HRIS is part of it, your applicant tracking system, any of those [00:26:00] three to five-year contracts you already signed. Those things all need to be looked at, but I think it's that one part is where do we wanna go to regardless of the technology yet? Just where are we trying to get to?

Jeremy Piker: Yep.

Fixing Broken Interview Processes and What's Next for Jeremy (27:00–32:00)

Jonathan Duarte: Then take the step back and say, "What are our known constraints, and how risky are they?" So what? We have an ATS. We have 12 months? Great. It's only 12 months, and we can abandon it, but is it getting us the workflow we need to solve the business problem?

Jeremy Piker: Yeah. No, absolutely. And I just, again, I think there's a lot of opportunity to tear that down a little bit. Working in enterprise staffing for such a long time and supporting so many different customers across different parts of the industry, supporting the technology space, finance, healthcare. I was really across the range, but the breakdowns that I saw were consistent, ... regardless of what type of industry it was in here, it was the same pain points, same problems that were [00:27:00] occurring. And I think there's a lot of opportunity because I've seen these breakdowns scaled to recognize, like, how fundamental this is. It's not an organizational problem. It's a systems problem. It's a workflow problem. It's a knowledge problem here. Those are the things that we can solve for, and the technology's starting to provide us the ability to do that.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting is, before we close is what... you mentioned a couple of the industries. Where do you see... what, w- what are some of those areas that typically break down? And then h- is it specific to, if it's healthcare, are most healthcare companies breaking down in, in similar areas, and is it similar to retail? Or what differentiates? Is it centralized recruiting versus decentralized? Where are some of those kind of pivot points or inflection points in by industry that most people have a breakdown that it's actually sometimes hard to diagnose?

Jeremy Piker: Yeah. That's a good question. Honestly what comes to mind right now, just off the cuff here, I think one of the first breakdowns [00:28:00] occurs throughout the initial hiring process and that volume. We're talking about that volume that you're receiving here and you're keyword scanning individual resumes. Managers go through, and at this point I'm seeing a lot more additional work occur for leaders. It's not uncommon to have a seven-round interview process right now. That feels entirely flawed to me. It's not a great talent experience here. It's a lot of work for a hiring manager. I don't know any hiring managers that are just hiring managers. They have other jobs to do, but now they're trying to coordinate seven rounds of interviews. They're losing engagement from the talent. The talent's oftentimes not getting the type of communication that they need to feel confident, that they're excited. Part of finding a job should be a little bit exciting. It's this new opportunity, this new prospect, but we're losing that momentum here because we don't trust the system, so now we need to have seven rounds of interviews because the actual system itself doesn't work, and so we have to continue to insert ourselves into that process. And I [00:29:00] think that's becoming a huge hurdle right now for both job seekers and employers.

Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And it's ama- it's amazing me. I heard a I heard a podcast from Alex Hormozi who was talking with now who... Oh, he was on the Diary Of A, a CEO

Jeremy Piker: podcast.

Jonathan Duarte: Okay. Yeah. And he broke down recruiting like I have never. Yeah. He did a reverse funnel of a sales funnel for recruiting, and he said, "If you're a business owner..." I gotta do a pod- I gotta do a review of this on LinkedIn, is he broke down the sales funnel. Hey, you get leads, you bring them in, you do all this stuff. And he goes, "Companies really only have two problems. It's either a supply problem, like they don't have enough s- they're not selling enough- ... or it's an operations problem, which is they can't fulfill it fast enough, and that's usually- ... a people problem. Two problems- The recruiting part is usually the most horrendous that no one looks at. And he said, "If you're the CEO or [00:30:00] you're the guy in charge or lady in charge, look at your job descriptions. You will not believe how horrendous they are compared to what you're trying to sell. And if you're always having an operations problem, start there because you're not hiring the right people 'cause your s- that funnel is broken." I'm like, God, and he's the king of, you know- Yeah ... business strategy. And I'm like, wow, I'm so glad to hear. I can't wait to find clips of that thing and blast them, because it was just straight to the core of, here is the problem. Like seven round interviews, would you put your... Would you try to sell somebody seven times? You know-

Jeremy Piker: No ... no. To me, that point is you're not selling anymore there, here. A- again it's fear. It's if we're not doing more things, then we're not gonna generate the results. And it- it's ignoring that it's introducing more inefficiencies and more breakdowns, within that individual process here. And again it's killing the talent experience here, but it's also [00:31:00] killing the hiring manager who's trying to balance their workload amongst trying to organize all these processes. So yeah- Yeah ... really it's an interesting time I think right now for the industry. I think there's a lot of opportunity for, some of these things to shift.

Jonathan Duarte: Yep. All right. Thank you so much, Jeremy. How can people find you online and re- and reach out?

Jeremy Piker: LinkedIn is probably the best way to go. Find my LinkedIn page here. Definitely don't hesitate to connect with me, and I'll do my best to see what we can do to schedule some networking or a meeting or connections beyond that point. Been doing a lot more writing. I've been spending a lot of time honestly just thinking about this, and I'm finding that sometimes just sitting down and digging in a little bit deeper, even trying to separate my own thoughts because there is so much noise right now, has been really cathartic for me. So definitely LinkedIn's probably the best way.

Jonathan Duarte: Oh, awesome. Very great. Thanks for hav- for joining us, and maybe we'll have you back once we can figure out some of these workflows that are starting to transform this authenticity- Yeah,

Jeremy Piker: yeah ...

Jonathan Duarte: in the recruiting process. 'Cause God knows we need for some really good ideas and some people to prove them out so that the, the large majority who don't scale quickly can slowly implement what's actually working, right?

Jeremy Piker: Yeah. Yep.

Jonathan Duarte: All right, thanks very much.

Jeremy Piker: Thanks, Jonathan.