AI Recruiting Tools and the Death of the HR Stack

The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript with Brian Fink

[00:00:00] Jonathan Duarte: Hey, everyone got a great guest that many of you probably already know, but if you don’t, Brian Fink I think is one of the guys in the space that I’d say certainly doesn’t mind about telling his thoughts about what’s happening in recruiting space and TA.

[00:00:16] Jonathan Duarte: And that’s what we’re gonna jump into today. Brian, I wanna give a quick intro if someone doesn’t know you, which I think is gonna be odd, but tell us about you and how you even got into recruiting.

[00:00:25] Brian Fink: Okay hey, I’m Brian Fink. I’m five 10. I’m 260 pounds. I am Maddie’s dad and I’m married to Allie, but I don’t think those are the factoids that you guys are looking for today.

[00:00:36] Brian Fink: I am a recruiter headhunter, whatever you want to call it these days because I’ve often hear it being referred to as a talent engineer, which I think is a little far fetched, but we’ll probably get into that a little bit. I am the managing principal at the Rework Group. We focus on working with companies that are 50 to 500 employees to help them grow their executive bench when it comes time for them to search.

[00:01:00] Brian Fink: Prior to that, I was at McAfee Twitter, Apple AWS. I’ve got the fang DNA, so to speak and I’m excited to help recruiters go further and faster and really take on this new challenging world. I think that your audience probably knows me ’cause I show up on webinars quite a bit because I am passionate, like those that I stand on their shoulders like a Shannon Pritchett.

[00:01:23] Brian Fink: Or Steve Levy that I’ve really been benefit, that I’ve benefited strongly from the open source community, if you will, when it comes to sharing recruiting knowledge.

[00:01:32] Jonathan Duarte: And that’s why I actually created this podcast. ’cause there aren’t, I’d say of all the, and you’ve been in this space and going to conferences and stuff.

[00:01:40] Jonathan Duarte: I was talking to Chad and Cheese a couple years ago. I’m like, why don’t you guys get into more like HR because they still have a huge part of recruiting in smaller businesses and whatnot, but it’s not their wheelhouse. It’s a different vibe.

[00:01:55] Jonathan Duarte: So my intent was how do we get the knowledge of people who are showing up at the conferences ’cause HR and there’s a lot of recruiters that don’t get the conferences. How do we get that mindset to them? And so that was my whole purpose was get the leaders who know this stuff and are talking about it get them to talk about it. So that’s what I wanted to do. And thanks for being on the show to dive in.

[00:02:25] Brian Fink: I don’t think that there’s. I think there are two types of recruiters that exist in the world, and those are the ones that are curious recruiters and the ones who are not.

[00:02:33] Brian Fink: The curious recruiter is going to continue to build things and pass that knowledge down. The not so curious recruiter, they’re gonna try to build a moat and try to create this impenetrable fortress where people can’t come in. And when you do that, you also make it where you can’t come out and learn other things.

[00:02:52] Brian Fink: So just, my 2 cents on, like you said, Gerry Crispin Steve Levy, Steve Wrath Michael Goldberg. I can just go down the list. Katrina Kibben. All these people who have been instrumental in building our community. And I hope that somewhere, somehow I’ll rank on that list someday.

[00:03:09] Jonathan Duarte: I think you’re getting in there pretty quick, buddy. Hey, so let’s jump in. So we talked the other day real quick about the new stack or non stack of Talent Acquisition tools. And one of the other things I like to point out in these calls too, is there are so many different types of recruiting from small business where you have limited tools to enterprise where you can just pick and pull and you have tons of structures and stuff.

[00:03:39] Jonathan Duarte: So when we talk about different things, I want to keep that in mind ’cause somebody’s trying to recruit and there are single recruiter and maybe there are HR in doing recruiting, what their ability to pull off the shelf and do is gonna be a little bit more limited than somebody who can just pull a ton of tech stuff together.

[00:04:09] Brian Fink: Actually maybe I want to go simplistic is that Jonathan, you and I the other afternoon we were talking about a comment that somebody had made on LinkedIn about the stack list tech stack. And I really think that it’s a useful frame where people can whether you’re a single operator in HR or you’re in an enterprise, I think that we need to look at the fact that all companies have stripped away.

[00:04:32] Brian Fink: They have the ability to strip away dedicated HR platforms and replace them with AI. Spreadsheets and improvisation, that curiosity, that curious angle. The pitch I’m going for I think is relatively simple is for most of the last two decades, and this is one of the reasons why I didn’t go to some major conferences this week.

[00:04:53] Brian Fink: I think that HR teams have bought a stack and they talk about what is your tech stack and what is your ATS and what is your CRM and what is your HRS and what’s your performance management tool? What’s your employee engagement tool? What’s your learning or your LMS system? Each tool as a vendor, a contract, an admin, a renewal conversion or success rate that nobody looks forward to.

[00:05:17] Brian Fink: The stack is the operating system of the people function. What’s happening now, and I hope that a lot of vendors are not delusional about this, is that the tech stack is collapsing. It’s not because the problems went away, right? Like you and I were talking at the pre-call about the fact that Charney made a tweet that the problem is not finding more people.

[00:05:42] Brian Fink: It’s what you do when you find the people, right?

[00:05:45] Jonathan Duarte: Yep.

[00:05:45] Brian Fink: This is an instance where because AI can now handle the workflow layer, this is a business where tech vendors are gonna have to move into the API business. Most of those tools that we’re solving problems, dude. They don’t need to exist anymore. You don’t need a $40,000 ATS license to parse resumes and to score candidates.

[00:06:06] Brian Fink: You need a good prompt and a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is everlasting, right? That is what all recruiters are working on. You don’t need a performance platform to run a calibration struggle cycle. You need a structured doc that somebody can use who can run a meeting.

[00:06:24] Brian Fink: What I think the irony is that all these people met up in Vegas with a lot of vendors and the irony is that companies are going stack list because they feel that it actually has more sophistication than these legacy tools. If you go to Claude and I’m a big Claude Head or

[00:06:41] Jonathan Duarte: I am too.

[00:06:42] Brian Fink: You can plug in skills, you can work in projects, you can build all these different sourcing, screening, drafting summarization components, you can plug in an API to Notion or an Airtable spreadsheet for pipeline tracking, for headcount, for notes, and then you can use Notion to record the conversation.

[00:07:03] Brian Fink: And therefore you can use that as a calibration call or as a shared review. Or you can use Loom or YouTube or Substack to do an on-demand learning with no admin layer. Okay, so everything I’ve just replaced, I’ve replaced on the ATS side. I replaced Greenhouse and Lever. I got rid of Workday Bamboo.

[00:07:24] Brian Fink: I’ve gotten rid of Culture Amp 15 five. I’ve gotten rid of Cornerstone. I’ve gotten rid of the Ceridian. I’ve gotten rid of Qualtrics. I’ve just taken you from $800,000 in spend to $40,000 in spend.

[00:07:39] Jonathan Duarte: Yep. With one person who can pull it all together and modify it as your systems change and your requirements.

[00:07:46] Brian Fink: And what I would say is that I don’t know if CTOs are listening to this conversation, but they need to be aware of it because in many instances there’s technology that’s purchased that the CTO is left out of the conversation, and it’s driven by the heads of recruiting.

[00:08:03] Brian Fink: I think that we’re seeing stack lists in the sales organizations. There are a lot of different venues as to how this plays out.

[00:08:11] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And that, let me clarify for some people who don’t understand from the technical side what we’re talking about. And if you’re not playing with tools and experiment with even free stuff with Claude, just get on it or look for a new job at this point.

[00:08:27] Jonathan Duarte: And I’ll be totally honest about it. It’s if you’re not inquiring into what your job’s going to look like and how to be better at a recruiter or in HR, in recruiting. It’s this world is not gonna be for you.

[00:08:42] Brian Fink: I want to double click on that. I don’t necessarily think people need to get out of it.

[00:08:45] Brian Fink: I would prefer that they do rather than hurt themselves. But they’ve gotta be curious and they’ve gotta experiment. You are absolutely correct, JD is that this bifurcates the market into two very different futures for recruiters. One that is shrinking fast. The person who is like the ostrich who has their head in the sand, or the one that has real runway that is using AI as jet fuel.

[00:09:06] Brian Fink: Yeah I just think that there’s a clear bifurcation there.

[00:09:10] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. And there’s the gray area where people who are experimenting and getting into it, and that’s fine, but you also have to listen to podcasts like this. Listen to the guys like Brian who are doing this stuff and talking about it, because there are tools out there that you can’t use or you’re using them the wrong way.

[00:09:28] Jonathan Duarte: Like you can’t just get a screening system and saying, wow, it found all these great candidates. If you don’t know how that screening system actually worked and you can’t test against it, did it really match people correctly?

[00:09:40] Brian Fink: What’s in the black box? I’m one of those people that I’ve come out and I’ve gotten some heat for this, I’m a sourcer by trade. But I think that pure sourcers and that pure sourcing function is gonna be largely obsolete by 2025 when you look at the market and you see what you can do with the GPTs or what you can do with Apollo. What that means is that people are gonna have to be AI fluent recruiting operators.

[00:10:04] Brian Fink: They’re gonna have to run full cycles with that leverage, with that curiosity.

[00:10:08] Jonathan Duarte: Yep. So let’s talk about beyond the stack. What are you seeing, like when you go to conferences and you talk to other recruiters where’s the market today and where do you think it’s gonna be at the end of 2026?

[00:10:27] Brian Fink: What do I see? I think that high volume corporate recruiting teams that are like 12 people in 2025, they’re gonna be four people. In nine months, and what I think is gonna happen is you’re gonna have those four people using AI to do what 12 people did before.

[00:10:48] Brian Fink: I think that RPO firms are gonna get crushed on margin because of the value prop is that they’re gonna say something like we have warm bodies and a process. This is gonna be what AI is gonna replace first. And also to that generalist agency recruiters who are just taking every rec that they can get and spreading themselves out. They’re gonna discover their access to LinkedIn and their Boolean search skills are not differentiators anymore.

[00:11:20] Brian Fink: They never really were, but now it is gonna be undeniable. One of the reasons why I work up market in executive search is not just because executive search is gonna survive, right? It is gonna be an area where the stackless native operator is gonna operate at scale.

[00:11:41] Brian Fink: They’re gonna be able to run a full search cycle solo at a quality level that used to require a team, and it’s gonna bring individuals forward who have genuine domain expertise in a specific vertical. My team at the Rework Group — what we do is we work with companies to bring in engineering leaders, engineering leadership.

[00:12:04] Brian Fink: It is that principal engineer. It is that software engineering manager who’s a player coach. It’s that director, it’s that CTO. What we’re doing is we’re able to bring in our genuine expertise because of what I’ve seen through 20 years of doing this type of search. We’re not necessarily saying that we can charge less.

[00:12:24] Brian Fink: We are saying, hey, we can do things at a better skillset because our output to cost ratio is generally better than a team, and that’s gonna fundamentally change executive search. I kind of frame this the stackless era that I’m projecting.

[00:12:42] Brian Fink: It doesn’t threaten specialized search. It validates it, right? So going back to that corporate recruiting team where you, instead of having 12, you have four. You may have one that focuses purely on GTM. You may have one that focuses purely on technical recruiting. It’s not what gets automated, it’s what gets more valuable.

[00:13:03] Jonathan Duarte: Let me ask you this on a separate note. How do you think there are, like in retail and hospitality — if you think about restaurants and hotels they’re huge corporations often, but very decentralized recruiting. How do you see any of this AI and these tools affecting decentralized recruiting?

[00:13:42] Brian Fink: I think that Hung Lee shared something the other day on Twitter about the fact that LinkedIn is moving towards more of an integrated ATS, it can do that call recording, it can do that tracking of those activities. I think that as recruiting becomes more decentralized and as more pressure is put on the hiring manager, not only to make the hire, but to govern the process — that the tooling will supplant them and keep track of them. Like a CRM keeps track of a salesperson.

[00:14:55] Brian Fink: So I think people are talking about it. I just don’t think it’s voices that are necessarily being heard. For instance, there was one young lady that I was having a conversation with that she thinks that LinkedIn has tapped out how many recruiters they can sell recruiting licenses to.

[00:15:15] Brian Fink: And then a different individual, Shannon Pritchett said, look, they’re gonna have to sell to hiring managers. They’re gonna have to make that part of the core function of where things are at.

[00:15:25] Brian Fink: And then a third individual Christine Welsh who I was having a conversation with, she said, why is LinkedIn running commercials during the Today Show? And that stuck with me because I wanna understand the philosophy of why they’re showing hiring assistant as a commercial during the Today Show. Is that somehow an audience that we have not tapped as a source of hires? Or would it be better to show that on Bloomberg?

[00:16:49] Brian Fink: What I think you’re talking about is pattern recognition, right? Like honest market intelligence. I think that if you can convey to them that it’s a network that’s actually built on relationships, then it becomes the whole product. And I think LinkedIn is trying to do that. I think that the BREW 360 changed the algorithm.

[00:17:05] Brian Fink: For those of you who don’t know what BREW 360 is — it is the propensity that your circle on LinkedIn, rather than it getting larger, is getting smaller and more concentrated. I’d recommend going back and pulling the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter so that you can understand where things get more valuable as everything around it just gets more commoditized.

[00:17:42] Brian Fink: Sourcing has largely become commoditized. And by that, LinkedIn is rolling out all these innovations — are they innovations or is it a second mouse? I think about it in terms of Apple. Apple didn’t invent the iPhone. Somebody else did. There’s a systematic escalation of who is gonna be in recruiting and what tech is gonna be in recruiting. The market for transactional recruiting is gonna shrink by at least half over the next three years.

[00:19:07] Jonathan Duarte: I think it’s gonna be interesting next nine months as this stuff rolls out. I’m gonna probably write a post called I’m Breaking Up With ChatGPT because I just canceled my entire company’s licenses.

[00:19:30] Brian Fink: Oh, really? Wow. That’s aggressive. This goes back to my thesis that the tech stack is collapsing.

[00:19:41] Jonathan Duarte: Yep. ‘Cause we were using ChatGPT like most people. We understood the research, it could help write. But it couldn’t tool right — it couldn’t do tasks very well. And then quite honestly, the memory was just killing me. I’m just asking the same thing and it just couldn’t get it. And then we started with Claude and we’re like, holy, this is 10x what we were doing before.

[00:20:12] Brian Fink: So you bring up the case that people had ChatGPT, they had Cursor, they had all these different tools and it all collapsed into Claude.

[00:20:24] Brian Fink: Oh I love the fact that I can be in Slack and talking to my team but go from Slack to Claude, never leaving Slack and text message my wife on iMessage.

[00:20:43] Brian Fink: Actually, it probably took me like six minutes because I was just — this goes back to the curiosity angle. If you are a curious, empathetic, tenacious, and mischievous recruiter.

[00:21:00] Brian Fink: When you go into Claude on your Mac, you have Chat, Cowork, and Code. If you go into Cowork, you can go into Customize. You have skills that you can customize and you have connectors. For instance, I’ve connected through the MCP, I’ve connected Apollo, and it’s what I use to produce my call sheet. I say something like, show me 10 CTOs that are hiring in the Atlanta area, or software engineering managers — bring me back their contact information — and it pulls back a list of 10 people, their phone numbers and email addresses. I don’t have to leave Claude.

[00:21:41] Jonathan Duarte: It’s the first thing I go into every day. I don’t open up my email. I go on Claude.

[00:22:42] Brian Fink: I just, you just described a $70 connection, right? You get 5,000 lookups a month on Apollo and you pay $20 a month to have the pro plan of Claude, so you can add all these things to it. This is not like going out and buying a Mac mini to run open-source stuff.

[00:23:17] Brian Fink: Just tinker, just be mischievous, man. If you spend the time being curious and mischievous, then you can focus your empathy on driving a better outcome, a better relationship with Mr. Client or Mr. Candidate. And that tenacity — don’t stop when you think you’ve hit the limit. My dad of blessed memory would say, Brian you gotta do one more.

[00:25:16] Brian Fink: One of the things that I think is ingenious about software engineers is that they want to know how has somebody made things more efficient. And efficiency is akin to laziness, right? How did you give back more of your time so you could do less of your job? That’s what AI is about.

[00:25:44] Jonathan Duarte: Mischievous — and it’s gonna break. So that’s why it’s not a do it once. It’s a mindset shift.

[00:25:54] Brian Fink: And then you’ve gotta be curious to solve for the variables. You’ve gotta be resilient to go after those answers. The recruiter that is successful today is curious, empathetic, tenacious, and mischievous. The recruiter that is going to succeed six months, 12 months, 18 months, two decades from now is gonna have to embody those four things — and those things will not be replaced by AI. They will only be augmented by AI.

[00:26:20] Jonathan Duarte: Oh, that’s a great way to end it, Brian. How can people reach out to you and learn more?

[00:26:28] Brian Fink: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Substack at Forward Motion. You can reach out on LinkedIn. You can shoot me an email to brian@thereworkgroup.com. I’m here to be helpful. I’m here to make sure that our community goes further, faster, and that we go from better to best.

[00:26:46] Jonathan Duarte: Awesome. Thank you so much. Great to have you on, and we’ll reschedule another one — a screen share.

[00:26:52] Brian Fink: Awesome sauce, John. I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for making it a great day.

Connect with Brian Fink on LinkedIn: Brian Fink