Many companies find themselves inundated with over 100 applicants for a single job vacancy, often resorting to traditional job interviews to make their hiring decisions. However, this process can be time-consuming and inefficient, leading to a significant investment of resources for just one hire. How can we address this challenge and ensure that we secure the best talent? Is there a solution that streamlines the hiring process and improves the quality of hires?
In this episode, join us as we sit down with Keith Hulen, the Founder and CEO of SmartRank. Keith brings his extensive experience as a Hiring Manager spanning over two decades to the table, and he’s here to discuss an exciting and groundbreaking solution for talent acquisition and optimizing employee-to-employer connections. SmartRank, the AI system Keith developed, revolutionizes the hiring process by not only saving valuable time and effort but also ensuring the hiring of the top talents for your business.
Tune in to discover how SmartRank leverages and predicts top talent for your business success.
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SmartRank: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Keith Hulen
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’m going to talk to you about something that’s near and dear to me because I think it causes a lot of suffering in this world, and that is this inefficient daunting process by which we go about finding jobs or finding employees, basically connecting an employer to an employee. This kind of really drawn-out process where people are submitting so many cover letters, so many resumes, reading so much, is what keeps a lot of people fearfully clinging to jobs that are making them miserable and a lot of business owners trying to hang on to employees that are just simply not working out and I personally think that we’d be in a much better state if we were to find a more effective way to connect these people so that if something isn’t working out, if someone is miserable or if someone’s not getting the job done, we can much more easily move on without this fear of what comes next and how much work am I going to have to put into what’s coming next. And that’s one of the core motivations for my guest today, Keith Hulen. Keith’s business is called SmartRank, more effective way in which to kind of sort through all the resumes, cover letters, or whatever employment materials that we get when we put out a job posting.
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Keith, welcome to the program.
Yeah, thanks, Stephen. Glad to be here.
Glad to have you here. S, Keith, first of all, let’s start by talking about your story. What motivated you to start SmartRank? What were you observing in your field that you had been in for a couple decades before that?
Yeah, so I’ve been a hiring manager for over 20 years, and me along with all of my peers over the last 20 years have all felt the same way about the hiring process, which is that it was fairly dysfunctional and it needed some sort of improvement. The hiring process, as a hiring manager, from just my perspective, hadn’t changed in 20 years.
I mean, very small nuanced little changes between each one of those but, for the most part, everything was very, very similar and it was very frustrating. And so when I set off to want to start my own company, I knew that this was an area that I really wanted to explore further. What we ended up doing was not coming in with any preconceived ideas. I knew what our problems were from a hiring manager standpoint, I had spent a lot of time hearing from my friends and colleagues and peers about their experiences and I knew what mine were, but what I really wanted to do was understand more from the recruiting side and the applicant side what their challenges were so I just started scheduling hundreds of meetings and we just started meeting with people and asking them what are the biggest problems you have, why are those your biggest problems, understanding more about their process and tools, and we really started to come up with some consistent themes and consistencies we heard in their answers that eventually led us to create SmartRank.
So, I think this is something that a lot of people experience, whether you’re a product manager or whether you’re starting your own business is that you come in with your ideas, you have a hypothesis, and then you conduct these interviews to kind of test that hypothesis or learn something more. From your 20 years plus experience as a hiring manager, what were your maybe like top three, these are the worst problems, and then how did that get amended by what you learned through all these interviews you conducted?
Yeah, well, there’s one that just screams out and that’s the one where there’s a massive disconnect between an understanding between a hiring manager and a recruiter of what the qualifications actually are to do a role. So, I’m going to share a statistic with you and the audience here that is one that I’ve seen a bunch of times. So, 80 percent of recruiters say that they have a high to very high understanding of the role that they’re hiring for. Conversely, 61 percent of hiring managers say they have a low to moderate understanding of the role.
The recruiter, you’re talking about they being the recruiter, right?
Yeah, the recruiter, exactly. So, just in that, that’s just one data point, there’s a bunch of data out there that supports this. You’ll see like another article I read not too long ago said that hiring managers say, on average, half of the people that are put in front of them from an interview are even remotely close to the qualifications they’re looking for. So therein lies I think the real genesis of the problem is that recruiters many times think that they are getting the detailed information of knowing what they need to know to go and find the right person. The hiring manager knows that they don’t have the detailed information. They don’t want to spend the time and the energy to try and make recruiter a subject matter expert. And let’s just face it, that’s an unfair ask that you take somebody that’s been a recruiter for, doesn’t matter, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and say, “Hey, now, you’re gonna be hiring for a full stack software developer,” and there’s no way that recruiter is going to be a subject matter expert in a full stack software developer. I mean, look, even if they’ve been a developer at some point in their career, unless they’ve been a developer at that company doing that specific role for that particular hiring manager, they wouldn’t be able to have a detailed understanding of what those actual requirements are. And, usually, when I talk about requirements, recruiters are always like, “Oh, yeah, no, I do a really good intake meeting and I know exactly what they’re looking for.” No. These are keywords, these are phrases, these are questions that only hit the tip of the iceberg. It’s what job descriptions say. We spend countless hours wasting our time filling out, editing, redoing, rewriting these job descriptions. For what? For keywords that don’t mean anything. If I say, Stephen, are you proficient in Excel? What would you say?
I would say yes.
Yeah, great, me too. What does that mean?
Does that mean you can build macros or that just means that you know how to like expand the columns and create a couple of colors?
That’s exactly right. And just because you put in something like extreme proficiency or —- these are all completely subjective.
So, unless you define the rules of the game, unless you define what that proficiency means, then you’re never ever going to really truly be able to capture what that qualification actually means. Share on XAnd therein lies the real problem right off the bat is that the basis for what the recruiters are out there looking for are not the right things. They’re looking for keywords.
And so that’s the main reason why, whenever you send out a job description, you get unqualified candidates that come in to you and come into an interview and you probably get a lot of qualified candidates that are pushed out, not even brought in, not even given a second look, just given that standard, “Thank you for your application and your interest but we have a lot of other candidates,” blah, blah, blah, email message that a lot of people get when they apply for jobs.
I’ll just say a few things really quickly about just job descriptions alone. Number one, you’re going to push away female candidates right off the bat. Why? Because, statistically, females need to satisfy 100 percent of the qualifications before they will apply for a role. So, if you have 10, 12, 15 qualifications on your job description, then, if a female doesn’t feel like she can do one of those, even though she may be your best candidate out of everybody that could have applied, she won’t even apply. You won’t even get a chance to look at her because she’s not even going to apply for the role. Men are 60 percent, statistically, is what we would need to qualify for —- and, by the way, I feel like that’s probably even high.
This is a psychological thing, right? Like when a man looks at a job description and matches two-thirds of it and he’s like, “Oh, I might as well just apply,” whereas a woman is more likely to say, “Oh, I matched 90 percent of it, but, oh, I don’t match this one, I shouldn’t even bother.” That’s purely like a psychological conditioning type of thing.
That’s exactly right, and the more vague it is, which they’re all vague and ambiguous, but the more vague and ambiguous it is, the more ambiguity you’re creating for a female to try and figure out what they mean. So, if you say proficient in Python, a female may look at that and be like, “Oh, they’re probably expecting —-” or let’s use Excel, if it says must be proficient in Excel, a female may go to, “Oh, they’re looking for somebody that can do macros,” whereas a guy is going to go in there and say, “Oh, so you want somebody that knows how to put numbers in cells and do that whole sum thing at the bottom. Oh, I can do that.” So you got a problem there. Number two, job descriptions and job postings are two separate things. Can we just say that and put that out there to the community? They got convoluted and they got basically put into one document for many different reasons that we don’t have time to go through but what you end up having is a legal document and what should be a marketing document and they’ve shoved the two together and just thrown that out to everybody. And that’s where you get all these requirements and qualifications.
Nobody is really opting out of the application process because of what the qualifications are. People barely even read them. People put so much time into these job descriptions, you’re fixing something that is fundamentally broke at its core. You’re never going to make a good tool to be able to use. And then, worst of all is that, yeah, you’re going to get a lot of people that are going to apply because of what you wrote on there and they’re going to say, “Yeah, I’m proficient in this, I have experience in this, I’m familiar with this, I have knowledge about that,” and they’re not qualified at all. And, by the way, some of the best people that I know that I’ve worked with, if you look at their resumes, their resumes are not great, because, in their mind, they’re like, “I’m not even gonna put Excel on there because I don’t know how to do macros or power pivots or VBA,” and they’re like, “That’s really good stuff and I don’t even know how to do that,” but they know how to do everything else.
Yeah, they can do recursive equations in Excel, which is still more than 70 percent, 80 percent of the people who use the program.
Exactly, but in their minds, they’re like, “I’m not even gonna put that,” because they know what good really is so they don’t even put it down, whereas somebody that, like I said before, knows how to do Sum formula or an If formula or something, it’s like, “Oh, I’m really, really good in Excel. I’m gonna put that down that I’m highly proficient.”
So when you came in to these interviews, you had these notions about the way job descriptions are written, the disconnect between the hiring manager and the recruiter with the knowledge, is there another bullet points that you added to this list where you’re like, “Oh, these interviews told me that this is also a problem”?
Yeah. Well, there was a number of other things that we heard. So, along the lines of candidates was there’s an efficiency problem. So, for everybody out there, so you know, the majority of how it works, and this is for applicants alike, the way that it works is you fill out your fields in the application process, you upload your resume and cover letter, whatever else they’re asking for, and then that goes into an applicant tracking system. Now, sometimes, these ATSs will ask a question like, “Are you legally eligible to work in the US? Do you require a visa?” and that might move you into a different bucket, maybe. But the majority, like 99 percent of applicants, are just going to end up on a big old list in chronological order. So, the recruiter, now, their job is they’re looking at a list, when they come into work on a Tuesday after Memorial Day, they’re going to look and they’re going to see 150 applicants.
Yeah.
Now the first thing they’re going to do, probably, even though a lot of them won’t admit it, is they’re gonna start taking some shortcuts, using the bias that’s in their brain. So I’ve heard everything you can imagine. I’ve heard people that say, “I don’t look at candidates,” because all they can see is a date and time and their name so that’s the only information they have about the person. That’s it. And in chronological order. So, if they see people that have their name in all lowercase, they don’t open them. If it’s in all uppercase, they don’t open them. Sometimes, if it’s an ethnic-sounding name, they won’t open it because they’re thinking, they’re jumping to conclusions and thinking, “Well, they may need a visa or something so I’ve got another 148 applicants I can look at, I don’t need to look at these two.” And then what they’re doing is opening up each and every one of those and they’re just comparing the keywords between a resume and a job description. So, whatever words you put on a job description, like Python, that’s what they’re looking for on the resume. If it doesn’t have that, then they move on to the ones that do.
How did the system get to be this way? Because we all know how the world of work changed, how it changed from assembly line to service and now it’s changing so much with hybrid, remote work, and some of the other types of arrangements. What started the resume? What started the whole idea of these vague words, like “proficient in…” or “excellent communicator” in job descriptions, that’s one that really gets me, like no one has any idea what that means.
Every single job description says must have good verbal and written communication skills. The other problem there is that everybody just copies from somebody else, right? If you need a job description that you don’t have, you don’t write that from scratch. Usually, you’re going to go find it on the internet and you’re going to copy it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else and that’s the job description that’s now proliferated and is going to be used, and everybody thinks that’s acceptable. The resume, actually, the history behind it, Stephen, if you don’t know this, is the first person in history credited with creating the resume is Leonardo da Vinci actually back in —
Like the 15th century?
Yeah, like 540 years ago. And that’s what’s actually kind of funny and also sad is that, if you think about it, we’ve been using that same tool for 540 years. Now, in reality, we’ve easily been using that tool for the last 100 years, easily the last 70, certainly the last 50, and ever since my career, it’s coming on 25 years, but like my entire career, in the beginning, it was going and handing these resumes off to people in person, finding a job ad in the paper or something and then go hand deliver it, but what ended up happening that really changed the game was ATSs, so applicant tracking systems. When those came on the market and the internet really became a tool where people could apply, that’s what changed the game because you started having people not have to physically drive to an office to drop off a resume. Now, they could sit in the comfort of their home in their flip-flops in a bathrobe and submit 50 applications in a day.
Yeah.
And then it got worse, because then they created this thing called Easy Apply.
Oh, yeah. We see that on LinkedIn.
And, by the way, that isn’t good for anybody. It’s not good for the recruiters, it’s not good for the hiring managers, and it’s not good for the applicants. This is a massive myth that everybody, the recruiters in particular, they think that everybody wants Easy Apply. Well, yes and no. Like, sure, it’s nice to have a button you can press and then that’ll apply you to a role but is that going to help you get the role? Not even close, because there’s no information you’re providing to that company that’s going to differentiate you from the other 200 people that hit the Easy Apply button. So, the applicants, they’re not dumb, they don’t think that throwing their resume over this ATS wall and hoping that the ATS gods are just all of a sudden going to love something and call them is reality, that’s not going to happen. So that is where we really started to go down this hill of, okay, now we have tons of applicants we got to manage and that’s really where I think the challenges really started to come in play is when you started to have so many people and they were all coming through electronically. We’re still using the same tools. We still use job descriptions before we had ATSs, we still use resumes before we had ATSs, but now we’ve added in a third tool and all that’s really doing is trying to organize it but it’s not making it any more efficient or effective.
So these job descriptions in these resumes and let’s just say they’ve been around some time since roughly after World War Two, the post-war period, did they ever work? Was there a time period in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, where these things actually worked or were they just much less shitty, for lack of a better way to put it, because we didn’t have the internet where people could easily apply so if you put something in the newspaper, you’d get like 30 resumes and anyone can look through 30 resumes.
Yes. So I do you think that there was a time there was a place for resumes because, look, back in the ’50s, what would you have used? How would you have communicated what you did, what companies you’ve worked for? So back in the ’50s, is there a reason that we needed to have resumes? Yeah. Absolutely there was. But here we sit 70 years later and we’re still using the same exact tool in the same exact way. See, that’s what I think people need to think about is like that was a great tool then, there is enormous amounts of technology in the marketplace today to solve these problems, our technology solves this problem, but there’s a habit that has been created and that habit hasn’t changed —- oh, and by the way, I’m not advocating for get rid of the resume completely, I just want to make that clear, I’m saying that the place for the resume might be more along the lines of like the interview process where you can say, “Hey, I see that you worked at these three companies and that you spent four years here, tell me about your experience there. Why did you only spend six months at this company?” There’s still value to that resume, I’m not saying let’s get rid of the resume, but from a screening perspective, it’s a terrible tool. It is an absolutely awful, awful tool and every single company uses it except for our customers to screen their applicants.
And that’s a great segue into exactly how SmartRank works. What’s your plan for —- or the plan that you’re enacting now for this update in our process by which we screen candidates to get to that interview process?
The way that we look at the screening process today, it’s inefficient, it’s ineffective, it is biased, and, ultimately, it becomes very expensive for a company. What do I mean by it’s expensive? I’ll just kind of work backwards. It’s expensive because when your processes look at all the resumes that come in, and the more requisitions, the more jobs you’re hiring for, the more resumes you’re going to have to look for, and so if you’ve only got three recruiters and now you want to hire another 50 roles or 60 roles, guess you’re going to go hire more recruiters, guess you’re going to go spend more on all these tools and trying to figure out how you can get the best talent becomes an expensive proposition. You also have expensive in the sense of, well, maybe we outsource it to external recruiters. Also an expensive option. You have another thing which is turnover. Many companies don’t track exactly what their turnover is and specifically what the costs are but there’s an enormous cost there. And then you also have hidden costs that nobody is tracking for, like interview-to-hire ratio costs. What does it cost if you have three people in every interview and you have three interviews per candidate and you’re interviewing seven candidates before you make the hire and all of those people in the interviews are $150,000 to $200,000 managers and leaders in your company? You’re wasting their time. It’s not only their time there but it’s the opportunity cost of what they could be doing. Instead of that, they’re spending in an interview process. Well, what if you could reduce the interview-to-hire ratio down to like three to one because you know that those three people are the effective ones, the best ones? It’s expensive, it’s biased. So what our solution is doing is we have a setting where you can —- it’s called the DE&I setting where you can turn it on and it masks all of the data that would typically give bias in the process. So, it masks the name, it masks what college you went to or what college you didn’t go to, what year you graduated, your contact info, your LinkedIn profile, your resume, all of that is all masked in our system until you schedule an interview. Once you’ve decided based upon their specific qualifications that you want to interview them, then it unlocks all that.
So everybody talks about DE&I, very few companies are doing anything specifically about it at the front end of the hiring process and so our solution allows for them to really put their money where their mouth is, if they want to do that. From an effective standpoint, it just gets to the very details of what somebody is actually looking for in order to do a role. So, I’ll give you an example. If we were looking at a position, let’s say it’s a software developer role, we were talking about that earlier, a job description is going to say something like “Must be proficient in Ruby on Rails,” which is a software programming language, and a resume is going to say, “I am highly proficient in Ruby on Rails.” Now, a recruiter is going to look at that and they’re going to say, “Awesome, I have a match here.” You don’t have a match. You have word association. Yes, they both say Ruby on Rails but that’s about the extent of the story, right? So, what we would do is we ask very specific questions with highly specific answers that are ultimately derived from the hiring manager, so it would be more like, “Which of the following best describes your level of proficiency with Ruby on Rails?” it would have four multiple choice answers and one of those answers might be something like, “I can build non-trivial queries with active record model associations and scopes and you’re comfortable with our spec and dynamic text fixture generation and you’re able to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.” Now, if you selected that answer for this one particular role, you might get zero points. You would get nothing for that. Now, it sounds good, sounds pretty technical, but you would get zero points because that’s like bare bones. What they would really want to know is that you know how to do that and you can do the next thing on the list there, which is also I can do action mailers, action cable, active model record association, stuff like that. It’s more effective. Why? Because it just, frankly, asks 100 percent of the applicants exactly what their skills and qualifications are. And, by the way, it’s another DE&I thing, we’re giving every single person the exact same screening process. And then last but not least is it’s more efficient.
Everybody answers the same exact set of questions and answers for a particular role and then they are literally stack ranked by their answers to that. Share on XSo if you’re the most qualified people but you suck at writing resumes but you have the skills that they’re really looking for to do the role, you’re going to move right to the top of that stack rank. Conversely, people that are not qualified to do that role are going to go to the bottom. But here’s the biggest thing for the applicants. They know before they’re done hitting submit on their application what their chances are. If one of the questions, going back to Excel, is, “Which of the four options best represents your level of proficiency in Excel?” and you see one of the answers says beginner, but that’s what your skill set is, you know that’s probably not going to help your chances, but if they’re looking for somebody for an accounting role that has like amazing type of skills in Excel and they talk about all these things and you just don’t have it, you don’t answer it that way and then you just don’t get scored as highly and that’s fair.
It’s the most fair and equitable way to give every applicant a fair shot at getting an interview. Share on XSo, an applicant will come in and they’ll answer a series of questions. How long is the series of questions? Are there any other aspects of the process or is it just a matter of filling out whatever questionnaire that the employer that’s recruiting a position has decided to put in?
Yeah. So, we tell our clients anywhere between 8 to 12 questions is kind of a magic spot. These are all multiple choice or multi select so they don’t have to type in some big long answer. So, it usually takes them about three minutes. We’re not asking behavioral or aptitude questions, usually. This is all stuff that is already information, they already know about their experience. Like if I ask you what’s your level of proficiency with Ruby on Rails and I give you these four options, in like 10, 15, 20 seconds, you can look at those and be like, “Not me, not me, yep, that’s me.” Because we do have normal things that you would need to be able to move a candidate all the way through the process from an applicant tracking system standpoint, we’ll still collect your resume, we can collect your education experience, it parses all that information and we collect contact info and all those other things. The whole process on average takes about eight minutes, which is half of the time that the normal period is where candidates will drop off. So the statistics are 15 minutes is the absolute max of which you’re going to lose — anything after 15 minutes for an application is you’re going to lose about 50 percent of your applicants. Ours is about eight minutes.
Now, for the positions that are a little bit more behavioral, let’s say it’s like a leadership type of management role, are those also kind of brought into like a multiple choice, like I manage teams like this and I have these four different options, I have this level of experience or generally people perceive me this way? Is that something people can throw into there as well? Is there an effective way to do that?
Absolutely. I mean, we have what we call situational questions. So, some of our clients want to say, “Given this situation, which of the following would be your first instinct,” maybe as a manager, maybe as an individual contributor. The other thing it’s going to ask from a management standpoint, we would ask all kinds of important questions that should be asked, like — my point of all this is really that the most important questions are not being asked right now. So like if you put a role out there and you said, “How many people have you manage?” even if you just said on the job description, “Must have management experience,” everyone interprets that differently. Some people are going to say, “Were a supervisor,” but they never hired, fired, managed, or managed somebody out of the organization, but, in their minds, they helped them with questions, they were a supervisor. Very different from actually managing people. When I was hiring for salespeople, this used to be one of my pet peeves. I would be hiring for a sales manager, a manager of people, and I would get — 80 percent of the people I get resumes thrown at me would be sales people, not managers, people. Why? Because sales people, their titles are like Regional Sales Director and Regional Sales Manager. Yeah, they manage a region, they manage a territory, they don’t manage people. I need somebody that’s managing people. So, being very specific about those things, that’s how we’re able to give them exactly what they’re looking for.
And then how are you reaching the potential candidates? Is it that a similar place that all the other traditional job descriptions are where it’ll be on Indeed or CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, anything else? Or do you have like your own separate outreach place where you find the right people for the positions?
We don’t have anything that’s like specifically reaching out to external candidates right now but we do have two things that I’ll mention. One is we’re not going to compete with Indeed or LinkedIn as far as the number of candidates they have, but what we do is, because what we usually hear from clients is when they post a role, they’ll turn it off after a certain point in time because they’ll get so many people so they just turn it off. I talked to an enterprise, a large company the other day, they posted a role on Friday, by Monday, they had over 800 people. They just turned the role off because they had too many —
More than they can handle, yep.
What I tell them is leave that spigot on full blast because what we’re going to do is we’re going to filter — we’re grafting essentially a spam filter for all of those candidates. So turn it on LinkedIn, turn it on Indeed, turn it on built in, or CareerBuilder or any of these sites or Monster and what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring all of those in and we’re going to funnel those into, here’s your 800 applicants but here’s your top 10, here’s your top 10 percent, whatever it is that you want to see, those are where you really should be spending your time, and then we have tools in place to help them get back to the other 790 that aren’t going to be moving forward, like fast tools. You’re at 14 percent. There’s no way that you’re going to be moving forward. We already know that about you, we don’t even need to look at your resume and we’re gonna go ahead and move you forward now and let you know that we’re not going to be moving forward.
Yeah, send that like generic email or message, whichever.
The other thing I’ll throw in is that one of the other challenges in the last year or two that’s related to this is a lot of companies would say, “We’re not getting enough people applying.” So, it’s been a really weird environment over the last few years with hiring. It’s like too many too to not as much, too many, it’s been really —
Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well. Yeah.
Very bipolar. And so, for a while there, people were saying, “Well, we’re just not getting enough people applying,” and my thing I would always ask them about is, “Well, do you have an ATS?” and they’d say yes and I’d say, “Well, how many candidates do you have in your ATS?” and they’d say, “Oh, we have 40,000,” and I’d be like, “Well, there’s 40,000 people. Why don’t you just go find your person in there? They’re probably sitting in there somewhere,” and they’d be like, “Yeah, buddy, you go and search and mine my database for 40,000 people, there’s no way,” because most systems have a Boolean search at best is what they’re doing. So, again, we’re back to these stupid keywords. So, if I’m looking for a Ruby on Rails, I guess I’ll put in Ruby on Rails and Python. It’s just going to pull back people that have those words on their resume and that’s not going to help you.
So, if I’m looking for a certain level of proficiency in Ruby on Rails, I can pull back all the people that have that particular relevant proficiency, that is far beyond what anything else out there is going to be able to do because now we’re talking about what you actually know how to do within that tool or whatever.
So you’re saying that, let’s say you don’t have enough new applicants for this job but you find someone that maybe had applied to an earlier job with your organization, that they applied two years ago, and maybe they’re still in your ATS system or maybe they’re still in your SmartRank system and say, “Oh, well, in what we’ve done before, we actually noticed these 75 people that have this level of experience with Ruby on Rails and maybe we filter it for another couple, you know, two or three questions that are important to your job, boom, we have like 10 or 15 people you can reach out to and say, ‘Hey, are you looking for something now? How satisfied are you?’”
That’s exactly right. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you posted for a senior developer role two years ago and you had a bunch of people apply and they answered the very specific questions. Okay, great. None of them moved forward because they didn’t have the experience level you’re looking for. But now we’re looking for a junior software developer. So, the way that they answered there might be perfectly acceptable for this junior role. So now when they go in and they say — you know, all they have to do is hit one button and it’s going to give them that list of people that says, “Here’s your best perfectly aligned matches.” It even tells them the score that they would get if they were to just apply. And then you can just quickly say, “I wanna recommend all 25 of these people to apply,” hit two buttons, they recommend all 25 of those people to apply, and now you’ve got 25 applicants immediately in your system that you know are qualified to do that role, not based off of some BS keyword.
What we’re really talking about in the grand scheme of everything is just a system that really was catered toward like the pre-internet age, the era before, the era when people were just like walking in, handing in resumes and, as a result, every single hiring manager had the capacity to usually read through most of their resumes, but now we had kind of moved on into a different world. We’ve also seen some other kind of more recent adjustments in our working culture. It started before the pandemic but with the pandemic, we started to get some certain preferences regarding in-person versus remote work, certain amounts of schedule flexibility is becoming a more and more important aspect of a job, especially to some of the younger generations. Are there any aspects in your system that are accounting for some of those things? Some of those like, okay, we need someone that’s, especially with developers because developers can usually find a job remote if they really wanted to but maybe you want someone that’s willing to come into the office three days a week or something like that.
Yeah. And, again, this all comes back to the screening questions that you’re asking. Or you could even ask the question of which of the following are you willing to do, and one could be “100 percent fully remote, I can’t come into an office,” another option might be, “I’m willing to come in one to two days a week,” maybe three to four times a week, or, “I’m willing to come into an office every day,” if that’s what the role requires, like that’s the type of stuff where the applicant can just tell you, “This is what I’m willing to do. This is what my preference is,” and then that’s either going to be a match or it’s not. Look, if you fake that and you try and hide and pretend it doesn’t exist and then you hire that person, and now, all of a sudden, somehow that got missed and now you’re telling them to come into the office five days a week and they’re like not going to have it, guess what you’re going to have on your hands? Churn. You’re going to have somebody that’s going to transition out of the organization because of something as simple as not clarifying exactly what remote hybrid actually means.
Hybrid, right? That could mean anything. That could mean like you’re remote most of the time but there’s this office you can come into for your meetings or we expect you in four days a week but Fridays, you can work from home, and anything in between.
Stephen, I’ll give you another example. Travel. I see travel required on job descriptions all the time and I used to have a — still he’s a good friend of mine, I worked with for a number of years, and he used to hire for solution architects and I remember when I told them about what we were first doing, he’s like, “I know what I would ask them. I would ask them about travel right off the bat.” Now why? Why is travel such an issue? I’ll tell you why. Because on the job description, it says travel required and nobody knows what that means because nobody defined it and so what you end up having is somebody that joins and they’re traveling two days a week and they’re like, “Wow, this is a lot,” and now you’re asking them to travel four or five days a week and they’re like, “Whoa, I’m barely able to do one or two.” So I have a customer right now that had this challenge where they were turning people over because there was no clarification as to what travel meant and so now they have a very specific question related to travel that says, “What percent of the time are you willing to travel consistently week after week all year long?” and the answers are like, “None, I’m not able to travel for whatever reason, zero to 25, 25 to 50 percent, 50 to 75 percent. The only one that allows you to stay in the process is 75 percent. That’s a lot of travel, right?
Yeah, that is.
50 percent of travel is a lot, right? But for this role, they know from experience that it’s going to be at least 75 percent of the time they’re going to be traveling. So what’s the point of bringing on a perfectly qualified person that is ideal for the role only to find out later on down the road that they have some sort of a restriction that doesn’t allow them to travel more than 25 percent? You need them to travel 75. Guess what? It’s not going to work out. It’s not going to work.
And now, from the hiring manager’s perspective, does this represent a little more thought put into who we’re looking to hire beyond what they traditionally have done in copying a job description and changing the words or is it just a different type of thought?
This system was created by hiring managers, okay? Let me just say that right off the bat. So, this is giving hiring managers exactly what it is they’re looking for. In almost every one of my first interviews I ever used to do with people, it was not an interview where I was asking behavioral and situational questions, it was a screening interview. Now, why am I doing the screening? Because I know that I’m the only one capable of really getting to the real detail of what I need to get from them. I can’t get that from the recruiter, they’re not going to give me that detailed level of screening, so I would spend my first interview screening people, not interviewing them, screening them, because if you can’t check the basic boxes, I can’t move you through the process, right?
Yeah.
And so now we’re just adding one more interview in the process, which isn’t good from the candidate standpoint either. But here’s the thing, if I’m a hiring manager, let me tell you what hiring managers don’t want is for you to send them five resumes a day and say, “Hey, do you wanna meet with any of these people?” They don’t want that because that, (a), it wastes their time, (b), they can extract a little more context but not a ton, and so what you end up having is a situation where they’re very frustrated because they’re just tired, and so then it turns into another issue where the recruiters are like, “They never get back to me. They never let me know about these candidates I sent over.” Yeah, I know, because they don’t want to do that process. So now what they can see is details that they want to know about the person and that’s the most important thing. I don’t just see that you have Ruby on your resume, I can read, that doesn’t do anything, but what I can see is do you actually have experience using SQL features, like CTEs, Windows functions, triggers, you can analyze and profile an application for performance and memory issues. If I know that you have actually done that, awesome.
Now I’m getting information I need to know. And the last thing I’ll say about this is for the recruiters out there right now that are listening to this and they’re saying, “Well, hiring managers don’t know what they want or what they need,” I would say if the hiring manager doesn’t know what they want, how the hell are you supposed to figure out what they want? That’s my first thing I would say. And my second thing to that I would say is this is a tool that helps. At some point, you have to get that level of detail. It’s going to come out eventually, whether it comes out in the interview and wastes everyone’s time or it comes out after they get hired, it’s going to surface at some point so you might as well surface it as early as possible, and what this does, I’ve been with hiring managers, Stephen, that are like, “You know, no one’s ever asked me that level of detail question about what proficiency means, that’s actually a really good question. What does that mean?” and it gets them thinking about, “Oh, what am I really looking for?” So it helps the whole process.
It helps create clarity for the applicant, for the recruiter, and even for the hiring manager, to really put specificity to it. Share on XWell, it sounds like way better of a process and I’m thinking about this from the standpoint of what would make the workforce in general, the average worker, happier, more productive, less likely to churn, which is what kind of everybody wants, and it looks like right now we have this problem that nobody knows what they want. Oftentimes, applicants don’t know what they want. The hiring managers might not know what they want with these vague descriptions. And then, of course, we don’t know how to actually match them very well because these vague descriptions, so people out there looking to get a new job or looking to make some sort of career transition need to do some personal reflection. What do I want? Do I want three days in the office, two days at home? Why is it that I want that? Do I want something that involves more interacting with other people or do I want to be the person that just puts their headphones on and codes all day? And they’re all perfectly fine ways to be, if that’s the way you work best, you just got to be that and if they can reflect on that and then if, of course, the employers, the hiring managers can reflect, “Okay, what do we need out of this role? Which program are we going to be using? Which program do we need this level of proficiency? Define more clearly what do we actually need this person to do? What role do we need this person to play on the team? Are we looking for another person that could potentially be a team lead versus just another person to just crank out some code, the junior versus senior developer?” and then bring that together with this SmartRank system that will kind of get through the list a lot quicker and hopefully what that’ll do, what I’m hoping is that it’ll make it so that the process isn’t as daunting. And so if you have a job description, you’re like, “Okay, we need this new job,” if someone’s not working out, you’re more likely to say, “Hey, listen, this job’s not working out, we’re gonna try to find someone else because someone else better is out there,” and the person who’s working in a job that’s making them miserable will say, “Hey, I thought this job seemed right for me but based on who I am or based on what I’m motivated by, it’s just not really working and I’m gonna go out there and apply to other jobs,” and hopefully find something else that’s going to be fitting better for them without having to go through all these applicant tracking system processes where you’ve written 500 cover letters that were never read.
Yeah, that’s right. And the other thing that we didn’t really talk much about but there’s an enormous amount of data that should be used and collected in this process because without a data-driven conversation, you’re having an anecdotal conversation, which means that there’s a lot of assumptions and opinions and this happens every single day at every company between recruiters and hiring managers now, they have an anecdotal conversation. And so if you don’t have data, how can you ever figure out what you’re trying to get for that role in the future? If I don’t have data on qualifications for literally every single applicant that’s ever applied, how am I going to know that that person down the road that that qualification is even important? Maybe it’s not.
I mean, it’s just like that your pet peeve like good verbal and written communication skills, no one knows what that means. I got to the point when I was looking at some of these job descriptions that I would see it and I’m like, “Okay, do you really need that for this role? Does this role really require that? Is this something that’s really going to be utilized in this role? And maybe there are some roles where it’s just not utilized.”
That’s exactly right. Oh, the amount of times we’ve gone through a job description and taken it apart to really figure out what they’re looking for as we created questions and how much of that was not accurate, I couldn’t even tell you how often that happens. Like where I’ve been on a call and somebody said, “Oh, I don’t know who wrote this. I mean, that’s not my requirement. I don’t know why that’s on there.”
Yeah. Someone should know why, right? Because it is really determining who you get and who you don’t get applying for a job.
Exactly. Exactly.
Oh, my gosh. Well, Keith, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all about your solution to a problem that’s been pretty terrible and pretty terrible for quite some time. I’d say pretty terrible since roughly when the internet started just changing the way we go about finding people for job roles and job positions. And I wish you the best of luck going forward. If anyone is listening is interested in getting a hold of you, that website, is it smartrank.ai? Is that correct?
It is, yeah. And AI stands for actual intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence.
Oh, nice. I love hearing that. Actual intelligence. We’ll have to clarify that. So if you want some artificial intelligence, maybe go to ChatGPT but if you want some actual intelligence, check out smartrank.ai, and that’s for both people who are looking to hire people as well as anyone out there listening who may be looking for their next job, their next role, something else to apply to, right?
Yeah. So we have a system called Smart Apply that they can go to and that’s where they can actually start putting in their information. Yeah.
Fantastic. Well, thank you again. And I’d also like to thank everyone out there listening to Action’s Antidotes and encourage you to take inspiration from these stories, encourage you to go about finding ways to make the life that you have the life that you want. If it is a new job, maybe find a new way to apply, given that these ATS systems keep spitting your resume out for using the wrong words, or if you’re hiring, maybe you keep spitting the wrong people out. And also just tune back into Action’s Antidotes for more inspiring stories about people who are doing things much like Keith is doing where you’re looking at problems and finding a way to solve it, finding like, “Okay, what can I do about it? How can I put something together that’s really gonna move the needle on everything?”
Awesome. Well, I appreciate you having me on, Stephen. Thanks.
Thank you so much.
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About Keith Hulen
Keith is a chronic problem solver with over 20 years of sales, operations, and leadership experience with multiple startups, mid-sized companies, and Global 500 organizations. Keith has been a hiring manager for over 18 years and is inspired to bridge the gap between talent acquisition and hiring manager teams once and for all. Keith has a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Northern Colorado.