Latest / Recruiting Evolution / FDE+ Executive Search | The Executive Recruiting Guide to AI Success: Training, Tools, and Transformation with Tricia Tamkin and Jason Thibeault

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FDE+ Executive Search | The Executive Recruiting Guide to AI Success: Training, Tools, and Transformation with Tricia Tamkin and Jason Thibeault · Recruiting Evolution

• Tricia Tamkin [00:00:00]: We want you to get real good at extracting what you need from Gemini, Claude and Chatgpt. It's going to save you so much time. It's super easy to get distracted by all of these tools and I want you to put blinders on. Don't look at those tools unless you have a situation where multiple people in our industry tell you this tool is amazing. You have to look at it. Not one person, not two people, three or four people tell you that over the course of a month, that would be a tool that it would make sense for you to do some light evaluating. Kortney Harmon [00:00:47]: Welcome to the full desk experience. I'm your host, Kortney Harmon. In the next few weeks, we're going to be specifically talking to the executive search industry and leaders who are ready to break through to their next revenue milestone. Over the next few weeks, we're going to deep dive into proven strategies that have helped top search firms scale from steady performers to industry powerhouses. This series is going to provide you with actionable intelligence that you need to scale and have sustainable growth. Each one of these upcoming episodes is going to bring you conversations from industry veterans who have successfully navigated the challenges you're facing right now. Tune in over the next few weeks. Join us as we uncover the strategic shifts necessary to transform your practice and capture high value you opportunities that are going to truly define your firm's revenue. Kortney Harmon [00:01:41]: Everybody, please give a warm welcome to Tricia Tamkin and Jason Tebow from Moore Essentials. I have definitely worked with them before and if you haven't, you're in for a treat. They have so many exciting things and if you've worked with them, you kind of know what to expect. So, Tricia, with that being said, I know you have a lot to cover. I'm going to jump out and you let me know if anybody has any questions, feel free to put it in the chat. We will manage that and then, Trisha, I'll come back on if there's any questions. Tricia Tamkin [00:02:10]: That sounds wonderful. Thank you so much, Kortney. Kortney Harmon [00:02:13]: Amazing. Thank you. Tricia Tamkin [00:02:15]: All right, welcome everybody. My name is Tricia Tamkin. I'm Jason Thiebaud and this is Future Proof youf Firm, Strategic AI Decisions for Recruiting Leaders. So thanks for joining us. We know it's March, the end of March, but we're in Chicago and there's literally snow all over the ground. So we kept our winter. Thank you. Slide here. Jason Thibeault [00:02:39]: That is appropriate. And this is just some pictures of some people we found. Now you can probably pick us out in here. That's us. And that's about as much introduction as we typically give. Tricia Tamkin [00:02:49]: Yeah. Because you know what? Doesn't it suck to go to a session where you want to learn something and then you have to spend like 20 minutes listening to why the trainers are qualified? If you guys want to know more about us, go look us up. We're easy to Google. This is really what we look like. But we're not on camera because it's hard when there's two of us sitting next to each other. So we're not on camera for you guys today. All right, our objective, we want to. Jason Thibeault [00:03:13]: Walk you through the decisions you need to make if you are a firm owner regarding incorporating AI and what you want to do about AI and when. Tricia Tamkin [00:03:23]: Right. There's six major decisions that you need to make, and we're going to walk you through them. This tech is moving super fast. Obviously, you're hearing it everywhere, you're seeing it everywhere. I just want you to know, think of how everything changed when we got PCs on our desk. Think of how everything changed when we had Internet access, when we got cloud computing, when we got these massive computers that just sit in our pockets now for mobile. AI is bigger than all of these. Jason Thibeault [00:03:54]: Yes. The approximate growth rate of AI, the rate of adoption over about the first 18 months of its existence is roughly equal to the first five years of major Internet. Not like arpanet, stuff like that way back in the day. I'm talking like 1995 to 2000. That's the growth rate. That's how much growth we've seen, except in under two years. Tricia Tamkin [00:04:17]: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So let's address the question first that we hear all the time. This is the most common question that we're asked. Will AI replace us as recruiters? Legitimate question. Jason Thibeault [00:04:32]: No, but a recruiter using AI will replace you if you're not using AI. Right. This is how every tech change has come from the automobile forward. I'm sorry if you were a blacksmith back in the day, but now we just go to a tire place. When computers came along in 1980, and I was like, oh, no, accountants don't have jobs anymore. Look at this. QuickBooks. We don't even need the accountants. Jason Thibeault [00:04:59]: Of course we need accountants. But we need accountants to know how to use those computers. The ones who didn't, well, they're retired. Tricia Tamkin [00:05:06]: They are. Right. So we're not going to be replaced by AI. There's too much humanity necessary in the recruiting process. And we wanted to just share this with you. I found this absolutely delightful. Anthropic is the organization that makes Claude, which is one of our favorite large language models. And just last week they posted this. Tricia Tamkin [00:05:30]: They're an AI company and they're basically saying, no, please don't use AI when you apply to work here. Jason Thibeault [00:05:38]: We don't want 3,000 AI cover letters that look basically the same. Right. Like, this does not help us at all discern you as candidates. I also like to think that this means that there is a need for humans in the recruiting process. So long as we need to make sure that there's also humans on the other end. Tricia Tamkin [00:05:54]: Yeah. So don't worry about AI taking our jobs. It's not going to happen. I do want you to be very worried about what happens to you and your firm if you are not on top of this technology because it's a problem. You will get beat out by other recruiters who have tremendous efficiency and influence during the process. Jason Thibeault [00:06:20]: Yeah, it's kind of scary because we talked about that rate of adoption. If you combine it with this and this idea that you have to know AI and use AI, our rate of adoption is the same as that computers from 1980 to 1989. Like, if you combine all those together, like, we gotta be on board with this fast now. Tricia Tamkin [00:06:37]: Like, you're already behind the curve if you haven't already started implementing. So in case that's you, let's take you through some of the decision points. Like I said, there are six of them. Okay. And we're going to walk you through all six. I'm going to encourage you to make these decisions before doing anything. Okay. So the first thing that we have to decide as a firm owner, are you going to optimize your firm or are you going to optimize the individual recruiter? Right. Tricia Tamkin [00:07:13]: So there's pros and cons to both. Here's how to think about it. Jason Thibeault [00:07:17]: So if you've got this restaurant and you develop a signature recipe and you've got, you know, your whole theme for your restaurant, and you want this to be a chain that regard that, you know, survives chef turnover? Or do you want these like all star chefs that are super well trained, that may very well join a competing restaurant or frankly start their own place up. Right. I sometimes have thought about this as almost the Henry Ford effect. Like Henry Ford didn't need to hire more Henry Fords. Right. He needed to hire people to do the work. Well, in this case, we might be interested in some sort of place that survives regardless of chef, which means that we own the product. Tricia Tamkin [00:07:55]: Right. So when we look at let's make the assumption that you're going to go in the direction of optimizing your firm and not optimizing the recruiter. Right. What ends up happening for you is you don't have as big of a risk of the person you developing, leaving and starting a competitive company. Right. You have standardization across your company, which is much easier to scale. That's awesome. But it takes a lot more work up front. Jason Thibeault [00:08:28]: Well, and I was going to throw out this idea of refer to resistance. Sometimes you do run into stuff. Now on the other hand, sometimes growing people and making them be the ones that's going to cause resistance to where they're like, ah, you know what? I didn't really do my training yet. Like, I didn't go through this. I didn't. And when you focus on your firm, it's just a thing that's in place. Tricia Tamkin [00:08:48]: At your firm right now. Could you optimize your recruiters? Of course you can. You're going to see more productivity, you're going to be able to attract more entrepreneurial people and you're going to get there faster. Okay. The problem with it, like I already said, is that you're developing people that can leave and become your competitors. Jason Thibeault [00:09:11]: You mean entrepreneurial people that you mentioned? Very same people would be the wrong people that we want to bring in because they are going to take some practice with them or they're going to become competitors or just learn from our business and go make their own business. Tricia Tamkin [00:09:27]: Right. So there isn't a wrong answer to this question. Some of our questions there are wrong answers, but this one there's not. Every firm is different. How you want to approach this is entirely up to you. Both of them are good options and sometimes your best choice is to blend the two together. Right. The only thing that would be wrong in this is if you just wing it. Tricia Tamkin [00:09:53]: Like, don't wing it. Like, this is your company, you own the company. Make these strategic decisions consciously in advance and decide for yourself which is the better option. Optimizing the firm or optimizing the recruiter. We can. Inside a ChatGPT, there are these things called GPTs. Okay. And it's basically like a little AI that you can build. Tricia Tamkin [00:10:21]: And the beautiful thing about it is all of the instructions for those GPTs are private to the person that built them. And those instructions are the gold. Right? Those are basically baked in prompts inside of a little GPT. And you can make all of these for your firm and just give access to your employees. Then they can't take it with them. Jason Thibeault [00:10:47]: Yeah. An example of this might be I have a GPT or miniature AI tool that is going to be used for something like I'm going to make a candidate presentation. Now I can have all of my employees learn how to do it and not just learn how to write them, but learn how to make the AI help them write them. Or they could just go right into the tool and do it automatically. The second one doesn't foster as much growth, but it also makes sure that our presentations look pretty much the same every time in formatting and style and so forth. And that again, that technique doesn't walk out the door. The blended solution is to have at least somebody on your team that can build them yourself. Right. Jason Thibeault [00:11:25]: That can modify and create and all that. Hopefully that trusted person is very trusted. Tricia Tamkin [00:11:31]: Right. Like it should be you, the owner, you should be the person that understands how to communicate directly with the large language models. So if we build these GPTs, what do they do? Okay, so you're going to get this deck. Don't feel like you need to quickly screenshot or your phone and do that. Jason Thibeault [00:11:51]: If I hit the button twice, it goes right to camera. Tricia Tamkin [00:11:54]: Yeah, you don't need to. You're going to get this deck. And these are GPT that we have built specifically for the recruiting industry. Jason Thibeault [00:12:05]: Okay, so wait, there's not 32 though. Tricia Tamkin [00:12:07]: There's not 32, there's a whole bunch more. We don't even put the sourcing ones in here. I think we have a dozen sourcing ones and we're continually building new GPTs. Jason Thibeault [00:12:18]: We personally have a page of custom ones. Heck, we have pages of custom ones that we don't even share. Tricia Tamkin [00:12:23]: Right, right. So what we do with these GPTs is we build them into a browser based tool. So here are all of these are GPTs that you can get to in order to do whatever it is that you need to do inside of your recruiting desk. Right. So we have a ton of these and I would encourage all of you make GPTs and give access to your team. Okay. Browser based is the best way to do it because it's always there for you. Right. Tricia Tamkin [00:13:02]: So these are some of the different areas that we make GPTs. And I mentioned something at the beginning. You know, a lot of times what you're hearing when it comes to AI is operational efficiency. Right. Can you drop the candidate notes and their resume and the job description into a GPT and have it write your entire candidate presentation for you in your format? Heck yeah, you can. And that is enormous operational efficiency. But I think we're losing sight on the influence that we can derive when we use AI the right way. We can go in and we can give the same resume, the same interview notes, the same job description. Tricia Tamkin [00:13:50]: But then we can also do an analysis and have the AI predict the personality profiles of your hiring manager and your candidate and then have the AI based on the resume, the personality profiles, the job predict, the questions that your hiring manager is going to ask and. Jason Thibeault [00:14:11]: Tell you what answers they, particularly with their background and personality type, would like to hear. Tricia Tamkin [00:14:17]: Yeah, influence. Look for influence, guys, because that's really where the gold is, is when we can leverage this not to write your blog posts, to close more deals. That's what we want it for, right? Jason Thibeault [00:14:30]: A little bit of me that's got a lean manufacturing background always looks at trying to eliminate my pinch points. What are my slow points in my process and now I get to say instead of who, you know, what assistant, what GPT can I write to eliminate that, to make it a faster process? Tricia Tamkin [00:14:47]: Yeah, it's fantastic. So that's your first decision. Your second decision is who's paying for it? Right. Are you going to pay for the cost for your team to have access to, to ideally chatgpt, Gemini and Claude. Right. Or are you going to make them pay for their tools themselves? Right. We have to consider who owns the account when they leave. It's a big issue. Jason Thibeault [00:15:17]: Now you have, you know, choices. I like to think that if you've got a construction company, you have. Choice A is buy all the tools, high quality tools, get them in like a trailer and you take them out to the job site and you put them in place that everyone can use the tools, that everyone has to return them, maybe even paint them pink so that they don't wander off. Choice B, though is you hire craftspeople who bring their own tools, cost you nothing. You say you got to have your own toolbox and tools to do the job and they bring them and they take them with them. That's how it works. It's not an asset to you at any point. And if the right wrench at this point is with Jim, who's homesick today, that's just how it is right now. Tricia Tamkin [00:15:57]: We're going to tell you there is a wrong answer to this decision. Don't make your team pay for their own tools. Don't do it. I would even encourage you to pay for them yourself and have them set up their own just for you, Gmail account and you have the password to that account and they have the password to that account, and that's the account they use to set up all of their AI tools. And then when they leave, those accounts are yours. All of the past chats are yours. All of the GPTs that were built or gems, if it was in Gemini, you actually want to own those accounts. Jason Thibeault [00:16:35]: Which means you could really, I'm sorry, set up the accounts so that they're not named by the person. And then it's just like, oh, you have Rich's old account. It's. This is recruiter account1mail.com. Tricia Tamkin [00:16:50]: Right. And that would work just fine. What we want you to really remember, if you're paying for it, you own it. If they're paying for it, there's going to be disputes to who owns it, because if they're paying for it and it's attached to their personal Gmail account, there's no way for you as the firm owner, to retain that. So we want you to be super careful with it. Jason Thibeault [00:17:15]: And I just want you to think about the training opportunity that comes from the fact that if you're passing it along to the next person that you hire, you know, when somebody leaves, that's all full of information. The end result of those conversations probably was business for you along the way. Tricia Tamkin [00:17:33]: Yeah, it certainly was. So this is our tech stack. This is what we pay for, for all of our employees. OpenAI's Chat GPT only the $20 version. Google's Gemini, only the $20 version. And anthropic style Claude, the $20 version. Now, these are, in our opinion, the three best large language models that exist right now. Jason Thibeault [00:17:56]: There are others, and a number of them that are. There's certainly tools and wrappers that are targeted straight at recruiters. There's Copilot and Perplexity and Deep Seek, which are all good in their own right. Though maybe I wouldn't say Deep Seek is. I would say generally avoid that one. But this is inexpensive, for a tech stack. Tricia Tamkin [00:18:17]: It really is. When AI these models first came out, Jason and I went hot and heavy into ChatGPT. I will tell you, I fell a little bit in love with it. It was amazing. The first class that we taught on Gemini, Jason taught the entire class. I just sat there and asked questions because at that point, I had never put hands on it. I was one of those people that just locked into ChatGPT. And I will tell you, Jason kept telling me, gemini is great, Claude's great. Tricia Tamkin [00:18:50]: And I didn't believe it until he came to me with some writing that was done by all three models. And he's like, hey, look at this. I gave the same prompt to GPT, Gemini, and Claude. I want you to read what they wrote. And he hands me the paper, and I kind of skim through ChatGPT. It looks just like I thought it would look. I get to Gemini. It's a little bit more concise, direct, less personality, but about what you would expect. Tricia Tamkin [00:19:18]: And I get to Claude. My chin hit the table. I could not believe the variance in the caliber and quality of writing that came out of Claude versus Gemini or ChatGPT. So if you're not using all three of these, we're going to highly encourage you to. Okay. And it leads us, I think, right into our next decision. Jason Thibeault [00:19:44]: Now, before you get to that decision point question, I'd love to answer a question that's in chat. What types of employees should have these tools? I would not want to hire a CFO or an admin assistant right now that did not have the ability to understand these tools, use these tools, be comfortable discussing these tools. Maybe I can get away with the administrative assistant not being able to discuss them. But we are in that phase, as we were talking about, where so many employees will need to have this in the very immediate future, that I want to be part of the businesses that are capitalizing on its use. So there's not a role inside of a recruiting firm that would not benefit. Tricia Tamkin [00:20:25]: Yeah, I would agree with that. In fact, I would argue that this is relevant for every single candidate you talk to. Regardless of your discipline. Ask them, how are you using AI personally and professionally. Because if we're going to sit here and tell you, I wouldn't hire anyone in any role in my search firm that hadn't at least put hands on AI, our clients are going to start doing that as well. Jason Thibeault [00:20:53]: Well, and by start doing that, the report I saw recently was more than 40% of hiring executives are already feeling that way, that they would not want to hire somebody who was inexperienced or reluctant with AI. Tricia Tamkin [00:21:04]: Right. All right, so let's get into decision point three. Okay. You have two different ways you can go with this. You might or might not be aware there are. What was the number we saw this week? Like, 50,000 AI wrapper apps. Jason Thibeault [00:21:21]: Now, I think it's 32,000, 32 or 36,000. But there's so many of them that if you decided that what you'd do is just try out a couple a day, you wouldn't finish all of them before there were 30,000 new ones. Tricia Tamkin [00:21:35]: No, there's a ton of apps out there. This is the big boom. This is the bubble. The bubble is growing with all of these different apps right now. Jason Thibeault [00:21:46]: Well, and from an investment standpoint, there's a good reason. It's cheap to build an app that's a wrapper on ChatGPT or one of the other models. And it's so cheap and easy, you can just do it yourself. Tricia Tamkin [00:21:58]: You can, and a lot of people are. So one of the things to think about with this, in my world, it's kind of like sourcing. Right. You have a choice. You can either learn how to use Boolean logic and speak directly to Google to get all of the results you need, or you can buy ZoomInfo and Apollo and LinkedIn Recruiter and get your data there. Right. So another way to kind of think about this is if maybe you were a fisherman, all right? Jason Thibeault [00:22:30]: And in that fisherman, you can. Or as a fisherman, you have a tackle box, and you can have two or three specialized lures that do basically everything, or you can have one lure that is exactly for this kind of fish at this depth and another lure that's at this depth and another lure for a different fish and another lure for a different dish. If it's a different temperature out, or like, if we have a very specialized, very complete tackle box. Which do you want to go with? Now? There's something to be said. If you really like all the specialized tools and all that, and you have an unlimited budget, go with specialized everything. Right? Tricia Tamkin [00:23:06]: Right. If we go with the tool Focus, what ends up happening is you don't have to learn how to communicate directly with the large language models. The tools do it for you. Right. These tools are coming out at a pace that's hard to stay on top of, but there are definitely good tools out there right now. Like, I hear a lot of people talking about Metaview, that they use it for recording. I'll tell you, Zoom released their AI companion this week, and it's rock solid. So you might want to just use Zoom for that. Tricia Tamkin [00:23:43]: But it costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of time to learn all of these tools, especially when we know where the bubble is growing and the bubble is going to burst, just like it did in the late 90s for Internet apps. We're going to see that. Which means you run the risk. If you get in bed with a lot of different tools, of them not making it, they might not actually survive the consolidation that we're quite certain is going to happen some somewhere in the next 18 to 24 months. Jason Thibeault [00:24:21]: Yeah. And one of the things about the dot com bubble burst. It certainly happened. And a lot of little websites disappeared. The big ones didn't. And the Internet is bigger than ever. So that's an advantage of going the other route. Tricia Tamkin [00:24:32]: It is. Right. So let's talk about what happens if we focus just on learning the large language models. Jason Thibeault [00:24:42]: For instance, you've got like three major ones that we teach. Not that you can't use others, but three major ones. So that's a pretty simplified tech stack. You saw the subscription costs, and there are upgrades to things like ChatGPT that are $200 a month. And we won't go into that right now, but that gives you even more power. But that's a pretty inexpensive tech stack cost. Tricia Tamkin [00:25:02]: It certainly is. I mean, 60 bucks a month. And I have what I feel like is a team of assistants that are really a lot smarter than I am in several areas. Jason Thibeault [00:25:13]: Well, and it's certainly fabulous because with three of them, you pretty much cover the gamut of so many different things. You've got great flexibility. You basically have the tools that are powering 32,000 apps so far all at your fingertips for the cost of three. Tricia Tamkin [00:25:30]: Right. So it may not come as any surprise to you that we are big believers that you should not go in the direction of all of these tools. We want you to go directly to the source. We want you to get real good at extracting what you need from Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. It's going to save you so much time. I was having a conversation with a million dollar biller and what they told me was that they're spending so, so much time looking at new tools that it is impacting their actual revenue. Shiny object syndrome. Like, it's super easy to get distracted by all of these tools. Tricia Tamkin [00:26:21]: And I want you to put blinders on. Don't look at those tools. Unless you have a situation where multiple people in our industry tell you this tool is amazing, you have to look at it. Not one person, not two people, three or four people tell you that over the course of a month, that would be a tool that it would make sense for you to do some light evaluating. Jason Thibeault [00:26:53]: Yeah, it's interesting. I had somebody mention an AI tool that they were excited about and wondering when it would get bigger. And I went and I looked at those LinkedIn insights for the company and I found that they had reduced their workforce recently by 32%. And I think the answer is they're not going to be releasing a better version. Tricia Tamkin [00:27:10]: No. All right, John, it's almost like you're a Plant in class. John just asked, how do we learn how to use these large language models to build GPTs and gems? Of course we're biased, but we think you come to us for training. We have not just the best AI program in the recruiting industry, I'd argue it's the best AI program in any industry. Jason Thibeault [00:27:36]: Yeah, we have a session every week so we can keep everyone up to date on the newest things that are happening in the world in AI. And if I tell you more about it, it's going to start sounding like I'm selling. Tricia Tamkin [00:27:45]: Yeah, we'll do that at the end. We don't like to sell in the middle of our sessions. We give you warning like, hey, we're going to sell now. So if you want to hightail out of here, go ahead. We're not offended if you go down the path of tools. Like Jason said, if you have an unlimited budget and you can allocate a person on your staff, and that's their job or a portion of their job, I don't still don't know that I do it, but I mean, you could, you could invest in these tools. Ultimately, I think it's a waste of money. I think that you want the flexibility and the control of communicating directly with these large language models. Tricia Tamkin [00:28:24]: Right. Like I told you before, Jason and I both got hot and heavy with ChatGPT. But now ChatGPT is both of our third models that we go to. I have found that I have quite a preference for Gemini. I go to Gemini first, then I go to Claude, then I go to ChatGPT. Jason Thibeault [00:28:48]: I would say that probably my top one that I go to is Claude. So much so that sometimes my thumb on my phone instinctively hits there, even if thinking chatgpt for this one. And then probably I do Gemini second. Now, that said, if I was only going to have one, it would probably be ChatGPT. It's the most versatile, it's the longest writer, and I can always make something shorter, easier than I could make something longer. Right. There's a lot of advantages to it. It's very flexible. Jason Thibeault [00:29:17]: But when you are that very flexible, we'll call it comparison of an suv. You just don't have all the capabilities of the also flexible sports car. So sometimes I want to take the sports car out and sometimes I want to take the sedan. Tricia Tamkin [00:29:32]: Right. I mean, each of the models do different things. So part of what you have to learn, part of the learning curve is which model to use for which thing. And not to further complicate it a ton, but inside of chatgpt, Gemini and claude. Each of those have multiple models inside of that. Jason Thibeault [00:29:55]: And to complicate that further, they keep changing. Every almost month, at least one of them is going to release a new version or an update of some sort. Tricia Tamkin [00:30:04]: That's why we teach every week on it, right? Because it just changes way too fast to stay on top of. Jason Thibeault [00:30:11]: And we even see like, you know, we had the mention of gems. Gem is a creep from GPTs. GPTs were first. Gems are basically a copy. Now if we think about this in terms of features of different things, you might think, well, eventually it gets down to I only need one. Maybe we're not there yet. Just because we added all wheel drive to the sports car doesn't mean I want to take it out on a winter day. Tricia Tamkin [00:30:32]: So you're going to use the different models in different ways. Jason Thibeault [00:30:39]: Recruiting is complex. Sometimes you just need a hand, someone beside you to give you that nudge to keep you on course. Introducing the new crelate copilot. Copilot is crelate's AI assistant. But it's more than just artificial intelligence. Copilot brings you recruiter intelligence. Need a quick reminder to reply to a candidate's email? Or maybe you're stuck writing up that new job description. Need a nudge to send a follow up to that client who hasn't gotten back to you? Copilot is there to help you craft it effortlessly with over 30 skills at your fingertips. Jason Thibeault [00:31:17]: Creelate copilot doesn't just keep you organized. It keeps you ahead of the game. Because recruiting isn't just about filling roles. It's about building relationships. And crelate copilot is the partner you've been waiting for. Check us out and crelate the future of recruiting. Tricia Tamkin [00:31:43]: All right, let's go to our next decision point. Decision point number four. Are you going to do an audit in your firm to strategically determine where you want to integrate AI into the process? Or are we just going to kind of wing it and implement as we go? Now, if you are looking at any type of audit, there are three areas that a search firm needs to audit. The recruiting process, the sales process, and your back office. All three. That's why Jason told you, Mary. All employees, right? Because that's what we need. We need across the whole company. Tricia Tamkin [00:32:27]: Where can we implement AI? Jason Thibeault [00:32:30]: I want you to imagine planning a vacation. We've been at this a little while now. We're talking for half an hour. You can use a break. So it's mental vacation time. Are you going to plan and research and book the whole thing out. Know where you're basically going to stay, go and do for the trip, or take the ADHD approach. Book the flight the night before and get the hotel for the first night while you're there. Jason Thibeault [00:32:56]: And then just decide, see where things are going to take you. It's vacation after all. Tricia Tamkin [00:33:00]: Oh, my God. I would have a complete nervous breakdown on choice B. I just want you guys to know I could never do choice B. Book the flight in the first night hotel. I'd be having panic attacks on the plane. Right. So clearly you probably know that I am a fan of the audit. I think the audit is a much more strategic approach. Tricia Tamkin [00:33:25]: This is the idea of not winging it. Really sit down and go through your entire workflow. I kept a post it note on the bottom of my center monitor for almost a year that said, how can GPT support me in this? Because you have to get into a habit of asking that question. You will forget that you have this giant, giant tool that can do so much for you. Like, I don't need tech support. Well, sometimes I still need tech support. Jason just asked me yesterday. But for the most part, I don't need tech support anymore because I can just go into an AI and ask them for tech support. Tricia Tamkin [00:34:13]: Right. So it's okay to just use it ad hoc. You're going to get a lot more value if you're more strategic about this. Jason Thibeault [00:34:21]: Yeah. To give that vacation idea again, just think about the restaurants. Right? That, that little, like, you know, yeah, sure. There's so much freedom. Just pick any restaurant. If you can truly pick any restaurant, maybe you'll have fun. If you are really going to say, all right, well, we need to eat now. So now I'm going to spend an hour of my vacation looking at restaurants and Yelp reviews and what's close and what has seating available right now. Jason Thibeault [00:34:47]: And wow, this is not as much fun as. As a vacation activity as I was hoping for. It sure isn't. That's what happens when you try to take a tactical approach. Sometimes with implementation, you're going to end up in a situation where. All right, now I've got to review all these tools because I've decided I suddenly need this tool because there's no plan here. Tricia Tamkin [00:35:05]: Right. So audit first. Okay. Audit. Look at every aspect of the business. The recruiting process, the sales process, your back office. Okay. Go granular. Tricia Tamkin [00:35:20]: You've probably never done this before in your business. Most search firm owners that we know have never done a comprehensive process workflow audit. What is at a granular level each step of the process in all three of those areas. And then we're going to continually ask the question, how can AI support me in this step? What can AI do for me in this step? Now, this takes time. Jason Thibeault [00:35:53]: I was just gonna add into there just a little thought around what this audit might look like and how this might work elsewhere. But you know what? Let's press. Tricia Tamkin [00:36:01]: Yeah. You know what? The best approach is probably a hybrid. Okay? So think it through. Find your biggest opportunities, and then you can wing it the rest of the time. But really, I want you to think not just about efficiency. I want you to think about influence. How can the AI make me a more effective salesperson? That's where the real money is, right? If we can influence the outcome of deals, we just haven't really had that opportunity. I think, truly, until now. Tricia Tamkin [00:36:43]: Those of you that have been at this a while, you've probably heard how important candidate control is, how important client control is. Newsflash. You have no control over other human beings. You just don't. You cannot make a hiring manager extend an offer to a candidate they don't like. You can't make a candidate take a job they don't want. But what if we could increase the likelihood of them extending the offer or increase the likelihood of them accepting the offer? Now we can actually drive more revenue to our firm. I think that's really where the money is. Jason Thibeault [00:37:24]: There's always a part of me that looks at it. Trisha says influence, and I say speed. And I'll be fair. I myself have picked up a saying from my military time that is speed is fine. Accuracy is final. A lot of these AI tools can make us faster, but a lot of them aren't terribly accurate, and you do need to have a good eye on them. So sometimes going for influence over speed means that what we're focused on is people rather than flinging paper. Tricia Tamkin [00:37:52]: Right? So, John, I love this question, right? To answer the question, how can AI do this? We need to know what AI is capable of doing. Where are you seeing AI make the biggest impact in recruiting and search firms? Gosh, there's so many areas that it's almost difficult. Like, I want to just scroll back up for you. Jason Thibeault [00:38:16]: Right? Tricia Tamkin [00:38:17]: Okay, so here is where the biggest impacts come in, right? Like, if I can do an MPC marketing list, then I can have it sanitize the resume for me. Then I can have it analyze the unknown prospect that I'm going to market that candidate to tell me the personality profile, and then Give me subject lines that are going to increase the likelihood of that hiring manager opening that email. Right. That's influence. Like that's going to make a really big difference. If I want to, I can, and I don't have it in here for sourcing. We have a GPT. Jason and I have been teaching Boolean logic for 15 years. Tricia Tamkin [00:39:01]: We have a GPT that we built and it was a hard one to build, but we made it so that you can drop the job description in and it will write your LinkedIn, Zoom info, Apollo and Facebook search. Jason Thibeault [00:39:18]: I think we took off the Facebook, turned it into Meet the Team, Meet the team. Tricia Tamkin [00:39:21]: Okay. So it'll write four search strings for you that are our search strings. Okay. Because you bake your own IP into the instructions. So like if we looked at all of your candidate presentations, every one of you has a different standard candidate presentation, right? So what you would want to do is you would want to articulate very specifically as if you were talking to somebody who didn't speak English as their first language. And you want to say the first section is this. List it out this way. Here's the example, here's the. Tricia Tamkin [00:40:00]: That's what you want to do, right? And give it the instructions. So that writes your candidate presentation the way you want that presentation written. Right. Kelly's so fun. Kelly, if we have time at the end, I'll show you the nasty client email, but only if we have time because Kortney needs to start another session right at the top of the hour, right? Yeah. Jason Thibeault [00:40:22]: And I will certainly tell you, some of those people come up to us. Some of our clients say, this one in particular is saving me money. You know, this one is saving me time. This one's doing great. But we frequently get the May. You don't know what a lifesaver and how like cathartic it is to use this cogbt for the nasty client emails. Tricia Tamkin [00:40:40]: I love the nasty client emails. It's one of my favorite use cases. I use it all the time. All right, so here's our next decision point. Internal AI versus external AI. What does that mean? Right. Are you only going to use AI inside of your firm or are you going to expand and leverage AI for your own offerings? So let's talk about what this might look like if you were an investor. Right? Let's say that you have a portfolio, okay. Tricia Tamkin [00:41:15]: And in choice A, what you're going to do is you are going to allocate part of that portfolio to high growth, risky stocks, Right? Or you're not. You're Just going to optimize your core holdings. So if you're just going to implement AI in your firm, your choice. B. Right. If you want to get a little bit riskier or gutsier with this, then we're going to have a lot more reward. Jason Thibeault [00:41:46]: So I want to give kind of the AI example of that. So if I've got AI working internally for me, right? If I produce a candidate presentation and then I review it and then I send it to my client and I skip along feeling like I saved an hour, I've only used it internally even though I've sent it out externally. External. If I use an AI system to answer my calls and direct them and help people out and possibly start doing pre screens and that is external. Now it's facing outwards and it's interacting with people outside of my firm. Tricia Tamkin [00:42:18]: Right. I am of the opinion right now and I'm just going to make this recommendation to you guys. I've been screaming this from the rooftops for at least 18 months. I don't care what industry you support, whether it's manufacturing or healthcare or anything else. It does not matter what your industry is. I want you to go this weekend and I want you to put a page up on your website. Let's say that you're a manufacturing recruiter. Why don't you have a page on your website that says the intersection of manufacturing and artificial intelligence? And then I want you to put content on there about what's happening in the world of AI, the fact that all candidates should likely have some exposure to AI regardless of what they do for a living, and that you specifically are positioned to be able to support AI focused placements. Tricia Tamkin [00:43:18]: We're going to see a ton of them and I want you guys to get in on that action. Right? We got to get those websites sites up. Jason Thibeault [00:43:26]: Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just reading a company that, that was talking about how it uses AI for. For sales forecasting and to know what they need to make and all that. They make carpets is the carpet company. Like AI is coming into everything everywhere all at once. Tricia Tamkin [00:43:43]: So go start your AI niche in your industry. Ask everybody you talk to. How are they using AI? How is it incorporated into their specific role? If you can get ahead of this and start aging that page on your website, you will ultimately have inbound leads from the search engine optimization as people start looking for manufacturing AI recruiter. Right? You want this? There's another direction you could go with it though, right? As AI has become so prevalent, there's a whole Lot of AI being used in the interview process. Fake people, deep fakes, on zoom people like I just read an article, tell your candidates this, don't say in an interview ever, because that's the indicator that you're reading the AI answer. Right. So let's start prepping our candidates for that because that was published last week. Right? Jason Thibeault [00:44:50]: Well, it means that one of the things that we can do is really talk about how prevalent the AI fraud is, what we're doing about it, how we're solving it, what guarantees really that we are humans, making sure that we're talking to humans, presenting you with humans, because that's what we're doing. Even if they're humans that are AI engineers. We bet that you want a human. So that's what we're trying to find you. And so the fact that there's so much nonsense, we call out the nonsense, agree that it exists, don't hide from it and not be it. Tricia Tamkin [00:45:21]: Right. All right, so let's do our last decision point, right. Are you going to invest in training or are you going to go through a direct exposure and self guided exploration? I will tell you, Jason and I self guided. We started the weekend, it came out Thanksgiving weekend of 2022. I had an 18 hour conversation with ChatGPT. It taught me how it's structured, how to prompt it. I did all of it and learned it through the model. You just can't get to that anymore. Tricia Tamkin [00:46:00]: They shut all that down back then. Jason Thibeault [00:46:02]: You could basically prompt your new car for the owner's model manual and get it out of there and find out what you were working with. Because that gets us to how this decision point might be thought of. Do you want to go to one of those like German European driving schools where it's professional instructors on structured courses and it's very well. Or be given that owner's manual, the keys to a new car and be like, what for the last 15 years of your life you've been a passenger? Go to it. Tricia Tamkin [00:46:31]: Oh my God, here comes my panic attack on choice B. That's my panic attack. You hand me keys and I don't know how to drive and now I have to read a manual and operate to heavy machinery. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen. Right. Please understand when it comes to this decision, we have to call out our own bias. We are trainers in AI, of course. We think that you should go through a structured program and have formal training in it. Tricia Tamkin [00:47:01]: Right. It's going to make your adoption and your ROI so much faster. Faster. You're able then to build competitive advantage for your firm. We can't lose that opportunity. Right. Jason Thibeault [00:47:15]: Well, Anna is so early. And you know that 18 hours that Tricia may have spent, all the countless hours that I've spent along the way. What's great is with formal training, whether it's ours or somebody else's, what you're getting is hundreds of hours to get you to the 18 valuable ones. Tricia Tamkin [00:47:32]: Right. So you don't have to hire us. Okay. I mean, you should, but you don't have to hire us. You do have to hire somebody. Jason Thibeault [00:47:42]: I'd hire me. Tricia Tamkin [00:47:43]: I'd hire you. All right, so what we're going to do from this point is we're going to take a moment and tell you what this program is. We're going to do it really fast, though, because I want to give you time for questions and maybe Kelly, I can get to the nasty client email. All right, so AI for recruiters. It's not a training class, it's a membership. It's a whole year. We are on our fifth version of teaching the whole thing from scratch again, which we're doing starting Monday. And then we meet every Wednesday at 3pm Central for a whole year. Tricia Tamkin [00:48:24]: And what Jason and I do is give you the updates to all the models, the things that have changed, what you can start doing now. We bring you the news, we bring you new use cases, and then we open the floor for anyone in the room to be able to ask us questions. Now, you'll see here it says free with the Mars program. We just launched this this month, and it is the single greatest program we have ever delivered. And it includes AI4. Jason Thibeault [00:48:56]: It's an entire organizational development framework where while you don't have to go through all of it, you can do some of it. You can do certain days of the week, you can do certain types of sessions. There's paths to follow, but there's access to Tricia and I to answer any recruiting question or guide you through a process, help you through a close five days a week. Tricia Tamkin [00:49:17]: Five days a week. Okay, so we were running into problems where we were privately coaching owners. But how do we really help you scale your firm if we're not developing your whole team? So this isn't based on the individual, it's based on the company. Okay? What happens is you get from us not just daily support, you also get our full business development program, our full recruiting program, our full AI program, Intro to recruiting. It's all of our major sourcing, too. It's the whole sourcing program the AI4 tool, the sourcing tool, a weekly newsletter. Jason Thibeault [00:49:58]: Which is also awesome. Tricia Tamkin [00:49:59]: Yeah. And then 200 hours of individual deep dives into recruiting related topics. You can literally hire recruiters into your firm and never have to train them. We'll do it for you. Okay, here's the pricing. If you have one or two people, it's 1900amonth. Three to 10 is 3400, 11 to 20 is 4900. And it's a six month commitment. Tricia Tamkin [00:50:27]: And then it's month to month from that point. If you're with us and you decide that you've gone through all of that training in six months and you're done, you still keep the tools, meaning that. Jason Thibeault [00:50:37]: You have access to both the sourcing tool, the AI tool forever. Tricia Tamkin [00:50:41]: Forever. All right, so questions. Kortney, I just want to tell you we made it. We gotta be able to help out Kelly. We might be able to help out Kelly. Kortney Harmon [00:50:54]: So let's help out Kelly right now as we do this one and then it'll allow any other questions to come in. And if not, we can always provide your email to be able to follow back up with you. Tricia Tamkin [00:51:05]: Yeah. Do you know what, Kortney? I'll send you the deck and some links and everything that you, you can send out. All right, so Kelly, I am inside of Google Docs and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Tools, voice typing and now I'm going to make up the nasty email. Okay? I'm just going to make it up and voice it. I am so aggravated and disgusted with you as a client right now that I can barely breathe. We went through expectations at the start of the process and you committed to me that you were going to give me feedback within 24 hours of me presenting a candidate or that candidate interviewing. I have left you 17 voicemail messages and you won't return my calls. I should not have to chase you like this. Tricia Tamkin [00:51:52]: If you are actually interested in hiring someone, if you can't get your act together and start responding to me, then from this point forward, I am not showing you any more candidates. I will start sourcing from your company. Okay? So please understand I am extremely upset about this and thinking that I don't ever want to do business with you again. Jason Thibeault [00:52:14]: All right, so that was pretty mild. I would dumb or something. Tricia Tamkin [00:52:18]: Right? So voice typing is your friend. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and I'm going to go into my tool and I am going to go into deal Management nasty emails rewritten. And now all I'm going to do is paste my very cathartic venting. Right. And now here's my very nice email. That is a whole lot nicer than what I said. Right. So let's go like this. Tricia Tamkin [00:52:50]: Too hard, soften it and don't mention the 17 calls. I was exaggerating. I can't spell that word. All right, so now here's a softer version of it. Right. The lovely thing about this process is to give you the opportunity for the cathartic verbal venting. That's what's awesome about it. You get to say everything you want and it'll write it for you in a way that is going to be a little bit more palatable to your client. Jason Thibeault [00:53:23]: Well, and I wanted to add that using the apps, whether it's the ChatGPT app on your desktop or your phone or plot or so forth, as opposed to going into the browser in the apps, you'll usually have your voice control right there. You don't need to go from one to the other like we did with Google Docs. But I do think it's great because at least one person pointed out that they did not know that there was voice typing in Google Docs. Yes. And in all three language models that we talk about. Tricia Tamkin [00:53:51]: Yeah, we use voice to text all the time. You saw how good that was. I mean, like I was going fast and it doesn't miss a word. It's lovely. Jason Thibeault [00:54:00]: Yeah. Gemini's voice text is what it is, powering that there. Gemini's browser based voice text is also very good. And it's probably one of the reasons Tricia goes there so frequently is because it can be faster and easier on your hands than typing to talk. Tricia Tamkin [00:54:16]: Yeah. All right, so I think we covered all the questions, Kortney, and we're going to give it Back to you. Five minutes. Five whole minutes early. Kortney Harmon [00:54:25]: Well, definitely early. There was two questions Sarah asked, did you share the GPTs that you built? I thought you did that last year. I can't find them now. And then Kurt asked a question as well. Tricia Tamkin [00:54:35]: Yeah. So Sarah, you have to be in class to get those GPTs. A lot of times what we'll do in sessions is we'll make them and then here's what you can do. Like you can make those GPTs and then I change it at the end when I turn them off and I change it to say, oh, sorry. Anything that they put in, the message comes back and says, sorry, this isn't available anymore. Here's the link to AI for recruiters. But think about it. You could make GPTs for your clients or candidates and embed ads in them. Tricia Tamkin [00:55:06]: It's very cool. Jason Thibeault [00:55:07]: I also would love to answer this question from Kurt using our nasty email example. Will the AI use your style speaking in the voice to text and keep it? Yes, we can have it do that. It wouldn't be the one in the style speaking in the voice to text because likely that would be too angry. But we can program with two of those three models, both Claude and chatgpt, to hold and maintain our own personal voice. Tricia Tamkin [00:55:31]: And it's so easy in Claude. My God. When we taught it in GPT, it was an hour and a half, very difficult session to teach. Now you can do it in Claude in 30 seconds. It's amazing. Jason Thibeault [00:55:44]: It's very convenient. I think it's going to make it much harder for teachers to catch the cheating in the future. Yeah, like, well, it's not. Doesn't sound like ChatGPT. It sounds like them. But how do they suddenly know all them? Kortney Harmon [00:55:56]: It's gonna get interesting. That is for sure. Trisha, Jason, thank you so much. I love having you guys on and your energy and so much excitement. If you want more from Jason and Trisha, there's their emails. Look at them putting their cell phone up there, easy access to them. They are truly some of the best. So I thank you so much for sharing your time with our audience. Kortney Harmon [00:56:19]: There was amazing people pieces and then thank you so much for your time guys. Have a wonderful day and we'll be sure to send everything to you. Tricia Tamkin [00:56:26]: Thanks, Kortney. Bye everyone. Bye. Kortney Harmon [00:56:32]: Thanks for tuning in to the full. Kortney Harmon [00:56:33]: Desk experience specifically focused on the executive search industry over the next few weeks. Tune in next week as we talk to the next industry veteran that you're going to learn the best tips from. Have a great day. See you next time. Tricia Tamkin [00:56:45]: 17.