Latest / Recruiting Evolution / Industry Spotlight | Aaron Elder - CEO at Crelate - Thriving in the Post-AI Era of Recruiting
Transcript
- Aaron Elder [00:00:00]: Everyone who is going to survive this is already working on it. So if you're not already working on it, you're definitely behind. They are looking at it across their business. And keep in mind, it doesn't have to be just production, right? Delivery, right? Like, it's, it's how you do accounting, it's how you do billing. It's. It's how you do your own sales, right? Every part of your business can be transformed. Don't expect it to do everything. Focus on really targeted scenarios where you can apply it and get value now. Aaron Elder [00:00:28]: Right? And I think that's what's happening is you're seeing these agents be sort of expert ified along these different lines and then which ones work for you? I think depends. Kortney Harmon [00:00:39]: Hi, I'm Kortney Harmon, Director of industry relations at Crelate. This is the Industry Spotlight, a series of the Full desk experience, a Crelate original podcast. In this series, we will talk with top leaders and influencers who are shaping the talent industry, shining a light on popular trends, the latest news, and the stories that laid the groundwork for their success. Welcome back to another episode of the Full Desk Experience Industry Spotlight. Welcome back to the Full Desk Experience, where we tackle growth blockers across your people, processes and tech that really keep recruiting firms from reaching their full potential. I'm your host, Kortney Harmon, and today we're diving deep into what might be the most significant shift our industry has seen in decades. We're really at this pivotal point, this pivotal moment in our industry, where intelligent technology is becoming as invisible and essential as electricity. A year ago, everyone was really debating LLMs and AI as the future, but today we're already moving into a post AI era, which is where we're going to go spend the majority of our time today. Kortney Harmon [00:01:53]: A post AI era. And what does that mean? Where are you and are you left behind? Today, Crelate CEO and founder Aaron Elder is joining us. He's been at the forefront of this transformation, quietly building what he calls a living platform, technology that evolves and adapts rather than simply automating some static process. Aaron really brings this unique perspective, not just as a technology leader, but as someone who's worked with thousands of talent professionals navigating this transition. So today we're going to explore how Curlit's approach is helping firms escape those disconnected systems that I am always ranting about. We'll also examine how AI is reshaping everything from executive search relationships to the very nature of work itself, and what separates those firms that capture real value from those caught in that hype cycle that we talk about. All right, Aaron, thanks so much for joining me today. A year ago we were sitting in this same place, same virtual conference room and we were discussing LLMs. Kortney Harmon [00:02:59]: But now, and hearing you talk and how we're positioning create itself for like a post AI era, talk to me about what fundamental shifts have really occurred in recruiting technology and what that looks like. So let's first talk about that post AI era. What does that mean and what kind of things have happened? Because last year to this year, there's. Aaron Elder [00:03:19]: A big shift, certainly. And thanks for having me again. And let's just dive right in. So this post AI era concept, I've been intentionally trying to use this language because I think it invokes the right emotion, which is that it's a foregone conclusion that AI is here and it's affecting everything. And it's not really a debate about if it's going to affect my business, should it affect my business, how is it going to change? It already is, whether you realize it or not. And this sea change is occurring and unless you're on top of it, you're going to be behind it. And so that's what the idea is, is that we are now living in a post AI world. It is everywhere and it is becoming more and more pervasive. Aaron Elder [00:03:58]: How are we responding to that and how are we taking advantage of it and how are we ensuring that our business is going to be on the winning side of AI? Kortney Harmon [00:04:06]: Okay, I love that it's here, it's static, it's kind of like electricity. It just is. While we're working, talk to me about those shifts. What maybe occurred in recruiting technology, but maybe not even just in recruiting. How is this evolving work itself? Aaron Elder [00:04:23]: Overall, great question. I think for me, what was interesting about this is that I've been watching this thing grow for years. And like many things in history, it starts off slowly and then all at once. Right? AI started off as sort of cute and interesting and little quirks and neat little experiments. And then next thing you know, it's everywhere all of a sudden. And I think what caught maybe me off guard the most was the rate of improvement. The rate of improvement seems to have accelerated exponentially just in the last year. It crossed the uncanny valley pretty quick and never looked back. Aaron Elder [00:05:02]: And so I think you are scrambling to react to that. How has it changed things? I think the first thing is that the quality crossed this valley and then all of a sudden it was just. It went from a toy to essential and great, like Overnight, that's a huge change. It went from something that maybe you'd use occasionally to like, I use it every single day and so does, you know, the entire team. That's crazy, right? When you think about that sort of overnight shift now, I don't have a lot of impact, so which we can talk about. But I think that's the first thing that I notice is the big change. Kortney Harmon [00:05:37]: I don't think you're wrong. We went from talking about how to use chatgpt better to now this thing called AI is more embedded in our workflows. When we think about recruiting. I know a stance that you had as we talk about this piece is humans are still involved in this process. So talk to me about maybe the principles or philosophies that really guide your thinking to ensure alignment with human interaction or human intent, especially in high trust fields like executive search and the places. Aaron Elder [00:06:10]: That we play, keeping the human element. And so it's interesting with, as you watch each generation of LLM evolve and it's. Okay, let's maybe step back a little bit here. So there was sort of the first gen, second gen, which was really all about crossing that uncanny valley. Can this machine produce something, you know, given a prompt that resembles what a human might produce? Right. Like the third gen. And wait, I'm talking generations. But this is all like within the last nine months, Right. Aaron Elder [00:06:39]: And so the third gen was when reasoning machines really kicked in and deep seek kind of kicked off. That wave caught a lot of people by surprise. And the secret that it, it sort of, its approach was to create this within the LLM, to have these series of experts that are individually trained on different areas. And so then when you ask a question via the prompt, the first thing it does is figure out which experts need to be involved in the response. And then it has a mechanism for focusing on the, on the reasoning and double checking of its work to produce a response. And so reasoning really became it. What I'm seeing now, and this is like literally last week, is they seem to be trying to push that boundary that you're talking right now of where is the line on human interaction. And so I'm reading about these sort of controlled experiments where they're trying to lock AI in a box and you give it sort of existential rules around how to operate in order to see how much of a human like sentient response. Aaron Elder [00:07:42]: And it's kind of crazy what they're trying to do. Like will it blackmail you into creating a response? Will it lie to you? Will it try to protect itself. Like these are the experiments that are happening in the last week. I mean, I'm sure it happened before, but now they're publicly talking about it. So ma' am, like crazy in all this. I, I guess my thought on the human response that the human side of things first is, is that there's naturally going to be laws that are put in place to protect and to try to put some ring fences around this. That's already happening last week. I think the, the federal government or in the new budget bill that they're trying to centralize and not let states have individual rules. Aaron Elder [00:08:22]: And like, like, there's gonna be like a master rule to like make sure that like whatever they're gonna do with it, but presumably what they're going to do with it is if it directly impacts a human life, a human's got to be involved somewhere in the process. I think the, the next interesting thing is that the quality and the speed and all that stuff is there. It's no big deal. Now to have the AI generate a sequence for you and the spam people with creative, witty responses. It's gotten way, way, way better than it's ever been before. And so that's all just like table stakes. And again, I go back to this race to the bottom. It's just noise. Aaron Elder [00:08:57]: And so I think the differentiator has to come in your ability to connect and create relationships around a future recruiting challenge or problem that you're trying to solve. Right. Like, you are a great fit for this opportunity and these people are going to work well with you. Which I, which I think has to be like, those are the only place where humans can add the most value in the equation and where people will want the humans to add the value. Kortney Harmon [00:09:23]: I love that. And ultimately cre late is about creating relationships. I need to put that forefront in your mind because, I mean, that was your vision of this whole thing from the beginning. So I love that you were speaking of these things that were the experts that obviously we have to put in a box. I'm going to assume those experts and what were functioning on the back end were things like agents and things that were doing work. Am I wrong? Aaron Elder [00:09:49]: Well, the idea of the group of experts is that within the LLM, if you have a language model that is trained on like all human words. Yeah, let's train a sub model just on math and one just on code and one on just on medical stuff. And so then that becomes, you know, I think deep seek has 12 experts internally train a musician on different areas and so it allows two things. One, it allows for deeper training around that one topic area. But the coolest thing is that allows for much faster, what's called inference because it doesn't need to go through seven 70 billion parameters to answer your question. It can answer within 7 billion. It could be much more efficient and how fast it can do a response. And so then as the efficiency of responses goes up, right. Aaron Elder [00:10:36]: It become, you know, you can have it on your phone before too long. So the experts, the so called experts are within the LLMs of the prompt. Kortney Harmon [00:10:44]: Amazing. I want to kind of shift gears a little bit. We've been hearing you say the words a lot. Living platform. Crelate's living platform really positions itself as a dynamic in contrast to maybe those static systems. So do me a favor as we start into this, can you tell us more about this living platform and really what makes it living? Aaron Elder [00:11:06]: Great question. I've been doing CRM systems my entire life. Like since I was 18. I was basically working on databases in the cloud. Although back then we called them application service providers, it was just someone else's computer. But at the end of the day these systems were sort of classic forms and grids. Show me a list of things, give me a form to be able to put new things in it. And if you really think about it, CRMs, applicant tracking systems, you know, all, all kinds of systems like this at the end of the day are kind of a box that puts your stuff right. Aaron Elder [00:11:40]: You know, it's a digital box that puts your stuff, keep it safe and that's of limited utility. You know, certainly now, and I think we talked earlier about AI is going to create winners and losers. I think the boxes that put your stuff are definitely going to be on the losing side of that. I can't predict the future, but I'm pretty confident in that one. And what the living platform is, is it's a commitment from us to sort of reinvent every aspect of our thinking to be on the winning side of AI. So what does it take to have a. DID have your ATS or your platform for solving recruiting problems, go beyond from just being a place to put your stuff and what like what we think that looks like is specialized agents focused on every workflow but, but again there's lots unpacked there. It's a specialized agent. Aaron Elder [00:12:32]: It is very targeted and built and trained and optimized for that scenario. It is an agent and an assistant. And maybe it's some assistant, maybe it's more agent. A little bit of both. We can talk a difference there, but it's just going to be specialized workers within each work stream that take the data you put in and then take it to the next step. This is the next step or next steps. I think the other thing that it is is those agents should be working to constantly clean, enrich, enhance, augment the data. Once it's in there, right. Aaron Elder [00:13:03]: You put something in and the data should just come alive. It's got new data you didn't have before. It's got insights you didn't have before. It's been, you know, enhanced with data from all over the Internet or whatever we can go grab. So again, while it's in the box, it's. It's growing. It's more like an incubator, if you will. That's what the platform is to us. Kortney Harmon [00:13:22]: We're feeding it, we're giving it sunlight, we're getting it, all those things that it needs to grow. I love that you just made a comment, agents versus assistants. Do you want to elaborate on that, Emmy? Aaron Elder [00:13:32]: Sure. It's funny, I feel like you can get lost in the quagmire of the vernacular. And I've seen like agentic assistance. Right. I mean, you can kind of mix the whole thing. I think at the highest level, the idea is that where is a human necessary in the process? Right. And so at a high level, AI is really good at doing sort of automated analytics analysis, right? You don't really need humans involved in that portion. Then there's pure automation, right? Where you don't want humans involved, and then there's a portion where you want humans involved. Aaron Elder [00:14:03]: And different machines can be trained and built for each one of those things. Generally speaking, at the highest level, assistants are designed to work in flow with you. They might use agents behind the scene to generate the next response. But ultimately the experience you're having, the user experience, is an assistant that's keeping you in control and supporting you. An agent, on the other hand, is a user experience where you expect it to do the next thing automatically. And it's probably the highest level. Kortney Harmon [00:14:32]: I love it. Thank you for breaking that down. Now let's talk about maybe some unexpected impacts that AI has had in the recruiting world that maybe we didn't really predict when we first started seeing LLMs. Aaron Elder [00:14:45]: Emerge in the recruiting world. And I'd love to hear too, you know, what you've been seeing. I think where my brain first goes is the more macro question of what AI is doing. So we went from six months ago, AI being, you know, a browser based Thing you type in some stuff and maybe get some help, et cetera, to. I'll use the product team, for example. Every single dev uses AI every single day to actually help them write code or to write code for them. I mean, that's transformational. And when you think about that, you know, and, and these tools aren't inexpensive, right? I mean, they're expensive tools. Aaron Elder [00:15:23]: And the expectation is, and this is talk sort of macro, again is great. You have these tools now what, Right, because, you know, I recently used Claude 3.7 to write a tool that would have taken easily, easily taken, you know, me, a day or two, a couple days of code, a junior developer, a week or two. And this thing did it frigging perfectly. Zero shot, which means like the first prompt right out of the gate in 30 seconds. I mean, like, how do you compete with that if you're not using it, you gotta be using it. And so now if you are using it as a business, my expectation is that your output would increase. And I think other businesses, you know, CEOs and leaders and boards are thinking the same thing. Your output should increase. Aaron Elder [00:16:11]: And so I think what's more interesting is the expectations that are changing within the workforce. And I don't know if anyone really knows quite what to do with that yet, but you can sort of see the seeds for it. Right? One thing I have seen, and this is probably happening within recruit agencies too, is your first thought shouldn't be, who am I going to hire next? It's going to be how can we do more with AI with our current team? Right? And you read about this with, you know, you know, Microsoft, Facebook, like, we're not going to hire junior devs anymore. We're only going to hire, you know, experts in AI or we're going to look to, you know, take our mid levels and make them more effective with AI. And so it's really changing the conversation of what's expected within the workplace. And I think that certainly applies to sourcers and BDRs and recruiters, et cetera. Kortney Harmon [00:16:56]: I love that you mentioned that because we talk a lot on the podcast about KPI and the hamster wheel of how we measure what successful recruiting organizations look like or what they're doing or what metrics they're hitting or their placements or what their ratios are. Do you think that's going to change the way leaders evaluate their effectiveness for their strategies and an AI post AI world? Aaron Elder [00:17:20]: I do. And, and I think the pressure will come from, from the market in general, like customers across all the different industries are going to start to expect changes. They're going to expect a higher quality, faster output, faster iteration, lower cost or whatever it is. And so these pressures would be put on businesses and businesses, and I'm talking every industry will start to see their competitors using AI to achieve these increased expectations. And so they then will start to see that they need to change or they're going to die. It's going to be this actual existential threat to lots of businesses across the world. And boards and businesses are going to want to do something to respond. And so I think, sorry, I'm not asking the exact question. Kortney Harmon [00:18:05]: Okay, no, I like it. Aaron Elder [00:18:06]: But then our customers have to then I think transform to help businesses solve this. So, so the employers of the world are going to say, we've got to do something. Okay, what do we got to do? Okay, what we got going to say? I think, okay, so who's going to do that? And they're going to look around and realize no one knows how to do that. Or they're going to need to like, we got to move manufacturing from here, over here, or we got to completely robotify this process and do this, or we got to completely reinvent how we do this. If we're going to compete, they're going to develop these strategies and then they're going to be stuck with this problem. How do we go build a team to go do this thing that we don't even know how to go do, et cetera, Enter in expert agencies and consulting and staffing companies that are going to help people solve these strategic recruiting problems that emerge. And so anyway, I think that's the big change that our customers are going to see is at least the ones that survive will be those that focus on solving these new problems for businesses. Kortney Harmon [00:19:04]: It's a whole new set according to where. Yes, well, as you think about AI and it becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, in our everyday workflows and our everyday processes of those problems that we're solving. What guardrails or principles should leaders prioritize? Like whether they're building tech, adopting it because it's ever changing, or scaling it across a large team or society at large, what do we need to think about? I mean, because this is a new. Aaron Elder [00:19:32]: Evolution, I think the first guardrail that leadership should be thinking about is, is are we even attacking the right problem and are we building the right guardrails? And what I mean by that is, is like if you're hyper focused on just making sure that Sally the Sorcerer is able to spam a thousand more candidates without saying compensative. That may not be the problem that you need to solve over the next two years. Because I use two years, not five, because it's happening quick. Because maybe that type of role that you're trying to go spam people for is going away entirely in two years. And that's the real thing that you should be really thinking about. So I think that's the first guardrail is as a business, what are we even doing? And don't confuse activity with progress. What is the real problem that we're going to be solving over the next five, 10 years? And when is the actual event horizon going to start hitting us? In a way we got to feel. And if you look at yourself and you say, yeah, it's actually only two years out, that might be a different conversation that you want to have internally. Aaron Elder [00:20:38]: And I think people need to think beyond just AI because everyone's really talking about AI and talking about, you know, all these things and people are kind of taking their eye off robots. And I've been digging way more into it since, since I've seen this thing. And, and I think the world's gonna be shocked at the rate of improvement of physical, you know, humanoid robot automation and self driving cars kind of thing. Like I took my first Waymo from a hotel to the airport down in Phoenix and it was seamless and wonderful. And I'm, I, there's gotta be people who are thinking like, yeah, we're gonna have a hundred million of these on, on the road by 2027 or whatever. Like it's going to be from nowhere to all of a sudden. Right? And I think this goes beyond just waymos. If it can do it for that, it can do it for deliveries, it can do it for truck driving, it can do it for flying planes, it can do it for a lot of things. Aaron Elder [00:21:28]: And so entire things are going to shift incredibly fast once AI becomes kinetic, right, and goes into these, into these working robots. And so again, if you're not thinking about this and thinking about where your business is going to be positioned with that wave, if you think you're shocked now, you're gonna be super shocked. That, I guess, is my thought. Kortney Harmon [00:21:49]: No, I think that's great. And it does, it changes everything. So talk to me based on that thought process that you just had and the problems that we should be thinking about as staffing and recruiting firms in this era and what we should be talking about, because what you just were describing was like, we're not there yet. We haven't arrived yet. You need to start thinking about things differently. But like, what are the telltale signs that people should keep their eyes open about what those new problems could. Aaron Elder [00:22:15]: That's a good question. I think it probably depends on each person's industry. So I think only they would know what's best, but maybe pull on some threads. So if you're seeing some things change, if you're seeing customers asking different questions, and let me flip the script, are you asking your customers different questions? Because if you're not, then again, then what value are you providing besides just people in slots? Right. I think you need to be helping your customers be thinking about these things. And so you start pulling on those threads and I think you'll sort of logically sort of see what comes next down the pipe. And I don't think every role is going to be affected at the same rate, obviously. Right. Aaron Elder [00:22:55]: But it's going to affect a lot of roles very, very quickly. And I think where our customers have to be is they have to be helping businesses respond to whatever it is. I mean, there might be a very real world where, you know, what is a staffing rule company look like in a world where maybe what you're staffing are, are robots or AIs crazy to think about, but you know what I'm saying, like maybe not looking for the right person or you're, it's, it's the person with the AI, right? Or, or maybe you highly reinvented your business, right, to be, you know, a consultancy around these things. Sorry, Rabbit holing, for a second there, don't have a good answer because I, I, I think it's happening way too fast. And I think it's going to be very industry, very industry independent in ways that, that's the expertise that you bring in your industry. And so I think my challenge to you though would be just you gotta think bigger than what I think you think you've been maybe thinking in the past. So, you know, it's not like, yeah, we'll have 3% incremental growth next year. Yeah, there'll be a shift in the workforce from this demographic to this demographic or this age or whatever. Aaron Elder [00:24:00]: It's not gonna be that I, I think you need to be questioning, okay, well, what if this rule is not even needed anymore? What if this role transforms entirely? How are we going to do that? What if this role goes entirely robotic, Right? Like, ask those questions at least, and then start thinking about how you could support your customers in that transition and help the world move Forward. Kortney Harmon [00:24:20]: I think that's great. And you have to start by asking different questions. If you're asking the same questions over the past three years, you're probably missing the mark totally. Aaron Elder [00:24:26]: Hopefully this wasn't too high level. Kortney Harmon [00:24:29]: No, it's good to get people thinking. Obviously we've seen that there's been a rush to add AI to everything. Have you seen talking to thousands of professionals in our industry, have you seen any firms that maybe are seeing the real value of getting it right or doing something right when it comes to AI versus getting stuck in that hype cycle of maybe something shiny, something new? Have you seen anybody doing it right right now thus far? Aaron Elder [00:24:57]: I think it depends. Here's what I know. I think everyone who is going to survive this is already working on it. So if you're not already working on it, you're definitely behind. They are looking at it across their business. And keep in mind it doesn't have to be just production, right? Delivery, right. Like it's how you do accounting, it's how you do billing, it's how you do your own sales, right? Every part of your business can be transformed. This mindset was mentioned a year ago, like don't expect it to do everything. Aaron Elder [00:25:26]: Focus on really targeted scenarios where you can apply it and get value now. Right. And I think that's what's happening is you're seeing these agents be sort of expert ified along these different lines and then which ones work for you? I, I think depends. I have seen it work well in some cool scenarios for straight up outbounding in the snapping world, like just calling people and doing basic question and answer. I've seen it, I seen it. You use very well just some, some. These are small experiments but you know, for a few months now I've heard of customers. This is actually outside of this field but, but a friend of mine owns an audiology practices and they're using it for getting leads and appointments right. Aaron Elder [00:26:04]: For hearing aids. And it's working like freaking awesome, right? It's like it's, it answers questions, it's. It does a call. It just works super, super well. So you could definitely see that, that working for other things depending on again, I don't think it's like you're hired, right. But as part of the funnel and part of the process, I think that's working. I think it's working for internal stuff as well, right? You know, operations, et cetera. Kortney Harmon [00:26:27]: I love it. I'm going to end on this question for this session. I know we're going to have you back on. We're going to talk more about this here in a few weeks. So looking ahead a few years, obviously today we're talking post AI era. It's here. But looking ahead, what feels inevitable to you, like something maybe that we're going to take for granted in 2026, but maybe feels very aspirational. Aaron Elder [00:26:50]: I think it is inevitable that the market is going to change and that the expectations are going to change. Everyone will use AI, certainly in our industry, everyone will use AI every day in some way and just full stop. So what does that do? I don't know. But you're going to use it every single day. We're working on building a series of agents that help each portion of the business, from right, find opportunity, defining candidates, to taking the hand. It's the next step to keeping your database up to date to running your business that touches every single aspect of what you're doing. We're working on having Copilot go from being just a sort of a helper on the side to literally integrated into every single text box in the application. So I think that's inevitable is that you're going to be using AI every day, whether you know it or not. Aaron Elder [00:27:40]: I think what might be even scarier beyond that is as AI gets better and the user interface changes Even further in 2027, what does, what does a subsystem record look like? I mean, your primary experience may no longer be a web app. It might be, you know, a chatbot, right, where you're just talking with your system and it's taking next steps. So I think once we get past this first generation of agents that are truly used every day, the next generation might be pretty mind blowing. Kortney Harmon [00:28:09]: Beyond that, I love it. And you talked about using it every day, but what you said was you may not even know that you're using it. It's just going to be built in and whether you realize it or not, it's going to be happening because it is here. And we're past that first iteration. So I think it's very exciting to hear you develop what a living platform looks like talking about this post AI world. So, Erin, thank you so much for your time today and all the work that you're doing behind the scenes for this exciting venture and what we're really giving back to this industry. So thank you. Aaron Elder [00:28:43]: Absolutely, thank you. Great time. Kortney Harmon [00:28:46]: And for our listeners, that's our deep dive with Aaron Elder, CEO and founder of crelate, on navigating this post AI era. We're so excited to get you involved. And if you want to see this living platform in action, visit crew and keep trudging along and asking those difficult questions to change your view on this industry and how we can help our clients solve different problems. Until next time, see you soon. I'm Kortney Harmon with crelate. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Industry Spotlight, a new series from the Full Desk Experience. New new episodes will be dropping monthly. Be sure you're subscribed to our podcast so you can catch the next Industry Spotlight episode and all episodes of the Full Desk Experience here or wherever you listen.