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Future-Ready Recruiting: Use AI Without Losing the Human Edge · Recruiting Evolution

• Tom Erb [00:00:00]: University of Geneva and the University of Bern came out with a study on AI emotional intelligence. And what they found was that large language models actually scored significantly higher in areas such as emotional intelligence than most recruiters do. Kortney Harmon [00:00:16]: Welcome to FDE+, where the conversation shaping the future of talent continues beyond our live event series. This special series brings our free virtual event sessions directly to you. So they're featuring thought leaders, top trainers, experts, that are really tackling issues that matter most across the recruiting, staffing, and talent acquisition industries. These sessions originally happened live with real conversation, practical insight, and open Q&A, and now we're bringing the best of them to the podcast. Listen in. Thank you for taking time outta your busy day to join us. We're not slowing down for those of you who have been with us since 9:00 AM this morning. Next up, I think a lot of you probably A, are waiting for, or B, know Mr. Kortney Harmon [00:01:11]: Tom Erb. He is going to be talking about future-ready recruiting, adapting AI automation, and whatever's next in this industry. So, Tom is the president of Tallann Resources, one of the most respected voices in the staffing and recruiting industry. And really been helping firms navigate changes for years. He's been tackling the big question, how do you actually build a recruiting operation that's ready for what is coming? So, Tom, with that being said, do you have a deck to share? If you share it, I will add it to the screen and I will jump away. The running joke was with Keely, if you said my name 3 times, I'm like a bad genie. I'll pop back up if you need me. And I'm going to jump off. Kortney Harmon [00:01:50]: Tom, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, sir. All right. Tom Erb [00:01:53]: Thanks, Kortney. Thanks to Crelate for inviting me. This is an exciting couple of days here. You guys, you're going to learn a lot of stuff, but there's a lot of AI that we're going to be talking about. And I do want to, I do want to preface it with a couple of things. One is that if everybody's talking about a particular topic, we need to pay attention to that. We need to not say, oh, it's oversaturated. It's overblown. Tom Erb [00:02:18]: AI is, and I'm going to talk about this a little bit, the most transformative technology that I've seen in the 32 years I've been in the industry or even just been in, out in the workforce. I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach to this in that Keely did a great job of giving some very, very specific things, which is what we need because too many people talk about just generalities. Oh, you should be on AI, you should be on AI. But he talked about some really specific things. There's going to be other presenters that do it. What I would say is that if you hear the same thing over and over again, Don't confuse that as being redundant. What it is basically doing is reinforcing that this is something you really should be looking at and that that is what the general consensus is, is that we should be focusing on those things. If you hear differing opinions, don't confuse that with contradiction. Tom Erb [00:03:10]: Just look at that, that, hey, things still aren't developed or there's different ways to go about things. So I think this is a great opportunity for you to have a whole bunch of different subject matter experts over the next 2 days talk about recruiting and sales and staffing and recruiting. And in many cases, how AI is influencing that. What I'm going to talk about today is how to future-ready your career around AI, how to leverage it, where we're going with all of this stuff, where we've been. I'm going to show you a couple of kind of fun things here. Go back before we go forward. And then just how to really approach your career, whether you are an owner, a manager, a salesperson, a recruiter, handling back office, whatever that is, this applies to everybody. So let's jump in. Tom Erb [00:03:59]: I want to go way, way back to August of 1994. This guy right here was right out of college. If you can't see the resemblance, that's me 32 years ago. That is me in one of my crazy ties that I had. I had to wear a tie to work every single day back then, even though we were doing light industrial and clerical staffing. And 1994, if we look back, I actually had AI try and reproduce kind of what the environment was. And it did a really, really good job of this after quite a few tries. But if we look back at when I first started out in staffing, We had all these paper applications and they filled it out and it was actually a folder is how we had it. Tom Erb [00:04:46]: So it's kind of a nice thing. They filled out the application, which became the folder that had all of their different documents in it. We had paper job orders that were in triplicate. You would write on the front of one of those and then it would go through to the other pieces and one would go to payroll and one would go to account management. We were heavily focused on classified ads, which is basically just the newspaper version of job boards. Job boards are the classified ads of today. We almost exclusively had to focus on the phone as a communication method. And so we were picking up the phone, calling people. Tom Erb [00:05:24]: We also had faxes. We had a thermal fax machine, which if you've ever seen one of those, it actually was on a roll. And the heat would make the facts go on there and it would rub across on your fingers and rub off and it would fade over time and it would curl up. And so it was the best technology we had, but it wasn't that great. We had this lazy Susan table that looks similar to this table that I'm showing you. The table was, you know, fake wood like this. The lazy Susan was a little bit bigger than what it's showing. And then we had these banker boxes on top that had all of the different applications in those. Tom Erb [00:06:02]: That is how we would go through. We would call everybody in the banker box, and when we were done, we'd put the top of the banker box on it. And then we had these AS/400. These were IBM. They were green screens. They were terminals. They were hooked up to the ceiling so you could pull 'em around. We used 'em almost for nothing but for just confirming that the person got paid. Tom Erb [00:06:23]: And there certainly was no, there were no computers. We had one computer in the front that did some testing. The reason why I bring this up is because things have changed a lot in 32 years, and yet the industry is still, for the most part, doing the same thing that I did in 1994 when I was working there, which is attracting, evaluating, selecting, and placing people on jobs. Here's what we didn't have. We didn't have a computer. Each of us didn't have it. The AS/400s we hardly ever used. The computer up in the front I would use If I had to create a document and print it out, we didn't have email. Tom Erb [00:07:05]: There was no such thing as email in 1994, or very, very limited. It did exist, but very, very limited. It wasn't used for a business purpose. No texting. We didn't have job boards. We had the classified ads. We didn't have social media. We didn't have an applicant tracking system. Tom Erb [00:07:22]: We didn't have mobile phones. We didn't have workflow automation. So, A lot of things have changed, and yet our industry still remains strong. During that 32 years, I have heard about the death of staffing multiple times. We've literally had meetings where we sat down and said, how are we going to take on this new technology? Is this going to be the end of us? And that's what we're hearing with AI right now. So if we go back to the late 1990s, we had the Monster board. Which then became Monster. And for the longest time, that was by far the biggest job board. Tom Erb [00:08:02]: And we were scared to death that Monster was going to take our jobs. People weren't going to need to use Staffing anymore because you were going to be able to post jobs on Monster and get all the people that you needed to. What ended up happening is the staffing industry ended up being the biggest clients of Monster and CareerBuilder and ultimately Indeed and all the other ones. And then we fast forward a decade to the 2000s. 2004, 2005 is about the time that LinkedIn and Facebook started to really get going. And again, we thought this is the end of us and people were predicting it. There were articles about it. There was all sorts of discussions talking about it at conferences. Tom Erb [00:08:40]: Biggest user of LinkedIn, staffing and recruiting firms. 2010s, now we've got this cloud-based staffing that's coming out that's going to go, you don't even need recruiters. You can do it self-service. It's easy. You can get there. Companies like Upwork, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, all of those were coming up and we go, and that's it. Well, what happened there? Upwork started hiring recruiters because they realized that they couldn't do it all and there needed to be that human element to it. And so, we're seeing cloud-based staffing continue to grow. Tom Erb [00:09:14]: But it has for the most part not really cannibalized much of the traditional staffing industry. Then we go to later 2020s mobile staffing and Uber Works. If anybody remembers that, Uber created their own division that was in more of a trial basis, was starting to pick up some steam. And what it basically was, it was the Uberization of staffing. Works very similar to if you've ever gotten an Uber car, or if you've ever ordered Uber Eats, it was the same type of concept and it was very successful and it was building momentum. And then guess what happened? COVID hit and Uber said, nope, we're not going to do all these peripheral things. We're just going to focus on the cars, the car service, and on Uber Eats. They got rid of everything else. Tom Erb [00:10:01]: Mobile staffing has not picked up to the level that we thought it was. It has certainly not been the end of staffing. It's just another way now people that can do staffing and we'll continue to see mobile staffing grow. I do still think that that's a part of the future of the staffing industry, but it didn't kill the industry like some people thought it was going to. And now we're with AI and everybody thinks that AI is going to replace all of us as recruiters and we'll weather this storm too. The interesting thing is, if you're paying attention to all the different experts out there and all these different think tank organizations like Gartner and all those, they have gone from saying that 75 to 90% of jobs are at risk of being lost because of AI and that we're all going to sit around like the people up in the spaceship on WALL-E and sit around and drink our Big Gulps and all that stuff because we don't have any jobs. Now they're saying that AI actually is going to spur job growth. So, and that's been within the span of a few months. Tom Erb [00:11:05]: So I think we're going to be okay. Pretty confident in that, but it is going to transform what we do and it's already doing it. And if it has not transformed what you're doing, you're behind. But I will say I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure a bit, because you wouldn't be on this virtual conference if you weren't ahead of the pack and ahead of the curve and focused on doing some of these new things. So none of these technologies is going to kill staffing, but you can tell from 1994, what my experience was as a new recruiter to today, all these technologies have really transformed what we do and it'll continue to do that. In fact, AI is, I don't think there's much doubt or much of an argument that it is going to be the most transformative technology since the internet or even before that. There's a Quote that I think is really well said here. Ethan Mollick from the Wharton School of Business, he's one of the AI experts out there right now, said that today's AI is the worst AI you'll ever use. Tom Erb [00:12:14]: And we've heard different versions of this. Peter Diamandis, who's a futurist and an AI expert, he equates it to we're in the first inning of a 9-inning ballgame. So if you think about that, it's only going to get better and it's getting better at such a rapid pace. That it's really, really hard to keep up with. I want to give a quick example of this. I think this is amazing when we take a look at version 1 of Midjourney. Midjourney is an AI generating website if you haven't used that. And the prompt was something like a closeup of an elderly man's face. Tom Erb [00:12:47]: Here's what version 1 was. I don't know what happened to that guy. Here's version 7, same prompt. And look at the difference. And this has been in the span of only 2 years. So just, it's amazing what AI is doing. It's just one example of what we're seeing out there. Some of you, if you've followed me before, if you've been on some of the other webinars or seen me speak in person, you might have heard me talk about 2 recruiters, Jim and Megan. Tom Erb [00:13:17]: And so Jim and Megan both started at the same time. And they were in the same roles. And yet, they approach their job very, very differently. For Jim, Jim is your typical recruiter that's out there. He's polite. He's professional. He primarily reaches out to job board applicants. He's basically processing the people that are applying to the jobs. Tom Erb [00:13:40]: He does a quick phone screen and then he tries to place as many of those as he can. His focus is all on new applicants. Doesn't tend to focus much, if at all, on his existing database because it's too hard to navigate or because the data is not good or whatever the excuse is. He doesn't pay much attention to the people on assignment. He considers himself a recruiter. Recruiters recruit. Recruiters don't talk to people on assignment. He feels his job is done. Tom Erb [00:14:07]: And of course, his top placement source, because it's his only placement source, is job board applicants. Move over to Megan. Megan's friendly and engaging. She also contacts job board applicants because that's part of what we do. But she takes a little bit longer to do a deeper interview because she wants to get to know candidates a little bit more. She also, when she identifies really good candidates that she doesn't have a job for, she proactively skill markets, MPCs, whatever you want to call it. We got 8 million terms for that action. But she markets those highly marketable candidates out to prospects and to clients or to her account manager so that she can get that out there. Tom Erb [00:14:48]: She follows up regularly with her assigned employees. She feels that that's a critical piece of what she does, and it improves retention and handles issues before they become bigger. She connects and engages with candidates on LinkedIn. She's actively doing that with every candidate she runs across. She's actively involved in Facebook groups. She posts video job search tips on social media. She exists. She's constantly engaging her database. Tom Erb [00:15:14]: She looks at it as a tool, a resource, and a competitive advantage, not just some black hole that doesn't have good data. And her top placement resource is actually referrals. In my experience, and I've been consulting and training to the staffing industry now for 16 years. 32 years total in the industry, 99% would fall into the Jim category. And yet Megan is the one that we really need to focus on being more like Megan. I'm going to come back to that and talk to it about why that applies to our conversation. But I wanted to bring up something that is very, very recent. We are already seeing the blueprint of what an existing staffing company is transforming into, and they're doing it right before our eyes. Tom Erb [00:16:01]: In fact, they're being very public about this. And I think this is as much, if you were to ask me, as much of an internal transformation of their business as it is a marketing piece to show how much different they are and how far ahead of it is. And who I'm talking about is the Adecco Group. So Adecco, largest or second largest staffing company in the world. Right now, they have gone all in on AI. And they've done this in a very, very short period of time. Back in March of this year, they announced that they bought an unlimited license to Salesforce's agentic AI tool, which is called Agentforce. That gives all of their recruiters, all of their employees, complete unfettered access to the AI tool. Tom Erb [00:16:51]: Their goal was to achieve back in March 50% of their revenue generated from Agentic AI, not by 2030, but by the end of this year. Okay? Very, very aggressive, going all in, pushing all their chips in. Just 3 months later, they came out with another press release. This was just a few days ago. They've had 1.2 million candidate engagement interactions, 250,000 of those have been completed interviews already. Now, I know some of you are doing those and having some of those, but this is— we're talking about on massive scale right here. And their time to delivery has already been cut by 50%. So their time from getting an order to the time they're presenting candidates has been cut in half already. Tom Erb [00:17:40]: It's a huge competitive advantage that they already have. And that's just the beginning of it. Here's the other areas that they're focused on. They have taken Agentic AI and it is now handling prescreening of candidates. It is handling talent pool management. It is supporting recruiters through a variety of ways, through workflows, through task initiation. It has created customer service. So now candidates and clients can answer questions and it's done through AI. Tom Erb [00:18:14]: It has streamlined the onboarding process, which is freeing up recruiters to do all sorts of other more value-added tasks. It has voice capability. And what they're most proud of, they actually talk about this specifically, is redeployment, which is a huge issue in our industry. Our industry on average only redeploys about 15 to 20% of the people we place on assignment. And redeployment is I place them on an assignment. When that assignment's done, I place them on another assignment. They have focused on redeploying where they are reaching out. The agent is reaching out to candidates a few days before they're starting to reengage that employee and they're starting to work towards getting them redeployed. Tom Erb [00:18:59]: This is huge, huge for them. And it's something that most staffing companies really, really struggle with. So it's already out there happening. I would suggest Pay attention to Adecco. And you might be saying, well, yeah, but that's Adecco. They're one of the largest staffing companies in the world. AI is pretty democratized here. AI is leveling the playing field. Tom Erb [00:19:20]: Everything that they talk about doing here, every key area of focus you can do today, regardless of the size. You could be a one-person shop and you can do all of the things that they are talking about. It's just really a matter of focusing on it and you're going to learn how to do a lot of this stuff over the next couple of days. The University of Geneva and the University of Bern came out with a study on AI emotional intelligence, I believe it was last fall. And what they found was that AI large language models actually scored significantly higher in areas such as emotional intelligence than most recruiters do. And this is 6, 8 months ago. It's gotten even better and better. And what we're finding is that the AI agents are able to have this emotional intelligence more because it is focused on, because it is an area that is worked on. Tom Erb [00:20:17]: Most recruiters just go about our day-to-day stuff and we rely on our natural emotional intelligence that we have or we don't have rather than really having a focus on it. So, When we talk about, well, you know what, they can't build the relationships, they can't do that. Well, technically, yes. But in many, many cases, candidates and clients are having better interactions with AI than they are with live human being recruiters. And so it's something we really need to focus on. We're going to talk in more detail about this. So let's go back to Jim and Megan. All right. Tom Erb [00:20:53]: How's this going to impact them? Well, Jim's going to go. Jim is going to be replaced by Jim 2.0, which is the AI agent, because as we already talked about with the Adecco stuff, it can perform thousands of job board and database searches. It can do texts and emails and at mass and immediately within seconds of applicants applying rather than what typically happens is. Got an applicant applies to a job on a Friday evening after they've gotten home from work. And when does Jim call them? If he's lucky, 10 or 11 o'clock on Monday morning, 2 and a half days after the person applied. So now we have Agentic AI that reaches out within seconds, gets the process going. So if I've got one company that's waiting for Jim to call them at 10 o'clock on Monday, I got another company that reaches out within seconds. Guess what's going to happen? Jim's going to call them. Tom Erb [00:21:51]: They're not going to be there because they're going to be in-person interviewing with the other company that already got them through the process and probably has them halfway onboarded already. So there's all sorts of things that Jim 2.0 is going to do that the human Jim doesn't do as well, or does but doesn't do it as quickly and efficiently. However, doesn't mean all the recruiters are gone. What it means is that somebody like Megan is able to scale. And she is a rock star. She was going to be a rock star anyways, but now she has the support of GymPoint 2.0 to help her scale her efforts. And she has pools of candidates that are ready to go. She's keeping them engaged both through personal interaction, but also leveraging AI to keep in touch when she doesn't have the bandwidth to keep in touch with everybody. Tom Erb [00:22:39]: She spends Most of her day just interacting with her talent network through all sorts of different ways. And she's having fun doing it. I work with recruiting teams, sales teams, executives, owners. I work with a recruiter that we've been working to wrap around AI to help with sourcing to selection, onboarding. And we were talking just a couple of weeks ago and she goes, you know, I've gone from kind of dreading coming to work on Monday to now I'm having a lot of fun. This is what I signed up for. This is why I want to do it. Because what she's able to do is she's able to do the important stuff, the stuff that moves the needle, the value adds. Tom Erb [00:23:24]: She's able to have deeper conversations with candidates and with employees. She is firmly falling into the Megan category, whereas she was forced into the Jim category. before. So this is what the technology is allowing us to do. And what's going to happen is it's going to escalate the speed, efficiency, and accuracy that the Meghans are able to do. Think of 4 or 5 times scaling is what we're probably looking at. We don't even know yet. So how do we evolve as recruiting professionals? So that we don't fall into the gym category so that we're not replaced by AI? How do we, we focus on leveraging AI as a tool and differentiating ourselves in a way that makes us valuable going beyond what AI can offer to our clients? So there's 3 areas that I want to focus on. Tom Erb [00:24:20]: First one is become an expert in your profession. It's what so few people do in our industry. And I'm going to show you some areas how to do that. I'm going to show you it's pretty easy to do that if you just have a little bit of focus, you set some stuff up. And just the fact that you're on this virtual conference says that you're ahead of the vast majority of the industry. 2, embrace AI as an efficiency tool, not as a replacement. And 3, focus on the human skills that AI can't replicate and won't be able to replicate effectively. Let's talk about becoming an expert in your profession. Tom Erb [00:24:57]: I'm very passionate about this topic. I truly believe that if we are focused on being a professional, not just looking at us as having a job, that we are going to be more valuable, more effective, and we're going to be indispensable. And when there are job cuts because of AI, or probably more likely, Just not replacing people because AI is able to do it. We want to be the ones that are being scaled. So here's how I stay up to date in staffing and recruiting. This is by no means exhaustive. And I also want to lay out that this does not take me 10, 15, 20 hours a week to do. These are things that I do when I have time. Tom Erb [00:25:46]: These are just areas that If I'm eating breakfast in the morning, I may be watching or listening to a podcast, or I might be reading an article from a thought leader, or I just might be on LinkedIn and looking at some of the posts from them. So lots of thought leaders out there. Ron Hetrick, to me, is one of the biggest ones as far as what's going on in the labor market. And if you want to really position yourself as a thought leader and as an industry expert, and it really is a talent workforce expert. Ron Hetrick, somebody you got to follow. He is the chief economist for Lightcast. He's phenomenal, very entertaining as an economist, and if you ever get a chance to see him speak, he's fantastic as well. Lauren Jones, one of the leading, uh, voices, uh, in the industry on technology in general as it applies to staffing and recruiting. Tom Erb [00:26:40]: Dan Mastropolo doesn't post as much maybe as the other to do, but when he is speaking, he's somebody that I definitely want to listen to. He owns several different staffing technology companies, and he is one of the sharpest people when it comes to technology in the industry. There's several podcasts. I actually, there's dozens of podcasts. The Elite Recruiter Podcast with Ben Mena is fantastic, and he always has people that are cutting edge, very successful people. That is interviewing. He's a great interviewer as well. I'm going to do a little pandering. Tom Erb [00:27:15]: Kortney's, uh, Full Desk Experience here. I've been on it. It was great. And she has great people that are on that as well. Haley Marketing does Secrets of Staffing Success, which usually is Brad Bialy. He does a fantastic job on there. And they've been doing that for years. From an email newsletter standpoint, Staffing Hub, you can sign up for that. Tom Erb [00:27:37]: You get a daily. Email update from them. The great thing is they go out to the internet and look for all sorts of different things that are relevant. They curate it, they summarize it, and if you want to read the whole article, you can click on it. Raymond Penny is the founder of Kylo. Kylo is a data analytics and reporting company for the staffing industry, and he does Five Point Friday. And Five Point Friday is all about— it's 5 different AI topics that are relevant to the staffing and recruiting industry. So you want a great summary there. Tom Erb [00:28:10]: It's amazing how many times I have read something on his Five Point Friday email newsletter, and it has led to me learning all sorts of new things about the industry. There are still things that I'm going to talk about here in a minute that I found out because of Raymond's newsletter. So definitely check that out. Staffing Monthly, actually this old one, there's old topics of that. Staffing Monthly is run by Dan Mori. He's actually kind of changed the format of that, but he still comes out with great stuff. And Staffing Monthly is also like an online video magazine that he did for a long time. And now he has a different email that goes out. Tom Erb [00:28:51]: Organizations and groups, ASA has some great stuff. By the way, ASA, if you're not a member of ASA, you can still access their Staffing Success Magazine. I've written the Recruiting Monthly article for that, Recruiting Today article for that for the last, I think, 8 years. But there's lots of great content and that's free to non-members of ASA. The digital format is the National Association of Personnel Services. I've been a member of that organization for over 15 years. Great, especially if you're in professional recruiting, direct hire recruiting. Lots of great information. Tom Erb [00:29:24]: Staffing Industry Analysts. Does require membership. However, they do have a lot of free things available as well. Talent Tech Labs is a great organization, a little bit different than the first 3 in that they are, you know, for-profit. They're a think tank. Basically what Talent Tech Labs does is goes out and they keep their finger on the pulse of all things technology, both on the staffing and recruiting side, but also on your corporate talent acquisition side. So you can learn about all the different technology on staffing and recruiting, but then on the corporate side, you can see what your clients are looking at. You can see kind of what the future is. Tom Erb [00:30:05]: What are they focused on to keep your finger on the pulse of your clients' technology? And then Headhunter and Executive Recruiter Community is a great Facebook group that I just sit back. Yeah, I don't post a whole lot on there. I just listen to what people have questions about, have challenges with, what they're having success with. They talk a lot about technology, but they also talk a lot about just different challenges we have on a day-to-day basis from recruiters. So those are great. This is a non-exhaustive list, but it's a good area to get started on. Let's talk about embracing AI as an efficiency tool, not as a replacement. So which AI should I use? Number one question I get when it comes to AI. Tom Erb [00:30:50]: And Keely mentioned in the previous session, I caught the end of it, and he was saying, don't be switching all the time just because you're going to get like a 5% improvement. I totally agree with that. I look at it at 3 different levels. First thing is, if your company pays for something, absolutely max it out. Okay. That's the first thing that you should do, because also not only Is it that you're getting that for no cost because the company is paying for it, but also it's probably integrating into your processes. Your coworkers are using that as well. So make sure that you max it out. Tom Erb [00:31:24]: The second would be the one that integrates best with your systems. If you're in Microsoft, then you probably want to be leveraging Copilot as much as you can up to the maximum level that it's able to do it. If you're in Google G Suite, you want to be looking at Gemini, those different things. Not to mention you got Claude and you've got ChatGPT that also integrate into lots of different systems. So it's important that it integrates and can access the systems that you use regularly. And then third is just the one you're most comfortable with. If you try and switch horses mid-race, you're going to lose more than you gain. And here's actually— Showing a quick example of that. Tom Erb [00:32:06]: This only goes through 2024, which sounds ancient now with AI. But what this shows, and it's continued to do this, is that once they caught up to each other, so you got Claude GPT and Gemini ChatGPT, they keep leapfrogging each other and they continue to leapfrog each other and they will continue and eventually there'll be some stabilization. But for the most part, They all do pretty similar things and they're all pretty good. You also have within these different types of models or different versions of them. So like in Claude, you have Sonnet and Opus, and we had Fable for a little bit before they pulled it because of some concerns, some risk concerns. But just pick the one that you're comfortable with and go based on what I said before and just stick with that. I also get the question of, I feel like Maybe it's more of a statement. I feel like I'm cheating when I use AI for certain types of things. Tom Erb [00:33:05]: And listen, if you're tasked with doing something very specific, something that is— you're being paid for your creativity in something or something like that, then you probably want to do that on your own, at least to a certain point. But this is what happens with any kind of new technology is that there are always people that are saying that, well, that's cheating. And then after a while it really becomes mainstream and that's what it's going to be with AI. So ask yourself questions. Is it cheating for an accountant to use a spreadsheet? And I've already dated myself with the first couple of slides, so I'm just going to continue to date myself. When I was in business school, I was in an accounting class where Our accountant required us to handwrite in general ledgers, paper general ledgers. And if he caught a whiff of anybody using a spreadsheet, then they were kicked out of the class. Nowadays, would anybody be handwriting a general ledger? What would you think of your accountant? What would you think of the person doing your taxes if they were handwriting something? So obviously it's become mainstream and accepted and And preferred. Tom Erb [00:34:20]: Is it cheating for an architect to use computer-aided design software? Well, at one point it was. It was definitely frowned upon by the profession. Is it cheating for the high school student to use a calculator? It used to be. And now, of course, high school students are required to have calculators, have scientific calculators, and even beyond that. Is it cheating for a college student to reference Wikipedia? At one point it was. And even today, there's, you know, it's not totally mainstream, but we're finding that in a lot of cases that they're able to cite Wikipedia as one of the sources. And so that is a big change from the beginning. All of these were considered unethical or at least inappropriate at the time. Tom Erb [00:35:03]: And over the course of time, they became widely accepted. So where should we start? If you were just to start, and I know you're going to get lots of advice over the course of the next couple of days. Is just keep learning how to write better prompts. And I find that that's something that has benefited me more than anything. In fact, in fact, the way that prompt writing has evolved very quickly— it used to be you had to be really specific about prompting, but nowadays, because you have so many other ways to provide the AI tool information, what you really need to do is just have more of a natural language type of prompting. Give it specifics, give it details, and then you can also, you can add to the prompts, you can follow up, you can refine over time. So it's gotten much, much better to do that. So the prompting has gone from a very specific type of structure to now much more just conversational. Tom Erb [00:35:58]: This is my assistant that I'm, I'm helping figure out how to do the project. Identify just a manual task or 2 that you can handle with the AI agents. I think Keely mentioned this before. You're going to hear this through the next couple of days, is that you just got to start. You just got to do some stuff. And once you do, you're going to go, wow, now what else I can do? I use Claude Cowork to create an app. And I thought, yeah, I'm just going to see if it can do it. And I was absolutely blown away. Tom Erb [00:36:27]: My wife, who has been up to this point a skeptic of AI and resistant to adoption. When I said, look at the app that it's created for me, it changed everything for her. She goes, wow, okay, this is actually what everybody's been talking about. Finished that app, started on another app. Right now we're working on about 5 different apps, refining those, and basically taking, in many cases, like spreadsheets or other types of documents, other things, and saying, can we create an app that is easier to use, that has analytics, all of those things. You don't have to create an app for everything, but just start to identify a task. I did a session on this a couple of months ago for a client conference, and I think I did it on a Thursday. That weekend, one of the attendees said, I had this report that I had to put together for one of our clients, and I had to pull data from a couple of different spreadsheets. Tom Erb [00:37:23]: I used Claude Cowork to pull that data, analyze it, and help me create the report. He said it took me minutes instead of hours and hours I thought it was going to over the weekend. So that's what we just got to work on doing. Leverage the free tools. If you don't have any paid tools, leverage them until you outgrow them. But here's what I would also say is that don't be penny-wise, pound-foolish. If I can pay $20 a month for something because maybe my company is not paying for it right now, And I can do it $20 a month. I can do it for personal life or whatever. Tom Erb [00:37:58]: It's so quick to get the ROI on that $20. I mean, we're talking— think of your— the value of your own time. We're talking about an hour or less of saved time to justify that $20. And then also max out what your ATS does, what third-party AI and automation capabilities do. So make sure that you're using those. To the max. We find a lot of people are not using the AI already embedded into your ATS, into your CRM, those kinds of things. Give you some free AI learning resources. Tom Erb [00:38:32]: There's some great stuff out there, and there's one in particular that if you do nothing else, if you take nothing else away from this, make sure that you follow it. I mentioned already Raymond's 5-Point Friday. Anthropic, who owns Claude, has created an online certificate. It's not certification, but, but there are courses where you can get a certificate. And Cloud 101 is one of those, but it has all different ones from Cloud 101 to more advanced. It's all free. It's something you should do. I would recommend doing it if you are going to be in cloud. Tom Erb [00:39:04]: ChatGPT, OpenAI, they have a similar website as well. IBM SkillsBuild has all sorts of great tools. Not only for AI, but all sorts of things. And almost all of them are free. YouTube, there's tons of stuff on YouTube. I've learned all sorts of things just looking at YouTube videos of people walking through how to do certain things on different AI tools. I mentioned OpenAI Academy. Microsoft has their own with Copilot Learning Hub. Tom Erb [00:39:31]: Coursera has a bunch of courses. Now you can pay for a lot of courses on Coursera. They also do have a lot of free courses, especially around AI. And then the big one that I would recommend starting with over anything is this guy is Reuben Hassid, H-A-S-S-I-D, and he has How to AI. He has actually now created basically this repository of everything you need for AI. He's got training on there. He's got prompts. I found out about Reuben Hassid through Raymond's Five Point Friday. Tom Erb [00:40:04]: And I have been following him religiously ever since. He has millions of followers, and the reason he does is because he just lays it out in such plain English. It's just easy to follow. He literally has prompts and he has things where you can set up skills where you essentially copy and paste what he has into AI, and then you modify it a little bit to customize for you. But he lays it out all for you step by step. Here's just a couple of examples. He's got, you know, 7 skills to master AI in 2026. He's also really focused on Claude, but you can apply this stuff to anything because they all work pretty similar. Tom Erb [00:40:43]: So he's got how to set up Claude Cowork, the different steps to do that. I have basically followed his steps verbatim and have had great results with that. So definitely recommend him. Can't recommend him enough. Last thing we're going to talk about, then I'll open it up for questions that you have, is just focus on the human skills that AI either can't replicate or is not going to replicate that well. We talked about the emotional intelligence improving for AI and that some studies are showing that it actually has higher emotional intelligence than some human counterparts. I think that's less of a signal of how well AI is doing and more of a signal of how poorly humans focus on emotional intelligence. And so, first thing you want to think or want to ask yourself is, how can I be a better version of myself every day? What is it that I can do to be more valuable and be more productive every single day? And if we talk about some of the things that I mentioned earlier, if you just start to do some of those things, what you'll learn is that the more I learn, The more I want to learn. Tom Erb [00:41:54]: And I will tell you, as somebody who started in 1994, I learn more today than I ever have, including in college. I am more purposeful in learning because I know the more that I know, the more valuable that I am. And the more that I know, the more expertise I have, the more fun things are. It's much better to be an expert at something or be really good at something than it is to not be. And so how can I be a better version of myself every day? One of the things that we can do is really focus on emotional intelligence. And we hear that term tossed around. There are actually somewhere between 8 to 10 different parts of emotional intelligence depending on what you are reading or listening to. But I've isolated 4 that I think are really critical to what we do as staffing and recruiting professionals. Tom Erb [00:42:48]: These are the areas that we should be focused on over and over and over again, in addition to developing our expertise. The first one is empathy. We do an assessment on— we've done it on thousands of people. We partner with a company called PeopleBest. And one of the behavioral traits, it has 29 different distinct behavioral traits it looks at. One of them is empathy. And on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not empathetic at all, I don't care about anybody else. And 10 being I am completely self-sacrificing and I care all about other people and none about myself. Tom Erb [00:43:22]: The average score that we see is around a 3 over and over again. In fact, I would say that 75% of the people that take the assessment score a 4 or lower. Doesn't make them bad people, doesn't make any of us bad people. What it tells us is that as human beings, we naturally focus on ourselves. And don't as naturally focus on thinking about others. Empathy is all about putting ourselves in the other person's shoes. That's hard to do a lot of times. But if we can do that consistently, we're going to be not only more valuable, but you're going to have people that gravitate to you, that keep coming back to you, that refer you people. Tom Erb [00:44:04]: Hey, I can't do any of that stuff, right? So that's an area that we really want to focus on. And if you struggle with that, because we all get busy, we all stop thinking about it and we get frustrated with a candidate on the phone or a client or whatever, make a Post-it note and say, put yourself in the other person's shoes and stick it up on your monitor and keep looking at that and remembering that until it's ingrained. Second is curiosity, is focus on being more curious of what's going on. Curiosity is all about, do I care about things? Am I wanting to learn other stuff? Most people in that behavioral assessment also score low in the learning trait. Most people on their own do not pursue learning. We like to learn in general, human beings do, but we don't pursue it. We have to be purposeful about some of these things, and curiosity is one of those. Relationships. Tom Erb [00:44:57]: Yes, we have relationships, but a lot of times relationships are built organically. Some people are much better at relationships, building, nurturing, and maintaining those than others are. We want to focus on that, really build relationships. That's where value is. AI will never have true relationships. And then the last one is active listening. Active listening is the act of stopping what you're doing. Don't think about what your response is going to be. Tom Erb [00:45:26]: Fully engage and listen to this person. Put the phone down. Don't be thinking about what your response is going to be. Actively listen. One of the good ways to actively listen, take notes while you're doing it. The other way to actively listen or to have your team members actively listen to something is say, we're going to recap this afterwards. If all of a sudden I have to report back on something, I'm going to pay more attention. So last thing I'll talk about and then we'll open it up here is just focus on that relationship building piece. Tom Erb [00:45:58]: Continue to build your network, get out and do networking events if you're not doing those already. One of the things that I've been talking about a lot lately is I'm going to all of these different networking organizations and I'm not seeing staffing people. We have not gotten back into the habit of networking. And so that's a real opportunity for us to distinguish ourselves and to build relationships. Your ChatGPT is not going to the local HR lunch. So we can go there and we can build these relationships in person and have a stronger network. Build it on LinkedIn, build it on other areas, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. Substack is an area I've just recently gotten on and started building up the network there. Tom Erb [00:46:46]: Leverage the AI and automation to communicate with your network. Having AI and automation reach out to your network is not a replacement to the activity that you're doing. It's in addition to it. And in many cases, it's not like you're replacing outreach. It's that you are adding to outreach or you're driving— you're reaching out through AI and automation to drive actual conversations back to you. And so look at ways that you can do that. How can I scale my communication out to people and actually have more communications live than I had before? And then the last one is become a thought leader. And if we go back and look, all of those things I showed you, those are all thought leaders. Tom Erb [00:47:32]: Those are all people that are doing the stuff that you can do as well. And that adds a ton of value to you and it makes you irreplaceable with AI. AI can create some blogs and stuff like that. It doesn't replace you as a true thought leader. So if we build up our expertise, we build up our network, then we can become a thought leader. So I'm gonna wrap it up here. Just want to touch on a couple of things. One is AI is transforming. Tom Erb [00:48:01]: It's not replacing our profession. Our profession is going to continue. Our industry is going to continue. Is it going to look different in 5 years? Absolutely. Everything's going to look different in 5 years. And focus on 3 key areas. One is becoming a recruiting profession expert. Talked about that. Tom Erb [00:48:17]: Embracing AI as an efficiency tool, not a replacement. You've got a great opportunity over the next couple of days to do that. And then lastly, focus on those human skills that AI cannot replace. So hopefully this is value. I will turn it back over to Kortney. We can answer some questions if there are. But thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Kortney Harmon [00:48:35]: Does anyone have any questions for Tom? Tom, thank you so much. Such good events and such good places to be and things to follow and people to follow. So amazing stuff. I may or may not have shared that on LinkedIn as well and tagged so few people. So if you have not, connect with Mr. Tom on LinkedIn, follow Tallann Resources, always amazing content. He is speaking at all the places all the time. So Tom, I think we're probably getting people stepping away to go grab some snacks for lunch at this point in time, or at least their bellies are talking to them. Kortney Harmon [00:49:09]: So I appreciate everything. Tom, could you do me a favor? Could you send me that presentation over? And I plan to send it over to everybody that was registered for the events. All right. I surely do appreciate you. Anything else from you, sir? Tom Erb [00:49:23]: I guess I would say that I think it's great what you and Crelate are putting together here with this 2-day virtual conference. I think it's awesome, and I think it's, uh, the speaker lineup's just fantastic. So everybody take advantage of this and just absorb as much. And, and for those that are on the call, I mentioned it a couple times, you're— I'm probably preaching to the choir. The reason why you're attending a conference like this is because you are more of a Megan than a Jim. You are somebody that is, is wanting to become an expert and to get better every single day. So kudos to everybody who has signed up for this, and kudos to you guys for the opportunity. Kortney Harmon [00:50:04]: Thanks, Tom. Tom, your perspective is exactly what the industry needs right now. An honest talk where it's headed, how to think about our future. Tom, thank you so much and have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to this Special FDE Plus virtual event. Do you want to be a part of the conversation next time? Our live sessions are free, open to the public, and packed with timely insights from some of the brightest voices in our industry. To follow the podcast, stay connected with Crelate so you don't miss the next events. Until then, keep learning, keep evolving, and we'll see you at the next one.