Disrupting Recruiting with David Paffenholz from PeopleGPT

[00:01:25] Started recruiting at NEA, now at People GPT, focused on searches and advising on recruiting.

[00:04:41] AI can help recruiters find candidates faster, but it won't replace them as recruiters still make decisions on identifying the best candidates.

[00:08:06] Online professional sites transformed recruitment with data. Peoplegpt enhances search with context and experience, leading to specific and successful talent recruitment.

[00:12:50] New recruiters focus on input metrics, but quality over quantity is key for successful hires. Focus on individual candidates and take time to consider before reaching out.

[00:14:04] Encourage openness to new technologies like GPT and chat GPT for job searches; experienced recruiters should try new technology and think about how it could help find candidates.

[00:18:54] Quick decision making is valuable even if flawed. Execution speed more important than deciding "perfectly".

[00:20:37] Get David's LinkedIn in the Show Notes. It's cool and personalized. Excited for more disruptions in recruiting.

Intro [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host, Benjamin MENA, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:19]:

I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. I have my special guest, Dave David Pavinholtz, to talk about AI disrupting the entire field of recruiting. And David and his team just hit the scene recently with a company called Peoplegpt. Now, if you've used chat GPT, it's freaking amazing. You put in a prompt, you get an awesome answer, you mess around with everything and it creates some great content. David's team actually took that up like ten notches. So picture this, you're using a Chat GPT like program, you're typing in what you want and then looking for it, finds those people based on those prompts, and then personalizes direct messages to them because it also has their contact information. So this is like mind blowing excited to talk about the AI revolution and how it's disrupting recruiting. So David, welcome to the podcast.

David Paffenholz [00:01:18]:

Thank you so much for having me.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:19]:

So, real quick, how did you even get into this wonderful world of recruiting in this recruiting space?

David Paffenholz [00:01:25]:

Yeah, so I started off in my first experience in recruiting was when I was working with a venture firm called NEA, and I was working with their talent team. And so it was both for internal talent operations at NEA, but also supporting some of their portfolio companies with their talent and their different recruiting needs. And so that was my first foray into the industry. From there, we then launched what has now become People GPT, the parent company of It being Juice Box. And that has really helped us get even deeper. And sometimes I feel like I'm more of a recruiter at the moment than running this business because I'm on calls all day thinking about different searches, helping some of our customers figure out how to best set that up, and also giving some advice on how to best prompt the system to really run those searches too.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:17]:

Okay, so real quick, give the listeners a good explanation of what Peoplegpt is.

David Paffenholz [00:02:24]:

Yeah, I think you actually already did a great job in the intro. So essentially you can think of it as Chat GPT and the interface that it comes with, being able to speak with a system and have a conversation with It, with all of the People data that you can find from different professional networks built into it. And so you might be able to define an individual, look at their LinkedIn profile, their GitHub profile, stack overflow and more, really assess the candidate and do so while speaking to an AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:52]:

And one of the coolest things, because I've done some stuff on Chat JPT, on searching for companies or searching for this, but you guys also have a database of contact information and the prompts that you give, it also feed the people with the contact information, right?

David Paffenholz [00:03:08]:

Yeah, exactly. So that's where I think our product really excels is that not only do we have the AI based chat interface, but we also have this database of all professional information for both individual profiles and backgrounds. So what are their experiences? What jobs have they had in the background in the past? What type of skills are they focused on, but also their contact information? How can we reach out to them, be it by email or by phone number, too?

Benjamin Mena [00:03:35]:

And I've seen from the demo, I've played around with it, and it writes like a pretty dang good personalized message. I cow.

David Paffenholz [00:03:43]:

Yeah, that's also one of my favorite features. One cool bit about that in particular is that we actually let you combine your own template. So if you have like a two or three sentence pitch for the role, you can keep that the same, but then also have the personalization on top. And so that's where we've seen a lot of value for recruiters using the platform compared to having, say, chat GPT, you write an old email from scratch where sometimes it's really good, but sometimes it also adds some things that you don't really want it to add. And so that's what we've been quite focused on, on keeping it consistent and making sure it's always a fit for a recruiting.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:15]:

So your customer base, is it mostly recruiters right now?

David Paffenholz [00:04:18]:

Yeah, it's almost all recruiters. We have a couple of other use cases and like expert networks and research, but I think 90% plus are in the recruiting space.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:27]:

Okay. There's talks of AI taking over, disrupting jobs. I think AI will help make great recruiters be more effective, but at the same time, this stuff has the possibility to take out some, I would say some average recruiters. What do you think?

David Paffenholz [00:04:41]:

It's an interesting question. So actually I don't think the system or even the AI more generally, be it in its current form or even five years down the road, is going to replace those jobs. I think it's going to help those jobs evolve. And so if we think about a lot of the time that gets put into a recruiting role, especially some of the tasks that might be more repetitive, like finding individual candidates, reading through their profiles, opening up all their links, I think that's where AI can play a really strong role in helping make those steps faster, giving you the right information faster. But in the end, it's still the recruiter making those decisions, evaluating the candidates, identifying who's worth reaching out to and who we should have conversations with. And I think that's where these AI systems are particularly powerful is making recruiters even more effective and helping them level up in finding the very best candidates for a role, which, if you think about it, more holistically, makes the biggest possible impact on a company and the company's success. The more we're able to find individual candidates that really bring specific skill sets or values to a company, the better the company will be able to perform.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:44]:

To awesome. Yeah. In the future. Where is people GPT going?

David Paffenholz [00:05:50]:

Yeah, there's a bunch of things that we're pretty excited to be working on. So the first one is around the data sources that we have. So we already have quite a variety, basically most of different public professional profiles, but we're always working on adding more and more data sources there. So if you think about BIOS on websites, even articles or past speeches, even podcasts that individuals have done, those are all information that can be really helpful for that recruiting information too. And those are things that we're pretty excited to be adding soon. And then at the same time, we're also always doing workflow improvements, so just making it even faster to help you show the right profiles, get their links, email addresses, et cetera. And so particularly on that workflow side, there's a bunch of new features that we're excited to release.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:32]:

To I know we have listeners from all across the globe. Is it mostly US focused right now for people GPT?

David Paffenholz [00:06:39]:

Yeah, it's fully global, so the platform will work anywhere. The kind of main considering factor where some geographies might work better than others is the amount of professional information that people post publicly. So an interesting example that actually looked quite deeply into is Japan, where there's less of a frequency of posting public professional information and descriptions of that information online. And so in those cases, it might be a little bit tougher to find those candidates depending on the information that's available.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:09]:

And people GPA automatically translates into different languages with those emails too.

David Paffenholz [00:07:15]:

Yeah, it'll work for any language and so you can actually also speak to it in different languages. One caveat being is sometimes it responds in English, even if you ask me a question in a different language, but it'll always understand.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:26]:

That is crazy. I know. I've done some searches overseas where I'm back in the day using Google Translate to kind of like write the emails once I find the person. Now an AI system can just kind of handle all that for sure, or.

David Paffenholz [00:07:42]:

Even figuring out what job titles are in different languages, what the different experiences are in different languages. And so a lot of those things is what we try to help alleviate.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:52]:

To so I'm going to ask this as a two part question. The first part is going to be with people GPT. So how can companies and recruiters leverage peoplegpt to win top talent?

David Paffenholz [00:08:06]:

So I think when I think about both the, I guess taking a step back first and thinking about how the internet or specifically online professional sites have transformed the recruitment industry is in essence the question of data. We suddenly have much more information that's accessible to us and we've made that searchable typically through boolean strings or different filter based searches. Now what peoplegpt does is it lets you not only search by filter, but it actually lets you search by context and experience. And so the system understands the background of an individual and what their career has looked like. And that's our goal and where we're very much focused is help you find much more specific if it talent, where we see much higher conversion rates but also much higher success once the talent has been recruited into the organization. Because we're no longer just looking for specific job titles or years of experience that are a fit, but we're actually looking at what did they do in their prior role and how will that impact what they're doing in their future role. So a lot of those decisions used to only be made at the interview stage and I think we can bring a lot of that one step forward now to the actual recruiting stage, helping find those right fit candidates and being able to go one step deeper than we were able to before.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:21]:

Can you give like a good example? I know when I was playing around with your system almost like prompt it down deeper into the selection. Can you give a few examples of that?

David Paffenholz [00:09:30]:

Yeah, one good example that we did, I actually worked quite closely with the customer on this search is they were looking for a software engineer with specific experience in fraud detection. And so we knew kind of some of the broad outlines, we knew it was supposed to be a senior software engineer, they should have experience at a fintech company and we moved a location with San Francisco. But beyond that we really wanted someone who had built these fraud detection systems on top of payments infrastructure. And so that's where it gets really specific and really tricky to find the right candidate. And typically it would involve opening up a lot of different LinkedIn profiles to try to find a hint of someone having that experience. And so that's where we're able to go really deep and not only understand individuals who had mentioned those specific experiences, but also taken a look at individuals who had experiences in data science or even in machine learning before, in other rules, then moved on to a fintech company and applied some of that within the fintech business. And we were able to make really good predictions about individuals that have those experience in machine learning for fraud detection and go more and more specific on the searches that we were looking for.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:34]:

So before I ask the next question, I'm in the govcod space, the IC world, are you ever going to move into the cleared world and cleared candidates?

David Paffenholz [00:10:43]:

Yeah, that's an interesting question. So we're excited about it and we have some customers who have been speaking about that too. I can't make any promises right now, but it is a direction that we're looking at okay.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:55]:

I always wonder just because it's a very interesting and unique space, but to also understand that it isn't, the masses are in there for sure.

David Paffenholz [00:11:04]:

Well, we like it. The more niche searches are, the more exciting, more excited I get too, is because I think that's where the system is really able to show its powers and find that one candidate that might have been overlooked otherwise.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:16]:

I'm going to re ask the question, but kind of like more general AI focus. So you're the CEO of an AI focused recruitment company that's disrupting recruiting, but as a whole generalize, how do you think AI is going to disrupting revolutionize the recruiting industry?

David Paffenholz [00:11:34]:

I guess I have a slight bias in terms of I think about it from our company and our perspective and how we integrate into different customers workflows, but kind of more general and holistic note too. I think it's going to shift a lot of the time and especially value add time in the recruiting and talent industry to focus more on one on one, collaborating with hiring managers to really identify the right fit for a role and two, being able to assess candidates before even reaching out to them. And so I think those are trends that we're going to see more and more strongly, especially when compared to, say, the sourcing side of initially identifying candidates before we move into that outreach stage.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:15]:

Awesome. So want to kind of move into some of what I call quick fire questions. Just like general advice, because you said they're talking to a lot of recruiters. You're talking to a lot of high level ta professionals, a lot of high level search firm owners. So you're getting a different perspective than a lot of us sometimes in the trenches. And I'd love to hear your perspective on that. So there's a lot of recruiters that are just starting off in this industry. They're brand new. Welcome to 2023. Whole new career in recruiting. Everything that you're seeing in the AI world and all the conversations that you're having, what advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's actually just starting out?

David Paffenholz [00:12:50]:

Yeah, so one thing that I've seen, and it's an interesting one as well, because it's maybe a little bit counterintuitive at first, is the focus on input metrics that I think a lot of new recruiters have, where it's a lot about profiles found outbound, emails sent, conversions to that first interview, where those metrics are really important. But in the end, the metric that truly matters is whether it's a successful hire and we'll only find that one out a year down the road. And so I think that's where I'd give the advice to have a stronger focus on the personalization and the real focus on individual candidates, the quality of who we're bringing in and reaching out to rather than necessarily the volume at which we're doing it. And so I think especially when being new to the job. A lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, but also important to take a step back and consider those candidates more carefully before deciding who we want to reach out to.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:47]:

Awesome. So the same question, but for experienced recruiters. I know there are a lot of us, I don't want to say like old dogs, but I'm coming in almost like 20 years of recruiting. The world is changing, it's kind of changing fast. But what advice would you give to recruiters that have been in the game for a while?

David Paffenholz [00:14:04]:

Yeah, so I think what I didn't encourage the most there is being open to these new technologies, giving technologies like people GPT or even chat GPT more generally, looking at them with an open eye and thinking about how they could be useful in different searches and even more generally in the industry as a whole. And I think that can involve things like a lot of experienced recruiters that they speak with are really familiar with Boolean searches and they can write those in like seconds. At the same time, I think that Boolean searches are not going to play that large of a role in the industry in say, two to three years. And a lot of those searches might be running in a different way. And so that's where I really encourage that kind of openness of giving a shot at the new technology, challenging oneself to think about prompting, how can that best work and how we can use that to find candidates instead.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:58]:

What has been one of the most unique searches that you've had on your guys'platform that you guys have run across?

David Paffenholz [00:15:05]:

Tough to say the uniqueness. So one industry that I was not familiar with at all that I've gotten to know more recently was we have a few customers that do recruiting for yachts and so they help find staff to work on yachts. And so that was an industry that I had no familiarity with. And to be honest, I was a little bit nervous to see how those searches would perform. But fortunately it ended up getting good results too.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:33]:

That's phenomenal because when you're thinking about an awesome new AI tech company, you're thinking most of the time it's very tech focused, but finding people for yachts, that's wild.

David Paffenholz [00:15:45]:

Yeah, it was quite fun. So I think that's also been when we started this off, a lot of the things that we were testing or thinking about were in the tech space and we were testing a lot with different things in the software engineering field or even in different roles that might be most relevant to tech companies. But right now the far majority of our customers are actually not in tech and they're not recruiting majority for software engineering roles. And so that's also been a really good journey for us to go through and take in those experiences and learnings to make sure that the platform is really serving the people who are using it.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:18]:

Yeah, no, I actually would have thought kind of in the tech world and I seen the DoD, but I really thought it'd be heavily tech focused for you guys. That's just wild. It's not.

David Paffenholz [00:16:28]:

Yeah, it was surprising to me too.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:31]:

And that's the fun part about the company's journey, is like where it goes and the customer base and people that get excited about the product for sure.

David Paffenholz [00:16:40]:

And it's also always really nice whenever I do a call with a customer, be it getting them set up or helping them with a specific search, every time I learn something new, we run a new search together and they're never the same. And so with each of those searches, I feel like I'm able to expand my horizon on there too.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:56]:

So has there ever been a book that has had a huge impact on your career? If so, what book was that?

David Paffenholz [00:17:03]:

That's an interesting question. So I'll give a bit of a different answer to that. So when I read, I try to read fiction where I am able to take my mind off of work. And so it might sound a bit odd and maybe it's not the best practice, but I actually don't read professional or work related long form content. Of course I read articles, research papers, et cetera. But for books in particular, I really love fiction. Big fan of Ken fallt century trilogy. In case anyone is interested in some long form fiction, definitely recommend those too.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:33]:

Well, and this is kind of a question that I've had also reframe. Is there other avenues and other things like YouTube or podcasts that you've really got into that's helped your learning? And if so, what are they?

David Paffenholz [00:17:43]:

Yeah, so I think on the podcast side, I've been also trying to really expand my dimension. So I feel like in my work day, I spend all day on recruiting, I spend all day on AI, what are the new advances there? And so often I'm tempted to start listening to those podcasts too, but I actually try to not do that. Sorry for this particular pod. Once in a while, of course I do, but I try to stay up to date with daily news, news podcasts, same on YouTube and just going out learning new things. Really recently gotten into learning more about religion in particular. And so that's been an interesting field. Really just trying to expand my horizons there.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:26]:

Awesome. So you've worked with multiple companies, expansion, international expansion with a company, working with multiple founders, all sorts of stuff before you started people GPT. And if you can go back and I normally ask this as a recruiting question, but I'm going to ask this as a career question for you. Everything that you've learned now, all the experiences that you have had, what would David tell himself as advice? Getting out of college, preparing for the.

David Paffenholz [00:18:54]:

Real world, I think speed of decision making. So that's the number one thing that I always think about is I have a tendency to go and overthink things. Really can kind of get really deep into different decisions. But in the end, whether it ends up being a slightly more right or slightly less right decision actually matters a lot less than the time I'm able to put into executing on it. And so that's what I continue to push myself on every day, is making those decisions fast. It also means that you sometimes make more mistakes, but you learn from them faster. You're able to grow really quickly. And so whenever I'm starting to think about something or doubting something, I try to make that decision quickly. And then whether that ends up being the perfect decision or not is perhaps less important than the speed at which I was able to execute it.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:39]:

Awesome. And kind of a second question to bounce off that. There's a few Recruit Tech founders owners that listen to this podcast. What advice would you give to another Recruit Tech founder on how to be successful and kind of how to have success like you guys are having success?

David Paffenholz [00:19:58]:

I'm not sure if there's any specific advice that I can give there. I think adopting new technologies and always being willing to take risks with those too, is certainly something that will continue to be really important in the coming years. I think there's going to be a really rapid pace of advancements in AI in particular, and trying to set up the company in a way that it's ready to jump onto that, adopt that and make products better rather than trying to catch up is one of the most important bits.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:29]:

Now, before I let you go, is there anything else that you would love to share with the listeners?

David Paffenholz [00:20:33]:

Nothing directly, except for thanking you for taking the time.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:37]:

And so if you want to connect with David, I'll have his LinkedIn profile. I'll have the link for people GPT in the Show Notes. Definitely check it out. Play with it. It's for somebody that you're going to laugh. LinkedIn was kind of new when I started my recruiting career to now be able to put in props and get personalized, people definitely play with it. It's a cool software. Like I said, I'll have the link in the show notes. And David, it was awesome to host you and I can't wait to see more disruptions that you guys are going to cause in the recruiting space. It's going to be fun.

David Paffenholz [00:21:07]:

I hope so too. Thank you so much for having me.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:10]:

Awesome. And for the listeners. Until next time, guys.

Intro [00:21:12]:

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