Preparing for an AI-Driven Future with Alex Libre

Alex Libre [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter podcast with your host Benjamin Menna, 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]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:00:56]:
All right, have you signed up for the recruiting growth summit yet? If not, jump down the show notes, make sure you get registered. On top of that, have you signed up for the recruiting AI summit? If not, jump in the show notes, get registered. The world's changing. We're going to help you crush the rest of this year. All right, guys, let's grow. I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. My special guest is on the forefront of working with artificial intelligence. All the big companies look to him and his company to help find the AI talent that they need to really just change the world.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:34]:
So we're going to talk about one like, how do you find these especially hard to find AI engineers and the specialists in that world? But we're also going to talk about what the future looks like for recruiting because AI right now is making a ton of noise. And at least personally, I think some things are overhyped. But I think the future soon is going to be next level. So I am excited to have somebody that's like on the forefront working with the AI companies, working with the AI technology, playing around with stuff himself to talk about this. So, Alex Libre, welcome to the podcast.

Alex Libre [00:02:07]:
Awesome, thanks, Benjamin. That's great to be here. And yeah, really excited to have this conversation. I've been, you know, prepping by listening to a bunch of your episodes and enjoying your content. So thanks for having me.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:15]:
So, first of all, like, there are many niches that a recruiter can choose. Did you choose AI or did AI choose you?

Alex Libre [00:02:25]:
That's a great question. I think AI chose me. I mean, I've always been interested in automation. My first sort of recruiting job, I was a recruiting coordinator at Google, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to automate the work that I was doing. So I didn't actually have to do it anymore because it was sort of mindless scheduling. And that sort of led me to realize that, you know, automation sort of the hot topic back then. Now, you know, certainly AI has sort of usurped that. But yeah, I think I've always felt like there are better ways of doing things than the way I'm currently doing them, and I seek those ways out and AI seemed like a topic I wanted to get into myself.

Alex Libre [00:03:01]:
And then, you know, the deeper I went, the more I wanted to recruit people for it and talk to interesting people who sort of thought similarly. So it's kind of how I ended up.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:09]:
Awesome. So before we focus on your background, talk a little bit about what you are doing right now and your company.

Alex Libre [00:03:16]:
Yeah, so right now I co founded my own firm, a sort of blended recruiting firm. We offer embedded sort of fractional work as well as contingent offerings, trying to give sort of flexible approach with our clients. And now I have my co founder and I have one recruiter working underneath me and we've got two clients at the moment, one of whom is a pretty big reputable AI client and been really stoked about that. And so yeah, things are starting to take off. But yeah, it's still early days. I found it in October, so.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:46]:
Found in October. You already have a recruiter working for you. You already have like big clients. Actually, we'll focus on that later. Let's jump into like how we always start the podcast. How did you end up in the wonderful world of recruiting?

Alex Libre [00:03:58]:
I fell into it like everyone else. But I do think that it's worth mentioning first that even in the last year and a half, I have not always done recruiting. Like basically since chat GPT was released is how I think of milestones in the history of time. In the last year and a half, I have been a recruiting manager at an agency. I was accepted into a master's program to become a therapist. Thought that was going to be a total career change, dropped out of that ten days before it was supposed to start, and then became head of talent at a small generative AI startup here in San Francisco. I ran recruiting for them for a while, then decided I wanted my own thing. So I co founded a startup and applied to the Y Combinator with an engineering director from Amazon.

Alex Libre [00:04:39]:
It was a good AI recruiting tool, kind of interview augmentation and helping people conduct better interviews with real time analytics didn't get very far, and I sort of lost confidence in the project and then decided to start my own recruiting firm. And so that's all been in the last year and a half. So I would say that I have not necessarily stuck to recruiting in the traditional sense. I'm always kind of open to where the roads may lead.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:03]:
And that's one of the wonderful things about recruiting, is we get to meet so many people, have so many conversations, and the road can take you at many places with this industry, 100%. So you fell into recruiting. You said you were a recruiting coordinator for a little while at Google. Like, did you want to become a recruiter? Or did you just like, hey, coordinating is awesome. Or is that kind of just like the gateway for recruiting at Google?

Alex Libre [00:05:24]:
So I think it helps here to go back a little bit. When I was an undergrad in college at Dartmouth, I had a couple of odd jobs that I think played a bigger role in where I ended up than I realized at the time, one of which was I was a personal assistant, basically for a middle aged woman whose son had recently died, you know, likely suicide. Unclear, exactly. And she had to go through all of this old stuff, and she needed somebody else to help her go through the old stuff because she couldn't do it alone. And that was my job. I got $20 an hour to, like, go through all this stuff and try to figure out what was to keep and not. And I think that job, along with transcribing, typing up a woman who died from cancer's journal about that process of having cancer, both really cemented for me that, like, you can have a really positive influence on other people pretty easily, and it feels really good. And so I wanted to do something interpersonal.

Alex Libre [00:06:15]:
And so senior year, I just applied to Google, kind of on a whim. I had a friend of a friend who was a recruiting coordinator at Google. They referred me. I got the job. It was going to pay twice as much as the competitive consulting job. The other one I was considering, and I just took it. So suddenly, San Francisco was calling California. I wanted to surf, I wanted to live on the west coast and ended up at Google.

Alex Libre [00:06:38]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:38]:
And then from Google, you've worked at a few other places. Do you want to talk about that? Kind of up until this last year and a half of pure craziness?

Alex Libre [00:06:46]:
Yeah, totally. After I started at Google, I was a recruiting coordinator for maybe a year and a half. Extremely boring, but a good intro to the professional world. And from then I got promoted. I became a technical recruiter at Google. After about four years at Google, around the spring of 2020, you know, shit kind of hit the fan, not just from the pandemic, but I basically had the full blown manic psychotic episode and ended up in the hospital for 29 days. And when I woke up from that, I realized that I had quit my job at Google a week before ending up in the hospital. So I was just out of a job at Google, didn't know what I was going to do.

Alex Libre [00:07:24]:
Took some, you know, a couple months off and then got a job as the first recruiter at Anyscale. So anyscale, for people who might not know, is a distributed computing company. They're valued over a billion dollars now. When I was there, it was a series b company. I reported directly to CEO, interviewed with the co founder of Databricks, who was also the co founder of Anyscale. I felt like I was around all these prominent people. It was like finally doing something big, whereas at Google it felt like I only got to work on this subset of the big picture. And so it was exciting, but I still felt like I lacked recruiting fundamentals.

Alex Libre [00:07:53]:
Honestly, I think people often, you know, this is just me being totally honest. I think people often think that I, coming out of four years in recruiting at Google, had more recruiting knowledge and experience than I actually had at a big in house company like that. It's so structured and you don't have to think very hard, you just kind of do what you're told and you don't learn a ton. And so I wanted to learn more. So was that any skill? And felt like I need to be surrounded by other recruiters. I need to learn from other people who know how to do this well. And so I took a job at flawless, this embedded practitioner, embedded recruiting agency, sort of RPO style, got promoted a couple times in the first year there and became a recruiting manager, running engagements for a handful of startups and maybe eight to ten recruiters at a time enjoyed it. But that was kind of when things moved on to go in house as head of talent.

Alex Libre [00:08:44]:
That felt like the next step and one thing led to another, and here I am starting my own firm. So I don't know, it's kind of been the roundabout path I've gotten to here.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:51]:
I always love people's stories and the recruiting space on how they got started to where they're at today, because there is no path that is the same, there's no path that's easy. This is how you do your career. Constant, like you're looking at different roads, like, oh, maybe I'll go that way, maybe I'll go that way. So that's awesome. So let's talk about this before we deep dive into some other stuff. How do you find these like crazy awesome AI engineers, LLM specialists, you name it.

Alex Libre [00:09:19]:
Yeah, so a couple of things here. First is I think people often don't realize how ambiguous the titles are in this space. You know, AI engineer can usually roughly refer to the same thing as machine learning engineer, which like five years ago pretty much everyone was a data scientist. Now those have sort of diverged. There's applied scientists, research scientists, you know, there's so many different titles in this space. And yeah, I think AI recruiting even can be thought of as encompassing some non technical roles as well that just leverage LLMs heavily, you know, sometimes a product manager or even other sort of solutions architects. Some of these other roles that touch AI and LLMs but aren't directly building or fine tuning the model. So that's the quick caveat.

Alex Libre [00:10:05]:
The way you find them is a boring answer. I think you find them the same way that you might find any other sort of tech candidates. I personally use. Seek out, put them in a sequence, look for people generally who have done cutting edge work and then reach out to them. But I think the interesting piece is how you get these people to want to talk to you and want to join your client company. And that's where I think the interesting thing I've noticed is most of the good people really want to do research and they want to, in addition to their normal work for a company, they want to publish. And a lot of these people come from academic backgrounds, a lot of them have PhDs. And I think that's where companies like Apple, which sort of don't do much publication, are losing out on a lot of top AI talent because people are just, you know, they'll go somewhere where they can still publish.

Alex Libre [00:10:53]:
So that's been an interesting learning. I think you have to think about what is your company doing that is going to be sort of sexy to these top people and how can you market that effectively? I mean, yeah, I think employer branding is sort of a separate thing, but employer branding is just so underrated in this space. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:10]:
What are some of these like, AI.

Alex Libre [00:11:12]:
Engineers getting paid out of curiosity, between maybe 400 to. I was just talking to this PhD NLP researcher getting 750. I've heard of people at OpenAI basically making around a million big numbers here. I mean, these are people who can add so much value to these companies that it makes sense to pay them five times what they might pay an average employee.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:37]:
I just had to ask because I work in the government contracting space and I get calls for like, let's talk about AI work. And I'm like, you can't afford them. Whatever you have for the bill rate for the government customer, you can't afford it. Simple as that.

Alex Libre [00:11:48]:
Yeah, I mean, that's if you want top of the line people. I will say there are machine learning engineers and, you know, data scientists you can get for 150, but they're discounted.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:57]:
Here's one of the things I'm super excited about talking with you about. Some people say AI is not going to touch recruiting. It's not going to transform recruiting. I think it is going to rock recruiting, and we're about a year or two away from that. What's your thoughts of how AI is going to literally rock our world?

Alex Libre [00:12:15]:
It's going to replace recruiters. There are, you know, I generally try to be pretty tempered with my statements. And if I am uncertain about something, I try to acknowledge that uncertainty. I have very little uncertainty about whether recruiters will eventually be replaced by AI. But I do think it's also worth mentioning that I think all knowledge workers will be replaced by AI eventually. This is not a unique problem for recruiters, but I think a lot of people are kind of putting their head in the sand. They think because recruiting is this human touch, white glove experience, that it can never be done by a machine. And they neglect the fact that everything that we think of as the human touch is reducible to data.

Alex Libre [00:12:56]:
Emotion recognition, facial recognition. Already AI is far better than humans at facial recognition, which saw an interesting study about people. They had actors get their pictures taken in various emotional states, and then AI and humans looked at these pictures of people and tried to guess what the self reported emotional state of that actor was in that moment. AI got it right way more often than humans did. And so I think often we have this arrogance about us where we think we know how to understand other people and how to give them the experience they want. But we're flawed, we're imperfect, and it doesn't mean we're useless to society. But I don't think we are immune to the advances of AI. It's just, it's unrealistic.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:39]:
I truly believe that AI is going to replace recruiters, but I also believe at that point in time, there's a lot of other jobs it's replacing, too. When we're talking about timelines, like how far in the future do you think we're going to see that.

Alex Libre [00:13:50]:
So I like to predict things based on what a lot of other smart people predict. There are some of these forecasting websites, like metaculous, I don't know if you've heard of metaculous. And they predict various questions and people get rewarded with points. They're incentivized to make good predictions. Right now, the prediction for AGI weekly general artificial intelligence is March 2027. So we're basically three years away from artificial general intelligence is what the community's prediction is. That was pretty shocking to me. I just checked that last night before this podcast, just thinking, oh, I wonder what the current prediction is.

Alex Libre [00:14:23]:
And it's coming up. So I think we are in for some major surprises in the next couple of years. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:30]:
When it comes to recruiting, we used to make fun of some of this, like, AI technology and how much has sucked. Shit's getting good. Yeah, like, shit's getting good. Like, it scares it. Like, scares the shit out of me, but shit's getting good. As a, like a knowledge worker or recruiter, like, how do you prepare? Like, what do you, like, what should we be doing now as recruiters to kind of prepare for this future that's in 2027 to 2030?

Alex Libre [00:14:52]:
Yeah, I love that question because there are things we can do. I mean, I think for one thing, you need to get super competent with AI. I think you should be spending time with an LLM a little bit every single day. This is just like brushing your teeth. You should be using chat GBT or Claude three or, you know, some sort of premier model every single day and getting better at working with it. Because it's almost like, you know, people think that no matter what you sort of ask it, it's going to perform equally and give you just as good answers as if you ask it some other way. It's just not the case. What you put in is what you get out of an LLM, and it takes practice.

Alex Libre [00:15:27]:
So that's the first thing I think is putting in the time to get better at prompt engineering. The other thing is, I think, sharpening your sort of stakeholder management skills, understanding what your clients need, understanding what all the various business partners are looking for, and how you can give that to them. I think there will be a long, you know, I shouldn't say long. There will be a period before we are fully replaced where recruiters are just leveraging AI to be much more productive. And in that phase, we're just going to really need to understand what our clients needs are our hiring managers needs and how we can use AI to give them those things more directly, because I don't know. I think I'm always shocked that there are people who still don't use chat GPT in their recruiting workflow. I mean, you don't have to have all these fancy AI tools, but I do think you need to be using AI in some capacity. You'll be left behind if you don't at the moment.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:24]:
How are you utilizing AI for your recruiting?

Alex Libre [00:16:27]:
The biggest way, I think, is with transcribing recruiter calls. Obviously there are a lot of AI note takers. I've literally tried, I think, 22 AI note takers speakers. I love trying apps, and lately I've landed on crisp, which is basically just really good at transcribing and separating speakers. And then I use custom prompts that, you know, I basically have a keyboard shortcut that triggers a chat GPT prompt that then summarizes the transcript in a very particular way. And it also pulls in the candidates LinkedIn page so that it is taking that information into the LLM as well. This is sort of like a custom, homemade solution that I made. I didn't really feel like paying for Metaview or something like that right now, and so I just crafted together my own thing.

Alex Libre [00:17:05]:
And I think that is the best, because you can make your candidate summaries exactly what you want them to be based on the transcript. You're not relying on what someone else's formula was because each type of candidate call might be slightly different. So that's how I use it. And then just tracking my data, I like to, you know, have a lot of fields in various tables to make structured data that'll all be filled out with AI by pulling out information from the transcript. So things like that, I think, are some of the low hanging fruit, and that's how I use it these days.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:32]:
Okay, so jumping back over to like this AI and recruiters, and we're going to get replaced. I think it might be like a while before we're fully, fully replaced. I think the tech companies are going to jump on things first like they always do. But how do you think AI or AGI is actually going to change society?

Alex Libre [00:17:51]:
Yeah, that's an awesome question. I think most likely when AGI replaces all knowledge workers, I think also robotics as an adjacent technology is advancing super fast. You can just look at Boston Dynamics and see the, they can pick up balls and do all these kinds of things. And the combination of robotics and AI is going to basically replace everyone's job. And I think that some people feel like that's the worst thing that could happen, that we're going to all have no money because we associate not having a job with not having any money. But I think what you have to recognize is that AI, it's still going to be creating the very same wealth for society. We're just going to have to redistribute it differently. And so that's where I think these concepts like universal basic income are going to come into play.

Alex Libre [00:18:33]:
If all the wealth is being generated, everything that we want in our day to day life is being provided to us by AI, the wealth and the sort of monies are going to need to be redistributed in a clever way. But I think the world's going to be vastly better. Like, I get so excited sometimes thinking about probably in our lifetimes we will all be out of work, but it's going to be amazing. We'll be able to spend more time with the people we love. I'll just go surfing, I'll go skiing, I'll make some music. I don't know exactly what timescale that will happen on, but I think the future in which AI replaces humans is actually a bright one.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:05]:
I love your optimism. I think I'm too close to DC to understand how the lobbyists work. I mean, it's not in the best interest for the american public.

Alex Libre [00:19:15]:
Yeah, that is fair, but.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:19]:
Okay, so if like, we, you had a universal basic income, the healthcare is provided, all this stuff, like, what would you do on a daily basis then?

Alex Libre [00:19:27]:
Yeah, I think I would spend a lot of time reading and writing. I think those are two things that I love. I've always been very curious and I think learning is never going to go out of style. And, you know, knowledge is always going to be powerful, even when AI has replaced our official jobs. And I also think that I want to spend more time being outside. I want to, you know, be with people that I care about. And I think so much of my time as a recruiter is spent with these semi superficial interactions. As much as it is important to really engage with candidates, a lot of times you're in a rush, you're just trying to get the right information out of the candidate.

Alex Libre [00:20:01]:
You're moving through your day, and then you get to the end of the day, you're kind of tired. You can't fully engage with your partner or your kid or whatever. I have a kid on the way. And I think when we no longer need to rely on our jobs for our sort of sustenance, we can actually focus our attention on the things we want to focus it on. So I think people and, you know, stoking my curiosity or the, what I would do personally.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:23]:
Okay, so jumping back to again, to recruiters. So, like when it comes to AI, some of the things that we can start working on is stakeholder management. What else? Like, we need to be working and playing with AI on a daily basis. I feel like with this coming storm of AI or this coming wave of AI, like we should be doing a little more. Is there anything else that you want to add to that?

Alex Libre [00:20:42]:
I think the last thing I would say, which is a little bit generic, is fostering your critical thinking skills and understanding how to solve problems that you've never seen before. Honestly, chat DPT is a great way to do this just by asking it about, you know, how various things have been solved in the past or how you would think about solving some particular problem. But I think we're going to be faced with so many novel situations in the coming years, and people who are so used to just repeating the patterns of behavior that have worked for them in the past are going to be kind of shit out of luck. This. It's going to be too different and too dynamic, and everyone will be best served to just practice putting yourself in uncomfortable new situations and figuring out how to get to a better solution.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:26]:
Okay, so, and I want to talk about this like, some of these tech companies are trying to get rid of recruiting as fast as possible. We've seen it during the pandemic. Recruiters are gone in an instant. Many times we've seen it during the red wave for tech. Like recruiters are gone instantly. And I think a lot of tech companies are willing to spend $100 million to replace a recruiting function the second it's available. I think, like, other places might not move as fast, but if you're right now recruiting, should you look at pivoting your industry based on this coming AI wave?

Alex Libre [00:21:59]:
Yeah, I could see what you're saying. You know, sort of tech might be eliminated first, so you might want to start diversifying and expanding into other areas. I do think there's some merit to that, but I think the period of time between when, let's say big tech adopts AI and replaces their recruiters and then the period of time when it has spread to virtually all other industries, it's going to be not very long, maybe a year or two, I think. And I don't know, maybe I'm not super confident in that prediction, but I don't think it's going to be like this phenomenal thing. If I were to switch to recruiting for some other industry, I don't think I would be that much safer, but I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? I'm curious.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:31]:
I think, like, skill trades might be a little safer, but, you know, at the same time, like, I know Amazon, they don't really talk about it, but for years, yeah, drone deliveries, they've like, hired their warehouse workers without like, literally the first time you have a human interaction is your first day at work. But I'm just thinking, like, maybe like the hard to fill skill trades, like the h vacs or like this wonderful person that needs to go to Afghanistan as h vac tech or government contracting, they're super slow there.

Alex Libre [00:22:55]:
I think you are in a better position than I. I will say that. But yeah, I know it's interesting. I mean, I think, like, there are a lot of industries that are going to actually be more revolutionized by robotics than by AI. I think AI gets all the attention these days, but physical things need to be solved with robotic and maybe some AI, but robotics not as advancing as quickly as AI. So I think there's some truth to what you're saying. For sure. For sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:19]:
Before we jump over the quick fire questions, is there anything else that you'd love to talk about when it comes to, like, AI recruiting the future, how society is changing and how we're going to get replaced?

Alex Libre [00:23:29]:
Yeah, I think I would just say not to feel like the prospect of being replaced means that you're useless or not valuable in some way, because you know you're still going to be important and valuable to all the people in your life who you actually care about. It's just that you want to spend your day doing the types of things that you've been doing most of the time. And so it's not really something to be afraid of. This is inevitable. I will say one more thing, which is I've heard one good argument against this position, that AI is going to replace people, you know, universally, which is somewhat subtle, but it's about comparative advantage and not competitive advantage, but comparative advantage, which is sort of like opportunity cost. And it's saying that because AI will be able to do literally everything so well and so cheaply, it suddenly becomes a better use of AI's time to do a variety of other things. Maybe, you know, instead of using the compute to recruit people for Google, we'll want to use that compute for it to. I don't know, solve various molecular biology problems or something like that.

Alex Libre [00:24:29]:
The compute is a limited resource, at least for now. And so that is the one argument that I haven't quite decided where I stand on in terms of the possibility that we won't be replaced just because there's an opportunity cost associated with using AI for the things that humans can also do.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:45]:
Honestly, the future's going to change and it's going to be interesting slash fun to watch. But if you're listening to this podcast, one of the things that I talk about constantly is find ways to prepare for the future.

Alex Libre [00:24:55]:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:57]:
Now, coming off of, like, recruiters being replaced, my first quick fire question is, what advice would you give to a recruiter that's just getting started in the industry in 2024?

Alex Libre [00:25:06]:
So someone who's just starting, based on my own experience, I would say learn something from everyone that you encounter in the workplace. Whether it's something good that you want to emulate or if it's some shitty person and you want to learn to not do the kinds of things they do. You can learn something from literally everyone if you view it that way, and that's useful. And then the other thing I think I would say is work hard, because early in your career, as confident as you may be, you know, like I was, you don't have as much to add compared to more senior people as you might think. And one of the things you do have to add, though, is hard work and kind of putting in the time. And if you were able to do that, people will see that and they will take you under their wing, and soon enough, you'll have much more to offer than just hard work. But I think there's no replacement for a good work ethic early in someone's career.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:48]:
The first, like year or two is the hardest that you will ever have to work. And the ones that don't work, I don't see them as recruiters that often after that point in time. Well, the same question. You've worked with these big companies who worked with some small companies. You have your own company now, somebody that's been around the block 510, 15 years. What advice would you give to them to continue to see success?

Alex Libre [00:26:08]:
Hmm. So for an experienced recruiter, this is, again, maybe kind of generic advice. I feel like maybe I'm giving to general advice. This sort of applies to any position, not necessarily recruiting, but it definitely applies to recruiting as well, which is do something differently every single day. So this is like a sort of a maxim I live by, which is you should switch up something in your daily workflow or routine every single day just to experience something new and different, because it might change your thinking, give you a new perspective on something. I mean, I think there's a lot of talk about DEi and the value of diversity in the workplace, but people don't realize that you can also cultivate diversity in your own mind and by giving yourself stimulating different sorts of, you know, I don't know, there are just so many different ways to switch up your usual and it can give huge returns. I think the average upside to experimentation is massive and it compounds, and most people are just way too afraid of taking reasonable risks. So that's what I would say to someone who's, you know, more experienced.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:08]:
That's awesome. Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Alex Libre [00:27:12]:
Not so many books, but I will say there are two books. One is I guests getting things done by David Allen. Great, pivotal book about how to manage tasks and be efficient, and also what we owe the future by Will McCaskill. That really changed my thinking about how to think about large systemic problems that also apply to making interview processes more efficient. I think some of the same ways of thinking that apply to global, effective altruism also are relevant to the recruiting work. So that's been interesting. But I also think that a lot of the best content these days comes in the form of blogs and newsletters. I think it's just, you know, growing with the rise of substack.

Alex Libre [00:27:47]:
And one blog post that I would recommend all listeners to read is how to do great work by Paul Graham. It's just utterly fantastic. He talks about the ways that you can, especially early in your career, figure out what you want to work on and how to be exceptionally good at it. And it is by far the best thing I've ever read on that topic. So yeah, love that.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:07]:
Do you have a favorite rec tech tool at the moment?

Alex Libre [00:28:09]:
Yeah, I would say probably. I'm very interested in Sendspark since I heard the podcast that you did with the foundry recently, and I've been playing around with it and sending it to candidates and I'm getting great responses. So I have to say shout out to Sendspark. It's a really impressive tool and I use it a lot. I test out apps all the time and I'm constantly jumping on video calls with the founders of these apps to give them feedback about how they can improve. And I'm impressed with Sensemark. So yeah, it's something I would say awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:39]:
So when it comes to actually here's a question for you. I'm excited about kind of switching up the quickfire questions. What's an underrated concept that you think most people should know but they don't?

Alex Libre [00:28:49]:
Ah, so great question. I think one thing that seems sort of difficult to wrap your mind around, but it's the idea that we don't have free will, at least not the kind of free will that we think we have. And this is just such a useful concept, I think, in terms of the way that it opens us up once we recognize that the world is both deterministic and we couldn't have done other than we actually did, and we didn't choose to be born as the person that we became, it frees us to love ourselves and other people in a way that this fixation on you chose to do this and you made this bad decision that hurt me. It just eliminates the need for hate and can give you such a tranquility about your day. And whenever I start feeling really agitated or anxious or angry, especially, I just remind myself that both I and the person I'm angry at didn't choose to be who we are. We just ended up this way and how things are going. And it just frees you to think rationally. And it's been so useful to me in times with hiring managers that are difficult or candidates that are rude or even, you know, just positive encounters.

Alex Libre [00:29:58]:
A totally underrated concept. And that's something that, you know, I've listened to a lot of. Sam Harris, he talks about this concept a lot. And I just think recruiters who are constantly talking to people all day would do well to reflect on that. I would call it a fact more often.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:11]:
Well, and I think you kind of, like, answered the question, but I'm going to, like, re ask it again. When you have those hard months or those hard days, like, how do you bounce back?

Alex Libre [00:30:21]:
I think for me, it's a matter of remembering that it's never too late to change your mind and start fresh. You can always begin again. I think of, you know, the low point in my life. I'd spent 50 days in the previous year in psychiatric hospitals by mid 2020, and I had woken up from this psychiatric episode and had no job at Google. Didnt really know what I was going to do next. And all I would think about every day was this mantra that id seen on a Bolton board in the psych ward which said, everything will be okay in the end. If its not okay, its not the end. And its kind of cliche, but it really is really powerful in that.

Alex Libre [00:31:00]:
If its not okay, its not the end. And that gives me so much strength on a regular basis where if something doesn't go my way, I don't land a client that I want, it feels like I'm not going to earn enough money. And the business isn't growing as fast as I was hoping it would. There's a variety of things that can kind of bring you down, and then it's not over and it's never too late for things to start going well. So. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:22]:
Wow. Well, I know recruiting is like a stressful job. Is there something that you potentially could have done that could have prevented that from happening?

Alex Libre [00:31:30]:
Actually, I have a family history of bipolar disorder that was sort of misdiagnosed for me. And also I was smoking a ton of weed, which can trigger psychosis in people who are predisposed to it. So I haven't smoked weed in about a month. It'll be four years basically, since this episode. I mean, that was enough for me to be like, all right, it's not that great. So that I think is the biggest piece and just treating my body well, getting enough sleep and staying physically active, all the basics I've started to really put more of an emphasis on given that major episode that was in some ways life threatening. And you come back from that and think like, all right, it's time to get my shit together and take care of myself.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:11]:
Jumping back into more of a positive question. You've had a lot of success. You were able to land a job at Google. You had a consulting offer that a lot of people coming out of college don't even have. You grew at Google. You've worked at some major tech firms like first recruiter at a billion dollar company. You've been embedded with crazy amounts of like, awesome companies. You have your own company now.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:35]:
What do you think has been a driver for your own personal success?

Alex Libre [00:32:38]:
I think what it really comes down to is a determination to do something impressive. And I know it might sound shallow, but I've always had this desire to do something notable or make a positive impact on the world in some way. And I don't know, I think just that willpower to constantly find a way to rise. I mean, that's one of the biggest things that I think has helped me, is just recognizing that there almost always is a path to kind of rise in whatever you're doing. Excel, optimize and grow, whether it's promotion or a job change or some other way of advancing your career. It might not seem like those doors are always open. But if you're super determined, I think you will find some of those doors cracked a jar and you kind of pry them open and wiggle your way through.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:31]:
So, yeah, so you're now, what, seven months into your company? You guys have been growing great clients. Starting a company is hard. If you got a chance to sit down with yourself on day one of you launching your company with everything that you know now, what advice would you tell yourself and what advice would you give to other people that are thinking about launching?

Alex Libre [00:33:53]:
So on this topic, I've heard you say several times, and all of your guests on this podcast have agreed, don't spend time making a pretty website and, you know, making a nice landing page when you start your firm. I sort of think, I mean, maybe this shows me being a naive, young, early founder, but I think that the process of making my website helped me sharpen my idea and my mind of what my business was. And if I hadn't taken the time to try to build out a website, I sort of wouldn't have figured out my corporate identity, in a sense. And I also was able to get some really useful feedback because I had a website where I had a friend of a friend who's an angel investor, very prominent sort of VC investor in San Francisco, and I sent her the website and asked her for any thoughts if she could, like, recommend me just some portfolio companies. And she gave me some phenomenal feedback, which was primarily that I wasn't specialized enough. She asked me what my niche was, and she said it wasn't entirely clear what I uniquely had to offer and thought that was such useful advice that I would also pass on to anyone who's starting their own firm. As much as you might think that as a good recruiter, you can kind of recruit for anything. You want to cast a wide net, you want to not remove anyone from your potential sort of addressable market.

Alex Libre [00:35:14]:
You also have to niche if I a little bit, because people want to work with specialists. And that's something that I had to realize that, you know, okay, if I'm going to have to specialize, I definitely want to specialize in generative AI. I think the industry is growing. I mean, just yesterday, Nvidia released their earnings and it exceeded even the general analysts predictions. It's like 28% up since this time last year and, sorry, now 228% up since this time of last year. And that rate basically reflects the growth of the AI industry as a whole. So that's why I chose to specialize. But I think you have to spend some time to soul search early on about what you actually have to offer and why that's different from the other offerings, because I think so many people out there who start firms just are too generic.

Alex Libre [00:35:57]:
They're basically a generic recruiting firm, and almost no one wants to work with a generic recruiting firm. So that's, that's my basic advice.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:05]:
I went to your website. You actually got a really nice website, but you can, like, you know, now that you mentioned it, you can tell exactly the target market that you're working with. You are the recruiter for XYZ compared to. You go to many people that have a website, they're just like, I'm Bob the recruiter.

Alex Libre [00:36:23]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:25]:
And they're like working on the font. They're working on this. You like. It's your sales funnel for AI recruiting.

Alex Libre [00:36:32]:
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. You shouldn't over focus on the font and the theme and the color. Those things are totally extraneous. But yeah, I think it's useful to think hard about what you have to offer and how you can advertise that.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:44]:
Well, Alex, for the listeners, if they want to follow you, how do they do that?

Alex Libre [00:36:48]:
So you can follow me on LinkedIn, I can share the link. And basically there is also Alex Libre.com, comma, my substack that I occasionally write things about recruiting and about other topics as well. And yeah, those are pretty much the two places that I'm primarily active. I would say LinkedIn, I've learned, is much more useful to develop a presence on than I previously knew. And really trying to invest in that, it is wild.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:12]:
I sat on it for way too long. I had a buddy, Joel, who was, I think, like episode six or seven on the podcast, and he's like, go all in on LinkedIn. And I'm like, I hate LinkedIn. And now I'm like, shit, I should have took a suffice.

Alex Libre [00:37:24]:
That's exactly my experience. I thought it was just annoying. I didn't. I don't even use Instagram. I don't use Facebook, I don't use TikTok. So when LinkedIn became, you know, something that Justin, my co founder, was recommending, I was like, oh, no, I can't possibly need to do that. But since then, I've started to enjoy it, too. I mean, it's kind of fun to start figuring out what your personal brand is and how you can post about that content and when people like it and share it and engage with it, it's kind of satisfying in a interesting way.

Alex Libre [00:37:52]:
So I would recommend that to everybody. Invest in your brand.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:55]:
Alex, before I let you go, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Alex Libre [00:37:59]:
I would just say prepare for a future in which you will be replaced. But know that there are many things you can do in the meantime to delay that and also to ensure that you ride this wave as long as you possibly can. Because it's not a situation where AI is just going to come steamroll over all the jobs and we're going to be gone. No matter who you are or what you have to offer, it will still depend on what you have to offer when you get replaced. And so invest in your critical thinking skills, invest in your stakeholder management, and invest in some of the things that you're going to want to spend more time with, you know, the people and things you're going to want to spend more time with after you are replaced by AI. Because suddenly you're going to have a lot more time for that and that's going to be important. So, yeah, that's what I'd say.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:44]:
Well, Alex, I just want to say thank you so much for the listeners. He's on the forefront of working with these AI technologies. He is in deep way more than most recruiters that are talking about AI, like me, are. So I just want to say thank you for kind of like just sharing, like what you're seeing, sharing what you know and just sharing what really what the future is going to look like. So for the listeners out there, first of all, keep preparing by growing, thinking and learning. But I also want you to bake this year, your best year yet. Keep crushing it, guys.

Alex Libre [00:39:12]:
Thanks, Benjamin. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed hit subscribe, subscribe and leave a rating.