The Future Proof Recruiter: Mike Wolford’s Guide to Thriving with AI

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this episode of the.

Mike Wolford [00:00:02]:
Elite Recruiter Podcast, the job that existed 20 years ago of calling people, screening them, scheduling them for a phone interview, that job is not going to exist for very much longer.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:14]:
One of these large defense companies actually, they shared the story that a new hire actually went to go talk to the recruiter that helped hire them because they were excited about finally meeting this person. The recruiting team actually had to let that person know that they were dealing with a bot. That person didn't know until after they got hired. That entire customer service was dealt with by a bot.

Mike Wolford [00:00:34]:
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 [00:00:52]:
I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast. One of the reasons is because I know some of you guys are going to be burned out hearing about this, but the world is changing fast and that's why this conversation is important. We're going to be talking about AI. And as of this recording, just last night, OpenAI dropped their operators, which, it's kind of crazy. I had the AI operator going through my applicant tracking system, building out lists in the ats, looking at the resumes of people that applied and giving me like a short info and notes on them. I had it going through Sales Navigator, doing crazy things, trying to find email addresses and cross referencing. It was working on trying to put stuff in a. A spreadsheet.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:34]:
Yes. It didn't do everything super clean. I feel like it's Drunk Toddler at the moment. But as we know, with OpenAI, things keep on getting crazier and crazier. But because of stuff like this, the world of recruiting is evolving and it's evolving fast. And I have one of the best people in the entire recruiting industry across the globe when it comes to artificial intelligence here to share on the podcast a little bit about what the future has, a little bit about how our world is going to shift and kind of just give you guys a preview of what is actually going to happen and not just the theoretical. So, Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Wolford [00:02:09]:
Anderman. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to talk about this topic. And like you said, OpenAI did us a great service, so thanks for that, OpenAI.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:18]:
Okay, before we get started, I'm playing around with this. Should I be scared or should I be excited?

Mike Wolford [00:02:25]:
A little bit of both. Some of the things that it can do are going to Replace our job. And some of it is going to empower us to do things we couldn't do before. So, for example, we're probably going to lose phone interviews, but we're going to gain analytics. And while we can't do analytics, if you can build an AI analyst, you can do analytics. And so that's the type of skill I'm trying to teach people. And what I think we need to evolve into is users. And not just users of AI tools, but creators of AI tools.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:00]:
Awesome. Well, before we, like, start doing a deep dive in your background, give us a quick introduction about yourself and tell everybody a little bit about what you're doing.

Mike Wolford [00:03:08]:
Yeah, sure. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Mike Wolford. I work at Revelia Labs as an account manager. And what I'm working on are several different things that I think are relevant to the future of our industry. First, my day job. I work in data. You mentioned putting together spreadsheets and lists and matching candidates. That's the kind of stuff I do day to day.

Mike Wolford [00:03:28]:
I think it's important. Also, I'm working on a book called the AI Analyst. Should be in stores February, March, that teaches recruiters and sourcers how to use AI for analytics. And teaching a bootcamp on the 31st that will teach recruiters and sourcers how to build their own agents. And I've also built my own agents as well, so I'm showing and sharing those with the recruiting industry. I've built a recruiter and an analyst. They're free to use to try and share with the industry the. Not only the power, but kind of wake them up to, like, the reality.

Mike Wolford [00:04:03]:
Because I feel like a lot of people think the tech's not there yet or things of this nature. It's not that capable when it's incredibly capable. So that's a little bit about what I'm working on.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:15]:
Awesome. And okay, you're doing all that. Your hands are full. You're seeing where the future is going. How did you even end up in this wonderful world of recruiting?

Mike Wolford [00:04:24]:
Yeah. So I was an entrepreneur in college and after college, but after I started to have a family, I didn't want to work seven days a week in my party business. So I started to interview for jobs and sales, and I got interviewed for a recruiting job and staffing agency. And my boss at the end tried a classic sales takeaway, Said, you know, we were 50, 60 hours a week. This isn't for everybody. I kind of laughed at him. I was like, oh, It's a vacation because to me, I didn't have to make payroll anymore. I didn't have to pay rent on my store.

Mike Wolford [00:04:59]:
This was great. And then I started to get hires, and to me, then I really got hooked and stayed in recruiting because at the end of the day, everybody won. My client got the candidate they needed, my candidate got a better job, and I got paid. So I felt like this was a place that I could make a career, make my contribution. You know, it's not curing cancer or inventing a longer lasting light bulb, but it's making some people's lives a little bit better. And I could take pride in that. So I stayed in the career and I got addicted to the word congratulations.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:33]:
That's awesome. So wait, you had your own, like, storefront and everything in college?

Mike Wolford [00:05:38]:
Yeah, I had this pizza and a movie. Back when you'd had to go to a video store.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:44]:
Like, how'd you even get started with that? Like, you know, most. Like, hell, I was doing stupid stuff in college.

Mike Wolford [00:05:49]:
I had a family, and I was a junior in college and struggling to pay for it. And there were no jobs in a college town with, you know, thousands of unemployed college students. So I knew what everybody wanted to do, though. So back then, I went on ebay and I went up and down the main street of town where I lived and found out who was renting the empty buildings and negotiated a lease and used some of my student loan money to buy shelves for the store and some of the first equipment. And then I used the store to pay for school.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:22]:
All right. I used my student loan money on alcohol. I feel like I'm so fast forward. Like, you know, you got into recruiting, you fell in love with it. It became an addiction. It became like what you were doing, but you start shifting out of agency. You shifted more towards, like, this AI space. How did you evolve down that road? Like, you could easily just be sitting in the same seat again still.

Mike Wolford [00:06:43]:
So that was what I actually liked about sourcing when I was a sourcer, is we usually got the new tech, like, everything that was especially for the late, like the teens, like 2015-2020, every new tool was a sourcing tool. And so for me, like, it just was kind of part of my career. That's one of the things I enjoyed about being a sourcer, was I got to see what was new and what was coming and got to go to sourcecon and see all the vendors and at least aware of what was happening. But it was really the end of 23 when I started to pay attention to AI. Dr. Allen. Oh goodness, I can't remember his name. Thompson from Australia is somebody I started to watch.

Mike Wolford [00:07:24]:
And he would interview the AI. He was interviewing GPT3 in 3.5 and he was animating his interviews with Synstesia so it looked like it was a back and forth conversation the way he had edited it. And he. Not only was he doing that, which got my attention, but he was really like a fair arbiter. I feel like, especially in social media, people are really hyped or really like anti. Like, you know what I mean? This is overhyped and there's very few people who are like in the middle fair mediators. And I felt like he was one because sometimes the AI would give an answer, he's like, wow, that's really impressive and insightful. And then other times it would give an answer and he's like, that's just wrong.

Mike Wolford [00:08:05]:
Like, there's just no other way for it. That's just wrong. But it evolved. And just to me, like, I don't know if anybody remembers Harry Potter when he writes in Tom Riddle's diary and then it writes back, like, that's what happened to me. I was just like, oh my God, I have Tom Riddle's diary. And I started to try and use 3 and 3.5 and they were hilarious. They really were. Tom, go kill yourself.

Mike Wolford [00:08:28]:
Like jump off a cliff, you know, rob a bank. It would go crazy after a little while and turn evil almost universally, which was not useful but kind of fun, you know, it's like, how long is it going to take to devolve and be like, you know what? Because you go back and forth, it's the same thing. Like you do the same thing a couple of commands a couple of times to try and get it to do what you want it specifically. And as you're new at it and the computer would get frustrated with you. But I tried to write a book with 3.5 and it was like I was impressed that it could do anything at all, right? Like that had never existed in the world. But it wrote like a freshman in college on Adderall. Forgive me. You know, it was quick, it was fast, it was technically accurate, but it really wasn't great.

Mike Wolford [00:09:12]:
Then I got 4.0 and I started to write with it and it was like an English lit professor. Like it was categorically better. And that's when I wrote the AI Recruiter. And as I was writing it, it dawned on me how powerful it was because I've written two Books before. About a hundred pages each. Took me about a year to write. Thank you, adhd. I wrote the AI recruiter start to finish in less than three weeks.

Mike Wolford [00:09:39]:
Oh, wow. Yeah. Don't print, don't finish. And I kept the prompts that I used to generate the content in the book because I thought that that would be actually the most valuable thing I could provide was show you how I got the AI to do all these things. Not just the fact that the AI can actually do this, but how do you get the AI to do this? And that led one thing to another. I started to look at what are the things that we need that we can't do, that AI maybe can do? And to me, I've been focused on data for the last four or five years, really telling the industry this is what we need to do. We need to speak the language of business, which is data, and we need to become data fluent. And that's been ongoing and it's even more urgent now than ever because we need to be able to communicate our value.

Mike Wolford [00:10:28]:
That's important.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:29]:
Let's pause there and talk about value because, like, we, we understand the value of recruiting. Every recruiting influencer talks about the value of recruiting. We talk about the human aspect. We talk about how important it is to be. I have the human aspect, but at the end of the day, and I'm probably talking like corporate recruiters and maybe even some like, large staffing agencies, I don't think the CEO gives a about that. They care more about the bottom line. We're walking into the future. Like, how do we make sure that we're adding value to like, you know, stay relevant, keep a career, right?

Mike Wolford [00:11:01]:
So the first thing you have to understand is how they're going to make a decision and like, just be totally clear about this. And this was actually driven home to me when I was at Twitter, right. Twitter had a reputation of being an extremely liberal company and open and like, Right. And then it's not right. It completely changes it. You know, as soon as somebody offers this money, right? That's. We have a responsibility to sell the company. So we have to understand that this is a business.

Mike Wolford [00:11:29]:
For me, the very first thing that recruiters and sorcerers need to wake up to is that we're solving a business problem and we need to think it in terms of business value. And so when it comes to that, you need to think about cost savings. One of the things I did when I was a manager, especially at Twitter, was I would take all of the offers that my sourcers got Assign a value to that based on how much it would have cost us to get that through an agency. And then what did we pay the sourcer? What's the difference? That's a cost savings. Right? So this is what we need to do. We need to become incredibly David savvy. We need to become labor market experts and value experts, meaning we need to understand the labor market and be able to articulate that on the fly as well as explain the value that provides. And the only way we can get to that is allowing the AI to free up the time to let the AI do the phone interviews, to let the AI schedule.

Mike Wolford [00:12:24]:
That will give you the time to do what I'm talking about, which is what the future of the role is, if you ask me.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:31]:
And I know, like there's a difference between sourcing and recruiting. And I know when it comes to recruiting, you have agency recruiting, exec recruiting, internal talent acquisition. Do you think one of those career fields is going to die off?

Mike Wolford [00:12:41]:
I think internal recruiting can if we don't again, express our value. This is the problem that we've been facing as an industry for a while. When things are good, we get hired. When things are bad, we're the first ones out the door. And it's because our only value is butts and seats. Right? And we need to expand beyond that as an industry executive recruiter to corporate recruiter. But the one who's most vulnerable in the moment is corporate recruiters because they're viewed as overhead. And one of the things I was saying earlier, you have to understand how corporations make decisions.

Mike Wolford [00:13:18]:
If they can have something 80% as good at 20% of the cost, 100% of the time, they're going to make that choice. That's what disruption actually is. So we're talking about disruption and some recruiters are like, it's not there yet. It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be to disrupt you. It needs to be 80% of good and 20% of the cost. If it meets those criterias, it's going to replace you. And so if you can only schedule phone screens and you can only manage an inbound pipeline and these are your only skills as a recruiter, then yes, I would be very afraid if I was in house and I do not have a way to demonstrate the money I'm saving the company, I'd be really nervous.

Mike Wolford [00:14:04]:
Because I guarantee you, vendors like IBM and Deloitte and BCG are knocking on the Fortune 100 stores right now, peddling their AI solutions. And once it starts at the top, it will move to the rest of the market. So I would be worried in those positions, which is why I teach AI, because there's going to have to still be somebody to run it. And the people who understand it and recruiting are the best people in position. Because really nobody has any experience running these systems. So it's really going to be who has the shortest distance to go to learn them. And it'll be the recruiter who knows how to run AI, who has been in recruiting for a while and understands the systems, the processes and the analytics. That's who has the best chance of getting a job.

Mike Wolford [00:14:50]:
Because phone interviewing, if that's your strong suit, that's really all you could do. I'm sorry, the clock is ticking. In two years, no human is going to take a phone interview from a human. And honestly, that's better. That's for the best. I mean, we get overwhelmed. I was a recruiter at Capital One. I'd put up a job, 500 people would apply.

Mike Wolford [00:15:09]:
And this is before AI was swamping, you know, I had 40 to 60 jobs. You know, 100 to 500 people apply for every job. It's not humanly possible for me to sort through all those resumes. That's just a fact. So we were never actually capable of physically doing the job, but AI is. And even though it won't do as good of a job compared to us, compared to the people we could contact, it can contact 6,000 people, where I can contact 30. And that's the trade off. So, like, if you want to look at it from a different way besides just money and like savings, try and view it that way.

Mike Wolford [00:15:46]:
Objectively, that's better. As a recruiter, you're going to push back on that. But objectively, from your perspective, from the candidate's perspective, and from a fairness and equity perspective, that's categorically better. Because everybody who wants a chance gets one. And then you use your matching technology like you were mentioning at the beginning, and now you have a phone screen and a resume and a job description, you can make a pretty good match. You don't need the human there until you're alerted that it's a good match. And then the human will validate that. But all of that process is going to be automated beforehand.

Mike Wolford [00:16:22]:
And again, it's fairer. And not Only that, when candidate 172 is a 95% match, they're not going to get buried in the AI application avalanche that is happening to us right now. You're actually going to be able to find that needle in the haystack. So intuitively your gut says pushes back, but the data says lean into it.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:46]:
How about on the agency side of the house? Like the recruiting agencies, executive recruiters, like they're positioned best.

Mike Wolford [00:16:52]:
They're actually about to have their best time ever. If I, if I was going to go anywhere in recruiting, I'd be an agency right now. The jobs will get tougher, don't get me wrong. But your capability as a recruiter, because staffing agencies will invest because it makes them money. Like if I can make 20% more hires in the same amount of time, that's all I have to convince somebody in agency to do to make an investment. And so agency will adopt AI and become much more efficient than internal recruiters. And that perception gap is going to increase. And it's not going to be the fault of the agency recruiter or the corporate recruiter.

Mike Wolford [00:17:27]:
It's just the nature of their business. Internal recruiters or corporate overhead. Agency recruiters are revenue centers. Revenue centers get invested in before cost centers. That's just how it's been since the beginning of business. I didn't invent that. So agency recruiters are going to start to have a real competitive advantage. They're going to be the first data driven recruiters because that's what their clients expect.

Mike Wolford [00:17:51]:
Your clients expect you to come to the table, say, here's supply and demand, here's what the talent market is making, here's how much you can expect to pay. Here's three, you know, nine candidates from your top three sources of hire. And here's what they're making and here's what they're expecting. Would you like to interview them? That's the future. It's data driven and it's informed. We're walking into a meeting informing people of what's going to happen and what's happening. It's no more. Oh, you know, we've had Mike here for three years, five years, and he's being paid $20,000 less than you're telling me.

Mike Wolford [00:18:24]:
Waste the next two weeks and go find me another mic. And then great. Like, how enthused are you to go do that search anyway? So, you know, I understand the anxiety about it. And honestly, if there is that and you don't want to make this move, there's other jobs, right? You can move into sales, you can move into hr, you can move into anything. In AI, there's no experts really. Nobody's been doing this for more than two years. It's not possible. So you know it might be time to make that move, but if not, it's time to learn and invest in your own education because that's going to give you the best chance of being positioned to be the person who runs the AI systems in the future, because they're coming.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:04]:
Let's talk about this. You know, I think there are going to be recruiters impacted, but how do you position yourself to be the recruiter that not only succeeds but also makes the most amount of money?

Mike Wolford [00:19:17]:
My elevator pitch would be data driven AI empowered. Right. When you get a search, you go to your client, you find your top sources of hire, you go directly to them, you look for the people with the skills who are most likely to respond and you reach out to them. That's data driven. AI empowered is you say, okay, here's the audience, here are the people I'm interested in, here are the types of profiles I'm interested. Go do the same thing at the next eight companies. Right, Done. Now that's data driven and AI empowered.

Mike Wolford [00:19:43]:
Nobody can beat you. You're going to be an unbeatable recruiter at that. You're going to look like a wizard. You're going to move much, much faster. Your clients are going to be happier. I've done data driven recruitment before and I promise you the clients are happier. I have the data and they trust you more. And the more you're able to give them what they want to buy, the more likely they are to buy from you in the future.

Mike Wolford [00:20:05]:
So it makes your life easier over time to do it this way. I get and grant that it's a little bit harder than spamming people, than spamming LinkedIn. This is a little more involved than that. But if that's really how you recruit, then AI is going to replace you because AI can do that recruiting brain food. Hung Lee just reported on response rates to inmails and humans are getting like 24% and the AI is getting 30 to 1. So I mean you could keep trying to do that, but that's a losing battle.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:38]:
I don't think I've spent money on in those in about five, six years.

Mike Wolford [00:20:41]:
Yeah, I mean, but I, I, I, me too. But I liked the data, right?

Benjamin Mena [00:20:46]:
Oh yeah.

Mike Wolford [00:20:46]:
To me, the AI is already writing better customer outreach than we are, which is just crazy.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:52]:
And I know you've talked a lot about data, data, data. As a recruiter, like what kind of data do we need to actually be looking for, looking at to be effective?

Mike Wolford [00:20:59]:
First you need educate what I call like educational data. This is the data you need to bring to your hiring team to set expectations so you don't waste everybody's time. This is things like salary, here's what the market is paying. And fortunately, especially those of US in the US we've really benefited from pay transparency laws. About 60% of jobs have a pay range on them. And yes, there are bad faith actors, but by and large the market has complied. So you could get a reasonable idea of what the market's paying and that's what AI should be doing for you. You get the information, you dump that into your AI talent intelligence agent and it creates the report for you.

Mike Wolford [00:21:35]:
But this is one thing you need to be paying attention to. Salary, supply and demand is another one. This is information for your hiring team. There are three nurses for every open nursing job. Meaning by the time we've interviewed three people, that's what the market can bear to fill this job. Anything more we're happy to do. But just understand we're going beyond what the market can provide. At that point it's going to take extra time and cost extra money.

Mike Wolford [00:22:01]:
And that's a data driven conversation, right? That's a way to ensure that we remain in control of the process and the conversation. Because hiring managers, even the well intentioned ones, don't actually know what they're doing, but we do. And so it's important that we maintain trust and control. And so for me, that's the first part of the data that you need. The second part of the data is what I call actionable data. Okay, Client A, where do they hire from? Company B, C and D. Great. Now that I know that the next data I need is who works at Company bc and then of those people who have the skills that I need and then of those people who can I afford and who's most likely to respond to me? Now I really have a true targeted short list and is data driven.

Mike Wolford [00:22:46]:
Before I reach out to anybody, I already have 10 to 20 high value prospects that I know would get interviewed in a heartbeat. That is categorically a better way to do it than the way we do it. And the other thing, for those of you push back and say, you know, you got to give everybody a chance and the way I do it is more fair, I mean, potentially. But at the end of the day, we're all measured on performance and that means how many people did we get hired? And we just have to be empirical about it by the numbers. Your client is most likely to buy talent from a place they've already purchased it. And a hard lesson I had to learn in agency. A friend of mine said, mike, you got to give the client what they want, not what you happen to have. And that's just the hard truth of sales and in being an agency.

Mike Wolford [00:23:36]:
And I didn't invent that either, but that's the way it is. And if you want to be successful, the smartest thing to do is to play the numbers and know the data and give yourself the best chance of closing every deal. And then you let the AI execute your actual tactical strategy. Those recruiters, you think a staffing agency recruiter can make money today? They're going to be staffing agency recruiters in this year that have made more money than any staffing agency recruiters ever made because they're going to be able to push so much more through their pipeline. So it's the best of times and.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:10]:
Worst of times combination of both well and like, okay, so we keep on hearing about AI being able to do all these things, but many times people have like tested a system or tried something out and they're like, okay, that kind of sucks. Like, how soon are we like looking at like, this is being the reality? Like the agency recruiter can make like, you know, 10x their money, or a corporate recruiter can literally just like almost run an entire TA team, like by themselves or with a few people.

Mike Wolford [00:24:36]:
Right. It depends on how sophisticated you want it to be and what you're replacing. The truthful answer is companies are already starting to replace humans in certain aspects. I mean, and not just in our field. For example, think about call centers. Like, there's almost no call center jobs anymore. Like, they're almost all AI at this point. Like, it's just, it happened, right? We weren't paying attention.

Mike Wolford [00:25:00]:
Nobody thinks about call center jobs. But go ahead and look, take a gander. You won't find very many, if any at all. And it happens right in front of you and you don't even see it. So, you know, I don't have all the answers to what's going to happen, but I know that we need to play the odds. And to me, the other reason why we're not seeing the results. We've talked about data, data, data, data. This is why part of the reason you're not seeing the results from the AI that I think has been hyped is AI is like an engine and data is the gas.

Mike Wolford [00:25:32]:
And if you put low octane gas into a high performance engine, that engine's just going to knock. It's going to suck. Yeah, it'll drive, but it's not going to be the experience you're looking for. You'll be like, this engine sucks, this car sucks. No, you put watered down gas in the tank. You know, like, I don't know what to tell you. It's not going to run great. One of the articles I wrote forever and a day ago was about the war for talent.

Mike Wolford [00:25:55]:
And I compared data hygiene to a company to washing your hands to a military. Like in the military you gotta, they, they're like strict about being clean. You gotta wash your hands, you gotta shower, you gotta wash your clothes. It makes sense. The greatest enemy to the army is actually disease, not the enemy. And the greatest, it's the same thing. For us, data hygiene is washing your hands. If your databases are full of garbage and it's just mostly stuff people dumped in there, you know, over their shoulder along the way.

Mike Wolford [00:26:26]:
And then you take that dumpster fire of data and you plug it into your AI and you're like, hey, yeah, I make sense of this. I mean, even it's not that smart. It's going through garbage. It's not going to be able to build you an airplane out of the dumpster parts, right? Like, that's an unrealistic expectation. And then to be like, no, it couldn't build me an airplane out of all these parts in the dumpster. I have, I have 10 dumpsters worth of parts. Can't build me a single airplane. What kind of junk AI is this? Some of that is our fault.

Mike Wolford [00:26:59]:
Some of that is, yeah, we feed it these massive data sets, but they're bad data. And so you're not going to get the results that you're looking for from a bad data set, even with a great AI. But we're probably about three to five years away from a true. Microsoft and OpenAI finally came to terms with to your point, when can it run? So they will agree to the term that artificial general intelligence has been reached by their systems. When it is capable of running a company that can generate a hundred billion in revenue. That was the definition that they settled on. So they made it a dollar amount. If it's capable of running a company of that size and that revenue, then it qualifies as an artificial general intelligence.

Mike Wolford [00:27:45]:
So we actually have our first kind of markers as to what to look for along the road and to see how far along the way we are compared to that. I'd say we're probably 10 years from something along those lines, given the speed of change. But the next two to three years, it's going to become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between an AI avatar and the person. And that is actually a real problem. Our inability to tell what's real is actually a civilization level threat. It's something OpenAI is working on, but it's also something we need to consider as recruiters is how do you validate someone's actually a human being? Because in two, three years, you could have an applicant on a zoom call be an AI and you would have no more idea that you were talking to an AI, that you were talking to me, especially over a zoom call. So how are you going to authenticate humanity? That's actually going to become part of our job, which I think is interesting. It's not part of our job today, but authentication of humanity will be part of the job of a recruiter to make sure you're actually hiring a human being and not an AI.

Mike Wolford [00:28:50]:
Unless, of course, you want to hire an AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:53]:
Well, before we jump over to the quickfire questions, is there anything else that you want to cover about anything we covered or any more in the AI side of the house?

Mike Wolford [00:29:00]:
Just don't comfort yourself with the fact that there has to be a human in the loop, because that can be an HR business partner or a recruiting manager. We need to educate ourselves and proactively be the ones to introduce these systems into our companies. That gives us our best bet.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:17]:
Awesome. Well, jumping over to quickfire questions, sure. This one's going to be focusing on the data. Like, you know, probably most recruiters out there have pretty, you know, as you just said, garbage dumpsters full of data. How do you actually go about cleaning up your data? So that way you can actually use AI efficiently.

Mike Wolford [00:29:33]:
Right. So pick out the data that's important and collect that. I need the name, the email address, the phone number, the years of experience, the skills. Extract that and then leave everything else. Right. Just take the needles, leave the hay would be my first advice there.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:51]:
I know we're talking about, like, recruiters being gone soon in like, certain cases and other recruiters making a ton more money, but what about this? Like, somebody like sits down with you and they're having a conversation with you, Mike, and they're like, hey, I'm actually just starting off in the recruiting world as a brand new recruiter in 2025. What advice would you give me to be successful in this industry?

Mike Wolford [00:30:11]:
I would say two. Well, three things. First is what I say to every new recruiter is, get yourself organized. Fail to plan, plan to fail. When I was an agency recruiter, I had a plan for Every day I had a call plan, I had a backup plan. I knew what I was doing all the time. You have to be efficient in this profession. So number one, get yourself organized and plan your day.

Mike Wolford [00:30:32]:
That'd be my first piece of advice. Second, I would learn everything I could learn about automation through artificial intelligence. I would learn how to build my own tools and I would learn kind of where the pain points are from the more experienced recruiters in the process. And I would start trying to build tools to automate those points because that's probably where I'm going to get stuck to. And number three, I would start learning about the labor market in general and the talent market specifically. So the labor market, I live in the US So for me it's relevant in the US I know things like, what's the unemployment rate? What's the unemployment rate among college educated professionals? How many jobs are open? How many people changed jobs last month? High level. I know these things offhand. So this is the kind of thing we're going to have to be able to report on and share to build our credibility.

Mike Wolford [00:31:23]:
And then your talent market specifically is the area you recruit in, right? I recruit engineers. So I know company A, B and C are top competitors. I know how much they pay. I know how many people they have. I've already mapped out their hierarchy and structure. I know everybody who I want to recruit. I know their email, and I'm watching them to see how likely they are to respond to me. And as soon as they move into the likely to respond category, I'm reaching out.

Mike Wolford [00:31:50]:
It's an informed data decision process. It's not manual. And so to me, those would be the three things I'd learned. How to get organized, because it'll keep you together. Because these days could get stressful and things could pile up and things slip through the cracks. Especially when you're trying to manage 20 to 25 candidates and 15 hiring managers and your boss. Right. Like, things can get lost.

Mike Wolford [00:32:13]:
So keep yourself organized. Two, learn how to automate what you can and build your own tools. Self sufficiency is going to be important for the next couple of years. And finally, learn to speak to the data that will establish your credibility. The thing that is hard for recruiters right now as is, is they only establish credibility after they've made a placement. After you've made two or three placements with somebody, they start to trust you and they start to believe everything you say. But if you don't want to wait that long, the way to establish credibility is to bring accurate and actionable data to their attention that helps them make a decision. They'll think you're credible and they'll believe you a lot sooner.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:51]:
Well, how about this for somebody that's been in the game, like you're talking to, I'm almost 20 years in the recruiting chair myself. I'm all over like ADHD around this AI stuff. But what about somebody that's like, not around, like ADHD plugging into AI, learning constantly, but has been in the game for two decades with the world changing the way that you see things, like, what advice would you give to them?

Mike Wolford [00:33:12]:
Change or retire? I mean, really, the job that existed 20 years ago of calling people, screening them, scheduling them for a phone interview, that job is not going to exist for very much longer. And so if that's what you do, then you're not going to have a job. What the job will be is run the AI, set up the AI to run the outbound campaign, pick the targets for the AI to engage with, and then after the AI has qualified them, then prep them, call out and then prep them for the interview. And the interview process, which actually is building a relationship of trust with the candidate because you're actually helping them also, you're helping you prepping your candidates. And you know this from your agency days, prepping your candidates is the number one thing that you can do to increase your close ratio, you know, your interview to offer ratio. So let the AI do those manual tasks so that you can focus on the things that are most likely to help you keep your job, which is place more people in less time.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:19]:
I know you play with a lot of tools. What is your favorite tech tool right now?

Mike Wolford [00:34:24]:
Hate to toot my own horn, but it's my AI recruiter and my AI analyst. I use them all the freaking time. My recruiter more so because I've had it longer. But it has been incredibly useful to me in my work and in my writing. Like it writes the outline for all of my articles. Now anything I publish is pretty much written by my recruiter because it has my base of knowledge, it has my articles, it has my books. And then my analyst has made my life easier because I actually work in data and sales and analytics and I'm not an analyst. So for example, I had it do my recruiting job postings that I post out that people seem to like.

Mike Wolford [00:35:01]:
I just took all of the pictures, all of those posts and I threw it into my analyst and I was like, predict the future of recruiting based on this data. I'll share that with you after. I'll send you what it says, but it gives a forecast for the future of recruiting jobs to 2030. And I cannot do that. I couldn't do that. But that's really useful to me. And this is also why I'm teaching a bootcamp is because I've seen the value that they've had for me. And I'm trying to get industry leaders like you to understand and have these tools so that you guys can really understand and communicate to the rest of the community how genuinely helpful they can be and how much faster they can make you and also how relatively straightforward they are to create.

Mike Wolford [00:35:43]:
You know, you don't actually need to create production level code or production level you know, reasoning for it to be useful. Most of the tasks that we do in recruiting, single prompt, straight shot recruiting is just fine. There's nothing that we do that's overly sophisticated that requires a completely autonomous AI agent. So that's kind of the good news for us is this is very powerful and also very easy to use.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:12]:
Love that. Has there been a book that you have read that's had a huge impact on your own personal success?

Mike Wolford [00:36:17]:
A couple. But the innovator's dilemma is probably the one that comes to mind for me in business. And it's about how great companies consistently fail. You know, how does Sears lose to Walmart? How does that happen? How does IBM lose to Apple? How do great companies that are well managed, that are good with their customers and have close relationships with their customers, have great management, competent professionals? Why do these companies consistently fail? The next one's Google. Google forever dominated Internet search. Do they today? Not like they used to and they never will again. Google's off its high watermark. Why? How, how did that happen? Remember, Google was unassailable.

Mike Wolford [00:37:04]:
They were unbeatable. They were number one in web traffic for 10 years. Now I think they're number three. I like TikTok beats them. And I think Netflix too at this point. So they're off their throne, but forever. If you'd have told somebody five years ago, somebody's gonna knock Google off the search throne. But this is the innovator's dilemma.

Mike Wolford [00:37:23]:
It's basically a recognition that this always happens and it attempts to explain why.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:28]:
It's crazy, of course, being close to the D.C. metro, I'm like, oh, I wonder how much money Google lobbyists spent on trying to get TikTok banned. I mean, outside the national security issue, right?

Mike Wolford [00:37:38]:
All of a sudden Google's really interested in national security, not privacy, security. You Notice the difference?

Benjamin Mena [00:37:45]:
Oh, yeah.

Mike Wolford [00:37:46]:
But important.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:47]:
Well, I mean, recruiting has tons of ups and downs and, like, you're kind of in the sales chair yourself, working with an analytics company that does amazing stuff. How can you get through those funks? Those hard days, those hard weeks?

Mike Wolford [00:37:58]:
I try and remember why I'm doing what I'm doing. To me, one of the things that's always kind of frustrated me, our profession, is we've seen a lot of what we should be doing, why we should be doing it, when we should be doing it, but not really how. That's what I've tried to make. My focus is really focus on how do we do things. And so I just want to be useful and teach us what I think is going to be the most important things for us to know down the road. Is that a decent answer? That's a good answer.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:32]:
That's a good answer. Well, it kind of goes into my next one. And this just out of curiosity, like, if you had the chance to sit down with yourself based on everything, you know, the conversations you had, your wins, your losses, your job changes everything, and you got a chance to sit down with yourself, we'll say, a month into your agency role, what advice would you sit down and give yourself?

Mike Wolford [00:38:52]:
Actually, it's probably the thing that the two things I've stuck to my whole career. One, I remember the first time I met Jerry Crispin. I was at a conference. He'd just spoken about candidate experience. I was really impressed with what he had to say because I never heard anybody even care what a candidate went through. And so I shook his hand and he said, oh, hi, I'm Jerry Crispin, eternal student. And that really stuck with me. I've tried to, through my whole career, make learning a focus.

Mike Wolford [00:39:17]:
I found ere and the Fortis letter back in the day. Meet other recruiters in the industry and be transparent with what you're doing and where your problems are. Because it's a small community, actually, and having, like, you been in it for almost 20 years at this point. I know some people. We've run into each other a few times. We've worked together more than once. Right. Like this is going to happen.

Mike Wolford [00:39:40]:
And understand that the company you're at today isn't, you know, isn't the place you're going to retire from. My network has provided with me with more opportunities than I could have ever had on my own. All of my speaking opportunities, the opportunities to become a sorcerer in the first place, my opportunity to be a sourcing manager at Twitter, my opportunity Here all came from my network referring me to jobs. And so you know that my network has been the most important part of my career because it's not just about what you know, it's also who you know, but also providing real value to your network. You know, there are people we could both name who endlessly give with basically no expectation of getting anything back. And I'll also tell you that the best connected people in the world, so there's a trade off there, and you can say you want business out of it or whatever, but the truth of the matter is the people who are the most giving in our community are also the ones who are the most well connected. And being the most well connected typically gives you access to the best opportunities. So those would be my pieces of advice.

Mike Wolford [00:40:48]:
Never stop learning. Figure out where the education is, go to the seminars, go to the webinars, learn. Educate yourself in your field. Some advice I got early in my career from a coo. They had a special leader bootcamp. He said, even if what you're doing today isn't your dream job, do it exceptionally well because it will open doors for you that doing your job poorly just won't. If you're an exceptional employee and you perform highly and you tell your boss you want to do something else, or maybe you want to explore another opportunity, they're going to be much more inclined to give you that opportunity if you're a high performer. So even if you're not where you want to be, do the best you can, because it will open doors for you that low performance and average performance can't.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:34]:
That's a great way to finish that part up.

Mike Wolford [00:41:36]:
Well.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:36]:
Okay, one last question before I let you go. You get a lot of questions from recruiters about everything, like AI this and that data, like, how can I use this? What's the future? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What is the question that you wish a recruiter would actually ask you, and what's that answer?

Mike Wolford [00:41:52]:
Actually, I'm a little Lou Adler on this one. What is your best accomplishment? What are you most proud of and why? I really like that one because it gives people a chance. Like, what's your greatest weakness? Like, some of these questions can trip someone up, but this is really what you're trying to find out, is what this person could do at their best. And I think it's a great question because you're going to find out, did they take credit? Did they work at a team? Did they accomplish their goal? Were they strategic? Were they reactive? You're going to learn a lot about that candidate and that person. So I wish that's the question somebody would ask me. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:27]:
Well, before I let you go, for those that want to follow you, how do they go about and do that?

Mike Wolford [00:42:31]:
You could find me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest place to find me. Mike Wolford, the AI recruiter. That's in my title. Creator of the AI GPT, writer of the AI recruiter. You can find me on Facebook. About 80% of my connections on Facebook are recruiting related. So I've accepted that at this point and you can find me there.

Mike Wolford [00:42:50]:
Also. For those of you who are looking for a job, we do have a Facebook group called Free Resume Review. It is by recruiters and for recruiters, you could go in, you know, tell your situation, share your resume, and another volunteer recruiter will partner with you, take a look at your resume and help you with your job search. So I know a lot of people are out there looking and that's a resource we have as well. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:14]:
And before I let you go, because it's been phenomenal and I'm going to go back and play with ChatGPT's operator for the rest of the weekend. Before I let you go, is there anything else that you want to leave the listeners with?

Mike Wolford [00:43:25]:
Yeah. The job of the future, I think is a really exciting one. It's where we actually get to be the advocate for our candidates and we get to actually build a relationship of trust and help them and we get to be the true business advisors we've always wanted to be and help our businesses make decisions by providing them with good, actionable decision, that intelligence that helps them make a decision. That's the future job and I'm looking forward to it. I think it's a really cool job. I think it's one where we get to say congratulations a lot more.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:56]:
That is awesome. And Mike, I just want to say thank you for coming on. I know it's like AI is like one of this. I feel sometimes it's been overhyped. But then behind the scenes you got companies that are sitting there making like 8,000 hires per year with recruiter using AI. I was just speaking at a conference up in the D.C. metro and one of these large defense companies actually, they shared the story that a new hire actually went to go talk to the recruiter that helped hire them because they were excited about finally meeting this person. The recruiting team actually had to let that person know that they were dealing with a bot.

Mike Wolford [00:44:30]:
Right.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:30]:
That person didn't know until after they got hired. That entire customer service was dealt with by a bottle. So the future's here, whether we like it or not. And, you know, thank you for coming on and kind of just leveling out where the reality is so that way we can figure out where to go now.

Mike Wolford [00:44:46]:
Well, thank you so much for having me, and I hope it was helpful, and I wish everybody the best.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:51]:
Thank you, guys. Until next time. And I want you guys to crush 2025.