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Isaac Cheifetz - Applying Lean Methodology to Talent Acquisition

• David Turetsky • Season 9 • Episode 14

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Isaac Cheifetz, Managing Principal at Catalytic1 Executive Search and Chief Mentor Recruiter at Minnesota Emerging Software Advisory, joins us this episode to discuss applying lean methodologies to talent acquisition. 


[0:00] Introduction

  • Welcome, Isaac!
  • Today’s Topic: Applying Lean Methodology to Talent Acquisition

[9:14] Is talent acquisition really broken?

  • Examining pain points for hiring managers, job seekers, CEOs, and HR teams
  • Challenges in the online job application process

[18:05] How can we change talent acquisition to improve it?

  • Importance of reviewing and improving job descriptions
  • Integrating lean methodologies into talent acquisition processes
  • Pros and cons of AI in talent acquisition

[40:08] Is formalized training required for good talent acquisition system design?

  • Strategic benefits to formal training in talent acquisition system design

[41:51] Closing

  • Thanks for listening!


Quick Quote

“All you have to do [when you’re designing quality job descriptions] is start with the funded business case. The role you’re hiring for is the result of a funded business initiative.”


Resources: 

Catalytic1 

Hiring Secrets of the NFL 

How to assess & improve AI competencies for Executives & BOD 


Contacts: 

Isaac's LinkedIn
David's LinkedIn
Dwight's LinkedIn
Podcast Manager: Karissa Harris
Email us!

Production by Affogato Media

Announcer:

Announcer, the world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources. Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, our source for data technology and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now here are your hosts, David cheretsky and Dwight Brown.

David Turetsky:

Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host. David Turetsky, alongside my co-host, best friend and partner, who jumps off of ridges, Dwight Brown. Ridges, not bridges.

Dwight Brown:

I was gonna say, I don't jump off bridges.

David Turetsky:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all, but by the way, from Salary.com so

Dwight Brown:

From Salary.com! Yes, yeah, but it's not Salary.com sponsored jumping.

David Turetsky:

No! Thank goodness, although

Isaac Cheifetz:

You're life insurance coverage, I assume.

Dwight Brown:

Right, exactly.

David Turetsky:

And you heard the voice of Isaac Cheifetz. Isaac, how are you?

Isaac Cheifetz:

I'm very well. It's great to see you two again!

David Turetsky:

And it's great to have you on! Isaac, tell us a little bit about you.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Well, I, like you, I'm New York, born and bred. I spent, let's see, undergrad in history, which I didn't know what to do with, masters in organizational psych, which I didn't know what to do with. Worked in as a comp analyst for three years, while I was figuring it out. This is all back in New York, jumped to a search firm in the very late 80s that did nothing but AI, if you could believe it. So was immersed in that world back then.

David Turetsky:

In 1980 there was AI?

Isaac Cheifetz:

It is very mid 80s.

Dwight Brown:

Everyone thinks it's new!

David Turetsky:

Oh, so new!

Isaac Cheifetz:

No, I was placing ML researchers and list programmers, and in that era when most people weren't on the internet yet! Iremember, we were on the internet, we were on the internet, but the web did not exist yet. So we would get resumes from people at Oracle or Sun, but we would have to FTP them.

David Turetsky:

Oh, sure, lovely.

Isaac Cheifetz:

And I came out to move to Minneapolis after a summer back country in Alaska, and have been here ever since. My career has really been I've been an executive recruiter two thirds, three quarters of my career. The other third, various kinds of consulting, mostly talent acquisition, organizational design, operating models, strategy. I'm not a technologist, but I know more about data than your average bear. And even though smart bears that can catch the salmon, you know, I saw those in Alaska. And these days, I basically do two things. I do retained executive search, particularly for roles that are evolving new roles where companies want to hire someone with classic blue chip business experience, but who are also sophisticated about the new technologies, not as technologists, but rather in terms of how to monetize the spend on whether it's AI or digital etc, etc.

David Turetsky:

That's a novel concept. Isaac actually having to have an ROI for it?

Isaac Cheifetz:

Well, I guess, well, I mean, this stuff interests me, and I won't. It's the I was always very interested in that topic going way back. It's a distraction from what we're talking about today, but it's interesting. And the other thing I do these days is I have an offering called hiring as a service, where I basically embed myself in companies on a long term basis for you know, to be available as needed, to help them turbo charge the quality, basically, to hire people better, faster and stay longer and, and the model we'll talk about today is a piece of that puzzle.

David Turetsky:

So you're the $6 million recruiter faster.

Isaac Cheifetz:

I'm more Oscar, I'm more Oscar Goldman, but I'll take it.

Dwight Brown:

And there's, there's a certain portion of our audience is going, hm?

Isaac Cheifetz:

They have no idea Johnny Carson was, there's no way you know Oscar Goldman. Yes, Oscar Goldman was The $6 million man's boss.

David Turetsky:

Yes, he was. He was a great straight man to all the jokes. So Isaac, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you?

Isaac Cheifetz:

Well. My friends know it, because I can't resist telling the story. But the summer after Alaska, I was solo hiking in the Montana Rockies, and I saw it was in the it was in the late spring, and I saw a bear on a ridge over me, and I wasn't really afraid a grizzly bear. And I wasn't really afraid because I'd seen lots of bears in Alaska, I knew how to deal with it, and one of the things you're supposed to do is just walk along and make a lot of noise so you don't surprise them. So I'm walking along saying, Hey Bear, Hey bear, and suddenly in front and I'm walking up a steep incline with probably a 50 pound pack on my back, and suddenly there's a young bull moose standing right in front of me. Yeah, looking Dumb, dumb as can be. Oh, and you know, he wasn't a giant. He was a six foot moose, not a seven foot moose, but you know it was big enough. And I, I've been walking along by myself. I'm a little spaced out. Just go, Hey Bear. Hey Bear. So I look at the moose, and they said, hey moose. And they just stared at me, and I so I thought I had to up the ante, so I sort of did my best rocky imitation, and I said, Yo, Moose! He charged me because, I guess that sounded pretty impressive. And he charged me from 10 yards away. And he was so fast! And so, you know, they look like they're on stilts. They're so nimble, especially on inclines, he was on top of me in three seconds. Fortunately, I was standing next to a big tree, so I just took one step behind the tree. He flashed by me down the hill. I could have patted him on the head. I didn't. And he goes about 100 feet down the hill, and I'm standing with adrenaline shooting out my ears, and I don't know what to do, because I know if I keep going up and he comes after me, he'll be on me again in seconds. But he's just chewing on shrubbery, and every every few seconds he he lazily, sort of does the 180 with his head like Linda, another ancient reference, Linda Blair and the exorcist. I realized he doesn't care anymore. He made his point. He got rid of the testosterone in his head, and I kept hiking, and I felt really safe for the rest of the trip, because I felt statistically, the odds of being attacked by both a moose and a bear on the same trip were really low. So that gave me some hope. Well, when I got home and told friends about it, I got a lot of grief for you know, inciting a moose to attack!

David Turetsky:

Inciting a moose! Did you get a ticket for inciting a moose?

Isaac Cheifetz:

No, no, no. There were no gang people around. I got away with it.

Dwight Brown:

I mean, it's not like you went up and kicked it or anything!

David Turetsky:

Right. Nor did you, nor did you

Isaac Cheifetz:

Listen, that's for the courts to decide, Dwight. No, I didn't.

David Turetsky:

A jury of my peers will find me innocent, I swear.

Dwight Brown:

Yeah, what's that phrase? Don't poke the skunk, yeah?

David Turetsky:

Don't poke the bear

Isaac Cheifetz:

Don't, don't pretend you're Rocky when talking to a moose, yeah.

Dwight Brown:

I'm just picturing you walking down this trail going, Hey, Bear. Hey, bear, Yo moose!

David Turetsky:

The bear looks at you and is like, I'm sorry what genre are we in now? What are we trying to do? I'm getting in the head of the bear, trying to say, and the bear is a director saying, What are you doing, Isaac? Isaac, I want one scene here. One scene! Give me one character.

Isaac Cheifetz:

David. I can't lie to you. I respect you too much. It wouldn't make the top 20 list of stupid things I've done in my life. So I think we should turn it aside and move forward.

David Turetsky:

Okay, all right. Well, that is, that is one of the more unique, one fun things that we've heard in a long time.

Dwight Brown:

Yes, it is, it's so, I think you're up there for the nomination for the the Oscar on that one. So

David Turetsky:

You get a slow clap for me. That was good. And transitioning now to talk about our topic, and our topic is going to be fascinating, which is applying lean methodology to talent acquisition. And so question Isaac, what's wrong with talent acquisition? Is it really broken?

Isaac Cheifetz:

I hear from a lot of people, I would say that if I think about the three constituencies, maybe three or four. I mean, who are the constituencies for talent acquisition? You they're the hiring managers, they're the jobs they're the job seekers, they're the CEOs. And there's HR there the talent acquisition folks in HR that. I mean, maybe there are others, I don't know. I guess legal comes in if you do something really awful, but probably not. And, and, yeah, I hear from lots of folks that that they're just frustrated with, each one in their own way! The candidates are frustrated when they apply over and over online for jobs that they're perfect for and don't hear back. The the folks in in HR talent acquisition are frustrated with often having internal business clients who don't take the process seriously enough. The CEOs are frustrated that this is that they're just not seeing the the consistency of quality results that they would like to see, that they hold other functions up to. So, yeah, I I'm not, I'm not saying it's irrevocably broke. Oh, and the last thing I'll put in there is, I often give it talk to executive transition groups, and I'll often say, How many of you found your job at the executive level through online application? And I know this sounds crazy, I've yet to get one. Yeah, which is, which is, which is mind blowing.

David Turetsky:

I think you've seen, you mentioned social media. I think you see the stories on LinkedIn about people getting frustrated, not just by being ghosted, but by actually getting through a process and then not hearing back. And there are just so many stories about the entirety of the value chain or recruiting that is just substantially broken. And we've actually had on the program a few talent acquisition experts who talk about, you know, how the process has evolved and whatnot. I think one of the tenets of the process, though, is you have a supply of people, and you have a demand for talent. And the supply of people has been gigantic, people not only switching roles, but people who are out of work, looking for a specific role and and also you have those internal people who are looking for new pathways, who are frustrated because they haven't seen growth in their in their roles. So to me, one of the key under underpinnings of the process is, I think, because of the internet, there are a lot more candidates. There are, there's only a few roles, and trying to stick the 150 maybe 200,000 pounds of supply into that, you know, eight ounce bag of of demand is, is a very, very key challenge, the funnel.

Dwight Brown:

And you think about the in between, between those you know, you're and that's, that's that brokenness is, it's like two groups sitting on opposite banks of a river without a bridge, trying to get to each other and jump in the water, and the water just sweeps you away. You never make it

David Turetsky:

it's cold

Dwight Brown:

to the other side, and it's cold! Exactly, especially where Isaac is.

Isaac Cheifetz:

I have people, yes. I mean, I'm outside Minneapolis, and it was five below yesterday. It's about 25 now, and it feels spring like. But I remember once talking to somebody a couple years ago, and he told me proudly that, oh, I'm doing a really good job on my job search. I'm applying to jobs online 40 hours a week. And I quoted to him the late great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who used to distinguish between activity and accomplishment. And I said, I said, it is completely useless to apply online to jobs that you are not a great fit for. It is just it is a bad use of time, because you're now competing, at least, if you're a great fit, you're competing with some finite number of people who are a great fit. If you're a loose fit or not a fit at all, you're now completing with 10s of 1000s of people who are doing the same mindless thing you are. So I'm a much bigger advocate for I call it peer networking, for simply going across your network and saying, Hey, let's catch up for 20 minutes and not talk about job search. At the very end, say, Hey, if you know of anything, because you'll have a set. And if you do, you can have a handful of those a day, and over the course of months, you'll cut you'll really stir up your network.

David Turetsky:

I just think that people, they get to a desperation point because they see so many other people out of work.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Yes!

David Turetsky:

And Isaac, I've been there too, where you get to a point where you say, I've tried to, I've tried my quote, unquote best, because I'm an expert in a field, to try and get a role in that field. But it seems like I'm competing against myself more than anything else, because I don't get anything back, I don't get any feedback, and I get ghosted more often than not.

Isaac Cheifetz:

I hear that from a lot of people who have absolutely blue chip backgrounds, and honestly it makes them a little crazy at a certain point! And not irrevocably, but it's, it's,

Dwight Brown:

yep it's, it's hard, yeah, especially the last year or so, because the last two years we was both kind of a down economy, and there was, in this era, this notion that AI would replace some large percent of jobs, which, which it hasn't yet, which it hasn't. And I think, we think probably, probably won't, but at least in the short to medium term.

David Turetsky:

Right

Isaac Cheifetz:

But it really I think there's reason to think that 25 well, that there'll be a lot more hiring, just because there was a lot that was where companies were resisting hiring in this two year period for those reasons.

Dwight Brown:

When you think about the you think about the impact. Number one, you have the impact on the candidate. Number two, you have the impact on the hiring company, but when you look at it from the big picture perspective, there's a big contingent of people who are unemployed out there who have given up on the hiring process. They've done it for so long and been so discouraged that they've stopped looking for a job. And so you actually have this broader economic impact that goes with this. I think a lot of people think, well, it's a process problem within a company. Well, it's, it is very much so. But there's a bigger component that goes with it too.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Big time and that. I mean, that's probably, ultimately, I mean, that's a more strategic conversation than the one we're having here today, I think. And it's ultimately a more important one, and it's probably above my pay grade, but,

David Turetsky:

but yeah, you should apply to that role then, Isaac!

Isaac Cheifetz:

yes

David Turetsky:

See if you can get it, and let us know.

Isaac Cheifetz:

I'll tell you. One of the fun things about my career is because I've, I've almost always been working with leading edge business. I mean, you know, businesses, I'm, I don't do much. I've never done much search for technologists, for programmers or something, but for business people, but still, they're at the cutting edge. So even when they're things are taking a little longer than they'd like to. Yeah, these people are not going to be unemployed in the long term, because what they're doing is so central to the future of the economy. So that you know when people, when companies I work with, have massive layoffs, I try to help, but I the human component of, oh, what will this person do next? Is just isn't the same. That's a luxury I have just because I'm at, I'm really at the cutting edge of of where things are now and where they want to be.

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David Turetsky:

So Isaac, let's transition to talk about, is there a solution? Can we make a change to the function that might improve the situation?

Isaac Cheifetz:

Sure. Let's talk about, how do we write job descriptions? I was like I mentioned. I was a comp analyst for three years, so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets. I think the vast majority of us, if we have a new role, if we're, if we're in the job design role, and we're and we're told to create a job description for role x, what's the first thing we do, we we go online. We go to Google. We Google the title. We scroll several dozen job descriptions that have that title. Find the ones that seem well written and closer to what we're doing. We download them, we meet with the hiring executive, and basically go through those job descriptions, circling the elements that the hiring manager wants in the role. We cobble it together, we polish it. We've got a job, a nice job description. Here's, and I used to do this forever. Here's the problem I realized at a certain point, from a process standpoint, is it from a distance? It looks like a good job description, but it's, it's almost like a Frankenstein monster across the field. It looks like

David Turetsky:

It's cobbled together

Isaac Cheifetz:

but when you get up close, there are bolts sticking out of his forehead, because he's not actually a real person. He's a facsimile. And and I think it's the same thing here. You can put together a job description that reads really fluidly for that and yet has nothing. Anything it has to do with what you're trying to accomplish in your business is coincidental! And that's just not good enough, because, once you hire that person, yeah, once you hire a person to that spec, the odds that the job description is incrementally off, 10% 25% 40, whatever, are pretty good.

David Turetsky:

Well, I think there's a fundamental problem, Isaac, with what a job description really is, because work today is mainly search for information. I'm being flippant, by the way, search for information, cobble information together and present information for a lot of us, right? And those are our duties. Where I mean, some of us sell, some of us buy resources, but, but the job descriptions that are there are so antiquated. They're they're looking at how someone works in a very old fashioned way.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Oh, big time. Big time. Oh, if you have a job, if you have a job that has existed by title for decades in the company, let's say a CFO. Okay? you could have a CFO and they just keep hiring against the job same job description because, well, a CFO is a CFO, right? For all we know that job description was written at the end of the Korean War!

David Turetsky:

exactly, right, that's the last time the survey was updated.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Even though, thematically, a CFO is the same as it was back then, in the sense it's the responsible for overseeing the metrics of the company and applying it strategically. But where does the sophistication of those metrics back in the day, it was gap or equivalent? Today, today, a CFO is half an analytics person. So yeah, that applies to same thing for sales and marketing. Good Lord. I mean marketing, marketing today versus 15 years ago, almost unrecognizable. I mean, I knew marketing executives in the 90s who were dirt ignorant about technology. They just they didn't know and they didn't care. Had nothing to do with them. Today, marketing is two thirds analytics!

David Turetsky:

Absolutely, SEO.

Dwight Brown:

digital medium.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

David Turetsky:

And that's what worries me, though, is that a lot of those descriptions that people use today are just totally antiquated. They don't really focus on the current set of tasks, duties and responsibilities or educational requirements. I mean, most of them still say they they require a bachelor's degree, and probably two thirds, or 75% of the people who are doing the job don't have a bachelor's degree, or they do, they probably have more and more insight not having one than they would if they already, if they invested the four years to get one.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Well, I couldn't agree more, but I'm going to sidestep that topic just because we could do, no, no, that's a rich topic, and that's very salient to what's going on today relative to higher ed, but that we'd need, we'd need hours to talk about that one!

David Turetsky:

I got all day! And that's and that's when we just lost all of our listeners just right there. Sorry, I was just kidding everybody. We will close this out in 13 or 14 minutes, I promise.

Dwight Brown:

But it's, I mean, it's true that the job descriptions are probably the most neglected thing. I mean, we see it all the time in our work, when we're doing market pricing and companies don't have up to date job descriptions. But it makes total sense to me, Isaac that with the process you're talking about that would be that's the ultimate starting point.

Isaac Cheifetz:

yeah, so give me maybe three to five minutes. I'll just do a quick dive on the process. Okay?

David Turetsky:

please!

Isaac Cheifetz:

So I mean when, when I say design for quality? What is design for quality? Most continuous improvement methodologies, whether it's TQM or Six Sigma, or, you know, whichever variant a company uses, use the concept of design for quality, which is that you are making hard, systemic decisions at the beginning of the process as to what you know based on data as to what the customer needs and what that translates into in the product. In our case here, what is the what is the product? Well, the product is the design job and adjust slash, which presents as a job description. Your customers, I would say, are primarily your internal customers, the hiring managers, and secondarily the candidates, maybe not even secondarily. And now you might think that this is a really complicated thing to do. I've found it's really easy to do, and here's why. All you have to do is take, you don't have to immerse yourself and become a quality guru. You all you have to do is start with the funded business case. Let's assume this is a new role. Let's assume this is a Director of Sales for your new for the attempt of your company at monetizing data. That's as an example, you make robots, you generate data from the factory floor. You want to anonymize that data and then sell it to to to customers. Well, this role that you're hiring for is the result of a funded of a funded business initiative where someone took the trouble to write an extensive business case that was approved. All you do, you start with that. You review it. You do the classic gap analysis, current state, future state gap, and then and you start flow charting. And what's beautiful about this is it both helps you be decisive and you show your math. So what needs to be done in the next year to reduce that gap or to address it? What is this person, this key person, need to do to reduce the gap? What experience do they need to have to be able to do this? And again, we're flow charting, and we're not sitting around just as a group of stakeholders in the higher up throwing out opinions where we're defining. We're making decisions the same way we would if we were building a call center and wanted the, you know, defined answer as to what next steps are. And I'll give you an example of where this can be really powerful, the question of, do we need someone from within our industry or not? I maintain that you almost never need someone from your industry. What you need is someone from a industry with the same critical attributes as yours, and because, after all, think about benchmarking. You benchmark Best Practices outside your industry in order to leapfrog your competitors, you don't benchmark your competitors, and the three elements are similar product complexity, similar go to market strategy and selling at the same level and and once you've identified what those quote cousin industries are, now you put yourself in a position where, instead of having dozens of candidates, you have 1000s, and none of them have non competes. So that's an example of where you can take some chances, because they're not really chances. They're the result of very concrete analysis, where you're showing your math, where someone questions, why are you doing that? You can say, well, this is our train of logic.

David Turetsky:

Yeah, I think Isaac, though a lot of people who are listening have just, there's a lump in their throat, saying, wait a minute. Does that mean that there has to be a business plan every time I want to hire somebody? Because the answer is, is that almost never do we have a business plan that supports the hiring. It usually is a requisition that got approved, whether it was last year, the year before, or even this year, and now they have to go out and, you know, hire for that. Do people typically ask for that ROI?

Isaac Cheifetz:

No, your point well taken. Point, very well taken. So let me step back from the Yeah, yes, there are occasionally those, those things exist. I'd say the more senior it is, the more likely it exists. Yes, if we're talking at the C level, it exists. But at most levels it does not, but it doesn't. You can still do this colloquially, and you're hiring that person for a reason, so you can do this on the fly just as easily, and you can just simply sit there and sit with your internal the hiring exec and say, walk me. Give me half an hour. Walk me through it. Where are you at now? What do you want to be in? Where do you want to be in 18 months? What is the role of this person and moving you towards this, what is it specifically that they need to accomplish to be successful in enabling what you're looking to do? So you can do it colloquially, just as easy, and it doesn't take days. It takes, takes a half hour session with with the hiring manager. And I'm not saying it's it's not. And the good news is here, there's this stuff is done on such a loosey, goosey basis, sometimes at its worst, that you don't have to get it perfect just by applying, just by using the concepts of lean, even though you're not actually reducing variance in the way quantitatively, in the way you do in real lean, there's so much low hanging fruit that the result will still be noticeably better. Does that mitigate? Shoot back at me on that, if you would.

Dwight Brown:

So, when you identify this pool of candidates we were just talking about the supply and demand and the chasm that sits between those how does this process identify those folks? Is that out on the applications that come in? Where do you identify this pool and then, how do you make that connection?

Isaac Cheifetz:

I don't have a perfect answer to that, though it's something I think about a lot. I would say that I think the trend we're going to see going forward is that talent acquisition partners for them to have still more of a positive of a powerful impact, that it's going the idea of taking people from line roles or support roles who are subject matter experts, and putting them into talent acquisition for a couple of years and making it in whatever you know, in whatever way, a you know, a high, you know, visibility role that is considered a step up. Because, I mean, what's more important than than your future, future employees, right? And talent acquisition, you know, the children are our future. But, yeah, the but what I'm saying so I think that that will

Dwight Brown:

We are the world!

Isaac Cheifetz:

And so I'm saying that remember, I mean, I'm I exist as the, I'm a head hunter. Okay, so I make my living at the ground level, putting people into roles. This isn't an academic. Everything I preach are heuristics that I learned over many, many searches. But I think, but to answer your question directly, yes, I think that the most important thing is to get move people up to where. I mean, okay. I mean, I presume people like David or myself, because we've been doing this for so long, we have the ability, if you gave us a stack, a three inch stack of resume, we could sort through them over a glass of wine in a couple of hours and just eyeball them and put them into red, green, yellow piles, even if they were a complex spec, because we've done it so often and are knee deep in so many different disciplines, we can do that.

Dwight Brown:

Right

Isaac Cheifetz:

Most people, it's not. It's not fair to expect most people to be able to do that, but it's eminently doable to have people incrementally get better at it, and the better they get at it, the more they'll be a it won't, it won't feel like it's much of a challenge to sort through those. Now whether will AI help, who's to say? I mean, quick story, a CEO told me a couple of months ago, he told me that he had heard from another CEO that people were starting to use candidates were using AI to rewrite the resume to tailor to the spec, to the job description, and the companies were using AI to assess those resumes. Well, I mean, that's the ultimate garbage in garbage out, right? Yeah. I mean, you're both, it's deception at. What were you going to say David?

David Turetsky:

Well, well, Isaac, I'll just, I'm just going to disagree a little bit. One of the things that AI has done on the inbound side is it's searching for certain things and certain patterns. And I applaud people that use AI on the on the supply side so that they can what's the word? It's not even gaming the system. It's actually utilizing the system for themselves. If they put together the best resume and cover letter possible, they're never going to get chosen because they're being honest, and honesty is not the best policy in this case, because the AI is looking for those keywords that the system has set up against them and gaming the system would be to your point, writing crap and expecting it to win. What the AI is doing is helping them understand how to write the resume and cover letter in a way in which the AI might be more receptive. To me, it's more not as much gaming system, it's using the system for your purpose.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Okay, but you're if I understand correct, I mean, that makes sense to me, but if I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that in your scenario, the candidate is using AI to make to to make their fit more obvious. What I was talking about are people using

David Turetsky:

Yes AI to make it look where they're not a beautiful fit, they're totally

Isaac Cheifetz:

a gental fit

Dwight Brown:

Right

Isaac Cheifetz:

Yeah. So I think we're, we're, we're holding on to parts of the same elephant I think.

David Turetsky:

Yeah. And I think the frauds, the frauds do get assistance here, but the people who are genuine also get assistance.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Sure. So yes, yes, yes. And again, I'm all Yeah. Always up for learning. I don't really understand the best practice of filling each job say on LinkedIn with dozens of buzzwords, because how does putting down business development or leadership or any number of dozens and dozens of key buzzwords that's that's not enough, given the current state of tech, it's just so brittle. Now I don't think there's information there.

Dwight Brown:

And so with the Lean hiring model, I think what I'm hearing is we've still got this brokenness of getting the supply to the to the demand however you're building up the supply in a more targeted way that really gets to what the needs of the job are, and what the key responsibilities are, and the skills that are necessary for that job. It's really about that targeting piece of things.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Yes, and I left this out, I didn't intend to talk about this a lot of this presentation in the interest of time, because normally when I deliver this as a presentation to HR groups at companies, it basically takes half a day to cover the several modules. But another powerful element of this is it makes it easier for candidates to see when a job is a great fit for them, because you're delineating so much more tightly how the role fits into the business and B it likely reduces their frustration level with the company transactionally because of that clarity. So that's really well, I guess what I'm saying is there's nothing else in civilized society that is still done from a process optimization standpoint. I mean, no one would ever build a call center or a technology stack or a house with this kind of casual attitude towards process? Yeah, and I want to know buddy, who's a pretty fellow, you know, Dwight of a former employer. He guy who who's a good buddy, and I was what described this thing years ago. And he said, Well, yeah, it's, it makes sense. But the truth is, I like to have a job 85% described. And then I go, I'll start interviewing. And I use those conversations to pin down, yeah, I learned things, and I add things to it. I said, Well, I said, that's cool. I said, Tell me this, would you build a new house that way? Right? And the answer, obviously is no, because if you said that to your PC, the GC would say, No, I won't do that, because some idiot with money tried it three years ago and his house cost 2x and he wasn't happy. So no, I made a tie down spec with a bow around it. And, you know, so that I'm suggesting that that doing that A will, by its nature, lead to a smoother, faster, hire and and that, number two, it also, I think, gives the talent acquisition person a real foundation on which to push back against hiring execs who have, not who have, because a lot, let's, let's be honest, a lot, if not most, of the undisciplined ideas about what ought to be in the job come from the hiring manager, not from the HR person and if and but in you know me as an external recruiter, it's part of my job to, in confidence, tell the executive No, that dog won't hunt. Be a lot different if I was on salary to that company. And this is a what? This is a tool, if with one grounds oneself in it, to be able to say, hey, this isn't my opinion. I'm applying just like you do in many areas, operationally the company I'm applying, I'm applying design for quality principles, ala lean and based on that, we need to answer these questions now, not later.

David Turetsky:

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this. Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com/hrdlconsulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. Well, but Isaac, how does someone let's, let's kind of start this last question in a very straightforward way.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Sure

David Turetsky:

What does someone do in talent acquisition to adopt these principles? Do they have to become certified in like six sigma or lean principles in order to be able to utilize those in within their role?

Isaac Cheifetz:

That No, no, that would well, I'll tell the short answer is no, though I would say that if they did, that's probably a heck of a competitive advantage for their career. It is not necessary, but if they did it, I think they'd be distinguishing themselves big time in terms of the kind of roles that will be available to them going forward. But no, they, I mean, I mean, I'm actually, I'm actually working on a, on a, on a handbook right now that would be basically paint by numbers for this, so that you wouldn't need to know everything about it.

David Turetsky:

So we'll put the, if there's a link

Dwight Brown:

Cliff notes? available, we'll put that in the show notes, so someone who's listening to us could say, okay, so how do I act on this? And if there's a crib, crib sheet version, or a or what do they call the the

David Turetsky:

Yes, if there's a short

Isaac Cheifetz:

David, don't act like you don't know what Cliff Notes are.

David Turetsky:

Yeah, Cliff Notes. I no, I've never used those in college. I mean, anytime I don't know what they are. No, but, but we can put answer the link to that. We will show notes. All right, perfect. So Isaac, any other salient pieces on this that you think are critical before we close?

Isaac Cheifetz:

said, Oh, that's a fascinating tangent that we don't want to go off on. So there, there are lots of emanations to it. But more than anything else, I think I would say that, okay, here's one. I would say that historically, when technology enables real efficiencies, has real ROI,

David Turetsky:

Yeah

Isaac Cheifetz:

it's pretty obvious, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit. So anytime someone comes to you and says, I have magic beans or magic Gen AI that will fix this problem, the odds are you're probably really better off focusing on optimizing your processes really tightly, and then once you really understand your processes, looking for modules of them that can be automated. But anyone that tells you that they can automate the soup to nuts what you're doing, run away.

David Turetsky:

So there are going to be a lot of people running and screaming then after this podcast, which you know, it's okay, especially if you are running and listening to us as you run, just run a little faster. They will not catch up to you. Isaac, I think we're going to have to ask you to come back and we can spend another at least day or two talking about this topic because it's a fascinating one for Dwight and I.

Isaac Cheifetz:

Anytime my brothers.

David Turetsky:

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much for being here!

Isaac Cheifetz:

My pleasure. I really enjoyed it!

David Turetsky:

Dwight, thank you.

Dwight Brown:

Thank you. Thanks for being with us today, Isaac. Definitely a lot more that we can delve into!

David Turetsky:

Absolutely and thank you all for listening. Take care and stay safe.

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David B Turetsky

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Dwight Brown

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