Mark Mutton from Inflection Point shared his journey from an electrical engineer to utilizing A.I. for staffing.

In this episode, Lindsey talks with Mark Mutton from Inflection Point.

Mark shares his journey from an electrical engineer to staffing, founding the company in 2019. Their recruitment approach utilizes AI tools like chat GPT for personalized messaging, aiming for successful placements by matching candidate values with company culture. Inflection Point's in-house programming team develops AI applications with Google's Gemini Vertex AI platform, emphasizing AI's role in streamlining job descriptions and candidate interactions. Mark highlighted the shift towards valuing skilled trades over college degrees due to AI's impact on labor landscapes, fostering exploration of AI's potential beyond recruiting tasks.

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Transcript

Before we hit the road on today's discussion, I want to express our sincere gratitude to our sponsors. Without their support, this podcast wouldn't be possible. So a big shout out and thank you to Performance Food Group,  C. H.  Robinson, to the PepsiCo foundation, and to the Knorr-Bremse Global Cares foundation. Without your support, this couldn't be possible. So buckle up and get ready for an insightful journey into all things next gen trucking, your road to the future. 

Hey, this is Lindsey Trent with NGT talks, and we are excited to have Mark Mutton from inflection point here today. He's a founder of NextGen Trucking, and we just want to thank you for your support. Hey, Mark, I am really excited to talk to you. You are quite the expert in the recruiting space.  Tell me a little bit about yourself and how did you get into your business? How did you get into recruiting? Would love to hear all those things.

Yeah, it's a long and windy road, but I started out as an electrical engineer, and I worked at a Department of Defense think tank. So literally sitting around trying to think of creative ways to measure random things. And my career evolved from there. I worked at a nuclear power plant as an engineering manager for a while, and that's really where I first started seeing some opportunities in the staffing space and talent and not being able to communicate my department's needs effectively to the recruiters. And I then took a sort of career change, path change. And my wife's dad, my father in law, he needed some help on the farm.  So I took a quote unquote break for a couple years and did some farm work and love every minute of it and still do some on the side, but quickly realized that, you know, there's not. There's not a lot of money in farming, and I needed to supplement my income.

Yeah, more of a project there with the farming.

Yeah, right, exactly. And so I started inflection point. It would 20 in the middle of 2019, and really it was around just a friend of a friend needed help finding the right talent, and I was just the perfect person to do so. And it really spiraled from there in a good way. We started looking for mechanics, technicians, and having my technical background, I developed ways to be way more efficient at processing candidates, finding out if they have the right skillset. And it's just continued to grow and grow from there. We now service all the tier one waste providers in the country and are continuing to expand outside of environmental services into logistics. And we're starting a subsidiary in Canada. So we're expanding outside the US.

Yeah. So the product that the service that you guys are helping these customers with must be doing great for how much you've expanded since 2019. Congratulations. That's really incredible.

Yeah, thanks. And I know we had some contact when you were first starting next generation trucking and, like, very early stages, and I have been continuously impressed by the progress that you've made on that organization and love the overall goal that you guys are trying to achieve.

Well, thank you. Because inflection point is a founding member of next generation and trekking association, and we really appreciate your support, especially, you know, with companies that are doing new and innovative things to reach out to people and to attract to the industry to put them in good jobs. So tell me a little bit about inflection point and what you guys are doing.

Yeah, so we're a recruiting company that uses data and technology to find the right fit for clients. And we started with using, you know, data analytics and just some programming languages to formulate automated messaging and skillset matching. And then the advent of were using AI before AI was cool. So the chat. Oh, yeah, the chat GPT phenomenon that's happened, that's this OpenAI's large language model, and they really opened up the public's eyes to the capabilities of artificial intelligence. But it's been around for quite a while before that even.

Wow. Well, so for me, I've just been getting familiar with chat GPT, and I've already used it once today to write a letter, and it just really helps, you know, it's not 100% everything I use, but it really helps to get things going. And so if I've never used any AI tools, what do you suggest as a starting point?

Chat GPT is a wonderful exposure to the capabilities, for sure, and having conversations, brainstorming ideas, drafting documents. Wordsmithing is really where chat GPT shines outside logical thinking. It's not quite there yet, but from initial exposure, it's a great tool. Also, Google has been working as fast as they can to come up with a competitor to chat GPT, and they recently launched Gemini, which is their large language model. And that's another good starting point for someone new to AI.

Yeah. And so how do you use AI in recruiting? Like, if I'm a recruiter and I want to start, what are some of the steps I need to take to start using it?

Well, from a messaging standpoint, there's. On the surface, it's very straightforward to tailor a message to a candidate so you can excluding the person's name and phone number. If you put in their work experience and a little bit of information about your organization, it can craft an amazing initial outreach message to them that looks at the candidates past experience, what your company and organization is looking for, and, you know, develop this. This conversation piece with the candidate that is almost like a singular connection between their work experience and your organization.

Wow. So do you have it set up to automatically reply back with replies, or is it manual?

Yeah, so we do a lot of things. AI in general is the publicly available large language models are very good at conversation. They can answer questions. So, yes, the questions get answered about the position, the company. You can have a whole dialogue around what the requirements are, but it goes way beyond that. And what we're using is we take the candidate's past experience, we look at who they worked for, what that company's core values, culture, employee reviews, and we develop a profile of the candidate. And then we can see if that. If their past work history is a fit for the client's company culture and work environment and fit. So it dives way deeper than just having a conversation back and forth and answering questions.

So you have created a profile for each one of your customers. Things that they value, what the benefits are, what's important to them, that company. And then you get the candidates values and what they're looking for. And you really are marrying those together, correct?

Yep. And we go, we even look to the. We look at the intangibles as well. So I think it's best illustrated with an example. We work heavily in the environmental services industry. And specifically, if you imagine a garbage collector, what is it? What are some intangibles in someone's work history that you could identify that would beneficial for our client? And one of those just face value is if at any time they had a labor position, it's very labor intensive job. So if they had a labor position in the past, that makes them a better fit for the role than someone who's just done over the road trucking for their entire career. And it's those type of intangibles that there's, I don't know anybody else out there that's looking that deep into someone's past experience to try and create that cultural and skill based fit that's just beyond the resume, right?

Absolutely. Because that's going to help with retention, and that's what everybody's looking for, is somebody to be retained. So what application do you create that in? Did you create your own? Okay.

Yep. We have in house programming team that has done a lot of work, initially using OpenAI APIs. So, but then now we're transitioning to Google's Gemini vertex AI platform and utilizing that for the backend.

Wow, that's incredible. So you're matching your customers and your candidates and hoping that they marry well and that they're retained and then just continuing that process. Is there any other ways that you use AI in the recruiting world?

I think that about covers it from the marketing material for candidates as well. So being able to distill a job description into something that the candidate is interested in. So a lot of organizations will have ten page job descriptions that nobody really reads. And yeah, if you bulletize that and you understand what the specific requirements are and workday look like, pay all those things that are important to the candidate.

Yeah. So taking like this huge long list of job description and inputting that to say, hey, make this bulleted and use the major points. Yep, that's incredible. I was at the recruiting retention conference last week and they talked about using AI to help with like replies back to candidates and automatic replies. And I guess that's kind of what you talked about with you, that personalized reply back. Right, right.

So from the initial outreach you have the candidate profile, you know their work history. Obviously we know what the client, who the client is, what they're looking for, what their company culture is. And then basically you take that information and you train your prompt, the AI with that information and then you can just have an unlimited conversation around anything the candidate could want to know or understand.

So an AI does all of those conversations?

Well, there's some that we interject and answer, but for 99% of the scenarios, the initial questions, and you could think, you know, when you were looking for a job, the initial questions that you ask are pretty proceduralized. As far as you know, what are the work hours, where's the location, you know, what's the company like? What are they trying to, what's the, what's a day in the life of. And those things can all be answered. There's definitely some edge cases where the AI doesn't have the right information and you can control, unlike using just the chat GPT interface, when you're programmatically doing it, you can control a lot of what the chatbot answers with. So it's amazing.  It is just, we are truly in a time that's very akin to the industrial revolution, the advent of the Internet, all these big monumental shifting moments in time. We're there right now. So it's pretty neat to be living it and seeing it from a macro perspective. This really is going to change the world of work. Go ahead.

What way do you think it's going to change? I mean, I know skilled labor can't be, you know. Right, with chat, GPT and all of that.

Exactly. And that's, it's a going. Well, my kids, they likely won't go to college. You know, they're still young, so there's time. But I truly think that a lot of the import, well, I mean, we can already see it. The companies are relying less on like college or getting a degree. They're looking more for experience in what they do. And with, already with the plethora of information on the Internet, you can pretty much learn anything you want to learn if you apply yourself to do that. So, and with AI, a lot of the jobs, that college degree, the majority of college degrees are going to be supplemented through AI, and it's going to be faster than a lot of people think.

The adoption of AI since chat, GPT, from an organizational standpoint, I get lots of questions all the time about how are you guys using it, what are you doing, how can we use it? And it's just going to change the labor landscape dramatically over the next decade.

Wow, I wonder if they've had any studies about that yet, because I, I was just looking at a bill that was put in to help fund more skilled trades in education. And with that, they didn't mention anything about AI replacing a lot of the jobs that aren't skilled trades. So it seems like that's another argument to fund more skilled trades is that education is that AI is going to be replacing a lot of that, those professional roles that maybe need a college degree but can be replaced now with AI.

Yes, skilled labor and leadership of skilled labor are going to be, I mean, there's multiple influences. The generation, the younger generation was brought up that college degree, do something in front of a computer and AI, I think skilled labor is going to be the most in demand profession in the very near future. And anything young, any youngster now, I mean, if you especially like an entrepreneurial type, there's huge demand for, you know, drivers, electricians, plumbers, hvac. It's, you can write your own ticket from a business perspective. And really the sky's the limit from a demand and training standpoint. So definitely skilled trade schools are going to be the next college.

Yeah. I mean, have you had a plumber or an electrician out recently? I mean, it is expensive, but you have to have their service. And I appreciate that you say that you're not pushing your kids towards college because it was a shift for me because, you know, our generation, were pushed with college, college, and there was really no other choice. And so I had to shift my thinking to say, you know what, it's okay if my kids don't want to go to college and want to get a skilled trade and more than likely they're going to be extremely successful and make more money coming out of that than they would make coming out of college. So that is huge out there. We have to get a shift of parents to say, it's okay. My kid does not have to go to college.  They can be a successful mechanic, a successful plumber, a successful driver, owner, operator, go right into the workforce and start making money, loving what they do and not having to get that student loan debt.

Yes, that's exactly right. Yep.

Yeah. So you might be able to recruit your kids and come in to take one of those roles that you're promoting.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if they have my entrepreneurial spirit, I imagine that they'll start their own electrician company or something along those lines. But yeah, they're, I mean, there's obviously some degrees that if you want to be a doctor or do something along those line, engineer, that requires some training. But the vast majority of college degrees are not going to be as important as we were brought up to believe that they are.

Yeah, absolutely. So if I'm a recruiter and I've not done anything in terms of AI and starting to do that with my processes, what is the first step or the first couple of steps that I should do to look into starting to use AI to help me.

Ask AI. 

That's true.

Seriously.

Okay, AI, how can I start recruiting drivers to work for my company using you? And then it'll give you a whole plan?

Yep, that's it.

That's the answer. I mean, that seems simple. I asked AI to plan a two day weekend getaway with family friendly activities and restaurants, and it gave me a whole itinerary. And then I said, redo that itinerary and it gave me a whole other set of things to do. So AI can be used for vacation planning, for recruiting, for writing letters. And so I thank you, Mark, for helping us see all of the things and the future. I mean, I really agree. You really opened my eyes to some things and I am going to go write a letter right now.  I am going to use chat GPT to help and I'm going to write a letter to this senator that's trying to get more funding for career technical education in support of that because we need more skilled trades and I'm going to have AI help me do that. So this is perfect timing.

Yep. It's exciting to be alive at a time like this. There's so much that's going to change.

Well, thank you for being on NGT talks and we appreciate your support and all you're doing for the industry.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Well, that was a great conversation that I got to have with Mark from Inflection Point. And I am going to check out Google Gemini and start utilizing that with my trip planning, with my schedules. And maybe I'm going to just ask him, hey, how can I use AI better? So we want to thank our sponsors. Thank you to DHL, KKW, Knorr-Bremse Global Cares, and we want to thank C.H. Robinson. Thank you for your support in supporting the next generation. And if you are liking this show, please like and comment. Please download our episodes and follow us on all major podcast platforms.

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