The Leadership Reset Behind a High-Performing Talent Team with Mike Bettley, StackAdapt

Recruiting teams earn influence when they understand what the business is trying to build.

Mike Bettley, VP of Talent Acquisition at StackAdapt, joins Shannon to share how he rebuilt a TA function that was stretched, fragmented, and operating without a clear hiring plan. Before changing systems or metrics, Mike focused on the team’s confidence. He created space for honest feedback, reset expectations, and helped recruiters move from asking for permission to making informed recommendations.

Mike also explains how his team became more involved in workforce planning, compensation conversations, and FP&A partnership as StackAdapt scaled from 170 to 1,800 people. He shares why every intake should start with the business problem, how recruiters can challenge unrealistic profiles, and where AI can support better planning before a role ever reaches TA.

Key takeaways:

1. Start with business needs: Define what the role must accomplish before writing the job description.
2. Context beats pedigree: A great background does not always match the company’s current stage.
3. Alignment prevents drift: Shared definitions help interviewers evaluate candidates against the same bar.
4. Process builds confidence: Strong hiring systems reduce overreliance on back channels and outside validation.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:35) Meet Mike Bettley

(01:30) Why recruiter confidence drives business impact

(03:33) Rebuilding a fragmented talent acquisition team

(06:11) Creating trust through vulnerability and transparency

(11:00) Earning hiring manager trust across the organization

(12:00) Shifting from job descriptions to business problems

(15:30) Teaching stakeholders what great TA partnership looks like

(18:30) Fixing operational bottlenecks through TA Ops investment

(21:00) Lessons learned from launching recruiting KPIs

(24:00) Measuring success through consistency and hiring quality

(28:00) Using AI to improve hiring planning and intake processes

(30:05) Where to connect with Mike

Transcript

Mike Bettley (00:00):
For you as a leader, you have to have a clear vision of where you want to go. If there's no roadmap, there's no direction, everyone's just going to try their best, but you're not going to make any progress.

Shannon Ogborn (00:10):
Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

(00:35):
Hello and welcome to Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am super excited to be here today with a longtime listener, first-time caller, Mike Bettley. He has spent almost 15 years in talent acquisition, guiding companies growth across all stages and maturity levels from early days in agency in the UK, a few years in Dublin at Google, before jumping across to the lovely Canada and building a few series A to C companies, pioneering sourcing at Thomas Reuters.

(01:11):
Now he is the VP of TA at StackAdapt, one of Canada's fastest growing companies. He leads a 25-person TA team driving over 600 hires per year for this highly competitive AI-powered marketing and advertising technology company. So Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike Bettley (01:28):
Thank you for having me. Yeah,

Shannon Ogborn (01:31):
That's cloud worthy. Mike's clob worthy, I think. Yeah. Well, we are going to be talking today about why instilling confidence in your team matters, not just from the leadership perspective, but from your actual team. So taking a big step back, would love to hear from you first, why do you think that matters so much?

Mike Bettley (01:49):
TA's always been about trying to build businesses, not about hiring people. And I think kind of counterintuitively, my job is to hire as few people as possible that enables the business to reach its goals. And in order to do this, you need to understand your business and you need all of your TA team to understand the business that they're supporting to a really deep level. But doing that is a very intensely vulnerable thing. You to ask a lot of questions you don't know the answer to. You have to go into really deep water. And so building that confidence that anyone on the team can understand the business is so, so critical. So it's been a journey. It's not the team I started with and the last two and a half years have been fun.

Shannon Ogborn (02:31):
And I know that one thing that we had talked about was the importance of changing the philosophy on your team from I'm just a recruiter mindset because that keeps recruiting teams stuck in a service provider mindset versus I'm the expert in this space.

Mike Bettley (02:48):
It's one of those where I remember coming out of agency and just being so intimidated by every single person I talked to because I was like, holy quick. These people know so much more than me. They understand it. I don't understand it. I'm just a simple recruiter. And the further I've gone through my career, the more I've realized that you can understand it if you put the energy and curiosity into it. And the more you open your aperture of like, what is my role? How do I contribute value to the company? The easier it becomes to do your job. And I've never been very good at staying in my lane as anyone who's ever worked with me will tell you. So I just think that TA should think more broadly than just the execution of recruitment and into what are we trying to build as a business and how do I play a role in that?

Shannon Ogborn (03:33):
You did this pretty strategically at StackAdapt since you have been there. Would love to hear more about sort of what you did on a high level and before we get into the house.

Mike Bettley (03:47):
Yeah. So the basis of my whole thesis is to build the business and to do that you need to have a team that's willing to do things they've never done before. Most of the team that I joined the company with, there'd been a big change of leadership. The team was very fragmented. All the TA partners reported into HRBPs. It was a bit messy and I kind of knew that going in. I got in there and it was worse than I anticipated.

Shannon Ogborn (04:14):
Isn't that awful? It's worse than you anticipated even with the honesty.

Mike Bettley (04:19):
Yeah. And not that anyone tried to mislead me or anything, but the first six weeks of one-to-ones was just crying. I did none of the crying, but there was a lot of crying and that just showed how uncomfortable, how high threat the situation was. And as I sort of unpacked this, I realized I can never achieve what I'm trying to build with this team until we resolve this issue. And so that really was the first probably year to 18 months was just building this foundation that's now enabled the team to accelerate and go way beyond the service delivery TA model of just like what role, post a job, hope for the best into a really something I'm incredibly proud to call strategic partnership with the business where hiring managers are genuinely coming to the team and going, "What's your recommendation here? How should I change this profile?

(05:09):
What comp should I be offering here?" And the team just feels and operates totally differently. It wasn't the plan going in. I was like, "We can do this. " And then I got in, I was like, "Oh, complete change of plan. Let's focus on this fundamental and see what that unlocks for the business." So talk a little bit more about what we did to address all the crying.

Shannon Ogborn (05:29):
Yeah. I'm a big time crier, but I think honestly, that would've been me guys. I think this is a very timely conversation though, because raise your hand if you are in the cliche feeling of I must do more with less. Is anyone feeling that way? I know a lot of our customers are, and I think this is the time where not only do TA people want to do more, but they're expected to do more and the scope is broadening a lot. So in terms of how you went from tears daily to a happy, healthy team that is now a strategic partner, what was step one of building that back up?

Mike Bettley (06:11):
Yeah, so it was definitely start with building trust with the team. And the behavioral scientist, John Levy, talks about how vulnerability is the currency of trust and vulnerability is like you offering something and somebody reciprocating with something vulnerable as well. So that can be as simple as I don't know how to do that. That's a vulnerable thing because you're displaying that there's a gap there. And if you as the leader are just like, well, you should know how to do that, you immediately break the trust. So leaning in with my own vulnerability of talking about how I was experiencing things, what's going on in my life, try and be as transparent as I can to show that for me, there's no separation between work and home life. If things are hard at home, it's going to be hard at work and you're going to need additional support.

(06:55):
If work is going bad, what do you talk to your partner about? Work, right? The two things have to be in balance. So we went through the first six weeks of just one-to-ones figuring out what's happening. And to be clear, I joined this company and there was no hiring plan. We were 700 people hiring about 300 people a year. There was no document that said this is what we're hiring. It was an interesting spot for sure. I see

Shannon Ogborn (07:17):
It like alarmed faces.

Mike Bettley (07:19):
Not as alarmed as my face, that's for sure. So the first thing we did was a week of discovery where I took the gloves off and I said, full moratorium, no repercussions. And each day we did one full day on stop, one full day on start, one full day on continue. And it just aired out all of the grievances and we found the themes that kind of came to light and then incorporate those into what do we prioritize first? But it just created that space where it's like, oh, everyone's experiencing the same sorts of things and they're all solvable. And I came out of that week going, oh, this is relatively easy. I know what the answers to all these problems are. And that kind of gave the team a little more confidence. We're not lost. We have a path forward. Pay McCord talks about how you share expectations for the role.

(08:05):
What I took from it was being radically transparent with the team and straight upfront about the reason that I'm going to fire you. And so it's a conversation I still have with every new hire on the team. The first conversation I have, I go, look, I'm going to lay out. These are the reasons I'm going to fire you for interest. It's just don't do illegal things.

Shannon Ogborn (08:23):
You piques my

Mike Bettley (08:24):
Interest. Yeah. Don't do legal things and take care of the things that are in your control. So if you have no candidates, that's on you. You didn't ask for help or you didn't action your candidates. That's one of the reasons that I'm going to fire you. Everything else, the outcomes, I can work with you, we can get to a solution. But all of a sudden it feels like a really scary conversation. Then everyone goes, oh, I can do that. The stress just melts and they go, okay, I can lean into this moment because I'm like, now I understand the rules of the game. As long as I keep showing up and putting my best effort forward, my job is safe. And so Patty McCord writes it very differently to that, but that's what I took from it. And so it's worked for me so far.

(09:02):
And of the 10 people that I inherited that were crying every week, I still have five of them on the team. They're all really high performing. They're really leaned into this totally different model of how we operate. And I'm super proud of that because it was like I'd never had this experience. Vulnerably as a leader, I've never thought that was the challenge I was getting into. I though it was all systems and operations, not the emotional piece. But I just tried to approach it as a human and as a father of how do I support these people that are having a really rough time and meet them on the level that they're at? And that's what set the baseline for what we built on from there.

Shannon Ogborn (09:37):
I think also when you have a new leader coming in for any function, it is scary and intimidating. We don't know this person. We don't know what they're about. We don't know if they're going to cut all of us and bring their own people in because these things have happened to people and so that's their preconceived notion of what might occur. So just going through all of these stages to ensure they feel confident and comfortable is huge because you won't get the most out of them unless you take this step.

Mike Bettley (10:07):
No definitely. If you feel high threat, you're not going to take risks. You're going to do the things that you know are safe and you'll default to asking for advice, asking for permission, asking for decisions from everyone. And you just slow the whole thing down and me as the leader becomes the bock if I have to make every decision. So you have to free people up to take intelligent risks. And I talk about as long as you can explain the rationale of why you made a decision, there's never going to be a repercussion on it. If you go, I don't know, that's why we have a bit of an issue. But if you go, I though this, this happened, cool. How do we change that hypothesis? How do we change your pattern recognition for the future? But I want people to try things. I don't have all the answers, I don't think.

Shannon Ogborn (10:51):
I don't think so.

Mike Bettley (10:54):
Sean's like I spent time with you. You don't

Shannon Ogborn (10:56):
Have the answer. I don't have all the answers either. So there's this step one of building connection and trust between the leader and the talent team. But then there's a whole second set of problems to be solved in that the organization is still operating under the hiring managers to leader, not hiring managers to individuals. You were just talking a little bit about how to expand that out to make sure that the blocker isn't you. The hiring managers feel comfortable and confident going to the individual recruiters. How did you then build as sort of the step two, build that trust between the talent team in general and the hiring managers? And the reason why I asked this specifically is because we've had even guests come talk about how do you create the relationship, the really solid relationship between the hiring managers and execs and the talent leader, but it has to surpass that.

(11:48):
So how did you go about that?

Mike Bettley (11:50):
For you as a leader, you have to have a clear vision of where you want to go. If there's no roadmap, there's no direction, everyone's just going to try their best, but you're not going to make any progress. And so by the end of week two, I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted the team to be. It took me two years to transform the organization to that point. And a lot of it is having consistent talking points. So a lot of where I started was talking about focus on the business problem. So really understanding why are we hiring this person? What problem does it solve for the business? So if you think about any engineer, yeah, they have a tech stack that they're using, but that's just a set of tools to solve a problem. What is that problem? And the more you understand that, the easier it is to pattern match who's going to be the right person to solve that.

(12:36):
And conversely, the other thing we talked about was that getting clear on what value TA adds to an organization. So for me, we only add value when we successfully hire someone. Everything else that we do is an investment we make to unlock that value. So being really though about how do you optimize your investments to get the most value? And that was a big reframing of our value is not just executing a search, it's getting the right person in the role that's actually delivering and solving that business problem. And that's easy to say and very hard to do. And again, going back to the vulnerability thing, you have to go into deep water of like, cool, I guess I'll learn how you build databases so that I know what the right skillset is for this person. But if you create vulnerability and trust, then you can go, "It's actually really interesting and now I'm going to learn more.

(13:24):
I'm going to work with this manager to get a full context. I can pitch the job much better and I can also see who the right candidate is. " And so that pivot into thinking about the business problem first and foremost still is the way that we kick off every single intake call with hiring managers. It is drilled into the team so hard. That's where we start from. Everything else cascades from that point. And it also then widens out their thinking because you start to look at, well, what's the right level to solve this problem? Or you've got this problem that's scoped and it's actually like two or three problems clumped together. Let's break it down. And then you can actually hire multiple people to solve the appropriate pieces of it. And

Shannon Ogborn (14:04):
That's happening so much right now because even I'm on LinkedIn, you're scrolling and someone's like, "I'm hiring for X, Y, Z job." And you're like, "Wow, that looks really interesting. I know someone." But then it's like you're hiring for a head of demand gen that also runs events that also does social. And I'm like, "Those are three different people, but they're trying to clump it all together." Reasonably so. I mean, people are trying to be more lean, but I think that's where talent people really become those experts with the hiring managers say, "Yeah, dog, I'm sorry, you're not going to be getting that today." Because it helps them understand the expectation to the market, which recruiters are expert in the market.

Mike Bettley (14:42):
Well, that's it. And that's where I'd push that conversation of why are you trying to hire so many people for different channels? It's generally because they're not sure what's going to work. And the answer is like, well, let's nail down what we think has our best bet and then look at what are your other talent strategies. Maybe you don't need someone who can do all of those things. Maybe you need a consultant that can bring in a lens on demand gen and you run events. There's different solutions, but if you just go, okay, Mr. Hiring Manager, I need all of these things in the purple unicorn squirrel person, cool, you're going to spend months doing it and you're not setting the business up for success. Asking that question and really trusting your instincts and trusting that you are smart enough, you do understand the business enough to ask the question is super helpful.

Shannon Ogborn (15:27):
Understanding the business is very important, but then there's also something that you did on this roadshow explaining what best in class TA looks like to bring them along on the journey. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Bettley (15:40):
Yeah. So when everyone's sort of learning this, you have to be the face of it. So I met every hiring manager. I was in every debrief call. I was in every meeting. I was very tired and very stressed. I got the feedback that I would just join Google Meets just rubbing my face. And the team was like, "Mike's really stressed. I don't feel good." So that was one of the first pieces of feedback.

Shannon Ogborn (16:02):
Yeah, you weren't asking it very well, apparently.

Mike Bettley (16:03):
That was the first piece of feedback I got. I was like, "You need to stop rubbing your face. The team think you're very stressed." I was like, "I am." But it's really about, again, going back to value. If you think about your engineering manager or your sales leader, the value that they add to the business is not hiring. Hiring is again, an investment they have to make to unlock their value. Their value is driving revenue. Their value is building the products that you sell. How do you get them to spend more time doing their value add and trusting you to do more of your value add? And the only way you get there is by proving that you understand and you care about their business as much as they do. And that takes repetition. And that means that you have to have an incredibly high say-do ratio.

(16:42):
If you say you're going to do something, deliver it because every time you erode that trust if you're not doing it. So it is a lot of face time. It's a lot of engaging in conversations and showing that you're willing to go above and beyond what their expectations of TA are. I mean, a great example, even a couple of weeks ago, I was meeting with our APAC leaders. The story I got from my team was like, "Oh, the APAC leaders don't want us to deliver offers. They want to do it themselves." So I sat down and said, "Why is this? " And they went, "In our entire careers, we've never had anyone from HR sit down and do an offer with us. We didn't even know that was possible." And I was like, "Cool. That's on us for not educating you on what our value add is so you can focus on the other stuff."

Shannon Ogborn (17:21):
And just asking more questions instead of making assumptions. I found that to be a really important part between building trust because like you said, it could just be something where the person, whether it be by geographic culture or department, no, we're just used to doing it this way, so that's the way we're going to continue to do it unless someone pushes us to do it differently or think differently about it or ask questions. And people just rest on their laurels because that's what they know and that's what's going to be easy. And as humans, we just defer to the easiest possible route. For

Mike Bettley (17:54):
Sure. I tell my team all the time, whatever process we have is literally just a thing that I made up one day. We can absolutely throw it away and replace it with a new thing at any point. And so it's not having them - He's an

Shannon Ogborn (18:06):
Innovator. Yeah.

Mike Bettley (18:07):
Help them understand why it exists and what we're trying to accomplish. But if it doesn't work anymore, get rid of it and do something different.

Shannon Ogborn (18:14):
Totally. And I'm sure that's happening a lot now, which we'll get to here in a little bit. But you mentioned earlier that a lot of times when new leaders come in, they think that they are solving more for the operational side instead of the crying. So we've solved the crying. Your team's going to listen to us and be like, why are we talking about the crying? We've solved the crying. We've built the trust between the talent team and the hiring managers, but then there's the third step where then you actually can start to solve for the operational paper cuts because you've done the other two things very well. How did that pan out?

Mike Bettley (18:47):
Yeah. And that was our journey as a company of the pain points. As I mentioned, we had no hiring plan. Every recruiter was writing offer letters in Word, PDFing them, emailing them, word signature back. Can you imagine how many errors there were? Again - I just short

Shannon Ogborn (19:03):
Circuited a little

Mike Bettley (19:04):
Bit. Yeah. I'll remind you, this was two years ago and we were 700 people. Again, it's because the previous leaders didn't have an operational lens on things. We didn't use our ATS at all really. And so the first hire I made was actually a TA ops lead. And she was absolutely phenomenal because she'd run TA teams holistically before and could see the problems, but also had the ops lens to just go and start solving them. Brought in a couple of managers and I have a phenomenal leadership team. The only reason I'm sat here is because of them and the team. None of this is actually me. I feel very imposter syndrome, but investing in that ops head first really allowed us to start to address some of these issues. And we showed the team that they could free up the time and space to actually work on these things that we were talking about, to understand the business problem, to spend more time with the customer who's hiring managers rather than just writing Word documents to be emailed out.

Shannon Ogborn (20:07):
Word document offers is just, I'm baffled by that. It

Mike Bettley (20:11):
Was a surprise. It's problematic. It was a surprise to me. And that first year was literally just Catherine Obsley just

(20:18):
Lifting up stones and going, "Okay, I'll put that one back down for now." It was a lot of stuff. And again, one of the things that trust and vulnerability also extends to the leadership team. We have a fierce culture on my leadership team of respectful disagreement. We have very differing views on how TA should be done, what our priorities are. I will be very upfront. Candidate experience is not the thing that I care the most about. Employer branding is not the thing I care the most about, but I have other people on the team who do care about it. And so it's healthy to have that tension of we don't want to over rotate and spend a ton of time working on employer branding when we get 280,000 applications a year. But then I also have the ops lens of compliance. Compliance is also not my favorite thing, but it's healthy to have that.

(21:05):
And so we've disagreed on a lot of things. And almost every time that I have pulled rank and pushed something forward, it generally goes badly. So I've learned that lesson. So in start of 2025, I was like, "Cool, we've done a year of this. We're in a much better state now. We're going to launch KPIs. We're going to have data. Everyone's going to get on board." So I launched 15 KPIs and the team just went, "Huh." And nobody cried. That's a win. But they did just go, "Oh."

Shannon Ogborn (21:37):
They were crying inside.

Mike Bettley (21:39):
They were definitely crying inside. But the good thing from that was I heard the sentiment, I heard the feedback and they felt confident to go, "This is too much. I can't deal with this. " And so refined it back, but I was very bullish on, we have to do this, we have to get data driven in 2025. And we eventually got there. It just took a year longer than anticipated. But my leadership team were exactly right. They said, "Don't do this. " And I didn't listen. So even as a leader, you can get it wrong a bunch of times. But I do think that, especially in today's world, TAs can be so ops heavy, just clicking buttons, moving paper around, and that eats up all the time that you should be spending in front of your customers, learning their business, discussing what value creation looks like for them.

(22:28):
So I really am a strong proponent of over-investing in an ops function, over-investing in the right technology stack to enable your team to spend time in the right places.

Shannon Ogborn (22:40):
The pendulum is swinging very quickly with all of the AI related things. And people now, candidates want to talk to people. They want to have no recruiters invested in them. And if you're spending time on all of these small incremental things that could be automated or whatever, then you have more time to spend on the human element. So all of these things go together though. If you wouldn't have built the foundation of psychological safety, they wouldn't have had the psychological safety to come to you with 15 KPIs and say, "Yeah, sorry man, this isn't going to work for me. " And that's not going to be a healthy way for us to operate as your team. And so you really have to get those foundational things right before you can start doing the nice to haves.

Mike Bettley (23:26):
Again, learning new things is a vulnerable act. Learning new ways to operate, challenging how you think about things. It's all going, "Oh, what if I'm not good enough?" I think we all have that little itch of... So again, having that basis then allows them to go, okay, we need to learn new ways of operating, new ways of thinking. And that's what sort of paved the path to where we are today.

Shannon Ogborn (23:45):
Well, in terms of results, this is a little bit more of a nebulous topic because there was so much that went into it. But what have you noticed since you started? What has changed?

Mike Bettley (23:57):
The consistency of our output has gone through the roof. So we're averaging between 50 and 55 hires a month every month across the business. We're moving faster, we're moving more intentionally. One metric that we use is phone screen to hire. So looking at that calibration, we've half that from it was 18 to one at the start of 2025 is now nine to one on average. So nine phone screens for every one hire that we make. And there's also an intangible human piece of this. And I was at a client conference a couple of weeks ago and I got to speak to clients, which is not something I usually do. They don't let me out very often.

Shannon Ogborn (24:32):
I could see why.

Mike Bettley (24:33):
Yeah, no, totally makes sense. But I got to ask them a bunch of questions of, why do you pick us over our competitors? Is it expecting features, AI, et cetera? And every single person was the people. And our customers repeatedly said their account managers and sales teams at the large companies, it doesn't feel like they care about their business, but the StackAdapt team, everyone feels like they're rooting for their company. And for us to be successful, we need our customers to be successful. If they're not seeing value from their advertising and marketing, they're not going to spend on it. And so their business isn't going to grow and that doesn't help us. And your

Shannon Ogborn (25:09):
Business isn't going to grow.

Mike Bettley (25:10):
Exactly. So it's got to be in harmony. And so our current marketing tagline is to grow boldly together. And I think that's so embodied in the culture of the company. And what's really cool is I've never had to do any culture interviewer training. We've never touched how do you assess for culture? And we've never had an issue with the culture of the company, which is awesome. So I feel immensely proud that the distinguishing and the USP for the company is the people that we're bringing in. And I can't put a metric to that, but it made me feel good and gave me warm fuzzies. So I don't know how...

Shannon Ogborn (25:48):
That'll do. We love warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies are measurable. There's also the fact of the matter that your team has taken over some of this FP&A burden from previously what was probably fully on you to have those conversations and be involved. And now your team's able to be involved because they're empowered to do so and they have the knowledge and trust to be in the room.

Mike Bettley (26:14):
Yeah. And we're a fast-growing company, so we didn't really cover this, but we went from 170 people in an office in Toronto in 2020 to 1800 people fully remote globally today. So that's six years, which is tremendous growth. And there are trade-offs that you make and on of those is operational maturity. Different teams get up to speed at different rates. And so what we realized was there was a bit of a gap on the FP&A side. And I've also, as I think many of you have, seen businesses overscale. And I was looking at the volume and momentum building going, "I really don't want to overscale this company if we can't support it. " So we leaned in really heavily with FP&A because we had a larger team to go, how do we put controls around our headcount? How do we start to think about what's the budgeted amount for the role?

(27:02):
How do we start to get feedback back to FP&A so they can update their forecasts and models? I probably spend today a third of my time with finance and FP&A and the TA team actually owns our entire hiring plan. So FP&A come to us and go, "Where are we at with the hiring plan? What's changing? What's moving?" Because we're the people that talk to the business every day. FP&A analysts may speak every month to the leaders in a real way. We're there every single day on the front lines. And I think that relationship is really special. So yeah, shout out to our finance team. They work incredibly hard and it's slight rant, but FP& seems like the hardest job in the entire world. It's like accurately predict the future with imperfect inputs. Don't get it wrong. You have

Shannon Ogborn (27:45):
No data inputs actually.

Mike Bettley (27:47):
Yeah, yeah. It's insane. Go

Shannon Ogborn (27:47):
For it.

Mike Bettley (27:49):
Don't get it wrong

Shannon Ogborn (27:49):
Though. Totally wrong because we're going to be totally screwed otherwise. It's so true. What do you think this looks like looking forward when you think about how to apply this in the future, especially with AI and automation? And I know that's a topic of curiosity for many. How does that look?

Mike Bettley (28:08):
Yeah, I'm actually impressed we got this far into it without saying AI yet. So I think AI is an advanced automation. I don't think it needs to necessarily be agents for everything. Even just workflow automations and real intentional process re-engineering can go take you leaps and bounds forward. But we actually built a pre-intake agent. So going back to trying to get hiring managers aligned, by the time they were getting to TA, they'd already made up their mind of what they wanted to hire. So course correcting that it's possible, but it's harder. And so now we actually have an agent that the hiring managers go through. The first question I ask them is, what is the business problem you're trying to solve? So it's not gone away, but it actually goes through and analyzes what leveling is the scope of this role aligned to the business problem you're trying to solve, where you're trying to hire it, what compensation?

(28:58):
And so it helps them to shape their thinking. So it acts as a coach to them before you even get into the intake conversation. And so we actually get an output that's like the job description, the scorecard, the interview questions, the interview plan and the business rationale for approvals all created by this agent. It goes through all the approvals and then comes to TA and we have something to work off to go, how do we refine this now? So that is a super exciting innovation. We'll see if it plays out the way that I hope it will. But I just think there's massive opportunity and everyone should be investing in their ops capability, whether that's a headcount or whether it's just spending more time on the operational side of things.

Shannon Ogborn (29:36):
It's again, going back to the thought of we are applying these to places and spaces that give us time back to do the human elements. And we want to know where someone stands when they come in because someone comes in with a hard line, you don't know that's going to happen. You don't have the time to think about how do I coach this person out of this because I'm the expert in this space. And so I think it could lend itself very much to that. Well, we are coming up on our time for this portion. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Mike Bettley (30:08):
Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I wish I posted a bit more, but I will try to. You can also just - You know what?

Shannon Ogborn (30:15):
Every guest, every single guest promises this when I ask this question. I don't post enough, but maybe I'll start. It hasn't never happened.

Mike Bettley (30:22):
No. Hey, thank you for calling me out, Shannon. I really appreciate that one. But also, if people want to reach out, especially local folks, if you want to reach out for a coffee chat or share ideas, please do reach out. I love connecting with people and I wish more people when I was coming up spoke honestly and transparently about their experience because I always used to feel like people on stage and podcasts were really polished and had it all figured out. So hopefully you don't feel like I've got it figured out because I don't want to.

Shannon Ogborn (30:51):
Well, I think this is going to be really valuable both for the audience, but also to our listeners at home, if you will, just hearing not only a lot of the conversations, like I said at the top, have been very focused on what talent leaders can do to get in the room and be at the table, but it's equally as important for leaders, especially now to bring their team along. So thank you.

Mike Bettley (31:11):
Thank you.

Shannon Ogborn (31:13):
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