Turning Economic Downturns into Opportunities Through Innovation || Season 2 Episode 4

William Tincup, a leading HR and talent acquisition expert, discusses the importance of adapting to AI in the workforce. Recorded live during Ceipal Connect 2025. 

Key Takeaways:

• Try something new with AI, even if it fails.
• Create a peer group to share learnings about AI.
• Adopt a mindset of wanting to learn about AI, not having to.

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Transcript

William Tincup: 0:00

If you talk to somebody and they're like, AI, got it, yep, nailed. They're lying. They do not have it. They do not have it figured out, because no one, there is a single company that has it figured out. We are. We're at a Christmas, if you will, or crossroads. Want to use that language where we either adapt to the technologies that are in front of us or will become irrelevant. You can see these different waves that hit the beach where our industry has just been turned on its head and and we've survived and thrived, actually, and we're going to do that with AI too. You

Andy Weiss: 0:54

Hi friends and welcome to this episode of Now Hiring!, the podcast about talent, staffing and recruiting, brought to you by the good people at Ceipal. I'm your host, Andy Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceipal, in this bonus episode of Now Hiring! recorded recently at Ceipal Connect, we're joined by William Tincup from WRKdefined. And without further ado, let's join the action.

Steve Vittorioso: 1:15

Hi everyone. Now it's my pleasure to introduce our opening keynote speaker, William Tincup, a true leader in the world of HR and talent acquisition. If you ask others to describe William, you'll hear words like influencer, podcaster, analyst, strategist, writer, speaker, consultant and advisor, and they all be right. And as someone who's known William, I'd say, yeah, those words are pretty spot on. But at its core, William is a thought provocateur, someone who questions the status quo and challenge us to think differently about the future of work. For more than 20 years, he has studied every aspect of HR and recruiting from practitioners shaping the industry to technology driving it forward. He's a prolific speaker, a trusted advisor, and the co founder of work defined a podcast network dedicated to exploring all things work related from hiring and onboarding to compensation and culture. We're honored to have him with us today as he dives into how we can turn economic challenges into opportunities through under in through interview innovation. Please join me in welcoming William tin cup here on screen. Take it away. My man,

William Tincup: 2:19

Absolutely. So wonderful introduction. Thank you, Steve. That was a that was amazing. I usually hate introductions. I'm one of those people that I just kind of hate hearing kind of things that I've done, people how they describe me. But it's nice, especially nice for the for the audience to kind of know a little bit about me. I have, as Steve said, I have studied HR and talent acquisitional facets of talent acquisition, from an executive search to corporate recruiting staff and RPO, MSP, everything. So I've studied both the practitioner part of it. It's important to know this, both the practitioners that do the job, as well as the technology that reinforces the job. So that's my background, and that's where I'll be coming from. And so I just put in the chat, please, please ask questions. I've got a, you know, 1415, slides that we're going to burn through. And really, what I'm going to do is kind of piggyback some of what's severe. So said just a moment ago, where you take AI and humans coming together. That's your ai, ai and human strategy versus AI and humans, you know, knocking heads with one another. Because I think that the solution is coming together. It's actually augmentation, using the best of one and the best of the other. So, you know, Steve, when he was introduced to me, told you about WRKdefined I'll just briefly tell you what it is. It's a, it's a podcast network. So it's a work related Podcast Network. That's, that's, we have 35 shows on the network right now. We'll be at 100 by the end of the year. Then it's just a if you like podcasts, video, audio, etc. It's a good place to just find out what different things that are going on. We got a staffing show. We got, you know, just we're trying to touch all facets of work. If you're really into AI Bob Pulver has a show called elevate your ai q, your AI like IQ, and it's a fantastic show. He's got about 50 something episodes in, and he's got wonderful guests. So if you're really, really, really interested in AI, that's a really cool show for you. But anyhow, the podcast network itself, we're always looking for shows. So if you listen to a show you know like, or if you're listening to a show you're like, this is fantastic. We need to know about this. Please let me know, because I do want to know about it. We want to collect all the independent work related podcasts. So enough about. Me, that's that. Now we're going to start getting into the more important part is I want you, there's going to be four slides in a row three that I want you to read. Normally, I wouldn't ask you to read, but I don't want to read it to you, because I hate having slides read to me. So please read. Read. An as you're reading. First of all, I wrote this so if it, if it throws you off a little bit with some adult themes or languages, sorry in advance, not safe for work. Probably put should put in on the on the slide. This, this quote as you read it. What I want you to understand about this quote is, this is a quote that I was asked last week about. It was about agentic AI, but really it applies to all ai, ai, Gen AI, and agentic AI. It's, it's, it's adapt or die. I think, I think people that kind of think like that. I think it's, this is the appropriate time to think you this is a moment where we are, we are, we're at a Christmas, if you will, or crossroads. Want to use that language where we either adapt to the technologies that are in front of us or will become irrelevant and like the yeah, like I say in a quote, like a fax machine. I was talking to somebody last night about skills and about skills based learning, skills based hiring, etc. And like some skills decay, like, I haven't used a fax machine in 20 years, but there was a point in my life where I used the fax machine all day, not all day long, but most of the day. I if you put a fax machine in front of me today, I literally, I wouldn't, I'd have to go to YouTube to find out how to use it. So that was a technology at one point that was really important to us, and it still is important in some places and in some, you know, industries, etc, but it's a skill that you don't need as much anymore. You need new skills, and that's really what this quote is trying to trying to get at. So when I say destroy this quote, I really want you to destroy it, because I want you to read it and then go, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with this. I don't agree with that, etc, because that's going to get your mind right in terms of thinking about how you should be thinking about AI, agentic AI and Gen. Ai, alright. Now next quote, much shorter, much easier to read. I found this quote on a report that I read from Deloitte. This was a 24 2024 kind of an end of year. Ai report. They were looking backwards. It was in December. You can go on their website and find it, but one of the quotes in it was it really put things in perspective for me, because I was still kind of rudderless, trying to figure out, like, Okay, well, how long is this going to last? How long is this, this innovation that we're going through? How long is this at all going to have to deal with this wave? And this put it in proper context for me, is it's a baseball reference, but you can use any type of reference where it's like, okay, we're in the first inning of 1000 inning game. And you can use cricket, you can you can use any rugby, you can use any sport that you like. But the point is, it'll the innovation will outlive us, like, it'll still be innovating, and we'll be dead, and that's okay. I think that's that's okay to think like that, like, okay, don't be overwhelmed, which I think happens a lot with practitioners that I, that I talked to, is that they don't, they get overwhelmed and don't know where to start. And in business school, they used to call that a analysis paralysis. And so you just go, we're going to do so much analysis that we don't end up making a decision, and we want to be able to make decisions. So if you become at one with this, like, Okay, I don't have to figure it all out. I don't have to figure everything out. I need to figure one thing out, what works for me, what works for my company, what works for my team, etc. Now, next quote is even shorter, so this, this quote is actually attributed to Winston Churchill, but no one could find it in any of his writings or anywhere. But, you know, this is obviously a quote about World War Two and and so the only attribution that people can find is Rahm Emanuel. And so that's why I put both their names on it. This is, you know, like the pandemic. As we went through the pandemic, we were all in crisis mode. We were all just trying to figure things out in a new way of business, etc. And we were, we were in a crisis, okay, what could you do during a crisis? Well, you can hunker down and hope, or you can start to think about, okay, how does the company innovate? How do we use this to our benefit? Yes, it's scary. Yes, we don't know what's going to happen next, etc, but we can use this crisis for good. And I think that whoever said it, it really doesn't matter. Y'all. Whoever said it, the thought behind it is what is brilliant. It's, it's so easy to be overwhelmed with the crisis, and take the crisis that we're going through right now, economics, inflation, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's crazy. The cost of eggs here in America, it's insane. Like you go by the eggs in the in the in the grocery department, you look at eggs, you're like, really, huh? That's crazy. And it is crazy. So we are in a crisis, an economic crisis. We've been in, in and out of this economic crisis for a couple years well, how it relates to you is, again, is this a time to think about redoing process, think about re or organize your good team around new things? Is it a time to look at different technologies? Absolutely, it's not as busy. So this is a perfect time, because when you're busy, it's like Michael Dale said, changing the tire when the car's going, it's, it's, that's what busy is like, if you're going 100 miles an hour, it's hard to change the tire right now, we're not going to hunt. No organization is going well, very few organizations are going 100 miles an hour. So let's get to why we're here. So why I wanted to do the quotes first, instead of getting into them now is I want to kind of get your mind around, okay, AI, is here. Okay, great. How do we then think about how our interaction, like, said, how do we think about us together, not us versus so this is the session description. First of all, thank you for being here. Forgot to mention that. I should have mentioned that at the beginning. My bad. I appreciate you being here. I know that you care, and I can say that easily. Because you're here this you can easily not be here. You have plenty of things to do. You got plenty of things to distract you. You got plenty of things going on in your life. You can easily not be here. So the fact that you're here, the fact that you're listening to the recording, etc, it means you care. People that don't care don't show up for things like this. So thank you. Hey everyone.

Andy Weiss: 13:04

I hope you're enjoying this episode, and if you like what we're doing here at now hiring, I invite you to check out our newsletter, also called now hiring. You can find registration for that@sql.com and now back to our episode.

William Tincup: 13:17

All right, let's go into something that happened just yesterday. Pillar, it's an interviewing technology. So they do in a standard interviews, they do transcripts, and they do stack ranking of candidates based on the questions and answers. In a small company, $5 million in funding, etc, employ is, it's a lot of brands, job, vite, lever, jazz, HR and a bunch of other brands are put together to basically be a talent acquisition platform for the corporate recruiting. Okay, yesterday they announced an acquisition, and this, you wouldn't think that this is a time that's ripe for acquisitions, and it wasn't a dumpster fire. It wasn't a garage sale. They they actually went out and acquired pillar. And then they've already have it fully infused with lever, and they're going to, by the end of the month, they'll have it infused into job bite. Then at one point, they're going to have some light product for jazz Sr, because their three ATS is hit all of the market job job byte is up. Market lever is mid market and jazz hrs is SMB. And so they bought this technology and talked to the CEO yesterday and asked him, you know, what was one of their first questions, why now? And he in his response was wonderful. Actually, it was, this is the time to be bold. This is the time to actually look at what like he was looking at from his perspective, and saying, I'm not going to be able to build it all. I can't build it all. And partnerships are great. So let's see who we can. Partner with, for the things that we need to partner with, with our clients. And there's going to be some things that you know you need to purchase, you need to acquire. And why I want to highlight that is it pillars all AI, and it's beautiful, and it could have just kind of kept riding and alone as a separate product. No big deal. It's a really, really well run company that would have been fine. But the employee, they've been working on deals since October, and they've been looking at this and saying themselves, could we build it? Yeah, but we shouldn't. We need to go buy it. And this is the time to be bold. And so with exhibit a what I'm really trying to carry across to you, in continuation of the theme so far, is this is actually the moment that you have where your art is busy as normal, and this is the time to really throw yourself into AI, Gen AI and gentai. I'll probably just say I from here on out, you'll know the differences between the three. But the idea is, this is the time. This is the time to actually throw yourself into it so that you feel comfortable both trying things and also failing. And I think that's one of the things that I see is is people without analysis paralysis. It's hindering their decision making, because they think that there's a perfect solution around the corner, and there is no such thing, sorry, if y'all are looking for a perfect solution. Yeah, I just killed that. My bad. There is no such thing, you know, that is, that's, that's, that's, again, we've been through several changes in in eight work tech, if you want to say we was on prem to SAS, we we dealt with it, we worked through it. We threw ourselves into it, got it. Then, you know, responsive design or mobile, okay, yep. We threw ourselves into it. We learned it. We did it. Social. Okay, you can see these different waves that hit the beach where our industry has just been turned on its head and and we've survived and thrived actually, and we're going to do that with AI too. So you know, a message of positivity is important to me, because I don't want you to get off this go through the whole day, because you got a whole day of really, really cool day, a half day of really cool things. We're going to be talking about technology. You're going to be talking about different things your partners are doing, etc. So like it, it's an exciting time. The part where you shouldn't be overwhelmed is starting and failing, starting and failing, starting and failing, starting and failing. That's okay, because that's what we did with SAS. When we were went from on prem to SAS, those first five, six years were just littered with failure. And same thing with all the other things that we've been through. It's It's okay failures are part of this. And I think it's okay for you to actually embrace a style says, You know what? Let's throw it against the wall. Let's see if it works. Let's see if it doesn't. If it doesn't, let's go quickly. So Exhibit B, talent acquisition either is a competitive advantage or it isn't. These are binary. It's black and white. The companies that you work with, your company that you work with, you're you're either at the board level looking at TA and saying, humans people are one of our competitive advantages. You're either having that conversation or you're not. I believe in a world where you should be it is if done well, it is a competitive advantage. It can be a barrier to entry if done well. And so I think you should so I'm not going to be impartial here. I think you actually should look at talent acquisition and retention, and going further in HR, which I'll probably wouldn't care as much about, but talent acquisition, acquiring the right talent. You know, both both quickly, speed to hire, quality of hire and cost of hire. You know, doing all of those things, but getting the right people into your organization, if you do that, well, now again, take any of your sports metaphors, any of your teams that you might follow. It doesn't really matter. That's an accumulation of talent. That's all that is. It's an accumulation of talent, and that's their advantage, and things go their way. So I think you look at talent acquisition as that way. You again, not just important. Notice I'm not using critical or important or really, really necessary, whatever the words might be, I'm actually taking it to the next place of no, no, the. This is your this is actually one of your competitive advantages, if done well, so let's see yet another thing that I want you to kind of realize that, hey, we're in a time crisis. Okay, got it new technology and of an innovation wave that, you know, we're probably terrified about. And, oh, by the way, Williams then saying talent acquisition is either a competitive advantage or it isn't, because it's true, you should build around that. You should actually make that a part of your your corporate strategy is the accumulation of talent. That is actually how we win. That's how we win anything. And in this, in this case, it's, it's what we do for our corporations. All right, Exhibit C, this will help for those of you that are over the age of, let's say 35 maybe 30 the internet, when it first time I actually do capitalize the internet, because at that time, it was the internet. We would obviously call it that now, but, but in 97 it became mass market it and and again. At that time, you had a bunch of people looking at it like it was a novelty, you know, like, oh well, yeah, that's cute. That's nice. Don't care. And you had a bunch of people that jumped in very early and and started to basically change their entire businesses, change their strategies around the internet. So that was a long time ago. Galaxy far, far away, 25 years ago, ish, ish. What can we learn from that? When all of our businesses changed like pre internet, all of our businesses were a certain way. We marketed a certain way. We sold a certain way. We town acquisition was a certain way. If you did staffing back then, you had the you had a Rolodex, a term that Gen Z might not Not, not understand, but yeah, Rolodex. You had these printouts, the dot matrix, printouts, of all the list of people I worked in staffing back then and and you know, you had a list you called people, and you're hiring. What are you What are you hiring for? Great. Can I feel that? Okay, here's what it costs. Great. Let me Fauci a document. Sign signed out. I'll put candidates in front of you. That was the bit. Can you imagine doing that today? No, of course not. You would do that today. But the lessons that of the internet, the early internet, I'd say probably all the way to oh four. I think those are great lessons to go back and look at, like technologies that came to market a little too soon, and they weren't ready. They weren't fully baked, like video. I remember talking to a video company in 2003 and it was gorgeous. It was here in Dallas. And I should write note, I'm I'm in Arlington, Texas. So in Dallas, I talked this video company, and man, their stuff was so great, but the ball, the bandwidth wasn't high enough. We didn't have enough bandwidth to actually use video in the way that they wanted. So 2004 not a good idea. Five years later, it's a great idea. We have enough bandwidth, so you'll see that with AI too. You know, you'll see some things, and you should poke a stick at that and go, is this? Is is this video in 2003 that's going to be over the internet? Is this something that's too early, or is it something that that that fits me right now, and I think that there's lessons, there should be lessons in history, specifically, specifically for us that went through the internet coming to market, and kind of internet coming of age, and the Internet continues to go on. So like, you know, there's more lessons to learn. It's not like we stopped, however, the early internet, I think, is really fun to look at as as as it relates to AI. And until, again, we've been working on AI for, you know, a long time, some somebody six years, 60 years. So it's not like AIS do. It's new to us. It's Gen AI new to us. Agentic AI new to us. It's not new, neither was the internet. People were working on the Internet message boards in particular for 20 years. So it wasn't new, it was just new to us, and is that consumption. How did we deal with this? What do we do with the Internet? How do we sell how do we market ourselves? What do we do? I think that's a really cool Listen, like when you're alone, to think about that moment in time and go, Okay, I remember being a bit overwhelmed. I remember, you know, not understanding kind of how it play out. I understand that there was a lot of pressure to get on the internet, to do things on the internet, and so look at all those lessons, especially those of you that went through it, those of you that didn't, it's okay. There's plenty of examples. I'm just using this one as an example of looking at it. Time in which new technology came along and we either adopted it or we did. And again, that's, you know, 4k if you know, if you want to use something that everyone knows now, you know, 4k when it first came about, people were, you know, like, too expensive. It's not right now, it's not that big of a deal. Blah, blah, blah. Can anyone imagine a world where you're watching TV and it's not 4k like, that's insane, right? Well, that's, that's what we that's a technology shift. That's all this is, is a shift that one was an easy shift, and then we'll move to 8k and 16k 32k and all that. Like It, it isn't going to stop. If the world doesn't stop, just because we're uncomfortable, we we have to become comfortable with what the world is throwing at us. So Exhibit D, strong opinions held loosely. This is important. So basically, whatever you want to try an AI, I'm going to give you a pass that basically says, Try it, try it. Just, just try something. And so you might have a belief that AI right now carries a lot of human bias. I'm not going to stay away from certain products because it's just not sussed out yet. That's fine, but hold those views and those opinions very loosely, because the technology is moving at such a rate where you might have been right and then all of a sudden you're wrong. Whereas a decision like that, or you have a strong opinion you know about something a couple years ago, you could hold on to that pretty long. It was a good opinion, and you could hold on to it. Not a problem. This is not that this, this is the the rate of change in AI is, it's, it's, it's like NATs, it's like a millisecond. You know, they have that old joke of the fish that swims across the fish bowl. And then when they turn around, it's a brand new world. Their memory is so short that by the time they swim to the other side of the bowl, they've already forgotten everything they've learned. And then they swim this way as well. Speed is speed of AI is insane. So my best advice, and you know, second point is try something. It really doesn't matter. Just try something, ditch it, replace it, and don't fall in love with anything that is extremely if I could kind of encapsulate everything, don't fall in love with any tech, any AI technology, because you'll you'll still hold on to it. You'll think that you made the right decision, and this is going to stay forever, and all that stuff half lives. So use it until that technology that augments this the the experience that you need use it until it be it's it's not relevant to you anymore, or there's a better technology. So again, I like strong opinions. I love people that have strong opinions. Have them, just hold them really, really loosely and don't fall in love with anything the try something that's the old in marketing, you'd say, throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. It's the same thing with AI. You just throw it against the wall. See what sticks. It's six, yeah, continue to use it up until it's time to not use it. Exhibit E, this is important as well, because you've got to, you've got to look at your learning and say to yourself, Okay, how fast can I learn some of these things? So one thing is, create a peer group you know, you and 10 other people you know, get on WhatsApp or whatever and share what you're learning. It's because you can only learn so fast. So getting other people and finding out, especially people that are your peers. And if it's, if it's recruited a recruiter or staffing owner to staffing owner, whatever, whatever your peer group is, create a small group. Just create a small group. And just, it's just what we've learned. Hey, we tried so and so prod product. It really works really well. Here falls off a little bit here, great. And then ask them to do the same. The whole reason you've created this pure group is to share what you've learned. And again, you can't learn at all. But I believe that if you're, if you're if you want to read, there's tons of newsletters out there, all you have to do is really Google Gen AI newsletters, and you're going to be filled with or you can go to sub stack or medium, you know, where they have a lot of newsletters, all kind of in one place, and just type it in and find newsletters, read a couple of them, and go, okay, yeah, I need that. I need that same thing with process, if it's more of a audio or. Visual kind of thing that you that you're into in terms of learning, then there's a ton of podcasts that are out there that are just talking about very specific parts of AI like, there's an agentic AI show, and that's all it's doing. That's all it's trying to do, is look at how that world is forming, where it's going, where it's been, what it's doing, etc. So learning with Exhibit E, that the carry over for you is you've got to learn. There's no one knows, no one knows it all go check, got that, but you've got to learn. And I say, got to it's, it's, that sounds very harsh. I think I don't want to come across that way, but, yeah, you have to. You really do have to learn new things. You can opt out of that process. I don't, I don't advise it. I don't advise it. This is the moment where I think you, you know, look yourself in the mirror and go, Okay, time for me to learn something new. I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and I'm gonna jump right in, I'm gonna learn something new. And, oh, by the way, that's probably going to be, that's probably going to change a year from now. Okay, great. But I'll, I'll at least be able to enter the conversation and talk to people about what I'm learning exhibit F. I think with exhibit F, what's what's great is you're going to fail. You're going to fail even when you try. So as I told you a couple slides ago, try stuff, and if it doesn't work, rip it out. Try something else. So that you could consider that failure. To me, that's not failure. Failure is doing nothing. That's failure and and thinking like social, there's so many people, when social first came on, kind of hit corporate, that they thought, You know what, if we don't have a Facebook account, it'll just go away. Or if we don't have a Twitter account or x account, it'll go away. It doesn't it's not going away. In fact, it's, it's, it's, it's omnipresent, you know, tick tock and and Instagram reels like people scroll content now, they don't necessarily read, they don't, they don't, they don't go to a place. They're just growing content. Whether or not they're doing on Instagram or tick tock or Facebook or whatever, they're scrolling content, it's interesting. Up until the point where it's not interesting. They scroll them. That's what you've got to look at and say, Okay, this isn't going away. You'll die first before we've seen the end of what happens with AI. So just do something. If you got anything out of exhibit F, do something exhibit G, real, real simple. If anyone acts like they have it figured out, like, if you talk to somebody and they're like, Oh yeah, got it, yep, nailed, they're lying. They do not have it. They do not have it figured out, because no one, there is a single company that has it figured out. So don't stress about that by not having it out, but not having it. The last thing I'd like to say is, have fun. It's extremely important to have fun with this. Try things share. Have fun. And the last thing is, make it a want to, I want to try AI. I want to learn AI. Not have to. I have to. Who's like you're forced. You're beating over the head with it. Let's not do that. Steve, how you doing? Brother,

Steve Vittorioso: 33:36

I'm good. Just listening to all of your perspectives and wisdom. So always, always great to hear. Thanks again for taking some time to hang out with us today. A big

Andy Weiss: 33:48

Thank you to William for shaking things up and challenging our notions of AI. Be sure to connect with William on WRKdefined.com and if you enjoy this episode, check out our Now Hiring! newsletter for more industry insights and strategies until next time we are now hiring you.