Member Spotlight: Vivian Larsen on Empathy, AI & the Accidental Admin (6/23/25)

Vivian shares how empathy shaped her journey from recruiter to HR tech expert. Hear stories of over-engineered systems, the pitfalls of AI in candidate experience, and why accidental admins deserve better support.

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Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
You ready? There were three of them, and I think I like the second

Speaker 1  0:09  
in the world of human resources, yeah, this is way better. It's way better. Okay,

Speaker 2  0:17  
all right, okay, so we're gonna play that whole thing at the end of this episode, and folks can hear what AI did with one of Vivian's not or all time favorite band, but one of her favorite bands. So I have a funny

Speaker 3  0:30  
story with the blue stones. One of the reasons they're one of my favorite bands is because I go to Music Fest in Allentown every year. I don't know if you've ever heard of Music Fest, but Music Fest is one of the largest free music festivals in the country and music, and it's like 50 years old, so it's been going. It's an entire week long, and there are hundreds of different artists, and they're all throughout Bethlehem, and it's like a seven block radius, and it's just this big thing. And my girlfriend lives not that far from there, so every year, the two of us just go to music fest together. And I met them when they were debuting like the and they were on this tiny little sound stage in front of the arts quest building, where it was just like this little pop up tent. And the two of them in, you know, their guitars playing in front of this tiny little audience of people sitting on picnic tables just listening to them. And I was like, you never, you ever hear something. And you're like, that is going to be big. Yeah, that was my first reaction that, like, I'm sitting there listening to them. I'm like, you have something, you're going somewhere, so I want to listen to your entire because I was actually walking to meet my friend at that point, so I stopped, like, told her I'd be a little later, sat there and listened to their whole concert, and then went and met up with her afterwards, and then, like, three weeks later, they became one of the biggest fans

Speaker 2  1:48  
in Canada. So, by the way, we're recording, this is we're ready. This is this we're doing. We're doing it. We're using this whole thing. And but I wanted, what I want to say about that is you would know, because you have a special family connection, deep connection to music.

Speaker 3  2:05  
Yes, I do, don't you. So it's, it's even deeper than I've ever told you about. So my grandmother, my father, my father's father's sister, is Norma Zimmer, and she was the lead soprano on Lawrence Welk Show for years and years and years. So anytime I talk to somebody who's my parents, age, 60s, 70s, I mentioned Norma Zimmer, and they're like, Oh, yeah. And I'm like, That's my granddaughter. And my father wrote, my grandfather wrote the forward to her the first chapters of her bio biography. So she has this biography was actually a very popular book in the 60s. Um, 60s, and he wrote the first two chapters of it. So he himself. My grandfather was a very famous model, and so he was a very famous model, but he also had a degree in the opera from Juilliard. What? Yeah. Wow. Music runs really deeply in my family. Wow, deeply. And then my father was a bassist, bass guitarist for a band called every mother's son, and they had this Wow, bubble gum pop music top 10 hit called, come on down to my boat baby, which is like exactly as kitschy and campy and cheesy as the name of the song sounds, but they were very famous for a while, and they were, they were at the top of the charts for a long time, and they traveled all over and he, my dad, used to travel with the who and Jefferson Airplane. Oh, wow, yeah, yeah. And then he got drafted. So kind of a sad story there, but it was like like, one of his formative experiences, as you can only imagine. And so Music has always been this very, like, underlying, deep thing in my

Speaker 2  3:49  
family. Yeah, me too. We have that common. My dad was a classical guitarist. My mom was a pianist. I played violin. And yeah, I you know music is that is the thing that I do for self care, you know, I just walk around and put in my headphones and and I just, I have a, you know, interestingly, the same thing over and over again, Oh, listen to the same song like 20 times in a row. Yeah,

Speaker 3  4:15  
yeah, to address my husband crazy. He's like, I don't understand, you already heard that song. I'm like, Yeah, but everything's still good. It's different. Like, every time you hear something over it's like, oh, I caught that note or that bridge or that phrase, and it's a different experience. Or how you're feeling at that moment informs how you interpret the lyrics. If it's a really meaty lyrics kind of song, yeah, and it can just basically help you. It's therapy. I love music. So,

Speaker 2  4:42  
yeah, me too. You were a musical theater kid, right?

Speaker 3  4:46  
So I was in musical theater in high school, and then I had four years of operatic voice lessons, and I have never sung again after college, because one of those things where, you know, imposter syndrome, I I've. Sure I permanently blame my imposter syndrome problems on voice lessons. Because Interesting. Yeah, you start to, when you start to micro analyze every breath that you take, it informs how you micro analyze everything that you do later in life. And so it's a permanent kind of way that I look at the world like is ever I look at every single thing that I do under this microscope because of the way I was trained from the age of 14 to the age of 19.

Speaker 2  5:31  
So, so a great teacher makes such a huge difference in a student's life. And and I, you know, I had a violin teacher like that. Once I took some violent lessons with a violinist who was very accomplished, and I never forget this one of our lessons. He said, You know, you've because he had me just he had me sing something I was trying to play something that was beyond my skill level at the time. And he's like, oh, let's just stop. Why don't you try to sing this? And so I sang it, and he said, Oh, you have a beautiful singing voice. It's a shame you didn't have better violin teachers as a kid. And Oh, that hurt, ouch. And it was absolutely true. It was true I would have a beautiful singing voice, but, you know, I'm all right. But it just devastated me, and I remember the feeling of wanting to throw my violin in the trash as I was walking home that day, you know. And it reminds me we're talking a lot on LinkedIn right now about L and D, the future of L and D, right? And what happens when information is ubiquitous and infinitely accessible to all of us all the time. What does that mean about the future of the L and D function? And I think it's, I think there's two really prominent things. One is learning community, right? So putting people together with tools, not in isolation. I do a ton of learning in isolation, and it's great, but it's also problematic, because I go down rabbit holes and I end up creating things that, you know, just are massively over complicated, you know, see, the whole website update thing, right? Like, I had a great conversation with tofique from echo yesterday, because their website is awesome. And he was like, This is great for, you know, your current skill set, and you just need to do three things here, right? You know, Hero section, testimonials, one call to action. I had like four different call calls to action on this thing, right? And so that is me learning in isolation, right? Not in community. So I think part of its community, and I think other big part of it is making it safe for people to learn. So I want to, I want to ask you, like, what has made it safe for you to learn about HR technology? Because I'm sure you didn't grow up thinking, Boy, I want to go into HR technology, right? You had to, you had to learn a lot in HR and about HR tech. What? What enabled that learning for you? Did you learn it all on your own? Did you have mentors? What was your approach? And how do you approach it

Speaker 3  8:11  
now? So that's a funny it's an odd question, like for me to think of from a path perspective. I started out my life pre med, I was going to be a doctor, and then I was going to be a nurse practitioner, and then I realized health care wasn't for me. And then I got a degree in English, because I had to finish that degree, because now my student loans were doing, oh, my God, I got to pay for him. Got it. You

Speaker 2  8:32  
went for the lucrative field of, of all the

Speaker 3  8:36  
communications, yeah, English and communications, I started in marketing. And then, because, what do you do with communications? But marketing? And always knew that it was either going to be human resources or communication. And then I got laid off from marketing. I got used to work for Lucent Technologies. Was my first job out of college. And then at the point I got laid off, it was like, All right, well, marketing isn't working out, let's try HR, and that's how I got my foot in the door in recruiting. So I got a small a job as a sourcing coordinator at a small staffing firm, and at that point, you're talking the days before ATSs were really huge and really popular, so we were using this like Access database to track candidates. That was so horribly painful to use. It was I had paper files like knees deep, and it was just absolutely miserable. And then I switched to being an agency recruiter. Same deal. We're using a system called Gold Mine, and that that system was just literally, yeah, great name I

Unknown Speaker  9:39  
want to use, gold mine, sounds great.

Speaker 3  9:42  
It was just again, like an Access database. Imagine, like the worst dos interface that you've ever seen. Like, there were days where I felt like I was in the movie War Games, where it was like, Hello, Alex, you know, like that, that kind of interface. So, like, it was always, always a problem. That I felt needed to be solved back when I was working in marketing, one of the formative experiences for me when I was working for Lucent, because I was working for their optoelectronics division was going to Mac world at the Javis center as like an early 20 year old. And this is back in the days where the Macs were these big, Candy colored giant things that would sit on your dashboard, like, like your desk, and you were lucky to have this giant bubble of a thing. And so, like, technology has always been this underlying thread of my interest. So when I got into recruiting and that interest in the background, you know, it's it became more and more obvious to me that there was a huge gap, at least in what I'd been exposed to, in the technological solutions that I was using. So fast forward couple of years, switched to working at Connects, and was a recruitment process, outs and out recruitment process, outsourcing recruiter. So basically meaning that I worked for a bunch of different companies, mainly pharmaceutical companies, and every one of them used a different ATS. So every client that I would work with, and generally it was the same client at the same time, or I'd have a year long contract with one client, they were using something of their own from at one point, I was working with Microsoft as a client, and Microsoft had their own homegrown version, and it was gold mine, like this. Theme just kept coming up to me over and over again that whoever designed the system has no idea what I do for a living. And it just kept coming back over and over and over again as I was exposed to all of these different technologies, until finally, at this point, I'm managing a team of 16 recruiters, and I'm working for a pharmaceutical company as their ops manager, again through RPO. So I'm contracted, and conexa is the owner of the ATS software that they had sold them. It's called two XR, so think of a bad knockoff of isims. That's what two XR was. So in some places, it was actually better, and I won't get too deep into that, but they had no one to administer their ATS. So they were like, your company sold this to us. We don't know what to do with it here. Here I am the accidental admin. I have a tangential software background, because everyone in my life around me, friend for friend base, my husband, everyone that has surrounded me does software development. My husband's an electrical engineer. A lot of his friends are coders. So like the language is something that I hear from an immersion perspective. So when people started, like, talking to me about all the technical problems, I'd be like, Why do I understand what you're saying? I have no IT background. So just learning by osmosis from my friends and like, circle, it just community actually came up that way.

Speaker 2  12:59  
Yeah? Community, yeah, so you had a community that made it safe for you, and you could ask questions and not be concerned that somebody's going to dismiss you or patronize you, etc, right? Yeah, well,

Unknown Speaker  13:14  
they're all guys, so patronize

Unknown Speaker  13:16  
Okay, let's talk about that. Yes. What's that? What's that

Speaker 3  13:19  
like being a woman in tech, you get used to a certain level of little lady. You don't know what you're doing, got it? Yeah. And you just learn to to dismiss it as okay. This is just how the the world interfaces with so to a certain extent, and most of it because there were family and friends, was in good humor. But that actually helped me develop a thick enough skin to not be offended by it when it came across, when I came across it in a professional setting. Yeah, so to a certain extent, it's a little different when you're configuring software than it is when you're coding. And that's a completely that's a weird little dichotomy that I would run into all the time, is occasionally, I would work with some of the teams that would be coding, and the females on that side would always kind of have a really rough time getting themselves heard, and I'd empathize with that. So community. Yes, very much so. But you know, there's always dynamics within a community, and those things, good and bad, teach you how to navigate. Got it.

Speaker 2  14:22  
So you've been doing this for a while, and you've seen a lot of change. How is your perspective on HR technology evolved since you started?

Unknown Speaker  14:35  
It's noisy

Speaker 2  14:38  
when I first started, it noisier than other areas.

Speaker 3  14:43  
I have limited exposure to other areas, but the place where I say it's the reason that I personally feel that it's noisy is what I started it was an ATS and a background check vendor, and then you added skills assessments, and then you added. Interview technologies. And then you added texting, and then you added all of these different ancillary bolt on things that started becoming part of you. Needed a CRM and you like you needed all these things. And it's like I was perfectly happy driving around my Ford Fiesta. But now, why do I need a Lexus? They both get me from Point A to Point b1. Is better gas mileage. I don't, I don't get all of the points. Or at least, you know, when I was in the recruiting world, that started to be my general feeling, because you get a bit of systems fatigue when you're asked to learn all of these different pieces and parts. Like, think of all the apps you use on a daily basis. And every time you log into an app, something is slightly different and in a different place than you expect it to be, and you gotta learn it, and there's this giant learning curve, and that can get fatiguing. So I always have a lot of empathy for the customers that I work with, because they're constantly asked to change and pivot and find the next great thing and chase that, you know, perfect imaginary world where everything works exactly like it's supposed to. And I've been in that situation so many times in my career that it is something that I I've tried to find ways to take the pain from an 11 to a five as often as possible. I can't take it away, but I can help.

Speaker 2  16:23  
So here's the thing. And the developers of even the best product there, and the most empathetic developers, let's say, who are really doing good job and anticipating the impact on the end user, they are thinking about it mostly within the context of the product that they're working on, right? And because they don't work in TA and haven't sat in the seat of the folks who are going to use this software, it's, I'm speculating, that they're not going to be able to extend that empathy beyond their product, right? And so that's where your experience across many different platforms, actually working in TA, etc, gives you an overall understanding of I love that term toggle tax right, having to flip from one tab to another, one system to another, it is incredibly draining, and I don't think that that can be under estimated, particularly when you consider that these folks jobs is not to be technologists, right? These folks jobs specifically. The whole point of their job is to make genuine connections with people and persuade them to come work for the company, right? And I just remember when I was managing supervisors, I just remember the stacks of paper and, you know, neatly piled stacks of paper. And just seeing seeing recruiters working on the stacks of paper, and just thinking like, wow, this is taking up a lot of their time, right, you know, but then also, when that paper started to go away and it was replaced by computer systems, right? Watching them click through things, seeing them get frustrated, being unable to do things that you could do with a phone call or handshake or whatever, right? That just like the technology was designed to make things better, and it seemed to just be making things worse, right? So, where are we? Where are we today in 2025 where we have, like, technology, like the you and I dreamed about, like, you know, Star Trek level technology is now real, right? Or very, very close where I'm just, I mean, I'm just talking to the computer now, right? And it's it, you know, it's, it's not quite Star Trek grade. I can't just, I guess I could if, I mean, if I was comfortable with Alexa or something like that, then I'd probably be even closer. But I'm not right. But where do you where do you think HR like an optimal scenario, right? Like, the company that is investing in the right tools and the right collection of tools and really being empathetic to their end users, like, like, where do you think we can be? Where are we now? Where can we be?

Speaker 3  19:05  
I think I've been through several paradigm shifts in my career, the paradigm shift from Access database ATS, the paradigm shift from paper to access database, the paradigm shift right now from standard SAS systems to API to AI. So if you think about the thing that industry has not been great at in every one of those experiences, in my opinion, is the empathy for the human being who has to go through the learning and rethink everything they've ever done in order to adopt the new technology. Right? It's just here, figure it out, and that's how everybody's every experience that I've had in each one of these paradigm shifts, yeah, has gone and so at this particular moment in time, I think one of the hardest challenges I read about people having. Me, and have witnessed myself with the paradigm shift to industry basically touting the AI tool as the next great thing, which it can be, is that lack of empathy, because on both sides of the house, whether it's the recruiter or the candidate, experience, the AI isn't a person, and it's very impersonal by its nature. So the recruiters are having a hard time getting through the layers of technology that are intended to help them to find the real people, and then the people who have the backgrounds are getting having a hard time getting through the layers of technology to find the recruiters, so I feel like it's becoming a bit of a roadblock, and so I'm hoping that there will be mindful development. But my fear at this particular moment in time is that my experience in the software development aspect of this business over the last 20 years has been that people that do this job don't do the development, and because those people don't do the development, they don't understand why. Giving me an AI filter that filters out all of these things isn't necessarily going to help me find that perfect candidate, because some of those things aren't tangible. They're not things that can be on paper. If I understand that, the way that you write, if you're in a just a for example, of this career is being threatened by it. If I'm trying to hire somebody for a communications role, I'm looking for an eloquently written resume. Well, now I can't look for that anymore, because AI wrote that resume. So everybody's got an eloquently written, written resume. So as a recruiter like they're at an unprecedented time. Though there have been many paradigm shifts again over the last 2030, years, but at this particular moment in time, there are so many challenges facing our customers, the people that we work with on a daily basis, and the candidate population that they serve because of the technology, not in spite of the technology. And that's something that, you know, I think we're going to have a very interesting time as we watch this evolve. Yeah, you know,

Speaker 2  22:23  
I'm thinking back to when my dad was sending out letters. I mean, this must have been like circa 1987 and I remember him and my mom sitting on the living room floor hundreds of envelopes, carefully folding resumes, licking the stamps, writing the addresses. It is a funny story. You just he told me this couple weeks ago, the interview that he got that eventually led to us moving to Cincinnati. He got a job at a company called Cincinnati electronics, and it was GD, I can't remember anyway, so the feedback that he got from the hike he got the job, and the feedback from the hiring manager was, you know, Bob, it's funny, you don't have any relevant qualifications for this job, but your resume, the cover letter that you wrote, certainly makes it sound like you do, and then that's why we're hiring you. And they hired my dad to be a business writer based on the quality of his writing, not possible today, right? Crazy, right. So, so I'm wondering I, and I, you and I are always thinking about impact on the end user. Impact on the candidate. Candidate experience is a passion of ours. It's how I got my start in HR tech. Somebody asked me to analyze what it was like to apply for a job there, and I thought it was atrocious, right? Has anything gotten better for the candidate, or has it only gotten worse? I can't tell, like, from those days when people were sending out letters and envelopes, you know, to now when they you know, they're having to fill out the same, you know, workday profile over and over again for the same company. Like, has anything gotten better?

Speaker 3  24:04  
So there are some great technologies out there, like jobright.io and simplify.io that help that experience from a candidate perspective, that let you automatically populate those multiple forms. So if I have

Unknown Speaker  24:22  
cross ATS, yes,

Speaker 3  24:25  
yeah, there's some simplify.io is one that Mitch gentlemen, both of us know I'm turned me on to while we were both job searching. And so there are some good technologies that help you fill applications out and kind of get over the tedium of applying, but I don't actually think that that's been candidates benefits. And the reason I don't think that's been candidates benefits is because when you hit that point where you've mass applied to 400 jobs, you're. It's a psychological thing at that point, you know, you're applying and applying, and nobody's calling you back, and you've got, it's basically like standing in the line at an Apple store to get the first iPhone. You know, it's like, you're, you've got that, I've got to be the very first person to apply to this job to be sure that I'm going to be seen otherwise. Now I'm competing with all of these people that are using all these bot tools to mass supply, and I'm going to get shuffled to the very bottom of the list, even if I'm the most qualified candidate. And so from a candidate experience perspective, it's gotten better and worse, because there are all these great tools to automate that tedious portion of the application process now, but those tools are being used by so many people that it's very hard to stand out. And so one of the things that I'm finding with all of my colleagues at my previous company that are going through was going through some shifts. And so a lot of my colleagues are on the market at this moment, is the ones that are finding positions and getting jobs again, are the ones that aren't bothering with any of the technology. They're the ones going through LinkedIn and finding connections and talking to people they know. And that's how I found you when I started working with you. So like in my experience, every time I've ever found a position, it has been that way. I've done the traditional thing of going and using the technologies that I implement for a living, but in every instance where I've ever needed a position, I've done it the old fashioned way. Picked up the phone call people I know, asked what jobs their companies were hiring for, and been referred so it's it's tough out there for a candidate because of the technology, but it's also easier because of the technology, see where I'm going with that.

Speaker 2  26:48  
I think a takeaway is excellent points. You need to be cultivating your network as your employee, no matter how much you love your job, right? You never know what's going to happen. And if you need to make a transition, you need to have a network that you can tap to help you with that next step. And yes, so when I, when I posted that role, I immediately got a flood. I needed an ATS frankly, like I was doing it with a spreadsheet, right? I got a flood of recommendations from people who I know and trust and respect, and they were saying that, and they said, Oh, you gotta talk to this person. You go talk to this person. You gotta talk to Vivian, right? And that's how we ended up working together, right? And I had, I immediately had a candidate pool that was very targeted, and folks who proactively reached out to me, right? So I didn't even have to ask people. And I had, like, three key people who I trust and respect, who said, You gotta talk to Vivian. So here we are, right. You didn't apply for a job, of course, for tiny company. So you can't, I don't know. I can't really the issue, of course, is scalability, right? So I don't know how you scale that relationship building,

Speaker 3  28:13  
and that's been the question in my entire career. Like when I was recruiter, I would have Excel spreadsheets with cold call lists of people that worked in specific positions that I'd be trying to recruit for, and I would have a bank of networked people that I had talked to at some point knew weren't interested at that time. Was a cold bank, just of people that I would keep in touch with. And you know, to a certain degree, I feel like technology has made that skill set less coveted in a recruiter, and that ability to I'll tell you a crazy story. I had a colleague at when I was in in like agency recruiting, who would pick up the phone, and he would make up the craziest stories to get this person on the phone and get past the gatekeeper. I'm Father Thomas. I'm his priest. Like, I'm not even kidding, we would take bets about what story was going to come out of his mouth that day, because he had a couple of recurring ones, and they worked. So he that skill, that cold calling skill to BS your way past the gatekeeper. Yeah, that's a sales skill. And that sales skill in recruiting, you know that the ones that are incredibly successful, those executive recruiters that wind up getting that really hard to find executive for some of the big companies, and the reason agencies still make big agency fees on that is because they're not using the technology. They're picking the phone up and making up a story to get to the

Speaker 2  29:46  
right for the relationships. Yep, yeah, that's that's really, really, really interesting observation, authenticity, more and more is it like? So I keep coming back. To this, like, what? Stop, stop laying recruiters off. Yeah, you know, everyone who's listening, please, please stop thinking that AI is a great way. Like, I know I'm kind of Pollyanna ish in this regard. And, you know, but like, just, just put it in your mind that the the end goal for AI does not have to be reducing headcount, right? Like every single recruiter wants to make those connections. They all do, and they and and they're the technology has been getting in the way, and now the technology can help take some that stuff and take it off their plate so they can do that. And if they're, if they're demoralized beyond the the point of no return, then, okay, I get it right, but I think people are dying to have their ability to connect with other human beings magnified, right? So that so they can do what, what, what fills them up. These are, these are people. People, right? They went into this field because they love making connections with people. And if you, if you it's a highly, highly valuable thing, anybody can click a button and blast out, you know, 10,000 emails right to put to be able to, to cleverly get past a gatekeeper. That is some social emotional intelligence, right

Speaker 3  31:16  
there, social engineering, right there. Yeah, yeah. And along those lines, like, I'm not saying the technology doesn't have value. There's so when I was when I was recruiting, I would have serial applicants. This one gentleman whose name I will never forget, because he applied to every job that I ever posted, every job, every one of my teammates, all 16 of them ever posted every job at another organization, another team of my colleagues had, like this poor man, applied to everything he was not qualified, over and over and over again, to the point where his name became a punchline, you know. So I felt terrible for him, but sure he was flat out told, after the second time he was in person interviewed, you're never getting a job with this company. Give up. Company. Give up and move on. So, you know, like in those back in the days where we were looking

Speaker 2  32:08  
to say stuff, like, right, off the record, sir, off the record, you're blacklisted from this organization.

Speaker 3  32:14  
Off the record, you're actually thrown into a black hole. We don't even love you anymore.

Unknown Speaker  32:19  
But, yeah, so like,

Speaker 3  32:22  
like, to a certain extent, the technology is incredibly helpful, because I could easily filter that poor person and the many like him out and not waste my time going through those people over and over again when I knew they weren't an organizational fit. But I, I feel like that, in and of itself, is kind of a cautionary tale of where technology can cause lots of human pain, because those people kept trying, and they weren't flat out told, Look, you're not a fit. Move on because you can't, because there's so many, so many roadblocks to doing that. So the technology allowed me to ghost these poor people, no matter you know how much time and energy they were wasting. So,

Speaker 2  33:06  
so we're going to find that guy, and that's going to be the next spotlight, sir. How's it going? No, I mean, everybody listening this can can relate. We all have had those candidates in our system, and you know that there we get that, get back, gets back to that relationship piece, like we and we all know what it's like to be ghosted. You know, it's such a horrible, such a horrible feeling. I bet I don't know. I don't know. Do you know? Do young people have, like, a different perspective on that? Because for me, gosh, I take it real personally, still, still like, just

Speaker 3  33:42  
like, I mean, I have some teenagers in my life, all nieces and nephews, and every single one of them, that's just generally how they expect to interact with people. So if they don't want to talk to somebody, they just that's, that's how they expect that

Speaker 2  33:58  
I'm counting them. I'm counting the minutes. Excuse me, I texted you 40s

Unknown Speaker  34:04  
Imogen. He calls that text back tempo.

Speaker 3  34:07  
Oh, I like that. Text back tempo, yeah, there's a line in one of her songs, my self worth measured in text back tempo, oh, yes, always kind of stuck with me. But yeah, no, it's very hard, not that instant gratification. I mean, I grew up before cell phones, and had the first great big Nokia brick. I'm really aging myself here, and it was analog. And so, like, I feel like our generation lives in a world before that, and so we know what, not having instant gratification. I mean, I'll bet you and I are some of the few people on our team that have looked things up in a card catalog. So

Unknown Speaker  34:42  
I could just, I could just smell that smell. Yes, I love

Speaker 3  34:45  
that smell. But anyway, so like, that's that not having that instant gratification is something that we've come up expecting, but not this generation, at least in my experience, and my nieces and nephews that go. Thing is, is, you know, they actually, that's sus when somebody gets in touch with you, again, even though their answer is no, like, like they they don't respond well to the no response, the non response is a response, the response that they expect, or at least that again, in my circle, in my experiences, I have like, six nieces and nephews, and every one of them, you know, five of them are teenagers, and every one of them, that's just how they work. So, yeah,

Speaker 2  35:27  
my first mobile phone was a 50 foot long cord. Very excited to walk around the house. Yeah,

Speaker 3  35:37  
cordless phone. Oh, my God, we're really aging ourselves, man. So this reminds me of a conversation with my grandmother. My grandmother was this incredible world war two veteran wife who was the executive assistant to the seat CFO of Citibank at one point. Like, amazing person, um, valedictorian of her class. Like, just super, super smart. And she was telling me a story once she grew up in Saint Mary's Idaho, which is like the boonies Idaho even now. And she would tell me stories about how they would all come running out of their house to look up when they heard a plane, because it was such a rare event for them that it because. And she was telling me this as she was FaceTiming with me, because she was so amazed by the technology of FaceTime. She's like, you don't understand this is the Jetsons that I'm having this conversation with you right now. So, yeah.

Speaker 2  36:28  
So, so speaking of, speaking of technology doing not so great things. So to go back to the the issue of technology getting back, getting in the way of people doing their jobs, a lot of that has to do with how it's set up, and then the rest of it has to do with how it's maintained. So let's talk about how it's set up. What are, what are the biggest mistakes that you see companies making when setting the system up initially,

Speaker 3  36:55  
over engineering your process, over engineering your process is the biggest mistake I see people make over and over again, you do not need a workflow status for every single possible permutation of your process. You don't the more heavily engineered your process is, the more confusion, the more pain, the more toggle text, the more click through issues at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, it doesn't matter what business you're in. Everybody does the same things, everybody sources, everybody screens, everybody interviews, everybody offers, everybody hires. There's five steps. That's it. Our entire industry can be boiled down to those five processes. So each one of those might have three or four steps in each one of those aspects, there doesn't need to be 50 in each one of them. And so when I work with like huge organizations, 100,000 plus employee organizations, there was always someone pushing to add this piece of complexity where it didn't really need to be, where, you know, all it was, was a minor semantic difference in the way that you were describing the step versus the step that was already there. Yeah. And the long term cost of that was you could never get accurate reporting out of it, because great coffee never get so leadership wants numbers. That is how your your CTOs and your coos and your execs and the people above you making the purchasing decision for the software that saves your life and helps you work. That's what they want to see. They want numbers. They want to be able to see that your costs have gone down and that your your speed of hiring has gone up, and all the things that affect the brass bottom line of your business. That's what they care about. And if you can't report well on any of that information, because you have 75 different ways to do the same thing, yeah. Mm, hmm. Then that is not doing you a service in the long run. Keep it simple is the most like silly, you know, plain, ordinary piece of advice anybody can give you, but it's the truth. You have five steps. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to

Speaker 2  39:22  
be. You know, I, I, I have prided myself on being able to think through every single permutation and find a place for every single permutation. And I'm sure a lot of techie people can can relate to this. It is sort of like, it's like the part of my brain that was obsessed with having every single baseball card of every baseball card brand, the part of my brain that like I to figure out how I feel about something, I make a spreadsheet out of it. Yeah, it's a stoke. It's a mentality, but it's but, but, and it has a purpose, and it's useful. Yeah, but it needs to be contextualized. And it's somebody needs to stand up and say, We have to keep it simple, right? And that's like, one of those core consulting skills. And like, how do you, how do you, how do you refer referee, like, how do you, how do you work with folks who are insisting that their obscure use case is actually more important than it actually is. Well, first

Speaker 3  40:24  
and foremost, you always leave with empathy because they're asking for it, because they feel they have a need, unmet need. So there is some part of what they want that is not currently being served. So they have a vision for how they're going to serve it. The best way I have always found is to convince people to learn that what you are trying to do serves their need. So however you need to do that. From a conversation perspective, I had a client. I'm trying to think of the nuances of the story, because it was at least seven years ago, but I had a client at a large biotech company who I don't know if you've ever been in the biotech industry, but the biotech industry has so many different divergent specialties. In an organization, you've got purchasing, you've got HR, you've got the scientists, you've got, like people in every single very diverse and no common ground kind of priority mindset as far as all the different departments. And we had this one stakeholder who did all of the the research scientist recruiting, think, like doctors, like really hard niche people to find 99% were going to people that you would have to network with, or find at a university somewhere, or possibly bring in from another country, like she had the hardest job of all of her colleagues, and then she had also had somebody that did, like the lab floor level manufacturing, recruiting, and the two of them were at each other's throats because their priorities were so vastly different. This person was high volume, this person was niche and network and very low volume. And so this person wanted to be able to document every nuance, because they're new. They had every nuance. They had the time to document every nuance, because they were dealing with 10 or 15 people a week, whereas this person was dealing with 70 people a day. And so never the twain shall meet in their mindset, as far as how you could get them to converge on a process. So I had them actually sit down and break their process down on a spreadsheet. You know, spreadsheets are good in certain scenarios. And I had them explain, okay, what do you actually do at each one of these steps? Tell me why you need a different step for interviewing your users than they do. And when I actually got them to talk a lot of times. Being a consultant is just learning to help people communicate where they have got their walls down and can't see past their own needs and breaking through that wall so they can see how their needs and the needs of their teammates are the same. They're just using different language to explain their needs. So when I finally got the two of them to sit down and kind of talk and talk through all of the nuances of their steps, we had a eureka moment where they were like, Oh well, it really isn't that different. So why don't we just come up with some common naming convention? And when we allow them to brainstorm and create the process themselves together, we were able to develop a unified process they were all happy with. There were still, like, one or two little niche things that we developed for the high end sourcing recruiter versus the the recruiter who did the high volume hadn't had evergreens, whereas the high end person didn't. I mean, there were some, some small niches that we had to specify for them, but overall, the the steps from beginning to end were the same. And so from a reporting perspective, they were able to get reliable, reasonable data at the end of the day. So that was, you know, why it was important to do,

Unknown Speaker  44:17  
yep, getting back to empathy, yeah,

Speaker 3  44:20  
it's the most important skill in this particular profession. I personally believe empathy for the candidates, empathy for your colleagues, empathy for your leaders. Your leaders have priorities too, that they're being beholden to. And you know, I think if, if you lead with empathy in every aspect of this, you ultimately win.

Speaker 2  44:40  
I think there is something about the HR technology profession specifically that lends itself to being effective enablers of empathy, of creating the conditions for dialog between two functions that. Uh, typically are, I don't say odds, but you know, you got HR, they do their people thing. Got it they do their IT thing, right? And, you know, some companies are merging the two into one function. I forget who's doing this recently, just on LinkedIn, but in any event, I think that there is some some translating that needs to happen of HR priorities, and it's priorities. And I think the folks who've been on the front lines of implementing technology mandates for slash on employee bases understand the overall impact of and I really think of so we see a lot of folks just like you and just like me who have a strong arts, creative side, education, that sort of thing, for whom technology kind of just landed in their lap and they just had to figure it out. I think that's our superpower. I really do. I really do, and I really think, I think HR technology workers need a seat at the table for vendor selection, right? Because, how do you, how do you wade through all of the hype, right? Like, how do you know what this is really going to look like in practice? And of course, we've seen many customers who aren't like realizing the dream that they had. And part of it, so part of his implementation, we talked about that, and then part of it is maintenance, system administration, right, having somebody in that seat who has both the time, the skills, inclination, bandwidth, right, to make sure that the system continues to run smoothly and constantly grows as as business processes shift and change.

Unknown Speaker  46:45  
That though, like there's no different.

Speaker 3  46:50  
I had a LinkedIn post a couple of weeks ago about what I call the accidental admin. And so so many people that do what we do fell into it by accident. Yes, it was. It was handed to them because nobody else would do it. And there is a skills gap that isn't recognized when that happens in that now, someone who doesn't have a systems background is expected to know all of the nuances of what it takes to maintain a healthy system, and there's no empathy from leadership. You know, we're talking about learning earlier. There's no empathy from leadership in the fact that those folks are in a position where they're being thrown things from every angle, and they don't have all the context for the decisions they're being asked to make. So they make the best decisions that they can within that environment. So like probably 60% of the implementations that I was given over the 500 plus implementations of isins that I did, most of those folks would tell me, I don't know what I don't know. It was like the opening line to every conversation that I would have with every one of them. I don't know what I don't know, and that's what I need you for, yep. Well, you know, I don't know your business. I don't have all the context for what your ins and outs and nuances of what you're trying to do are I know software and I know a I know talent acquisition from having been in talent acquisition myself, you're going to have to help me get you there. As far as the different moving pieces, and so there's an education gap in a lot of the system administrators that I work with. They don't even know that they have whole data management, the whole database maintenance conversation, the training that we're doing, many of the folks that we've expressed that this is something we're bringing up are very interested in it, because they don't know what it takes to keep a database up and healthy, because it's not their day job. Many of them are still recruiting on top of being system administrators and system administrators like a sub line of something that they didn't even realize when someone handed them an ATS, somebody needed to do so, I think that you don't see this in enterprise softwares. You don't see when somebody implements a procurement software, yeah, it manages that. It owns it from the very beginning, you have a support system, you have the expectation that someone is going to need to maintain this whereas in applicant tracking systems, I don't know why, but there's this persistent, this persistent misperception that I've never seen broken, that they just don't need that kind of maintenance, and they don't need That kind of oversight, and they do, because you're dealing with human in human information. You're dealing with personal identifying information. There was a read back rumors, which is a site where they talk about hacks and like all kinds of security threats and stuff like that. In the morning today, there was literally somebody who found a random. Hard drive out there with hundreds of 1000s of people's passwords to different apps, including their login information that wasn't hidden behind a firewall and was just randomly sitting there out on a network. And, you know, so those kinds of mistakes have real impacts on human beings. And there is PII in ATS is there's, you know, dates of birth and social identifying information and how much money the person makes. And this is important software from a perspective of information security. And I feel like that is a very overlooked aspect, because the people that we're working with don't know to think that way. That isn't how they're trained, and that isn't their fault.

Speaker 2  50:45  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know I, I can totally relate to that. You simply don't know what you don't know. You don't know what the right questions are to ask until you've encountered that, or somebody's told you, right if you're new, if you if you're new to the profession, what's the best way to figure some of those things? I'm not trying to turn this to commercial for Sai, of course, working on some great content material, some great learning experiences. But like, aside from that, what would you what advice would you, let's say, let's put it this way, what advice would you give to your younger self? How could you have sharpened your learning curve just a bit? Sai didn't exist then.

Speaker 3  51:29  
So when I first started in this space, one of the first things I was fortunate enough to do, because I worked for the company that sold the software that I was working in, was to go to the implementation team and be like, What do I not know and help in that community? Again, community, it doesn't matter if you're talking Sai, but like, find your most techie friend and ask them to explain the ins and outs of the various pieces to you. And if you don't have that. You know, there's LinkedIn learning, there's Khan Academy, there are so many YouTube there are so many resources I didn't have when I started in this profession. If there is something you desire to learn, someone out there is desiring to teach it. So you just have to find it. And that's one of the great places for AI, because AI can help you narrow down the resources that you need to have. But just taking, like a basic database infrastructure training might be a very helpful thing. There'll be a lot of information in there you don't need to know, but a lot of it you can contextually apply. Taking a basic training on data analytics will be important to you, because when you understand all the nuances of what you may need to have and get meaningful data, it will help you understand what data you need to have in the system in order to be able to get that data. So a really common mistake I see made in isims all the time, and implementation is not bringing over enough data, from a data table perspective, to be able to break security rules and reports and dashboards out. If you don't know what department all your employees are in, you can't show them a report by their department like it's it's that simple. The system is only, I say this over and over, any system is only as smart as the data you give it, because systems, I mean, think about AI most AI right this moment is only trained to 2023 so most of them are not trained on anything currently happening right this moment,

Speaker 2  53:38  
well, fortunately, Nothing interesting has happened since 2023 so we're

Speaker 3  53:42  
good, but yeah. So like, when you, when you try to actually pull those, those systems, those great, large learning language model systems, they're missing two years of context, yeah. And so hold what they tell you with a grain of that grain of salt, because they're missing two years worth of information. And quite a bit has happened in the last few years. Yeah, so yeah, just, I'm on a tangent going back to you know, what kind of trainings you can take, think of like basic database maintenance and infrastructure and database architecture. Types of trainings, they may not intuitively seem like something that you would need to know, but knowing them would really help you, especially when you're working with SAP or Oracle. Those two systems are dinosaurs. Sorry, they are but and they're based on frameworks of data that you know you need a consultant for every module in order to figure out because they're so heavily architected. And so if you understand how a database works, you're going to have a lot easier time understanding why you need a person for the payroll module and you need a person for the ATS modeling module. Person for like each module, because their work days the same like. Workday has so many different moving parts that each individual module needs an expert because they're all so different.

Speaker 2  55:07  
Yeah, this episode is sponsored by SAP and Oracle, just kidding. So to go back to AI and learning, I was thinking of it as like AI can give you the 101 version of anything, right? And if you choose to, you can start off at 201 and that's how I felt talking to tofiq yesterday about the website, like I was able to get value from his level of expertise that I don't think I would have been able to get otherwise, right? But it's a fantasy to think that independently, with AI, I would get to where he's at because he designed the website. I forgot to mention that. So he's both the founder of Echo, but he also was a web designer in a previous career and and so like it gave me access to engage him at a higher level, much more quickly, than I would have otherwise. And I think that is a missing piece in a lot of the conversation about learning and AI, it's like, and in general, right? Like we're not, I don't think even close to needing fewer great teachers. I think, I think great teach. I think, I think there were so many great teachers who never were able to thrive because of various things that impact education, right, systemically, right? I see so many more great teachers coming up and being able to elevate everyone's skill set right through AI. That's the potential for me. And again, it's like, yes, there, there are bad things that can and will happen, right? But I think we really need to focus on what is possible and what good things can happen, because it's just enormous opportunity to to upskill and unlock connection, authenticity, creativity.

Unknown Speaker  56:59  
Let's, let's wrap up with

Speaker 2  57:02  
what's the most rewarding project you've ever worked on? I'd like to hear about

Speaker 3  57:08  
that. There have been so many, but I'm going to have to go back to one of my first so I won't name the customer, but I was handed a customer while I was working for conexa and implementing to xr, who had been in implementation for two and a half years when they were handed to me and they were still not live big retail company.

Unknown Speaker  57:34  
There was just so sorry.

Unknown Speaker  57:35  
Typical implementation for a company that size, what

Speaker 3  57:38  
would it be? 20 weeks? Okay, wow. 15 to 20 weeks, wow. Yeah. Okay, so this should and it was the same stakeholder, and she had gotten a bad reputation on the team because she was trying to solve the needs of so many different external pressures and forces that were being exerted on her, and trying to articulate them in a way that the person that was helping her implement would understand her level of urgency. And at a certain point, some of our colleagues, some of my colleagues, started basically saying, you know, this person is using perfect as the enemy of good, like they just don't understand what good enough is. And so when I got the account, um, she had actually gotten to a point where she had asked certain people to be taken off the account, and they were like, good luck here. She's really difficult. Yeah, she wasn't really difficult, yeah. And I've had this kind of experience more than one time in my career, but the problem was that the they weren't listening to her enough. And so I said, act like you've done nothing. Tell me everything you need. Let's start from square one. And so, um, I had her live in seven weeks. Oh, wow. And then they send down the product. And then they what, sundown, the product, Oh, yeah. And then I had to learn brass ring, and I helped her implement brass ring and go through that whole process over and over again, yeah. So the reason I'm most proud about that is, A, I got her live on two XR, when no one else could, yeah, but B I was able to help her navigate the fury that she understandably and rightfully felt when IBM came to them and her and said, Sorry, we're not going to let you use this product anymore. We're sundowning it after she had just been implementing it for almost two and a half years, breaking heartbreaking. And so, you know, I came to her and I was like, Look, I don't have any control over this. This is what's happening. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to learn this new system I've personally never worked with before. Let's learn it together. Let's figure out how to get you live. And she ultimately wound up going. Live with KBR. I helped her go live with KBR in 20 weeks. So it took another 20 weeks for her to go live with KBR, but all of the things that we had learned, I said, 16 before it was about 20, all of the things that we had learned together about her process and the things that she needed, helped inform us in building the new system. And so ultimately, it made such a difference for her that I understood where she was coming from and what she needed, and that understanding and empathy, again, I keep talking about empathy, was the thing that ultimately got her over that line. So that's probably the one that I'm most proud of, and it was

Speaker 2  1:00:40  
one of the first that's amazing. The trust is really so valuable. And when that exists, like, you know, a lot of things where we can figure out the technology, you know, like, across different systems and whatnot, so much of it is built around the same concepts, and just figuring out how that specific technology was was configured, right? But the trust of you know, for somebody to enjoy working with you, enough that even for the whole thing to just completely fall apart, that they were like, Yep, let's let's do this again. That that's amazing, and that speaks volumes for your consultative manner. Well, Vivian, this has been a gold mine of insights. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. If you're listening to this and you're an isims customer, we have a community, a learning community, specifically for isims system administrators. Over 300 isims customers are in there to date, talking daily in a supportive, safe space for conversations where you're going to find people who have a similar level of empathy and regard for the end user and passion for nerdy configuration conversations. It's really, really a unique space. You can go to System Admin insights.com, and search for join a free Friday call. You can join our Friday calls for free. We do that every Friday at 1:30pm Eastern. And then membership brings some additional perks, like small group office hours with folks like Vivian and other members of the IRD team, who have all sat in your seat as system administrators, working with Isom specifically, as talent acquisition professionals, working as recruiters, ta, managers, etc. It's really, really very special value that we've created there. So hope to see you there. Vivian, once again, thank you so much for speaking with me today, and we'll talk soon.