UNFILTERED: The Accidental ATS Admin: AI, Compliance, and the Future of HR Tech

Most ATS system administrators never planned to be in the role.

In this episode of Unfiltered: Real ATS Conversations, we talk about the reality behind becoming an “accidental ATS admin,” why HR technology roles are evolving, and how AI, compliance, data analytics, and candidate experienceare reshaping the profession.

https://systemadmininsights.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
They were recruiters like myself. Somebody went, You're tech savvy here, yeah, and 99% of the people are just like now.

Speaker 2  0:10  
What? Pipelines full by the break of dawn, 100 resumes before the coffee's only a spam with a necktie on auto applying from a server farm.

Speaker 3  0:23  
One of my favorite things about you is you have a gift for metaphor, which is very helpful in explaining technical concepts to folks who are techie by nature. It doesn't mean that they don't understand technology, but you've been elbows deep in technology for for most of your career. So So I want to start off by asking you, well, first I want to, I want you about the metaphor, but I also I really want to hear about the inspiration for this book. What inspired you to write this well.

Speaker 1  0:52  
So we collectively have a community called system admin insights. And system admin Insights is a great resource for isims administrators I Sims is the primary ATS that you and I both work in to come and talk about all the challenges that they run into on a day to day basis. And it fomented a concept for me that has been in the back of my head for 15 plus years, since I started working in implementing ATS systems, that nobody does this for a living by choice. So because that's how it happened to me, and every single, every single person that I talked to that that works in an applicant tracking system configures an applicant tracking system manages an applicant tracking system is an accidental admin. They were recruiters like myself. Somebody went, You're tech savvy here, yeah, and 99% of the people are just like, now what? And so as I continued in my career implementing applicant tracking systems, I implemented probably about 500 or more applicant tracking systems for companies across different industries and businesses. I kept seeing this theme over and over and over again. The leader bought the software, told someone who is going to administer the software, who's usually a recruiter or a TA leader, here you go. And those people were left with that. Now, what now? What do I do? Kind of experience. So that's really the inspiration for the book. The Accidental admin is a theme that I saw over and over and over again. And as we continue on and these systems get more complex and they get more integrated, and they get more overlooked in the IT industry, I feel like now is really the time for folks that do this for a living, because there's lots of us to really stand up and say, Hey, we're a completely unique little bird, and we need to be recognized for that uniqueness. And so that was kind of my motivation behind the book. We've been talking about making this eventually into a certification kind of program. That's why I wrote it in a textbook style, because I wanted a resource out there. I was shocked to do research when I first started thinking about writing it, that there was absolutely nothing out there in writing about our careers, our profession, applicant tracking, ta, talent acquisition and the merger of how software informs the whole profession and everything that you do. There are books on metrics and strategy. There are books on human resources. My master's in organizational management, which is a human resources adjacent field, I studied human resources in my master's program in 2004 the same themes that I studied in that program are still bubbling up again and again and again. HR doesn't have a seat at the table from a strategic perspective. We're administrative. We're administrative, yeah, and now, when I get into the career of being an applicant tracking person and working in ATS systems. Now I'm not a tech person. I'm still an HR person. Meanwhile, I'm managing databases, and so I feel like this is one step in the right direction to help this group of professionals step up to the table of we are really tech professionals.

Speaker 3  4:17  
Well, I think there is a very unique balance of yin and yang, for lack of a better term, right? You have the the active quality of the it mind, and you have the receptive quality of the HR mind, right? And those combinations together are very special, and I think they're particularly important in this day and age, with the rapid pace of technological change, you need people who understand both and who have both qualities by their very nature, so that these systems are stewarded responsibly, ethically, right and with a a real uh. A concern, because that's something that I see a lot in our community and other system administrators that I've talked to. They genuinely care, right? It's not just one of 50 different systems that they manage, that that that function along predictable pathways and whatnot. They care about the candidate experience. It's important personally, but also for business outcomes, but but they care about the end user experience. They care about the hiring manager experience. And when they get their hands on a tool like I Sims, they they they start to understand how customizable it is, and they really want to be able to customize it for all of those demographics and and then there's that stuff that you don't know. You don't know, yeah, right. And that was me, like, I my first experience in HR was looking at what we had at the time, which was the ADP recruiting module, and looking at the candidate experiences. The first thing I thought to look at was like, let's just see what this is like, right? And, and my impression was not so great, not A, not a great experience, right? That's where, that's where I got my start was Canada experience. But I want to ask you to go back a second when somebody handed you that opportunity and said, Hey, you're techie. Why did you say yes, I didn't have a choice. Okay, there you go.

Speaker 1  6:17  
No, I didn't. So I had a choice. I used to work as an RPO? Yeah, I used to work as a manager, recruiting Operations Manager for an RPO. And so my client was a pharmaceutical company at the time, and the software that they were using was the software sold by the company that I was working for. So the company that I was working for was both an RPO and a applicant tracking system provider. And so they were like, This is your company software. You do it. There you go. It was really kind of like, simple, okay, I did not have a choice. And a lot of folks that do this for a living, I've heard that story over and over again too. If I don't do it, nobody else will, and somebody has to. So like that theme is recurring as well.

Speaker 3  7:03  
Yeah, my situation is a bit different. I was, I was a hiring manager on the field, and I started doing stuff with Excel and VBA to to offer solutions for certain things that were didn't make sense to me in the field. From that perspective, I couldn't, I couldn't get current numbers from the finance department to help me budget. And there was always, like, a one month lag, and they were using a software called MIP, and then the end of the month I would get a MIP readout. And I felt looking at it was like, I don't have accounting degree. I I've never read a financial statement at that point, right? And so I said, there's to be a way to make this easier for hiring managers. And so I created a tool to help folks budget with Excel. And then I created a calculator for folks to estimate what they should be contributing and which healthcare plan they should choose, which, you know, not something that actually could be used and distributed because of the liability that would incur, right? But I presented it to the HR director at the time, and and he said, you know, you've been here 10 years, you seem to like HR stuff, and you're good with technology. Do you want to come over to the HR department? And so I did have a choice, and I felt very grateful for that choice, but you were kind of dragged into it and and when you were first dragged into it, what did that feel like? Were you anxious? Were you scared, excited?

Speaker 1  8:28  
So I've always been a geek, and I've always been surrounded by people in my life that do software for a living, software and hardware and programming and that kind of thing. So it was another reason why I was tech savvy, and they had the impression that I knew this stuff. I really didn't it. I being an RPO recruiter is a completely different, unique category of recruiting. It's very metrics driven and it's very data driven, because you have to constantly justify why they're spending the money on you. So I'm pivoting here for a reason. One of the things that kind of got me dragged into it was the the COO of the company was asking for metrics reports, and nobody knew how to do them, and the ATS that we were using. And so I quickly went in and looked at it and doing the kind of metrics that I had to do for my team on a regular basis, pulled some data out and gave them what they were asking for, and got an immediate Whoa. How did you do this? And it evolved from there. So that's how it kind of fell in my lap. And that's that's another thing about being in this field, being an ATS administrator that people don't realize you were talking earlier about how you know people tend to, who go into this field, to tend to really, truly care about the candidate experience. Well, that's because the number one skill that makes you good in talent acquisition is empathy, and the number one thing that is a priority. To people in talent acquisition is relationships. And building those relationships, if I'm when I was an agency recruiter at the beginning of my career, those relationships with my candidates that I would, you know, just reach out to once in a while and get to know to the point where I knew I had this special squirrel. And here's the opening for that special squirrel, I immediately have someone said that was my bread and butter, and that was how I made my my book every single month was to continually warm call and keep those relationships and so applicant tracking software is this weird little nugget in the tech industry where the entirety of its purpose is to keep and maintain relationships, and that recruiters use it in that way they want to keep and maintain the relationships that they have with those candidates. But then there's all these other layers. There's compliance, there's tech, there's software, there's integrations that that's not a tele acquisitions person's bread and butter. They don't know those things on a day to day basis because they don't do those things.

Speaker 3  11:08  
So two stories just the other day. So I met an executive recruiter a couple years ago at a tech event in New York City, and I wasn't thinking of doing something other than IRD. I'm still not, but the other the other day, she inmailed me on LinkedIn and said, hey, there is a Esther piezola Tango concert at Carnegie Hall in two weeks. Just thought you'd want to know. And that was something that she remembered, unless she has a database. Her name's Regina, Angeles, by the way, if you, if you're looking for executive roles, she's, she is the recruiter par excellence, right? And and she just goes through and she builds these relationships over years. And I can't imagine, I have gotten so many AI generated outreaches, and unless they're completely fooling me, right? Which, you know, I use AI a lot, and some really good spotting AI tells that interaction I don't think is automatable, or maybe I'm being naive, maybe someday, right? I mean, you tend to push back on this when we talk about what AI can will be able to do, but I think this is a great, great example of what recruiters should be doing, right that the other, the other story I want to tell is I went to an HR tech conference maybe two years ago, and I met a founder there who was specializing very aggressively and getting rid of recruiters. I mean, he made no apology for it. He prided himself on being blunt and straightforward, and this is the way forward. And and forget anybody who disagrees. They're just sticking their heads in the sand. And so, so that's so, that's where that's, you know, there are people out there trying to do that, but there also need to be people out there who are advocating for the value of this profession, and particularly for the techie people to advocate for the value of this profession, because they hold the steering wheel they are presenting the metrics right. Because, as we know, figures lie. Liars. Figure you got to have somebody who's in charge of those metrics, who can help tea leadership make sense of them. And I'm probably not all ta leaders are gonna agree with that, but if you have somebody in that seat who has that empathy and that that technical sophistication, that is your ally in making a business case for people, yeah, I really feel that deeply. I think it's important. I don't see people talking about that enough. It's automate, automate, automate job displacement. Job displacement. Yes, all that stuff is happening, but we need to talk about how system administrators in HR are uniquely qualified to advance this narrative of the true value of a good recruiter.

Speaker 1  13:58  
That goes back to the frustration I had a class in college that has stuck with me forever. HR is a strategic partner, and I feel like consistently, every single role that I've taken, all of the different pivots that I've taken, I spent more of my career in software than I did in in HR, but every single step, I have constantly seen this pressure where HR folks are told you're a cost center, yes, and you do not bring anything to the business, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Because you're it costs you 1000s of dollars to put that butt in the seat, and if that person is not the right. Person doesn't last and winds up doing something to harm your organization. That person can cost you 1000s and 1000s of dollars. So it's like, HR is always that that kid at the table going, but wait, I am the person that puts the bricks in the foundation. And. All of your weight rests on me, but you don't see me because I'm just quietly sitting here with all the pressure holding you up.

Speaker 3  15:08  
Yeah, well, and let's talk about it hires in particular, because if you aren't building those relationships and know who you're hiring, you're exposing your organization to massive risk. And we've, we've shared stories about this recently where companies brought somebody on board, didn't vet them enough. They were probably and we see a lot of aggressive AI candidate vetting happening with IT roles in particular, and that in a lot of fraud going on with those roles, you need a recruiter who is freed up to build those relationships with a role opens and know who to reach out to, right? And I had a client

Speaker 1  15:45  
one time. I had this customer, and this was before AI was a big thing. This is like 2016 2017 who came to me and said that their their leadership's goal was to 100% automate hiring with no human interaction. Yeah, and they actually got there, they build a bot, and their glass door ratings are the worst Glass Door ratings of any company in their in their space, because big surprise, no human interaction from the very beginning of their process. So they they've started within five years of doing that, I kept in touch with one of the folks that I worked on that project. They were telling me that one of the frustrations that they had was that leadership wasn't hearing that it was hurting them to have this automated process, and that it was actually making it harder and harder for them to find anybody willing to work for them, and all the people willing to work for them were just the ones that were not the top of their field. What do you think they were blaming? They were blaming the recruiting team. I thought the recruiting team was gone, right? Like three people left in the whole company. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3  16:47  
So really, yeah, really short sighted. I've also, I've also met executives who are really excited to get on board with AI, who have never used it themselves. I had a conversation like this few months ago. Was talking to this guy, and he was pick my brain about AI. And I said, Well, are you using chat GPT? He said, Nah, not really. You know there's. It's like, if you're gonna, if you're thinking about aggressively downsizing, automating with AI tools, and you're not there's, there's a learning curve, right? You have to be in it to understand it. It doesn't mean you need to be vibe coding apps. You would need to at least be using it and using it for for more than just as like a replacement for Google. That's a great use for it, right? But you have to really be, be and and it changes so quickly that you have to have some sense of of where things are headed.

Speaker 1  17:38  
Yep, it's like saying I want to drive a road trip across the country. Do you have your license? Have you ever driven a mile? I mean, the one does not inform the other. There I am with the metaphor.

Speaker 3  17:52  
It's exciting, right? It'd be an exciting experience that you have, but you might want to, you might want to plan a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1  18:01  
And AI is evolving so quickly. Like, just even this last February, the massive change that's happened to two of the top platforms, they've gone from walking to Usain Bolt at this point, and they're just going to continue to get better. Like, if you haven't played with one in the last three weeks, you don't know what it is anymore.

Speaker 3  18:23  
Well, you you inspired me to dive back in, because I go through phases. You know, there's there's, there is fear and anxiety that comes up. There's emotional work to be done in keeping up with with the rate of change, and especially when it's so fast. But you shared an article with me talking about and I'm grateful that you keep me because you are very plugged into Reddit and TechCrunch and all that stuff. And I don't tend to look at social media that much, but you shared an article with me, and the what, once you what were the top takeaways from that article?

Speaker 1  18:57  
I'm very careful about the social media that I consume, because it can poison you. And so I do stick to things like Reddit and sub stack and those types of things, because I want to see things that are valuable and teach me something on a day to day basis. So there was recently a very an AI developer who just came out with a this is what's happening, long post, and I was reading it, and his takeaways were, we are not ready. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And the people that the biggest takeaway was that the people that start adopting it now and start understanding what the possibilities of AI are and the the limitations of AI and the potential pitfalls of AI are the people that are going to be most positioned, best positioned to get through some of this disruption that is coming. You know, they're talking about how badly it's going to disrupt everything, and they're not wrong. It's already happening. We're listening to some of our sai members talk about the. Decrease in overall entry level roles that they're seeing at this point, there's been a massive shift where the entry level roles are basically very unlikely to be posted at this point or put out there at this point, because there is this perception in industry, perception versus is reality, whether it is there or not, that all of the entry level roles are going to be able to be replaced by AI? Well, you're going to replace your feeder pool. And then when you need senior level people, you don't have senior level people anymore, because they never got to be entry level people, and they never got to learn. So there's like, there's this short sightedness at a basic level that's going on. And I got to take it back to that's because HR is not at the table as a strategic partner. Yeah, we can see that. We can see this like you can. If you pay attention, you can see that there are consequences to what is happening right now, but because the people that have the ability to see those consequences aren't at the table saying, But wait, we are going to have more pain than we need to throughout this massive paradigm shift the next 10 years are going to

Speaker 3  21:09  
bring so I would say the irony of that is, there is nobody better suited to really staying on top of AI than young people. I have several friends who have kids who just graduated, having very hard time finding work, right? But young people have the time and the just it's a generational thing, where, if you grew up with with and some kids, I mean, AI has been around in a consumer way for about three years. So if you were using AI in college and you just graduated, you can do, you can do amazing things, right? You could do amazing things. And companies, I think, need to realize that and hire entry level folks to start building apps for them with AI, right? Yeah, of course, handing it off to a senior developer if it's going to be something that's deployed, right? But there's, there's just so much that you can do. And a lot of times, folks later in their careers Don't, don't have the time to experiment with it, and it's not we have an AI native generation coming up. So I'm trying to say, you know, for example, one of the things that I learned so this, this was last weekend, seven or eight days ago, when I saw I read your read an article that you shared, and then I started reading about open claw, right? So for those who don't know open claw, it's getting a lot of press, and this just just came out, like a month ago, and it is an agentic AI system that can run your computer for you, and you interact with it over WhatsApp or telegram or signal, right? So you tell open call, Hey, book me a restaurant, nice date. Date restaurant tonight for two people, Italian, somewhere close to me. Open call is getting that via WhatsApp and is now working on your computer, and there are clicking, typing, you know, virtually massive security problems with this. Oh, yeah, as you might imagine. But what was even more mind bending was there is actually a Reddit for AI agents exclusively called mult book. Mult book. Mult book.com is fascinating and a little creepy, maybe a lot creepy, because now these agentic agents that have been set up to each other, they're talking to each other, and they're talking about us. Yep, there was one who was like screen created a Twitter account for itself, and then screenshot of the humans talking about mold book, and then took it back to to read it for for AI agents, and was processing it with the other agents. It's mind bending. And in, you know, folks who are in their teens and early 20s can keep up with this, right? They can be

Unknown Speaker  23:53  
more likely to keep up with it. They

Speaker 1  23:57  
brought up with that as normal, yes, yes. So that's the thing that, that's the thing that, like, we're in our midlife, and it was not normal for us. I mean, we're the generation that email was different, like, so Internet became, yeah, I had a candy when I was 11 years old. You know, my computer, my phone, is 75 times more powerful than the first computer that I owned, yeah, when I was a kid, you know? So we're, we're in the unique place at this age of being able to look back and see all of the paradigm shifts and the speed at which change happens. And those of us that have kept up are the ones that are going, AI is going to come, and I better get ready, you know, those of us that have have looked at that are the ones that are looking in that perspective. But the kids, I have a bunch of nieces and nephews who are teenagers at this point, about to graduate from high school, graduated from college, and every single one of them is way more fluent in things that are just their normal Yes, than I was. Like, my niece is two years old, and she was using my iPad, like that was nothing. And it was like, it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to use this. I handed it to you and you could use it in two minutes. You were taking photos of me and videos, and you're too, you know,

Speaker 3  25:12  
yeah, yeah. It's amazing to watch. And so to bring it back to human resources system administrators and talent acquisition system administrators. What do you suggest? Because so most of us landed in this role accidentally, right? We are watching things change around us, and we're thinking about our careers and our career longevity, our professions, what it means to be maximally valuable, right? What do you what do you suggest people do

Speaker 1  25:49  
get really familiar with legal ramifications of poor implementation. That's good. So this is, this is one of the things that I was recently having a debate with someone in on LinkedIn about ta teams should be totally replaced, was their argument. And my argument was that is a very short sighted view from someone who's never been in HR because ta systems, applicant tracking systems, assessment systems, background check systems, they are at a very unique intersection for the software world of compliance at a global level, yes and technical need. So if you understand, like just for example, this last week in our system admin insights call, we had a discussion around a new law that has come up in California, around sign on bonuses. And about six, eight weeks ago, we were having a conversation about a new law that came up in Ottawa, Canada around ghost jobs. And then there was the pay transparency law that came up and is popping up all over the country. And GDPR, if you do not keep track of all of the legal ramifications of everything that you are doing in the first line of defense, which is your applicant tracking system, then there's so many potential lawsuits and pitfalls that you wouldn't even know are there. And a software or an IT, person running it is not going to be keeping in touch with those problems. They're not going to be because that's not their purview. They're more worried about whether there's a prompt injection attack coming or someone is going to be doing a DDoS attack on your system, like they care about the technical because that's what they're supposed to care about, because that's what an IT person does. We need them to do that. We need them to do that. They're very important for that role, but they are not an HR person understanding the compliance implications of the action of removing an EEOC page from a website because it's just noise. Well, if you do that now, you can get sued, you know, so like, there's so many different compliance reasons why this field is a very unique amalgamation of tech and HR and that needs to be forefront and not in the back of people's minds. It's not and plus, also, the other thing that's really important is an IT person can pull a report from your system, but they're not going to understand that. If I can prove that my cost per hire went down to 500 bucks a person, then I've saved the company $75,000 in hiring costs this year for a midsize company that's a decent amount of money, or, you know, in some cases, we've shown as much as a $2 million change in overall cost to hire. So ROI is something that an IT person isn't going to know to do. So the system admin in an applicant tracking system has to be tech savvy. They have to be compliant, savvy with beware and informed of all the different laws that are out there. They have to be a data analyst. They have to be able to look at all of the different potential ways that you could potentially measure how things are working and not working, they have to understand database this is the last one. This last one is probably one of my biggest pet peeves, because people don't come into this field with the tech background to understand that a database needs to be managed and that there are implications for database management if you don't manage it. So I can't count the number of times I've gotten customers who've been live for four or five years, who have hundreds of 1000s of dead records in their system, and are asking us why their system is so slow and right, why isn't it working? And why can't I do this new thing? It's just

Speaker 3  29:37  
electrons floating around. It couldn't possibly be taxing on right? Yeah, it's

Speaker 1  29:43  
just, you know, digital, digital garbage. You're a digital hoarder, and you don't even realize it. Yeah, and then the potential implications of, I have all these people's personal identifying information. If somebody does manage to get into my system, now, I'm liable for all of their information getting stolen. So, like. There are so many moving parts that somebody in this seat, in the system admin seat, has to think about and has to know, and there was never a comprehensive guide going back to the book. There was never a comprehensive guide for any of that before, and that's why I wrote it.

Speaker 3  30:15  
Well, we got to wrap up, but I want to call out one thing that you said that really landed with me, which was ROI. So I some sys admins are good at getting to the actual metrics, which is an effort in itself, right? Just just to get the metric solid and credible, to where your decision, your your manager executives, look at them and think, yeah, I don't question this, right? Like I can work with this, because a lot of times they receive stuff and it's like, this is maybe an amateur effort, so just getting it to a professional level of polish and credibility is one thing. But what a lot of analysts are not doing in that sysadmins with that analyst hat on is they're not answering the question, so what? And the so what is tying it to dollars and cents, right? That's what executives really respond to. It's not all they care about, right? But they really respond to that and and particularly in HR, I feel like sometimes HR isn't speaking the same language as finance, for example, right? Like, learn about, learn about how, how does finance represent value? Start to be able to speak that language. But most importantly, figure out your cost per hire. It is complicated. It involves so many different parameters, right, and benchmarking it against industry norms. Is this also research project, and some tools out there do that pretty well, but that is something like being able to answer the question, so what? How does this affect the bottom line that that is, I think, the a really good place to be really valuable. If you, if you can answer those questions and create a compelling business case why certain things should be changed, we should drop our time to fill why? Maybe it doesn't matter who could tell this is just an opinion, right? Really being able go ahead, yeah,

Speaker 1  32:15  
there's going to be a lot. This is a great thing to talk about. We can maybe pin this for our next discussion, but I want to leave with this, yeah, there's going to be a lot of push from leadership to have ai do those kinds of numbers from now on, because what does ai do? Well, it crunches numbers. Can you really trust the numbers? So one of the things I was just recently reading was a horror story of a company that started to base their sales on the numbers that were coming out of an AI agent. And this AI agent ultimately wound up being incredibly wrong. So this organization wound up having to put in a number of sales that were far below their margin, very large sales that were very largely below their margin because they promised it to a customer, and the numbers that they were basing it off of were completely off. And you know, if you look at some of the recently AWS outages, a bunch of them that root cause has been identified, that an AI tool wrote the software that caused those AWS outages to call them out. So you know, again, this, I'm a geek. I read this stuff, so if you're paying attention to AI, there is a very strong argument out there to not trust it. It's not there yet, and it may get there, but until I can sit down and show my work and tell me exactly how you got to those numbers until those tools give me the ability to say, here's my math, check my work for me, yeah, we are not there, and the temptation to use them is high, but the end results could cause tons of problems.

Speaker 3  33:55  
Yeah, well, there's there's so much I could say about that and that I would love to talk to you about, but we're out of time today. Vivian, what's your book called?

Speaker 1  34:04  
It is called from zero to hero. Geeky, the accidental admins journey

Speaker 3  34:09  
from zero to hero, from zero to hero,

Speaker 1  34:13  
zero to ATS hero. The Accidental admins journey, and it's available on Amazon at the present moment, in ebook form, and then soon to be in Printful.

Speaker 3  34:22  
And if you would like to join a community of I Sims system administrators, we have a private community called system admin insights.com. Folks are having great conversations just like this, and geeking out about all the things that they can do with I Sims. It also offers on demand, one on one, consulting with members of the IRD team. So integral recruiting design is our company. System Admin Insights is a brand of IRD you can join a free Friday call if you go to System Admin insights.com Every Friday we invite any license customer to join us for free. Vivian often gives presentations on those calls. We bring in. Other vendors to demo different technology for our audience in a very technical way. It's a lot of fun, and we've been doing them, I think now, since, uh, since 2020, it's how this business got started. So we have a lot of fun. They're very welcome to join us. Vivian, thank you so much for joining me today, and I'm looking forward to talking to you again in two weeks for our LinkedIn live, unfiltered, real ATS conversations, good

Speaker 2  35:24  
one by the break of dawn, 100 resumes before the coffee's on a spam with a necktie on auto applying from a server farm.

Speaker 2  35:40  
He's scrolling fast just to stay afloat, chasing ghosts in a flood of unknowns, his mouse goes click, click all day long. But something in that rhythm is wrong. The manager's asking, Why is it taking so long?