iCIMS Hacks: Spring Release & Automation Insights (3/20/26)

System Admin Insights dives into the iCIMS Spring 2026 release, covering hiring automation, interview scheduling challenges, and Frontline AI. Learn how admins are navigating API updates, complex workflows, and real-world use cases, plus tips for optimizing templates and scaling processes.

https://systemadmininsights.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:01  
All right, let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody to system admin insights. This is a place where Super isims admins get together. Kayla, did you like the hat? By the way? Would you think of my hat? Yeah, okay. All right, we, we have a super admin hat in the works. Everybody here is a super admin because you're on these calls and you're helping your orgs get the most value out of I Sims. We meet here every week at 1:30pm I want to start off today by a correction to something we brought up on last week's call. So we talked about whether job screening questions are exposed through the isims API, and we were under the impression that they were not. However, after the call, our friend John Barth from harmonize HR reached out to me. He read our newsletter, and he said, in fact, job screening questions responses are available via the API. It may it may not be documented on the dev site, but they are accessible. They have done this for a couple of customers, so the library itself cannot be accessed, but he can see the responses a candidate provided when they applied to a job. So that is your authoritative answer from John Barth of harmonize HR. John does workflow automation integrations work. He is a friend of ours. We highly recommend him. So if you'd like to know more about John Barth or reach out to him, just let me know, and I'll connect you guys. All right, next is Kathy here. So Kathy Nava wanted us to talk about interview scheduling. She hasn't joined the call yet, but I told her that we would talk about that first, because she had to break at two o'clock. So we may take a deviation from our subject matter. Kathy shows up, but for the time being, what we're going to talk about today is the i Sims spring release. So I don't know how many of us were able to attend the ISIM spring release webinar, which was yesterday morning, but I know both Caitlin and Vivian were there, and No, you weren't there. Ty was there. Yeah, okay, I'm full of mistakes today. So Caitlin and Ty were both there on the call, and Caitlin wrote something up in circle here. Let me share my screen. There we go. All right, so she posted in circle about the spring 2026, release, and there was a lot of interesting stuff in here. And Caitlin, maybe I'll just hand it over to you. What? What do you what? What intrigued you? What questions do you have? And hopefully some other folks on the call here were able to attend too. So even if you weren't, if you have questions you want to chime in, please feel free Sure.

Speaker 2  2:43  
So primarily, I noticed that there were some things that came up in chat that were either answered on the call or answered in the with a link to an article, and that article also was taken into consideration with the questions that were dropped in the chat during the webinar yesterday. So I have amalgamated all of that information into one place for you guys, so that if you didn't attend, or you didn't scroll through the chat while you were on there, or the Q and A, I'm sorry it wasn't chat that you could get some takeaways from it. Figure out what's happening in terms of new updates, how you set them up, questions that were asked, responses that were given, all of that feeds this post here. So first, I guess I'll just ask Who else attended. I saw some of you were in there. I recognize some names popping around. But if you attended, what did you think?

Unknown Speaker  3:51  
Typing?

Unknown Speaker  3:58  
Did anybody attend?

Speaker 3  4:00  
Were the only ones who attended was this, the one from yesterday, the call from yesterday. I wanted to attend that one, but I had another meeting and I missed it, so I'm hoping that's recorded so I can see it.

Speaker 2  4:12  
Yes, it should have been. They said they'd send out the transcript and stuff today. Okay, good, great.

Speaker 1  4:19  
So Nina said that she attended, and she said that she tried to follow Caitlin's instructions on self service for the automation wasn't able to get to menus to select trigger based configurations. Is this potentially because her company hasn't been released yet? Yes.

Speaker 2  4:33  
So the automation piece, they said, will drop tomorrow, I believe, conveniently on a Saturday. So I think that one it's in test sites right now. So check your test site if you're not in your live if it's not available in your live site,

Unknown Speaker  4:51  
but that should be rolling out. Thank you.

Speaker 4  4:57  
You're welcome. Please. Yeah, go ahead. Cheryl, tomorrow is the wave four. Go live date for all of the changes. It's probably why it's the last wave also. So I would assume

Unknown Speaker  5:10  
that's probably why they're doing a hiring automation.

Speaker 4  5:15  
Got it. Thank you, Laura, she has it now. So never mind you.

Speaker 1  5:20  
It. So Lauren said she did, but she didn't understand anything until the end for the auto workflow part,

Speaker 5  5:29  
yeah, I think that we like when it comes to the AI portion. I a lot of that went over my head, but was really excited, and we'll have to re watch and kind of show Christine so that we can put together that, you know, the auto workflow step. So when somebody accepts the offer, that was, like, the most exciting part for me,

Speaker 1  5:52  
got it, yeah, we had some conversation last week where we talked about workflow automation, and Greg had a lot of great contribution. So you might want me to check out the conversation, the video recording from last week that has some more information there. Let's see Patrick said I attended with my TA team. They were very excited about frontline AI. I'm excited about frontline AI, too, Patrick, you want to say some more about that.

Speaker 6  6:21  
Yeah, they were excited because of the clients that we like to target. Usually they're at work, so when it's something that they could be doing after work, and having that AI kind of help source with the candidate and everything they were, you know, they like the demonstration they saw yesterday. Unfortunately, you know, we were like, do we have enough hiring volume right now to support that kind of engagement? So even though it's a very cool application, they're trying to add everything comes with a cost. So that's something we're going to have to look at.

Speaker 1  6:57  
Yeah, did they give any indication of what type of hiring volume is advisable to get the most value out of this tool?

Speaker 6  7:05  
I asked the question, and they didn't really respond to it. I've kind of done my own independent research online, and you know, if you're looking at a minimum of 1000 candidates a month, it might be perfect for a company like that, okay? Plus where we have, maybe, I don't know, a couple 100 a month, because of our industry that we're in, this may not be something that's a wise investment for us.

Speaker 1  7:34  
Got it. Got it. I'm curious if any of the larger orgs on the call or are looking at that. You

Speaker 7  7:46  
Alex. This is Terry. We are not looking at it right now. They did a Eric Connors and his team did a demo for us a few months ago, and while it may have improved since that demo, it would only allow our managers in the restaurant to take them up, you know, through the workflow to the offer, then they would have to go into the office to complete the offer and initiate the onboarding from that point. So, I mean, I know they're just bolted it on, and they may work on it to make it better, but it just didn't make any sense for our managers have to use to need to use two systems.

Unknown Speaker  8:26  
Got it? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay.

Speaker 1  8:31  
Michelle said that she has workflow automation. Now you're in an earlier wave, Michelle, I forget if you were on the conversation last week. What were your impressions so far?

Speaker 8  8:42  
Hey, Alex, can you hear me? Okay, yep. Okay, so it was tricky to figure out the build. Right off the bat, the key thing I'm using it for interview scheduling, and the key thing I found there that was tricky is you have to go to the templates in interview scheduling, and there's a toggle or something to check that allows the template to be visible to hiring automation. So I was stuck going, why can't I see my template? Until I discovered that that little trick, and then after that, it wasn't too difficult. What I'm trying to get clarity on right now is I have three different recruiters who all use different templates, and one of them uses teams, which this hiring automation won't work if you're using teams or if you're using video, so it could be zoom either, but the other two don't. And so I'm just trying to figure out, can the status that we have selected for everyone to use currently, can I build the hiring automation in such a way that everyone can still use the same status, but they're doing different things, and I think it's possible. I actually have a call scheduled with I sense later today, but fun to explore.

Speaker 1  10:00  
Yeah, very cool. Thanks for sharing that. So going back to the I just got the name of it, the AI, apply high volume. What's it called? Frontline, frontline. Ai, thank you, frontline. Ai, so Liam. Said we are big enough to support the volume mentioned, but a company prefers to watch and wait adopters of AI, so we're holding off on it for now. That is. Amanda says she's in the same boat, yep, okay. Cheryl says we haven't found a good use case for hiring automation due to having way too many auto launch enter its criteria and event notifications. Oh, well, but we're excited for future updates. That makes sense.

Speaker 2  10:46  
Cheryl, one thing I did see around that on the call that I thought this group would find interesting is that people were asking if there was a way to get your event notifications pulled into there so that you could see your event notifications and then decide which you wanted to replace with hiring automation. And we were told no, but they've also said that they're intended to work together. So if you do have your event notifications documented, there may be an opportunity here for you to get some of those transferred over to the automation so that you can control it yourself. So I thought that was a neat call out.

Speaker 1  11:27  
And I'm curious anybody who's playing around with workflow automation, what's the feedback mechanism? Are you supposed to talk to your CSM? Or do they have a way to submit feature requests?

Speaker 9  11:44  
We had our CSM actually just kind of put out a request on our behalf, a feature request. You know, I'm sure if we can go, I know that I've gone with you could always submit it through support as well. I mean, it was nice to see on their roadmap that they look like they want to continue investing in something like hiring automation. And you know, they're seeing also frontline AI exactly, even though we don't, we're not eligible for it in terms of volume. It's good to know that this, they're seeing this as the starting point, not just here. It's a one and done. And you know, we'll come back to when we get to it. I do the one thing I will, like, you know, I totally get Caitlin's, you know, and ISIS approach, saying, Look, this is not replacement for event notification and higher automation does really work well with statuses. I mean, it does really work well as long as you understand, you know the nuance that items up front, I think, though, the interesting thing is, we're seeing more and more customers trying to find workarounds, either through CxM, through the campaign manager, through this. And I think the bigger message here isn't a feature issue. It's, it's question of saying it looks like the business requirements for many of the clients are growing, what the what can be done with event notifications? And I think that's the bigger message to isims is, well, that's the message your clients are sending to right? We'd love to see what's on your roadmap to help address that? And I think that Kayla, you just mentioned about the whole idea of, you know, people being able to, hopefully be able to map it to hiring automation so that they can get better control. That's the message. Customers want more control the limitations that exist today, even if they're for good reason. They're not, they're not, they're no longer acceptable. To many clients are seeing the growing pains and work. You know, I'm curious to see how I Sims is going to pivot and respond to that in the coming months. So we want to give it. I want to give an honest opportunity to do that, but I hope they're hearing their customers loud and clear that they that's what they want, something around the flexibility of the hiring automation, or campaigns, or CxM with the power event notifications without, of course, nuking their platforms. Performance. You know, where is that excited? See where that's will that end up? Hopefully you'll hear something sometime this calendar year.

Speaker 1  14:21  
Thanks for that, Greg. All right, let's talk about interview scheduling. Um, before we talk about the spring release interview scheduling, Kathy, are you on the line here? I think I saw you join Yeah. Kathy, you want to unmute and talk about what your kind of assistance you're looking for? Yes.

Speaker 3  14:40  
Um, so it's just really a couple of things with the interview scheduler. I think one is kind of around the notification templates and how to use that. I see, I know that people do use them for different scenarios, different like, based on different locations. Or do. Type of interview that that you know that is required. So I just kind of want to get my head around how that works. And then also for scheduling complex like interviews, like, say, we have a panel interview, and it requires multiple people, not necessarily the hiring managers, but maybe, like some, sometimes there's participants of the hiring managers team that they want them to interview, you know, potential teammates. So just kind of understanding, like, how would that work? Because it seems to be where the recruiter has to be added to the interview invite, even if it's for, you know, the hiring manager in their team, just so they could be, just so they can have that view on the outlook calendar, like, what managers having, what interview? In order to kind of keep track of all that, they always have to put themselves as part of the interview, or even though they're not interviewing at that moment.

Unknown Speaker  16:03  
And then I know that there was another thing around

Speaker 3  16:07  
the time the end the interview time, like, I'm sorry, the availability, preference time. And I know that one of the things was around setting up the time to like a UTC instead of like putting in America slash New York, because when the time changes, it's going it's not going to adjust the time, but you want to do it more like a UTC type of Time, time zone and, and I'm looking in isoms, and when you look under the Like the time zone drop down, there's all GMT or time zone preferences for the US, and I guess for like, say, for example, San Francisco, California. When I was like googling it, it looked it showed that for like, Pacific, for Los Angeles, California, time zone, you want to use UTC dash eight or minus eight. But I don't see the UTC in the isoms. I see GTM and other things, just not that. So things like that. We just kind of want to know more information about how to handle complex interviews. I see in my research, some people use the new ice interview scheduler for more of a basic, you know, recruiter to candidate type of one on one sessions, but then they go to the legacy interview to do more of their complex interview schedulers, like when you get more in depth with adding more people to it. And we're not using both. We're just using, we're just going to use the one, the new interview scheduler. So there's a lot of different random questions that we would like to kind of see what other people are doing. And we did ask, I did ask the ISOM, our Isom CSM about it, like, if we can maybe connect with another isoms customer that they could, you know, connect us with, so we could just kind of see how they're doing it and just kind of ask them questions and but I know they were a little hesitant to kind of share that which I get. But you know, that's why I wanted to bring you here to see if anybody you know was willing to share their experience and maybe kind of show us, like certain you know how to do certain things that we are still just trying to wrap our head around.

Speaker 1  18:19  
Yeah, absolutely. So. Angela, you have your hand up. You're muted.

Speaker 10  18:28  
Angela, can you hear me now? Yes, thank you, Alex. Firstly, I want to second Amanda's comment about the time zone. I think if you remove the ability for candidates to select that and it's just automated, you'll have much better luck with your time zone challenges with interview scheduling. I'm in one organization that has really complex interview, highly skilled, technical, regulated positions. We're not doing a high volume, but the process is really complicated and regulated we are doing, you know, genetic scientists, or, you know, just different very positions that have rounds and rounds of interviews with large panels, and they're doing presentations, and they're, you know, hybrid where the candidate may be in person, but the interview panel isn't all on site, or we need To have virtual interviewers, but an on site conference room, and just a really complex process. He ended up doing was building out, you know, we put it in our intake tab, but you could have an interview scheduling tab in I Sims. And what we did is we did people picker fields for, you know, final interviewer one, final interview two, final interviewer three, we did options for like, if you needed to have extended slots, you could put that in that intake tab, so that, you know, we it's different for every organization, right? We have interview scheduler team so we've got specific people that are doing interview scheduling all the time, so they know exactly how this works, where it gets. Tricky is those required additional interviewers and optional interviewers, because you don't want to do people pickers for every single person that's involved in a slot. So then we have, like, an additional field that's just like, who else is in slot one, who else is in slot two, and it gives a little bit extra. But what we also did is for on site and virtual interviews, we use a teams link, because even if a virtual there may be a virtual candidate, but they need to, we have someone on site who needs to use a conference room to utilize that. So we wanted to have a teams link, whether it was on site or virtual. So we've had a lot of unique workarounds just for our complexities with our organization. And I'd be happy to connect with you to discuss because we've, we've been through all the questions.

Speaker 3  20:55  
Yeah, that would be great. We really appreciate it. I would definitely, you know, connect with you. I know that there's a couple of others on on here that also are going through the same thing as well. So maybe we can connect with you. That would be great.

Speaker 10  21:12  
And on the on the notifications front, you know, if you're just starting with interview scheduling, being really strategic about how you're using naming conventions can make a lot of difference in terms of how, the ease of use for the messaging, just the consistency between templates and naming conventions for, you know, what's your stage, what's your status, you know, what are you calling it? So that when you put that into that template, it all still makes sense in the messaging, because those things don't sound like they would have a big impact, but, but they do. There's more flexibility now than there was when we started using it in terms of really customizing

Unknown Speaker  21:54  
the different variables and

Speaker 10  21:57  
getting additional information in there, but having an additional tab and I Sims for all the features that we wanted, made all the difference for us.

Speaker 3  22:06  
Okay, okay, yes, I will, you know, definitely reach back out to you so we can connect further. I really appreciate this insight is really helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 1  22:19  
All right, great. Thank you. Let's go back to our spring release. So we've got interview scheduling in here. Multi calendar support, RSVP, visibility, text messaging, etc. Anything here stand out as useful to folks on the call? No.

Speaker 1  22:46  
And if not, there were also updates to the AI sourcing agent, CxM only, you know, I wanted to mention so we've been vetting AI fraud prevention tools. And one of the things that came up during one of our demos was we asked about the opt out feature that isims provides and whether that would persist across the third party tool to also respect that. And the answer was that they hadn't thought of that yet. So this is just a call out if you're looking at AI fraud prevention tools, make sure that whatever the candidate is seeing in the isims UI is also hooked up to what that third party tool is doing, just to call out for you. All right, there's also some talk about CxM. Anything else that folks want to talk about regarding the spring release today,

Speaker 2  23:39  
I have a follow up question, sure. So I was a little confused, because I read the notes before I went to the webinar, and one of the things around the AI sourcing agent, specifically, which is different from frontline AI, which is a separate, full time additional model module, they mentioned, the notes say that it's disabled by default and requires you to agree to the AI addendum. But then on the call yesterday, they mentioned that it was generally enabled by default. So does anybody, is anybody using that currently, who also uses CxM? Or have you seen that? Or is that your takeaway also? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  24:31  
I going once, going twice,

Unknown Speaker  24:36  
okay, might be worth a follow up.

Unknown Speaker  24:39  
All right, thanks. Caitlin,

Speaker 1  24:42  
all right, so with that, we're going to transition over to our members submitted calls, but first, for the first time in six years, I forgot to kick off one of these with gratitude. So I'd like to share my gratitude for the IRD team. We. Who has just been incredibly creative. We are sort of in stealth mode now working on a product, you know. So we started off with the maturity assessment, which I shared on LinkedIn, and that is available for share this over here. Where do we go? Am I sharing? There we go. So we have this maturity assessment that is available for anybody to take. You can find it on the IRD website. If you click this button here, run the isims maturity assessment will take you there. The cool thing about this, oh, that's our admin view. The cool thing about this is, not only do you get an assessment of where your current instance stands in comparison to other companies, but there was also a cost per hire calculator that was informed by feedback from this community. Cheryl, you in particular, had some great call outs there that I incorporated into this tool. And there was also a model for a tool for modeling the costs of leaving for another vendor. And I learned something very interesting today in a conversation I had with a friend of the industry, we were talking about the Big Four consulting companies and the influence that they have on vendor selection, and it would appear that big four consulting Companies proactively encourage their clients to go to one stop shop solutions. Why? Because it's more business for them. Now, this, this is, this is hypothetical. It's my best guess, but it is the case that they do proactively recommend that companies move away from bespoke solutions. We all know that the bespoke solutions do so much more than the bolted on solutions that the full suite solutions give you, right. But when these when these consulting companies are talking to leadership, you can't get away from the fact that getting your foot in the door with a huge org that is moving everything to work day opens up many, many more revenue streams for that consulting company. So that is a dynamic that I had never thought of, that I thought folks might find interesting. What else do we have gratitude? Caitlin says she's grateful that she could open all of her windows. Today, I actually ate lunch outside sitting in a sunbeam. It was so nice. Vivian says grateful to work somewhere that allows me to be creative daily we're grateful that you're that you're here doing that. Patrick says, grateful my March Madness bracket is still perfect.

Unknown Speaker  27:29  
We're rooting for you, Patrick, we are rooting for you.

Speaker 1  27:33  
All right, so let's jump on over to our user submitted our members submitted questions. Call questions. All right. Liam, I believe you're on the call. Liam, Liam, you had a question about importing candidates, new hires, from an acquisition. Liam, you want to talk us

Speaker 11  27:54  
through this? Sure. I think we actually kind of kind of got our answer, and I appreciate those who primed him, chimed in on it, provided context. We had a thought of something we wanted to do, and I know Cheryl kind of echoed what, what she thought would work as well. So we have an acquisition coming, and it's going to be about 6000 employees. We found out they're trying to not have everyone apply into the system, because I think that's just much, much too high of volume for them to kind of track and chase down all the people, ensuring their applications got in and everything. So the request came to us to import all the candidates in which we can it sounds like we can do as a person, import first and then extract them, so we get the system IDs out of the system, and then we can do a recruiting workflow, import to then append them into the requisitions. And our big question was, Is this something that's viable, or is there a more efficient way to do it, or any pitfalls that we should be kind of aware of with that? And then we've also found a way. We're calling it a workflow bridge, but we've modified entrance criteria, at least in the test site for now, so that they can kind of bypass some of the steps, since we're also going to upload their information directly into HRIS. It's kind of a weird way to go about it, but hrs has certain requirements for this, and TA has certain requirements for this, so we're kind of trying to pencil everything in together, I guess

Speaker 12  29:35  
got it now, I know you have your hand up, sure. So I was just going to volunteer I do the so I'm in dental, and we acquire or partner with dental practices on a regular basis. So I have multiple of these a month. And exactly what Cheryl said I do a person, import, a job, import, and then a recruiting workflow, import that populates my offer templates. So I'm actually training an ad. Men on Monday, I can record that session and share it with you, or I'd be happy to send you the invite if you just want to see it. We've kind of gotten it down to a science now, and of course, you'll have to set up all your import files, but be happy to let you join that call if you'd like.

Speaker 11  30:19  
Yeah, that or the recording. I think either one would be, would be great. I'm happy to join if it coincides with availability and everything. We've we've gotten comfortable with the import process. We've done a lot of correcting source information and other little things, using person imports and things like that. But I haven't done one to generate system IDs, extract and re implement before, so it sounds good in theory, but any any tips or tricks or watching it happen would be great, and I

Speaker 12  30:50  
appreciate it good. I'll send to the invite and then the recording as well.

Unknown Speaker  30:55  
Great. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  30:58  
Any other thoughts on Liam's question?

Speaker 2  31:00  
Hey, Alex, I got a Benny cameo.

Speaker 1  31:04  
You go to Benny cam, Hey, there we go. All right, windows are open. Only one black and white cat per call, I guess Fiona. Fiona still recovering emotionally from a vet visit yesterday, so she's hiding under the bed.

Unknown Speaker  31:19  
All right, let's go over to our next question here,

Unknown Speaker  31:25  
Vivian, you had a question.

Speaker 13  31:30  
So, no, it wasn't a question. It was just last week I posted that this was the follow up from Christine Hill's question from last week's call.

Unknown Speaker  31:38  
Okay, great, great.

Unknown Speaker  31:42  
So this was regarding apply framework.

Speaker 14  31:47  
Thank you for doing that. I wouldn't say I'm any happy. It's Christine. I'm not happy about what they've done. I have to tell you, I keep learning about with the ability with items taking away that toggle yes or no, and every if you've built the Apply framework to be public on that, my external careers portal, I have jobs that were not originally included when we recently launched it. So now it messed up everything to there's not the right apply flow. I didn't think to think about it because they weren't originally pushed to the Apply network. They were toggled off, but them taking that away has made some extra work for me, so I'll get through it well.

Speaker 13  32:33  
So have you entered a case specifically about it?

Unknown Speaker  32:38  
I have not yet

Speaker 14  32:42  
said that you going to be oh, maybe that was you. Yeah, you sent it to

Speaker 13  32:46  
me, yeah. So do that and give me the case number, because the person who demoed the Apply frameworks two weeks ago, Jason bad shelter, is the product manager for it. Okay, I'll send him the case and just say, hey, FYI, we're receiving this kind of feedback.

Speaker 14  32:58  
Yeah, for sure, it's just stuff we didn't like you just didn't even know to think about. So, so, yeah, I will do that. I've not had a chance to do that

Speaker 1  33:11  
yet. All right, thanks, Vivian. And we'll open the floor in a second, but first we have a wheel to spin. We are giving away a free copy of From zero to ATS hero by Vivian Larson with Alex Marcus. This book is everything that I wish I had known when I got my first job as Assistant Administrator. It is Vivian's entire career in book form, and it covers so much great material, from the basics through the more complicated things. It is ATS agnostic. So you know, if you have a friend who might be interested in this, who works with a different system, feel free to recommend this. But I'm going to hand the screen share over to Caitlin, and Caitlin's going to spin that wheel.

Speaker 1  34:11  
And today's copy goes to Liam, Oh, you missed it by a hair. Sorry. Michelle Braunschweig, congratulations.

Unknown Speaker  34:20  
I already have a copy,

Unknown Speaker  34:23  
yeah, let's give it or spin again.

Speaker 1  34:25  
So spin it again, yeah, okay, spin it again.

Speaker 1  34:37  
This time it is Cordell Ratner from AARP, congratulations, Cordell, you will get a copy, and Caitlin will reach out to you and connect these. Get your address, hope you

Unknown Speaker  34:48  
enjoy it. Thank you. Tried to check the list.

Speaker 1  34:55  
So So Michelle, you said you love Vivian's house, building analogies. I'm going. Glad to hear that.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
Yes, I flipped a couple houses. Can you tell?

Speaker 8  35:03  
Yeah, for sure? No, they're great. It's lovely just to have that perspective that anybody can relate to.

Speaker 1  35:10  
Well, Vivian is a master of metaphor. I found and and metaphors. You know, it's sometimes it's hard to to talk to, to leadership. I found, at least in my case, because I really pride myself on being thorough. And I would show up to meetings, and I would come with a prepared with just a extremely thorough accounting of what I had done to fix what for him was probably very simple problem. And if I had come with metaphors instead, I think I would have made him far less angry and frustrated with me. So, you know, I encourage you, as you, if you've got the book you're reading through it, I encourage you not just to benefit from the way that Vivian uses metaphor in the book, but also think about how you can talk about your work using metaphor. Because we right here. This is a space for us to get extremely technical. This is the audience, but there are many other audiences that we need to communicate with, and metaphor is a great tool for doing that. All right, so the floor is now open for any questions. Who else has a question today?

Speaker 9  36:16  
I actually have a quick question. I posted a question. To be fair, it was only just, just a couple of hours ago. Vivian, I was sharing an update about the ramifications of what we have to look out for with the EU AI act. And I noticed, like, you know, these are the things we have to watch out for. One of the ones that point that were that came out were the record retention requirement, where we need to have, we need to be able to produce the logs, if, if, if requested. And I was curious, is that something that we could just ask, I Sims to be able to ask, you know, to request access to as a report, or is that something like, well, we would reach out to customer support and say, Hey, I've got a the EU asking, Can you, you know, can you produce based on their requirement the logs, and I pass it on to you. I mean, I'm curious to tell if you know anything, or heard anything about what I since is planning to do about the requirement.

Speaker 13  37:13  
So I don't know that this is on their radar. I have not heard any of them that I spoken to recently mention it. In fact, I've brought it to a couple of the product team members attention, just as, hey, FYI, after I read that. So I don't know that they have an A current process like they did with GDPR. GDPR, there was a lot more lead time with GDPR before GDPR became law. GDPR actually gave about two years worth of notice before it became the law of the land, this kind of just popped up out of nowhere. So I'm not 100% sure any company is really ready to do be compliant with it. And I think it was Christine was basically pointing out that it's in it doesn't comply with GDPR. So if you're asking me to keep a log of all my people's data? Yeah, but I'm told to delete people's data. They conflict with one another, so yeah, I don't 100% know the answer to your question. I do know that getting logs from your database instance, because that had happened at one point with a previous customer of mine, is it's a cloud hosting level question. So it's not something this simple. Help Desk is going to be able to help you with you're going to have to go through your account rep, and you're going to have to go through the account rep is going to have to go through a couple of different chains internally to fill that request for you. So currently, I don't know that they're prepared to handle that. If anybody knows has had a conversation with one of them, other, with somebody at I Sims, one of their account reps, that says, otherwise, please let me know. I just personally don't know,

Speaker 9  38:48  
yeah, all that. All I've got him is pretty much, you know, the usual links to their AI KB and but our cyber security Max is saying a similar question just about a about a month and a half ago as well. When we're doing, you know, coming internal AI audit, they're like, Hey, so what about the logs? And I was like, you know, that's the vendor. We don't have access to that. I said, Well, you know, because they they were beginning to count a match, what was happening with the EUI, ai, ai act? And I was like, we're just gonna, probably have to wait here what the vendor is gonna say, because I haven't heard anything yet? Yeah, yeah. It's possible. Maybe over the summer, we might get some more information, they might start doing something similar to what they did with the GDPR. But like you said, it kind of, I think for a lot of people, this is the, this is the first time they're hearing

Speaker 13  39:33  
about it, and it isn't getting a lot of so if the it's the same as GD is GDPR, a lot of times, I will talk to customers, and they will say, I don't operate in Europe. It doesn't affect me, but GDPR does affect you, because if somebody from Europe applies to you, they are protected by the laws in their country, and they can sue you if you're not compliant to those laws. So there, there are a couple of precedent cases set. From GDPR, specifically where they have gone after other other places that don't normally operate, or the job itself isn't in the country that the person is applying from, and the precedent has applied that that country is their law protects the person living in the country. So there have been a couple of different cases that have set some precedent for that that I've read about, and I'm concerned that this one's going to be the same, where a lot of the compliance laws in the United States that have started to pop up have been modeled after GDPR. Individual states will most likely be the ones that pick up AI regulation faster than the federal government. So I'm suspecting companies will do the same thing they did with GDPR, which is start to comply in advance, because it's easier. It's just simpler for them to follow one landmark rule that most people will model themselves after than it is to try to whack a mole all the different individual state rules that will come up state laws that will come up around it. So I'll be curious to see where this one is going to go. But the key thing I really want to call out, and we were going to talk about this in next week's call, but the key thing that I really want to call out in that EU AI regulation is that it is not your vendors rules. Your vendor is not going to protect you. So as far as this, the rule itself is concerned, your vendors compliance to the rule is not legally a compliance, compliance on your behalf, you, as the person who is using the software still need to be able to document your own compliance. So in a lot of GDPR cases, people assume that the vendor, the SaaS company, is compliant with GDPR, which means that they're compliant with GDPR, but in this case, they very specifically call out in this law that that is not the case. So it's just something to get ahead of. It came into effect in February of this past year, so

Unknown Speaker  42:05  
sounds like it's clear as mud. Yeah.

Speaker 1  42:12  
All right, thanks, Greg. Who else has a question today?

Unknown Speaker  42:28  
The floor is open. No question too big or too small. Angela, go ahead. You are muted.

Speaker 10  42:38  
I keep putting my hand down and not unmuting myself. Thank you, Alex. So I've seen some great posts on the forum about confidential postings, and we set up a confidential portal. It's not syncing or on job distribution candidates. Can only get it to it to the link. What our executive team is still struggling with the company name being in the URL, and I know that that can't be customized. I'm just curious. We want the job description to be visible to candidates with a link. We're also considering using this for M and A activities. I'm just curious if anyone has a really successful work around for having it be truly confidential.

Speaker 13  43:26  
Who told you you can't take the company name out of the URL?

Speaker 10  43:29  
I Sims, they said it's hard coded into the portal

Unknown Speaker  43:32  
URL. Somebody doesn't know what they're talking about.

Speaker 10  43:35  
It can be done. Oh, that's refreshing to know. So,

Speaker 13  43:38  
so there's a caveat to that. Ask them to talk to Chris Young, if he's still there, I hope he's still there, but he was the original guru who knew absolutely everything's been there for 20 years. There is a way to do a masked URL, but the problem with doing masked URLs is that browsers and search engines see them as a redirect, and it often pings your like security settings, and a lot of times it won't go to it. So it is not best practice, and it's one of those cases where they're advised not to do it because, in general, it's not a good idea. But in this kind of a use case for confidential when you're only sharing the requisition to individual, purpose driven folks. It's not something that should be stopped. It's in, I still remember the system that I could change it in, so it's the extension is the problem. But think about your career sites. Your career sites, URL can be whatever you call it. So if you've got career sites, career sites, you can actually name what the career sites URL is going to be for the initial landing page. It's the same concept, so you would create a masked URL in that case.

Speaker 10  44:52  
Okay, and can you share a little bit more about that security concern? Because that is a high touch factor for my org.

Speaker 13  44:59  
Well, so. It would not if you're not publicly posting the link anywhere, it's not really a problem. But if you were trying to do this, let's say you have four different entities, and so this is why i Since generally says no to this question. If you were trying to do four different entities and you wanted each one to have their own individual name of the company in the URL. The problem with that is it's in order to do it, they have to create a redirect. And most pop up blockers, most virus software, most of your your general security measures that most Windows systems take, basically view redirects as a potential threat.

Speaker 10  45:41  
So thank you, Vivian, yeah, and I'm so glad I asked Thank you.

Speaker 1  45:44  
So Chris is still there. His LinkedIn profile is such a flex URL is Cy and I Sims, and he's been there for 27 years and three months.

Unknown Speaker  45:56  
Really think Shane pap. But even

Speaker 1  45:58  
cooler, I don't know if that's possible. I hope it isn't. Listening to this. Chris is a really cool dude. Shane, if you're listening, that was Vivian's opinion, not mine. He's one of the

Speaker 13  46:09  
original programmers. I'll just tell it's a small little anecdotal story. And if you know anything about coding, a lot of coders will note that make notes in the tree of why they made a change. It's just like common practice in coding, you can always tell a Chris Young quote because it's snarky as can be, like, this is the stupidest piece of code I've ever seen. Why did anyone write like, Cool dude, funny. So anyway,

Unknown Speaker  46:36  
all right, thanks for the question. Angela,

Speaker 2  46:39  
Alex posted screenshots, but it's in a thread. It's not on the main

Speaker 1  46:43  
Oh, it did. Oh, I don't even know how to use this thing. My bad. Okay, there we go. All right, who else has a question today?

Speaker 1  47:01  
Floor is open. No question. Too big or too small. Greg, can I, you know, you mentioned something. I was talking about the consulting firms. Thing you said you had some experience seeing that. Can you elaborate? Are you at Liberty too?

Speaker 9  47:15  
I can share that without getting too much into it. Is, yeah, they look I don't like the saying goes, You Don't hate the player. You hate the game, right? There they are doing this because they can make money. If they could make money by doing bespoken systems, they would do it. And there are some clients who there are some custom companies that do that, especially they specialize in that. But when it comes to something like work day, UK G when these company cornerstone, when they these are companies that do that market all in one products, right? So some of it has to do with, they spend a lot, a lot training their people to get certified to be able to do this, right? So they want the return on investment, but they also see, like you said, they want to be able to make it a lot easier to generate income. And the best way is something like is to is to sell that one stop. Because the beautiful thing with the One Stop, if they're from their point of view, is you, you're probably not going to have enough people who are certified to know that or know everything about it, and so you're going to need somebody who specializes first in doing the consulting, to do the scoping, then you need the implementation specialists. Those implementation specialists going to typically add on some type of training module, some training components that you want support. Oh, we can get that support too. That's an added fee there. It's just a it's just kind of a racket from the and the most amazing thing is, you know, a lot of larger companies plopping down between, you know, a few $100,000 for a consulting engagement to do this. They see it as, just as a simple has, you know, cost just has to be part of the gig, right? But I've seen some constant gigs where the actual cost has been in, you know, high six figures. We're not talking about the actual platform, just a consulting gig that, and they know there's gonna be more of that coming down the pipe. When we've seen other companies that have nothing to do with ATS, they're brought in, you know, the company that you're you want to purchase the product, they'll say, hey, we have a third party as well that we work with. So they make, sometimes a little bit on the side in their internal referral and that partnership. So everyone's getting a piece of it. It's a sad thing, because leaders, it's just they see it as it's a lot easier to go with that one, that one stop. They don't see the long term cost. I think if someone actually did all the math, I think they might be surprised. But what's interesting is the consultants also come with their own version of kind of a tool that you built, where they show the opposite. How the One Stop actually works better. And then it comes down to, well, whose tool do we go with? Who has the quote more experience in the industry? If I hear Gartner quoted one more time, I'm going to scream. You hear you hear that note, though? And there's wrong with Gartner. Gartner is a very good company to take, to look at. But they're not the only one. So you see a lot of these companies doing this, and unfortunately, they just take, kind of take advantage of of the fact that people are don't have the bandwidth or nor desire to kind of dig into this. And they go with one of these companies as well. You're the consultant, you tell us, and then they go with it, you know, go with it. And these consultants are also pretty well trained to handle to handle CFO, CTO CIOs, so they know what to say, how to in, how to say it in such a way that even if it's not in the company's best interest, they'll still go with it. You name the solution, you name them, they can, they can do that. And again, that's their job. That's their job. They're going to do that unless you give them straight up. You tell them you're not interested in one stop. You're here to figure out the best solution you want them to consider, a bespoke solution. They're more likely, they're more likely, going to go with the one stop that they're certified in and that they can make the most money long term on. That's just my personal pain and insights, not an NYU opinion.

Speaker 1  51:23  
Well, so part of the strategy around building out this tool has been that Claude code gives us the ability to build a bridge between deep, vertical, domain specific expertise and presenting that in a way that is credible on a on a level that would rival the Big Four consulting firms right previously you so you have all these different companies out there that have this domain expertise, not just IRD, but companies that specialize in Aperture and workday and all these different things. And so you have that information sort of trapped inside smaller orgs who've developed that deep expertise, but getting that information in the right place, in the right format, so that it's actually taken seriously. That's the nut that we're trying to crack. So I'm looking forward to sharing this more with with the community as it evolves.

Speaker 9  52:13  
I mean, I would say to God speed. I would I just, I think they need more they definitely need more tools out there, like yours out there to kind of frame the frame the conversation, and I think also it could save companies hundreds of $1,000 in just consulting fees. I mean, it's amazing what consultants, again, nothing wrong with with consultants, but it's amazing what, it's almost what I've seen some there's a consultant that that's there to help and guide and advise the client, and then there are those who will advise. But sometimes, Alex, your team have been industry long enough where you've seen it happen, where they don't always have the client's best interest, and when they don't have a client's best interest, that's we see, almost semi predatory approaches that you kind of question, hey, you seem to be going from the you seem to be crossing that line, from being a consultant and advisor to something else entirely. So it makes consultants in general look bad when they do that, and then it gives them bad name when you see that kind of practice, Yeah,

Speaker 1  53:22  
agreed, and it's and it's why we don't take referral revenue, and that's a decision made a few years ago, and it there's, there's been repercussions for that, right? But from my perspective, there's no way that we can be credible to our community and to our customers if we're if those sort of forces are at play, all right, so we have a few more minutes left. Got five minutes if anybody else has a question today?

Unknown Speaker  53:50  
No question too big or small, we covered a lot of territory today,

Unknown Speaker  53:58  
going once.

Speaker 1  54:02  
Oh, actually. Natalie Stevens, I noticed this is your first time on a Friday call. Would you care to introduce yourself? No pressure, but we'd love to welcome you.

Unknown Speaker  54:18  
Natalie, are you there? Okay,

Speaker 1  54:22  
well, maybe next time. All right, with that, thank you. Everybody. Have a restful and restorative weekend. So good to see you here as always, we'll be back next week at 1:30pm Eastern, and we'll see you soon. Bye.