Episode 5: Smarter Hiring, Faster Decisions: How AI Is Changing the Recruiting Game

Hiring can feel like a full-time job all by itself. In this episode, Sandy sits down with Sean Griffith, founder of Truffle, to talk about how AI is helping businesses cut through the hiring chaos, save time, and make smarter recruiting decisions. 

From sorting through stacks of applications to improving candidate screening, this conversation explores how AI can bring more structure and speed to the hiring process. 

Sean shares practical ways businesses can use AI to solve real hiring problems, including one-way video interviews, better candidate evaluation, and tools that help hiring teams focus on the people most worth their attention. 

This episode is packed with useful ideas for small businesses and growing teams that want to improve hiring without making it cold, robotic, or overly complicated. 

At the heart of the conversation is an important reminder: AI works best when it supports human judgment, not replaces it. If you want to hire faster, hire smarter, and still keep the people part of people operations, this episode delivers practical insight with a fresh perspective on the future of recruiting. 

Takeaways:

• Start with the hiring problems that waste the most time
• Use one-way video interviews to create consistency and flexibility
• Let AI help surface strong candidates faster
• Keep human judgment at the center of hiring decisions
• Build a hiring process that improves as your business grows 

Resources:

Truffle - Website

PlaybookAIPartners

Signature Playbook Series Course - Bonus 50% Off

Community: The Huddle Community - Live Training Sessions - Free March and April

AI Platforms - Making The Right Choice - Free

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What story have you heard lately about AI? There is so much out there. How can we keep it all straight? What is exciting are the great stories about innovations that people create with AI that you can benefit from.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome to Playbook AI Partners Podcast. The show that turns AI from overwhelming into actionable.

SPEAKER_03 0:26

Your host, Debbie Kibling, is the chief playmaker, helping business owners and teams stop tasting shiny tools and start using AI in a way that actually moves the numbers, saving time, reducing business work, and driving growth.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Each episode features industry experts and real world tactics, providing clear, business, places, simple AI workflows, and practical guardroads so you can use AI safely, with confidence, and get results. Let's run the play.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Well, hello everyone, and before we get into the show, I wanted to highlight a few things. Number one, I want to highlight the signature playbook series course. If you're looking to build that foundation, that's not necessarily 20 questions about AI, but really getting into the meat of what AI is, like understanding prompt framework, understanding the chat platforms, talking about the navigator, helping you maintain your AI with authenticity, your brand, your voice, and shaving off 15 to 20 hours a week. That's all about the navigator. Learning how to use AI with some use cases and talking about data security and governance to maintain your trust with your clients. This course is the course for you. It's currently 50% off. I'll drop a link to it. Number two, I want to highlight a free course that's out there. Yes, I said free. This course is all about chat platforms. Whether you're trying to understand Gemini or Copilot or Chat GPT, this is a free course that you can take to give you a foundational understanding of those platforms, which may be good for your business. I'll drop a link to that as well. And number three, I want to highlight coaching and community. Guys, I think in the world of AI, having that community is so incredibly important. Just to collaborate with other people, share wins, ask questions. But in the community, the Huddle, one of the things that I do is I have two live sessions a month. I did Perplexity about a week and a half ago. The playback is available if you want to better understand perplexity, use cases, how to use it, kind of a home tour, if you will, of what it looks like. And it's again, I'll drop a link to it, but there's a great playback on that. Tomorrow, April 1st, at the time of this recording, I will be talking all about the navigator. Again, helping you understand how you can shave off 15 to 20 hours in a work week and help maintain your brand, your voice. I will be getting into that tomorrow. And if you can't make it, there'll be a playback. I'm also going to talk about in the month of April, I'm going to talk about automations, really kind of getting down to what they are and how they can benefit your business. And I'm going to highlight Suno, which is a creative music platform. So what I like to do in the Huddle is to highlight an AI tool, usually two times a month. Again, in April it'll be three times because it's a longer month. But that way we can talk about a tool, not listen to 20 tools in 15 minutes, but really get to a tool to really understand it to see if it can benefit you and your business. The Huddle is free for the month of April, so feel free to join us. I'd love to have you on and get to know you and share with you this great knowledge. And also there's coaching. If you feel like, hey, I just need someone to walk me through it, make sure and check that out as well. And finally, I wanted to highlight the Winning Edge course, which is all about workflows and automations. We're working on that right now, and that will be available at the end of April. I will keep you posted. So again, make sure to check out the show notes if you're interested in learning more about any of those options. And now on with the show. Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the show Going from Zero to One in the Age of AI. While a conversation about AI can be positive or negative, I have to say I really enjoy the people I meet and learning how they have transitioned to a new opportunity and creating innovations in AI that people can benefit from. To help us get into this topic, I have Sean Griffith on the show. Sean is a longtime SaaS operator, turned founder, and the creator of Truffle, an AI-powered interview platform, helping small businesses hire faster and smarter. A marathoner and sun chaser, Sean thrives on big challenges, but after years of early morning calls and late night dashboards, he made a bold pivot leading corporate life to build his own company and reclaim time with his family. Now, as a founder and dad, Sean is on a mission to help others find a better balance between meaningful work and meaningful moments. He brings practical wisdom, startup scars, and a fresh take on what success really looks like. Welcome to the show, Sean.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Thanks so much for having me, Sandy. This is wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

I'm so excited. You've done a big pivot. So why don't you start off by telling us about what you've done and how it's led you on the journey today and why AI?

SPEAKER_02 5:23

For sure. So let me I'll roll to the, you know, the way back, I guess, if you will. So if we look back about 10 years ago, um, I was making another career transition. I I um uh started with a company called Simple Texting um very early, right? They were a startup themselves. Um I was employee number seven and uh brought in at that stage. They were starting to see some scale and I had some skills um that were uh, you know, I think uh the founders saw could really contribute to the to the growth of the organization. And that was a pretty incredible journey. So we went from seven people to about 150 people in the course of a few years. I helped to lead that organization as COO and uh and general manager. Um, and that was really wonderful, right? So, you know, sort of going through the growth of the company. And this was before AI was sort of really a thing. That company was acquired actually twice by two other companies, and so it was this really interesting sort of acquisition story. But along that journey, I ended up um running product strategy and operations for um a publicly traded company, which had offices in Australia and Sweden. And so my teams were spread globally, right? And uh, you know, I had sort of 700 people in in the various teams that I had and was getting to a stage of, you know, a little bit of burnout, right? So you're sort of um you know calls all of the time, uh, and more calls than actually doing work, right? And uh for me as sort of an operator, my happy place is um is doing work, right? It's actually seeing the results, right? Working with the teams and and I was finding that more and more difficult. And at the same time, AI sort of comes on the scene, right? Where you know, we saw and we started to institute some AI in the companies that we were working with and running, and we saw an opportunity. And the opportunity, you know, we saw was really around this hiring piece for myself and and some of my uh sort of colleagues that I was working with at the time, where you know, we were a remote company, and so we were getting, you know, a thousand applications for every role that we we posted. And if you can imagine, right, how do you possibly sort through a thousand applications trying to figure out who's really good? And so we, you know, we sort of started to talk about some ideas, right? What um is there a way to leverage AI in this sort of world go forward to help make some smarter decisions in hiring? And the businesses we had worked with previously were small businesses, right? We had 18,000 small businesses at simple texting that we worked with. And we really loved um, you know, sort of working with these smaller businesses. It's not a real opportunity there. There were some tools that existed, but they were all$30,000 a year, something that a small business just couldn't afford. Um, and so we, you know, had some experience, right, in this sort of SaaS space building products that were affordable, but still, you know, simple enough to use, but but really powerful. So that's um that's sort of the the where it all began. And AI um gave us the leverage or the the that we needed to to sort of unlock um this sorting through candidates. It was no longer just kind of a keyword filter, but you can actually go deeper. And so that's where where the AI story began, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Awesome. No, I appreciate that. So you you made the decision then to leave corporate and it sounds like saw the value in FNAI and AI and some other family reasons to say, I'm done with corporate, I'm going out on my own.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

Yeah. That's right. I think um you know I've always had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit, right? I was raised in a household where, you know, both of my parents at various times had been entrepreneurs, and it is something that I had always wanted to do. And um, not to get too ethereal, right? But I think if if if I think about, you know, uh, you know, sort of a lifetime, right? You you only have so much life to give. And for me, it was like my the perfect opportunity where I was in my family and my career to do something and really give sort of my my full life force to to something and that thing being being truffled today.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Oh, that's awesome. Before we get into that and and your startup scars, because I know you have a few of those. What do you tell people today? Because I still think I have different conversations and um my husband actually works for a global mining company. So I thought of that when you talked about the 700 people and calls and calls at all different times a day, especially if you're dealing with a company. What do you tell people today that are still kind of on the fence about AI? Just, hey, I'm gonna sit on the sidelines, this too will pass, or it's I I hear a lot of hype, but is it real? What made you just kind of say, no, it's it's time to get out, get, get away from sitting on the sidelines and jump in? What was kind of that pivotal point for you?

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Yeah, I think um look, I totally appreciate it. It's pretty easy to say, uh, oh, you know, it's not gonna happen, or it's not gonna happen to me, or it's not gonna happen right now. Uh but I think a good example was that you know, there was this essay that went around not that long ago. And for every, you know, most people have seen it, right, and really talked about this sort of like this moment in AI. This is more recent, of course. My story is a little bit older, but just anecdotally here, you know, a few days afterwards, I got on the phone with my mom, right? And and uh, she's getting a little bit older and I said, Mom, you've got to go and you've gotta, you know, download. It doesn't matter which model you're doing, but you gotta go and you gotta download it and you gotta start using it sort of today, right? And um, yeah, she called me this morning and uh she runs her own business as well, and she's like, you wouldn't believe, you know, sort of the the back and forth that I'm having, right? And the just the um the what it's opening up for her, which is really incredible. Which is all to say that I think maybe I just saw it a little earlier. Um, you know, I I was we were very early users, right, at simple texting. We did a bit of a hackathon when, you know, sort of GPT APIs first came out. And in a weekend we built sort of uh some AI tooling. And that for me was the moment where I said, wow, this is this is really interesting, and it's only going to get bigger from here. And we've seen that, and we've seen the time compression actually, you know, get smaller and smaller and smaller as these models grow and and um get more capable. I think we saw this big leap right in February with some of the new newest models being released.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Yeah. You know, I have to say, I'm also an insurance broker, so I know you're in Canada, I'm in the US, but open enrollment period is kind of like a huge big time of the year for a health insurance broker helping people get healthcare insurance. But I mean, I was like on the sidelines and I'm like, I just, you know, I'm gonna dabble, figure this out, all this good stuff. And I was busy. I mean, I really didn't have time to add something to my plate, but I was so blown away by what you can do, by the hours I can save, and really just seeing the view of it. And I've had such a pleasure, even on my healthcare podcast, I I've interviewed so many um physicians and how they're using it today in healthcare. It's absolutely mind-blowing. So I like asking that to always find out that pivotal uh point was and yay for your mom, right? That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 11:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

And so that's that's great.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

And now she's sending me pictures all the time. She's redoing her house, right? And I I get a picture saying, Hey, what do you think of this? Right? I've had I had uh GPT, right? You know, change the color of the house and add this new light in here for me. It's it's it's you know, there's sort of the sort of fun things. But you know, there's a there's a a million different things that it can do. Really capable.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Look at what you did to your mom. Now she's like running wild, right? That's right. Yeah. That's funny. Well, tell us more about Trouffled and and kind of what you learned. You mentioned having a few startup scars. I'm sure there might be some listeners kind of going on that journey or thinking about that.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've I'm, you know, this is sort of my third startup, I guess, uh that I've been a part of, right? So there's there's a few of them over the years, right? And maybe I'll I'll share a few scars and a few sort of learnings that we've taken away this time around that have made our lives a little easier at the same time. But let me just start with Truffle. So Truffle's a candidate screening platform. And uh what Truffle does is it allows recruiters or recruiting teams or even you know, sort of solo founders to design uh a recruiting process, right? Which could be taking resumes, asynchronous interviews or assessments, any combination of those to help provide some more signal on the candidates that you're interviewing, you know, before you're even really speaking with someone, which is to say um, you know, you've got a choice of a hundred candidates, which ones should you spend the most time with? The judgment is always up to the individual. We're just using AI to power some of those insights. And it's always grounded in the specific company and role, right? So it's always matching to something very specific. So we think this is giving, you know, people who don't maybe have a giant recruiting team or are inundated with GPT-generated resumes today, um, or ones from Easy Apply on LinkedIn where you're getting just, you know, a ton of people who are, you know, sort of barely qualified. It gives them new tools to help gain back some of that time and help them make better decisions. That's truffle. And maybe I'll talk about, you know, just a couple of learning opportunities. So for us, one of the things we did really well, I think, you know, in sort of starting Truffle this time around, and that was a learning from the last organization that I ran, was we didn't really have a great operating system for the organization from day one previously. But here, right, we were very intentional from the minute that we sort of said, hey, you know, we think we have something here, and this is a real business, to define our, you know, sort of what was our culture and our values, right? As we looked to, you know, engage and work with, you know, other people outside of the founding team. And then also things like our our you know, our business rhythms, what does that look like? How often are we meeting and how do we make decisions? And that is such a big unlock for a small business, right? Is to define those really early. So I think that's a, you know, sort of a key metric. It was a learning from previous and then a you know a change this time around that um that really helped. Maybe from an AI perspective, I'll I'll talk about that for a minute. You know, I think at the very beginning, we were thinking about how could we use AI in our product. But I don't know whether we did a the best possible job of using the tools ourselves. Of course, we were using GPT and Claude and some of the other models as a sort of sounding board and helping to refine some of the things that we were doing. But I would say that looks very different today, right? Where we have been sort of totally pilled on on AI, right? And and we're all using Claude code in really incredible ways that have helped to, you know, unlock the team, right? We're a pretty small team, but I think we're probably punching 10 times above our weight today because we are truly leveraging AI, not just in the product, but in you know, sort of our our the full full gamut of the business.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

No, I really appreciate those tips. And and um so so how is Truple kind of give me a scenario of how that's working uh today in terms of maybe if if you can provide right time savings. I just don't know. I mean, I didn't even know about the LinkedIn easy app, but yeah, that makes it sense because if it sense, because if it's one, super easy to do, then if that person's gonna qualify that may or may not be fully qualified. One and two, you are getting those AI written um resumes that may be fully AI and not vetted with human in the loop kind of things. Um so yeah, there's more to go through. So give me a case scenario. How's it working today? And maybe number of hours or uh reduced or save, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

That's right. So the way that the sort of the first thing that we did at Truffle was to say, you know, what's the what are what's one of the biggest problems that recruiters have today? And one of the sort of big bottlenecks that we identified in the process was around just like phone screens, right? If you can imagine you've got to sift through resumes and then you've got to do phone screens. And phone screens, I think, is a really great example because you can put some concrete numbers on it. So if you imagine you have a role and you have uh a hundred applicants and you decide that you're gonna screen 20 of those applicants, that means you've got to schedule time with those 20 applicants. So I gotta, you know, get on calendars and I gotta go back and forth and I gotta get time, right? And then I gotta pick up the phone and I gotta get on a, you know, 15, but it's probably more like a 30-minute conversation by the time you go through pleasantries and you know get some information from these folks. So that probably takes a week worth of your time, right? Just to do these phone screens for one application. And in the end of it, what do you get out of it, right? Is you're you're probably making some gut decisions on who you liked best, right? You know, hopefully as a sort of you know, well-trained recruiter, you are also bringing some rubrics or scorecards to those and you're asking some consistent questions. But I think what what we've learned is that's you know, sort of it happens sometimes and it doesn't other times. And so then you're sort of comparing apples to oranges, right, at the end when you're trying to figure out which candidate to move forward. So with Truffle, we said, hey, look, you know, we think this is a better way to do this, which is a one-way video interview, right? Where you can actually set up a list of the questions, right? You build some scoring rubrics for those questions, and you send a link out to the candidates who can complete it on their own time. So you're not tied to setting up sort of those first conversations. They take the one-way video interview, and it's not like creepy AI here, right? It is uh it is just, you know, they're getting asked a question. Um, and that's been really successful. So we have some companies who are using this sort of one-way video interview assessment. And what that gives you is you can see how they communicate. We do rank and score those candidates, right, based on the job description and and those particular questions. And then you're getting a really fair, sort of consistent view across all of the candidates as well. So in the end, what you can do is then you have maybe your top five, and then you can go, right, and you can you can reach out to them and schedule that first interview. And so you've compressed the time that it's taken to get from getting applications in your inbox to making sort of confident decisions on where you should spend more of your time. Um, and there's other one other sort of really cool feature in here, which I'll share, which is one of the things we do with AI is we take a look across that whole transcript, right? So let's say there's five questions, maybe there's 10 minutes worth of video, and we pull out sort of the three top moments from that interview and we build it into this a little candidate short, right? So when you're going through candidates, you can sort of watch these candidate shorts to get the top moments from each one. And so maybe, you know, for your best candidate, you're watching that candidate short and you're diving in and you're watching a few of the questions. And it might take you a total of 10 minutes, but you've got really good signal there. For those other candidates, you're watching the candidate short and you're sort of moving on. And so for those ones who aren't a good fit, you're spending 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes on those candidates.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Oh my God. I am so blown away. This is so awesome. So one thing I want to recap and make sure I I got this straight. So I love the fact that I don't have to get on the phone, schedule. I mean, right then and there, that that saves you a week's time. So what happens, and it's kind of easier for the candidate to sometimes people get intimidated, but now some people may have a problem with it. But I like that they can just have that one-way conversation. So it's an algorithm behind the scenes, an AI algorithm that's ranking the questions and other parameters. And it puts it like in a summary, so said HR person can review that and determine, okay, let's narrow down that hundred to the fifth 20 that we want to take to the next level, so to speak. So I mean, that is just mind-blowing, but it's the algorithm that's ranking those questions and capturing the capturing those top moments behind the scenes, right? I did I capture that correctly.

SPEAKER_02 20:18

That's yeah, that's exactly right. So, you know, you're you're putting, giving the candidate the opportunity to do it on their own time. And we're sort of scoring and ranking those candidates. And I will say that it is, it's pretty good, right? Like this is where AI sort of shines, is that with some good algorithm on the on the back end that we've put together, it can really recognize and it is taking cues from the job description, from a sort of intake that the hiring manager does to say, here's what I'm looking for, right? I I'm looking for people who you have great communication or uh who are builders, right? Rather than just doers. Or these are the things that I don't want, right? Um, we can sort of pick up on those, and that helps in the in the ranking and matching.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

What do you say to the person? I can hear this. There's a person, a friend of mine I'm I'm good friends with on LinkedIn, and he's a recruiter, and he is very big on, you know, AI, and not speaking negatively against it necessarily, but he's skeptical. So what do you say to the skeptics out there that say, yeah, but this is gonna take away some good candidates? It's just, you know, it's people to people, that's the way it is. What do you say to someone who says something like that?

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Yeah, look, I totally get it, right? I absolutely empathize with that. But I think for us, we've taken you so I think if you were to look at, you know, sort of truffled competitors out there in the market, they're probably saying things like, well, in fact, I know that they're saying things like, you know, AI can help you choose those candidates. In fact, but we've taken a really different approach to this. And what we've said is we want to give recruiters um new tools in their toolkit, right? Help them build the ultimate screening flow that has some AI in there. But ultimately, we're not making a judgment. We know that that's where the recruiter superpower really lies today, is being able to make that ultimate judgment. But what recruiters need today, right, given how candidates have changed, right, with AI, is they need a way to cut through all the noise that's out there and get some more signal. And that's really what Truffle does here is it gives recruiters the signals, your friend who may not be sort of wholly trusting AI, right? Um, the some signal from the different tools that we provide to them in this sort of customized screening flow that help them make those decisions.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah. And the way I see it, and I'm no recruiter at the end of the day, but I love what you said about, I mean, there's a lot of noise and stuff out there, but it this, it's not taking away that final interview, right? Or it's narrowing down, you know, the most qualified so that your time can be best spent in interviewing those qualified people, you know, that face-to-face or whatever executive or second-tier interview to really narrow it down to get to the right person. So it really is just a tool for that. And so I think if we embrace it by that way, because I also think even if you're doing a 30-minute call, going back to the old way and taking a week's worth of time, you could easily miss things in that too. So I think that will always happen. But if you can, you know, speed up the search, especially if you have a position that needs to be filled, I mean, it's a win-win for everyone. At least that's how I see it. So I just applaud you and your team for doing that. That's really awesome. And we'll make sure and link to TREPL as well. Cause yeah, I'm looking at it on the websites looks amazing. So that's awesome. So tell us, um, speaking of that, what kind of two two-point question? Where do you see trends going in AI? I mean, you're you're building things, you're doing this. Kind of what's on the second wave, do you in your opinion, of where AI is going?

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Yeah. Well, that's a great question. So I think what we will see is there's this, you know, idea of diffusion, I think, that we'll see in AI over the next little while, right? Which is really that some roles see it today and some roles see very little AI. And I imagine that just more and more people will start to see AI creep into sort of their their daily work, right? I think that's uh something that's happening today. And um we'll continue to see that happen. Um and the models continue to get to smarter, right? Much smarter. I don't think there's any slowing down, right? At least in the next little while, what that that looks like. And so um our sort of bet here is that in the near term, what what we need to do is give people is more people will become what we call an architect, right? So we have this concept of like a talent architect, and that is really like Truffle's ultimate customer, right? If you think about that person in in in talent recruiting that um maybe is looking a little onto the horizon and they're saying, I see some things changing here, right? And what I need is a way to orchestrate these things, right? And orchestration is really key in AI. And so, you know, some roles will change over the next little while. And I think for folks, if they are looking onto the horizon, right, it's how can you become an architect in your role, right? If if you, you know, if your role is likely to be impacted by AI, you know, sort of seriously at some point in the future. It really gives you superpowers in that case, right? Where you can build a new screening flow, which includes AI here. And all of a sudden, it's not just processing more applications, right? I think that's the sort of standard way that a lot of people think about it, but it's how do we actually get more signal out of those applications, right? And I'm talking about truffle specifically, but I think that this applies in a lot of different roles in, you know, marketing, for instance, or sales, right? If um those marketing architects or sales architects will um, you know, will be the ones who will really stand out in time by leveraging AI.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

No, that's really it's just a great perspective. I appreciate that. So what's on the horizon for um for truffle? I mean, and and and you mentioned something, so I want to go back to it, is uh who your target. I mean, you already talked about the pain point you're solving. What who's your target audience and what's on what's the next wave for truffle?

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Yeah, so uh, you know, if we really think about the the sort of evangelist for truffle, it's you know, sort of in a it's probably a smaller recruiting team, right, which could be a founder, right, who's being supported by a couple people or somebody in operations, or you know, sort of truly the the talent at maybe, you know, sort of three to five people in the in the talent and HR organization, right? That's where I think uh folks will get the most out of out of Truffle today. Very simple and easy to get up and running, right, which has always been um sort of really key to to us and what we're doing. If we think about the horizon, so we started sort of one-way video interviews. Next week we're gonna be launching some of the new assessment types. And the way that we've designed these assessments is sort of for uh to be AI proof, right? If you think of a lot of assessments that exist today, you can sort of game them with AI, right? You sort of put them into Chat GPT or you have it running in the background, it'll give you the answers. But these are designed to sit alongside one-way video interviews to give you a different sort of signal, right? One-way video interviews gives the ability to assess communication and some skills there, but it's uh either sort of like an environment fit, which is sort of more of a culture assessment or a situational job test, uh, which gives more sort of skills based or a personality test. And we've designed them in such a way that, you know, they're sort of meant to be AI proof. You can't sit with Chat GPT, you don't know what the answer should be, which gives you great signal again. So you start to partner those together, and then resume screening will come online shortly after that. And then you've got a really nice stack of sort of from the time somebody applies to the job until they've completed some assessment, which are all pretty quick to do, right? It's this does not take a lot of time for Truffles AI to sort of analyze once we've got those results in. You've got a really nice stack to be able to determine who you should go and talk to. And then if we think about what that sort of comes next, is how do we then give them better tools in that first interview, right? So can we prepare them with a guide to say, hey, here's what we know about the candidate so far, here's what you may want to dig in on, because we don't know these things that are sort of still outstanding on your job description. And then that's where the sort of judgment from the recruiter really comes into play to you know, partner with the hiring manager and and get folks moving on to the next level. So continuing to layer in sort of more AI and what we're doing, we're constantly improving our scoring models, right, to make sure that you know we're delivering truly great results for our customers.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

We didn't talk about this question, so I don't mean to put you on the spot, but you know, I think we're hearing more in the world of data security or governance, you know, keep protecting that data. Now I know you're not dealing with bank account information necessarily, but some might in some cases argue that if you're looking at a resume and it has people's address or things, that might be a concern to someone on that. And so we can't talk about AI and not discuss any data security or governance side of it. How are you addressing that where appropriate with Truffle?

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Yeah, so this is where our selection of models and how we run them is really important, right? And so, you know, for some, we're using sort of for some analysis which has no, you know, PII data, we're using publicly available models. And for other things, we're running some sort of local instances of of of models, right? Which allows us to keep things really contained and ensure that, you know, we're not sharing any sort of private information. So it's something that we've taken really serious from day one is ensuring that compliance and privacy is just baked into the way that we work.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

Good. I love hearing that. That's awesome. Well, I this has just been mind-blowing. I am so impressed with what you guys are doing and just the time savings. And I think I hear about this a lot in AI. And I know I talk about it in my community and whatnot, but just truly the time savings that you have. I mean, you talked about your family and marathons and just doing the things that you love and embracing life moments. And if you could get 15 to 20 hours back in your week and and be able to do things productive at a workplace, or just if you're a solopreneur, entrepreneur doing that, it's such value. So I really, really applaud and thank you for what you guys are doing at Truffle. But with that said, what are some um uh final tips or closing thoughts that you would leave listeners with um in the world of AI?

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that one of the biggest things for us is how we use AI internally as well as a team. Um and so that's really changed over the last little while. We've sort of leveled up our own skills here, and this has allowed us to save even more time to sort of the split, I guess you can just work more and you can get a lot more done, right? But our goal is also to figure out how we can use it to take a little bit of time back so we can sort of continue to focus on that family time and and other things. And I think that's where AI internally is really, really interesting. It's a it's a slippery slope, but I think it's also really interesting. So an example of this is you know, our our uh marketing team recently built like a release flow using Claude Code, which used to take us, you know, two days to go through. You've got to write help center articles in order to, you know, update your change log and all of these other things as a software company that you need to do. And now it's sort of completely automated with with Claude Code, right? Uh where you know it looks at our all of our help center articles, it looks at the release that we have, right, going out and actually analyzes the code and said, okay, here's what's actually being released, and it categorizes them by, you know, it's a feature or a customer or an internal only. It will build the help center articles, do the change log, update a product catalog, and it it runs in the background and it takes about 10 minutes, right? This is a real key, right? And I noticed this on your site as well, Sandy, right? Is sort of how you the the the process flow here for AI to do something like this, right? Which is, you know, we we run it, we it goes to draft, we review it, right? Yeah, we release it, um, and and that's really key. So there's still a trust but check with AI that's really important. But if you can figure out these points of leverage in your business, right, where AI can help to automate some of those tasks, it is absolute game changing. It is really, really game changing.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

I appreciate what you said. One of the things that I always try to promote and do as well, because I think what I hear so often is AI overwhelm, and I get it. I kind of heard it within the lines of what you were saying too. And that is, you know, if I always try to think about what my listeners might be thinking, it's that, okay, that sounds automation and all these things, but I'm not there. And I think with AI, it's my humble opinion, but I think with AI changing so quickly, um, we have to build that foundation of knowledge. And it doesn't have to take six years or a PhD, but I think we have to, and that's what I try to focus on to really build that knowledge and then just build on it so that people can say, okay, I want to build an automation. Okay, well, make sure you get your you know, knowledge of models, your knowledge of prompt framework, getting to that one-shot prompt, all those things that you need, I think that are so important um to get to that extra level of getting to those automations and stuff. And so I do think it's so important and and just start. That's what I always tell people. Yeah. We were all there. I mean, I will tell you this. There's not one person I interview on this podcast that says, Oh my gosh, I have 20 years of experience in AI.

SPEAKER_03 32:57

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Nobody does. Everybody's learning while the plane's flying. I mean, that's really where we're at, you know? So uh I encourage people to begin and do great things like you're doing that are really impactful to people's lives in so many ways with the great work you're doing at Truffle. So, Sean, I just want to say thank you. I mean, there are so many words of wisdom in this podcast that you've provided, and I really appreciate your time and sharing that with us. And good luck on the next wave of Truffle. And as I said, we'll make sure and link to that in the show notes.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah, that's wonderful. It was a great conversation. Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Absolutely. I enjoyed having Sean on the show. What a cool tool Truffle is. Make sure and check out Sean's website to learn more about Truffle and all the great things he is doing. In our next episode, it is me and the Mike talking all about AI enablement. I recently had a debate with someone about the fear of losing their job and the anger and frustration that comes with it. Yes, some jobs will be replaced with AI. You, however, won't be replaced unless you are letting those who understand and are using AI effectively have the upper hand. Don't let that be you. Let's talk about it, and more importantly, let's do something about it. Until next time, take action, execute, and let's run the play.