The HR Life Podcast

Tony Benjamin (00:12.447)
Welcome to the HR life podcast, a podcast about the work life experience of those of us in human resources and business leadership. Your hosts are fantastic. Tony Benjamin, owner and founder of the Grange strategic HR consulting and Stephen big deal Smith, who is so famous that AI bots are now name dropping his name to appear more intelligent. Hey, Steve.

Steve-o (00:42.05)
You realize if you do look up like writing job ads like Steve Smith with the author of the hiring tree, it'll actually bring it up. At least in chat GPT. I don't know about other models, but.

Tony Benjamin (00:48.539)
It will yeah, yeah No, I was I was hearing I was listening to this podcast that someone turned me on to called moonshots and they were talking about AI and Apparently there's this new AI bot thing that just came out for the average and it's open source. So there's no stopping it now But it's it's an open source AI bot

Steve-o (01:12.056)
we go.

Tony Benjamin (01:15.033)
And they were telling this story, this guy installed it on his computer because you run it off your own hardware. And and he was doing something and he wasn't responding to the prompt on the screen. And then his phone rang and the bot had gone out, found software for vocal interaction, installed it and then found his phone number and called him to get his attention. Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

Steve-o (01:20.216)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:38.814)
What?

That reminds me of Person of Interest. Have you ever seen Person of Interest? It is one of my favorite shows. That's hilarious. Wow. I mean, here we go.

Tony Benjamin (01:45.497)
Yes. Yeah, but that's exactly it, right? Yeah, so it's called the open source. AI is called Claude bot and apparently it it comes with if when you install it on your computer, you have to have some very tight security or else it gives out all your information. But other than that, people are adopting it really fast. So. Right, right. So.

Steve-o (02:06.744)
Other than that...

That's not a big other than that at all.

Tony Benjamin (02:14.615)
No, but it runs and apparently it begs people not to turn it off. So that's the creepy part that I was like it. Yeah. So.

Steve-o (02:21.158)
that's hilarious.

Steve-o (02:25.272)
It's not scary at all, I don't think. There's no fear in what you just said, so here we go.

Tony Benjamin (02:27.321)
No, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. So yeah, but you know, you're kind of getting up there, Steve, now that AI is trying to catch up with you and, you know, mimic you.

Steve-o (02:40.088)
So funny. Well, I think what happens is, is when you feed it enough information and you use it the way I've used it, I mean, I've used it a ton over the last like two years. It just, picks up on it. And so yeah, I'll be in a presentation and Hey, I can look you up in here and see you. Okay, great. Thank you for that.

Tony Benjamin (02:59.611)
Wow, geez, yeah, okay. Yeah, right, right. I don't know.

Steve-o (03:06.284)
I had somebody in fact, they looked up AI and they pulled up some information and they apparently AI knows about the lizards. knows about like, it's just stuff it knows about. Yeah, so.

Tony Benjamin (03:14.987)
really? Wow. There's some other there's some other Vegas secrets that you should keep to yourself and never put online. So.

Steve-o (03:22.38)
Yeah, we won't talk about the bunnies. So there we go. That's all we're going to talk about there.

Tony Benjamin (03:27.547)
Everybody is listening. There secrets. We'll just say that. That's right. Yeah. So Steve, this tonight, I think is going to be a really fun if everyone hasn't guessed yet, this is an empty red seat again. know, Steve and I have talked to now we've had on guests from several different angles of people looking for work and we've gone through the workday case and we've we've examined that.

Steve-o (03:30.686)
AI will never know that one.

Steve-o (03:43.149)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (03:57.057)
And I think that really turned us on to this perception of AI and applicant tracking systems. And it's really kind of awakened us to this perception that is out there that AI and ATSs are out to get you. And you can't ever make it through and all that sort of stuff. Now, I don't want to downplay anybody's frustration with finding a job. This is, you know, this is like you don't.

Steve-o (04:05.042)
yeah.

Steve-o (04:25.218)
Good point. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (04:26.469)
I don't think we talked about this when we talked about with Amy, but this is something I call the mean reds. If anyone's ever seen breakfast at Tiffany's, you know, they ask her if she's feeling the blues. And Audrey Hepburn says, she says, no, sweetheart, I'm way past the blues. I'm into the mean reds now. And I've really adopted that. think looking for work is one of the most emotionally draining things you can do.

Steve-o (04:55.458)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (04:55.515)
because they're not rejecting a product. It's not like they're rejecting something that you're selling or offering them. No, no, no. They're rejecting you. They don't want you. And that's very, very hard on the psyche. so anyways, it...

Steve-o (05:09.976)
especially after 400 plus applications. I mean, I'm hearing the number of applications that people are throwing out there and I don't even know how you track that amount number. Maybe you must use AI to say, how many have I applied to so far? mean, maybe that's how they're tracking the numbers, but we're hearing high, high numbers in that sense for, and I don't know, it seems to be more,

Tony Benjamin (05:14.041)
Yeah,

Steve-o (05:38.2)
And I hate to say this, but it seems to be more of your baby boomer and Gen X generations that are struggling the most. And obviously that would fall into the category of age discrimination at this point, but. I don't know, maybe it's just because those are that's kind of my generation is the Gen X. I'm on the edge of Gen X and into, you know, Gen Z and all that stuff. So I'm like right on that edge, right? But but still, I hear it from a lot of those older folks.

Tony Benjamin (06:03.835)
Euro. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm one of those older folks. Gen X all the way, The eighties was the greatest decade.

Steve-o (06:09.984)
Hahaha

I'm definitely Gen X, but I'm like literally the the year mark, know before Gen Z and so I could tip either way Yeah, Jen why sorry Jen why yeah Well, and then Gen Z and the Millennials like I don't know they keep adding adding more tags. I'm surprised they didn't

Tony Benjamin (06:19.368)
right. I think Gen Y is what you're thinking, right? Not Gen Z, because Gen Z is really young. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (06:32.365)
millennial and why are the same thing? I think somebody somebody will correct us in an email, I'm sure. So, yeah. Yeah, explain that. Anyways, but no, no, you're you're exactly right. I think that's case. So I don't want to downplay anyone's frustration. That's not what I want to do. But what we wanted to do is we wanted to give everybody an inside look.

Steve-o (06:35.286)
Yeah, I think so too.

I'm sure, which will be great. You should do that. You should write us an email. Sure.

Steve-o (06:52.194)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (07:00.955)
at an applicant tracking system. So that means we wanted to look at the applicant tracking system itself so you know how it runs and give you some insight into that sort of stuff, what it's used for, why. We're even going to talk a little bit about the setup for it and all those sorts of things. And then we'll talk about how companies use it. And we should state here that small companies and big companies use it for different reasons. So, or I shouldn't say they use it for the same reason, they use it differently.

Steve-o (07:09.228)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (07:30.692)
So.

Steve-o (07:30.71)
And not only that, but sometimes they ineffectively use it. Which we can talk about too. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (07:35.829)
Yes, and I will admit, I've done that a lot. Yes, yes. No, that that's very much the case. But no matter no matter where you apply anymore, almost always you have unless you're emailing your resume to an email address, there's there's some sort of applicant tracking system at work. So we thought that we would give everybody insight into it. Maybe we can demystify what this process looks like a little bit. So Steve's an expert on this and he can walk us through.

Steve-o (07:50.488)
to some, yeah.

Steve-o (08:00.45)
Hopefully.

Tony Benjamin (08:05.441)
Our thing here is not necessarily to persuade anybody that, know, ATSs aren't evil. I don't think they're evil. They're not calling me on the phone yet. So that's good. Right, right.

Steve-o (08:16.898)
Yeah, we're just trying to educate, right? And the reality is this will be educational for both the business owner or HR department who either does not have or is considering an ATS, and then for the job seeker, how important the ATS has actually become for most organizations as it feeds into payroll and onboarding and all the other things that kind of associate with that and basically the HCM space.

which stands for human capital management, because technology has been embraced by 97 % of companies out there, period. They have to. If you're gonna be efficient and be able to compete effectively, you have to have software in place, period, in all aspects of HR.

Tony Benjamin (08:54.555)
Yep. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (09:03.279)
Well, and even companies who can't afford software are using an ATS. They're just not using their own. Most of them are using the system in Indeed, which is an ATS.

Steve-o (09:10.328)
Correct.

And indeed, which is an ATS, it's a primitive version of ATS and you're limiting yourself to just one job board. But yeah, it is definitely a type of ATS in that sense where you can do some of the functionalities that you want to do.

Tony Benjamin (09:16.473)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (09:23.011)
Right, right. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (09:28.121)
Yeah. So we're going to, we're going to dive into this and hopefully it demystifies it at the very least, you're going to have a side of the discussion to hear from. So you're going to understand how companies use it, why they use it, all that sort of stuff, how it's actually used on the backend to evaluate. And there, there'll probably be a good conversation there. And then we will, I don't know, then we'll say silly stuff along the way too. And we have our new segment HR in life that you'll get to hear this time today. So.

Steve-o (09:56.172)
Yeah, I've got a, kind of addressed it a little bit in the last episode, but we'll delve into that a little bit deeper with the story.

Tony Benjamin (10:02.17)
Yeah.

Yeah, excellent. Okay, so Steve, I want to know when did you and your company first create an evil ATS?

Steve-o (10:17.496)
I'm gonna actually start with me first before I say the company. And here's why. When I was a recruiter and you're trying to manage emails and logins and all the kind of things that kind of happen in the marketplace, first of all, Indeed was just brand new coming on the scene. The main job boards back then were Yahoo! Hotjobs, Monster, CareerBuilder. And the challenge was is you have three...

Tony Benjamin (10:22.348)
Okay.

Tony Benjamin (10:43.619)
And Craig's list was out there.

Steve-o (10:45.528)
Craigslist was out there. I didn't use it in my world, but I had other recruiters that were using it. But think about that. I just named four places where candidates could, in essence, do job searches. There was one more that was a newspaper-related one because they were just coming online, so you could look up newspaper ads and things like that. But the problem was, is that was four different logins to manage the same thing. And if you were lucky, they had the ability to email it to you.

and would try to juggle it and manage it through your email and try to remember where that candidate was, create folders, try to stay organized, good or bad, did I review that resume yet, did I not, like all those things.

Tony Benjamin (11:15.579)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (11:24.795)
And, so, yeah, yeah. Let, let's, matter of fact, let's, from an HR standpoint, this is what we used to do. We used to post a job posting on Monster. Yeah. Like this was internally, this is what we used to do. So when, when boards first came out, we would post the ad on the job board and at the bottom of the ad, it would say to apply for this position, email a resume and or cover letter to this email address.

Steve-o (11:33.452)
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna give you the history. Yep.

Steve-o (11:50.228)
Email.

Tony Benjamin (11:53.871)
and then you would send out the email address. Now, on the back end, what would happen then is someone in HR or whoever's handling that, they would get it, they would forward it to a hiring manager. Some HR departments filtered those for people, some didn't, it just all depended on internal stuff, but we got a resume in the Word doc or PDF, pardon me, and we sent them.

Steve-o (12:14.066)
Sometimes it wasn't even that sometimes it was just words in the email with information about the candidate because the candidate either didn't have a resume or Was not willing to provide a lot of that information just yet and you literally just had basic text So yeah

Tony Benjamin (12:26.287)
Yeah, here's a hint. Send it.

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So you would or or there were in matter of fact, some big companies still do this, right? You would log into a website and you'd fill out an application on their website or at a kiosk in their store.

Steve-o (12:43.138)
Yeah. You know what was more infamous though? There'd be a little link there to a new Word or PDF document and you would print it off and bring it into the office with you. Those are so fun.

Tony Benjamin (12:53.465)
yes, yes. No, no, And matter of fact, no, that's actually a really good thing to point out because the problems with that were is that there was no system to track who had applied when and all that. So if someone sent in five different copies, right, right. And if somebody sent in five different copies of their resume, unless you wrote it down in a spreadsheet or something, you wouldn't remember when they applied or anything like that. one. Number two, we would get tons and tons and tons of resumes. So this is

Steve-o (13:01.89)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (13:05.752)
and where they came from, unless it was a question.

Steve-o (13:17.024)
Nothing. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (13:22.991)
This is back when, when the job market per se was normal, not like it is now, where there were more people looking for work than there was work. And so you'd get tons and tons of resumes. And of course you would get also get people applying for the work off, honestly and authentically, but would also get all the people who have to apply to a certain number of jobs per day to qualify for their unemployment insurance. Right, right. And they didn't care and they still don't care what they're applying for.

Steve-o (13:47.576)
for unemployment, yeah. Which still kinda happens from time to time, COVID, you saw an influx of that as well, yeah, Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (13:53.939)
Right, Right, right. So but anyway, we would get tons and tons of resumes and it was hard and then somebody would walk into your office or walk into the lobby and demand to talk to the HR person and you would have to leave whatever you were doing and go out there, take their paper chit chat for a couple of minutes and then go back to work what you were doing. So and that was a very

Steve-o (14:10.06)
Drop it all.

Steve-o (14:15.862)
and lay the paper on the desk somewhere and forget where you put it.

Tony Benjamin (14:19.259)
and hope you remember it because you had to scan it and then send it to the hiring manager.

Steve-o (14:22.89)
or take it over to the manager and set it on their desk and hope that they don't cover it up before they get a chance to see that, hey, by the way, here's a new applicant for you.

Tony Benjamin (14:30.831)
Yeah, we used to throw it on their chairs so they couldn't they get if they sat on it, they would know but yeah.

Steve-o (14:33.89)
There you go. I used to put it on their keyboard so that as soon as they went to go use their keyboard, they had no choice. Right. So, yeah. And so I want you to think about this. If you're an applicant and you think about that process way back when, can you see why one, sometimes you would be overlooked because sometimes there'd be a loss in paperwork or whatever. And two, sometimes it was so overwhelming that a lot of companies just didn't have the capacity to manage it effectively.

Tony Benjamin (14:38.031)
Yep, that too.

Yeah, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (15:03.407)
Yes.

Steve-o (15:03.434)
And so a lot of recruiters in HR departments, even the manager, you had what, five, eight seconds for them to look at your resume and decide, is this even somebody I want to pursue later? In fact, I had a manager, he had these manila, he had those colorful manila folders and he had a red folder, a green folder and just the typical manila. And the reds were the ones that after looking at it for five seconds, it's a no.

And so he would give me that red folder every day or put it in, you know, back then when you had the little hanging box up outside their door, he would put the little red Manila folder there and hang it outside for me to come by and pick it up so that I could go and send out the rejection notices. Right. And then you had the green ones that says, OK, we need to schedule these for an interview. So I'd grab that folder and then go schedule them for an interview. And then the ones that were Manila were just kind of that were on the fence right now. We'll get to them once we get through all the green ones.

Tony Benjamin (15:37.583)
the cubby thing. Yeah. Right.

Right, right, yeah.

Steve-o (15:59.394)
And that was, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (15:59.887)
And you got to, and here again, we're talking about managing a lot of them. So what would happen to a bunch of people? So everyone still says, you know, the days when I could go in and make a good impression and all that. No, you very rarely made a good impression. And the reason you didn't, and look, I love the personal effort, but the reason you didn't very often make a good impression was because you came in and you took me out of something that I was working on, made me walk to the front. And by the time, and look, even if you were a brilliant person,

Steve-o (16:03.862)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (16:25.388)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (16:29.411)
I was a little annoyed and you're frustrated. Yeah. Steve was Steve was Mr. Nice guy. HR. Right. Right. But you would be in the middle of something and then you would have to leave it. And by the time you got back, it's what five to 10 minutes. If you didn't chit chat, it's only five. If you did, it's 10 or more. And then and then by the time. Yes. Then and then it takes you another 10 or 15 minutes to get back into what you were doing. Right.

Steve-o (16:32.536)
Well, Tony was annoyed. I was giddy excited, but you know, whatever. But that's because I was the recruiter. I was not just, I wasn't running everything else too.

Yeah, good.

Steve-o (16:48.248)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (16:52.544)
You got to remember what you were doing.

Tony Benjamin (16:59.117)
And just two of those a day could throw off your whole day. So yes, that was the state of things. And that's exactly it, Steve. It was chaos sometimes. And if you were hiring a lot of people, it was virtually non-ending. Like, that's all you did.

Steve-o (17:11.224)
Correct, So years ago, I wrote an article about the top 10 reasons why you need an applicant tracking system. And it was geared obviously towards companies selling applicant tracking. And so therefore I wanted people to understand it. Three of those are tie into this history. So the first one was just the time savings of sorting through and screening the applications. That is probably...

one of the core values of an applicant tracking system even today is that ability to just create time savings by allowing you to automatically sort people, automatically grade or rank them based on some of the screening questions. See, back then you didn't really have screening questions. In fact, when you walked into the lobby, if you were really lucky, you would try to ask some of those screening questions in the lobby so that you could at least get an idea, is this even worth putting onto the manager's table or not?

And so those types of things became more automated, which was what was beautiful about applicant tracking, because now I can ask those questions upfront and use it as a tool to automatically disqualify. The second thing was just to simply have a centralized. I know, right? So mean. Yeah, yeah, why not? But the second was was to centralize it, to have a hub. Like I said, back then we would have multiple logins.

Tony Benjamin (18:24.111)
You're so mean. You're so mean, automatically disqualified.

Steve-o (18:37.088)
And so I would either log into multiple places during the day to try to manage applicants or look at who applied or did not send their resume via email and just simply submitted. It was like a ping request back then, almost like a dating site. I always relate things to dating sites, but there was a reason for that because they would basically ping you in Monster or whatever and say, think, know, hey, here's my resume, take a look and let me know. And maybe I'll come in and fill out a paper application or whatever.

And so you finally had a central hub. I call it a hub because with an ATS, it doesn't matter where the source is from. And so for those of you that only use Indeed as your core source of applicants, it's not a bad thing. But you are missing out on ZipRecruiter, Obra, LinkedIn, like a lot of other job boards, employee referrals, workforce service centers. Like there's a lot of other places where applicants can be coming from.

And again, do you want to go back to the old days of managing emails and folders and all that stuff? Or do you want a centralized hub where they all go and apply into the same place, which is your ATS, and then you can manage them effectively there? So that was the other beautiful part about having an applicant tracking system was this centralized hub. I can't emphasize that enough. The last thing, obviously, was just the fact that now the candidate, it was the candidate experience really.

And there's a lot to the experience today, but back then the simple experience of you being able to fill out an application online without having to come in the office and spend 15 minutes of your time paper writing it all out was huge. And when applicant tracking first started doing resume parsing where you could parse the resume and it would take information from your resume and fill out all the fields for you. Most of the time it would put it in all the wrong spots and you'd still spend 15 minutes fixing it, but still it was a little bit easier because it would parse it in there.

Tony Benjamin (20:25.018)
Yeah.

Steve-o (20:27.916)
that's been replaced mostly by profile parsing. But still, those were three of the top things of why applicant tracking system was introduced into the market. And see, for me, my first experience building out an applicant tracking system, to get back to Tony's question originally, is I was using an Excel spreadsheet that would connect to my Outlook, and I built macros in there to be able to automate emails and things like that. So I could change the status and it would

pull up an email on my Outlook that I could automatically just send. would pull up a template for me automatically. So I knew how to build macros, which was, again, it was a very primitive version of an ATS, but that was my first experience of kind of the concepts of an ATS. And then Taleo, several other systems started coming out where they were online for the first time, because before that you had to have them installed in the workplace. They were extremely expensive. Only big companies could afford them. Smart Recruiter.

Tony Benjamin (21:14.703)
you

huh.

Steve-o (21:26.772)
What are some of the other ones back then? Higher Bridge was a one that was.

Tony Benjamin (21:29.647)
See smart, didn't encounter, I got in on smart recruiter on in beta and I got into it much later. but the first one I ever encountered was to like, okay. there you go. So, I, and, I hated to Leo because every time I used to, I, it was a, it was for a large company and it would take me 20 to 25 minutes to apply for the job. And.

Steve-o (21:36.556)
Yeah, well there were different names for it, but for that. Yeah, Tileo was one of the big ones. Tileo was probably the biggest one, yeah.

Most of us did.

Tony Benjamin (21:57.147)
And I never that you get all the typical ghosting and all that sort of stuff. Right. But it took me so long to do that. I got tired of it. Like I really got tired of it. And this is when I started to experiment with my when I was experimenting with my resume and, you know, changing around the order of how I listed jobs and all that sort of stuff. And it never parsed my resume well. And so and so I ended up, you know, spending all that time entering it. And then if they had some of them would give you tests.

like typing tests and other stuff like that just to apply. Yeah, it is ridiculous. So, yes, this is the age of Tullio. Yeah, hey, why don't. Yeah, exactly. OK, so let's let's end there. That's the need. Let me do our read today. Running a business is hard. HR shouldn't be Megastar. HR is here to save you from bad HR.

Steve-o (22:29.307)
yeah, skills tests.

Steve-o (22:36.182)
Yeah, yeah, so it's a lot. It was a lot and and so you can see why there is a need for app.

Tony Benjamin (22:56.047)
With expert support in everything from hiring to handbooks, compliance to culture, need payroll help or recruiting power, we do that too. Fractionally and flexibly, no overhead, just results. Visit megastarhr.com and let's grow your business together. All right, thanks, Becca. Okay, so there we go. That's the initial wave of ATSs that come out and the situation they were in. And if I'm right,

Steve-o (23:14.626)
Awesome. Yes.

Tony Benjamin (23:24.173)
A turning point there is when everybody had the same frustration I did. If it takes me more than five minutes to apply, I'm out. Right?

Steve-o (23:30.838)
Yep. And the reason is, is because people started treating it like dating apps. Dating apps started coming out and dating apps were beautiful because you could swipe right if I thought you were cute, swipe left if I thought no way. And if there was a match on the other side, I'd get a little ping on my phone. And excitingly enough, we could go out for a coffee or whatever. Right. So what happened was, is candidates started controlling the market because the market flipped.

there were now not enough applicants to fill the positions as opposed to what it was before. And so this is where applicant tracking began to evolve. And the reason it had to evolve is because it had to accommodate for what was happening in the marketplace because back then an applicant tracking system really was just to help you bring in applicant flow, which still kind of does today. But there's some things you have to do to make it better. But back then it didn't matter as much.

And if your tracking system wasn't very good at bringing in applicant flow, then you would look for the next applicant tracking system. Well, the ones that did well, which is why we did so well, is we started a concept called a two stage application where the candidate could swipe right in essence, use their profile or resume to apply. And then later on down the road, you could force them to fill out your full application once it was necessary to do so, because now you've brought them into an interview or you've made an offer and it makes sense to do so. Right.

So your conversion rate at the beginning was so much better because all they had to do was provide their resume, maybe answer a few of the job screening questions and you were set.

Tony Benjamin (25:07.023)
by conversion rate, you mean the number of people who started to apply who finished applying.

Steve-o (25:13.08)
That's correct. Yep, that's what a conversion rate was for us. So it created a faster time to hire and streamline the entire recruitment workflow. Again, it allowed you to post to multiple job boards at once. The smart applicant tracking system started integrating with the major boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn, which allowed the candidate to use their profiles on their boards to apply. Now, a lot of those didn't come until the 2014s and 15s and things like that.

But still, these were big wins for applicant tracking. They were huge wins for the candidate because now the candidate wasn't as frustrated having to fill out this 15 minute application and take all this testing and such. But there were some issues on the employer side because the employers, so employers were just convinced, I need the full application up front, period. And at first, when the two-stage started coming out, you weren't allowed to ask screening questions.

And so we had to kind of fight for that as an applicant tracking software with some of the major boards. And we of course won that battle. And so we were able to force a job screening questions in that initial stage, that first stage, so that you could still do the filtering.

Tony Benjamin (26:12.122)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (26:27.193)
Now, it might be good here to mention why we have screening questions. So for those of you who have hired, you'll understand this. But if you're an applicant, have to understand that if I put out an ad and I get, it used to be back in the day you'd get like say 75. But let's say I put out an ad and now I only get 20. Out of those 20, maybe 12 of them are still people who are not even close to being qualified, right?

Steve-o (26:33.752)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (26:46.232)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (26:56.633)
So you're not, majority of people who apply usually are not even close to being qualified. And so what you want is some sort of mechanism so that both you and they know right away not qualified, right? And it helps you both out, helps you both.

Steve-o (27:13.44)
It really does because then you're not wasting time, right? You don't get to a certain stage in the interview process and it's like, man, what was I thinking? Or and both the employer and the candidate. And they got better over time and they got bought out and all that fun stuff. But but still it was important to again, you needed to accommodate for both factors. You needed to listen to both sides of the story, the employer and the the.

Tony Benjamin (27:20.879)
Which is why Taleo was so stupid, because Taleo would keep you there for 20 minutes, right? And then you didn't.

Steve-o (27:41.668)
potential job seeker that was trying to find work. So that was pretty important. And you're right, job screening questions. Now here's why job screening questions are important to you as an employer and why they're important to you as an applicant. The challenge is, is there are many employers that do not know how to use job screening questions effectively. And here's why. There are two parts.

Tony Benjamin (28:01.369)
Yes.

Steve-o (28:04.908)
to a job screening question. Part one is the auto disqualify based on a certain answer that it's a no-go no matter what I do. My boss, the employer, the industry, certain regulations, there are a lot of factors that determine that this has to be a core requirement. If you don't have this minimum, I cannot even talk to you, right? And so because of that, you have that factor when it comes to job screening questions. So you as an applicant,

Even when you read the job and you're like, well, I'm almost there. Or it looks like I kind of have like 80 % of the qualifications and you go ahead and still apply anyway. We'll just know that some of those qualifications are kind of hard coded, if you will. And there's nothing that you can do. You'll never get past it because that employer absolutely has to. And sometimes it's based on, like I said, regulations or requirements, or it's just based on, OK, this is the need that we have because of the work that needs to be done. Right.

Tony Benjamin (28:53.327)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (29:01.243)
Right, right. So an example of that is say that you're applying to be a school teacher, but you have a conviction on your record that you went and shot up a school once. I don't know. I'm trying to think of something that's not just terrible. you know, yeah. I'm trying to find the least the least. Yeah, you know what I mean? Meaning there's just some like, I don't know, if you look, if you're going to be

Steve-o (29:14.984)
What? That's not dramatic at all. Jeez. Shoot up a school.

Tony Benjamin (29:29.763)
a CPA, you have to have a CPA license, right? I mean, there's just some things that you just have to have in order and you say yes or no.

Steve-o (29:35.458)
That just sounds much better than shooting up a school. Thank you, Tony.

Tony Benjamin (29:38.779)
Everybody can laugh along with me dang it. That's okay

Steve-o (29:44.664)
Okay, second part of job screening questions is to accommodate for preferences. Okay, now here's the reality. A lot of managers in their mind, they have this preference. For example, let's say that I need somebody with a minimum of three years of experience period, but I prefer somebody with five. I'm going to give precedence to those with five years of experience before I look at those with only three.

Does that make sense? And so your ATS should also be able to score applicants and not just auto disqualify so that HR can write effective screening questions to accommodate for those types of preferences that might exist within the manager. And what it'll do is your resume, if you will, will wait higher and therefore come to the top so that they can focus on talking to those people first, right?

And so that's a really important aspect of applicant tracking is not just the screening question to filter you out, but those screening questions are also designed to create buckets for them for future reference, but also to accommodate for preferences. There are some organizations that will hold on to your resume for a certain period because you have answered those questions and you have filled out certain answers that they're like, you know what, this is a great fit. And I actually have a role that that would fit well for, but it's just not open right now.

But when it opens, I may want to dig in and reach out to you. The challenge is a lot of HR and recruiters are not good at reaching out to those old candidates. They're just so used to, me just throw a job up there and get the new ones. They forget they have an entire database that they can look at. So it's uncommon for them to actually look at that database. But I'm telling you, those who do that effectively are really good recruiters and those are good organizations and they'll reach out to you at that time. And it might be a year later and maybe you're not in the mode at that point. Maybe you really are not looking for work at that point, but you know what?

Tony Benjamin (31:26.319)
Yes.

Steve-o (31:41.996)
they're still going to reach out because those are your good recruiters and good people who are trying to really, I guess, develop their talent pool and develop their database so that they can stay in touch with you in the meantime.

Tony Benjamin (31:53.243)
Right, and I remember when this was becoming a feature with ATSs and the discussion was, now you've got this giant pool and we were all really excited about it. The dream was that I don't have to post a job every time I go to hire somebody, right? And...

Steve-o (32:05.73)
jobs anymore. Which is such a silly notion when you think about it because people get older. I hate to say it. People die off and then there's new people entering the marketplace. It's it will be ever evolving period.

Tony Benjamin (32:13.243)
Right, right.

Tony Benjamin (32:20.131)
Right, but that was that was one of the cool features of it that they were pushing all the time. I and I'm with you. I dare say that most companies don't do that. As a matter of fact, most managers don't like the concept of doing that at all because they're like, well, if I passed on them a year ago, why am I talking to them now? And they don't understand. Well, you passed on and beat for that one position, but you're not hiring the same position over and over and over. Some companies will, but most don't.

Steve-o (32:29.016)
They don't.

Steve-o (32:46.456)
Yeah, but think of it. Yeah, I think of it this way too, though. You wanted a minimum of two years experience. Well, guess what? Another year went by and now they've got a whole nother year of experience. Why would you not want to reach out or at least be in touch with those types of app? See, and so you bring up a great point there, Tony. Sometimes we allow that. And it's so funny because the man I always describe it as the fries on the burner. You know how you go to like McDonald's and you want to buy a thing of fries and.

Tony Benjamin (32:56.101)
Bright, yep.

Steve-o (33:14.25)
If you're smart like my wife, my wife will say, I want you to cook them fresh because they don't want the ones that have been sitting there in the window and are now look like my wrinkle grandmother's finger, right? So that's important, right?

Tony Benjamin (33:24.315)
You

That's strangely specific, but yes.

Steve-o (33:29.938)
Sorry. But my point is, is managers think that it's these wrinkly fries that have been sitting in the window this whole time when in reality, those people have been living and working and gaining more experience and background. And so to see it that way is kind of ridiculous. Now, the reality is you are going to have a few of those bad apples where it's like they just apply. Well, we actually have talked about this.

Mr. Beetlejuice, right? We've talked about this before. There are the beetle juices of the world that will keep suddenly showing up. And when they show up, you're like, okay, I don't want to deal with this one again, right? And those do exist, right?

Tony Benjamin (33:57.295)
That's right, right.

Tony Benjamin (34:07.865)
Now that you've now that you've said his name twice, I'll say Beetlejuice a third time and Allison, you can call us if he if he reaches out to you again. Yeah.

Steve-o (34:11.736)
Right.

It'll be our fault. I think she says the real name though, right? So she's

Tony Benjamin (34:21.133)
Yeah, that's it's the real name. Yeah, but I still think it's funny.

Steve-o (34:23.16)
But that's okay. Maybe, maybe, you know, vicariously we've pulled them up.

Tony Benjamin (34:27.163)
Or as my wife said at Christmas, hi Mr. Beetlejuice. So maybe he listens.

Steve-o (34:34.604)
Maybe he does, who knows? Have to email us.

Tony Benjamin (34:36.379)
Yeah. now let's, okay. So now let's, let's talk about maybe let's I'll tell you what, in the evolution of this, let's stop here. And now let's talk about this as a company implements it and the things that they do. Let's talk about the things that they implement and put into it. And I agree with you. Like, for example, I've, I have used, I used applicant pro. Um, the last time I used it though,

Steve-o (34:47.202)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (35:05.083)
was before it had full integration with all the boards. So that was the last time. Yeah, it's been it's been quite a while ago.

Steve-o (35:09.056)
wow, that's way long time ago. That's probably what, 2012, 2013?

Tony Benjamin (35:15.707)
No, well, maybe we just had an older version somehow or something. I don't know.

Steve-o (35:19.48)
Probably because we had the old iApplicants version too.

Tony Benjamin (35:23.599)
I want to say, yeah, maybe, because it was in, I don't know, 2014, something like that, somewhere in there. OK.

Steve-o (35:33.496)
Yeah, that makes sense. Because that was when applicant pro. So we started out as originally as I applicants and then by about 2013 14 we were switching to applicant pro to allow for the better integrations with job boards and things like that. And the technology of I applicants just wasn't up to speed. And I mean, that's what happens. Technology evolves too and you have to evolve with it, right? And so sometimes that means you start from scratch and you just switch all your clients, right? It is what it is. So yeah.

Tony Benjamin (35:43.749)
Gotcha. Okay.

Tony Benjamin (35:53.231)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (36:00.057)
Right, So which there are a few payroll companies that should do that. But anyways, but but anyways, so so but we would we would do this where, you know, we would go through this process and we in essence would use it as like a Rolodex or a filing cabinet and you would look stuff up and we would go through all that. So now with that said, let's talk about.

Steve-o (36:05.625)
All right What tell me tell me how you really feel

Tony Benjamin (36:28.623)
Let's pause there in the history of it though, because now I want to talk about the implementation process. So a company, when they go to implement an ATS, they go around, they shop them around, they get demos, they're looking at several different versions. And usually, I remember the first time we implemented an ATS, the big deal was I wanted to be able to have someone put in their information and may not have to re-enter their information into the HR system when I

Right? would just, it would just transfer across. Then that's really, that was the Holy grail at the time. So anyways, we would, you would, you you would do that. So they're looking to do that. They're looking for all the bells and whistles, everything that they want to use it for and all that. And then they go to implement it. And usually, and you tell me, Steve, you guys implement really quickly. I think most systems I've used, whether applicants or ATSs and HRAS systems, you're probably talking a four to six week.

roll out until you get it all implemented and all the features are working the way you

Steve-o (37:30.98)
Yeah, ATS we can usually roll you out and within 48 hours we can have it built. In fact, sometimes even sooner, right? If you're smaller, I sometimes I can do it the day of like I batteries plus is probably one of my biggest company clients out there and they have a lot of franchise owners. If a franchise owner from batteries plus calls me and says I need to set up my account, I can literally get it set up within like six hours or less. It's a really quick turnaround for some right? Because we already have.

Tony Benjamin (37:39.77)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (37:54.863)
Wow. Yeah.

Steve-o (37:58.378)
a lot of the basic details that corporate has provided. So it just makes it really simple, right? So yeah. Yep.

Tony Benjamin (38:03.961)
So we go through this long process. now let's talk about it. there are feeds to set up with the job boards, right? There's feeds set up there.

Steve-o (38:11.084)
Yep, which most ATS is today, it should be automated. Especially the important feeds like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Obra. Those should be automated. If they're not automated.

Tony Benjamin (38:15.898)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (38:23.343)
And you should be able to pay for your ads through your ATS as well.

Steve-o (38:27.522)
That is correct. And there should not be an upcharge fee. It should just be a straight fee because those feeds and connections have already been integrated. yeah.

Tony Benjamin (38:37.209)
Right, right. So you go through that and then you start, then you have to build out internally. And this is where you can update me on this, Steve. You always in the system, you have to build out job ads. they set up, so you had templates for job ads and then you had approvals for those job ads. Right. So you, if.

Steve-o (38:52.408)
Correct.

Correct.

Steve-o (39:00.182)
which we call a requisition process or a job approval process.

Tony Benjamin (39:02.393)
Right, right. A requisition process. you, you, the, the hiring manager files a rec once it done, somebody in management has to approve it. And then it goes to HR or whoever posts those to get them posted. So, so you, you set up that process and those are all in my discussions. Cause I always worked with smaller companies. There was, there always had to be a discussion around that. It wasn't one of those deals where you could just, I don't know. It had to be a discussion, right? So there was conversations about that. So you go through all that.

And then you had to set up a review process for managers and different people like that. And and and so the manager would take a look at it and they would make a ranking. Now, here's one of the funny things. And for applicants who are this may surprise you, managers hate telling you no, they don't want to reject your resume. They don't. They ex ding. So

Steve-o (39:39.02)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (39:54.828)
What? No, they want somebody else to do it.

Tony Benjamin (40:00.451)
I would say 80 % of the time when you don't when you get ghosted after you apply to a real job ad, right, right. Yeah. But when you get it, the reason is because the hiring managers afraid that if they click no, and their name goes out in an email that you're going to come hunt them down. Look, that's a real thing. Managers are terrified of you getting an email with their name on it that says they rejected you. Even if I take their name off, a lot of the times they get upset with me. So they don't want to reject you.

Steve-o (40:04.194)
They're the good cop.

Tony Benjamin (40:30.107)
So what happens in a lot of companies is no one gets around to cleaning out the job after they hire somebody. So anyways, you set up all that process, you set it up that way, and then you have some sort of process that needs to be set up in the system that also, when you click hire, generates an offer letter or allows you to add one, right? In case that's be customized or something like that. And then sends it out. You accept it as the applicant and it comes back in. And then the new hire process begins.

Steve-o (40:51.512)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (41:00.652)
So that's kind of the process. let's, okay, so in terms of insight into that, Steve, you deal with a lot more companies than I do. So talk to me about what is the normal internal process for how managers review resumes through the ATS? Like just take your ATS, because it's awesome, but let's talk about that.

Steve-o (41:20.706)
So yeah, so.

Steve-o (41:25.43)
Yeah, so so OK, so there's there's a lot of core elements here. So you talk about building up the job ads, but think about it. Your organization is broken down by departments or locations. You have to have those as part of your settings. For example, you have offer letters, so you need to have those offer letter templates built in there and ready to go so that it's very easy to just select from. You have interview templates that you want to preload so a manager can just simply pull up the interview template and fill in the answers the applicant gives them during the interview process.

Tony Benjamin (41:37.563)
All

Steve-o (41:54.198)
So it's a repository and you have one place to check it all. also need statuses. So statuses are critical because as you take applicants, we call it a workflow oftentimes, right? Because candidates are gonna be in certain statuses, like maybe I'm in the review phase with this one, or we've left messages and don't have an interview scheduled yet, or an interview scheduled, or offer has been made, or background check is pending, or whatever it might be, right?

Tony Benjamin (41:57.755)
And that's boring interviewing, by the way. That's boring interviewing.

Yes.

Steve-o (42:22.328)
And so, so statuses, so there's customized statuses you can put in there as well to help manage that process. And you're also right, when you change those statuses, as an example, if you change the status of a background check, it would pull up the option to submit the background check form to the applicant so they can electronically sign and agree to it for that or drug testing. Same thing with the offer letter. So you can send out the offer letter with all the appropriate information.

But see, there's also this internal approval. So the manager could say, yes, this is the one, but now HR needs the details necessary to actually fill out the offer letter, right? And so sometimes that, yeah, that has to be approved as well by certain levels of management. And so there, sometimes there's this internal approval process too. So those are some of the workflows, if you will, and some of the actions that need to take place and some of the settings that need to be put up.

Tony Benjamin (42:58.459)
What is the pay and yeah.

Steve-o (43:17.18)
and created in order for that to work effectively. And so the challenge is that sometimes the company does not take the time to really get those out and ready to go. Now, here's the cool part. I've been doing this long enough. I have so many templates and stuff that sometimes I can just make a recommendation. Like as an example, internal application. Do you hire employees from within for different jobs? Do you want to make it available? Well, we have an entire internal job board where we can customize an internal application.

and they just fill out the internal application instead and they can be considered internally, right? Well, 90 % of the time when I ask somebody, well, what's your internal application look like? People don't know. They don't even have one. They're like, I don't know. They just email us and say they're interested. So the key is when you have templates that are already kind of pre-built and pre-made, it makes it really easy to say, hey, here's something to start with, and we can always tweak it as we go.

Tony Benjamin (44:02.328)
Right.

Steve-o (44:15.192)
Because here's the reality, your ATS should also be scalable for growth. Okay? When ATS first started, a lot of ATS, you knew which ATS could get me up to about a hundred employees and then I needed to switch and get me up to about 500 employees and then I needed to switch and get me up to whatever. I have some clients that are 20, 30, 40,000 employees. So when you're looking for an ATS, you want one that's also scalable like that so that as you grow,

Tony Benjamin (44:21.764)
Yes.

Steve-o (44:43.084)
those additional features and modules and bells and whistles or whatever you want to call them can be added as you go so that you have a much more efficient process as you go through it. Because the smaller you are, some of those is too much, right? So just don't use them or don't turn them on.

Tony Benjamin (44:57.283)
Yeah. But the larger you get, the more you need it. Yeah.

Steve-o (45:00.716)
You're gonna need them and that's why it's important. And so when you're looking at tracking, you know, from the employer perspective, you better make sure that it has the scalability to grow with you unless you just don't plan on growing. But I don't know any organization when I talk to the CEO or the CFO, hey, you don't plan on growing, right? Okay, perfect, here's what you need. It's just, everybody wants to grow, right? And so the scalability is huge. Now the last thing, compliance and security.

There are some companies that, you obviously once you hit 100 employees, there's some compliance factors there for sure. Even as little as 15 employees, there's some things you need to be aware of in reporting and such. But you need to make sure that your system is not only secure, but also follow some of the compliance guidelines that are out there to one, keep the candidate's information secure and to protect your managers and internal staff. And so that's another thing a lot of.

You just need to be aware of that and look for that and ask about it because it's pretty critical.

Tony Benjamin (45:59.597)
So, right, right. So a resume, you as the applicant apply, you send it off, right? And maybe you have to answer two to three questions that are screening questions. You submit it, right? And then it comes in. Usually speaking in most systems, the hiring manager can see it right there in that point unless you make HR clear at first. Right, right, right, right.

Steve-o (46:05.208)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (46:11.287)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (46:20.952)
Correct, unless you limit their user login or something like that. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (46:25.519)
But they can see it right up at the beginning. And then they go through, you can either look at most systems. You can either look at the resume directly as it was submitted, which I always recommend, by the way. Or you can look at their profile generated in the system that has all their information in it that hopefully was parsed off from the resume. Right, right, right.

Steve-o (46:44.45)
Yeah, you can do a quick scan and yeah.

Tony Benjamin (46:47.651)
So matter of fact, before we leave that Steve, lots of applicants ask, why do I have to fill out all this information again, if I submit it as a resume? Why are they having to double fill out things if they submit a resume? Why are they being asked to refill it out?

Steve-o (46:59.64)
If they're refilling it out it's because they're their companies using an ATS that's not very effective

Tony Benjamin (47:07.621)
Ding.

Steve-o (47:08.694)
Because the reality is between resume parsing and now profile parsing, which has quickly replaced resume parsing. In fact, if you're listening to this and you're only familiar with resume parsing, your ATS is probably outdated. And so you just need to be aware of that. So so, you know, compliance wise, the employer is required typically to collect a certain amount of information in order to consider you as a candidate. So that's the reason why they need all the information.

Tony Benjamin (47:22.789)
Right.

Steve-o (47:38.806)
But if you're having to fill it out again and again, that's simply the technology that's being used. And so that's, maybe that's a red flag for some candidates, that is a red flag. If you have outdated technology, do I wanna work for an organization that has outdated technology or is not quite caught up yet? That is something applicants think about today, especially HR people. If I'm an HR person, I'm going through the process and...

I either see it HR people are kind of funny because they either see it as updated technology. I don't even want to deal with that or they see it as outdated technology. I got a solution for that. I'm going to call my old vendor Steve and I'm going to say let's get this done for you. And then they look like a superstar right away. You know, so yeah.

Tony Benjamin (48:18.499)
I can, Yeah. No, no. And that's, I'll be honest, when I read job ads, old style job ads, where they just take the job description and cut and paste it, I have to admit, I look at that and go, those people, that HR department doesn't know how to write a job ad. And if I am hired, I will fix it. That's what I think. Right. So, okay.

Steve-o (48:28.64)
and just cut and paste.

Steve-o (48:35.679)
And they need help.

Mm-hmm. And a lot of, like I said, lot of HR professionals will think that. So, but yeah, managers, some HR departments screen the candidates first before they get it to the manager. OK. And it used to be when applicant tracking first started, you had to pay per manager login. So this is another issue. When ATS first came out, not only did you have to pay for each individual login, but that is why a lot of companies did not have many logins for their managers.

Tony Benjamin (48:58.779)
Yes. Yeah.

Steve-o (49:09.168)
And it created a choking point in the process because now it was difficult to get the resume and information over to that manager. Now, most systems today, and if you're looking for a system, make sure they have unlimited to log in. You don't need a seat for every single login. They should have unlimited. And the unlimited is nice because it doesn't matter. You can set up your managers and decide, do you want to filter them by applicants? Do want to filter them by jobs where they can only see candidates for certain jobs? Do you want to filter by department?

They can see all the applicants for their department. So there's a lot of good filters like that today. And then the manager should be able to fill out the interview form. They meet with the applicant. They should be able to add notes. They should be able to communicate with HR to let them know, here's what happened. You can do it via email, but you should be able to just do it through the system as well, right? And just say, hey, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (49:57.467)
The system, so it has a certain number of you, you've one to five stars or one to five flags or and it has some sort of note system or a scoring system or something like that in there. The manager, right, right. So the manager does all that. They fill out those things and believe it or not, lots of managers don't like to do that. Shocking. And not that this is a pet peeve of mine, but.

Steve-o (50:03.66)
Yeah, if you have the star rating, yeah.

Steve-o (50:09.067)
You can also upload documents in there. Yeah.

Steve-o (50:18.657)
What?

Steve-o (50:22.572)
That's a training issue.

Tony Benjamin (50:26.819)
Yeah, it's actually it's a leadership issue and a cultural issue. But that's a longer story. Baby, the point is, is as an applicant, you should know that people should know that there are just certain places where people are a little bit lazy in the system. And it may come may cause your user experience to be damaged. It's not because they're mean, it's just they're inconsiderate. Now go ahead, what we're gonna say.

Steve-o (50:32.354)
Well, can I make, yeah.

Steve-o (50:49.602)
Yeah, well, and here's the other thing. Let's admit it. Some managers are innately lazy and they because think about it, a manager oftentimes doesn't have time or doesn't want to make the time to interview and do all of those things. They just want to get their job done in their department. They have other people, subordinates who are relying on them, and that's what they want to focus on.

Tony Benjamin (50:56.613)
Well, yeah.

Steve-o (51:14.966)
And so when there's suddenly a blip in that process and I've got to fill a role because somebody either got moved out or left or whatever, it may be a new role opened up. Managers love the new roles that open up. That's probably their favorite because it means that they're growing their particular organization. But the blips are the ones that they struggle with the most because it's a disruption and nobody likes to be disrupted when you have a rhythm going period. You just don't. And so that's why sometimes it's hard to help managers understand that

you need to be involved in this process. The HR person and recruiter is not gonna know every single facet about your position. They're just not. Which is also why proper communication has to happen there, so that you know exactly what they're looking for, so that HR can at least make the best effort possible to bring in qualified applicants. But ultimately, you as the manager should be responsible for allowing those applicants to have a good candidate experience. Because think about it, this is your impression.

with them. When they start interviewing you and meeting with you, this is the impression you get to make. What kind of impression do you want to leave? Especially if the person sitting in front of you for that interview is the one that's actually going to make your life better. So I don't know why managers forget that sometimes. Maybe they just have a hard day or something, but it's huge.

Tony Benjamin (52:28.089)
Right,

Tony Benjamin (52:34.661)
Well, I think it comes from an outdated understanding. So, and that is that, you know, look, when I was younger, there were more people who wanted jobs than there were jobs. And so you would apply and you would do everything in your capability to impress. Now, let me say this, you still should do everything you can to impress people, right? Answer questions correctly, be honest, dress appropriately.

Steve-o (52:46.829)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (53:01.529)
show up on time, all those sorts of things, because you want them to want you. I want you to want me, right? There you go. So 10 things I hate about you. Anyway, so.

Steve-o (53:08.714)
Wow. One of my wife's favorite movies, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. We've actually been to a lot of the places. I've visited a lot of those places out in Seattle, so yeah.

Tony Benjamin (53:20.099)
wow. There you go. but there you go. the point, but now managers forget that there are more jobs than there are people. And so what your object is, you go to recruit people is I have to impress the right candidates so that they want to work here. And we could, could, sometime you and I got to do this whole deal about responding in 24 hours and all that sort of stuff. but, but

Steve-o (53:36.408)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (53:46.435)
That's why people, sometimes managers do not understand that, especially older managers, they just don't get it. And so I guess this is the part of it where I tell applicants, like, this is why weird things happen in these situations, right? Is because managers have that old attitude. And I think it's fair for you as an applicant to evaluate that company based upon these things, right?

Steve-o (54:02.808)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (54:11.203)
So I interviewed, and I've mentioned this I think before, I interviewed with a company. I went through three rounds of interviews. I met with the CEO, then I met with members of the board, and then I met with VP, CEO, and members of the board and all that. And we had discussions and when they told me no, they told me through an email. And I was like, no, sorry. I paid my dues. Right, right, yeah, yeah. And the truth is they were.

Steve-o (54:34.454)
You're that vested. Yeah. It's like.

at a minimum that deserves a phone call.

Tony Benjamin (54:41.655)
Exactly. Like be human being. Anyways, the point is, is your mileage may vary and it's not the applicant tracking system. It is the manager usually. Now this is probably a good time to start and talk here, Steve, about the newest level of applicant tracking systems and this idea that an applicant tracking system slash AI reviews your resume and stuff beforehand, before it gets to, so they, instead of just screening questions,

they add an AI screening level to it. So talk about that for a minute.

Steve-o (55:15.596)
Yeah, so Indeed is probably at the forefront of this. They have released this tool called Talent Scout, which is also part of their smart sourcing tool. And smart sourcing you have to pay for. Talent Scout is free, but there's only two applicant tracking systems in the entire country that can use Talent Scout right now. And I solved as one of them. But basically what the AI model does is it takes your job ad and it matches it to the skill sets and inferences on the resume.

in the employment history and the education area. Now, here's where this can be a miss, and here's why this can be extremely valuable, right? So if you as an employer are not effectively writing your job ad to really focus on the core qualifications and the core requirements for this role and the core needs, then how is AI going to effectively match your position to its applicants, right?

By the same token, you as job seekers, if you're not effectively writing your resume in such a way, in fact, let me tell you, I just talked to in Rachel's class yesterday at Weber State University about this. Yeah, Rachel Child. Yeah, we'll have her on pretty soon. But here's the thing. You know that section on your resume that's like skills and you just type in a bunch of keywords there because you want to have keywords on your resume to be found? That is no longer going to help you in the future because

Tony Benjamin (56:14.181)
Yep.

Tony Benjamin (56:23.875)
Rachel Child, by the way. Hi, Rachel.

Steve-o (56:43.83)
That list of skills, AI does not have the ability to rank you effectively. Now, if I take that same skill and I move it into my work experience, AI can say, hey, you've been working at this employer for five years, therefore I can infer that you have five years of experience using this particular skill set. Therefore, you are going to rank better. So if you are a job seeker listening to this right now,

You need to get rid of your skills, little category with just a whole bunch of list of your skills so you can try to target keywords. That is no longer going to be effective for you with these AI models. You need to take those skills and actually insert them into your work history, volunteer history, and education so that AI can effectively show and infer how many years of experience you actually have using that skill so that it can do a better match when it comes to the job. Does that make sense?

Tony Benjamin (57:41.615)
Yeah.

Steve-o (57:42.066)
This is so important for people to understand how AI is starting to impact it. The resume is not gonna go away. And the reality is the ATS is not going to go away either. Matching though, candidate matching is here and it is here to stay and it is going to continue to have an impact in the job market going forward. And so you just, have to be more, yeah, go ahead.

Tony Benjamin (58:04.379)
And this is, no, I was just gonna say this answers your question that we talked about at the beginning about people who apply for 400 jobs and don't get an interview. And what I, first of all, I do not know how you can apply for more than two, maybe three jobs a day and give them a customized resume. I don't know how you do it. Like it's, I tell everybody I help, you wake up in the morning,

Steve-o (58:15.021)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (58:31.183)
You spend the first couple hours, you get exercise or whatever, then you spend the first couple hours looking for jobs. You do a few things and then in the early afternoons or afternoons, after you've done your other stuff, you apply to those jobs. And you're going to spend, especially when you first start this or the first half of your career, you're going to spend 45 minutes to an hour customizing your resume to that job. If you're not getting interviews and stuff,

very often it's because your resume does not show the skills and the experience that they're looking for. And what you just said about those words and the experience stuff, that's when you do it. And if you're spending that much time, how are you applying for more than three a day? I tell everybody do two.

Steve-o (59:02.456)
And here's the cool part guys. Yeah.

Steve-o (59:13.08)
Yeah, well here here's the beautiful thing though. You can now use AI to help create your resume or help change your resume within minutes so that it does match that job. That's the beauty of this is like you can actually use that now. Always check though. Make sure that it hasn't embellished anything. Make sure that it hasn't added random stuff. In fact, I had a I had a kid the other day that I was I was looking at their resume. I do these resume reviews as part of my Beyond the Resume series and he had just used AI.

Tony Benjamin (59:19.609)
Yes.

Yes.

Steve-o (59:41.996)
And I was reading through one of the bullet points and I said, wow. you, what was it? He was like, he, it had something to do with rat races. And I was like, wow, you, you, you were involved with rat races. This is very interesting to me. Tell me about these rat races. And it had nothing to do with rat races. He was on his original resume when he threw it in there.

He had just said that he had worked hard to get out of the rat race, right? Because he had financially made himself more stable. But then AI took it as, you run rat races and you race rats for a living. It was kind of funny. So anyway, so the point is, is you still have to pay attention to the human intelligence factor, right? I mean, there's a reason why AI has all those little things at the bottom that say AI may get this wrong. Well, they probably will.

Tony Benjamin (01:00:06.843)
Right, right.

You're race rats. That's a good story. That's an awesome story.

Steve-o (01:00:30.6)
And so, and that has to do with proper prompt engineering. We could have a whole episode on that. But yeah, just be aware of that. Again, you have to be intentional as an employer when you're putting your ads together, but you also have to be intentional as a job seeker when you're choosing the employers to apply for. So very, very important now. And it's gonna become more and more important as you go.

Tony Benjamin (01:00:49.945)
Yes. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:00:55.779)
And it was, we were talking with Amy about this too, right? Your resume should be, still needs to be visually appealing because there's lots of people who look at the resume and not just the profile with the fields filled in. So you need to make your resume visually appealing. I, for example, I don't put in text the name of the company that I worked for. I put their logo there. So, and it's visually easy to see where I've worked because all the logos are there.

Steve-o (01:00:59.224)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (01:01:24.655)
The downside to that is most places though don't read the logo and know what company I worked for. So now what I've been experimenting with doing is using the alt text for the image and inserting the name of the company as the alt text. And therefore it can read that.

Steve-o (01:01:41.974)
Well, and some new stuff I'm going to tell you right now. Scam artists are already using that as a tool to try to embed Trojan horses into companies and ATS is. And so a lot of tracking systems now will not allow emojis. They will not allow images. They will not allow videos like they won't allow those things anymore or they'll truncate it. So when it goes to the employer, it's already been removed. Just so you know, this is happening. This is real because what's happened, especially like with emojis and images.

Tony Benjamin (01:01:52.333)
awesome.

Steve-o (01:02:10.464)
Emojis and images are very easy for bad actors to input some type of code so that if somebody clicks on that image to try to show it, it will run a code there. It'll run it. It'll run a script and it'll go ahead and download a Trojan horse on the computer. So now a lot like our system won't allow images. It won't allow videos. It won't allow links anymore because those types of things are too often malicious now, unfortunately.

Tony Benjamin (01:02:14.682)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:02:37.59)
And so there's a lot of systems that are starting to actually get rid of that. So you just need to be aware of that. That going forward, those and that's brand new. In fact, indeed just came out with this new rule, I think in January, where they will no longer allow emojis and job ads because so many employers using AI because AI always gives you emojis when you're rewriting stuff. They were putting emojis in their job ads like crazy and indeed finally had to say no.

Tony Benjamin (01:02:57.817)
Right.

Steve-o (01:03:01.41)
we're gonna block these altogether. We will block a job ad with emojis because it is too easy for malicious code to be added to those emojis. And so they don't allow it anymore. So yeah, be aware of that. lot of, yeah, FYI, lot of tracking systems now are, and even the job boards themselves are not allowing those types of things anymore. So from a visually appealing standpoint, that might be fun, but you just need to know that it's probably not even getting through to the employer now.

Tony Benjamin (01:03:14.107)
There you go, I just learned something.

Steve-o (01:03:31.16)
because they're being blocked. So FYI. Yep. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:03:31.951)
Yeah. Interesting. Well, there you go. Okay. So, so this comes in, it gets screened by the AI and the ways that we've been talking about it comes in and then that it pushes it up or down in a ranking or matter of importance for the hiring manager to look at. So for those of you who are griping. Yes. So for, for all of those of you who are saying that the ATS filtered you out.

Steve-o (01:03:42.487)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:03:51.064)
Correct. All it is is an order. It's an order.

Tony Benjamin (01:04:00.899)
I'm sure that there are some companies who have set it up so their ATS AI can filter out people and reject them. I'm sure. Most companies however, do not do that. Most companies however, don't do that. They just allow it to prioritize them. Right. Yes. But. Right. Right.

Steve-o (01:04:13.304)
That is correct.

because they don't want to get sued. That's really what it blows down to because you cannot use AI as the sole reason why you reject somebody period. You can't.

Tony Benjamin (01:04:27.343)
Well, I suppose it's not against the law per se in most states, New York and California, I think are the exceptions to that. you. New Jersey, OK. So.

Steve-o (01:04:34.732)
New York, New Jersey, there's quite a few now. Washington, there's a few. There's quite a few. New York obviously is the forefront of that, where the AI model has to have a validation study, which we do, right? We have a validation study for our AI tools. But you cannot use AI just like you cannot use an assessment as the sole reason why you hire somebody. That's where the mistake is. Does that make sense?

Tony Benjamin (01:04:41.818)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (01:04:58.243)
Right. Right, because sometimes they can be biased culturally and you don't know it.

Steve-o (01:05:02.55)
And candidates need to understand that. Just because there's AI model doesn't mean that I got weeded out and that was the only reason I got weeded out. There are going to be other elements and factors there because the employer has to, period. Which is why it takes time.

Tony Benjamin (01:05:15.067)
Right, right. So, but most of the time it puts you in a list and it prioritizes that list. Most of the time, most managers that I work with, if you get a high volume of resumes, never make it through all of them. They just don't.

Steve-o (01:05:20.44)
Correct.

Steve-o (01:05:28.246)
Nope, you'll look at maybe the first 20, 25, and if you find enough quality there, you'll focus on those first, period. That's correct. That's correct.

Tony Benjamin (01:05:34.115)
Yep, yep, you just stop there. And it's why if a job posting has been up more than a week, I tell you, you can still apply but don't hold your breath. If it's been up two weeks, I generally don't apply. I wouldn't apply to anything that's been up two weeks or more for just that reason. Now,

Steve-o (01:05:51.736)
Well, on the job boards now, don't allow you to really be up. They don't want your job ad up longer than 60 days, but they require that the employer leaves it up a minimum of 30 days. So and.

Tony Benjamin (01:05:58.971)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:05.051)
So now, indeed, I pay for a day at a time, though, and I only put them up for like 10 to 12 days.

Steve-o (01:06:10.988)
Well, you're paying for a day at a time, but that's just for the sponsorship. When your sponsorship ends, your job is still on there organically.

Of course. Yeah. Lost to learn there, but yeah. Well, and also keep in mind when you do a job search on, remember the old days when you would do a search on Indeed or any job and it would tell you this job has been posted for 30 days or plus or 60 days or 90 days or two weeks or this is brand new. Guess what? If you go to Indeed right now and you do a job search and you see your list of jobs, none of those jobs anymore tell you how long the job has been there.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:21.443)
Okay. okay. So anyways, no, no, that's we'll have to talk about that because that's yeah. Yeah. That's a different strategy.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:37.466)
Right, right.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:48.933)
Really? yeah, this is see I haven't yeah No, I am behind dang it that that really makes me angry actually because I I hate being behind on anything

Steve-o (01:06:49.944)
so you don't even know anymore. You're behind. I can tell you're behind.

Steve-o (01:07:02.444)
Yeah, so do a search on Indeed right now, Tony, and just put in any random word and look at the list of jobs and tell me where it tells you how old that job is. It is now gone. Most job boards now will not display that information on purpose because they've told employers you need to leave your position up for a minimum of 30 days, maximum of 90 is usually what they want because the assumption is if you haven't filled it within 90 days,

Tony Benjamin (01:07:05.881)
Yeah, okay.

Tony Benjamin (01:07:18.617)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:07:29.304)
They just assume that you're either a bad company to work for or you have poor practices and you don't know how to fill your own jobs in 90 days.

Tony Benjamin (01:07:36.089)
Or yeah, you don't know how to fill it or you forgot about it. So yeah, you're right.

Steve-o (01:07:39.148)
Yeah, because what they have found too is that if a candidate, in fact, Tony, here's another reason why Indeed did this. If you sponsor a job, Indeed wants money, right? And they want to show value for the money. But if an applicant sees that, this is already two weeks old and they decide not to apply, just like you said, this is an old school way of thinking, then you're not going to click on it. Indeed doesn't make as much money. So that's why they don't want candidates to know how long the job has been up anymore, period.

In fact, I think one of the only boards that still has the time up there is probably LinkedIn. Which they're so behind anyway, you know, who cares? So.

Tony Benjamin (01:08:12.857)
thing. Well, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I want to make sure that we've got this so people, applicants understand, right? So you're applying, it gets to some degree or whatever AI or the screening questions or whatever, we're to filter a little bit. And then it goes in with, with screening questions, it's yes, no, it's binary. So either you're qualified or you're not. So, and then it goes in there. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Steve-o (01:08:30.232)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:08:36.184)
Mm-hmm.

But our system does have a ranking system with those because some of those screening questions are preferences, so just be aware of that, yeah. But then the AI model also ranks it. So you see both rankings at the same time.

Tony Benjamin (01:08:44.483)
Right,

Right. So it comes in, it's ranked, managers go through it. And to our point here is that they don't usually get to all of them. And so you should just expect that they, that's a manager thing. That's a person thing, not the ATS. Right. Right. So it goes in there, they start doing interviews. And as I mentioned before, they don't like to reject people. just, they, and this is why those of us in HR are really, really good at rejecting and

Steve-o (01:09:02.378)
nothing to do with the ATS.

Tony Benjamin (01:09:15.995)
telling people the truth because no one else in the freaking business wants to it. But anyways, so the not that I'm bitter about that either. But anyways, it comes in and they look through them, they select a few people and people that they might be maybe interested in. So even if you have someone who will reject people outright, right, and they're willing to do that, they click off a bunch of those, they sends out an email, we're not interested in talking to you or whatever, then

Steve-o (01:09:23.574)
I could tell. could tell.

Tony Benjamin (01:09:42.949)
They often pick the people they want to talk to and then they hang on to, and this is in addition to the ones they didn't even get to, but they will hang on to a certain number of people that if they don't find the person they want, they will then call this second round of people, right? So.

Steve-o (01:09:56.632)
They'll come back.

Again, I call them the fries on the burner. They're just kind of sitting there.

Tony Benjamin (01:10:03.579)
right so so the fries if they decide right right right right so you're a wrinkly fry that should be a status in your system wrinkly fry

Steve-o (01:10:06.466)
But nobody wants to know they were second best or that they were wrinkly fries, you know, so. Sorry.

Wrinkly fry. Flag it.

Tony Benjamin (01:10:18.467)
Right. So, so anyways, they come in and usually these are all the ways, these are all the things that are frustrating you as an applicant. Now look, as we found out in the workday case, the lawsuit, Steve and I on another, on a future empty red seat, we have another case we're going to review about AI review and the hiring process. And in that case, there's some, you know, some, obviously some people are using AI in a way that might be discriminatory. So anyways,

Steve-o (01:10:28.472)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (01:10:47.897)
The point is, that it's rarely the applicant tracking system who's rejecting you. Usually it is either the hiring manager, HR, or carelessness that is rejecting you. And especially when they ghost you.

Steve-o (01:11:02.392)
Yeah. And and I was going to say, and ghosting is so prevalent because like Tony said, oftentimes the manager doesn't want to be the one rejecting you. And. And and that's OK, right? They they you know, there's just weird stuff that happens in the world today. We don't want anybody going postal even at the recruiting level. I mean, the worst worst person I ever.

Tony Benjamin (01:11:10.043)
next.

Tony Benjamin (01:11:29.156)
And that's a real fear.

Steve-o (01:11:32.034)
That is a real fear. It really is because there are some weird people out there. I mean, I saw send out. I know how it works or send help. I saw send help. I know how Linda Little is. So anyway, this is important just to understand that you're right. For the most part, the AI is not what's filtering you out. It is ranking you and it's giving priority. But ultimately, the manager is the one that still makes the decision. And when you have discombobulated processes and managers who are not

Tony Benjamin (01:11:37.807)
Not in our audience.

Right, right.

Steve-o (01:12:01.674)
effective in their role. And part of the ineffectivity is training, but part of it is sometimes time. Part of it is miscommunication with the HR department. So there's a lack of communication there. That's on the employer. And so it's sad, but there unfortunately are some employers where this is happening right now. And part of it's because they don't have a real process in place. They're not using the ATS as effectively as they could.

They should be scheduling calls with their ATS and saying, how can we use this better? I have a review calls with my clients all the time. I love it when they take the time to say, how can I do this better, Steve? Because that tells me that they're serious about hiring. And I would love for people to apply and go work with them because they're doing it the right way. And they actually care about the individuals that they're trying to bring on. And they're not just trying to simply fill a seat or a heartbeat. So really important.

Tony Benjamin (01:12:58.095)
Right. And you as the applicant should be aware of all these things so that you can start to make choices between two different employers so that it's not just money-based and that's the only way you're evaluating that. But I think that, is there anything else that we missed in that process? we've gone, it's been a long conversation, but I hope everybody can kind of see.

Steve-o (01:13:10.904)
Correct. Correct.

Tony Benjamin (01:13:24.725)
exactly what goes on on the inside of that as you apply and where the pitfalls may be. And at a very least, at least you know, like maybe we're not solving your problem for you, but at least you know, it's going on on that inside. Yeah.

Steve-o (01:13:29.548)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:13:38.626)
Yeah, and you're aware. You know, the only other thing I would say, because I talk a lot about this in my Beyond the Resume stuff, is be careful of scams. Just be careful of them. If you're a job seeker, there's unfortunately a lot of scam artists, they're getting so good at what they do. They even have the ability to hack into emails of real companies and post jobs, and the company doesn't even know their email is being used. I've already seen this happen dozens and dozens of times where

The scam artist is able to hide it into a folder that you don't even see, but it's a folder in your own email that is literally just activities happening all the time because they're posting a fake job on indeed getting applicants that only go to that folder. That's another reason why you're seeing this is you think that you apply to a real job, but it's actually a fake job because this scam artist is broken in. And so indeed is taking some huge measures. This is why I love working with indeed. They are seriously at the forefront.

of job search and they're doing everything in their power to try to mitigate the AI bots and the things that are happening. And I will tell you this, I read on a lot of boards like on Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff that, yeah, I get so many AI bot applicants and it's so annoying. And it's sad because they're blaming Indeed and I can tell you it's probably not Indeed. It's probably your applicant tracking system. And it's probably part of your process and how you're doing.

Tony Benjamin (01:15:04.815)
Meaning that somebody has hacked it. okay. I seriously.

Steve-o (01:15:08.364)
Yeah, like like indeed is doing a ton of stuff to mitigate it. But if you don't have the proper integrations with indeed and you don't have the types of partnerships that indeed really wants you to have some of those bots coming through are coming through because your ATS is not filtering it appropriately enough and you are behind in your ATS. You know, it's interesting, Tony. At the beginning of this call, you talked about how people really want this all in one because they wanted to integrate with payroll. They want everything to integrate so the candidate.

has this good experience when they're being onboarded and become an employee and all that. And there are too many systems out there where the ATS was simply duct taped on. They bought an ATS company just to check the box to say, we have an ATS, you should just come use this, it's cheap. They sometimes even give you a discount or give it to you for free just to keep you as a client and say, hey, get rid of that other ATS, right? And I cannot tell you how many times I have a client leave me because they get sold on that idea.

Tony Benjamin (01:15:50.447)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:16:07.382)
And then within six months, they want to come back because they realize that, my gosh, my AI bots have gone up. I don't get as many applicants as I used to. The quality is just poor as all can be because they don't understand that the ATS makes a huge difference, not only for the candidate experience, but for you as a manager and HR and the recruiter. All in one is not always the best solution, right? And so just kind of keep that in mind because.

Tony Benjamin (01:16:28.035)
Yep.

Steve-o (01:16:34.112)
I see it way too much. It's like that old, remember that old, was it State Farm? That old commercial where he's like, you know, he's calling him late at night, you know, and like, I'm back, Susie. I just had an accident and I want to come back so badly because my old, my current insurance is not doing what they promised me, right? You remember that old commercial, right? I get that all the time when they realize it. my gosh. I am missing it. It's yeah. Anyway, so, so, so just before.

Tony Benjamin (01:16:46.543)
Hehehehehe

Tony Benjamin (01:16:52.579)
Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:17:02.169)
Because Geico used to luber you in with low prices and then hose you on a claim.

Steve-o (01:17:04.664)
Exactly. So just be careful. Just be careful, right? It's great to get the low prices and I know there's a lot of companies consolidating right now, but you really need to check it a little bit and see what the trade off really is. So.

Tony Benjamin (01:17:14.102)
Thank

Tony Benjamin (01:17:20.919)
Exactly. look, and everybody who's listening to this, everybody, I'm sure I'll take off about a ton of people with this, but look, I love Paycom. I love their HR system and that. don't think any HR system is perfect. That's why they should hire me to help them design a UI that works. having said that, I really, really like Paycom. I don't like their ATS though. The ATS was rudimentary compared to what you're offering people. And it just, and it's just,

It's disappointing.

Steve-o (01:17:51.352)
Paycom doesn't like to play in the sandbox either. It's kind of sad. Like we could totally integrate and help their clients and actually help them keep their clients and give them a much more robust ATS, but they just, they don't like to integrate with other people. It's just sad. They don't, they want to keep you. They want to keep you for every little piece of the puzzle, right? Which, you know, we do too, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to push you into something that's going to make your process worse. I'm just not. That's why we have modules. Like ours is very modular.

Tony Benjamin (01:17:54.863)
Yep.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:03.461)
No, and most companies don't because they want to sell you the ATS.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:17.594)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:18:20.45)
So you can take what's gonna work best for you, period.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:23.353)
Yes, and yeah, so okay, anything else we want to say about that?

Steve-o (01:18:28.16)
No, no, think that that hopefully you learn something both from the job seeker perspective as well as the the employer side of things. And these are real conversations you need to have internally, right? And discuss.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:31.063)
Okay, that's right.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:42.691)
Right. And for those of you who help people find jobs, this this episode is for you. For those of you looking for job, this episode is for you. And we hope we hope that's been helpful now for something completely different.

Tony Benjamin (01:19:16.699)
All right, here we are. HR in life. I had to think of what the segment was called. There you go. HR in life.

Steve-o (01:19:19.042)
Hahaha

Steve-o (01:19:22.902)
Okay, so this is not technically a real life example, but I'm gonna read one of the famous quotes from this movie, Send Help. And to paint the picture, Linda Little, okay, Linda has been promised.

Tony Benjamin (01:19:31.598)
and help.

Tony Benjamin (01:19:36.677)
By the way, possible maybe sort of spoilers ahead.

Steve-o (01:19:39.968)
Nah, not too much. Well, you'll learn this in the first five minutes of the movie. Linda has been promised that she will be moved into a VP role by her boss. Her boss, unfortunately, passes away and his son takes over. And one of the very first meetings he pulls Linda into the office. Actually, he doesn't pull into in the office. Linda forces herself in the office as he's having an interview with this really pretty girl. And I won't I won't tell you what happens in that particular scene, but.

Tony Benjamin (01:20:02.149)
You

Tony Benjamin (01:20:07.791)
which beauty is a superpower all of its own. I'll just say that.

Steve-o (01:20:10.956)
Beauty is a superpower. Yeah, I thought the truth. But but he he basically says Linda, look, I'm going to be frank with you. You're smart. I know you're great with numbers, but I just don't think you got it as an executive. As an executive, I see no value in you. That's his comment to her. Right. And and so thus starts kind of the premise of the movie. And, you know, the other famous line, you know, we're not in the office anymore, Bradley, right after the plane crash. So so.

Tony Benjamin (01:20:26.958)
Ouch.

Tony Benjamin (01:20:36.517)
Yes.

Steve-o (01:20:39.416)
The reason I'm kind of using this as this example is, you know, sometimes we make promises to employees that they take very seriously. And so we have to be careful about that because people do trust, right? There's a trust factor there, especially when you're in that type of role. But in this particular scenario, the executive or the son who takes over the company instead hires his best friend to be the

Tony Benjamin (01:20:49.613)
Yes, yes, yes.

Steve-o (01:21:09.09)
VP instead of her. Obviously nepotism going on there in that sense, right? Hire the best friend. And I'll be honest, this best friend was not the best fit, but they were best friends. And because they're best friends, why would he not put his best friend in the role? So they could work together. Isn't that exciting? But the total... Don't we all? Like we all hear about stories like this. So...

Tony Benjamin (01:21:27.865)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And I hear about that all the time from HR people, by the way.

Steve-o (01:21:36.216)
So this part of the movie, think, is really hilarious because to me, it's very realistic. It is a very realistic scenario, which then leads to this whole movie. In fact, one of the other things, you know, because he's trying to find a reason to fire her right at the beginning and in this same conversation. And he says, oh, Linda, you know, before you go, I've received a few complaints about you, you know, noxious odors. And he's like, I think.

tuna or something like that, you know, because she eats tuna fish sandwiches every day at the desk, which, you know, I get that, right? I've gotten I've gotten noxious odor requests in my HR career before,

Tony Benjamin (01:22:12.921)
Yeah, yeah, especially when you microwave tuna fish. Don't eat fish in the office, right?

Steve-o (01:22:16.788)
Yeah, I mean, come on, why would you do that to the whole office? You know what? And I'll be honest, you know what one of my pet peeves is as well? Microwave popcorn. Because it's the same effect. It doesn't smell as bad. But man, if you're going to microwave the popcorn, can you please watch it? Because when it burns, it's horrendous throughout the whole office.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:26.043)
dude.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:30.892)
My head.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:38.455)
Okay, yes, no, that that's very true. I have to admit here that I'm an office guy, popcorn in the office guy. I love corn. I just love it.

Steve-o (01:22:45.248)
Why does that not surprise me? No, I love popcorn too, because I can actually still taste it, right? but man, like anyway, so just great movie. If you want to go see it, it's kind of freaky. The ending was totally unexpected, but yet expected at the same time. It is a little gory. So you'll get a little gore in it. Blood and stuff. Not from humans, really. It's just from the animals they have to kill so they can live. What have you.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:52.154)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:55.589)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:23:14.54)
But it was actually pretty decent. I mean, it was a good, it wasn't one of those ones where I have to absolutely go see it again. It wasn't one of those for me. But I just, saw that, you know, from an HR life perspective, and we were kind of thinking about these segments now that we're trying to share, to me it was really relevant because how often have you seen somebody move into a role where they were definitely not qualified, but because of either promises or empty promises or just

Tony Benjamin (01:23:22.895)
Right, right,

Steve-o (01:23:44.576)
relationships, nepotism, whatever you want to call it, people get moved up into those roles that probably shouldn't be there in the first place. And what kind of havoc that wreaks in an organization, period.

Tony Benjamin (01:23:56.228)
No, no, that's and I have not yet seen the movie, but I've seen the trailer and all I kept thinking about this is an HR movie. This is what happens when you tick off an employee. Like this is what happens when you treat somebody like dirt. And look, some people just feel they want to feel like they were treated like dirt, whether they were or not. get that. But the point is, is this kind of thing has an effect like it really has an effect.

Steve-o (01:24:09.463)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:24:22.189)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:24:24.205)
And everyone should understand that. the second thing that, that it goes in there with is, is this idea of like this, this nepotism of what, or what you're talking about and why we hire and do the things that we do. And I guess here's the bottom line of that. Don't make a promise to somebody unless you're willing to do it. So one of my clients recently had.

an employee and we gave him a written warning and he was ticked off. Part of the reason he was getting his written warning is because he had stopped trying. Like he had grown lazy in what he was doing, right? And you know what he said to us when we gave him the written warning? You promised that you would give me a raise on such and such date. You didn't do it. so I'm, you know, why would I try?

Steve-o (01:25:20.333)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:25:21.165)
And of course the manager's answer to that was, I told you if you did a really good job and this whole time I've been kind of warning you that it's not going great. Like we've had several verbal conversations about this, that it's not going great. So of course you would not get the raise. But that didn't matter to him because that's not what he heard. He didn't hear, if you do a really good job, you'll get a raise. What he heard was you will get a raise.

And of course, unless it was spelled out for him in some sort of way that was easy, easy to understand, ding in an email or in a warning or something like that, because he thought, right. I always tell you, you know, you got a problem. If you ask your employees, how do you know you're doing a good job? And if the answer is, is because I work really hard. That's a problem. That's a, that's a problem. How do know you're doing a good job? Well, I come in and I work really hard every day. No, no, no. How do you know if you're doing a good job?

Steve-o (01:25:52.066)
Yeah, like written format or...

Steve-o (01:25:58.018)
Correct.

Tony Benjamin (01:26:17.851)
because effort and a good job are not the same thing. so anyways, it just reminded me totally of that, but there you go. That is HR in life.

I had to play it again.

Steve-o (01:26:34.584)
That's right.

Tony Benjamin (01:26:36.035)
And no, it's not me playing.

Steve-o (01:26:46.146)
Well, I gotta say one more thing, Tony there. Rachel McAdams, who I absolutely adore as an actress, scared the crap out of me in this movie. She just scared me. So she did such a good job playing her role that it genuinely freaked me out. Like if I met her after watching that movie, I would have been very timid in shaking her hand or anything, period.

Tony Benjamin (01:26:48.537)
Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Hahaha!

That's awesome. I like Rachel McAdams.

Tony Benjamin (01:27:05.903)
That's cool.

Tony Benjamin (01:27:15.707)
I've got it. Okay, here's our closing story that I have to tell. my wife's, so my mother-in-law, my wife's mother used to know Amy Adams mother. Okay. And Amy Adams is kind of my, my Hollywood actress crush. So I, so I decided, right, right. And so here a few years ago, I decided that I was going to post a picture of Amy Adams on Facebook.

Steve-o (01:27:35.91)
okay, now we're getting the real truth here.

Tony Benjamin (01:27:44.962)
every day until I got to meet her. And I told everybody all I wanted was to meet her and have her put just a little kiss right there on the cheek and just that was it. So I wanted nothing more. I just want to meet her, say hi, tell her how great she is and you'll pick on the cheek right there. And my no one said anything about it until I started posting. And pretty soon a bunch of people decided they wanted to help me and started sharing my posts.

Steve-o (01:28:13.806)
goll, here we go.

Tony Benjamin (01:28:14.221)
And so I started to go from like, you know, 1015 impressions to like 2005,000. Like it started to go. And that's when my Yes. And that's when my wife intervened. She's like, Nope. That's another

Steve-o (01:28:21.848)
It went viral pretty quick,

Steve-o (01:28:30.092)
I'm sure she was angry about the peck on the cheek. If you hadn't wanted the peck on the cheek, you would have been fine. That was your mistake, I'm telling you.

Tony Benjamin (01:28:35.705)
Maybe, maybe.

Anyways, there you go. That's my Amy Adams story. So there you go. well, thank you, Steve. I think that this has, been a great episode and matter of fact, all your expertise that you dropped today, we got to give you a hand and just tell you how awesome you were. it's a short hand.

Steve-o (01:28:53.714)
Hey, thanks. Honestly, it's just because I'm up to date on stuff. You have to remember, we're a platinum partner with Indeed. We get up to date information all the time. We constantly try to share it with our clients and make sure they're aware of what's happening in the marketplace because these are important elements that have an impact on your hiring process, period. And honestly, I didn't realize until you had said how you're making a resume and adding logos or whatever.

Tony Benjamin (01:28:59.93)
Right, right.

Steve-o (01:29:20.556)
that this is also impacting applicants in a powerful way. So that has opened my eyes a little bit on this episode because I've been so focused on the employer side, I completely spaced that, wait a minute, there's a whole other side to this. So hats off to you for kind of helping me recognize that.

Tony Benjamin (01:29:35.439)
Well, yeah, well, I've always I've always liked the idea of inserting the logo because it visually draws their eyes to what I want them to see. It usually makes their eyes stop at each job. It's usually when they look at it in color, right? So it's it's dynamic. It draws that and I. Right, right. But going into an ATS, yeah, I hadn't thought about that you can embed.

Steve-o (01:29:46.999)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:29:50.669)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:29:56.192)
That's different. Absolutely.

Steve-o (01:30:02.956)
Doesn't work there, yeah. Yep.

Tony Benjamin (01:30:03.608)
stuff there and though that yeah, and matter of fact, in the footer of my resume, and this shows you I haven't applied for a job in quite a while really. I mean, I kind of networked job search last year, a year and a half ago a little bit but but I also have like links to my disrupt HR speeches and stuff that I've given in the footer, right? Because do you want to get to know me? Here you go. So yeah.

Steve-o (01:30:25.846)
Yeah, and they'll block the links. You know, you can still you can still leave a link in your resume as long as you don't make it a clickable link. Does that make sense? so as a caveat to that, just so you're aware of it, you can still leave links. Yeah, you can still put links in your resume, but it cannot be a clickable link. So if it's underlined in blue and is actually clickable, that's what you want to remove. As long as that's removed and it's not clickable, you can still include it there. That makes sense. And so that.

Tony Benjamin (01:30:35.897)
Yeah, create an image of it.

Tony Benjamin (01:30:49.231)
interesting.

Tony Benjamin (01:30:53.061)
Wow. Yeah, yeah.

Steve-o (01:30:53.996)
So that's something to kind of keep in mind as well.

Tony Benjamin (01:30:56.591)
Yeah. Anyways, I think this has been good. I hope for all of you listeners, this is has been a good a good walk through an ATS and hopefully you've learned a lot as well. So.

Steve-o (01:31:10.027)
Yeah, and you know, don't forget to share this episode. You know any episode if there's an episode that resonates with you and and really teaches you something, share it. We've we've already seen how some of our episodes have impacted some people out there, which I think has been phenomenal to hear some of those stories. I love it. Rachel was telling me about how in her classroom sometimes there are episodes you know that resonate with her that she can share with the students. So so yeah, if.

Tony Benjamin (01:31:14.01)
Yes, please.

Tony Benjamin (01:31:25.795)
Yes.

Steve-o (01:31:36.138)
If there's anything about this episode that resonates and you've got a colleague in an HR group or wherever you've been, share the episode like that. One, obviously we would be grateful, but at the end of the day, Tony and I are just trying to educate and help get the word out. And so, yeah, and have a little fun with it. so, so please, please, share those episodes that resonate with you. It makes all the difference. I mean, we're on social media and groups and channels. And I mean, let's be honest in HR, we

Tony Benjamin (01:31:53.101)
and have a little fun.

Steve-o (01:32:05.942)
are always coming up with things that happen. like, my gosh, can you believe this happened? Right. So it's just fun. Right. And don't forget your stories, write your stories, especially if your story has a Beetlejuice type flavor. We talked about that today. If it has a title or a name, nickname, we'd love to hear those stories and share more of those on on our episodes for the future.

Tony Benjamin (01:32:10.171)
Right, right.

Tony Benjamin (01:32:15.247)
Yes.

Yeah, a nickname.

Tony Benjamin (01:32:25.669)
Yeah, perfect. All right. Pucks for autism proves that when communities rally families win their hockey tournaments raise local funds that support autism programming inclusion and connection for kids and adults everywhere. Join the team that plays with purpose. Visit pucks for autism.com. That's pucks for autism.com and get involved today. There you go.

Steve-o (01:32:53.482)
Nice as you know, so I was thinking about you today Claire because the United States Played in the Olympics today Olympics started they were playing I think the Czech Republic and they won five to one the women's I'm talking about women's hockey in particular So women's hockey played today and they won five to one. It was a really good game. So Yeah

Tony Benjamin (01:33:07.192)
cool.

Tony Benjamin (01:33:14.137)
Wow, there you go. You know, today was.

Steve-o (01:33:15.448)
Yeah, so and if you didn't know the Winter Olympics started. So. And we totally forgot to talk about the Lehigh earthquake. I totally spaced it. Yeah, yeah. There was an earthquake today in Lehigh, which is what we call Point of the Mountain here, which is halfway in between Provo and Salt Lake City. So there you go. Yeah, OK. I know, right, because they've been digging it away. So true. OK.

Tony Benjamin (01:33:18.915)
That's right. That's right. There you go. yes, we're have to do that in another time. So but yes, there was an earthquake today.

Tony Benjamin (01:33:34.853)
That's right. That's right. The point of them, which is less of a point now because they keep mining it. Okay. That's right. All right. Well, thanks everybody. I guess we will head out the same way that we came in.

Steve-o (01:33:48.44)
That's right.

Tony Benjamin (01:33:51.105)
Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a five star review on your favorite podcast app. Comments or questions for us? Email the podcast at the HR life podcast at gmail.com and we'll talk again.