The 10x Recruiter: Hand the Admin to AI and Make More Placements, with Tycho De Saeytyd

0:00 Having that admin work, doing that every single day, we call that non-revenue generating work. Because in a way that is not going to increase your GP as a recruiter, you want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. You guys raised 21 million for your Series 8, which is amazing. Working for a company that is actually building the tools, we can say for a fact that we are not here to replace any recruiters.

0:21 We're here to enhance the work. As soon as you've closed that conversation with your clients, Spot was there in that call. So Spot immediately can create a search for you based on that call. All of that just happens automatically. You don't have to do anything. Okay, I didn't appreciate that. That's cool.

0:35 Yeah, yeah. Agencies have built their tech stack. They've been adding different features and tools which don't necessarily talk to each other. So it becomes very, very complex to maintain that entire IT stack and to have some kind of intelligence layer that is across those different tools. By unifying that and by making sure that you have one tool that talks to all of those different components, there's a huge efficiency gain.

0:57 Recruitment agency owners are very aware of the opportunity AI represents in terms of being able to scale, grow their billings. Where do you think legacy IT systems are costing agency owners money? I'm really curious, you come from McKinsey. Why did you give up a career in consulting to get into the recruitment industry?

1:22 When I was studying at university, I always wondered, I think like many other people, what I would be doing as soon as I graduate, because there's so many options and I had in business engineering, which is in a way quite broad. There's many different options that you have, but many people go into business or go into consulting.

1:40 Other people, they start working for corporates. And there's only a very small fraction that immediately goes into the startup world. But for me, that's always been something that I wanted to do. I always wanted to start something myself or grow something myself. But being connected to a lot of friends who chose the path into consulting, I was also drawn to that market.

2:03 So I was scanning the market and saying, okay, what are all the different options I have for consulting? And that's when McKinsey caught my eye. I initially didn't want to work for McKinsey or BCG or Bain. I was actually working at a telecommunication company in Belgium, but we were working with BCG at that company as a consulting partner.

2:22 And that's really where I started to see what kind of work they were doing. And that ended up working, that basically got me an offer at McKinsey. And I think... The reason why in the end I chose to leave McKinsey is because at McKinsey, you become very, very good at spotting great opportunities. And you see so many different companies.

2:45 Some do very well. Some are more in trouble and then they seek for your advice. But when I understood what Spot was doing, and it was actually because one of the people that I used to work with at McKinsey founded Spot, Got it. Okay, now that is all adding up. So you had a colleague who is one of the founders of Spot.

3:13 Exactly. Yeah, actually, Manu and myself, we both started on the very same day at McKinsey four years ago, four and a half years ago. So it was then that I got to meet him. And over the years, we got to know each other better. And then I knew he was going on his own venture. So I followed along very closely from the sideline.

3:32 And then when I got his call late last year, I was actually quite surprised. And the funny thing is, I told him there's less than 1% chance that I would ever be leaving McKinsey because things were going awesome. I had really, I had a blast. I went to, um, Asia. I spent a few months in, uh, in Tokyo.

3:51 I went to Africa. I went a lot to New York, um, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston. Like I spent all, I spent time all over the place. So, I mean, I've, I was having the time of my life. So I said, there's, there's less than a 1% chance that I would be leaving McKinsey. McKinsey, but going a little bit deeper into what Spot is doing and what it can do for our customers.

4:12 Yeah, in the end, I chose to take the chance. All right, fantastic. And you guys raised $21 million for your Series A, which is amazing. But what is the opportunity that attracted Manu? Like still, it seems like a counterintuitive to go from a big consulting firm to a startup, a software company that's targeting the recruitment industry.

4:39 So what's the logic? Why are you guys excited about this industry? So I think, again, it comes down to the fact that at McKinsey or at consulting in general, you become very good at spotting opportunities and finding ways to improve certain ways of working. And what really struck us, and I think the entire team right now, is that we're in the recruitment industry, there's been very little innovation over the last couple of decades.

5:05 Many of those people are still using the same technology that came out 10, 20 years ago. And while we saw what's possible in other industries and what is possible today with the new AI features and everything that is available today, we were like, what if we just apply these learnings from other industries and apply them to the recruitment market?

5:28 And especially because there's still so much manual work that goes on into most recruitment agencies today. Okay, that makes sense. And I agree with that. I would say that... like what you just said is not news to most listeners, right? Recruitment agency owners are very aware of the opportunity that, you know, AI represents in terms of, you know, being able to scale, grow their billings, improve efficiency.

6:02 But I think there's a couple of things. Number one is either they don't even know what's possible Right. And so their version of implementing AI is just like using chat GPT or that kind of thing. Right. Or... Well, you tell me, rather than me guessing, where do you think legacy IT systems are costing agency owners money?

6:31 In my opinion, there's two main things that we see where people are really losing money or earning less than they could, right? Or where the profits are lower than they could be. First and for all, I think it's on how their tech stack looks today. And it's quite remarkable to see how agencies have built their tech stack over the last couple of years or decades.

6:56 They have been trying and they've been adding different features and tools on top of each other, which don't necessarily talk to each other. So it becomes very, very complex to maintain that entire IT stack and to have some kind of intelligence layer that is across those different tools. So I think there, by unifying that and by making sure that you have one tool that talks to all of those different components, there's a huge efficiency gain.

7:21 And not only in efficiency gain, but also you unlock much more potential by having those tools all connected to, let's say, the same database underneath or the same kind of company brain that you are creating every single day. So that's literally one by simplifying your tech stack. I think the second is about leveraging the technology that we have today.

7:42 Many agencies are indeed starting to use AI through LLMs, like publicly available LLMs like ChatShiftia and Cloud. And while this is already probably unlocking a lot of efficiency gains for them, for the recruiters, this is mostly helpful for edge cases, right? For writing emails, for creating a Canada's write-up, for reformatting a CV, or just to ask a few questions and bounce some ideas off of your LLM.

8:11 Whereas we actually try to leverage that AI across your entire tech stack. And most impactful there is by giving you the possibility to search your entire database and not just finding a name of a person or finding their current job, but also using all of the information that you have collected as an organization That means all of your phone calls, all of your virtual meetings, and all of your tags and notes that you might have put into the system, they now become searchable in a very easy manner by just using natural language.

8:44 So there are people that are like agencies that are becoming very successful. They start using their database as an asset than a graveyard. And that's where we see that there's lots of potential to just streamline your entire process and find much better profiles for your searches. Okay, that all adds up.

9:06 So talk to me then about where you think the recruitment market is headed by 2030. You know, let's transport ourselves to the future, only two or three years in the future. Imagine we're working at a really successful recruiting firm or search firm. What would be different to the way things work now?

9:30 I think if you see how the market has evolved over the last couple of years, let's say two years ago, nobody was creating their candidate write-ups in ChatShift or Cloud. Today, I assume most of the agencies are using some form of AI to create their candidate write-ups or to write their emails. So we already see a huge improvement on that side.

9:50 I think if you extrapolate that another four or five years further down the line, I think AI will have his role in every single step of the other recruiters. Yeah, workflow, essentially. So we think in sourcing, there will be much more AI. We also think that in Canada's presentation. and conversations with your clients and your companies will be more AI.

10:13 But where we are trying to go is to have agents that go across that entire workflow and basically enhance every step that you as a recruiter have to follow during your candidate interactions. So that basically allows you to have a 360 view of your entire process at every single step, of the way and making you like a 10x recruiter instead of having just a tool here and there, just having an agent that is constantly working for you, essentially.

10:40 So we were going to a more agentic platform where the platform is working for you instead of you working with the different tools. All right. I love the idea of the 10X recruiter. That definitely sounds appealing. So let's then just really break this down and imagine I am a Spot customer and I want to 10X my billings.

11:05 And talk to me about how Spot helps me at every stage in the recruitment process. at the very start, let's say finding candidates or sourcing candidates, we know that most agencies today, they already have a huge database. And that database includes information from years and years of conversations with candidates, jobs that they actually were placed for, jobs that they didn't get, a lot of notes that were put in their resumes, write-ups, whatever it is.

11:37 So there's a huge, huge, huge database of information that is living there. And what we think, and that's also the reason why Spot was founded, is that that data is not sufficiently used to find the right people for your next search. So that's the very first thing. We want to make sure that you have all the agents and all the tooling available to find the people.

11:57 in your database that you've already spoken to that might have been considered for a job in the past that can now be surfaced for the right new search. Because that is not only publicly available information on LinkedIn, but that also includes all of the specific one-to-one conversations that you've had with that person, where they might have shared any other information that's relevant for the next search.

12:19 So that's really the first thing on the sourcing side of things. We want to make sure that everything that you've collected over that person over the years becomes useful in the future. Just pause there for a second, Ty. So, yeah. I agree with you, and that makes total sense, but surely that's what every recruiting software wants to achieve, right?

12:39 Is helping me find the most relevant people that I already know on the database, as well as search externally and pull those candidates into my database. So how does this agentic way of working that you described earlier, what does it actually look like in practice? Yeah. So in practice, that means whenever you have a new search that comes into your system, either through a VMS or you have created that job yourself, that the system automatically proposes, let's say the 20, 30 different candidates that are in your database that you should talk to.

13:11 And not only here are some candidates with a... with a score, but also very granular. These are the five reasons why you should speak to that person for this specific job. And that can be anything. That can be based on whatever is on their LinkedIn. That can be based on a conversation that you've had two years ago, or that can be based on a rejection for another job where they actually said, I don't think it's a great fit because X, Y, Z.

13:32 And that information is now very relevant. relevant for this new search. So we want to make it very transparent to you as a recruiter that you know why this person is actually surfaced for you to then further review. And that review, and that's a very good question, that review should be made as easy as possible.

13:48 You should have an easy chat dialogue to ask any question that you have for the system to immediately know, is this person qualified or not? Instead of going through their resume, searching online, et cetera. And all the information needs to be in front of you to very quickly make your assessment, because we still believe that you as a recruiter, you should make a decision and the assessment.

14:10 What does that involve in terms of like, let's say I've just come off a call with a client. I've taken a full brief. I know exactly what they're looking for. I'm excited to start, you know, recruiting and filling this position. So open up Spot. And what am I doing to, you know, quickly and easily create that list of candidates?

14:34 Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think it even starts a step earlier. As soon as you've closed that conversation with your client, Spot was there in that call. So Spot immediately can create a search for you based on that call, and it will use all of the information that was shared either over email or during that actual conversation with your client to then populate the fields and the knowledge about that search.

14:56 Right? So that's the first step that happens in Spot. The second step is Spot has access to your entire database. It knows all of your candidates, candidates that are being considered for other jobs, candidates that were considered for other jobs in the past. And it will then immediately for you match the right candidates against that search.

15:13 So all of that just happens automatically. You don't have to do anything. I didn't appreciate that. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So the search is created, the people are being surfaced, and then you as a recruiter, you can immediately start assessing the right candidates that the system has surfaced for you.

15:29 Okay, fantastic. Now, what about fine tuning that though? Because until I am confident that the spot agent is doing it correctly, I might want to double check, right? So how do, what does that, what does that involve? 100%. And that's, we also, we approach the technologies that we have today, and especially the AI to be more as an assistant and as a person that is helping you rather than a black box kind of thing.

16:01 So we want to make sure that you always know exactly what's going on and why the AI makes certain proposals or suggestions. And you can tweak it. So the way that it works is it will create certain filters automatically saying, hey, some of these things this person needs to have. For example, if I'm looking for an account executive in New York and I value people being in person with me, that person needs to be in or around New York so they can come into the office every single day or how many days I would like.

16:31 So that's a hard filter. And you can have many, many other hard filters that are automatically proposed by the system. But then you also have something which we call criteria and criteria are something like some aspects or not necessarily requirements, but things that we value in that person. And you can rank each of those.

16:51 You can go up to five or six different criteria. And then the system will basically assess each candidate against those criteria. And those criteria will be suggested by the system, but you can very easily change them, reorder them, or add additional criteria so that you know exactly, hey, the perfect persona that I'm looking for has these different traits.

17:11 And then every single person that will be suggested will have a clear assessment against each of these traits and not just the surface level assessment. It will go as deep as it can, including all the information it has on that person. Okay, got it. Now, does it get smarter over time? In other words, does it learn my preferences?

17:31 Or how is that better to other tools that I have access to? That's a great question. And I think just like ChatGPT and Cloud these days and many other LLMs, the system is constantly learning from the kind of feedback that it receives from you. Right. We, of course, during the onboarding, we make sure that we set up the system already in a way that it becomes useful as of day one.

17:54 We use templates, we use certain prompts, certain skills that you as a person, um, uh, yeah, would want to see in the system. But over time, the system is going to learn from how you. rate and rank candidates, what type of candidates you very quickly move into your candidate pipeline. And you will learn that over every single search and over all of your behavior that you put into the system, willingly or unwillingly, just to make sure that whatever you will see on the screen is as useful as possible for you, given everything you've done in the past.

18:26 So yes, it learns all the time. Fantastic. So I've done that search of candidates in the database. What's the next step? So as soon as you have found people that you want to continue the conversation with, you can add them to your candidate pipeline. So that's the first step you do after you have reviewed certain profiles.

18:46 And then the first thing you want to do after is reaching out to them. And we are really a strong believer that everything needs to be made as frictionless and as seamless as possible into one system. That's why we are an all-in-one system. And you can then immediately send them an email or schedule an interview with them through our system.

19:05 We don't want you to switch between tabs, switch between tools. So you do that in our system. You basically send them an email, which can include some type of information around the job, which AI can also write for you because it knows everything about the job. It knows everything about the candidate.

19:22 So it can create that invitational email to that person saying, are you open for an opportunity? Here's what we have in a few bullet points that are relevant to that person. And then if they are interested, you can also schedule that call directly from our platform. Okay, cool. Now, something that I spend a lot of time teaching recruiters, Tai, is to, because it's difficult to get someone's attention and get them interested in even just having a conversation with you, then...

19:55 Our strategy is multi-touch and multi-channel. So I'm curious how a campaign like that, rather than just a single reach out, would be facilitated through Spot. Yeah. And I've seen many, many different things work at staffing agencies. Some people categorize their database into people that are actively looking, which are much easier to approach.

20:18 And there you could, for example, just have a quick email that you send to them or they have been referred to you. And then the people that you know might be looking for a job, you can indeed roll them into a, which we call a multi-channel sequence, where people will get, you can reach out to people over different channels.

20:34 And those channels can include text messages, multiple emails, or multiple text messages. to LinkedIn, um, reach outs, um, and even phone conversations. So you can basically just define the different channels that you want, would like to include in that sequence, and then already includes the kind of message that you want.

20:51 And then everything runs automatically if you want, or manually, you can always have that option because we think automation is great, but you need to make sure that you're still on top of the entire process. So if there are certain steps, like a phone call that you want to do manually, you can also choose, uh, choose to do that.

21:08 Okay, I'm loving this so far. That all makes sense. So what if, I know it's an all-in-one system tie, but what if I have certain tools that I just really like and I want to continue using? How easy is it to integrate with Spot? Is it like through an API or something? Yeah. So the first thing that I always do before giving them an answer is understanding why they would like to use that tool.

21:34 Okay, I'll give you an example. Yes. LinkedIn automation, let's say, is very tricky. And obviously LinkedIn doesn't like automation tools to be used. So if I, and I'm worried, let's say, about losing my LinkedIn account, right? So I've got a tool that is reliable that I know works. I've already got it set up and I've been using it safely to connect with people and follow up with them.

22:02 And so I'm a little bit reluctant to try Spot because I don't know if that's going to have the same success or if it's going to get me into LinkedIn jail. There's basically three types of connections that we typically suggest to people. The first thing and the first two are the easiest one and then I go a little bit more complex, but.

22:22 The first thing that you can always do is indeed have an MCP, right? If that tool that you're using has a cloud or chat GPT or whatever LLM MCP, you can basically use our MCP and their MCP to basically have those systems talk to each other. That's the easiest thing to set up. The second, if you're a bit more advanced but still easy to do, is having our APIs.

22:43 We have full open APIs, which allow you to basically use that API key to either write information into Spot or take information out of it. It can also update stuff through webhooks. Whatever you need, you can set that up there. And then the last step is we also have built a lot of native integrations into our system.

23:02 And that list is constantly growing, which also allow you to bring whatever tool that you would like to use and basically have that integration directly into Spot. So you don't have to set up anything yourself. So it really depends what kind of tool that you're looking for. But across those three different categories, you almost always can connect it to Spot.

23:20 Got it. Okay. That sounds cool. So, um, so we've, we've identified our candidates, we've started our outreach. I'm curious how the, um, the phone, like I'm a big believer that ultimately this is still a relationship business. Right. And in terms of like where the skill of a recruiter is in communication, persuasion, influencing, qualifying, negotiating, advising, you know, um, And those skills, you can't really automate.

23:55 So ultimately, we do need to talk to people in order to do deals, right? And so, but where people get bogged down is finding the data, knowing when to reach out, you know, having phone numbers. putting together lists and it's that admin part of business development or recruiting that like slows people down.

24:19 So what's the, what's the solution for you guys in order for me to like really maximize my time and be as effective as possible? No, 100%. And what you're seeing or experiencing is, I think, what 90% of the staffing agencies are experiencing today as well. And it's also, it sounds cliche, but that's exactly the problem that we're trying to solve.

24:39 Having that admin work, doing that every single day, we call that non-revenue generating work. Because in a way, that is not going to increase your GP as a recruiter. So in a way, you want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. which is also why some of your top recruiters might not be filling in all of their admin work or updating all the profiles as they should do, because that's not getting any value for them in the short term, at least.

25:04 So that's the main thing that we want to focus on with our agents and with our different features, is that work that immediately goes after a conversation with a client or after a conversation with a candidate. That's why one of the first things, one of the first features that were non-negotiable for us is that profiles need to be updated automatically after every conversation that you have with that person, be it over a phone call or over a virtual meeting.

25:29 It doesn't matter. It automatically needs to be updated, right? So that's already one step, one, a huge thing that you, yes, you can have a note taker, but if you still have to copy paste that transcript into the profile, it's still a very static environment. So we want to make sure that it's automatically in the system.

25:45 But then let's say you have a very well-established profile of a candidate. You still, if you're looking for certain information, you still have to go through all of those different attributes, files that are attached, etc. So we wanted to make that as easy to use as possible as well. That's why we have our Ask AI functionality where you can just chat with the system.

26:05 And you can just say, hey, does this person have enough technical experience to work in a, let's say, go to market team where they use certain systems, XYZ. And the system will actually search everything that it knows about this person, including everything from your conversations, emails, etc., to then automatically respond to you.

26:25 So you can just chat with the system and see if the person has that information. And it can also coach you for your next interactions. Like, what are the five things I should discuss with this person during my next screening call? And that's really where we are going to, that it does that proactively instead of you having to ask it for.

26:42 So you know immediately, these are the things I should focus on during my next interactions with my candidates or with my clients. Okay, that sounds cool. So with that in mind, then, let's say... I want to also search externally, whether that's LinkedIn, MetaView, or just searching using Claude or searching, you know, using Boolean on the web to find those candidates.

27:09 How does Spot make that part of the job easier? Because then also there's data enrichment that needs to happen where, you know, I might find the names and the companies, but not have the email or the phone number. 100%. And today, we already have our LinkedIn browser extension, which essentially allows you to import any candidates or contact directly from within LinkedIn, LinkedIn sales navigator or LinkedIn recruiter.

27:37 So you can basically build your database very quickly next to the original or traditional CV parsing. You can also import people directly from the web. The same, by the way, is true for jobs or opportunities that you find on job boards or LinkedIn or wherever online. You can immediately import them into Spot as well.

27:55 With that being said, we are also very quickly releasing our own external database, which will essentially do the same thing that it does now for people that you have internally in your own database. You will then allow to find people outside of your database as well. Right. And to your, to your question around like contact detail enrichment, a candidate is only really helpful to have in your database if you, if you know how to reach out to them.

28:20 And yes, you might have the LinkedIn URL, but that's why we, for example, also included that functionality to enrich phone numbers and email address, including LinkedIn URLs from within the system. So you don't need to use a third party contact detail enrichment. We have that as part of your subscription.

28:37 Okay, fantastic. So I'm searching for Candice. I'm reaching out. What about on the BD side? Because depending on... So I guess typically agencies find themselves in one of two scenarios, Ty. So either... They have, they're in a client-driven market where there's plenty of candidates, but fewer job opportunities, right?

29:06 Or it's the opposite. It's never perfectly balanced, right? It's always one or the other, or like it's very candidate-driven, everyone is recruiting for the same profiles. And so if I find a good candidate, I'm definitely going to be able to place them. But let's assume that I'm in a client-driven market.

29:24 So getting quality clients with fillable mandates, that's the challenge. So how am I using Spot in order to support my BD efforts? So I think the first step is finding those opportunities. And those opportunities can either be with your existing clients or it can be with new clients, right? Yeah. With your existing clients, given the fact that Spot will be present in all of your conversations with your clients and has access to all of the emails and all the interaction points with your clients, it can automatically suggest new entries or new opportunities with those existing clients for you to explore.

30:05 So you can query any kind of questions around what are some other departments I might be able to find great candidates for, or how should I transform this current partnership into a larger partnership. So that's the first thing that the system will be able to help you with, given all the information and interactions that you've had with that client.

30:24 How can I increase the kind of partnership that we have going on? Ty, just before you move on, can you elaborate on that? Because I think that's super interesting. What... Everybody knows, right, that it's much easier to get more revenue from an existing client than to find a new client, right? And because you already have a relationship, they already trust you, you've proven that you can deliver and so on.

30:47 Yeah. But I'm not clear on how the AI would help me with that. So in the end, it comes down to merging publicly available information about that company and about the contacts at that company with the, let's say, information that you have based on your conversation with, uh, with that, with that company, uh, and merge those two, those, those two, uh, database or those, those two sources essentially.

31:15 So that means if you were working with a large corporate, um, in, with their marketing, um, uh, department and you see online that they're also sourcing for, let's say, are they looking for it profiles, then knowing what you already know about that company, Combined with the fact that on their, let's say, company page, they're also looking for IT, the system can suggest, hey, maybe ask person X in the marketing campaign if she can make an introduction to person Y in the IT campaign and introduce it with this specific information that you already know about the company.

31:49 So you're going to leverage your existing position to then have an introduction into a new party or a new department if that is what you want. So we see huge traction there. Are there any other signals that Spot is flagging for existing contacts in the database? Yes. So we track everything from hiring growth.

32:13 So which companies are hiring, uh, funding rounds. So are people open for new, like have they raised new capital, uh, and new, um, uh, like overall just information on their website. And we use all of those different signals to then alarm you or, or, uh, warn you like, Hey, this, this is, might be a great moment for you to reach out, uh, on top of what you are ever already going on.

32:35 Because as you mentioned, if you already have an existing relationship, you can very much use that to your advantage to grow your business. Does Spot do that automatically in the background for all my existing contacts? Or do I need to add them to a sort of watch list? No, so that's basically part of the co-pilot functionality where you can just...

32:58 talk to the system. And if you're talking about certain system, certain company rather, the system will automatically propose these kinds of entries and will suggest whatever options that you have available and where the system thinks you have the highest likelihood of converting it into a larger partnership.

33:17 Well, that's cool. Does it, can it do that for, does it only do that for my existing contacts? In other words, so some of our clients use a tool called Clay. I don't know if you're familiar with Clay, Ty, but essentially, so you could put in your entire TAM into Clay and now it's going to cost you a lot of credits, right?

33:37 Depending on how big your target market is, but it could constantly monitor those companies and those contacts for the things you mentioned, like funding rounds, uh, department growth or, you know, job openings or, you know, people moving from one company to another. Yes. So the co-pilot has full access to anything that is publicly available.

33:59 So it can screen any of those pages from your, from your addressable market and basically say, Hey, this is what we're at, what I'm seeing. Uh, and it goes even one step further. So it can immediately say, um, Let's say if I ask the system, is Entropic hiring in New York City? Then the system will automatically search my existing database.

34:16 Do I have anything that is open? We'll search their websites and LinkedIn to see is there anything open. And if there is something open, let's say there's five jobs that are currently open, it will automatically match the people that are in your database against those jobs. So you can already create a shortlist of the best candidates in your database and immediately send it to them.

34:36 So instead of just answering to the specific question that you might have asked, it will take one step or two steps further for you to immediately reach out and have a concrete plan rather than just a one by one conversation. I love that because that fits in with what you were saying earlier about reducing friction, right?

34:55 Because friction is, it tires you, it wears you down, and it slows you down, right, from getting as much done as you would like. So that's pretty cool. We kind of went off on a tangent there. You were about to say step two with the business development setup. Yeah, so I kind of already alluded to it.

35:16 So you can do this for people that are existing clients or people that you've already had some way relationship with. But you could also do this with completely new clients. So you could ask the co-pilot to say, look at the clients that I have today. What are some new clients that I could potentially reach out to given my expertise and given the kind of candidates that I have in my database?

35:38 and set up a certain campaign for them. So the system will then learn from every placement and every interaction that you've had with your existing clients to then define your ICP. You can, of course, further improve that by talking to it and then using that ICP to find the right clients that you should now also kind of open the interaction with.

35:59 So you can extrapolate whatever you have today to the bigger markets and find the new leads that you should actually be talking to. Okay, that's cool. Fantastic. In what other ways, Ty, does this tool allow to reduce friction in the sort of workflows day-to-day? That's also what we start, like the entire roadmap or the entire journey of Spot, it all started with talking to the people that you're building the tool for.

36:30 And again, sounds like a cliche, sounds like everybody's doing it, but you would be surprised at how much you learn from actually talking to the people who will be using your system every single day. Absolutely. And that's one, but also it doesn't stop when you already have a platform and then you have already a working solution.

36:44 You should continue having that input from your customers to... adjust and to further improve your platform. So that was one of our main focus points to understand where does that admin work go into today? And I already gave a few examples. Most of that admin starts as soon as they hang up the phone or they close that Teams call with the candidates.

37:08 Then all of a sudden they should update the profile. They should create an entire email campaign. They should start creating a candidate write-up. They should start sending emails. All of that is manual work, which will not essentially give you more placements. You make placements by talking to candidates and by talking to your clients.

37:26 So that's why first step, automatically update that profile off of that conversation. You don't have to do anything else. It will happen automatically. Step one. Step two, whenever you say this candidate is a great fit and I want to present that person to my client, the system knows or should know how you want like to present candidates.

37:46 Whether that is through a company portal or that is through an email, you should give it a template. And that is exactly how you want those candidates to be presented every single time. right? It's very likely that your staffing agency has a certain way of presenting candidates. It can have a front page, then their reformatted CV, and then a few pages on skill assessment.

38:08 But every single time, it should, at least in my opinion, be somewhat similar. Of course, it can be different for certain clients, but let's say in general, it's a very similar format. You can give that format or formats to the system and it will then automatically create it for you. Because again, it was part of all those conversations.

38:28 It reads your emails. It knows all of your... your interactions with your candidates. It knows what the job is about. So it can tailor that template already to a 95% ready file that you only have to review, and then you can send it to the client, right? So where there's high prediction that you are going to do a certain task in a similar way or fashion like you've done in the past, the system or AI can really help you to accelerate the process.

38:55 That's cool. Any other bottlenecks that you've uncovered that are important to your customers that you've found a way to remove? We see a lot of adoption of our company portal because many people have used some portals in the past, but they were very hard to set up. It was very hard to maintain. And the clients were also not a big fan of them either.

39:17 What do you mean by company portal? Yes. Very good question. So it's basically a, an online environment where the clients can log in and they can either in real time, or if you don't want in real time, you can have it offline as well, but basically they can see the candidates that you have presented to them for a certain job or jobs, right?

39:38 So it's an interactive environment where you as a recruiter can present candidates to your clients and they can log in whenever they have time or whenever they want to review and can give you feedback through the portal. Got it. A few benefits there is just reducing the dozens of emails that go back and forth between the client and the recruiter.

39:56 And also that you are not in a reactive mode, but rather in a proactive mode. I think actually the bigger benefit, Ty, is it creates transparency, right? And it shows your work. It's a little bit like... I think clients don't appreciate always how much goes into the process behind the scenes. So it's almost like you're pulling back the curtain and you're saying, hey, come and let me show you.

40:22 This is the work that we've been doing. And it makes it more tangible, more visible. But what... does that portal look like? What, if I'm the client logging in to the recruiter recruitment agencies portal, what kind of information do I, do I get to see about the shortlisted individuals? Yeah, great question.

40:45 And I think there we wanted to give our clients as, so the recruiters as much flexibility as possible. So you can go to a very, very granular level to define what can the client see and what they can, can they not see? So like, if you want to, it's a spectrum almost. And if you go almost all the way to the right, you will see every single candidate that you have been reviewing, people that you have rejected with their names, all of the information, including their resume, their contact details, the hiring manager, et cetera.

41:14 Or if you, for example, work in executive search, you can even anonymize certain people and just have, let's say, first and last name or not even that, and just a high level view of what their experience is. So it's really, it gives you a lot of flexibility to completely anonymize or completely, let's say, set up that environment as you want.

41:34 It's also fully white labeled. So it's basically an extension of your website. Yeah, that's brilliant. And the other benefit of that is if you decide to share the long list rather than just the short list, then it removes – because you may or may not know this, Ty, but one of the frustrating objections that recruiters hear when they're presenting candidates is, oh, yeah, she looks really good and he looks good as well, but I want to see more.

42:04 Right. Go and find more resumes. And, but you've already looked at everybody who's worth looking at. And these are the two that the candidate needs to interview. And so they're just trying it. But if you can show them and say, well, this is the entire, this is everybody who we considered that was a potential match, right, for this job.

42:26 And here's the the people we ruled out and why we ruled them out. And here's the people that weren't interested because either the salary was too low or the location or whatever. And these two are the ones who've been through that entire process and they're both qualified and they're interested. So hurrah, no more.

42:45 Go and envy these two, right? Exactly. That's why by default, we also have the rejected people on that platform to show that level of transparency and show you all of the time and work that you as a recruiter have put into this to say, hey, I spoke to this candidate. Yes, he's a great fit, but right now he's not open for a new opportunity.

43:05 So they have that, like that they have the transparency and say, indeed, as you mentioned, these two people are almost as good or even as good, but they are interested. So that's why let's, let's not stop. And I saw it start looking outside of those because you already have the perfect people in front of you.

43:19 Exactly. Absolutely. No, that's cool. Um, okay. What do you feel like recruiters need to understand about AI or misconceptions about, you know, either how they're currently using it or what is possible? Like right now today, not what's possible in a few years, but what's possible now? One of the things that I hear very often, let's say I speak to 10, 15 different agency owners every single day or recruiters for that matter too.

43:47 What I hear most is that people are afraid of losing their job or at least losing a part of their job because, and I think that's not even tied specifically to the recruitment market. That is tied to the entire, the entire world. Everybody is a bit, let's say not afraid, but the people are thinking about this.

44:03 How is this going to affect my job? And working for a company that is actually building the tools, we can say for a fact that we are not here to replace any recruiters. We're here to enhance the work. And it's really the agents need to work for you. And it's our job to make those agents as easy to use as possible for you and use them to your advantage.

44:26 Right? So it's not there to say, hey, I don't need your decision anymore. I don't need your input anymore. No, no. You need to turn it around. This agent needs to give you all the information you need to make a very quick and informed decision past each and every candidate. And then you want to create a candidate write-up.

44:43 Well, the system needs to give you all the flexibility and all the transparency to create that for you. And if you have feedback, you give the feedback and it should create it again for you. Do another iteration. So that's why we are a firm believer of having AI at the very easy to use at your fingertips to do all of that run non-revenue generating work very quickly for you.

45:03 So you can focus on what's most important and why recruitment agencies that are doing well, will continue doing well. It's because you are good at talking to people, you recruit communicator, and you, you immediately find that information in people when you talk to them. And that's what robots in our opinion, um, will never be able to do as good as, as people.

45:20 It's true. In fact, we had an event recently in Dallas, which is like our annual conference tie. And my presentation was about the future of recruitment and how to position your firm to profit in the age of AI. And I did basically a year's worth of research for this presentation. I'll send you the...

45:42 like what I discovered if you're interested. But essentially, I looked at 273 sources. Well, basically I used five models, right? So I used Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. I'm sure there was one more. Perplexity. And so I gave them all the same research brief to go out. I wanted to find like how, what impact is AI having on jobs, right?

46:12 not what the media headlines say, right, but what's actually happening. It was super interesting because – so, 273 sources, 170 of them were – 174 primary sources. So, like Harvard, Yale, you know, central banks, you know, these kinds of organizations rather than, you know, vendors or – maybe less authoritative sources.

46:42 And we graded the sources as to how credible they were and whether they were biased, right? And so what's interesting is that AI is not so much replacing roles, it's replacing tasks, right? So similar to what you've been sharing today, like if you, and you can do this for the role of a recruiter, but you can also do it for the roles that you're recruiting for within your client organizations, because those roles are changing right now and are going to continue to evolve.

47:12 But essentially, if you think of a role as a bundle of tasks, what are the tasks that make up the role? And then which ones of the, which of those tasks are the. likely or already being automated, right? And then what's left in that role and... is there enough there that that could be someone's full-time job?

47:35 Or is that gonna get, if there's not much left by the time you automate the things that you can, is that role gonna be absorbed into other people's jobs? In which case that role would be eliminated. But in many cases, it's the bundles of tasks that are getting removed rather than the role itself. Yeah, no, I really second that.

47:57 I mean, if you would say to a recruiter, let's say the time that you right now spend on doing the admin work, let's say you have a one hour conversation with a candidate and 30 minutes after each conversation, you need to block because you need to put all the information into the system and make sure that nothing gets lost.

48:16 What if instead of 60 minutes, you can now speak to that candidate for 90 minutes, getting even deeper in those conversations and really understanding their goals, their needs. Same thing with your client conversations, by the way, and having an even better output, having an even more updated system.

48:32 I think every recruiter would take that. So I really agree with what you're saying. So the task of doing that manual work and updating the candidate, that will be taken away from you. But instead, you will be given that time back to go deeper into those conversations with your clients, with your candidates, to really spend time understanding what they want and what they need.

48:53 I think that will lead to more placements, better placements, and overall higher expectations. happiness in the people that are jobs as well, because I don't think anyone is waiting to do that admin work when they wake up in the morning. Well, okay, so this is an interesting point, Ty, because you said like AI and technology is not going to really take the jobs away from recruiters.

49:18 But the thing is that that's only true in... assuming the recruiter has those finely developed skills we talked about earlier, the communication, the influencing, qualifying, negotiating. If the recruiter is more just an administrator who uses email, sends, you know, searches for candidates, you know, sends them over to clients and most of their time is spent on those types of tasks, they could be eliminated, right?

49:51 Because we don't need people doing that stuff. So I think there's an opportunity for people to really think about what are the real skills that are valuable in a recruiting agency? And am I developing those skills? Because all those other aspects you discussed today can be done by AI, right? But it's also because those people were trained and were asked to do these kind of things.

50:19 Those people filled a gap, filled a void because no one was doing that work. And that's why people who did sourcing and who did the admin work were well needed because nobody was doing it. And today that can indeed be to a large degree be replaced by AI. But that doesn't mean that those people have no other skills that they could do in this new day and age where there might be other gaps or other things that require their expertise.

50:43 So I think it's rather a, it was the demand of the industry, it was the demand of those recruitment agencies for these people, because that was a gap. And I think now the demand will just shift and the kind of tasks that we require will shift. And those people might be well suited for that, or they might go into recruitment themselves.

51:01 So I think it's more from, it comes from a place where those people were asked for it, rather than those people, that is the only thing that they could do. That's a great point. I accept that. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Hey, listen, is there anything we haven't chatted about today that you wanted to make sure we cover?

51:18 No, I mean, I think we went through almost the entire workflow of a typical recruiter from sourcing to interviewing them, to actually presenting them to a client. I think one other thing that we see very often is that people struggle with their reporting side of things. Oh, yeah. People are still trying to...

51:36 put all different Excel sheets together to kind of have like a holistic view of how their business is going. I think AI also there provides all the tools and all the features to give you that full 360 view that you need at whatever level you are. As an individual recruiter, you need different KPIs and different views than a manager, than a department owner or a CEO or a founder.

51:58 So we, and we, and then like AI in general. allows you to basically create those views that are specific for you. And who can also kind of like uncover your blind spots so that you know, how am I doing against my peers? What are some things that I spend a lot of time on? And what are things that I should be spending more time on?

52:16 So that's one thing that we find super, super important to have reporting front and center. So you know what you're doing as an agency and whether that aligns with what you have as a strategy. I'm really glad you said that because I'm a huge believer in knowing your numbers and having that data, knowing for the key metrics that are most important to you, what are they, first of all, tracking them.

52:40 Then you can have an opportunity to improve them, right? But if you don't know what the numbers are, how can you improve? You don't know what you're doing. I don't know. Exactly. And so you'd be, well, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but I'm continuously surprised that when I talk to recruiters and even recruitment business owners and ask them about their numbers, they just don't know.

52:59 They know their revenue. They know how many placements. but they don't have the more granular numbers. And so if they wanna increase billings, well, how are we gonna do that? We need to know what the reverse engineer in a way, right? If you wanna generate a million dollars, how many placements is that?

53:18 Then how many jobs do you need to work? How many candidates do you need to talk to? How many resumes do you need to send and so on? Yeah, I think that was also one of the key reasons why we wanted to have an all in one platform so that we have data from every single step of the entire process so that you can link your actual placements, which comes all the way at the end, or even your invoices, you can link that back to everything that you've like from the sourcing side of things.

53:43 So that data layer that we have across the entire platform gives you so much insights as to where do I lose candidates? Where is my database strong and where is it not strong? If my people are talking to a lot of candidates, where do I lose them along the way? So you have that full 360 and full end-to-end view so that you can basically go much deeper into why was I successful in that placement or why did I not find anyone, right?

54:10 So that's one of our core beliefs there as well. Fantastic. One last question on Tai, and that is, if I'm in the market for a new ATS or CRM platform, what questions should I be asking to the provider to help me decide if that's the right one? One of the most important questions that I would like the most important question that I would ask myself and then to my vendor in extension is, how is this going to help me?

54:39 make more placements because I think as a recruitment owner, that is what you should optimize for. It's your time to placement and it's the number of placements and that the answer can be different for every single agency, because that depends on how you do business today, where you lose a lot of time today.

54:54 But I, I truly believe that, um, A platform should optimize your time to hire. It should optimize the number of placements because otherwise it's going to have, it's not, in the end, it's not going to help you. You want to grow your business. You want to make it as efficient as possible. So those are the two things that I should focus on and hence my question, how is this going to make.

55:12 more placements for me. Fantastic. Good, good answer. All right, Ty. But look, it was fun catching up with you today and hopefully we'll get a chance to meet some of the spot teams sooner or later. I know that I'm going to be My team, you've got your head of partnerships is becoming a bit of a LinkedIn celebrity.

55:35 So that's, is it Felix? It's Felix, yes. Felix, yeah. So my team are wanting to meet Felix because his videos are funny. But by the way, actually I should tell people like, You guys are, the way you're marketing is fun. People should definitely check out your LinkedIn content as well as your YouTube content as well.

55:58 Because, you know, it's really fun the way you guys are marketing your business. Exactly. Yeah. We're putting a lot of time in that. And Felix is awesome in what he's doing. The marketing side of things, we're trying to make it as light as possible. Recruitment doesn't always have to be serious. While what we're doing is a very serious job and a serious change that we want to bring, we want to make a name for ourselves in a very light and funny way as well.

56:26 And that's what Felix is all about. So if you're interested, you can always reach out to him as well. Fantastic. All right, Ty, well, look, have an awesome rest of your day. Thanks for making the time for this. And you, thank you so much for inviting me. I'd love to talk more. Take care. What stood out the most for you in this one?

56:44 Let me know your biggest takeaway on LinkedIn or in the YouTube comments. And more importantly, what are the one or two things that you're going to put in practice this week? If you're getting value from these conversations, do me a favor and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. I really appreciate you listening.

57:01 Make it a great day and I'll see you next time.