00:10:33 · CJ Gustafson, Paul Todgham
[00:10:33] S1: Paul, I recently went to hire somebody for my team. I put the rack up and within thirty six hours, forty eight hours, I had over 1,400 applicants. I'm gonna be honest, it was miserable. And I'm saying this because it feels like we've driven the marginal cost of applying for a job to zero. And whenever you drive the cost of something to zero on the interweb, you get tons and tons of spam. Is that what is basically happening to recruiting? [00:10:58] S0: Amongst our customer base, we've seen a 129% increase versus three years ago in applications per organization. And applications per recruiter are up even more, up about 185%, as there are fewer recruiters to review those candidates or more realistically and more appropriately for your thirteen fifty, to not review those candidates. [00:11:19] S1: And now candidates have AI helping them apply, but recruiters also have AI helping them screen, and candidates have AI helping them get through that AI screen. So from my perspective, it feels like we are caught in a bit of a doom loop here. Is that a pessimistic view on it, or or where does this arms race end?
00:11:19 · CJ Gustafson, Paul Todgham
[00:11:19] S1: And now candidates have AI helping them apply, but recruiters also have AI helping them screen, and candidates have AI helping them get through that AI screen. So from my perspective, it feels like we are caught in a bit of a doom loop here. Is that a pessimistic view on it, or or where does this arms race end? [00:11:37] S0: My boss, Daniel Chait, the CEO of Greenhouse, talks a lot about this and definitely a lot more eloquently than his CFO does. We've coined this notion of the AI doom loop, And, yeah, it's a problem on both sides. Like, everybody's using these tools, and nobody's happier. And the system is worse than it was, you know, prior to, you know, the launch of ChatGPT or or whatnot. We did a recent hiring survey that indicates, yeah, 74% of candidates use AI in their search. And that was from earlier in this year, so I'm sure it's gone You see this in resumes that are customized to every job description and increasingly looking more and more generic and less useful. And then just, yeah, trust is weaker than it's been on both sides. You said you feel awful, and we hear that for both job seekers and recruiters and companies. 46% of job seekers in our... In this survey said that their trust in the hiring process has declined over the past year. 42% attribute that decline directly to AI. There's an additional problem, which is fraud. [00:12:27] S1: Is it just easier to apply and you don't actually have the credentials?
00:12:30 · Paul Todgham
[00:12:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, fraud can mean a bunch of stuff. But but Gartner did a survey last year that said, you know, by 2028, one in four applicants will be fraudulent. And this can mean a range of things. Right? On the extreme, this is like state sponsored organizations in North Korea or Russia who are, you know, have elaborate schemes, probably with someone in The US that they're VPN ing in through, you know, to get interviews, poses American citizens and get jobs, you know, particularly in cybersecurity, IT, financial services. It's not state sponsored people who just doing it for the money in in low cost locations. The preponderance of it is the more run of the mill, like misrepresenting your experience, using AI to fake your way through interviews, cheat on a take home test, and and and so on. So we have several big problems. And one is just, yeah, the number of applications has has has gone way up. The signal to noise ratio is distorted. There's more more noise, less signal as... You know, AI has made things more generic, and then you have this problem of of of fraudulent candidates. We think the solution is the human at the center but with better tools, and many of those tools are AI. What do I mean by human at the center? You know, we mean that a human should be making every decision informed by valuable data they're getting from tools, some of which might be AI and some of which might be non AI. In February, we launched a suite of tools called Real Talent that it helps with talent matching. So, again, matching, you know, for for a company candidates to a to a job they've posted, fraud detection, and identity verification. Only the first of those is what I consider an AI tool. The others are sort of using a bunch of different signals, but pretty deterministic. But all three are helping recruiters spend more time on on the candidates who are real and qualified and less time on those who aren't. So that's kind of one small piece. Again, we're not the only one doing this, but I think that's sort of helping to try to restore trust in the system. Another one which is less intuitive maybe, because I'm sort of saying throw more AI at the problem of the AI doom loop. In May, we acquired an AI interviewing company called Ezra Labs that we're really excited about. But I think that better AI with humans firmly in the center is part of the answer.
00:14:21 · CJ Gustafson
[00:14:21] S1: I got news for you. The ERP category is finally getting disrupted. And if you haven't heard of Rillet yet, please pay attention. It's the AI native ERP built specifically to replace NetSuite, and it's already won over hundreds of finance teams. Their mission is to make these zero day close a reality, and they're actually doing it. We're talking teams closing the books at 01:35PM on the first day of the month. Companies like Windsurf, Mercor, and hundreds of others run their entire finance stack on Rillet. Revenue recognition, close management, multi entity, native Stripe, and Salesforce integrations, whoo, Everything a scaling company needs. They've got 5.0 star... Five zero. Wow. Five zero stars on g two. They're backed by a 16 z and Sequoia, heard of them, and CPA led implementations that get you live in forty five days. That is simply unheard of in the ERP space. If your books aren't running as fast as your business, check out Rillet. Book a demo at rillet.com/cj. That is rillet.com/cj. That's me. You are what your gross margin says you are. Sorry. My kids are tired of hearing me yell that at the kitchen table. Dad, I'm two. I don't know what cloud costs are. Well, I do. And cloud infrastructure is the second largest line on most tech p and l's. And yet, most finance leaders couldn't tell you how it's priced. And as a CFO, I understand there's a nonlinear impact to your company's valuation when you improve your gross margin, and the path of least resistance is through your AWS or GCP bill. Because like anything you buy, cloud gets cheaper when you buy in bulk. In fact, you can get the rate down by 20%, 30%, even 60% in some cases. The flip side is getting saddled with a bunch of capacity you never touch. Happened to me once. I think I still got some megawatts in the kitchen cupboard somewhere. That's exactly what cloud capital solves. Cloud capital underwrites the risk so you can realize the same savings of a deep long term commitment. Sends the downside. Oh, and it takes no engineering work. Bingo. I've known Edward since back when he was just starting the biz, and it's incredible how much they've saved customers on their cloud bills. That could be you too. So head over to cloudcapital.co. That's cloudcapital.co and find out how much you could save. When somebody asks, how is business? What they're really asking is, how are your finances?
00:16:40 · CJ Gustafson, Paul Todgham
Because every single decision a company makes is inherently financial one. I've said it a thousand times, finance isn't just keeping a tally of what went down. You are not the person piecing together what happened the morning after in the hangover. You're the person deciding whether bringing Mike Tyson's tiger back to the hotel is a good capital allocation decision, which means your team can't afford to be living in the past, policing a $30 software charge or slogging through a close that drags on for weeks. Remember, there's a tiger in the living room. That's why you need Brex. Brex built an intelligent finance platform that combines global corporate cards, expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel into one system with real time controls. AI handles the grunt work, enforcing spend policy at the point of sale and reconciling continuously so your best people can chase growth instead of chasing paper receipts. Defense handled. Terry Tate office linebacker style. So go play offense. [00:17:38] S0: Throw the ball deep. [00:17:39] S1: Thousands of top companies, including Anthropic, DoorDash, and Coinbase already run on Brex. Join them and take back your team's momentum at brex.com/metrics. That's brex.com/metrics or just tell them CJ saying it. There could be this disutopian future. This is tinfoil hat, CJ, where you have AI interviewing the human. Do you think we ever push to that point or worse... Or we'll stop ourselves?
00:18:03 · Paul Todgham
[00:18:03] S0: This Voice AI product is is AI conducting a top of funnel early interview. So there is an an element of truth to it. I think what's gotten a lot of people's heads sort of in a tizzy about this or mixed up is this sort of false narrative of, do I want to be interviewed by a human, or do I want to be interviewed by an AI? And go back to your example of 1,400 applicants. For the vast majority of candidates, the answer is not a human versus an AI interview. It's, do I have an opportunity to showcase my skills, admittedly, by talking to an AI? Or am I gonna be judged and likely just discarded on the basis of a one page or two page resume? So that's the experience for over 80% of candidates. We think that if those candidates had a real shot, right, to spend fifteen or twenty five minutes talking about their skills, going into detail on examples, talking about maybe the work environments they thrive in. Yes, it's with an AI, but it actually is very conversational, low latency. And the candidate can do it on their own time when they're at their best. One of the things we believe most strongly in at Greenhouse is structured hiring. And that's what this is. Right? Before any candidate has spoken to our Voice AI, the Voice AI has had a conversation with the hiring manager and the recruiter to understand what specifically he or she is looking for, what competencies to test. And then when the interview is done, the recruiter gets a full summary, including preliminary ratings on different competencies, which they can overwrite and train the AI as they do so. And also transcripts and video links. So you can watch someone give the three minute answer to maybe the most important question you asked, instead of spending all this time scheduling and conducting the interview. So it's early days here. And there's definitely resistance in the marketplace around some of the tinfoil hat, or just lots of various reasons for anxiety around AI. But overall, we're bullish, particularly with what we've acquired. And, you know, our opt out rate is about ten percent, and our survey rating of our interviewee... Interviewees is actually 4.5 out of five. People are accepting it, I think that's only gonna change and get better over time as the technology continues to improve.