I don't hear many people talking about, like, how are we going to get our candidates and our clients to trust our use of AI? How do we explain to them how we're using AI effectively, and why that's good for them, and that doesn't put them at risk in their business?

There's a lot of hype about AI and recruitment right now. There's also a lot of fear, two conflicting paradigms. Either AI is a magic bullet that will turn you into a superb biller, or AI is going to replace you altogether. Both narratives are nonsense.

What AI does is it doesn't make things faster. AI only makes things faster if you can scale the human capacity within your business. And there are several conditions that need to be in place before that can happen. In this episode, you'll hear a clear, realistic view of how recruiters can use AI to their advantage. Welcome to the Resilient Recruiter podcast. I'm your host, Mark Whitby, and my guest today is Rebecca Hastings.

What is it that is going to make me happiest? Like, if I'm going to have to become more niche, and I think as recruitment business owners, it's really easy just to get caught up doing what you can do. But I think that ultimately you will have greater success in the long run if you think about like, what do I actually want to do? Because there's nobody who's telling me what my desk has to be or any of those things. I can make it anything I want.

Rebecca is a former client who's now part of our coaching team as an AI and systems coach. Over the last few years, she's also become a good friend, so this was a conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time. Rebecca is the founder of Lucent Search, where she works with CEOs, CTOs, heads of AI, and boards of directors, helping them make smart decisions about AI leadership, strategy, and governance. That puts Rebecca in conversations most recruiters never hear. Conversations about what AI actually delivers inside real businesses, where it creates leverage, and where it falls short.

You know, people talk a lot about psychological safety. I think you are actually like very foolish not to be building that within your organization because AI can solve some of the biggest challenges out there. But people have to tell you what the problems are for you to know which ones you should be thinking about or to understand the themes within your business. In this episode, Rebecca brings that perspective back to recruitment and explains how AI can help recruiters focus on higher value work, build stronger sales and delivery systems, and run more profitable, resilient businesses. You're going to hear why the future is far more positive for recruiters than many people seem to think.

There's not going to be this like job apocalypse. There is going to be a huge learning curve for a lot of us and our jobs are going to change. But AI will not work without the context of humans.

And by the way, if you want to go even deeper on this topic, then I invite you to join me and Rebecca for a free webinar on building AI sales systems. You can learn more at recruitmentcoach.com/aii. Rebecca, welcome. Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me, Mark. It feels like it's been a long while coming.

Absolutely. Cuz we've known each other for what, three years now?

Uh, maybe longer.

Thereabouts. Okay. And so we've I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time and it feels like now is the the time is right. So Rebecca, take me back to when you first started in recruiting. How did you get into the industry?

Well, it had kind of been on my mind for a year or two as a career I'd like to explore from a period I spent working in yachting because I could see that the success of the charter yachts I was working on was really dictated to by the crew and whether or not you got a job was very much controlled by the recruitment agencies in that world who operate quite differently to the ones outside of it. And so it planted a seed. So when I returned to the UK, I initially worked in a tech company, but I thought I would really like to go and work in recruitment. So when I went to look for a role, I approached Hays and they hired me in my first role in recruitment, many years ago, back in, I think, 2007.

Fantastic. So tell me about that first job then.

So it was an amazing opportunity. I was really lucky that I got to work with somebody who I I still see to this day from time to time and we were opening a new office in like a small regional area which geographically was quite large. So it had some interesting challenges and I was hired to build up their temps desk and office support with like, I suppose, some lower-level accountancy roles as well. And it was very structured, very disciplined and we were given like a lot of latitude about how we built things for our specific area. Great training in sales and within like the first year, I think I built about £360,000, which was a lot of money and it still is these days. Back then, but I would attribute that success more to the structure and the processes in place than the level of skill I had. Like obviously, you know, I was doing lots and lots of placements very quickly to hit those numbers, especially in that market where it's high volume. So I had a a lot of chances to learn and refine my approach early on. But, um, yeah, the like process was something that's lived with me since that point and discipline about using your systems.

Let me just press pause here because that is an insane achievement in your first year in recruiting. What did you, is that $360,000?

Pounds. So it's more like $500,000.

In your first year. And now you said it was down to the processes and everything, but what was the difference between you and your peers who like, cuz that must have been, that must have put you in the top, uh, in the business.

Yeah, I was one of the top billers in the region, which was Scotland at that point. I think that I worked longer hours and harder. Definitely. There was an element of luck that the market that I was given was one that I'd grown up in and I so I already had like quite a big network. I'd always been very sociable and, um, that definitely helped having the understanding of the nuances there and the the people. There was also an account that they had just signed but not started working on. So I did have a piece of work where I could really like focus and always have some kind of jobs coming through. But then there was also a focus on building up margin.

Fantastic.

And maintaining margin within that business. Like you just, you didn't go below a certain amount at that point. You had to manage your weekly book value for every single one of your temps. Like the fundamentals of like, it's not profitable at this point were built in.

Hays is a great training ground actually. Did you ever meet Jenny Diaz?

Yes, sir.

Uh, so Jenny and Ryan Diaz and James, their business partner, um, are in the States, but they all worked at Hays together before they started their own business.

[snorts]

And I think that the training that they delivered was very structured and it wasn't a given that you would pass it. You actually had to demonstrate the skills. It was very much focused on like, these are the things you need to do in order to be successful. So, um, you know, within temp, there was a lot of negotiation training that you were given.

Fantastic. So can you describe in more detail the process, like the day-to-day plan that you followed?

Yeah. So back then, get into the office, I think 8:15 start and start meant like, you could pick up the phone. It wasn't like you're arriving, going off to make a coffee or anything like that. And you would be able to do whatever you needed to do, like probably before like 9:30, 10:00. Between 10:00 and 12:00, your time was absolutely protected. You 100%, no matter how many jobs you had on, had to be on the phone doing business development. All the calls were screened by our office manager. And there would be some latitude, like obviously if somebody is phoning in a job, you're going to take that call because that applies to your business development.

Then between two and four every day at that point, I would have people come in to meet me because, you know, temps, you're not going to have them go on site in that kind of role at that time without having met them, registered them. You always needed to have a bank of people so you could fill a job on the phone and close it before it went to a competitor. And again, that time was very protected. So if you did not have people in that you were interviewing or doing skills assessments on, then you were on the phone doing business development if you didn't have jobs to work on.

And you would do your candidate calls between, you know, 12:00 and 4:00 and 6:00. Additionally, when it came to like your planning, you would always be planned for the next day. You got really well incentivized to hit the KPIs that actually would move the needle on your desk was something I can see in reflection. So you, you got extra money each month, which was great if you were just building your desk from scratch if you made the right number of sales calls. You had, um, 100% um contact with all of your temps who were out working for you, for example. And I think building in those kind of disciplines because it's really easy to place a contractor or an interim or, you know, they're looking after themselves to a certain extent at that level, but not everyone keeps in touch with them and therefore you miss out on leads and opportunities to expand those accounts.

Fantastic. Yeah, I think that's a great, uh, point for business owners listening, thinking about, um, first of all, setting people up for success. What are the KPIs that move the needle? And by incentivizing those, it gives you because it takes a while for the per, first placement to like, to land, but it gives its people focused on the right activities and, um, gives them a little bit of bonus to keep them going until they do that first deal.

Um, so it really was driving the behaviors for success. And the other thing which was drilled into me, and I think that might have been more to do with the person who was leading the office, was about having really strong adherence, like coding your candidates, your companies that you're prospecting to, and your jobs so that you could search through the system very quickly.

Okay. Awesome. So, yeah, the, the data-based discipline, and, um, that's something that a lot of recruiters find hard and they don't do. Uh, but obviously that's going to make your job easier as time goes on.

Absolutely. And because I was very disciplined about that, it meant I could really react quickly whenever a role was in and get there before any of the other competitors.

Fantastic. What, what were the KPIs that you were targeted for, and which of those do you still find relevant?

So the numbers were different cuz it's quite a different market to where my career has evolved to now. But I definitely think that it wasn't a KPI that I had there. It was KPI I had in another company later on was about the amount of hours you spent on the phone each week. So for me personally, I know that if I've got less than 10, 12 hours of talk time across the week, I've just not been speaking to people and not having enough detailed, enriched conversations that will move things forward. So the number of hours that you spend actively building relationships is how you would manage that. Um, the number of meetings per month. It's really easy when you're busy to forget about bringing in new business or even going to visit your existing clients that would count towards that target for me. And I think that it's really easy to overlook that. Um, sales calls, definitely keeping in touch with your candidates if they're candidates that you, I don't know, suppose like own in a big company where that's maybe a challenge, would be absolutely vital too.

Fantastic. All right, that's awesome. So, um, I want to talk about launching and building your own business, but before you launched your business, Rebecca, are there, can you think of one or two experiences that, um, had an impact on how your business has evolved and how you, how you work today?

Absolutely. So, I, um, really enjoyed my time at Hays. I had to relocate. So, I left them and I worked for a couple of other recruitment businesses following that. When I was at Harvey Nash, there were definitely some things that I took from that period. Um, I worked for Rona Hutchin. I don't think you've had her on.

No, I should actually. I worked with Rona like 30 years ago.

Um, well, no, at 20, I, I don't want to age Rona, uh, at 27 years ago, I think, something like that.

Uh-huh.

So, uh, you know, Rona's Rona is still a friend to this day. So we, I was, I joined them again at the point where they were establishing a relatively new office in Scotland. They already had some people working for them there. And some of the key learnings from that time, I would say, are definitely, you know, I mean, that was a point in my career was early on. So there's lots of personal growth about like working out what you're good at, what you're not good at, beyond the recruitment side of things. However, um, we had a lot more success in that business once we applied a couple of things that I think are really relevant just now. Cuz for context to people who are listening, that was just coming out of the financial crash of 2008. I can't remember the exact years that I worked there, but it was at the point where everyone was really starting to rebuild. And in that team that I was in, we decided that we would become way more niche in our focus. So to start with, there were a couple of us who were all working software development. But very quickly, um, you know, at that point, we split it into like Java, um, C, C++, like the, the different languages was the way that we did it then. And again, that allowed us to build the market knowledge faster because all of those markets grow and to evolve at the point you come out of a financial turmoil, essentially. You can't just assume that because you did a two years ago, it's still the same. We also had a real focus on events and marketing within that business. And I was given a lot more opportunities to be involved in like projects that were maybe more UK or globally focused. Um, one of them was a women in tech survey that we did at that point and got to run, set up, and run a series of events around that. So, there was a lot of empowerment at a local level there. And another big lesson for coming out of a challenging economic environment was that there was a big piece of research, like obviously Harvey Nash and where I ended up working with them was more on their CIO practice doing CIO CTO recruitment. They had temporarily lost a little bit of market share at that point and that was very important to them because their business at that point in time was, if we have the senior roles and we place senior people, other roles are going to fall out for people in those development or infrastructure practices across technology. And there was, you know, some research done and the feedback that came in from contacts was, well, you weren't there for me when I needed a job and now you want to speak to me. Now I have jobs. And it felt quite disingenuous. So these senior candidates are hypervigilant to how you treat them when the market is down.

Absolutely. And I bring that up just now because in, you know, some of the coaching calls that we have, you know, it is really easy to be frustrated speaking to candidates when you don't have jobs for them. And you do have to be selective and you do have to fall in, well, make sure you don't fall into the trap of accidentally doing really valuable free career coaching all day. But you do have to be there for people when they need you, or they might not return the favor as the market pivots. Rebecca, I think this is huge and it is, I, I mean, it's human nature to, um, [snorts] to to think shorter term, right? And what, what do I need today? I don't need candidates. I need jobs. So, I'm going to focus on like finding clients. But if you just widen the, um, aperture a little bit and think down the road, then you realize that that is undermining building a long-term sustainable business because people will remember how you, as you said, how you treated them when they needed help. And, um, if you want longevity in this business and you're, this isn't like just a short-term gig, but you actually want to build a career, then I think that makes a massive, massive difference.

Absolutely. And I have worked in the tech sector for, I don't know, like 14, 15 years now. I, in a relatively small market. I would say there's no way you can do that if you burn all your bridges constantly. You just, it's just not possible.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned like hosting events and and, um, putting together like surveys and research and that kind of stuff. You're really, really good at marketing, Rebecca. Is that something you have a background in or is it kind of self-taught, kind of, uh, in your recruiting career?

So, it was something that I learned a little bit of when I was at university. Then I was just naturally interested in it. So self-taught a bit, um, during my recruiting career and then I think, I can't remember when it was, like 2017, 2018, I did a kind of like diploma in digital marketing at that point because back then I could see I need to understand this stuff and, you know, like it's not just have, you know, we're having a real shift to online at that point. It's not just thinking about, uh, you know, basic social media anymore or events or having glossy brochures. Like at that point, marketing was evolving. So I did courses then and I would say I, I do try and keep up to date on it. But is, I, marketing is something that you can know everything about and be absolutely atrocious at if you do not know your market. So going back to something you said a few minutes ago about, um, I can't remember the exact phrase you used, but it's like, what do I need now? Like, we work in a job for, like, you know, very few people set up their own business on day one. So you normally work for somebody else before you do this and you, you are trained to think, what do I need to do today to hit these targets? What do I need to do? But ultimately, in order to be successful, I do think you need to start thinking, like, what does my client or my candidate need tomorrow, and what do they need in three years, and what do I know that they need that they don't know that they need? So it's always about thinking about what's relevant to them and the value, like understanding your customers, ultimately, is the most important thing that you can do.

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I love this. This is, I've never heard anyone say it that way, that you can be really good at marketing, but unless you know your market, then,

Yeah, what's the point?

It's not going to be effective. So, um, can you elaborate a little more on like knowing your market and how you've gotten to grips with that?

So since the like start of my career, I was always very big on going to networking events. Like even now that, um, the world has reopened, I do make an effort to do like a minimum of three or four a month. Um, they're not all to do with things that my customers or prospects will be at. Some of them are for my own education and learning. So you are constantly learning about different things when you go to these events. There's normally a talk. For example,

Three or four a month is a most people would say that's a lot.

But like some of them are like meetup groups that I would go to. Like one of them is a meetup group that I go to every month or two where we talk more about like human behavior. So,

[laughter]

It's not, I'm not going to meet people who are in tech, but I'm going to gain insights that I can take into my world.

That's cool. Fantastic.

And then others will be, you know, really quite specific about the, you just know, like about the applications of AI, or there are just things that I think my target market will be at so that I can have more opportunities to capture those people's attention that are hard to get hold of. And I know that it feels like a lot, but it's one of the most important parts of my job. It's really hard for me to get a hold of people or to build the right level of relationships just through like cold outreach on LinkedIn or on the phone. If you meet people, they know that you're really actually engaged in what you're doing.

100%. It's, it really, um, can be powerful. So you mentioned attending in-person events and meeting people, um, is one of the keys to, uh, really deeply understanding your market. What have been some of the other ways that you go about that?

So I have had a podcast over the last few years and that has been an amazing vehicle for again, meeting people, learning from them, and then sharing that learning with the community that I'm operating in. So my podcast, initially when I set it up, the, the first kind of season, my motivation for that was we were coming out of lockdown. A lot of the earlier stage businesses that I was working with, they were maybe just getting their Series A funding and they wanted a CTO, for example. And really, they didn't need like a CTO CTO, they need like a VP of engineering or someone who could be hands-on but had the capacity to grow. And a core difference between, you know, VP, head of, director level, depending on where you are in the world, how they're applied and C-suite is when you move up to the C-suite, that is your team. You are in the leadership team now. And yeah, you have this functional responsibility, but you need to have a broader appreciation of the business you're operating more strategically. You can't just know about technology or AI. You need to understand how you're going to interact with the other areas of your business as it grows. And because of remote working, I identified it was getting harder and harder to find these people because they'd become so siloed in their own teams during that lockdown period. They had, they had lost some of that, I don't know, like town hall water cooler chat that would happen, or just even, I suppose, like if you sat next to the marketing team, you'd learn a bit about marketing in your career, for example, or you, I don't know, like, you, you can see how well sales is going sometimes in an organization just by glancing over at that part of the business.

So I wanted to make sure that my candidates could become more T-shaped. So I focused on having a lot of conversations with CEOs or people who had been in C-suite that had exited businesses. And then I realized that I could use that as a vehicle to also just get in front of and meet some like super interesting people. A few of them, like I had just heard of them or I had come across their book and, you know, I'm not backwards, I'm going forwards. I was like, I, you know, there was one guy who did a TED talk, I was like, I'd like to have you on. Another guy who wrote a book that I was like, I learned a lot from this and I know that when I talk about these principles, my clients are learning from that. So have that person on. And then I could also then recommend some of my guests to like conference organizers. So, um, I don't know if you've heard of the Turing Fest. It's a huge international conference that's hosted.

Turing is in Alan Turing.

Yeah. So it's an international conference that's hosted in Edinburgh every year. I've been going to it since it started and I've always got huge amounts of value from learning there. But, you know, this year I was able to connect them with some international speakers and one of my podcast guests, um, from Agent AI, flew over to Edinburgh to do one of the talks. And I also had, um, another, um, speaker came from Estonia, um, the person who had, um, set up their digital ID system. So people who've got like fantastic life stories that you can learn from. So I would say that's definitely a great way of, you know, building your market knowledge. But then I also have done my own surveys to understand, um, like and infer insights rather than just report on the data, what is happening within my market. So I did one this time last year where I, um, spoke to or got survey responses from around about 100, um, C-level AI and data executives to find out what, what the challenges were in their business at that point in time for creating successful implementations. And then revisited those people, you know, once the research was completed to find out, well, you told me this, like, has this been a success or not? So again, like that, that's a great way to network and also validate, like out of all the respondents, I know that people who demonstrated these behaviors were more successful.

Wow. That's, there's so many layers to this, Rebecca.

Yeah. So, a real mix of different things. But if you're having those like that level of conversation with people, then you're always going to be able to bring something to the table that's different from somebody else, whilst, you know, demonstrating your expertise because I think that's the core differentiator in exec search. Not just proof of network and do you know what you're doing, you know, but process. Like we all have a process these days, well, I hope we do, not everyone does, but there is a sense of process.

But I, yeah, I, you, you sometimes need to have a bit extra and you, really, in that world, you need to have an appreciation for the challenges that your customers have, or you're not going to be focused on solving them.

Then. Okay, brilliant, brilliant. So there's, we started talking about really knowing your market and, um, the way that you've gone about this is just very strategic. And that's, by the way, what is a T-shape?

I didn't.

Uh, so, yeah, it's when somebody has got, you know, a general breadth of expertise along the top and then depth. So in that market, you know, I was dealing with a lot of people who just had the depth of tech and they maybe didn't understand anything about ops, sales, revenue, finance.

Okay, that makes total sense. I get it now. So, um, the three keys for you in really becoming an expert in your market. Uh, one was attending the live events, and you mentioned that you attend some events that are for your own personal development, but others are very specific to your industry. So that you first of all learn that, uh, market, but also meet, you know, relevant people, um, clients, candidates, or, or referral partners. Second was hosting your own podcast, which allowed you to really, um, have deep conversations with people in your industry, which again, is so smart from a marketing point of view, but also gives you really in-depth market knowledge. And the third was doing your own studies of research, surveys, and that kind of thing, like your, uh, the one you did last year with C-level people in in AI and and data.

Um, and I would bring that back to like, all of those things are really about listening.

Yes. And that's why I believe that, you know, 10 hours of like phone plus Zoom time is so important because I am definitely not able to talk that much. I, I will talk a reasonable amount, but, um, if you do not have that amount of time listening to people, yeah. How can you know what's going on?

Okay. This is a great. I've never heard anyone say this before. So, I've heard of people measuring talk time, like how much time are you on the phone?

But the distinction you just made is that a lot of that time should be actually the per, the other person is talking, you're listening, right?

Yes. Yeah. And I'm sure that's what most people are doing.

Yeah.

But I try and think of it as like listening time rather than talking time.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's brilliant.

Because I talk a lot. That helps train me to do less of it.

[laughter]

Fantastic. Okay. This is awesome. So, um, I want to talk more about your business, Lucent, um, search, but, um, it's probably worth touching on just before you started your own business, you also spent some time in-house with a tech firm.

Yeah.

What can you talk about that experience and what you learned from that that's been useful running a search firm?

Mhm. Definitely. So I had worked in-house previously for other companies, kind of like leading RPO solutions there in kind of like AI and cybersecurity. I was really lucky that I, um, got an opportunity to work for a company called, who have been one of the fastest growing FinTechs in Europe and they're now expanding globally. They're in payments, which is a niche of FinTech that is either super dry or super interesting depending on how you feel about it. But I joined them at the point there were around about 30 people and, um, got to set up all of the systems within the talent function and then grew them to around about, I think it was about 172 and like headcount in under 15 months. And I only had people come in and join me in the talent function in the last couple of months because I'd been quite transparent that I'm not going to work here forever. I'm going to have my business, kind of situation. So, I wanted to make sure that that was set up before I moved on. But that was really interesting and because of the like the pace could be, I don't know, like some people might find that relatively relentless, but everybody who came into that business, um, came through me in some way, shape or form. Um, I was very, um, you know, was very involved in like making sure that it, the talent function wasn't just a recruitment function that, you know, was helping business actually hit specific goals that we had, um, and they obviously shifted and evolved during that time. But that meant that I got to work with risk and compliance and I got to work with ops areas of the business. And, you know, recruitment at that scale and pace is expensive. So you're working with finance a lot and understanding a lot more about the business from their perspective. And then you're coaching everybody as they join so that because everyone has to be able to interview like very quickly. Um, so you get to know everybody and you understand a lot more about business in general and how technology businesses are run and operate when you have that kind of experience. So it's been hugely valuable and, you know, I've, you know, done done work with them recently there. Um, still growing from strength to strength, which is great to see. But understanding, you know, actually being able to experience what it's like to work in a scale-up is a very valuable, um, ex, thing that you can do in your career, I think. You know, cuz obviously I, as much as I say I took the headcount from X to Y, I was enga, a lot of it was direct, but I was engaging with agencies. It's not possible for me to have done that all on my own. But it gave me a very good, um, it gave me very good experience in understanding how, you know, a TA function works and how they make decisions about what you send out, what you don't. And I also formed some my own personal opinions about what you should and should not send out. Like, I, I truly believe that a, like certain companies should not be doing their own sales recruitment, for example, because a good salesperson, if you head them, they're not going to, and they're a competitor. There's things they shouldn't tell you that they should tell a recruiter, and the recruiter should be the bridge there. I also think that, you know, certainly senior appointments, C-level appointments, you again, unless I, I think there's a lot of situations where it doesn't make sense to do that work yourself, but there's some things that absolutely 100% it would be foolish for our clients not to deliver themselves.

Okay. Super interesting. Um, what, since you, by the way, you, you grew to 172. How many were there when you first joined, Rebecca?

Around about 30.

Okay. Wow. So 30 to 170 plus. Um, working with recruitment agencies on the client side. What were your observations as far as thing practices you saw that were great, and others that were poor?

So I had, I went into it obviously, I had people I knew who were good in that space that I'd worked with. Um,

And, but I was always open to working with new agencies. So like if we cover off like the, the things that were poor, everybody contacted me at the same time and nobody followed up. I will never forget one day I had 70 voicemails at the end of the day.

On one day.

Yeah, like I think it was like when I changed my LinkedIn status and obviously I'd triggered like a wave of Lucia and Apollo alerts all over [laughter] all over recruitment businesses in the UK. I'm just, but nobody, like very few people actually did anything beyond that if I never got back to them. And there's no way that anybody's going to get back to anyone in that situation.

Very few people kept in touch. I like there were things that, you know, if I, if one of my executives said, can you speak to this person, this agency, I'm obviously going to do that. Like that would be, I'm there to enable them, I'm not there to, you know, have my own. So I think I learned that's a very powerful way in, but the consistency of follow-up was just not something that I saw very often in that space.

Um, ultimately pitches. People came to me with a lot of the same stuff. So, what I cared more about was how well they knew their market because I was giving away like really specific roles. Um, I kept PSL small. You just cannot manage like more than a couple of agencies in that situation. You've got too much that you're getting pulled into and need to do. So, and then when it came to hiring search firms, I think again, for me, that was down to the individual much more than the actual business. Like I, I know that we spoke to a couple of big firms about certain things and decided to go with boutiques. But then a frustration for me being on the talent side is it really felt like some of those search firms were delivering me the usual suspects. Like they weren't going far beyond, they weren't going out and doing proper proactive headhunting and mapping. Like they weren't doing things systematically. Like they would, they would maybe potentially give me four or five names that I could have found myself or, you know, great, they've known them for years, that's fantastic, there was, but there wasn't a thor, like much rigor. Like people would talk about no stone unturned and things like that, but I just didn't see it in practice.

Very interesting. And also, um, contrast with what you've built when you launched your firm, Rebecca. So let's talk about that now.

Oh, sorry, you want to add something?

Well, I do think the, the technology was quite different back then to what we have now, even though it's only like, I don't know, like,

Five, six years ago.

Like we don't, we, the recruitment business, sorry, the recruitment industry has evolved a lot since then in terms of its technology stack.

Imagine this: you're no longer chasing clients, you're working with people who respect you, pay your full fee, and treat you like a trusted advisor. You've got a system that fills your pipeline even when you're busy delivering. That's exactly what the Client Acquisition Accelerator is designed to do. And I've created a free training to show you the nine steps that over 800 recruitment business owners have used to build predictable revenue, win retained searches, and finally scale without burning out. You don't need to hustle harder. You need a better system. Register now at recruitmentcoach.com/clients.

That's absolutely true. And now it's obviously easier to map the market and find people's contact info and so on, but it was still possible back then. You just had to, it just took longer, right? Um,

Yeah.

So you launched Lucent in 2020.

Yes.

Uh, so when's your f, have you had your fifth anniversary yet or?

[snorts]

Yeah.

So, um, yeah, I have.

Yeah. Yeah, congrats. I didn't really, I didn't really think about it.

Yeah, neither did I. I just realized, wow, five years, that is a huge milestone. And I know it's not been always smooth sailing. Before we get into that though, um, can you just explain what you specialize in and how your business is set up?

Yeah. So, um, things have evolved over time. I had like a, a great idea about what I wanted to do,

But, um, we obviously had lockdown.

Within like within like six weeks of me leaving my job to do this,

Which was fine. Like I had work lined up. I was in a good place, I suppose, compared to other people. And it, it wasn't a bad time for me compared to others, I suspect. Now I've focused very much just on senior appointments that are very specific to AI leadership and I mainly work in the UK but also globally. I think there's a lot of, um, like there, there's a lot of people who are open to relocating geographically at that senior end of the market.

[clears throat]

Okay. Fantastic.

And on top of that, I also work with an advisory firm, um, which and that work is, you know, very, very separate but complimentary, where I am actually a consultant doing, um, strategic advisory around AI transformation and people.

Amazing. And I, I definitely want to talk about your consulting work and and why you've pivoted to add that rather than just focus on search. Um, can you describe the, like structure of business? It's, are you just solo or like, what's, how do you work?

So at the moment, I am solo and I have like a couple of freelancers that do very specific work for me that have worked with me over several years.

Great.

Um, they, they are self-employed but very experienced in this space as well. Um, but I want to just go back a little bit to like the, the why piece because that's so often overlooked. And I think it's like a really critical time for people to think about why they do what they do. So I honestly, I found myself in a situation where like some of my clients who I loved were going bust. Like it's been a difficult time in the tech sector over the last while.

And I'd built up a real depth of knowledge through my podcast because I'd been focusing very much on global AI leaders and what was happening at the forefront of that world. And it's not just what you learn in the interview, is all the research for it and all the books that you read and the like academic papers that I was reading to understand what was going on. And I had also worked with AI companies since 2011. So it wasn't like a new thing to me with ChatGPT and LLMs and much broader. But I, like many people, have found, you know, it's not been the most busy year in the recruitment world. There's a lot of people, like I look at my world and I think, why would any of these people change jobs sometimes? Like they're, they're in a good place and there's so much uncertainty.

Yeah. So I was like, well, I can see with the way that technology is evolving that you have to be even more niche than you previously were. And I think recruitment will split into a couple of different ways. We can come back to that. But I was like, I want to stay, like when I'm doing recruitment, I only want to do very senior strategic work. I do not want to be doing, um, some of the like, well, still senior to other people, but I, I don't want to be doing just, you know, the like first roles in companies and things like that. So, I was like, what is it that is going to make me happiest? Like, if I'm going to have to become more niche. And I think as recruitment business owners, it's really easy just to get caught up doing what you can do. But I think that ultimately you will have greater success in the long run if you think about like, what do I actually want to do? Because there's nobody who's telling me what my desk has to be or any of those things. I can make it anything I want. And if we're all, I think a lot of us are in a place whether or not we realize it, where we're going to have to do some degree of rebuilding or repositioning as our markets evolve. I want to make sure that I'm just only doing stuff that I'm really interested in, that makes me really excited, and I'm really passionate about. I, and it's not that I dislike the other stuff, but, you know, if I could only do my favorite thing every day, then that's the job I want to create for myself.

This is brilliant, Rebecca. I think hopefully people have had a light bulb go off and, and it's a great, it's a powerful question to ask yourself, is what do I actually want to be doing and what is going to make me happy and fulfilled and what is going to get me out of bed in the morning, and realizing that just because you've been doing whatever up until now doesn't mean that's what you must continue doing. That maybe there's a pivot that allows you to capture the knowledge and, uh, aspects of what you've already been doing, but maybe in a slightly different, uh, direction. So that's super interesting. Um, and anything else you want to say about the why?

I think if that is missing when times are hard, it makes it even harder for yourself. So if you are not confident on that,

It is going to be

Pretty torturous

At times, like, cuz this is the best job and the worst job. We all know that.

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, cool. So,

It's about taking personal responsibility for your, like, for that aspect of your role. You'll think about it a lot more for people who work for you. Like, I certainly have done that over time that, you know, they want to do this, I need to make that happen for them. Well, you have a choice. Do you make it happen for yourself or not?

Awesome. Great, great insight. Um, okay. So at this point in time, I think most your business is retained. Is that?

I only work retained.

Okay, got it. And how, um, has that always been the case since you started the business, or how did, how's that evolved?

No, so I had, through co-, fallen into the contingency trap. Like, I was doing exclusive contingency. I wasn't really in competitive situations. And because of, like, I don't know, there was like a level of panicking, you know? I, I'm not, I'm not above myself. Like, I'm, you know, if this doesn't work out and one day I just have to, I don't know, like hire software developers or I don't know, like lorry drivers or [laughter] customer service, I don't really care. I, I don't think that you should be precious about that to a certain extent. But I had like got myself into this situation where I was doing like everything for every client that I had contingent with some retained. And that is a really hard situation because with retained, you have to fill that role. It's not optional. But then you also have the pressure of like wanting to fill all the contingent stuff and not let anyone down.

So, I think it was shortly after I started with yourself, I, um, very quickly decided, you know, I'm going to tell all of my contingent clients, um, you know, it's been great. I would love to keep working with you, but this is my situation. I've got a business. I want to grow it. In order to do it, it needs to be more like this. So, I'm only going to be able to work with you on a retained basis anymore. And I don't want to let you down. Um, and I'd rather just be upfront about it. Um, some of them were absolutely fine and gave me retainers for work moving forwards. And it definitely did make it much easier for me to think about running my business and spending time on that rather than just constantly being like a bit of a manic recruiter, which is how I felt.

I love this. And look, there's so many. Yeah, I know that everything I work on, I'm going to get paid for it.

100%. Exactly. Um, so our members will know that you did a presentation for us at our Edinburgh Life Summit called "Visualizing Value to Differentiate Your Service," and you talked about how you made that transition to fully retained. And it was, uh, it's still one of our most popular, um, modules in the learning management system. But

Oh, great. For today, I, I'm going to resist going off on that tangent because I want to get to the AI stuff, which is something that you've done a lot of research on and and and know more about than than most. But just one final question is, what percentage of the clients that you wanted to keep came on this kind of new journey with you, and how many did you lose? Because I think that's the fear of making this transition is people are afraid of losing their customers.

So, I definitely lost some customers, but I was fine with that.

Okay.

Like, not all customers are good customers.

True. And not all customers are profitable. Just because you have jobs, if they're contingent, you're, you're maybe losing money.

Yeah, that's really worth looking at.

I don't remember exactly, but it was probably between 60 and 80%.

Okay.

Who?

Who stayed?

Who stayed? Oh, that's actually higher than I would have thought. But nevertheless, even if it had been, you know, 50/50 or even you kept a third of them, it still

Would have been the smart thing to do.

It's made a significant difference. And now, even when times are hard, I hold firm on it.

Yeah. So, tell me about that then, because I think that is harder for people if

Yeah.

You know, the market's tough and they don't have enough work coming in. It's tempting to go back and go, "Do you know what? I'll just take a few contingent jobs." So, what's the mindset that you've had during that?

I actually was so annoyed at myself at this. Like, it's a real lesson that I learned because, lally, in recruitment, I only worked on retained roles when I was doing recruitment, and everybody just knew me as a retained recruiter. And I eroded some of that value that I'd built up in my personal brand by doing contingent recruitment. I could totally see the way things were, that that whole like market mastery that I'd been looking for in the recruiters who were doing work for me. Um, how could I have that if my time is spent listening to people was diluted across so many different things? Like, you're not a master of anything in that situation. And I think that it is harder to reposition yourself than to hold firm. And that you are better to think of other things you can do. So, you know, hence, um, why like I had always been doing, um, consultancy alongside retained work, um, for scaling businesses that wanted to understand how to build effective talent acquisition functions, or for investors that needed, uh, due diligence done for talent along the way. So, I have, you know, there's a lot more consultancy consultancy involved as well when you're doing like a true executive search. So, doing more strategic consulting alongside it is what makes sense for me. So, you know, for the last couple of months, like I'll be quite honest, I actually haven't had a chance to do any specific recruiting due to a project that I'm working on just now where I'm working with a large energy business, um, along with a couple of other people to build out their AI transformation strategy for the next few years. And for me, that's just like an amazing opportunity. How could you not do that if you're an AI when everyone's in a total panic about energy being the thing that could mess it all up?

So, >> okay. Well, since you brought up, let's, let's just drill down on that a little bit more. Um, so what made you decide to add, because you, I know you were doing some consultancy alongside, but it was mainly >> search and then you were doing some consultancy around that, but now you've actually >> created a service line where you are >> positioning yourself as a management consultant essentially, as well as doing the executive search. So, um, talk me through that shift, and then if you can say more about the project that you're doing right now. I know you can't.

No, I can, I can like talk a little bit about some things that, and maybe what we can do is talk about what that means, what, what the things I'm learning and seeing across the market and the research that we're doing there would mean to a recruitment business owner.

Definitely. So, I was very lucky in the, um, I was approached to do this, and it was somebody who has known me for many years. And that work happens through Owendale Advisory. And they, they knew me, they'd been a client and and a candidate. I'd actually placed them in C-level roles before. So, having that like long-term relationship, they knew that I wasn't doing solely recruitment, and they'd worked with me and seen the depth of knowledge that I have. And, um, we developed a friendship over years. So, like, I don't know, like people who know me, they've maybe been to my house to see, like, I actually have a library. [laughter]

I'm like, I'm from like, I'm from a very nerdy background, and that sticks with me. So, people come to me like, "Oh my god, have you read all these books?" And there's literally, um, thousands of them. It's a nerd stream. So, the, so that, that came to me through, um, really like relationships and people already seeing what I could do and, um, sharing the research that I had been working on and knowing that, you know, if you work in a search and you know, if they know the level that you work at, then it's, you're, you're defin-, like that makes doing something slightly different easier for people to visualize when they know that you know lots of senior people and are having very senior strategic conversations. Anyway,

So, it's been so interesting because some of the people I work with have much stronger consultancy consultancy backgrounds. So, I've managed to, well, I'd say managed to learn, um, I've been lucky enough to learn a lot more that I can bring back into, because we talk about being consultative all the time. But I think there's stuff that we let ourselves down on,

Without even, 'cause we don't know what we don't know. It's funny because, you know, in the UK, uh, recruiters are often called recruitment consultants, right? And

Recruiters do talk about being consultative, and, but I feel like it's a whole different thing to being a true consultant, you know, where you're getting paid for that work. It's not just a kind of

A veneer on top of your, you know, recruiting work. Um, so tell me about the project and what you've been learning, and especially, especially as it, you know, would relate to, uh, recruiters and business owners.

Definitely. So, we are doing a deep piece of research to inform the AI transformation that this organization wants to go through. So, we've looked at global case studies that have been successful or unsuccessful across AI within their industry and tangential or heavily regulated industries, 'cause that's obviously a key consideration there. I, in advance of doing this, I think it's important for context, I also have done like several courses to make sure that I have learned like AI ethics and AI legislation. And it's not like I just woke up one day and I was like, "Oh, I can, I can do this." 'Cause you do, you do need to know some fundamentals, or this can go wrong, very wrong for certain people. And through like getting to understand what that business does, we have identified not just like the use cases, and, and I would say I'll talk a little bit about how this relates to recruitment business, but the actual problems and the themes that are happening. And through the research phase, one of the things that really stands out to me is, you know, people are fine. There is not going to be this like job apocalypse. There is going to be a huge learning curve for a lot of us, and our jobs are going to change. But AI will not work without the context of humans. That is why there, you know, there's so much slop out there just now 'cause people are leaning on it too heavily for their LinkedIn contact, for example. So, the use case would be, I don't know how to write LinkedIn posts. I'm going to get, I know Claude or ChatGBT or Gemini or something to do this for me. People do that, and they don't put huge amounts of thought into what that means. They don't apply their market knowledge to it effectively, and then you put it up there. Not many people view it. Doesn't do you any favors, does it? Generate you any money? Because ultimately, the, the challenge is, how do I get LinkedIn working for my business? So, it's generating me the candidates that I can place. It's opening doors to the clients that I want to work with.

100%.

Rather than, I need to write posts.

Yeah. Yeah. [clears throat] Okay. So,

It's about the problem framing, um, in one place. And then another core learning, I would say, is, and I will try and put this in less technical terms, but essentially, what AI does is, it doesn't make things faster. AI only makes things faster if you can scale the human capacity within your business. And there are several conditions that need to be in place before that can happen. So, you need to be enabling it within your processes. So, like, you actually have to have processes to be doing that, would be one of the things. And you're then moving the point of action to the, the point you make a decision. That's how it's accelerating things. So, for example, your, the point of action towards making a decision is, so I have Recruiter Flow. It can auto-populate the fields based on the conversation that I've had, or flag that someone's just changed jobs. I am then just pressing a button to say, "Yes, that's right," or tweaking something, rather than doing it all. So, it's moved the decision to the point of action where it updated the database there. And that is how you reduce bottlenecks. You need to make sure that by creating, um, success and more effectiveness in one area, you don't just move that bottleneck to the next stage of the process. I've, I see that happen as well.

And because we are changing it, that rather than people in that example, it's really basic, but hopefully one we can all understand. Rather than people are updating the database and spending like an hour at the end of the day potentially doing it, or, you know, eating into their sales time in your team. You need them to be good at making decisions quickly. And that might not be something you've thought about because you're increasing the cognitive demands on people earlier in their career. So, it's really easy for me, many years in, to just glance at that and be like, "Yep, correct." But if I've only been doing this for one month or two months, I'm still going to need to read it and think about it, rather than just glance at it. So, it only accelerates things as much as you accelerate the capability and expertise of your team.

Wow. And I don't think people think about it. I think they just, and I, like, one of the,

Things that I spend a lot of time thinking about is, by doing this,

How do we make everything better for everybody, and what could happen that makes things worse? So, there's, if you solve that problem, I think that in many businesses and many industries, one of the core things people need to work on is building greater expertise. And you can use AI to do this. But the other thing, which, you know, like we're talking about, um, is decision-making. You need to give people a sense of accountability for doing that, rather than just, "Oh, it's, it's right 90% of the time." Because we all know garbage in, garbage out, and we're wanting to increase value from automation. So, you need to actually have clearer, I don't want to say rules, but you need to have like frameworks for people to make the decision. Like, "What is the AI responsible for? What am I responsible for?" Because without trusting a system and knowing where that boundary is, then people can't operate effectively, even if they have the expertise. Like, "Should I, you know, like, should I send this email out to a thousand people or 10 people? I don't know." Those kind of questions, like, "What is the AI going to do? Is this going to work for us?" Um, I, I do think you need to give people clarity for them. So, in order to give them clarity, I truly think that you need to be thinking about how you educate everyone in your business. Not just on that expertise, but you, plus the people who work for you, need to understand how these systems work. You need to actually have explanability and transparency under certain legal frameworks with AI. And you, there's things as well that if, if you've looked at the legislation, for example, like EU AI Act, people would be a lot more relaxed about. They would know that they are not replaceable because you have to have a human in the loop in high-risk decisions or decisions where there's, you know, bias. Like, you have to have. And there's lots of case studies out there where AI tools have absolutely flopped. Not because they didn't work and that they weren't better than the humans that had previously been doing everything manually, but because people internally didn't trust it, but importantly, their customers didn't trust it. And I, I don't hear many people talking about, like, "How are we going to get our candidates and our clients to trust our use of AI? How do we explain to them how we're using AI effectively and why that's good for them, and that doesn't put them at risk in their business?"

This is very reassuring to hear, Rebecca, because there's a huge amount of hype out there right now. And I'm, it's, it's kind of disappointing. Like, I really like, um, Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO, as a, like, the quality of the show and the guests and everything is fantastic, but they're really leaning into this narrative of fear-mongering and like, you know, getting people on who are like, ex-CEO of Google is saying, "Look, tell your children, become plumbers, 'cause all the jobs are going away." And, you know, in the next couple of years, we're going to have massive unemployment. And, you know, with Sam Altman, who's like, you know, really, uh, hyping up that we're on the verge of AGI, and that's going to completely fundamentally change society, and all this stuff. And the headlines in the newspaper about the job apocalypse and all this stuff. So, but what you're actually talking to people who work in this field, uh, as well as working directly with real companies who are

Doing the AI, uh, implementation. So, I genuinely have read over 300 case studies around successful and unsuccessful AI implementations, probably in the last month alone. And some of the overriding themes for, like, some of these transformations is zero redundancies.

Really? Wow. Okay.

And, you know, because a lot of the time, you're only using AI when you've just run out of capacity. Like, there is a moment of crisis or some kind of intense pressure that makes it acceptable in a lot of industries. It's, it's easy for us little small businesses to put it in place. It's not as disruptive. But if our clients have got hundreds or thousands, tens of thousands of people working for them, it's really difficult. It's not the same.

It's not going to happen overnight, is it? Like,

It's, and I also, yeah. So, there is legislation in place. So, I think one of the things I have been thinking about that everyone should consider is, what is not just like, how is AI changing my sector, but what are the guardrails that are going to slow that down?

And,

Like, highly regulated environments, for example, it's,

They, it's, they can't just decide tomorrow they're going to.

And it's going to create, it's going to create new jobs. So, I went to a conference a few months ago, sector that I don't massively work in, um, manufacturing, and they were talking about construction.

Mhm.

And how you could, like, when you're building, like, a, a concrete foundation, you have to put lots of metal rods in it. And that is something that people have done, builders have done.

A, a robot can do that 13 times faster than a human now. M.

But ultimately, a robot is not going to be allowed to do that without a new job of a human supervising the robot. And it, you know, is, as maybe there'll be a point where there's another robot that fills up with, you know, the concrete in a different place, and another robot that passes a rod. But there's still lots of people involved in that. It's completely unrealistic to think that somebody is going to go off and build, I don't know, like a new airport without any people being involved. It's just mental.

Yeah. Okay. Great. Great. Great.

I don't think, I don't, it, it's making people lots of money spreading fear, but very few people are talking about how you solve this. And, you know, technology for recruitment business owners in the last five years, I've certainly seen there was a time where I had a competitive advantage because I had good tools, and that meant that I could automate things and move faster. I don't think that that is the case now. I think the things that are going to give us competitive advantage are being a bit more strategic. And that is a mind shift, like, certainly has been for me, to take a step back and stop reacting, 'cause that's just like what I have to do when I'm busy so often, and think about what's going on around me. But think about who, who your market is. What are your processes? How are they going to change? Can the people who deliver that work do it? What do I need to do for them to get them there? How do they feel about it? How can I make them, uh, feel safe? And, you know, people talk a lot about psychological safety. You know, in, and to me, I think you are actually like, very foolish not to be building that within your organization because AI can solve some of the biggest challenges out there, but people have to tell you what the problems are for you to know which ones you should be thinking about, or to understand the themes within your business and get new insights and opportunities. So, we now want people to come to us and, you know, like, "Oh, don't bring me problems." It's been like something a lot that you've not wanted. "Just bring me solutions." We've all had somebody over the years say that kind of thing to us. Nobody knows all of the solutions. It's going to take teamwork and different perspectives to find the right answers. So, you want to tell people to bring their problems to you now.

Wow. That's interesting. I've never thought of that before, Rebecca. That actually there's value in even identifying what are the problems that we should be solving. Um, that's a different, a different frame to consider it. So, I love the way you're thinking about this. And so, in practical terms, well, okay. So, first of all, I do know that you're saying that you don't feel like the tools and the automation is a competitive advantage anymore, but I kind of feel for a lot of people, it is because

You've got it in place and, and, but for people who don't have any of that in place already, they still need to make that, um,

Yeah, they need to,

Transition. The tools are important, but I think how I think about tools is also shifted. So, um, being able to integrate with other tools is absolutely critical. Like, if you have a system and it's not going to let you connect to Zapier or something, that's going to be a problem for you. Like, one of the things that I am thinking about doing is, and I'm, I'm thinking about doing it. I'm, I know I'm going to have to do it, and I'm just going to hate it, is migrating away from Microsoft into Google. I think there's more flexibility there moving forward.

Interesting.

I think that, um, you know, like I use Recruiter Flow. I mentioned. I think it's phenomenal. It ticks those boxes. If you're on the fence, then that's a great one to go with. But, yeah, you, you need to have a process in order to maximize the benefit of anything. And my process isn't going to work for many people, and other people's processes will be far more of a fit, but you need to think about that definitely.

Okay. Could you share a little bit about, because you've built a kind of sales and marketing machine? Yeah.

Inside your business? Could you, um, just give an overview of what that entails?

So, thinking back to, you know, like the beginning of my career, one of the, like, the first couple of companies I worked for, the most important thing was that you were regularly in touch with your prospects. Every, I don't know, like, three, six, or 90 days, depending on what it is you were doing and what was going on. And that's something that is pretty hard to, like, build up that list of people. So, my processes focus on how do I get people to the point that they're speaking to me? Because after that, you're literally just running a search, filtering it by date, making sure that you are keeping in touch with people. And I have quite separate processes for MPC account development and then, you know, active lead chasing, because they are different sales processes and different steps. I have lots of different automations, GPTs that do different levels of personalization, but the level, but ultimately, everything is approved by me. So, it's at the point where I don't have to sit and do much, but something comes to me for me to edit, tweak, and send out, because I don't believe that AI can do all of that for me. I know that there's some amazing tools like Clay out there, but I'm not looking to have thousands, hundreds of customers or anything, or meet, reach that number of people. I'm only looking to speak to certain people at certain key points.

Okay, awesome. So, step number one is people need a process. So, and they need to like map out what is our sales process or processes in these different, you know, uh, whether it's Go ahead. And I would say it's not just a sales process like you would see if you go and like work in a tech company where, you know, they'd be like, "Oh, you need to have, they maybe like follow like MEDDIC or SPIN and they're wanting so many meetings and for you to map an account." Some of that stuff is important for landing bigger accounts, but it's more like, "How do I get this person to speak to me?" Yeah. So, it's like, how many attempts over a six-month period, and what cadence of different multi-channel activity will happen that is personalized to that person at that time and place in their business, and how do I make it so that I just know what that is and it's easy, and I get an, like, a batch of emails to look at, approve, tweak, do. And something which would have taken me hours and hours and hours, now, you know, I can do that in an.

That's amazing. So, what is the cadence touchpoints like? What does that look like?

Um, so because it's like automated, forgive me if I make a mistake, 'cause it's just coming at me now. I want. So, for me, if you don't connect me on LinkedIn, you don't fall into the funnel. It's important to me that you can see what I'm doing and I, and that you're kind of opting into being interested in me. Otherwise, I just feel like I will go back to those leads, definitely, that don't connect to me. So, I have a Dripify campaign. People connect, that syncs with Recruiter Flow. Um, Recruiter Flow sends me a number of tasks that get completed at that point, depending on the level of contact enrichment that I get around phone numbers, emails, or if I'm just only connected to them on LinkedIn, they will go then, like, funnel out into one of three processes. And, you know, maybe it's email only, or LinkedIn only, or maybe I've got their phone number, and I will get a series of reminders to send them different thought-out emails, links, and messages, or phone calls with the scripts. And, you know, obviously, I'm not going to read off a script, but it's like, you're phoning, and the purpose of this call is to add value. Here's a GPT. Click on it, put the company name in, do this, and it tells you what's going on. So, you don't need to know everything all the time about all of the things that are coming to you. Or it might say, um, "You spoke to this person two weeks ago. Send them an email. Here's three options. Pick one. Tweak it. Send it."

And I don't, and it just takes that mental effort of organ-, 'cause I'm, I'm like one of the most organized people, but also one of the least organized people. I feel like I'm, I'm very organized, and some people think that I'm incredibly organized, but it's just because I know that doesn't come naturally to me, that this is the way that I could mess myself up the most is not by having systems organize me.

Okay, this is brilliant. I like what you said about it reduces the cognitive load of getting this actioned, right? Because, um, something I find is I really overthink things and I,

It, I'm kind of slow to get things done. And so, what you've done is created a system that supports you to achieve a very high level of productivity, but without you having to think through every single task every time you're doing it.

Yeah. And I don't need to think, "What is it I'm going to email them about?" or "What do they do?" or that, like, one of the initial steps is that when someone connects to me, there's a GPT that will go off and do all of the deep research into the company about the things that I want to know. And I'll maybe like rerun it every, like, three to six months, but I don't need to keep educating myself. There's a note pinned to the top of that record which gives me an overview of, you know, there's a change in the board, or they got this amount of investment from these investors at this point, or these are like the top three things in their annual report this year that are in their strategy. And it's compiled that for me, because one of the things AI is great at is summarizing information. I will say, um, I've seen your entire playbook, and it's much easier to to see than to explain verbally. Right. So, uh, for listeners who are interested in in knowing more about this, I've persuaded Rebecca to, um, do a little webinar with us where she can actually show you what it looks like and give you a better, uh, understanding of what, you know, what the sales marketing machine looks like. So, if you're interested in seeing that, you can register for that call by going to recruitmentcoach.com/ai. And, you know, if you're intrigued and you want to actually, because it's a little bit like trying to describe a Ferrari to someone who's never seen one or been in one, right? You can say, "Okay, it goes really fast," and you can give the technical specs of it, but it's easier if you just say, "Look, let's go for a ride. Hop in." And that's what you're going to see on the webinar.

Absolutely. I'm happy to share what my process is with people because it's, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, if we all share our processes, we definitely all inspire each other. That's one of the things that I love about Recruitment Coach and where I've got so much value. Like, although I maybe maybe have like the most detailed documentation of process, I'm sure that there are people who have, you know, better or simpler processes for certain things, or would make completely different decisions for their market. Um, and I would learn from that too. But I think sometimes it feels like quite a big, daunting task to map a process, and I see a lot of people delay it because it feels like it's a bit boring. Like, I, I spent a lot of time thinking about, well, over the course of this six-month period for this process, these are the things that people need to see from me, and these are the things I can give value. Whereas, you know, for me, an MPC process, that's like two weeks max, like, if, if I've not got interest in that time, then, you know, and that's a much more linear process. It's much easier for people to see and understand at a glance. But it's always intriguing to see what other people do as well, isn't it?

Definitely. And, and there isn't one right way to do it. But what's clever about your system is you have thought through for your industry and your business, and what you want to be doing, what is your ideal process look like? And so, the MPC, that's a two-week process, but whereas maybe your Dream 100 is a six-month process of touchpoints. And so, um, so that is awesome. One thing I did want to mention is, um, the phone calls are still part of your, although you've automated a lot of stuff, you are still picking up the phone and reaching out to people. Yeah. And so, we did a course this year called "Call Calling Confidence," and, um, as part of that, we had a little competition where it was like a leaderboard that you updated every week. And we were tracking, um, call attempts, conversations, and then meetings booked. Those were the three [clears throat] uh, KPIs we were measuring. And you won that whole competition out of like, I don't know, there was 50 people on that course.

I know.

And, but what was interesting, so the, the real measure of success was how many appointments did you book, and that's the category you won in.

Other people had more volume of calls. And so, what was super interesting is that you didn't make the highest number of calls, but you,

Probably won the lowest.

Exactly. Well, no, no, no.

So many meetings. But your conversion, first of all, the number of people who took your call, yes, was high. So, the number of attempted calls to conversations was high. And then the number of conversations to meetings booked was very high. And so, you booked the most meetings without having made the most number of calls. How do you think your system and the way you've set yourself up contributed to you being able to achieve that result?

So, I was only trying to speak to one type of person.

Okay.

I think that's an important thing to recognize, 'cause I haven't done that always in my career, and it's been very much to my detriment.

And I had something of value to offer them that was unique to me.

Which was?

Your AI report, or?

Yeah. So, my global AI leadership report. And there were, that wasn't just like a salary survey guide. I had collected information, like thought about that in relation to like some of the latest research that's coming out there, and I'd been having conversations with people throughout that process. I hadn't just been sending them emails. And people wanted to know what other people were telling me about it. So, I had something that was unique and of value. They could learn from their peers that they did not know. And I knew that I was talking to them about something that they were under pressure about, and potentially could be part of solving one of their problems.

I love this because

I don't think people, I, I don't think people think, like, "Yeah, it's great, you know, send, send your interview guide, send your CV guide." Some of those things are actually the best thing to send in different situations. But how can I make that unique and something that people align with me? I don't want people to see me as just a recruiter. For examp-, you know, we hear that phrase quite often. I quite, quite dislike it, but I want them to see me as like someone who is an expert and really understands what's going on and can solve multiple problems for them. Like, I'm not going to come at them with just one solution. I, you know, I feel like there's a lot of nuance just now around what's happening in businesses. And going to people, you know, it's like, I know that you've talked about it before in other podcast episodes, but, "What is the prescription?" Well, I, I need to diagnose your condition first. So, how do you get people comfortable like treating you like the doctor, not, you know, not not just anybody that they can speak to about that problem?

I love that. I, I think you're 100% right. So, you created value in the conversation. So, they actually wanted to talk to you, which is a whole different thing than try-, like, convincing someone to give you 15 minutes, right? And they may reluctantly agree to the call, or they may, or they may ghost you. They may not even turn up to that call, but you'd positioned yourself and provided enough value that they saw you as a peer and someone they, they were interested to to to hear what you had learned from all your other conversations and what they could potentially learn from that as well. So, I think that is massive. Um, so I had our mutual friend Matt Alder on the podcast recently, and he described two potential futures. So, one was recruiting dystopia, and one was recruiting utopia. What do you think, um, listeners, and in particular business owners, need to be doing and thinking about in order to ensure that they are, um, part of the recruiting utopia, like where actually AI doesn't destroy their business, but it's actually, uh, a positive?

They need to think about what they understand, what their teams understand, and be very focused on learning and development over the next couple of years if they're wanting to grow their businesses. I also think that you need to be a bit more niche and really understand your customers so that they accept your usage of AI. I don't think you should be closed off to it, but I do think you need to recognize that human judgment is essential for deriving context. AI is great for, you know, giving a statistical recommendation on what has happened previously, or what is happening in real time based on where it's getting the data from. It is able to make binary yes/no, if/no/if not kind of decisions. It can't, but it can't pick up everything that's, it just, it doesn't know what it doesn't know if you haven't told it that. So, enriching the expertise level of your team is going to be super vital. But the expertise is also going to shift because it is about having better judgment. Um, I don't, I also think that you need to be conscious that it doesn't mean that people can do tons and tons more.

So, that's,

You can't overload people. You can't,

It's, because that is,

That's harder work mentally to do. So, you can't, you need to also then make sure that you don't erode the quality of what's happening. So, like, we've, you know, AI is making huge inroads in medicine. Like, quite a famous study, radiographers were getting AI assistance like to assess MRIs. Great. They're getting through loads more MRIs. What they discovered, though, very quickly, was it made the radiographers worse at their jobs, temporarily. And one of the reasons was the AI was getting it right so long that it made people a bit lazy.

And then they shifted the algorithms so it gave only the hardest cases to the radiographers, and that meant that more were solved, and the radiographers increased their skill. So, you have to, like, this is not a one-and-done rollout. This is like iterative, ongoing learning. You're not going to get it right first time. We're all going to mess up, find better ways of doing things. So, as business leaders, we need to really think about the management style and behaviors that we encourage in our organizations, and that we deliver, and are they right for that moment? But also accept that it's not like buying a CRM or an ATS from a few years ago and just leaving everyone to get on with it once you've updated all of the fields and the processes in there. This is something which is going to require ongoing adjustment. It's going to change your processes, which is what, and you won't be able to identify how it needs to unless you actually have the processes to start with. So,

Wow, that, thank you. That was a really nuanced answer. And Rebecca, I could talk to you for another hour. Um, this is so interesting, but we're out of time for today. If people want to continue the conversation with us, and and also be able to see on a screen some of this stuff rather than just hear about it, then join me and Rebecca at recruitmentcoach.com/ai. Sign up for the webinar, and we'll see you there. Rebecca, thank you so much. That was fun.

No problem. It's been fascinating and lovely to catch up with you again in person. [music]

Absolutely. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Resilient Recruiter. I know how busy recruiters are, so I'm honored that you're investing this time with me each week. [music] I don't take your attention for granted. That's why I'm going all out to deliver value for you here. Real insights you can apply to improve your business. And if you really want to help me to reach a wider audience and impact more people, please consider leaving the show a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you leave me a review, [music] please reach out and let me know so I can thank you personally. Please hit the subscribe button, and I'll see you next time.

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How One Recruiter Built a Sales System That Books More Meetings With Fewer Calls

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