AI Made Recruiting Harder Not Easier (Chris Berta)

Chris Berta is a partner at Laurel Group, a retained executive search firm on the US West Coast. Chris started out at aQuantive in Seattle, the digital marketing firm Microsoft bought for roughly twice what Google paid for DoubleClick, then moved to Amazon as a product manager to stand up its online marketing capabilities, and then to Washington Mutual to run digital marketing for the bank. Twenty-two years ago people in his own network recruited him into Laurel Group, which he resisted for the better part of a year because his experience of recruiters was closer to used car salespeople. He took the flyer anyway, and has spent the two decades since placing CEOs, CFOs and VPs at companies including DuckDuckGo, F5 Networks, Bloom Energy, Expedia and AWS, and writing papers on what AI is doing to hiring and to the way anyone learns a craft. Expect to learn why recruiting got harder rather than easier once everyone had AI, what happens when AI-written resumes get screened by AI against AI-written job descriptions, why he tells people to stop applying online, what Klarna found out when it replaced its customer service function, where anyone will learn their craft if the entry-level roles disappear, what deliberate apprenticeship looks like in practice, why AI output is the average of everything that came before it, the candidate who wrote to a CEO about a product and got hired into a role that was not open, and much more… - 0:00 Intro 0:43 From aQuantive to Amazon to executive search 2:08 Why he took the recruiting flyer 4:48 Dystopian or accelerate: where AI actually stands 6:07 What AI has really done for recruiting 7:06 180 of a recruiter's 240 tasks 9:16 The entry-level roles are disappearing 10:13 Where will anyone learn their craft 11:10 What Klarna found out 12:08 Deliberate apprenticeship 13:33 The part AI cannot touch 16:10 Why AI made recruiting harder 17:09 Bots talking to bots 18:34 Slop, and the average of everything 22:14 The candidate who wrote to a CEO 25:14 Why companies still hire a search firm 26:44 Where to find Chris - 🔗 Guest & Resources Connect with Chris Berta:   / chrisberta   Website: https://www.laurel-group.com - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... LinkedIn:   / mikulaszach   Apply to be a guest: https://consultingrainmakers.com/ Email: mikulas.zach@agenteedigital.com