Jim Miller: Rethinking Recruiter Productivity in a High-Volume World

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Episode Summary:

Season One | Episode 20

Jim Miller is a global People Operations leader with over 20 years of experience scaling recruiting and people teams across tech giants and hypergrowth startups including Google, FullStory, and now Ashby, where he serves as VP of People & Talent.

From leading 200+ recruiters worldwide to advising on product, process, and people tech,

Jim has built his career around one central truth: productivity in recruiting isn’t about doing more it’s about doing smarter.

In this episode, Jim joins Talentless to break down what productivity really looks like for recruiters in 2025, the data, the burnout, and the brutal myths we keep telling ourselves about “hustle.”

 Tune in as we unpack:

• Why recruiter productivity has become a broken metric

• How tech and tooling (like Ashby) can elevate—not replace—human judgment

• What real efficiency looks like when hiring at scale

• The future of People Ops leadership in an AI-driven world

Smart, funny, and deeply experienced, Jim brings clarity to a conversation most of us are too busy to have.

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Ashley King (01:22)

me I would have been like here I am same set different day

Desiree Goldey (01:27)

Am I starting all the way over or are we just going forward? Okay. All right. All right. So, would love to know, you know, what does recruiter productivity mean to you in this world that we live in right now?

Ashley King (01:31)

from productivity I can cut out the rest.

Jim Miller (01:41)

Thanks. In simple terms, I recruiter productivity is just a measure of the number of hires you can expect from a recruiter over a particular time period. I'd love to get into philosophical debate as to whether it's actually a good metric to use or not. It's a question I see asked quite often by TA leaders in various different forums I'm a member of. I think my answer to when people say, what are you set as recruiter productivity surprises people? So I'd love to dive in deeper.

Ashley King (02:08)

We would too, like take us for a swim Jim, dive us in.

Jim Miller (02:12)

I got on stage recently at Ashby One and one of the lines that I said was talking about headcount planning. And if you have on your resume, I did 178 % of my target in whatever job it was that you were doing. was like, congratulations, you burnt all your company's money. It's not a hiring target, it's a hiring budget.

It's a headcount plan, it's a budget, you need to hire 100 people, not 110, 100. Don't burn the cash, that's where we end up in layoffs and rifts. Vice versa, when you're a recruiter, and I'm looking at recruiter productivity, I don't want to set a goal that the recruiter feels that they have to beat in order to get a high performance rating. I want them to fill exactly the number of roles that I need them to fill in that particular time period with the highest possible quality of hire.

the best possible people. So for us, we have an operating principle, number five, which is we hire frustratingly patiently, which is a mandate for quality. So my team do not have a quarterly hiring goal.

They have requisitions which open on a daily basis because we don't do quarterly headcount plans either. And so the constant drip in of new roles, constant closing of positions because we have closing dates on the majority of our positions. So then the real work starts of the assessment of the pipeline. And then we move those cabinets through and we might go back to market on a roll. We might move forward, but the constant focus is can we hire the very, very best? I think when you set a target of eight per quarter per recruiter,

you might get seven, you might get ten, but pretty much on average you're going to get eight. I've got recruiters in my team doing 29 in a quarter simply because without breaking a sweat and with the processes and the technology that we have, they're able to produce that number at the quality level that we look for without

any of the kind of artificial constraints that we put onto things because of this recruiter productivity metric. So it's not something that I utilise now. The one thing I would say is it's probably good predictive analytics that if you need to hit this number and either the activity or the quality that you're putting in as the input isn't right, then you've got some pretty good predictive pieces you need to work harder or you need to work a bit more smarter.

Ashley King (04:25)

Yeah, I love the predictive data part. Another thing that I feel a lot of people don't pay attention to, and you kind of touched on this, is the idea of productivity and how sometimes what we think is good data is actually contradictory. And what I mean by that is like, going back to the individual that's like, got 178 % of what I was supposed to do. My first question is, unless these are all new headcount,

Are we attriting? Because to me, recruiters, our number one strategy should be retention. So if you can hire all day, but again, if it's not that quality, if they're not maintaining, if you're having to over hire and redo that route again and again to keep the seat filled, that's not actually, you are producing, but you're not producing well, even though the data, if you look at it, would say something completely different. So I do completely agree.

the interpretations that we put on it and the parameters that we set to do goals. I think that's kind of where a lot of it, because a lot of it comes based from sales, the productivity side is like you got to do smile and dial baby, 40 calls a day, this much of this, that much that. And it's just like, y'all sales and recruiting is so different. Like sales, every single dollar you gain can spend. So get as much as you want. Like.

Finding quality is not the same as quantity. I don't need every single dollar to spend. I just need one person that fits the bill

Jim Miller (05:52)

I love that. I'd say sales and recruiting are different because of pipeline. In sales, more pipeline means more shiny logos downstream. In recruiting, too much pipeline is cost and waste. Less is more in recruiting. So focus on that piece first. I hate the analogies between sales and recruiting. They're totally different beasts.

Ashley King (06:07)

Yes.

you're muted, Des.

Desiree Goldey (06:15)

I just want to say I came from sales to recruiting. So I want everyone to know that I think I am really good at recruiting because I was really good at sales. I do not think they are the same though, but I just want to say that. Yes, no, absolutely. Right.

Ashley King (06:15)

Here we go. She dead.

No. Even just the monopoly money difference, right? Like a salesperson is like, can I play with your monopoly money business? But recruiters are like,

hey, will you change your life, move your kids, come and do this forever? Like it's a very different, much more intimate. Yeah.

Desiree Goldey (06:41)

It is a very different thing.

Jim Miller (06:44)

You did

raise a really good point about the ecosystem you're in if you're doing that 178%. You're probably either in a hypergrowth or a hyperdia situation. Hypergrowth, very few companies have got unlimited headcount. In my early days at Google, it was like, headcount plan? What? Just go. Hire as many engineers as you possibly can. We can afford it. We can print money.

But to your point, it's getting under the hood of that 178%. If it is a hyperdia situation where you are literally replacing people continuously, then in that sense, 178 % isn't necessarily a bad thing because you're putting in the performance because you've got to beat your own targets because the people are leaving faster than you can replace them. I'd hate to be in that situation, but kudos to the people that are continuing to try and achieve the goals in a very tough environment.

Desiree Goldey (07:32)

Listen, for me, you sold me at Work Smarter Not Harder as a recruiter. I think we're sometimes we're working so hard to do the wrong thing. It's just a crazy world we live in.

Ashley King (07:32)

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

And even in that scenario, so like, let's say they are having to overproduce because of attrition. That always stems me back to like, it sounds like that's a really good recruiter who's like patch-jobbing as much as they can. And in that sense, I'm almost like, whenever you're very good at what you do, don't just do it for anybody. Because as we can see, they're treating humans like numbers and they're just bink, bink, bink, bink, bink, seat. And so even again, I don't know if it's because I've been

doing performance oversight for a little while now, but again, anytime I see numbers that are just like any number, it could be 2%, it could be 178, I'm always like, now wait, what does that mean? And in what context? How is that working? But yeah, so share with us a little bit more like how do y'all measure productivity? Like what are some of the things that you're looking at that are like, how am I measuring success? What does that look like for you?

Jim Miller (08:41)

I try and tie everything through to the business. Everyone in the business should act like an owner and that includes the recruiting team. So why are we hiring the person? Well, we're hiring them to achieve some kind of business outcome. If you think about the concept of talent density that Netflix made famous, that can take two different guises. It's either hire less people to do the same amount of work, which to me is a recipe for attrition and burnout.

Or the counter, which is more my philosophy on this, and remember I get to run both sides on people and talent, is to hire the same number of people that we plan for, but for those people that we bring in to achieve greater than we expected. And there's a freedom within that. some of the data, we talked a bit about it when we had our series D announcement, but to today we've just 4x the headcount since I joined in April 2023.

But we have multiples of that on top in terms of revenue growth. And most companies think about at this stage linear growth between those two pieces that you need the same amount of bodies in order to grow the company. And we've managed to tip that on its head and it's pretty incredible through a focus on quality. So when my team are like, what's my hiring goal?

bring the breakeven date forward. That's the kind of conversation. So freeing them up to actually do the job properly without fear. Metrics drive behaviors. So if you can free them up from focusing on the metric and instead to focus on the underlying responsibility of their role, which is to find the very best person to get into that seat so that we achieve great things as a company, then everyone has a much more enjoyable life.

Ashley King (09:53)

you

Desiree Goldey (10:18)

I think I'm going to cry. I think I'm going to have like a moment right now. look, that was just so beautiful. Yes. Like, mean, free people up to do their job, people. Like, I love it. I love, love, love everything about it. Love it. I really am having a moment over here a little bit. Because it's just, it's very rare you hear TA leaders actually talk like this. And it's, and, and, and I don't think they think of their job. And plus you're

Ashley King (10:21)

What? Really? Jim's bringing you to Jesus. Okay.

Desiree Goldey (10:46)

VP of People as well and the mixture of those two things probably helps you out a little bit. But I wish more talent leaders thought that way. How can we get this part?

Jim Miller (10:56)

I'm very lucky to

be empowered, sorry to cut you off. I'm very lucky to be empowered to do this by my founders. They're the ones who wrote the operating principle, we hire frustratingly patiently. And I came in and yes, I have the fancy job title, but I'm the only TA person when I join it is employee 60. So I'm doing the 16 screens a day and I'm reviewing every single resume and doing that work and building it out. And I got to design a process that anchors on

Desiree Goldey (10:59)

No, it's okay.

Jim Miller (11:23)

that operating principle and how we hire today is pretty unique. The closest analogy I can find is the UK Civil Service hiring model. A window of opportunity for anyone with the aspirational role goal of doing that job.

and then the closing date and then the assessment of the entire pool objectively through until you end up with multiple people who are above the bar and a hiring choice, choice being the biggest driver of quality. So that's how I have my folks thinking about it. They don't sell candidates to hiring managers at any stage. In fact, we flip it on its head and at the very last stage, the recruiters pull out all of the negative themes.

and surface those about every candidate that we're looking at to offer so that no one can ever come back to TA and say, you pushed us into this one. But instead, everyone can make the true decision. Is this the right person for now, for us? If not, we'll go back to the drawing board and we've potentially even started to build again because the data suggested that we weren't in the situation to create that choice. But we get to the end and we have three or four candidates that we would hire.

That's the perfect scenario. We get choice. There's the redundancy in there in case someone declines an offer. You don't have to start again. And for a role where perhaps you might hire two or three a year, you can look to pull forward her account and make two or three hires in that moment instead of just one. All of those things are viable opportunities from that style of hiring. And it means that the jobs are not there and we're mitigating the disappointment of the masses.

because the job is not advertised beyond the point of what we needed pipeline-wise to come back to that less is more concept.

Ashley King (12:59)

I love that. And I love it for a few reasons. pulling out. So we, I used to call it the strategic scaffolding level. And we would do almost that same thing. Not the, I hate calling it devil's advocate, cause like the dude has enough, but basically kind of that. And was like, okay, these are the areas where we could see that this individual could use strategic scaffolding with you as a manager and looking at all four of those candidates and doing that and being like, which

Which scaffolding do you want to support the most? Like which one meshes best with this team, with this needs? And again, that even built out their onboarding plan. We made sure there were solutions involved through that practice. And it is something that whenever we talk about being a strategic partner to a manager, holy smokes, did it change the game? And it's this ounce of rawness that is real about what it is, because no one's a perfect 10.

I think we're all looking for perfect eights at best. And so how can we as managers facilitate that too to make them attend and giving them the feedback of like, this is what we think their two gap is gonna be that you're gonna need to fill. Do you even have time for that? Or do you need to go to someone that has a night like, know, but it also helped us even in the realm of trying to hire into different communities to where it's like, if we have the best managers in the world.

We don't just wanna keep hiring the same female engineers from each company. Like let's create more. Like let's be a marketplace for these people to come in and grow. And the way that you do it is through processes like that of enabling the managers of like, this is what's gonna come next. This is what happens with the hire. And kind of desensitizing them from this idea that again, there is no perfect 10. Like they always think the referral and their best friend's the perfect 10. Like all these different things.

⁓ So that part I loved, the second part that I loved, man, Jim, and this is my favorite part, because you're spot on, is I think a lot of people measure productivity, I think a lot of people measure performance, but what actually really matters, don't let me put words in your mouth, but where I think you were getting to, is kind of this idea of measuring impact. And that is much different, a much bigger measure.

⁓ than just like, did we get booty in seat at certain time? It's did we get booty in seat? Was it the right booty and what has that booty done? Those are the specific terminologies, just in case anyone was curious on those parameters. But it's something that's a very different measure. And it's something that honestly, whenever you're talking about, my favorite thing that you've said so far is people and talent need to act like the business is theirs. Like they're a part of this business in a big way.

And it gives us, whenever you're measuring impact, that ability to actually translate this to not only a business case, but to the business language that is like, let me tell you why this function not only matters, but is making a difference. And you can go really far one way, but you might be going the wrong way. So like, let's, you know, re-calibrate. But anyway, I'm gonna stop talking because I love Jim already and I hope all of our audience knows that. Okay, bye.

Desiree, you have questions? Hit us up!

Desiree Goldey (16:03)

Unbelievable you are my friend. I knew you were gonna nerd out with Jim. That's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. I'm sure you have a million more questions. I'm sure you do. Listen, one of the things that you know, I struggle with and I've asked other TA leaders, but I want to want to ask you that question because you did talk about treating TA as you know, being an owner, right? Why do we why do you think TA leaders struggle?

to get their teams to understand that. And why is that such a hard concept for TA in general?

Jim Miller (16:34)

I think first of all it's trust. They haven't yet won the trust of the business or they've lost it. And selling candidates is a pretty fast way to lose the trust of a business.

The data and analytics side of things is critically important to build the frameworks around the concepts of how you're going to go to market. It's supporting the overall culture of the business downstream from hiring and showing how you're feeding into that. So there's so many different angles to it that you've got to get right to come into that. also folks are just, I think there's a lot of fear.

There's even more fear now because of the way the downturn impacted TA in 2022 and 2023 and then with the AI situation, people are scared. So they default back to these kind of primal attitudes of, I'm going to fill every single role you throw at me. And you've immediately just turned yourself into somebody that's focused on the transaction.

and then it becomes a speed and cost thing rather than a quality thing. And if you're going to be the business owner, quality has to be the first one of that famous trio that you're focusing on. to relax back into the, you don't have to be excellent at everything all the time.

What is it that the company needs? You've got to sit down. You've got to look beyond the metric of the day, the metric of the week, the metric of the month, quarter, and so on. Okay, this is what we need to do. Here is my plan for how we get to this. And then you've got to influence up with this is how we should do hiring.

This is the logical reason, this is the emotional reason for it. This is why you, the founder, the C-level, should care about this model. And here's how I'm gonna facilitate us getting there. And this is the change, this is the impact that I hypothesize will happen. And this is how we're gonna measure it downstream. If you're not doing that, you're probably putting your own job at risk to come back to that fear piece.

Time is your one finite resource, not the candidates and probably not the roles to fill. So focus on the efficiencies that you get from the time piece without cutting corners, without introducing efficiencies, things that cut time for the sake of it that often create biases that then impact the downstream quality too.

It's a deep analysis, understanding of where you are as a company and what is truly needed rather than just diving straight into the transaction of hiring and delivering everything that's thrown at you, which doesn't necessarily have that impact that the business truly needs. You're there as an expert. Be that expert.

Ashley King (19:08)

And let me ask you, and I feel like, okay, so we'd have to pretend here, because I feel like anyone that you hire in your TA or people organization is probably like bom.com. But let's pretend like you inherited, like ⁓ recruiters, right? However many. And how do you, what do you find is the best strategy for?

getting recruiters to be that strategic partner, for getting them to build confidence within themselves, to be a trusted ally, to see themselves as a SME, to even advertise themselves like that to managers. But how have you found success with the recruiters that you've had working for you of transitioning a recruiter from kind of a, I don't even want to say a paper pushing admin, but kind of, to someone that's actually thoughtful about the strategy, is thoughtful about

Hey, my number one strategy is retention. So that means we're gonna find you the best fit at all times. How do you go about that as a leader?

Jim Miller (20:02)

calibration is the starting point.

because that's how you build the trust. You reset of what are they looking for? It's a simple rec qualification stuff. So again, it's back to lead running a business. If you're ever an agency recruiter, that rec qualification was the key moment. If you did it right, you were going to probably be able to fill that role or at least have a shot of it you've get it wrong. You've got no chance. So making sure that they're really dialed into what the business is looking for and why, and what the expectation is downstream of that hire.

So you can go and find the right person and then talk about both the qualities that you were looking for in that individual, the qualifications, whatever the thing is, the attributes downstream to that impact and why this person can get there and what evidence there is of that. ⁓

That's that starting point. So when I look at how a recruiter has been operating, if I take over a new team, or even if I'm bringing somebody in, I'm very, very focused on the removal of any noise, any work that's being done that isn't required, any pipeline that's being created that's superfluous to the needs, all of that work.

So then you're anchoring quality. Once you've got that quality piece put in, then you can go faster. And then you can develop beyond that into the relationships, into the stakeholder engagements. You can start to do process optimization and so on. But if you're not generating accurate pipeline for the roles that you need to fill,

nothing's going to change, nothing's going to work. Pipeline solves all ills, accurate pipeline solves all ills, and then you build from that point.

Ashley King (21:37)

Yeah, no, hey, we were definitely aligned on the good pipeline piece. Because I can't tell you how many managers are just like, more, more, we just need more. And it's like, yo, quality and quantity are two very different things, And now we're just duplicating efforts going through a mass amount of recruiting, or recruiting, sorry, candidates. Sorry, go ahead.

Jim Miller (21:56)

of the fun things that we've got in place with our process here at Ashby is we do a multi-stage resume review process. We do sourcing before a job opens, long before a job opens. So short list of candidates, not for TA roles, but for all the other positions, we source ahead of time. So then the hiring manager gets to look at the sourced.

Ashley King (22:03)

Mmm.

I like that.

Jim Miller (22:18)

pipeline and use those for calibration and inspiration for the job description and so on. And then the candidates that look really, good will get the outreach on the day the job posting goes live. And that makes people feel really special. They reached out to me on the day the job went live. And who is this company anyway?

they've got expiration dates on their jobs. It's like they must be really special. So all of that stuff happens, right? The sprinkling of the stardust behind the scenes. And then we use Slack alerts to alert the rest of the business that these new jobs have opened to get the referrals. And obviously we've got internal mobility. So then the job opens and it's open for a time period.

Ashley King (22:47)

Yeah.

Jim Miller (22:53)

The system actually automatically takes down the job at that expiration point to the second pre-programmed and we've used data to tell us how long it should be posted for. Only then do we start resume review. And we do the first pass and we reject everybody that isn't qualified for the role.

Then, still in Ashby, as a second interview stage, interview plan stage, with the same lovely UI, we then do a long listing to short listing exercise. So at that point, we might be using some of the preferred qualifications or whatever to really drill down to the highest quality candidates within that pool. And all of this is objective based on the criteria in the job description. We're using our tooling and functionality to do this very, quickly and efficiently. And then there's another step of resume review.

but this time it's the hiring manager. You might have 28 resumes on that shortlist, but the hiring manager is only allowed to move 21 people forward.

So they've now got a tough decision and 21 comes from the data. Imagine a pass-through rate of seven recruiter screens to one offer. Now 21 means you've got three candidates who are likely to get to the end of the process to create that choice. Now the hiring manager understands. They can see the numbers of how many applications you had. They can see the number that that's been distilled down to. And now they've got a very difficult choice. They never come back and say, I'd like to see more.

Ashley King (24:08)

smart. You put it, you embedded it into the process. There's no reason to have to go.

Jim Miller (24:12)

early, early

signal. And now they're excited for those candidates to get to the stage where they get to talk to them. And now they feel fulfilled already. And we haven't even filled their role. We haven't even started the interview process for them. But that omni-channel approach and the way that we've constructed it with different time boundaries really helps take them on that journey of focus on quality.

Ashley King (24:32)

And let me ask, so the data that you're using to kind of create the parameters of this, even just the day it closes, how many candidates they should push through, I don't know if that's ratioed, but what is this based off of y'all's historical data within your roles? Is this based off of maybe like an AI analysis of the market for that role in general, a combination or kind of what is that?

Jim Miller (24:54)

One of my favorite, well my favorite dashboard in Ashby is the job dashboard. So you've got the concept of openings, which is headcount and jobs. So you hire the same job against multiple headcount. So say enterprise account executive, we might hire six of those in a year for the Americas. And so each of those six hires that we make this year and the six we made last year and the six the year before are all on the same job.

you get the aggregated data across every single one of those hires, and it's all in a dashboard precanned for you out of the box. So even if you're migrating from a different ATS, that data then exists for you at job level. This is pretty fantastic because the first window that you see is the waterfall.

Ashley King (25:25)

nice.

Jim Miller (25:36)

The traditional waterfall model be used in sales or in recruiting. This is the input. This is the different stages and this is how many hires you've made. Then you can use the time-based charts to show here are the times the job has been opened. You see the spikes in activity. You can isolate that down to applications. How many applications did we get per day while that job was posted? How many do we actually need in order to create a pipeline that gets us three hireable candidates? Remember, pass-through

then won't be accurate because pass-through rates are always based on the one you hired but actually if you've got three hireable candidates your pass-through rates are 3x wrong. So you've got to do a little bit of massaging of the data and understand the contextual information there to make the right decision and that then informs and for the most of our jobs I think we average like five and a half days posted in payroll so it's pretty cool and we're transparent about that.

Ashley King (26:06)

Mm-hmm.

Wow. Yeah.

Jim Miller (26:28)

and transparent about the process, and transparent that we will review everybody. So now the folks who are applying take the time to make their best effort in the application, to answer the application questions which gives us the richer contextual information about them. So now we can make an easier decision, or a tougher decision depending on your perspective, because now we've got a whole set of fantastic information about folks and it's a very difficult choice often to who you move forward.

Ashley King (26:37)

Yeah.

Jim Miller (26:53)

It just builds something that's I don't know, it's much more special process this way around.

Ashley King (26:59)

Yeah, well, and it sounds like it yields better results as well. It sounds like you all have done a lot within the infrastructure side of being thoughtful to ensure that the impact that whatever happens from the outcome is what y'all are wanting. And I think that's half the battle. One question that I did have, and sorry, Dads, I saw you just went off mute, and you totally should talk, because who am I? But.

You had mentioned that sometimes before the job even opens, y'all kind of do a little poke around sourcing, which as far as like efficiency, I love that, but I am kind of curious. Does, do y'all ever, and the answer might be yes, cause it is a startup and sometimes new jobs are like new jobs, but does the sourcing of kind of this early style pipeline and just seeing what the market is, does it ever actually influence the job that y'all end up hiring for? Yeah. Okay. I'm curious in that.

Jim Miller (27:48)

Absolutely. Yeah,

I should have mentioned about new jobs. So sometimes you have a brand new job you've never hired before. Then you have to make the best guess of the data. And we've got dashboards that enable that. I think you were probably going to ask that question. And for new roles, and I'm passionate about double checking even on roles that we've hired previously because things evolve. They evolve based on the people you've already hired into that team.

Ashley King (27:54)

Yeah.

Desiree Goldey (27:57)

Right.

Ashley King (28:11)

Yes, yeah.

Jim Miller (28:12)

scope

gaps and so on. the profiles that we find are based on the light qualification of that role with the hiring manager long before the day the job goes live is going to happen. Sometimes we do this work nine months in advance, the day the job is planned to open. And it all sits in our system in a project at the opening level, at the heck out level. So when the hiring manager comes to open, here's this resource, this talent map. It tends to be 10 to 20 profiles.

Ashley King (28:28)

Yeah.

Jim Miller (28:39)

And they look at that and they're like, I hadn't thought of that as a skill set. And that creates, like I say, the inspiration for the job descriptions. So it's very powerful. if you look at our job descriptions, they're really detailed, a really long narrative style, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, but people really do love it. The folks that are good for it.

Ashley King (28:42)

I was curious. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

so interesting.

Desiree Goldey (29:00)

Yeah, absolutely. mean,

I've read some of them and I'm like, well, this is really thought out, right? And you would know whether you qualify, right? Because it's so good that you're like, okay, maybe not so much after I read that very long story. I have to ask the question and Ashley's going to kill me, but I need to get your feelings on AI. What changes in talent for us? it because we are talking about productivity. I mean, I use AI for so many.

productivity things that I do right now, even sort of this podcast. But do you think, you know, we, you know, do we think we're getting replaced, Jim? Do you think we're just gonna up our game? You think we're gonna get better at this? What do you think?

Jim Miller (29:41)

think life's going look very different for us. All the noise is still all about the selective technology, the bias. I'm not seeing masses of innovation in that space because legislation is restricting that.

All of our product suite, all of the technology that we're building AI-wise into Ashby and we are in multiple, multiple sets of product releases. You've seen the sheer volume, the way the engineering team are iterating is incredible. It's all focused on augmenting the human, doing the TA work, not selecting the human to be hired.

So that's our first focus. So then it's all about driving efficiencies. It's about removing the timely, repetitive tasks. It's about making work more accurate. was talking to one of our customers. They had a team of 30 in TA in 2021 and a team of five in TA in 2024. And they hired 50 % more people in 2024 than they did in 2021. They changed systems to Ashby. That was one thought.

Ashley King (30:36)

⁓

Jim Miller (30:38)

But the technology was enabling them to have far more human interaction.

than they were able to have before. And this has continued. mean, and that conversation was probably seven months ago. I think it was back in March talking about 2024 specifically for them and little tiny things like we've just released the feedback tokens, AI driven feedback tokens. So for the first time in my career, we can now scale the delivery of meaningful feedback.

to candidates, both the candidates that are being rejected, but also the candidates that are moving forward in process. Right? So this is not just a replacement of the work that humans used to do, but it's an enhancement of that work. We didn't have the time to do it now. The technology is adding value back to the humans. It's not taking away any work. It's creating the opportunity to do the right thing that we weren't able to do before. And candidates are loving it.

Ashley King (31:12)

like that. Yeah.

Jim Miller (31:34)

It's just a quick summary of here's the positives, here's the negatives. You might want to work on some of these things for future interviews. And it's so powerful. So if we think why do we exist as a TA function? Well, originally, pre-software, it was to take the administrative burden of hiring off of hiring managers. So if the administrative burden is disappearing thanks to technology, what role does TA have?

Well, what we've built over the last three decades, four decades, is this expertise in humans. And that cannot be replaced, I don't think, by technology. So our role will evolve into the coaches, the player coaches.

will be deeply still involved in the recruiting process. I would argue that we're still doing interviews, recruiter screens and so on. I don't think they will actually get fully replaced by AI or technology or even just the hiring manager.

think there'll be fewer people in TA based on historical tech benchmarks. I mean, we're already doing it. We have a hiring manager led hiring model anyway in Ashby because we want our hiring managers to experience what our customers experience in the product so that we can then build better product, look after our customers, better sell the product.

Ashley King (32:43)

Mmm.

Jim Miller (32:47)

and our recruiters play that coach, they see around the corners, they don't do the negotiations, they don't do the offers, the hiring managers are doing those, but in the background they're creating them, they're taking the emotion out of the journey for the candidate and for the hiring manager. Sometimes they might not necessarily even have that connection. So it's going to be a very different value add, but there's still a value there. Then I think we've got to look at what the problems that the technology is going to create. At some point, the AIs are going to go to war.

You're to open a new job, you're going to have 10,000 perfect applications in the first 10 seconds. And their AI has produced it and your AI said, yeah, they're great. Look at these. We don't need more people because it's the human that's then going to have to make the decision. We're probably not far away from that kind of scenario happening.

Desiree Goldey (33:33)

I think it happens in

a couple of months, I'm not gonna lie. Right.

Ashley King (33:35)

An AI cahoots!

Jim Miller (33:38)

But whether the 10,000 people are actually humans,

think we've already got our fraud detection functionality launched and so on, which is very, very cool. So the war is happening in this sense. And if we distill that down and only actually talk about the humans that are applying for jobs, it's still going to be a much higher volume, mostly because of the democratization of work, thanks to the remote nature of companies and companies realizing

Ashley King (33:45)

I saw.

Jim Miller (34:01)

Why do we spend all this money on offices? I think we've gone on a bit of a backlash to remote, but I think it will come through as the more sensible working option downstream for the knowledge economy. So it's a fascinating space we're going to be in. I think some people are predicting that sources won't exist.

Desiree Goldey (34:18)

I know.

Jim Miller (34:18)

Do you remember, maybe you do, and maybe I'm just dating myself, when the value of an agency, of a recruiting agency, was the database that they had, right? Then LinkedIn came along, and the whole world had a database.

Ashley King (34:18)

Yeah.

Yes. Yes!

Desiree Goldey (34:26)

Right, right. Yes. Yes.

Right, right.

Jim Miller (34:33)

Would

the plethora of AI or the tooling and so on? I'm intrigued to see where LinkedIn sits in this. And I think that companies that are sensible will be building their own databases, their own private databases of the talent, engaging with them properly, making sure that the data compliance, GDPR, and all of these things are met and permissions are gained and so on. But I think the power of the network is going to be interesting.

Ashley King (34:39)

Yeah.

Jim Miller (34:58)

But of course, you're not going to be able to pick up the phone and network directly in by spoofing the receptionist to say you've got a parcel that you need to deliver to whoever the head of software engineering is just so that you can get on the phone to them. It's going to be a fascinating journey downstream as technology creates new opportunities for us and closes down old ones. And you're to have to be incredibly adaptable as we go through this.

Desiree Goldey (35:20)

Yeah, absolutely. I remember when I used to recruit and I used to have note cards for every person. That was my network. Yeah, the Rolodex! Yes! Yes!

Ashley King (35:26)

Rolodex girl? Yeah. Hot book! Yes!

Jim Miller (35:29)

A hot book.

Desiree Goldey (35:33)

Yes, that was back in the day.

So I believe, I'm like you, Jim, I believe things will change. It's going to be entirely interesting to see the evolution of this thing. I think it's going to happen faster than we think. But I do believe there's still the avoid, always have to be this human part of what we do. You can't take it out completely because you're human. Yeah.

Jim Miller (35:50)

and the legislation is being written to keep human

in the loop and I can't see the legislation being dialled back to remove human from the loop.

Ashley King (36:01)

Well, not only that,

Desiree Goldey (36:01)

Absolutely.

Ashley King (36:01)

but I don't really feel like legislation has caught up even just in data privacy and us protecting ourselves. Like that's the new oil and gas is any company that can get any data on you possible and do predictive analysis because now they can get you to purchase things as well. Not to tin foil my hat ⁓ too tightly here. But one thing that I think is important and I'm just going to say this because I've even said this to Ben, y'all CEO before, but

I think in this space of AI technology, us leaping forward as an HR and TA profession, because legislation has not caught up to protecting the human and our whole job as HR professionals is to be that person that thinks about it. I genuinely feel like Ashby is one of the very few companies that is actually thinking through on a macro scale.

what the impact of their innovations are on society because I'm looking at things that like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say if you on the phone, like greenhouse doing clear.

and all these other, and I'm just like, that is a massive government overreach by using technology to allow people to, know, very different things. That's a big topic. But the point is, is whenever I'm looking around at the technology and I'm looking at the people who are really building things and building it well, and this is not to be an Ashby ad, but it really is, cause y'all have a choice. Like you can choose to get the most efficient, flashy for all the monies.

and make it in a way that isn't really beneficial to the humans that are applying or the humans that don't give y'all money, right? Because companies are who gives you money. But y'all are actually forward thinking of the candidate and in my mind, the recruiter as well, because even the small things that y'all do, I think are great. yeah, think that that's one thing I wanna make sure if our listeners are listening at all.

they have the power to literally do whatever they want in this marketplace, kind of basically. And again, they are over and over choosing the more ethical option. And I don't think that can be like plastered everywhere enough, because I don't think it's rewarded enough. But I hope you know that people who are in HR that are paying attention to tech and to products, they see it. And they, again, I don't know.

I'm just, hey, fangirl. But ⁓ yeah, no, I think it's...

Jim Miller (38:26)

I'm very lucky to work with some incredibly smart people. They see round corners and they look long term. We don't know where the legislation is going to take the world. So we focus on the user and there are multiple users. There's the end customer, of course, but there's also the candidate. So we're trying to do things that are beneficial across both of those spaces.

where they won't get impacted by whichever way the future of the legislation goes. Now we can't predict that, but we can do our best to make sure that there is the philosophy that's there that's right. So everything is transparent, everything is auditable, the citations are there, every single human using the product can explain it in natural language.

You know, it's not an opaque box of trickery that does whatever. And it complies where it complies. And we have dynamic terms and conditions. This is the next level of things because your legal and compliance team cannot monitor the static terms of 10 different providers of AI technology with a single platform.

Ashley King (39:20)

you.

you

Jim Miller (39:33)

they can actually know that that company, we're going to update them when the legislation changes, when the functionality changes and the implications of each of those pieces. And that's a dynamic relationship.

So we're sailing through the AI councils at companies that are actually being quite conservative and setting up their AI council. And we appreciate the fact that our landing page for AI and our philosophies are all getting picked up and actually replicated by end users. It's a fascinating moment. And like I say, this is down to some of the brains in the business. Certainly not me. And they're doing an incredible job to protect.

our user base, be they our own clients or the humans behind the applications and so on. Again, incredible work.

Ashley King (40:18)

Yeah, agreed.

Desiree Goldey (40:19)

Ashley, are you doing tailing outside the box today? I don't know.

Ashley King (40:22)

Did you put one in there? I didn't read it if you did.

I don't know either. Girl? I don't know. I mean, I could always put something in later. That's no biggie. Yeah.

Desiree Goldey (40:32)

Okay.

Well, do you have any more questions for Jim?

Ashley King (40:35)

⁓ Like a 50,000, but I'm not gonna torture the poor man

Desiree Goldey (40:37)

I know, where am I going keep him all day?

Well Jim, I want to thank you for being here. You know, and you know, because of who you are, usually do this big plug party, but I don't know if you want everybody connecting with you, so. But I would love to do that. Okay, well let's hear the plug party for yourself, Jim.

Ashley King (40:50)

He might.

Jim Miller (40:51)

the North America.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you're in the TA space, if you're in the people space, if you're interested in the technology behind this, the compliance pieces, anything at all. I try and release content that's not just focused on Ashby's product, but also thought leadership pieces around how to disrupt how we go about recruiting and how you can build out processes that are functionally, that are focused on the culture of your company.

and how to think differently and not just be transactional in TA. And then a whole bunch of information around data that we get from our customer base, our talent trends reports and so on. And we have our own podcast of Offer Accepted and generally helping the world of TA. So you feel free to connect.

Desiree Goldey (41:34)

Yes, of course.

Ashley King (41:38)

Yeah.

Desiree Goldey (41:39)

Love

it, love it, love it. Well, thank you everybody. This has been an excellent episode and we will probably have more people from Ashby on later in the season. We are all for it because we just love to hear what they're doing and the impact they're making on the world of TA. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye.

Ashley King (41:46)

Yeah, I know, we're big fans. Shannon, Jam, ⁓ yeah.

I need you.

Jim Miller (41:57)

Thanks everyone.