Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, founder and CEO here at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Martin Dangerfield, CEO of Immersive. Immersive provide a flexible solution to having an auxiliary TA team at companies of all shapes and sizes around the world, and Martin also hosts a bunch of events, most recently probably Tru Manchester, which I know was super, super well received by a bunch of folks in our client base and in the broader community. So lots of experience there to leverage. I'm looking forward to having the chat. Martin, you ready for some questions?

I am. It's good. Yes, I'm excited. Thank you for having me.

Yes. No, thanks for coming. It's really great. We gave you a bit of a high level intro on Immersive, but would love to dig a bit deeper there, right? Could you give me a kind of 60 second overview of what you're trying to achieve at Immersive?

Yeah, it's always difficult to say. I'm trying not to to generalise too much. Some people would describe it as an embedded so embedded recruitment, but I look at it as going in-house, hiring in our client's name. As you rightly said, we've had clients from true enterprise size, 60,000 people plus. Through to startups. Our smallest client was 22 people big. We've been going for three and a half years. And as we've chatted before this, the good and the bad of the last three years has been some really good times. We grew off the back of of that COVID boom, that post COVID boom. But 2023 has been been challenging. I think it's the other phrase I use lots, euphamism for a bit crap. But yeah, we're certainly doing more around sort of talent advisory now looking at organisations saying, yeah, your recruitment processes aren't very good or your people aren't as good as they could be, or your employer brand's a bit crap. You can see I'm the eternal sales person using the word crap as often as possible.

It's only British. Just to use that word, British word.

It's very true. I love it. It's great. No, it's good you're speaking my language. And look, I couldn't agree with you more. We also grew meaningfully through that kind of COVID boom town period. And I think we leveraged a lot of desire for change within organisations that sort of didn't quite know how to react to changing times. And also, we saw everybody increase headcount quite meaningfully in a sort of bullish environment, I think we're very much in a bearish environment today. And I think 2023 represented that. 2024 is also showing signs of that as well. I think the sentiment and the tone is a challenging one, but great to operate within that. And I think, yeah, empathise with the situation you're referencing. I think, interestingly though looking at your background. Obviously there's a lot there. If you weren't in talent, what would you be doing today?

That's really tricky. I saw that you obviously shared some of the questions beforehand, and I didn't really know what to answer. My background is IT but further than that, I used to work in retail. My first proper job, I used to be in charge of everything in a fridge in Marks and Spencers which I thought was a wonderful thing. And then I hated retail and went to become a hardware engineer. Fixing among things, retail stuff. So anything printers and scanners and the back office stuff and became a proper sort of techie and moved into sales from there. So I spent a big chunk of my life in technology, sales, outsourcing sales. So that's where I've come from. And then I went into recruitment because I didn't know what to do. And it's, you're stuck as being a sales guy going what do I do next? And lo and behold, recruitment is quite easy. It's ah, these are the companies I used to work for. And these are the people I used to know and ta-da I can make that make something out of that. My current anorak moment is I have a very high mileage Volvo. And in my head, there's an empty garage up the road. And I keep looking at it with envy thinking, I could fill that with other very high mileage Volvos. And that's what I really want to do next. I don't know if there's any money in it. So there you go. There's a question for anybody watching. Is there money in high mileage Volvos? Awkwardly, my Volvo has made money in the last 18 months, whereas everybody else's cars just depreciate. My high mileage Volvo is making a little bit of money. It's very scary.

Of all the things I thought someone would say in response to that question, used car salesman was not at the top of my list, but I adore you for it.

I don't want to just sell cars. It's a niche. High mileage Volvos. High mileage Volvo Estates, XC70s for anybody watching. Yeah, mine's done just shy of 200,000 miles.

We'll put the full spec of the car in the show notes and the price and a little bit about the vehicle.

No I want to buy others. Yeah, and I do, I trawl, I Autotrader most weeks, just looking for more high mileage Volvos. The problem is I'm not a mechanic. And YouTube is a wonderful thing and I've fixed some of the things I could, I'm quite proud. I fixed some things for not a mechanic is quite good, but there's a limit to my skills.

And I love that. And I think, yeah, nice to step back and look a bit at the trajectory into the recruitment world, right? And there's a lot of similarities in your background with mine, which is super refreshing to hear. I think now you are in TO, though, and you've been in TO for a little while, right? I think what's the biggest change you've identified in the segment since you joined, right? We've talked about the impacts of COVID already, but looking back further.

Yeah. As you say, so my background is a mixture. I started in recruitment at a traditional agency, moved in house in the sort of 08/09 recession, decided that in house was the future. That's a hindsight thing. It says, oh yes, I made a conscious decision to go and do that. The reality was I just followed the work, but equally, I always believe that agencies days were numbered and it just shows you how much I know about anything that's still just not the case. There's an awkward YouTube video of me from 2011 with me telling a whole room full of people that your days are numbered. A bunch of IT recruiters in the room, believe me. Luckily the other 78 percent or whatever it was, didn't, and we've carried on making money being agencies. I think the biggest challenge is probably just how we, I think it used to be easier. I think it was easier to communicate. I'm hiring. I'm looking for this. I'm looking for that. And I think that's the sort of, the premise of recruitment, isn't it? I want this thing and come and join me. But the messaging around that, we think about as a candidate, I've got LinkedIn, I've got job boards, I've got emails coming to me. I'm looking at some content over there on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. It's the whole shebang, so to really demonstrate who you are and what you want to a candidate is a lot tougher than it used to be. Candidates are more demanding. They want more realism, authenticity around who you are as an employer. And all of that just means it's just a lot more complex. I don't think, the actual basics are still the same. Okay. I want this, are you this? But going through that journey now, there is so much more to think about. And I think that's probably the biggest challenge that you find that recruiters in general, TA people as well, are they're not great at all of those things. And that's not their fault. And so for some, it's actually definitely caught them out unawares that they're now put into a position of having to market themselves and then market their company and market the role. And they're not marketeers. They're decent TA people who know a good candidate when they come across it. So I think that's the biggest change for me over the last few years. Probably the last 10 years the need to be more open, more transparent. From my perspective, loads of companies get that wrong. So good news for them.

Likewise for us, to be honest, I think we, we take a lot of pride in the fact that we work with a lot of organisations who would be very open about the difficulties they experienced going through that transition.

And I think it's almost like a commoditisation of strategy piece where like the expectations have just got higher and higher on all fronts and teams have had to adapt. And I don't know that budgets have necessarily grown to reflect that sort of. increased expectation and increased competition. But yeah, good for us. Good for you. But nevertheless, yeah, it's an interesting challenge. I think you're absolutely bang on the money. I think if we focus on 2024 and ask it a very similar question, right? So I couldn't agree more that this kind of long term macro trend of just hiring becoming a sell side exercise or a buy side exercise is absolutely true. If we look specifically at the past 12, 18 months what are the major challenges you think are top of mind for recruiters today?

I think it depends where you are in the organisation, what you do. So I tend to lean towards, talent acquisition in house. Certainly the people I talk to, so TA people, TA leaders, their biggest challenge is the unknown. Workforce plans have gone out the window. It's funny, a bunch of companies that we've been talking to would just love it to reset to 2019. They weren't, there wasn't a wonderful year, but they knew where they were. They knew that, attrition was 15%. They knew that growth was 10%. And so they could plan for what they could plan for. Having had that sort of big spike in hiring through 2022, some organisations, there's been a big crash at the other side of it. They've had to get rid of people, they've overhired. So TA leaders are now sat in that position of not really knowing what the hell is going on. So it makes it really difficult to plan. Without selling what we do, that's the conversation we're having saying, we'll help you to be more flexible around that plan. But sometimes it's easier said than done. As a TA leader, I don't quite know what I don't know. Lots of pressures around here. We talk about AI probably at some point as well. There's a lot of pressure around AI and everybody in the business is an expert in recruitment. The poor old TA person is still sat there going, Hey, I know I am the expert. I know what is possible. Isn't possible. But everybody wants to say, Oh, I know more. I know this. I saw this on LinkedIn. And I think, so I think recruiters are in a tough position of, demonstrating they understand what they're doing, demonstrating they understand the business. It's not as simple and never has been, as simple as just we've hired people, aren't we great? I think some TA teams have done that before. Look, we, you told us to hire a thousand people, we hired a thousand people. That's not enough anymore. They've got to understand the business in a broader sense. So it's a really tough thing. I think not knowing how to plan for the next six months is probably the biggest challenge TA leaders have really got right now.

Yeah, no, again, making my life easy. I couldn't agree with you more. I think the stuff we see on the ground is like this. If we step back, one of the missions we give ourselves here at Pinpoint is trying to help TA get a strategic seat at the top table, right? And actually get involved in the decision making trajectory of the business rather than just being reactive to demands from the top. And I think my argument is if that had happened earlier, I'm not saying we would have foregone all of the self correction that you had to see. But there's a lot of circumstances where TA aren't given a voice in those discussions and that's a fallacy in my opinion. And so I hear you loud and clear on that and that kind of right sizing is difficult, but there's two things I think are interesting underneath all of that, right? One is if you step away and you look at TA, but you also look at basically, in my opinion, anything that isn't engineering, everybody seems to think they understand that space of the business, right? The CEO is always a great marketer and a great salesperson and a great recruiter and a great whatever. And I think that's often quite damaging as you've rightly identified. I think the other challenge is every element of the business is operating under the same uncertain terms that you referenced in recruitment, right? I think we have that same conversation in sales and marketing. We've seen lead performance go incredibly up and incredibly down and incredibly up and down in every which way. And I think that uncertainty inherently trickles down to recruitment, whether they like it or not, because often plans and headcount plans and workforce planning are subservient to numbers that get posted in every other area of the business. And so that uncertainty is just bloody difficult to navigate, frankly, and I've got a lot of empathy for businesses, including our own, trying to identify the right path through all the mud. I think we're very aligned in that perspective and your focus on in house recruitment very much mirrors ours. Pausing for a second and just spicing it up a bit. I think we throw a wild card question in every now and again. And I think one of the things I'm always interested in when I speak to people is who their hypothetical idols and mentors and folks they go to for advice are. And I guess if you could speak to any either talent leader or just business leader in general, one to one, and spend an hour with them and get some advice from them, who would you choose?

Oh, I'd go for cliches, probably. If you look behind me, you can see on the screen, actually, there's a couple of Stephen Bartlett books there. I spend lots of time, I'm envious of his youth. And the fact that he's managed to make huge businesses, sell huge businesses, go off and do something different. I think it's that go off and do something different bit that I've always been chasing that says actually the business at the time is the means to the end rather than the thing. Probably actually I'll say that it's probably Immersive has been different. So I'd go for obvious ones. Yeah, live people, Steven Bartlett. I've watched the film, The Founder. About Ray Kroc. Partly because awkwardly he was my age now when he founded McDonald's. And I think that's been something. I didn't have a startup in my twenties. I didn't have a startup until my late thirties. I didn't get into this until relatively late in the game. Many people started their businesses in their twenties. I didn't want to do that. I was happy working with people and happy working for people. So yeah, somebody like him, I think from what I've seen of him, he was pretty obnoxious. But I also think there's that focus and drive, which sometimes is difficult. I've always been a, reluctant business owner. I'm a fair weather business owner that says when things are going well, it's amazing. But that resilience that you need when things aren't going so well, sometimes it's just, it's like, what do I do now? I'm going to name drop somebody alive as well and because hopefully you'll thank me for it. I do talk to our competitors. Chap called Dan Goldstein, he runs Elements. Elements have been around for a lot longer than us. And he's a really useful barometer because he really has been there, seen it, done it. That transition from being something sort of agency led into a proper embedded, a proper in house provider like us and that's really useful just to get that sort of. How is it? I probably speak to him every couple of months and just check in and always appreciate the time that he gives me. And I think that's really useful to find, in, in life to find those people that you can just ask. Kevin Blair's going to thank me for mentioning his name as well. So Kevin Blair has done both sides of the fence, been a big TA leader, run a competitor, now back to being a big TA leader. So again, it's useful to get his steer on the viewpoint of the world in general. Also, like you having been there, he's actually had to go and sell. And obviously that's a thing that people like the idea of running a business. The bit they forget is you've got to stick your neck out every single day. Like we talked before, yeah, that 11, 11 PM call, just because that's when the client wants to talk to you. That's the call that you have to do. And that can be a real pain. Particularly if you have to do that lots and lots.

It's easy to do once, it's hard to sustain, right? Yeah. It's it's, there's a lot of pain in keeping that up, but no, look, there's a bunch of great recommendations there. And yeah, if you've not read it, Grinding It Out, which is the book about Ray Kroc is really worth reading because there's a lot that goes pretty deep relative to the founder, which was great. Big idol of mine as well. And yeah, it's interesting when you talk about people starting business later, I think Colonel Sanders from KFC started KFC at like late 60s or something like that. There's a lot of people who are often used as like an example of someone in that arena. But yeah, no, cool. And great that you've got access to people already. Like we speak in hypotheticals and we ask the question, but now you've actually got folks in your corner that you can go to for advice as well. I think that's something. I've always found quite difficult personally.

It is difficult. I think it's something about trust, about, you're sharing, I think we get very protective of our business secrets. I'm currently doing a rebuild in public as I'm calling it, which is, and that's the one thing that we're not shared. We haven't shared financials which is I keep having this awkwardness of need to really, because otherwise it doesn't really mean anything. So we talk about it hypothetically. It's great when people do that. Yeah, it's actually more about the sales cycle rather than, so what we've done historically is easy. Annual reports you can see our turnover in there. You can see what we've done. That's fine. But yeah, actually saying we're bidding for this and talking about what does that mean and how would you change that? But yeah, trying to bring a few more people into what Immersive will look like in the future.

No. I love that stuff. I think I just think that you're adding a great deal of value to the wider market, whether you realise it or not, when you publicise those sorts of things. I remember, years and years ago in a prior business I was running, there was a company still exists called Groove HQ that built customer support software. We didn't use the product bluntly, but it was fascinating to watch. The founder was British and he ran a blog and he basically shared absolutely everything. And they literally had a progress bar at the top of the blog that was their journey to, I think it was a million dollars a month in revenue. And he blogged openly every week about the sort of trials and tribulations of scaling the business and shared financials and other things. And I think. As a sort of inexperienced entrepreneur at the time, and still to a degree now, it's super useful to just get extra data points on stuff that's working and stuff that's not, and just understand what that journey looks like before you undergo it yourself, right?

People in recruiting are very secretive.

I'm aware.

You know. That's actually the challenge is breaking through that people almost smell a rat that says, why are you being so open? Why are you being transparent? Equally, we're always worried that somebody would just go, oh, great. We'd thank you for that. We'll just go in, that awkward, we'll go and beat you to the price, whatever the thing is. Yeah. Things are very. Very price dependent. It's interesting. It is difficult.

Yeah no. It's super interesting. I think sticking to the wildcard questions before we get back to the shock talk, I think what's something that people would be super interested to learn about you? I don't know.

It's a really good question. I don't know. what they don't know about me. I said I've embraced the idea of sharing stuff for a long time. So I always used to do it once upon a time. I used to write a blog a lot and blogging was easy. 15 years ago, writing a blog about recruitment used to get an audience because not an awful lot of people wrote about stuff. Not consistently. I don't know what they would know about me. I'm still a frustrated, whatever it is. A frustrated something else. My current obsession is watching Matt Armstrong on YouTube. Yeah. I was having breakfast with somebody in Berlin last week. It was the group of people. And I got there on time unusually for a breakfast I was hosting, which is also good. And three people were there. And we all talked about Matt Armstrong and we're not his target market. So that's probably my only vice right now. If a Matt Armstrong video comes out, then I will be watching it almost immediately. There's one out just now, funny enough, which was from yesterday. But other than that, yeah, I don't know. I, I've always been open about who I am. I said, I made this transition from, in my mind, from tech into tech sales and then into recruitment and then into TA. And this is the end of my career. And this is not cause I'm going to be, I'm not that old as we discussed, but, I don't see anything next in the next, five to 10 years. Which means I have been looking for other things. I do try and learn other languages. I'm very bad at them. I'm 3% fluent according to Duolingo in Swedish. There's another useful fact. I will never be more than that, I don't think. And I can order beer in several languages and that's my limit of things. That's impressive.

I find Duolingo fascinating. I struggle with things like that. I would love to speak another language. And I did 1000 days in a row. So a thousand day streak in Duolingo in Mandarin. And I cannot speak a word of Mandarin despite a thousand days.

Despite Duolingo encouraging you, yeah, you are this and you're like, look at this guy.

Yeah, masterful gamification. Yeah. But but no, okay. There you go. Languages and Matt Armstrong, who I also have a massive affinity for. He is a master of his craft, right?

He knows what he's doing and he knows his audience as well, even if we're not in it. He does. I think that's telling we're not neither was a particularly in it. And yet we're both really aware of him. And yeah, a view on a video now of his is something like 1.2, 1.3 million. And it's a significant thing. I don't know how long he'll last. I don't, but maybe that's the thing. The fact that people like me and you are looking at him, it means he'll keep on going.

And look, the CPMs, the sort of value of his audience in the automotive segment is very high relative to some other segments. And he's on to a winner and fair play to him.

I started talking about old Volvos with high mileage and I've gone back to smashed up cars. I feel like there's a theme there.

We should start another podcast. But cool. I will bring it back to shop talk because I want to make sure we touch on some other stuff where I think you'd have an interesting opinion. So I think I want to get to as we head to finish time. I want to think about things like data. I want to talk about AI. I want to talk about trends for the future. So let's start on this data literacy piece. I think I talk about this a lot because like you I'm a sort of geeky, nerdy, technical background type chap. And I came into this industry with the view that we could solve a problem, but data is natural to me where it seems that's not the case for a lot of the HR folk we speak to. If we think about metrics and reporting and stuff like that, what are talent leaders not looking at from a data perspective that you think they should be?

So let's talk about I guess the things they do look at, people are forever measuring time to hire and time to fill and time to this and time to wear. And those are the easy things and they like that. And for some organisations, that's actually, if they're not doing it now, that's still a huge step. We meet organisations at various stages. Some definitely have no data. They don't look at any hiring data at all. So relatively speaking, we, we both know you want to rock up and say there's your core basics. And we picked up some work last year off the back of that actually funnily enough. There was a TA leader, and they came to us and said, we've got all this data. We don't really know what we're doing with it, but by the way, we've got this time to hire number, which is really big. Is that big? And yeah, that's huge. And it's back to that what should TA leaders and business leaders be looking at next, is now you've got your data. So if you've got a time to hire of 150 days. What does that mean? Is that good, bad or indifferent? The answer is it depends. If you've got a supermarket and you've got loads of checkouts, then I suspect 150 days to hire is absolutely killing you. Whereas if you are a, I talked about my wife's in in education. If you're looking for a new headmaster or new head headmistress or new head person 150 days is probably neither here nor there, because they tend to work on a sort of an annual basis anyway. I think the bit that TA leaders have always missed out on is that business impact. It's the, so what. For whatever reason, they never really look at the sales opportunity cost which says, here's my, I filled with these roles, aren't I great. And it's yeah, but. So what. Almost, it's like, what could you do to improve it? Have a conversation with your business about the actual impact. Is, we've gone time to hire again, the 50 days are great or not is irrelevant. It's about what could you be doing differently? I learned that years ago from from a VP of Sales at an IT security business, he used to meet me every month and have two conversations with me. And this leads to this as well. So first of all, he talked about his sales teams. He knew their target. He knew how much per day they were worth. And we'd have a conversation about what can we do to improve this? Because relatively speaking, and it was in software sales, it was a $10,000 a day target. While you can ask for an awful lot of money internally, if you're operating on a $10,000 a day target, it says, what can I do? What if I could shorten it by a week? Potentially I'm giving you $50,000 extra revenue. Will you give me some money to go and do that? And TA leaders tend not to do that very well. The other thing he always used to ask me was just about what are the competitors saying, because he knew that my TA team were talking to all of our competitors all of the time, and he couldn't do that. And we would consciously make an effort to gather that data and gather that information. So he'd actually got a barometer of what was going on in the marketplace from the horse's mouth as opposed to having to read about it or guess it. People don't capture that. So I guess for me, it's about impact. The data gives you some of the answers. Now, what was the, what's the genuine business impact on that.

I agree with everything you said again. The two things I want to call out there are, A couldn't agree with you more on the business impact piece. And I think I won't labour that point because I feel like we've done that a few times. And I feel like your explanation was super articulate. The bit I do want to lean into and just doubly emphasise because I think it's not talked about enough is this sort of second order information gathering thing from people like yourself or people like TA recruiters and other things like that perspective on the market on candidates sentiment and on competitors is an absolute goldmine and it frustrates the crap out of me in your speak that people don't go engage with that stuff more and don't mine that very readily available source of information because as you identified very clearly, you're getting a perspective you yourself could not get regardless of effort, right? And I think that's super i'm just really glad you said that so for that. I just wanted to lean into that a bit more I think cliche question we have to get to it, AI, you referenced it earlier. I think we've talked about trends in '24. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? And what's your perspective on the role AI is going to play in space moving forward?

In 2023, I thought it was hokum. 2024, I'm starting to feel it a little bit more. I've been messing with AI, genuinely. It's funny, actually, somebody pitched me a product, a competitor of yours, potentially, it's not going to be, which said, I've got this amazing bit of AI, and I looked at it, And it was like, oh no it's the stuff I used to mess with in 2017. There's nothing new in AI. What a surprise. And he's no, this is the new AI. It's different. It's the same thing. I think so yeah, without, this is an endless topic. I've been talking to a lot of people about AI and saying, what do you think? Good, bad, indifferent. And the views are so broad. We've got people going, I'm all in. I want to get rid of humans out of the process as much as possible. Humans are expensive, they're fallible. And they don't add value all the way along the line. And I think there are things that humans are doing just for the sake of it. And I do think about clunky recruitment processes, clunky ATSs. I'm literally cutting and pasting bits of data from one thing to another. Because I'm a human, I'm going to make a mistake. Because I'm a human, I take a long time. That's machine learning and automation, probably. True AI isn't, I don't think it's quite there. I have done some demos. I've had some conversations literally with AI and they're almost there. They are, to say they're almost there they're really close. I guess my take on it is that it has to play a factor in everything. What I've seen a lot of TA leaders say to me and are hiding behind is, Oh, but, people are much better at recruitment than AI and I'm starting to say I'm not sure that's true. I think they're hiding behind a world where they'd like the people to be better than they are. I'm trying to find a way of better saying that. I was asked this question, would you rather talk to Amazing AI or a rubbish recruiter. And it's interesting. There's still people who go like with humans, we still human interactions like, yeah, but some of those are rubbish, I think we've got this rose tinted view that all recruiters are amazing but we're not, we, it was. I do not have that view. We're inconsistent, actually part of the problem. So I know there'll be people out there watching this and they've been interviewed by me. Some of those interviews, in my opinion, have been amazing. Some of those interviews, in my opinion, awful. And that inconsistency is a challenge. But above all, yeah, I think people are going through the motions of recruitment in some cases and saying, Oh, look, I'm super busy and I'm managing this and doing that it could genuinely just all be replaced by AI and nobody would feel it. And candidates would probably have a better time of it because the process would be that much quicker. They'd feel like they're a bit more engaged. If nothing else, maybe then recruiters can spend a bit more time. Actually thinking about engagement, actually thinking about telling people, we've got that age old thing of, every time you log onto LinkedIn, there's somebody moaning about being, I've been ghosted. I applied for this job and heard nothing back. That happens all the time. I'm not sure AI will rectify that because quite frankly, it's a really simple process to fix it. You want to fix it now, but people don't. But I do think, yeah, I do think the trend has got to be to look at it in the round and go what am I trying to do? Let me automate what I can automate. Let me get to a sort of personalised volume engagement with candidates. That's what we still really want. But I said there are businesses out there now going I'm gonna actively cut every single human outta this. What happens? What if? And most are hitting that sort of Paretos law thing that says actually 80% of the work can be done by AI. I'm gonna keep 20% of my people. Yeah, if you've got team of a hundred, that means you only need 20 of them. So I do think TA leaders in the future are gonna be managing a different world of AI agents and a smaller human team. That's probably the thing they need to think about now. It's not that far away. I used to think it was decades away. I reckon we're a couple of years away now.

Yeah, look, I would agree with you. And I think the only thing I would say from my perspective on that is just that you're right on the timeline, I think that AI is an inevitability. It's going to form part of the stack and part of the team. My question and comment, and I think maybe where our perspective is slightly different from other vendors or solution providers in the space is. If you're a programmer, you want AI to do your project management and your admin so you can do more programming, not, you don't want it to do your programming for you, so you can do more project management and admin, right? And I think a lot of the things that we're seeing introduced into the HR tech landscape with AI are trying to compete with the bit that the humans could actually do better if they're very good. And not doing the stuff that people actually don't like doing. And there are high values, low value tasks. And so it'd be interesting to see what that role that looks like. But I think, yeah, the composition of talent teams is going to shift job titles and talent teams are going to shift and AI will be present. It's just those that do it sensitively are going to win. And those that just sloppily throw things on the top, I think you're going to suffer.

Using your programmer example, though, that's about value that the bit that a business values, that software engineer, they value the output. They don't value TA. Going back to the, what we're talking about at the beginning, that for a lot of companies, TA's just pure cost. It's an admin function. They don't care what great things their TA people have been doing and the outreach they've done and the engagement they've had. It's just admin, it's shifting a cv.

I think you're right, but I think my comment would just be, I think that is definitely true for many businesses. I think the best of the best businesses and the organisations where TA does have that said seat at the top table, that perception has already shifted and should happen more commonly, right? And the analogy I would give is. Um, you said the word authenticity when we talked about candidates experience. And I think that is the role the human plays. I think the importance of authenticity is only going up. I think that's a category that is harder than any to differentiate on if you don't do it well. And frankly, there is no AI at any level of intelligence that I would rather speak to candidates than my Head of Talent or my top tier hiring manager. And I think that's the bit we're optimising for, right? Is how do we help those touch points happen? And how do we use AI to get everything in the middle of those two things away? But yeah, it sounds like we're on the same page. Somewhat unsurprising at this point.

Big old conversation though. And I think I said that the impact is significant. I think people are trying to solve for it now, which is probably a little bit too soon. I think that's the slight challenge that, that, yeah, this thing that they should have been doing already to be streamlining process, automating process where possible yeah.

I think the one truism is just the rate of change is going to continue to accelerate rather than decelerate. Yeah. Last question. Um, you organise Tru and you do a whole bunch of other things. You're at a lot of events. You do these breakfasts. You're just in the market a lot, right? And I guess I'm just interested in what are you hearing and seeing on the ground in these discussions that you think other recruiters would benefit from also hearing?

Oh, it's really difficult. Yeah, I never really know what to say. The, some of the themes. So we talk about Tru. So I run, yeah, Tru Manchester, Tru Leeds, Tru by Sea in July, big hint. The themes are similar. I guess that's the thing. Yeah, I've been running Tru since 2017 actually. Did Tru Manchester, it hadn't happened for nine years, which is why I picked it up. I deliberately wanted to do it because it is an opportunity to listen to a bunch of different people in different organisations about what's going on. So yeah, dominating conversations, we talked about AI, AI is dominating the conversation. Looking for work is dominating the conversation. There's a whole host of TA people looking for work. In my world of looking for customers, that's a conversation that we naturally lead to quite a lot as well. I do think the, the topics and the themes have changed in the last 18 months. So there was a lot of conversation about diversity and that's gone away a little bit. Not in a good way, I don't think, but it's gone away a little bit. And I do think that's organisations is seeing it as a nice to have that. Yes, we were evolving our processes and making our organisations more diverse and getting to grips with what that means. And then. TA teams have been made smaller. So instantly that's been a sort of a drive a line through that. There's a big conversation about skills based hiring. Lots and lots of conversations about skills based hiring. And for me I'm probably not the person to comment about it. I look at it and go, I get it. I understand what skills based hiring is, but fundamentally I've had this conversation last week, actually, with somebody, I've got all the skills you need to be a surgeon, but I've none of the experience. You don't want me to be a surgeon. Exactly. Do you want me being a surgeon? So skills based hiring is lovely in theory, but it's actually really difficult to put into practice. Again, without naming them, we did some work last year around skills. It was actually saying as an organisation, we've identified skills gaps because skills gaps are different to roles. We tend to look for a role, which is a combination of skills. It's very rarely that you're looking for a somebody that can write and can only write an email and that's their job is email writer. It tends to be more if you write an email, you can write content. If you write content, you can do this, it's a broader sense. And we tend to be a accumulation of those skills. I do think people are trying to do it to cut out some experience that says, I don't value experience. I'm going to just get people with the skills and throw them in at the deep end. And I suspect that's probably not going to work. But some of the grownup organisations are going. As a premise, we like that. Let's bring this focus on the skills that we need. Yeah, so that we can actually evolve and build in resilience and build in ambiguity. So people understand that I'm the sum of my parts and this is where I can go. But the other thing, yes, it's a big corporates are definitely looking at that. And startups are still having the same old problem of, how do I hire good people that get me, that get us, that get the thing that we're building here. So that sort of cultural based hiring is obviously always a topic. And again, if anybody gets that do let me know. It's the eternal challenge of, you're great for now. Startups work on that basis, don't they? You're great for now and I'd love you to be great for the future. But if we triple our size, you might not be able to do that anymore. You might not want to do that anymore. So how do you manage that transition and stuff? Yeah, so nothing very revolutionary. Yeah, AI, skills based hiring, cultural values, how do you hire for culture against pure anything else? And I think that skills, culture, things are an interesting, Dilemma for organisations. There's a tension between the two of them often. And that's again, I have all the cultural values that you want. I have none of the skills. I'm using me as an example of any of those examples, but if you want me to practice on surgery, then I'm your man. It can't, how hard can it be?

Yeah, no I think you're right. And I think, yeah, skills based hiring is super interesting in a whole bunch of ways. I speak to a lot of CPOs at these very large 10 to a hundred thousand plus headcount organisations. Often they'll talk about skills based hiring through rose tinted glasses. And I think there's definitely a trend and a justified one there. But I think people significantly underestimate the sort of infrastructure internally required to actually deliver that. I think your example of a surgeon is a great one because you clearly want skills based hiring to bias towards a more entry level or kind of junior role that can be trained on site. But I think people underestimate the investment and the time that it takes to ramp those folks into a level that you actually get them to be productive relative to buying the talent with the experience. And I think there's clearly a right answer there, but I think people underestimate how hard that's going to be. But three super useful themes and a great answer to the final question. So Martin, thank you so much for your time today. It's been great. I learned lots. So thank you for joining me. Everybody, you can follow Martin on LinkedIn. If you want to stay up to date and find out more about things he's doing, learn more about Immersive, learn more about Tru and shout out to Tru by Sea in July. And we will put all of that stuff plus the description of Martin's used Volvo in the show notes. If you'd like to join me on Talent Talks, please do get in touch and hope you all have a fantastic day. Thank you for listening. Thanks, Martin.

Thank you.