Your Attrition Problem Is a Hiring Problem. Your Hiring Problem Is a Data Problem.

Daniel Ash 0:00
We found that the phone screen was had a negative correlation with job success, meaning higher candidates who scored higher during the recruiter phone screen tended to perform lower. A human, you know, having a 20-minute, 30-minute conversation with a candidate, we found that that's in many cases not true. We've seen many cases where it's the opposite. Candidates with high amounts of work experience actually are the ones that leave at higher rates or do not perform as well. All right.

Milan Batinich 0:27
Welcome to the Build a Better BPO podcast. We know that hiring is the most expensive or one of the most expensive, most overlooked operational problems within the BPO industry. And on today's podcast, we are going to break that down.

Amanda Quinn 0:43
Yeah, we are so happy to be joined by Daniel Ash. Daniel is the CEO and co-founder of Journeyfront, an intelligent hiring platform built purposely for BPOs. Journeyfront is used by BPOs, both large and small, in over 50 countries across the globe to improve their hiring process. And Daniel has worked closely with their BPO clients on a broad and deep range of hiring or hiring related initiatives. Before founding Journeyfront, Daniel worked in private equity at Sorenson Capital and management consulting at Bain and Company, advising contact centers, venture backed startups, and Fortune 500 companies on their workforce challenges. Welcome, Daniel.

Daniel Ash 1:22
It's good to be here. Thank you.

Amanda Quinn 1:25
We're so honored to have you. We're so happy to get into this conversation. I think it's long overdue. Milan, um we, you know, you you and I have clearly talked a lot about hiring and what um what are some of the best practices. So I'm like really excited to dig into this with Daniel. Um and maybe we start off by asking, Daniel, what does a bad hire actually cost a BPO?

Daniel Ash 1:50
Yeah, it's a really good question question because that's the that's the first thing to be aware of, right? When it comes to understanding the importance of hiring. Luckily, there's been a lot of studies on the topic. Um Department of Labor, probably one of the most broadly cited studies, estimated that the cost to replace a worker. So let's just start there. You hire someone, they don't work out, whether they choose to leave or you have to let them go, you gotta then replace that person. What's that cost? And that's about 30% of their annual fully baked salary. So that can add up, right? Even if this is a US worker that's that's you're you're paying, let's say, $40,000 a year, that's a $12,000 cost annually per worker like that that you have to replace. And that's to, you know, process their departure, go out and obviously source, screen many applicants to find the one and then train on board and ramp that person up to the same level of the person that left looking at turnover, the turnover cost. Um for a 200% org with 30% turnover, let's say you're paying $18 an hour, like if you do that math, um, that can add up to over a million dollars a year. So so it's a uh a big number. And that's just 100% org. The the broader costs, if you don't just think about turnover, but you think about the you know, cost two of a hire that's you know high performing versus low performing can be upwards of 200% plus. And and that's thinking about the difference between a worker that's a high performer, stays for many years versus a low performer that stays for only six months as an example, right? So it's that delta that takes into account the opportunity cost as well, where the number can get even much bigger and higher than than the 30%. So it is a big number that adds up really fast, and why it given how often and how much hiring contact centers and BPOs specifically have to do, it's just something we have to all focus on in a big way, right?

Amanda Quinn 3:39
Yeah. And that number doesn't even count for the impact that the revenue impact that may be associated with that turnover and perhaps client attrition because they're unhappy with how high a turnover is and now you're losing contracts as a result of it, which I'm sure can certainly add up as well.

Daniel Ash 3:57
Right. Yep, but if it affects retaining clients, new clients, right? Who are gonna first thing they're gonna ask is show us your numbers or some of your KPIs, right? So it affects this the client customer experience, right? So it really is a big deal.

Milan Batinich 4:10
Yeah, and I would think that that long-term uh knowledge base of your agents, if you're constantly having new agents start, can cost you not only clients, but then affect your KPIs as well, right?

Daniel Ash 4:21
Mm-hmm. And and obviously you both know this more than most as the BPO landscape, the CX landscape is changing, evolving, you know, AI, more tech, more complex work being required due to the simple work being automated. I I would anticipate that the cost of turnover will only go up because the role's getting more sophisticated. The the need to train and ramp people is getting even greater, right? And the delta between a high performing and and low performing agent will will only go up as well. So those costs are, if anything, only gonna increase as the industry evolves.

Amanda Quinn 4:55
That's a great point. This is this is a big problem. BPOs will need to address it, and it's a problem that's not gonna go away, as you say, despite role an increased role of technology in the contact center. So I'm really keen to dig into given how many BPOs you guys have worked with, like what are you unpacking when you or what are you commonly seeing when you get into a BPO, like their hiring process? Like what are what is their typical BPO hiring process look like? And what stands out to you as like a problem that you see a lot?

Daniel Ash 5:30
Yeah, so obviously it's it's a big, big world. There's there's a lot of variability out there, but I I would say there's two common types of BPOs we see as it relates to their hiring process. One is a BPO that is not really using any solution uh technology currently. They're either managing their hiring in Excel or maybe it's uh kind of an older school, more clunky applicant tracking system as an example. And for those types of organizations, their hiring process is incredibly manual. So they're maybe collecting resumes and review or applications, sometimes through email, but like through their outdated system, whatever, and they're having to review that very manually. A lot of chasing of candidates, then there's a phone screen, then there's an interview, maybe there's another interview, right? And the problem there is uh not a lot of automation happening, not a lot of reliable screening happening just because it's so driven by the person that's that's doing so much of it and the variable variability that come that can come from that. And then the other type is is uh a BPO, let's say that that is using systems. Maybe they're even more modern systems. They have an applicant tracking system, maybe they have one or more assessment vendors that they're using, and and also they're probably tracking quite a bit in Excel too, because the systems they have aren't designed for their unique business model and how they hire, right? So they're tracking hiring classes or other things in Excel. And so because of that, there's a lot of back and forth with the candidate into multiple systems, which causes drop-off. The recruiting team is back and forth between systems. So there's just a lot of friction and the heavy load of interpreting the information coming in with the volume they're doing is all on the hiring team, which causes all sorts of challenges, right? So with that, the issue is maybe not optimal automation, maybe a lot of friction in the process due to managing multiple systems and and just a lot of things that are getting in the way of them really taking hiring to the next level and becoming more sophisticated with it, I would say.

Amanda Quinn 7:27
And Milan, you and I have talked about this on an episode where you were saying how some of the biggest reasons that BPOs or companies in general like lose prospective agents is just the speed with which they can get back to them and keep the process going. And it sounds like either of these two kind of status quo alternatives are gonna inherently be adding time to an applicant's track, like system, um what is called the applicant's process of getting on getting into your company, right? And that's gonna like turn off people that would want to be there.

Milan Batinich 8:03
Right, right. And for many candidates, they view the interview process and the hiring process of the company. They they correlate that to is this how it's gonna be once I get started and once I go through onboarding? And if it took you know through six weeks to get through a two to three interview process, how's how's communication gonna be once I'm a team member? Or is it gonna be the same way? And is it gonna carry over into how the organization runs for the first impression, right?

Daniel Ash 8:30
They haven't yet met with the person, so they're just right, they're just drawing conclusions based on the clunkiness of that experience or the little delay, et cetera. And and of course, then also the example you just gave me, Milan, is if they took six weeks, that person probably already went elsewhere, right? Because if they have a competitor who who's more dialed in in their hiring process, they're taking the cream of the crop and you're kind of left with whoever didn't make it on those other faster organizations, right? And it was still available six weeks later. Yeah. And that's the it's a tough, it's a tough uh and competitive world and and is a double-edged sword, right? Because there's nothing stopping that same organization that is taking six weeks from just saying, all right, our application process starting today is going to be, do you want a job? If yes, we hire you, if no, we don't, right? And and yeah, you'll have all the speed you want, but quality is probably gonna fall, right? So it's balancing the speed and quality, I think, where the opportunity lies and and also the challenges, right? Uniquely that BPOs feel probably more than most in the world in terms of the volume they do and the speed at which they have to do it.

Amanda Quinn 9:35
Yeah. How do you recommend that they that they do balance that?

Daniel Ash 9:40
Yeah. Um, so I think I think most organizations, due to the natural incentives that come down from the top, we need to fill this class 100 seats by Monday. There's a lot of natural pressure to prioritize speed. And and I think the problem typically is quality falls by the wayside. It's like we optimize for speed and pray for quality, right? If we're being honest. And that's just natural when it comes to an organization that they're gonna feel more accountability for whether they hired that class and not so much for what the outcome was two months in, right? But I I think I think more optimal balancing is key than than what companies are doing today. And I think there's too much on a recruiter's plate to try to have the recruiter do all of that, right? They have maybe this evergreen rec where they're across one rec, maybe they're hiring for multiple role types, right? Customer service, sales, IT. And within each of those role types, they're hiring for, you know, client one, two, three, client four, five, six, and they all have different timelines, different hiring class sizes, different requirements. I'm just feeling overwhelmed describing that complexity, right? And so for one recruiter under an intense amount of a pressure to meet hiring classes, having the recruiter be responsible for both the speed and all the processing and orchestrating, but also the quality is a lot. And I think it's natural for quality to fall by the wayside, right? And so my advice is typically you've got to take some stuff off the recruiter's plate, who's gonna be so microfocused on orchestrating the to meet these hiring class needs and so on. So the more automation you can have, where there's all these repeat tasks that let's be honest, a human doesn't have to be doing that, reminding the candidate to complete their application, scheduling an interview and coordinating the candidate's calendar with that recruiter or hiring manager's calendar, notifying them of the next step, right? These are all things that humans don't have to necessarily be doing that. We can rely on technology and AI and things like that to automate those things. That can go a long way, just to take, let's say, 80% of the heavy lift off the recruiter's plate, just in the tedious manual stuff. But then another thing is like a lot of the quality stuff. If we can pull in more advanced means and effective means of screening talent for fit, right, and for skills. And and you can have the recruiter more is using those scores, or ideally, even the systems, you know, learning how to use those scores, and the recruiters just sitting atop orchestrating and watching it and making sure they're hitting their deadlines they need. I I think that can go a long way to making what seems like an impossible problem suddenly seem possible to be fixed, right?

Amanda Quinn 12:21
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And Milan, I know you've talked a lot about the screening um and assessments that they should do to to hire for fit. Maybe you can jump in on kind of what you uh remind the audience of what you typically recommend and and about what how they should prioritize fit and maybe behavioral assessments and things like that.

Milan Batinich 12:43
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And Daniel, everything that you shared have been great, great points. Yeah, if there's, and I just want to talk about that for a second, uh, you know, being able to automate some of those tasks to take it away from the recruiter. I think a lot of times with those of evergreen recruiting recs, you know, there's an expectation from the top that we're gonna have X amount of attrition. So I think that's why a lot of organizations are prior always prioritize speed over quality because they're like, well, we already know, you know, every two months we need a class on this program of 15 agents, and we know that out of the 15, X amount are gonna turn within a certain period of time.

Daniel Ash 13:19
So let's just keep filling it because they just accepted it.

Milan Batinich 13:22
They accept it, yeah, as as the norm. And they're not focused on, okay, how can we improve on that so that way we can keep more? And then maybe we're not having uh a new uh class of 15 every six weeks. Um so yeah, so Amanda, to your point. Um the you know, from the BPO perspective, uh having uh assessments like cognitive assessments, behavioral assessments, aside from skills-based assessments, can really help BPOs or organizations overall identify, you know, is this person going to be a good long-term fit? Because I know many companies will give a skills assessment. It's like, uh, you know, Daniel, earlier as you're talking about speed, do you want the job? Okay, you're hired. You know, I've seen a lot of organizations, can you type 25 words per minute? And do you have a heartbeat? And then you you don't even need to want the job. You can have the job anyway. Right, right. And uh so I I think a lot of that comes into play. But you know, in order to be able to have that quality and make sure that uh uh that the right agents is in the workforce for the BPO, you know, I think uh having those specific assessments around, you know, personality-wise, are they a good fit for this specific role versus you know, are they just a human being that can do the job? Um, and then also do they have the ability to learn the job? You know, can they retain the information that they're learning and are they a good fit culturally at where they're gonna stay, you know, long term versus leaving for you know 25 cents more per hour somewhere else? Right. So yeah, so I think uh, you know, the whole suite of assessments are important to be able to identify, you know, is this person gonna be the right fit? And I think a lot of organizations, if Daniel, to your point, if it's not automated, I think a lot of organizations get nervous because then they feel like they're gonna lose out on the speed. You know, well, we need to fill this class, and if we have all of these uh requirements or uh ways to vet a candidate, you know, are we gonna still be hitting that speed?

Daniel Ash 15:15
Yeah. I mean, uh one of the advantages of assessments, besides being more validated and science science-backed, let's say, is that we already have a clear, consistent scoring criteria being applied with every single candidate. It's hard when a human evaluator is doing it, right? Let alone that, you know, going from one candidate to the next, to the next, to the next, doing anything like that is gonna take a ton more time and slow everything down. Even just the variability and the evaluation of a recruiter doing that is gonna be affected by all sorts of things. The the skill of that recruiter, how they're feeling that day, time of day, all this sort of stuff, right? Whereas the nice thing about assessments is can if you configure it all right, not just around the scoring, but even the length of the process, let's decide it once before we begin to execute on this massive hiring plan that will be endless. And we can make tweaks along the way, but they're tweaks at the macro level. It's not not each candidate to candidate, which is what kind of happens with uh with a human doing the heavy lift there, right?

Amanda Quinn 16:18
Yeah, that's such a good point of just treating this like a system and not treating it all like a one-off and the efficiency that can be gained from taking that that macro approach, like how you put that. Daniel, I'm curious, do you ever see BPOs do assessments that are like looking for the wrong thing or like they're prioritizing something that isn't actually a predictor of success in the role?

Daniel Ash 16:44
All the time. Yes. And it's not just BPOs, by the way. I think most companies struggle with this. And if they're being honest uh and reflective, they're doing a lot of things that haven't yet been validated, at least within their own organization. Maybe it makes logical sense, or maybe they heard it, somebody else did it somewhere, and so they're they're copying them, but they're they're not really tracking at a more precise level often whether the things that they are doing are leading to job success associated with those same hires. The things they're using to screen those candidates, are those the things that predict whether a candidate makes it, predict whether they're a performer or not, et cetera. Going back to the beginning when we talked about two groups, you know, there's the group that isn't using many sophisticated tools, and then there's the group that might already be using an assessment solution and an innate applicant tracking system. Even the second group, so many of them have not actually, maybe they did at the very beginning, maybe, but they're they haven't on a recurring basis gone back to look at that, those assessment results and interview results or whatever, and whether the scores that they're using to make hiring decisions correlate with job success or retention. So really what they've done is, you know, it ironically is as outsourced call centers, they've outsourced the hiring decision to another company, but not vetted it themselves, right? And so they've, even if they're using another assessment vendor, they're just kind of trusting that the scores are actually correlated with job success, but they they don't know for sure. And and that's where, you know, Journeyfront takes that very seriously. And we track that in a more automated manner. So that's why we know this, because we've we've seen a lot of that data and how some things that the companies were using for months or even years weren't correlated at all. And they didn't know it until they actually looked at that call it feedback loop and and and tangible data to draw conclusions on versus at best anecdotal evidence, which is the weakest form of evidence out there, right?

Amanda Quinn 18:33
Yeah. Right. Interesting. Interesting. This sounds like, I mean, uh I spend a lot of my time obviously in marketing, and it sounds like basically a company that is optimizing all of their marketing budget based on like which channels will give me the most leads without actually being like, do those leads like, okay, I got a high click-through rate, but did that that actually turn into a customer? Like it sounds like that's kind of what's the disconnect here.

Daniel Ash 18:56
Totally. And coming from your background, Amanda, how crazy would that be to be spending tons of money on marketing, but never tying it to the outcome that you actually care about?

Amanda Quinn 19:05
No, it'd be bananas.

Daniel Ash 19:07
And getting in a meeting where they're like, well, this feels like a mark good marketing campaign. And it feels like it's been good. It seems right, logically, because we've been doing it for six months, but never, never look asking, okay, but what was the result? Well, in higher, and and and there, you know, um, you get some kind of ROI even on that stuff. But in hiring, where we see, you know, 50% of hires in at BPOs often aren't there at six months, and 50% are, right? It's like a top toss of the coin accuracy rate. It's even crazier to not track that because of it representing your largest cost on your P&L, right? And not only turnover, but like the associated cost with high or low performance. And to your point earlier, how that affects clients and the customer. Number one driver of your business.

Amanda Quinn 19:54
Totally in the people business and like to not track the people feels.

Daniel Ash 19:59
Which is why I say skip all the like nuanced language. If there's two things to do that will fix the majority of the hires, because because we could go into why is hiring hard, and a lot of it's about like we have hundreds of biases and we don't even know they're affecting us when we're evaluating other humans. And it's like whack-a-mole, right? Even if you're aware of one bias, to whatever extent you're aware, you're trying to work on it, the other 99 will pop up while you're focused on that one, right? If you just stop trying to act like we can't have those challenges and just say instead, how do we fix this? It's structure and data. Structure up front, the process, how you're going to score candidates, what good looks like, making sure it ties to things that lead to success within the job will fix a lot of those biases and issues where quality of hire breaks down. And then the other is data, which is like just being relentlessly empirical about your hiring process, because it is a system, like Amanda said, that's producing outcomes. And whether that hiring process is leading to the outcomes you you want or not, and then making adjustments along the way will solve so many problems that BPOs are often facing. And that often problems to Milan's point that they don't even know can be solved because they haven't really stopped and thought you can solve turnover by improving hiring. It's not just a given, whatever your turnover rate is, as one example.

Amanda Quinn 21:15
Yeah, because it's like we, I mean, Milan, jump in here if you you've seen differently, but it feels like we treat retention like a completely separate problem with gamification and all the like what incentives do can we give to make you guys want to stay more and come parties at the at the headquarters and whatnot, and hiring is a completely separate action. And there seem like there's a disconnect in turn in the BPO. Do you see that same Milan?

Milan Batinich 21:41
Yeah, no, I agree with that statement 100%. Yeah, absolutely. It's almost yeah, treated as two separate things. And then not only two separate things and setting up if they if a company sets up process processes, they set up separate processes for hiring and then also for retention. So it's disconnected, but then you have different departments. Departments and different individuals managing that. Which Daniel, to your point, you need to have a process in place for each, but you really need to have them connected because they're continuous versus being two separate items.

Daniel Ash 22:14
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot that goes into turnover. The largest study ever done on turnover, which we should do a discussion on that and that alone someday with the three of us. It'd be fascinating. But you know, it found there were market forces that caused turnover, you know, like when we're in an employee market or a candidate-driven market, they have more options that causes turnover to go up. Then there's job factors, you know, good pay, benefits, leadership, culture, whatever. But then there were a lot of factors related to not the market, not the person, but or not the market, not the job, but the person, how they handle stress, how committed they are to their career, certain personality traits that are associated with greater longevity within a role, and so on, right? And we often forget that there are factors related to who you hire and and and how they fit the job that impact retention. And the research suggests they are actually greater in effect than the other factors if you actually plot that out in terms of scientific validity and how this thing correlates with tenure within a role, right?

Amanda Quinn 23:15
That's fascinating.

Daniel Ash 23:16
That is, that's really interesting.

Amanda Quinn 23:18
Is that what and I feel like you've talked about that too, Milan, the um the factors that that align with employee engagement. I think you added you also added in um like the manager management style, which probably factors into the personality as well.

Amanda Quinn 23:32
Daniel, you used the word closed loop when you talked about this system. I I love that concept. I don't think I've heard that in this space. Can you maybe like articulate a little bit about what that closed loop looks like and how does uh what what you've kind of seen in and running? It sounds like Journeyfront has a closed loop in its system.

Daniel Ash 23:52
Yeah, so this is going back to that marketing analogy you used where, of course, when marketers spend money on ad campaigns with the desired goal of bringing a customer or a prospect at least, et cetera, they're tying the efforts they're using up front on you know, marketing ads and dollars spent to did this produce that outcome. It's the same thing in hiring, ideally, right? And so one of the unique things of Journeyfront System is all the data that we're collecting on candidates, resume, application data, interview data, assessments. Um once you're hiring these people, we connect that to things like those hires performance, their retention, and let analytics and automation and AI do a lot of the pattern recognition around everything we're doing and hiring, what's correlated with job success, what's correlated with retention. It's this idea of tracking at your own localized level to get out away from the theory and what works across the globe, generally speaking. And let's look at not only within BPO specifically, but but even within our geo and this this specific environment, client or job, job role, what are the things that correlate with job success and retention? And and it's like turning a light on in a dimly lit room where once you've done that, you've hired people and you've seen what of everything you collected on the candidate, what correlated with job success and retention, it it makes things rather clear what what leads to success, what doesn't. And and that allows a more evidence-based way of updating your hiring process rooted in actual historical patterns that you've seen in your own company with your own agents hired and how they did. That's what we mean when we say closed loop.

Amanda Quinn 25:21
That sounds like that makes a ton of sense to have a system like that. And that's really cool that you guys have been able to bring all this data together. Would love like what has been the most surprising thing that you've learned in observing this and and running this and seeing this play out with your different clients.

Daniel Ash 25:39
Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of it is like it's a myth buster because companies have all sorts of myths, especially hiring managers. Let's be honest, they they can have strong views. You gotta have, you know, people that we hire, you gotta have, you know, XYZ type of experience. I don't want to, I don't want you to bring me anyone that doesn't have at least three years of contact center experience or healthcare experience or BPO experience or whatever. And I think one surprising thing is some of the strongestly held views, like how much prior work experience matters for job success, are not only not true, but we've seen many cases where it's the opposite. Candidates with high amounts of work experience actually are the ones that leave at higher rates or do not perform as well for whatever reason. Maybe they're more entitled, maybe they're a job switcher, so they've been in the industry, but they're more likely to switch. Maybe they come in with a certain set of expectations from where they worked before that is in fact not true at your company. So their expectations are going to be even more misaligned. We found that data points from the resume that recruiters often rely on the most for evaluating fit are not good predictors of job success and retention. And yet for many companies, it's like the predominant data point that they're going after, right? Another surprising thing is just how variable in effectiveness interviews are. Um, I think there's this assumption that a human, you know, having a 20-minute, 30-minute conversation with a candidate, that that how that candidate does in that interview per the evaluator's evaluation will correlate with those who are the best performers, right? If the recruiter thinks this or hiring manager thinks this person's great, that's because they're going to be a great hire. And if they think they're okay, but they barely passed this person's gonna be okay, but not great. And we we found that that's in many cases not true. Like interviews are not necessarily effective. And often we can tie it down to the interviewer or even the question. There's certain questions that are effective and not, certain types of interviews that are effective or not. That's not to say they aren't sometimes effective, but it's variable. And I can't think of a client we've ever had who hasn't found a significant step in their interview process that was actually negatively correlated with job success, meaning higher candidates did the worst later in the job. So it's it's stuff like that that's that's been really, I think, surprising to many clients once they've run that closed loop, if you will, on their own data, things that they weren't anticipating before they found out.

Amanda Quinn 28:05
That's fascinating. Are you seeing like anybody like put weight up to okay, like Jane asks terrible interview questions or whatever Jane thinks, we're gonna do the opposite of it. Is that like where they end up, or do they just remain?

Daniel Ash 28:18
They don't go that far, but they definitely do quickly identify all right, we need further training in this area, maybe third further interviewer training, or what we're asking is just not effective. So, as an example, one time we found that the phone screen was had a negative correlation with job success, meaning higher candidates who scored higher during the recruiter phone screen tended to perform lower. So you might as well have, to your point, Amanda, done the opposite of that recommendation, not that they wanted to put that in practice. Found that the hiring manager interview was effective. And and you look at what they were measuring in those two interviews, and they were different things. So, what we did is we we took those learnings and we moved some of the things they were probing for in the hiring manager interview and how they were grading candidates with a standard structured scoring rubric and so on, and we trained the recruiters on that and dropped some of the old stuff that wasn't working. And within six months, that recruiter interview suddenly was predicting job success. And it's just based on learning what was working in another step and moving it up in the process. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do when you're starting to see those kinds of patterns. Another one is you can even shorten interviews sometimes just by identifying of the six questions we're asking, only three are effective. You would be better off having a 15-minute phone screen rather than a 30-minute phone screen. Not only because it's more efficient, it's actually more accurate as well. And the data supports that. So it can drive decision making, not just at the candidate by candidate level, but even the system level and what you're doing across the process.

Milan Batinich 29:42
That's super cool. Uh so, Daniel, in addition to like the process or finding that, okay, during a phone interview or phone screen, that maybe the questions aren't the right questions, can you also analyze through your the data that comes from the closed loop specific individuals? So maybe, you know, if a BPO has five people doing these screens, can it uh analyze and identify, okay, maybe this one person in particular needs more specific training and things like that?

Daniel Ash 30:06
Yes. So many of the things I've just talked about, the attributes we're screening for inter evaluators, i.e. interviewers, the steps in the hiring process down to the specific questions. There's a dashboard for that. It's automated and spits out those types of results. So you're describing what we call our interviewer effectiveness dashboard that identifies patterns around who effective interviews are and who not, and where are they getting it wrong? And to your point, you can use that to to drive coaching and and development. Yeah.

Milan Batinich 30:34
Yeah. Just to st steal Amanda's word, fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.

Amanda Quinn 30:40
Milan's going to become like a savant on this, I have a feeling, pretty soon. And he's going to become like your uh number one partner channel.

Daniel Ash 30:48
Milan and I have geeked out about this on some prior calls. Yeah. We have a lot of similar, similar views on some of these things, which is awesome. Always fun.

Amanda Quinn 30:57
Awesome. Um, well, I would love as we kind of start wrapping this up to talk about the the topic that we can escape these days, AI. I know there's probably lots of places that AI is being layered into the hiring process right now. Where are you seeing it adding value? And maybe where are should BPOs be skeptical of leveraging it?

Daniel Ash 31:20
Yeah, so um, yeah, we we all get hit up all the time on AI uh these days. Um and and and my view is that it it has been uh a game changer in a variety of ways. It's allowed us to do things that were really hard to do before, um, especially things that involve like screening candidates in typically unstructured ways, suddenly like a resume review or you know, a can you candidate inputs uh answers a question, writes a response, or even like one-way video interview, which is something we have where historically the recruiter had to go and listen to that video, or if it's like one of our job simulation tools, the the recruiter hiring manager had to evaluate the candidate's response to that customer call, right? In our the job simulation. AI has made scoring that unstructured data really easy and effective. And and even a lot of the analytics really, really effective. So um I think I think it's a game changer in that context. But it's it still has issues, right? There's still, no matter how right it is or wrong it is, it's very confident. AI, right? The other day I I put in chat to ChatGPT, I was curious. I said, based on your experience with me over the last year, how would you rate my Python skills? Which is a coding language that, by the way, I know zero about. I mean, our team uses it, but I I'm not the one doing that. And it gave me a four out of five, you might be impressed to hear, uh, and gave me some great reasons, which I was shocked because I don't know uh I could have written a line of code of Python. But that's the problem, right? Is is that um AI still hallucinates, it still can be overconfident, which by the way, is mimicking what humans are like. Humans hallucinate. We call it, you know, being unself-aware of you know not being perfect. And so we think someone thing that's not true, um, and we can be overly confident, right? And so I think where the I think where where you you need to be careful is AI is not perfect. It it can make mistakes, it's just harder to detect them. And if your AI is just duplicating what humans already are doing that's wrong, which is often what it does, you're gonna get the same outcome. So, as an example, humans already, for many years, have thought that like the resume and how a resume matches a job description is a good sign of whether that person will go on to be a top quality hire. And like we were talking about earlier, our own findings and frankly, a lot of the literature suggests that's just not the case. Like prior work experience, educational background is not as associated with job success as we think. In fact, it's often the opposite. And so it's it's true when humans were doing that matching. It's still true, even if an AI is doing the matching of a resume to a job description. It's still true. And most of the applicant tracking systems that have added AI, the first thing they added, because it's so easy to add, a company could add it in like one day or a few days, any any hiring system. It just matches a resume to a job description. And if that's not effective in terms of predicting success, it's still not effective when an AI is doing it, right? Same thing with interviews. We have lots of data to suggest that not all interviews are created equal. Some interviews aren't effective. And if an AI is doing the interview, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to correlate with job success. And so that's why we say be relentlessly empirical, track it, right? Because the AI is not foolproof.

Amanda Quinn 34:34
Yeah. No, I I think that makes a ton of sense. And having heard horror stories about those in the job market right now trying to get into companies and trying to do everything they can because they know they're fighting up against ATS systems that are looking for that matching. And they're that's the gatekeeper you need to get through these days. It's like creating such a friction, such friction, such a roadblock. And for what, it sounds like because it sounds like the data doesn't support that it's in any way.

Daniel Ash 35:03
And if it didn't support it before, now that it's easier than ever for candidates to fake it, like candidates can go to a third-party free site and say, match my resume to this job description, and it'll do it in two seconds, and that's the one they upload. And that's happening a lot, our data suggests. So if anything, it's getting less effective over time because of those types of gaming behaviors, right?

Amanda Quinn 35:24
So what do you do when you see somebody submit? Because I presume your system is seeing somebody come in one resume for this job, and then I'm gonna, I didn't get it, so I'm gonna put a different resume out for another job. Like, does that have impact your scoring of them? Like, have you guys hired somebody that's fit that?

Daniel Ash 35:43
Yeah, so our system will flag um historical candidates, uh, do not hire, et cetera, straight within the dashboard that a recruiter would be viewing as they're orchestrating their hiring classes. So typically, if there's like weird variations about their work experience or or they've applied to multiple jobs, um, we would flag that. Um, this is within our like our fraud detection suite. There's a lot of stuff that people will do nowadays too, and BPO. BPOs are so you aware of this, all these like the gamers. I mean, there's gotta be some center in Nigeria or India where there's like professional test takers taking tests for candidates, right? Because um many BPO clients will say, we hired this person, but the person that showed up on day one didn't look like that person, right? Or or what have you. Uh when we released our fraud detection tools, like literally that same day, tons of our BPO clients said, we suddenly getting all started getting all these high and medium, most especially high frauds alerts. And when they dug into why, one thing our system does that it tracks IP address of like where you are as you're going through the process. And there's people that you know took step one, a candidate took step one in New York, but step two, like 20 minutes later, they were suddenly in Nigeria, which is to say it's now with technology, we're able to capture things that were invisible to BPOs before, which can greatly improve not only quality of hire, but reduce it can reduce risk, right? Because of apparently what is a pretty sophisticated apparatus of of gaming and and faking it that the candidates are learning through whatever sources they they are using.

Amanda Quinn 37:19
What goes on and like this is what I imagine is on the deep web, people being like, how do I do this? How do I get around?

Daniel Ash 37:25
Yeah, totally.

Amanda Quinn 37:26
It's crazy. Um, some ways I'm like that this the uh not not the test taking, but like somebody who's gonna go through the effort to upload and customize a resume for each job. I'm like, there's kind of a persistence there. I'm like, I'm almost wondering if that's like a candidate you want to bring in to be like, yeah, okay, you you really um have a have a fortitude here.

Daniel Ash 37:47
You you're you're which is which is a good point because to some extent, having a a little bit of friction in the hiring process, and by little I mean more than what I described earlier, where you just click a button, I want the job or not, and that leads to the hire. Having some friction where the candidate has to actually do and demonstrate some things can actually be a good way of weeding out bad candidates, whether bad because they don't fit the job, don't have the skills neither, bad because they don't really want it. They want to make their rent next month, but so they'll they'll go there for 30 days, but they're they might switch to another job on on a dime for no other reason than they want 10 cents more or their somebody offended them, right? Like there's just that's why quality really matters in terms of um setting up a system that will that will help you evaluate that.

Amanda Quinn 38:30
Yeah. I feel like that was a good conversation. Anything else, Daniel, that we didn't cover that you feel like would be really helpful when you think about helping BPOs improve their hiring process, think through attrition. I know we we'll unpack that more in another um maybe another talk.

Daniel Ash 38:48
Yeah, I mean, I I I think I think my my takeaway for BPOs would be you hire in a very unique way, right? Like you're hiring for other clients across geos, across client types, role types. These are very unique challenges that the non-BPO industry doesn't even can't even fathom, right? So I guess that's a a way of maybe affirming that it's a really hard job hiring for B in a BPO context. And recruiting teams need help. Like they do need automation, they need analytics. There's a lot of things in terms of getting more strategic in hiring that you just can't do if you're relying on too many manual processes, if you're still tracking things in in spreadsheets. And so I would, I would encourage a very pro-collaborative relationship between you know hiring teams and technology to help solve those challenges because to be honest, you can't solve it otherwise. So that's that's probably one of the key takeaways I'd I'd lead the audience with.

Amanda Quinn 39:41
Yeah, I I think that makes that's great advice. And I think that echoes across the board. I think it's like we're at this phase, the tech is available, BPOs need to be investing in themselves, in their operations, really starting taking their business from like the kind of manual way of just throwing bodies at the problem and really starting to think through what are the right solutions to be like getting leverage from my business. And I think recruiting software and in general, uh things that are gonna improve back office efficiency are no-brainers that should be on their consideration list.

Amanda Quinn 40:18
Well, I thought Milan was gonna close it out, but I guess I guess he's not.

Milan Batinich 40:22
Yeah. I mean, you you told me before that you're gonna close out the episode. So let's just leave. Oh, okay. No, you told me you were.

Amanda Quinn 40:29
All right, Miss Tom, Miss Tom. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. I forgot Milan has such a good memory. Daniel, thank you so much for being here. We're so happy to have you. You're our first guest, and we really appreciate you you sharing your time with us and sharing your amazing insights with our audience. If anybody has any questions for Daniel, you can find him on LinkedIn, I assume. Reach out to him at Journeyfront.

Daniel Ash 40:54
Um, I hope everyone hopefully this isn't too much, but Daniel at journeyfront.com is my email. If I can be helpful in any way or answer questions or provide additional resources, we have a lot of free stuff. Um, feel free to reach out.

Daniel Ash 41:08
Wonderful.

Amanda Quinn 41:09
Thank you so much. Appreciate you joining us. And thank you everyone for tuning in.

Daniel Ash 41:13
Okay, looking forward to the next one. Bye.

Amanda Quinn 41:15
Yes, bye.