Episode 9

Vladimir Lagutinskiy on the Complexities of Modern Hiring: Challenges, Techniques, and Future Horizons

TIM: So, Vladimir, when you think about hiring, what personally are the biggest challenges for you right now?

VLADIMIR: I think right now the biggest challenge is basically the number of applications. This is after last year, or like the last two years of layoffs, when people really invested time in applications, and basically based on my experience hiring, like last year, last summer, it's really difficult to handle. So just let me give you one example: I was looking for two data analysts, and the total amount of applications that I got was kind of 1500 or something like that, so basically for a human, or like for a recruiter or like for a hiring manager, it's like impossible to check all of them. And this is actually, I think, the biggest challenge right now. Actually, I've heard a joke that right now all the candidates basically are two groups of candidates: the first group of candidates knows how to apply for the position, how to pass the interview, but they don't know how to work. and the second group knows how to work, but they are completely missing skills for how to apply for a position and how to pass all the interviews, so this is, I think, basically right now the kind of the skills how to pass an interview, how to get your CV reviewed It's like completely new skills that we all have to build, and this is transforming the industry a lot, I would say.

TIM: And if I think about the way hiring is done, I feel like the traditional process is not that closely correlated at all with predicting job performance, and as you say, like the act of sitting there and writing a CV, which for a data scientist is probably a little bit hard, like they're not a marketer than a salesperson; they probably don't design the perfect-looking CV to get past someone who's, for whatever reason, looking for that And then there's often a lot of, I find, quite gut-feel-based interviews that focus on finding the best candidate, and yeah, I can see how a lot of the process is biased towards certain types of people that aren't necessarily the best candidates at all, like there's all this research around the most extroverted, tall, handsome people are going to perform best in interviews. and I guess that's just being magnified right now, silence

VLADIMIR: understanding the industry, like everything was good, like the best team, feet, and so on and so forth, but then it's difficult to predict the

TIM: okay

VLADIMIR: Understand if you have some kind of feelings or some concerns; it's definitely something that's

TIM: Okay.

VLADIMIR: Ask for the contacts of the people who can reference this candidate who can answer this question, but still there is like no certainty; it's still guessing that candidates should be good or not, because again, as I said in the previous answer for the previous question, it was that people who mastered skills of passing interviews And yeah, definitely we have more challenges in terms of it right now.

TIM: And so you mentioned also just a skyrocketing number of applications, partly because of increased unemployment in the sector, lots of layoffs, as you mentioned, but is there something else behind the scenes as well? Is there some technology candidates are using to apply more than they were previously?

VLADIMIR: Actually, it's really a good question, and I've seen examples of the, let's say, scripts or tools that allow people to search for positions with certain keywords quickly and easily apply for those positions and also adjust their CV or cover letter based on the job description, which is, on the one hand, good for the candidates; they can apply for more positions, but being on the hiring manager's side, it's definitely More challenging, first of all, it's of course an increased number of applications, and all of them are good. Let's say it's matched with the job description and everything that you are looking for, but it raised the number of questions. how everything that is described in the person's CV actually matched with the real experience of this person or just matching exercise, like what's in my CV matching with Warsaw in the job description So it's adding more candidates to the pipeline and making the work of recruiters and hiring managers even worse.

TIM: Yeah, it's going to have to take a rethink from a lot of people in hiring because previously, the number of applicants looked like we drove a thousand applicants to apply for your role, which was a metric of them optimizing for probably, but now it's clear how much of a vanity metric that is if I don't know half the applications ChatGPT generated in some way. And then you can't really believe the CV because it's not a true representation of the candidate, and it's going to have to be a bit of a rethink in terms of what actually matters in the hiring process.

VLADIMIR: Yes, absolutely. It's a new challenge that we haven't seen before.

TIM: And I've seen a lot of statistics in the past talking about how I don't know, 70 percent of candidates lie on the CV at some level, so this has always been a problem, but I wonder now if the difference is that they can lie at scale because they get ChatGPT, let's say, to write the CV for them, lie or exaggerate, but also maybe as a person, if you now disassociate from that process, like you're not consciously writing a CV and knowing you're adding a lie to it, you're getting an LLM to make the perfect CV for a job. And so in a sense you've almost unburdened yourself like it's not a moral quandary anymore because it's not. I didn't write that. Do you get that sense so far from the candidates?

VLADIMIR: to me actually I have a little bit different perspective from that one because CV it's is the the only the first step to get let's say access to hiring manager and to recruiter but but then usually I have the structure set of questions that I always ask and basically my impression if I want to move forward with specific candidate it's based on the answer to those questions my impressions after interview CV it's good to have but finally I wouldn't make any decisions based on CV like on only decision to to okay let's let's have a a chat with this candidate but based on Again as I said before with this number of perfect applications number of perfect CVs the enter of the funnel right now is there are really a huge amount of people huge number of people

TIM: That's right. The way you frame it, then, actually, that's another vanity metric, like CV quality match score or whatever, that is meaningless if it's been bullshitted by TPT.

VLADIMIR: No, actually, actually, I think it's actually a really tricky question how we should filter the candidates in basically how we can prepare this shortlist of the candidates because, to me, on the one hand, yes, there is a chat GPT that allows you to perfectly match your CV with job description. But on the other hand, we do not really have clear algorithms on the ATS side, so basically, sometimes, like in being a candidate, I have no idea why it was automatically rejected, so yeah, those filters are not clear, and basically the answer to those filters is perfectly matching CVs. I don't know if it is good or bad. Maybe something should happen as an answer. To this ChatGPT application, something should be improved. On the ATS side, so maybe they shouldn't be, let's say, like from my perspective, there shouldn't be an automatic rejection of everybody, but there should be some score of how the person matches with my job description or maybe some extra information, and then I like, as a hiring manager or recruiter, we should decide if we want to have a conversation with candidates or not; it shouldn't be like, let's say, an automatic rejection; otherwise, it will be a never-ending fight between algorithms on one side and algorithms on the other side.

TIM: Yes, yes, exactly, and it's really interesting. From a lot of the companies I've spoken to recently, at least five or six have been creating their own tools internally to use either ChatGPT or Claude to do CV screening, so there's all this skunk works developing and businesses and a demand for that product. and inevitably if candidates are applying en masse and there's just too many CVS to deal with, that screening step has to be automated, and so I'm sure they will end up using a similar large language model to what the candidate has used to create the application in the first place, but to your point before around the kind of transparency and the feedback, at least if companies were now screening CVS with AI or any automated tool then gives you the opportunity to say, Here's how we got this score for this CV. We gave it a score of 70. Here's the reasons why it got 70 versus this other CV. In theory, that information could be shared with the candidate, which would be a drastic improvement on the current situation, which is a human reading a CV for six seconds, pressing reject, and, as you say, you've got no clue why you were rejected, and you're left frustrated in your job search.

VLADIMIR: Yes, I think it's you who mentioned really good points because I think the main complaints that candidates have about writing on LinkedIn or whatever side it is like the lack of feedback after rejection or personally I don't think feedback is the ultimate goal to like to receive feedback. It's the ultimate goal of every application, but because they might be situations in which you are not a good fit for a specific position, it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you, but if you get, I don't know, 10 pieces of feedback with the same kind of thing mentioned, it's probably something to think about and maybe to improve, like to change something in your CV. but anyway, like having this even automatically generated feedback and sending candidates not like the standard answer Hey, you're a great candidate, but we find someone who is like a better fit. I think it would be really helpful, and it would probably add a little bit of, let's say, more personalization to the hiring process. So you didn't get rejected with feedback that you don't like, an answer that doesn't make any sense. you get at least something so like we we Even like we read your CV, even like our LLM reads your CV, but this is the score; these are the points that are not in match with our expectations or something like that.

TIM: Yes, and I think that's a really good point that it's very easy to go, Oh, technology is dehumanizing, and that's really the problem. If anything, the opposite is true here, where the current process, which until, let's say, the last year has been 100 percent human-based and manual, is dreadful, where most people don't get feedback even after interviews. Now we have an opportunity to use technology, as you say, to make it more personalized because we can do it at scale. It's almost costless if you've already made the determination on the CV or the interview answers or whatever, and so I feel like if companies are open to it, they can do this. What I wonder is if they will be willing to do it, whether initially they'll be like, We'll keep the score logic to ourselves because we don't quite trust it. and we'll just keep telling the candidate no, but we won't explain why. I wonder if there'll be this initial period of hesitation or something like that.

VLADIMIR: Yes, I think besides investments and willingness to build those, let's say, scoring algorithms, there might be some legal issues or something like that. Yeah If you reject that person in, let's say, an automatic way, there might be some consequences depending on the country of application or something. I don't know, but it's a little bit of a scary thing, yes. for sure there are markets I know New York has automated employment decision tool rules where you are not allowed to use a tool automatically to make any hiring decision unless you've previously explained on your website in the hiring process exactly what it is and why it is and show like audit results to show that it's not biased against any subgroup of people, which is good. That's Responsible AI Yeah, hopefully once we get past that hurdle, then that hurdle, and then maybe the technology problem, I could see how an AI hallucinating could give a very bad bit of feedback to a candidate, but a company might be freaking out about a kind of brand reputation as well. Yes, yes, yeah, there should be some investments, and I think it's not all the companies that are ready to invest in this kind of new, completely new world, a completely new approach to hiring.

TIM: Speaking of the approach to hiring, what has your hiring process been to date? And then another question would be maybe like if you fast forward into maybe a year into the future, we imagine how AI is developing; how do you imagine your hiring process will be different in a year compared to, let's say, last year? okay, you

VLADIMIR: of the whole interview preparation, and basically I got

TIM: I get experience working with different recruiters, and now I know the difference. How can a professional recruiter support you with a job description? How is a great job description different than, let's say, a normal job description? It's not just tasks that you are going to perform; it's something else. Then, after the job description, of course, there should be an initial screening with the recruiters. Sometimes, depending on my availability, I'm also involved in this initial filtering or initial screening. Sometimes it's completely up to the recruiter to decide to run this first step, then interview with me with the hiring manager, then they usually interview with stakeholders and the team depending on the position, and finally they might be, for some positions, they might be interviewed with one of the C-level or like founders of the company.

VLADIMIR: Like it's pretty standard. It's worked so far, but I think the last challenge that we had, like last year, with 1500 candidates in our pipeline, like 1500 applicants, I think what definitely should be changed in the future is how to deal with this enormous number and how to change this initial screening process, especially in the cases when it's difficult to, let's say, explain to the recruiter what exactly you are looking for. Okay, it might be like if the responsibility of the person, like expected responsibility of the person, let's say pretty standard, we are talking about like data analyst or something like that, then you can mention skills and experience that you are looking for, but sometimes it's difficult to explain, like how to explain the difference between a data analyst and an analytics engineer. If a like person actually works on an analytics engineering task but heads, I don't know how to explain this to the recruiter or how to make this initial screening actually work. Yeah, this is something that we need to figure out.

TIM: Yeah, and I think you've just touched on at least what I view as one of the other big fundamental flaws with the way that hiring has been done until now, which is you would have a team of, let's call them hiring professionals, talent acquisition HR recruiters, who are hiring for jobs that they have no experience in themselves. and I feel like we're asking them to do something that's basically impossible. If I went to try to hire a lawyer, I would have no fucking clue what I'm doing. I look at a bunch of CVs of like a commercial lawyer, a barrister, and a conveyancing lawyer. I don't know the difference, and so for us to expect recruiters to know the subtle difference, as you mentioned, between a data analyst who's done some data or analytics engineering, an analytics engineer who does some data analysis, a data scientist, and a data engineer, like these things that almost look, crossover even for us; for them, it's what the hell is the difference, and so I hear a lot of feedback from hiring managers who would often have their talent team doing that initial CV screen, but then once they check in on it and see the CVs they've missed or the CVs they've passed through, there's like this kind of constant feedback loop to almost train the model to be more accurate, and surely an AI system could do a better job, I feel than that

VLADIMIR: Yes, because I think, yeah, I think it's a perfect example of training the model because everything that I can explain that there's a certain list of skills or tools that person used to meet the expectation, meet my expectation. but again, like if, like, a data engineer works with SQL and Python and a data analyst works with SQL in Python, and both of them Have strange job titles like, I don't know, kind of decision-making engineer, or like whatever, then in that case it's impossible for a recruiter to understand. There should be other indications that, okay, this person is more on the engineering side, and this person is more on the analytics side, but yeah, like, it's probably not the most efficient way to train the model. Mention everything, like giving recruiters all the examples. Probably it's not the kind of most efficient way, and another thing that probably also could be automated somehow with the help of AI is if you have If you have some open questions after reading the CV of the candidate, exactly like you, you don't understand, like if it's how technical the person is, maybe before scheduling a 30-minute interview, it's better to ask a couple of questions. Hey, this position is pretty technical. How comfortable are you working on development stuff? Maybe we can automate this process, and maybe AI can help us to ask the right questions before investing, like really expensive time of recruiters and hiring managers.

TIM: Yeah, what I'm absolutely seeing emerge now is we're talking about this explosion in applications partly driven by the macro factors and partly driven by probably AI driving the marginal cost of applying down to almost zero, and then what a lot of companies are saying to me as well, it seems as though Each candidate seems a bit less engaged than normal. If you were to get a CV and then reach back out for an interview, the drop-off rate at that point seems higher, which is surprising, but I think it's because now if the effort to apply is zero, you can apply to a hundred jobs. Your engagement in each job is now one 100th of what it used to be or something like that. So then there's going to have to be this secondary screening layer after the CV screen for sure because if all these CVs are made from AI, they've been automatically optimized for the job ad, and the candidates aren't that engaged, who's actually going to be turning up for that first interview, and what are their skills going to be? I feel like there's going to have to be some layer in between. What do you reckon?

VLADIMIR: Actually, I agree with you, but I think it's a really, really tough thing to implement because from the company side, of course, the more things you can automate, the more kind of filtering algorithms you have, the better your filtering algorithms work, the less investment in the hiring process you're going to do. But on the candidate side there is also

TIM: everyone

VLADIMIR: Time in like case study or whatever So they should be really, really careful in terms of what questions we are going to ask and how much time it's going to take to answer them, and probably another thing to think about in this step is how easy it would be to answer those questions using ChatGPT.

TIM: Yes, you reminded me actually of a great company in your market in Berlin, GetYourGuide, who we've worked with in the past, and what I was struck by from them is their approach to being really transparent with candidates upfront, so for a typical company you'd have, as you say, a job description that gives you a snapshot; the worst ones are like nothing more than a laundry list of tools and responsibilities; the best ones, like some of the ones that you were mentioning before, maybe a more insightful But it's still just a JD. What gets your guy but great at was upfront as a candidate you would get information about the share appreciation rights and how much they'd be worth, like a day in the life of this role. LinkedIn links to your colleagues would be what KPIs your team is optimized towards, what product you work on, and a lot of information upfront, which I then noticed that it de-risked it for candidates a lot because it basically covered off all the questions they would normally ask in that first interview, and then it gave them an incentive to go through whatever the first gate was. So I think if companies can find a way to be more efficient with just disseminating the information to candidates, then they should get, like, an improved kind of flow through the candidates.

VLADIMIR: Actually, I completely agree with you, and even more, I can say that I had an interview with GetYourGuide like a few years ago, and I was so impressed with how prepared the recruiter was. It was like the presentation with, Okay, this is the data team; this is the place of the data team in the tech organization. This is the place of tech organization in the whole company. This is your link to your profile for your potential future colleagues. This is the grade. This is the salary range, basically everything, so instead of wasting time Hey, can you give me any idea of what data the team is working on? They will already be prepared with all the kinds of slides that are needed, and being a candidate at that time, I was really impressed, and I think another great outcome from this, let's say, high-level overview that you are You clearly understand what this position you applied for is about. So you can even understand the, let's say, expected level of maturity from this person, okay? This position is, let's say, I don't know, the entry-level management grade, and there are, like, I don't know, 10 steps to direct a repeat position. You have an idea that this is position Is it something that you're looking for, or maybe it's something that doesn't completely fit your needs and your goals? Yeah, I think it's a great example, and I would really be happy seeing more examples of what your guides actually did and doing.

TIM: I agree completely, and a shout-out to Stephen Rose, a recruiter from GetYourGuide, at least back when I was dealing with them, who, yeah, did a great job in compiling that information and really putting it forward to the candidates. I suspect most companies don't do this for the simple fact that they're not that well prepared. It is a lot of work up front, like putting all that together to really think about who we're hiring, why, and what the team is like, preparing that almost like marketing documents. It is a lot of effort, but it's the sort of thing that surely must pay off pretty quickly because you'd be cutting out so many questions that candidates have. I I know this myself because after we saw how Get Your Guide did this, we basically tried to do the same with our hiring, and so we'd get candidates into the first interview, and they'd be like, We don't have any questions because you've already answered all of them upfront, and so it just saves a lot of time, and yeah, it helps motivate the candidate to continue through the process. I think

VLADIMIR: Yes, but you mentioned one important thing: the company should know what exactly they're looking for, and this is the question that sometimes has no answer, especially in the beginning of the hiring process, because sometimes requirements can evolve during the hiring process, like seeing different candidates and so on and so forth. Yeah, in the case of getting your guide, preparation for having this approach was enormous.

TIM: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, changing gears a little bit, if you think back to all the candidates that you've interviewed over the years for different roles, have you seen recurring patterns that would separate the successful candidates from the unsuccessful candidates? I'm

VLADIMIR: Yes, I think there are different things that differentiate successful candidates and unsuccessful candidates. To me, the first, I feel, is the most important one: to understand what you want as a candidate and to be able to describe It's in your CV, so basically the first thing that I want to see in a CV is the clear career path in the candidates' work history. So basically, if I see switching from one type of role to another type of role, like from a senior-level person to, let's say, a junior-level person, from a senior-level position to a junior-level position, actually I have questions about why it's happened. What's the reason for switching from, let's say, a software developer role to a product manager role and then back to, I don't know, a data analyst role? So it's okay to have it, let's say, for the first few years of a career, but then, like, they should be for me as a hiring manager; it shouldn't be the question of why a person switched from one role to another one after reading the CV if I see, like, the consistent consistent path consistent growth of the candidate I have basically no questions, and with the current markets, I think the people with this unclear career path in their CV have less, let's say, chances to get into the interview process than people with clear Clear growth and clear expected career path I think it's the second thing, like basically you have to be able to explain to describe your career path and to explain what your goals are during the interview. Candidates who don't understand what the perfect role should look like, what their responsibilities should look like, or what responsibilities they want to have in, let's say, five years why what I don't know what job title they want to have in five years and so on and so forth. Sometimes it's difficult; to me, it's maybe not like a red flag but still a reddish flag. Yeah, because, to me, it's the indication that potentially I'm going to have the kind of issues with this person in the future in terms of career growth, in terms of what I'm going to do, what should be the next role for me, and so on and so forth. My kind of personal feeling can be like my personal opinion that finally this career path and like growth is the responsibility of the person, not the manager. It can support, give, share the knowledge, give all the resources, and so on and so forth, give up opportunities to have a proxy practice gaining some certain skills, but it shouldn't be like, Okay, I want to grow, and what options you can offer definitely, and I think it's one of the biggest differentiators between successful candidates and successful people when you compare them with unsuccessful candidates.

TIM: And I would have thought thinking about it now that this must carry over to the rest of their life, like it's not just a problem in what job they want; maybe that's indicative of a lack of conscious, deliberate action of what they want to do, and it's just the job is just part of the overall problem if maybe

VLADIMIR: Yeah, I didn't check. I did; we didn't run experiments or any research on that one.

TIM: It's funny because the way I heard you describing it, it sounds very similar to a lot of people's complaints about dating, like going on a date and getting a very vague sense of what the other person's about and where they're going, and it's a similar kind of problem: you give off negative vibes about how focused you are in life.

VLADIMIR: Yeah, as I said, maybe it did this kind of behavior. It's probably okay if you are like in the early steps of your career; you need to explore what opportunities are there and so on and so forth, but then, like when I interview in like senior level, like I'm a person who was like, let's say, five, seven, eight years of experience. I assume this person should understand what exactly should be the next step. Is it like management's track? Is it like the expert track? If it's the expert track, what exactly should the area of interest be for this person? So on and so forth.

TIM: All right. What about hiring fails, like either yourself as a hiring manager or a team you've been in or a company you've been in? Have you ever seen a particularly bad hiring fail, and if so, what was it?

VLADIMIR: Interesting question. There are some examples when I failed as a hiring manager, and there are some examples when, from my perspective, the company failed when I was the candidate. If you talk about myself as a hiring manager, I think the biggest fail is It's when I assume that if a person is good in certain areas, like hiring for a data analyst, I see the person is a really good data analyst, like with every technical skill needed with business understanding with everything. In that case, it's easy to assume that a person is good at other areas that also could be important for the job. Like for data analysts, sometimes project management skills are needed if you work on long research, and you know that other teams are involved. I don't know, like third parties are involved; you need something like you are dependent on, I don't know, like a technical team, marketing team, or whatever team. In that case, those project management skills are crucial; otherwise, it's difficult to expect the results of the research to be successful, and it's kind of something that you usually don't check during the interview because, like, you're hiring data analysts, so why should I check project management skills? but sometimes it's like really necessary, and you really should think about how I felt a couple of times with those kind of not really must-have skills but really nice-to-have skills, which finally ended up with not really pleasant experiences working with those candidates. and from there, let's say being candidates, the kind of the worst experience that I had was when companies, how to say, basically there are two patterns that companies with really cumbersome hiring processes follow, so basically sometimes there are companies that think that Let's say they're Google or like they're Netflix, and they built all the hiring process assuming that a candidate should have the same level of excitement being interviewed by a small startup; it's like excitement should be like being interviewed by Google. I'm not saying that Google is much better than small startups or that small startups are much better than Google. It depends on the preference of the candidates, but there still should be Sometimes a company is missing this, let's say, selling process, so they should sometimes it's worse to sell your position and explain why it's your position that is really great and brings tons of opportunities to the table. and another pattern that may be similar to this one is okay. The candidate applied for our position. Let's ask him or her to pass a few hours of tests or a case study or something else as the first step of the interview process. So candidates have no idea. The candidate has no idea about the position, the expectations, the challenges, and so on and so forth. So basically nothing besides a job description, but there is the company asking for investment in multiple hours and, let's say, psychological tests, which could be good. Let's say it's a good addition to the candidate profile, but definitely it shouldn't be the first step of the interview, and actually I think those companies are missing a lot of perfect candidates because, yeah, why should they invest time?

TIM: Yeah, exactly. I think it speaks back again to the transparency, perhaps, of those companies that packaged together all that information and gave it to candidates immediately and had already front-loaded the process so much that it answered all the questions. Maybe the candidate would do a five-hour take-home I think it's still a bit much as a first step, but I feel like some of this is within the company's hands to improve those conversion rates.

VLADIMIR: Exactly, especially when we talk about you. Not, let's say, a junior-level position with a junior-level position, of course, like with any ideas on how to filter out all the candidates who are not really wanting to work for your company or not really excited, I think it makes sense. But if you talk about, let's say, a senior-level position, there are not so many candidates, not so many perfect candidates, and in that case, it's again not only candidates wanting to sell themselves to the company but also companies should be able to sell the position in the company.

TIM: Yeah, do you have any particularly memorable experiences as a candidate trying to get a job, either very good or very bad? I guess you already touched on your experience with Get Your Guide and having a positive one. Do any others spring to mind?

VLADIMIR: Actually, I think the most memorable interview processes for me were when I had this opportunity to talk to, let's say, founders or people who really build the culture of the company, so usually it's founders. because at that point you can clearly understand what to expect in terms of the perspective of the founders, which is sometimes a little bit different than the perspective, like opinion, of the stakeholders or team members or source or something like that. So yeah, when you talk to founders, there are some really new perspectives from work. For example, in my current company, when I had an interview with one of the co-founders, he told me that, okay, what's the reason to work for a health tech company? What is the most exciting thing besides you are like solving really important health-related problems? so the people and make their life better One of the kind of really not so obvious things is that you don't need to build the market; you don't need to build demand because demand is there, so this is something that you probably don't hear from your stakeholders or like engineers. yeah so it's like a really really shows what founders of the company are looking for what are the perspective what are the plans so yeah really really great experience having and through you as founders

TIM: Give me tips for how companies could make hiring a bit more objective and a bit fairer, okay?

VLADIMIR: Mentioned is the feedback. it's also should should be Should be really helpful, and maybe the last thing is that it's like being really conscious when you think about job descriptions, so because a traditional approach, when you say you will be working on reports for that, you need to have experience with Tableau or like Power BI or like whatever BI tool I think it doesn't add any kind of additional information or any clue to the candidates about the position and the work itself. It's just, I don't know, the set of, let's say, tools and responsibilities, but it doesn't answer the question of why you should work for this company. It doesn't answer the question. Why are my opportunities in this company What's what? What's how can I grow with this company? What can I achieve with this company? It's actually, I think, one of the most important and one of the most beneficial things that many companies are missing. many hiring managers are missing

TIM: That ability to sell and explain the role in enough detail that's going

VLADIMIR: It's not only about selling; it's also about setting expectations, so maybe if you, if I, don't know, like data analysts, let's pick the example of data analysts. Maybe sometimes people want to have, let's say, a nine-to-five job and, like, build tons of reports. and this is exactly the work that they are looking for, but there might be people who think that reports are just a tool. I want to work on, let's say, really complex business problems with—I want to be able to measure business outcomes. It should be every time; it should be research. I like it. I want to feel like I'm a real scientist, and if you are for both positions, you can describe it. Okay, you need to have Python, SQL, and BI tool skills, and it doesn't say anything extra, and in that case, basically both candidates who want to just develop reports and want to work on interesting research, both of them will apply. and then it's up to you, and like you, it's now your kind of problem to figure out what exactly the person is looking for. Yeah, I think, like being conscious with job descriptions, it's given you an opportunity to find the

TIM: Do you have a hiring hero? Anyone that you felt like you've learned a lot about hiring from silence?

VLADIMIR: There were many people who showed different examples of how to build a really good hiring process, and I'm talking not only about the—let's see, my colleagues recruiters or hiring managers I'm also talking about

TIM: Silence

VLADIMIR: The thing that I mentioned a couple of times is the job description. It's not my idea that job descriptions should be perfect. There was a person, there was a recruiter in our current company who basically gave me this perspective: here's your job description, here's my job description. I just rephrased a couple of things. What do you think about the difference? and what is most attractive, and to me it was like an eye opener that this is actually how job descriptions should look like. I'm like, if I were a candidate, I would immediately apply to my position after this change, changing the warning and description, and another thing also being like working with many great people. I also understood that, and actually I have the same right now. I have the same opinion about the hiring process for the hiring manager. It's not something that you can do as a, let's say, side hustle or something like that; it's almost a full-time job, so if you want to hire the best candidates, be ready to, like, really invest your time and focus in it. Otherwise, I think there is an opinion that it's okay. There are recruiters, and they have to find the best candidates for me, but finally, you're the hiring manager, and the best profile of the perfect candidate should look like it's impossible to delegate all the kinds of responsibilities to recruiters or, like, to the team or even to the recruitment agency. They must be investments from your side.