Episode 97

Debopam Ghosh on Hiring Beyond Resumes And Cultivating Culture, Metrics, & Human Connection in Modern Teams

TIM: We're live on the Objective Hiring Show with Debopam. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

DEBOPAM: Thank you so much, Tim. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

TIM: Oh, it's absolutely our pleasure. It's great to see you, your handsome face, and your beautiful background. It's a great start to my evening. And for those listeners and viewers, it'd be great to get a bit of a background about yourself. Who are we speaking to today? Just so we can contextualize the conversation.

DEBOPAM: Absolutely. So yeah. Hi again. My name is Debopam. I have a background primarily in data science and analytics, consulting strategy, and engineering delivery management. I started my career as a data scientist, and over the years I've worked with a few medium- and large-sized cross-vertical organizations. managing and building up analytics and machine learning practices in Asia, Australia, and lately Europe. In my current role, I am a senior director, and I lead the data and analytics organization at Travix International, which is one of Trip.com’s online travel agencies. Operating from Amsterdam. That's me.

TIM: Perfectly beautiful and succinct summary there. Where I'd love to start our conversation today is with a topic that I think is a tricky one. And that is how do we define hiring success? Are there any particular metrics we should be looking at when we're thinking about evaluating how our hiring is going? Is it going well? Is it going poorly? Are there any metrics that you think about when you're going to hire?

DEBOPAM: That's a good one. I would say that hiring success, we look at it at two different times. One is how the hiring itself is going. What does your candidate pipeline look like? How many people are, let's say, applying for a position? And how many of them are actually being passed on to the interview stages? That's one dimension that I generally look at. The other, of course, is post-hiring, how the candidate is performing. Let's say you hire 100 candidates a year; how many of them pass their probation phase and are inducted formally into the organization and into your team? That also tells a lot about the quality of hiring that you're doing.

TIM: Yeah, I feel like one of the challenges with hiring is that the main success metrics, for example, the second one you mentioned, which is ultimately, did you hire the right person? It just takes quite a long time to really know that for sure. So yeah, you could have that past probation or not data point after six months or 12 months, depending on your country. If someone stays in the same job for five years, is that success, or is that a situation where you might've expected more growth from them if they'd, I don't know, left your role after 18 months to go get a promotion in another company? Is that success or failure? I feel like. the lack of like super clear, almost like gold standard success metric, maybe makes it hard to optimize and automate things in hiring. Do you see it that way?

DEBOPAM: Yeah, of course. If you zoom out a little and, let's say, look into the philosophy of team building or hiring or introducing external parties. When I say external parties, let's say new candidates. who don't just bring in new skills into the team, but also a definitive culture, which could be very unique to them, into the team. It does; it changes the dynamics of your team. It depends on what kind of. values and culture your team already has and what kind of leadership principles your organization runs with. And over a longer period of time, these things also evolve, right? When, generally speaking, you hire for a specific purpose, right? So basically you're, let's say you're hiring a machine learning engineer. You have identified a need for a machine learning engineer in your team. It could be either to extend the capacity of your team or you're trying to add a new skill set in itself to the team, right? That basically changes how you look at the future of that team itself. With the increase in maturity, I think a lot of things evolve along with the circumstances. And, look, to be honest with you, how long does a candidate stay with you? It does not only depend on what the candidate brings to the table; it also depends on what you are offering to them as a team, as an organization. When you're looking at longer time spans, let's say, a year, two years, or five years, all of these things also take up. A lot of priorities, or it has a lot of impact on that.

TIM: Yeah, for sure. And thinking about it now, as you described that kind of time horizon, geez, there's so many other factors, which you know, if you're building like a regression model to predict success on the job, there will be a lot of factors that are pretty much out of your control. What's happening in the macroeconomy, what's happening in the company, and technology change. So many things that you just can't really touch. For example, in Australia, during COVID, we had a lockdown. where we couldn't get any skilled migration at all. And in the tech sector, we rely heavily on skilled migrants. So overnight, pretty much, software engineering salaries went up like 40%. So if you weren't really carefully matching your current salaries to the market rates, your engineers just left because they could get such a massive pay increase very easily. It'd be so easy to look back on the data and say this person left, or they only lasted this long without knowing all these other factors that must. Yeah, create a big error in any kind of model to predict hiring success, I would have thought.

DEBOPAM: Yes, indeed. Indeed. I think you're right. And look, these are heuristics that will come into the market once every few years. The robustness of your hiring strategy, the stability of your team, and your company. I think, although these are testing situations, right? But these should not define how to hire. Of course, you should evolve and adapt to what is coming towards you. The cards that you dealt with, but but yeah, it, I think these These wider topics depend on very many things. You might also argue that even during this topsy-turvy time of the pandemic, there were many engineers, analysts, and data scientists who also stuck with the employment that they. previously had, it also depends on what kind of value the person sees in what they're doing or what their organization is contributing to. So yes, indeed, I agree with your principles and your hiring policies. what you offer to a candidate when you're hiring them. It sometimes is dependent on market situations, the kind of salaries that are being offered, and several other things, right? With technology changing so quickly, that is also something that you need to account for. So it's obviously not just salaries that keep people going, right? What kind of tech stack are you working on, and what kind of. business and technology problems are you trying to solve? These are, I'm sure, things that equally impact how, what is the longevity or the shelf life of your teammates.

TIM: You mentioned in passing there a few times the culture of the place and making sure that people are going to be able to add to that and thrive in that. It struck me, actually, a few times going to certain offices of companies, especially the sort of high-growth tech kind of vibe, is that sometimes, to be honest, they feel almost like cults. Like, you go there, and there's very consistent branding, and they're all bought into this message with the amazing CEO leader, who is very charismatic but elusive. And it just, it feels like everyone's got a certain. way of talking or being, which you could say is like a cultural fit, or you could say it's you're getting closer to a cult. Have you experienced or seen that kind of thing yourself?

DEBOPAM: Yes. And let me put it this way. Yeah. The driving principles or values, or a combination of which we say we have come to know as company culture. It's like a language, yeah? At the end of it, that's what is the crux of it. I can give you some examples like Amazon, yeah? I've had friends who have worked with Amazon for a very long time. And they have a certain leadership principle. And these leadership principles are not just put across their offices and stuff, but this is indeed something that I've seen them live by. They talk about it during growth reviews. They talk about it when they have bottleneck situations, even in brainstorming sessions, and so on. That talks about how a strong company culture and values actually lets you also resolve conflicts and solve problems sometimes. So yeah, and there are several ways in which your management decides to inculcate this into your workforce, right? So it could be, it could be completely, something that is completely online. what you show your customers, and then you imbibe that into your workforce, or it could be something more visual and something that you can interact with, like posters and fun stuff in the office, which is also something that you see. Of course, there needs to be a balance in how you're dealing with these things, because many times, it's very much possible that you're dealing with a situation where if you are trying to follow one principle, you're maybe conflicting with another, but how you prioritize these things and what ultimately brings the most value to your customer and also to your workforce. That is something that I think every company tries to drive.

TIM: Yeah, and I can see why and the value of it. Because if you had a collective set of people who are almost irrationally excited and enthused about a particular mission, they're going to do amazing work in a way that they wouldn't if it's just a job. I'm going to create a dashboard. I'm going to write a bit of SQL. I'm going to, but if there's some kind of greater good-created goal, which I'm sure smarter people than me would realize, that any human group needs that kind of common goal, then they're going to do great work. I wonder also if maybe. If I can draw this analogy, it is not too controversial, becoming a little bit less nationalistic, a little bit less about the country. So now they made the core unit maybe more the company that you work for. And that's who you're holding on to in the same way you might hold on to, like, your football team. And that's your favorite thing. Is it a similar kind of feeling?

DEBOPAM: Yes, of course. To address the first point that you made, this has a pyramidal structure where, you know, everyone knows what the North Star is and what they're chasing. And I think this is what I was trying to imply when I said language, because as you scale, let's say you're working with a startup where you have 15 people. And all of you are working on the same mission; you know exactly what the priorities are, and you're trying to solve those problems that you're solving one by one based on what the priorities are. And it's very easy to do when you are 15 people compared to when you're 1500 and compared to when you're 15,000. The farther you are from decisions being made, the more important company culture and values become so that there is proper translation of what the company wants to do. Comes to you so that you are able to better, yeah, better manage what the expectations are from you and what you should be expecting from the organization as well. So definitely, I think that's something that can be facilitated quite well through having a very strong culture and value. Indeed.

TIM: Sounds almost like the glue of the company holding it together, the kind of foundations, those. Guiding principles are almost that you can fall back on, as you say; even when it comes down to decisions, you don't know which way to go, so go with the core values of the company. And I guess no one can really complain.

DEBOPAM: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I also think, yeah, your analogy of this being a glue is very true. And I think these things also, like most other things, evolve. Very recently the organization that I'm with right now, Travix, we changed our leadership principles primarily because we thought that our old principles were not serving our current goals or objectives as strongly as we would want them to. So we pivoted. We did not totally give away or close the book on our previous, let's say, leadership pillars or leadership principles. But we evolved them, or we changed them more accurately. fit what we are trying to do. And we felt that it was necessary to do so, primarily because we felt that these are, it's the glue that keeps the company together, and more importantly, it's the glue that. That basically helps everyone bind their combined efforts towards a unified goal.

TIM: Out of interest. Would you be able to share one of the principles that got adjusted and why that particular one was changed or evolved?

DEBOPAM: Sure. Yes. One of the things that we changed was that we used to have a principle that was worded as an inclusive family. But we changed from that to a diverse and inclusive team. I think it wasn't done to move away from the fact that we are a very closely knit group of people. But as we started branching out, having offshore teams that are working over different timelines. I think it was important to. Have that spirit going in a very, very definitive way. And there, there were also, there were all, I could also quote examples where we actually wanted to challenge each other. And we felt that, having family there, it makes things a bit more complacent. If so, we wanted this to come out very well. That we are not always, we don't shy away from challenging each other. And you do that more in, as a team than as a family. So we want that flavor to come out well. And that's what we did.

TIM: Yeah, I like that rewording. I guess some people listening to this, their family. At Christmas time might be particularly brutal, and they're thinking, No, it's fine. We're very honest with each other. We should keep the family analogy, but yeah. I completely get it. And at a, yeah, at a certain size of company, I think it's. It would feel to me slightly disingenuous to refer to it as a family because it really isn't at that kind of scale. Maybe when you're five, 10, or 20, you've got that family-like vibe, but at the kind of thousand-person mark, I guess that's, it's not really the case anymore.

DEBOPAM: Yeah.

TIM: What we're discussing at the moment is interesting because we've spoken about some of those hiring success metrics that are quite measurable, particularly in that the pipeline you're describing is also the success. Did they pass probation? Did they not? You know what their overall score was? Those kinds of things you can imagine. And then we're talking about a bucket of things that maybe aren't that measurable culture. Some of these principles. When you go higher, how do you think about using data versus using more intuition and gut feel? Where are you on that spectrum? What do you think about this?

DEBOPAM: Let me put it this way. Your gut feeling is also data-driven. That's the best thing about being human beings. I suppose that we're all, we all have biases. Yeah. How much do we disagree with ourselves? We all have biases. The question is, how much do you let this bias influence your judgments, your decisions? Yeah. If you are doing something with a gut feeling, it's generally because you have made observations in the past. And you are just trying to align that with. Align the new situation with the trend that is already in your head. So that also, in a way, is data-driven. But when it comes to practice, you want there to be tools and technologies available now that let you matrix these things very well. You would want to be as data-driven as possible. But then again, every candidate is different, and how you gauge them and what comes across very well during an interview. And to be honest, look, an interview is also a very, it's a very short period of interaction that you have with the candidates, right? What you are deciding to get out of an interview drives many things. So if, let's talk about a situation where you have been trying to hire a very high person for a very niche role for a very long time. As the hiring manager, you might be getting impatient, and what do you do about it? Once you see certain skills in the resume, you're immediately attracted to that candidate, and you definitely want to have a conversation with them, and in the back of your head, you do want them to succeed because you don't know when you will get another candidate who has worked on those technologies that seem to fit your needs. Yeah, you know your needs very well, and then you have to basically take a decision on what the things are, what the trade-offs are that you're ready to make. Yeah. You're looking for someone who has 10 years of experience in developing a very particular component of your cloud strategy. You're not getting someone like that. You have someone who has, let's say, lesser experience in doing that but a wider, more generalist skill set. that you will be able to leverage on other projects. It totally depends on what you're trying to achieve there. And sometimes you feel like relying on your gut feeling would be the easier thing to do. But, and that's also the reason why you have a hiring committee. And hiring responsibility is not just on the hiring manager, and this is coming back to one of the things that we were discussing before, the inclusivity and diversity of your candidate pool, right? It is as important as the diversity of your hiring committee. So you're basically inherently that way. filtering out bias to an extent, and you also know you're more confident that this is an all-inclined decision or whether, let's say, a representative of the design team or a product engineer, sorry, a product owner, sees things differently. So you always have that perspective coming in, which is also very valuable.

TIM: For the hiring panel scenario, where, or at least let's say, several different interviewers across several different stages, and you, as you say, almost average out the biases, or they, the outlier biases, almost cancel themselves out a little bit 'cause you get this diverse set of opinions. I guess in a way, the way I was thinking about it is each interviewer's value is the same. Or another way of putting that is I don't know if I asked my mum to interview a data analyst; she would give me a different perspective. I guess she'd give me some insight that I don't have, because she's not an analyst and she's an elderly lady, but I don't feel like she would be ultimately a better judge of who a good data analyst is than me. So is there sometimes something to be said for making sure you've got the right interviewers in there who are actually adding value?

DEBOPAM: Absolutely. All of these things are highly driven by context. Let's say I am hiring for a senior business analyst, a senior data analyst. Ideally, the interview panel for this specific role needs to be people who this person will or this role will interact with regularly. So basically, they're asking the questions that are relevant for this role and for the success of this candidate and for the combined success of the team. So context in this case is very important. Unless you want to have a wider, more open discussion, especially like rounds of cultural fit, where a senior leader in the company is interviewing someone, where they are exclusively looking for cultural fit and intention, the whole intent of this person not being from the domain that the candidate is going to report into or work with is so that there is a wide-open perspective of how this person not only fits into the context but also the general context of the organization, but other than that, I think even the hiring manager or anyone in the recruitment team would want or would desire a higher context and higher empathy in these interviews.

TIM: You mentioned earlier part of the challenge with interviewing and hiring being that even a lengthy hiring process that might be, I don't know, four or five interviews is still only four or five times an hour. It's not even one full working day. So I feel like that's one of the fundamental challenges with hiring; it's like a small sample size issue. Even if we gave them a few different tests and five interviews, it's still almost nothing. Compared to just working with them for a week or two. Have you, without of course naming any names, ever hired someone in the past where you hired them with such high hopes, and then, almost like on day one or week one, you're like, oh my god, what have I done?

DEBOPAM: Not in a day, not in a week, no. Over a longer period of time, I've had some experience of questioning myself or questioning the team's decision to go ahead with someone. But more often than not, these are behavioral issues. These are issues that have to do with traits that are not trainable. Yeah. When you, generally speaking, are hiring for a role, 70 percent of your questions are possibly directed towards the technical fitment or the business fitment of the person that you're trying to hire. And the rest of it is basically to understand what their cultural fitment is, what kind of a person they are, and if it is easy to work with them. Is it difficult to work with them? What kind of soft skills do they bring to the table? Are they, or can they, consult with the business, or are they like heavily tech and would like to be given a sheet of to-dos and they would deliver? I think that part is easier to determine, I think, especially in technology. But I suppose obviously once you start. Interacting more with the person once you start working with them on a day-to-day basis, then you get exposed to the wider personality of that person or that candidate. And then obviously, not everyone you have gone to school with is your best friend, so it's a bit like that. Of course, you want everyone to ideally, your entire team should gel well. You, your engagements with your stakeholders should be impeccable, but then, yeah, we all know that delivery is delivery. You need to be very objective about how these things work, how you set up expectations accordingly, and then you manage those expectations well. From time to time, you do, unfortunately, end up with teammates where there is, let's say, a massive conflict of fitment, and unfortunately, that's the reality, and you have to deal with it in the best possible professional way when you, yeah, when you come across such situations.

TIM: I'd say I've spent almost all of the last six years really thinking very seriously about hiring accuracy and the best way to predict who the best hire is going to be and almost like obsessing over measurement as much as possible. And then I hear anecdotes from football managers of football teams who've just spent like a hundred million pounds on a player. They've done all the research on everything this person has ever done for the last 10 years. They've measured everything they have. know, a billion times the amount of data we could ever possibly get about a candidate. And they get them in on training session number one, and they're like, He's crap; he's got to go. So that always gives me a little bit of solace that, like, if they can get it wrong at that level of investment with that level of data, then we can't expect to have anywhere near a hundred percent hiring accuracy rate. And I certainly don't have anywhere near that in my life. What's your rate? If you were to try to think back to all the people you've hired and, just intuitively in your head, like, I'd hire them again, or I wouldn't. What, where's your metric sitting? Like, I've heard 70 percent is pretty good. Is yours anywhere near that?

DEBOPAM: Yeah. Look, when you're starting a new engagement with someone, and of course, this goes both ways. Yeah. So when you're starting to engage with a new employee or a new teammate starts to engage with their team, I think both sides assume best intentions. Let's consider that they are. well off with their technical skill sets, and that is not something that is in question here. Then, of course, the rest of it is behavioral, and look, indeed, you aren't able to tell thoroughly through the hiring process if this person is going to be loved by all or if this person is going to have some kind of conflicts, small or big, with pretty much everyone around them. These are personality traits; these are quirks that you find a balance to live with. Of course, it also depends a bit on yourself. What kind of leadership role do you play? Are you able to coach them and bring them to the same level or at the same foundations with the rest of the team? Are you able to understand what they see as blockers, and are you able to help them remove those blockers to smooth out engagement processes? That's one thing, of course; you also need to look down your own collar and try to engage if there isn't anything that you or the team can do to make someone. Or is everyone in the team more accommodating, more relaxed, or more chilled out? In my experience, yeah. When I started my career, AI was essentially mostly on prod. We were not talking about these things or being able to leverage these things for hiring at the same frequency as we do today. So we obviously leaned more towards the more traditional way of hiring people. And yeah, I've worked with big teams before, and I haven't really experienced. Yeah. Three out of 10 people Not three out of 10 people having behavioral issues is a high number, actually. To be honest with you, you wouldn't expect that amount of conflict within the team, at least if the person that is in question here is comfortable. You're aware that everything around them is going well. They're happy with what they're doing. You're, as an organization, being able to offer them what you promised. I think it's something that you can deal with. To add to this would be some quirks that I can specifically talk about because I manage tech teams. There are obviously certain kinds of personalities that tech people are that, let's say, a marketing or copyright person wouldn't be. So there's that. I think what has helped maybe a bit with the pandemic is that I think the world has gone full work-from-home mode. Remote working has become way more regular than it was before. Interactions now happen in a certain specific way. So let's say you have an introvert in your team; that person is only viewing them when you're in a meeting with them. So they don't feel drained throughout the day having to have conversations that possibly they don't want to have. Some people like to do small talk; some people don't. That I think. Has, in a way, been eased by the remote work culture that is all the rage these days. But of course I am just one person. There are many organizations that are bringing people back to five days a week in the office. They definitely have different data. They definitely feel that tech teams work better when they are sitting together at the same table. These are all perspectives; something might work better for a company as compared to another, so yeah.

TIM: Yeah. I remember casting my mind back now to when the pandemic started. And it was like, Oh, we're going to have to work at home by ourselves on our computer without being interrupted. I'm like, yeah, I could probably do that for a while. I'm not complaining. Every introvert thought that was a pretty good idea. And every extrovert was like, Oh, after about a week pulling their hair out, just let me speak to someone. After a while, I have to say, even as an introvert, it does get a little bit boring. And I'd like to break it up a bit, but yeah, it's amazing how it's like, yeah. Big changes like that have sudden impacts on different segments, both positively and negatively, including in hiring as well. Actually, I would have thought as an introvert, it's probably easier to do a one-on-one online call than go into an office and shake three people's hands and deal with the secretary and everything. Like, it's just a lot less intimidating, I would have thought. I don't know; would you classify yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

DEBOPAM: My colors are red and blue. So I don't think I'm an introvert in any way, but I mean Look, these things I wouldn't; it's probably not the best idea to label people as extroverts and introverts. Many people might not like that, but yeah, when you speak with someone, you know what makes them comfortable and what doesn't. You spend some time with some people, and you immediately are able to figure out what they like and what they don't. With the data that I have for most of my tech teams in my current role and in previous ones, because these span together. over the pandemic. I have seen effectiveness, and effectiveness is pretty wide, but I think throughput of my teams has increased, which tells me, obviously, that maybe the time that they were not spending or they were spending somewhere else is probably a bit more focused with this. I think techies understand what their managers and their organizations expect of them pretty well. And they basically make efforts to deliver in a way that does not interfere or is independent of them being present somewhere or not. That has been my personal experience. I generally have said that I genuinely feel that social touch is very important. The people who you work with, they should know each other. They should. understand each other, and they should have empathy towards what the person who they are working with is going through also, in their individual lives. And if you're interacting with your teammates only, yeah, I don't know, twice a week or only during stand-ups. That's just not enough. I think most companies encourage people to meet outside of work context. There are so many team-building activities offline and online that companies are now doing to basically increase empathy and increase understanding of each other. And this is also, I would say, an evolution in the way workforces across the world operate, right? I'm sure back in the sixties. You didn't do as much of this then as you do now. So as something important, it has been identified, and people are taking steps towards it. But yeah, that has been my observation so far.

TIM: Probably especially important nowadays if there's, yeah, the remote working, but then a lot of communication in text, which straight away you lose all the kind of visual cues you'd pick up if you're speaking to someone in real life. I don't know about you, but I feel like it's so easy to infer. The worst and the negative when you're reading something in an email or Slack message versus face-to-face, like it's just, maybe this is my personality, but I always detect, like, a little bit of negativity or sarcasm in the tone, just because we can't speak to each other. So I feel like, yeah, adjusting for that with some face-to-face catch-ups is a no-brainer. The other one I think is maybe important is that if the average person's tenure in a company is so much shorter. It's not like you're a lifer and everyone's a lifer for 30 years. And even if you didn't have a lot of out-of-work team-building activities, it doesn't matter because you see them every single day in the same kitchen in the one office. So with that different dynamic here, it's probably especially important to try to build up those engagement pieces. Do you go into an office as well yourself, or are you working fully remotely?

DEBOPAM: We are hybrid. We go to the office twice a week. But, yeah, it's optional, so you choose; you decide whether you come to the office or not, and we have, so we also offer fully remote roles as well. I think less than 10 percent of my current team is fully remote, and the rest of us are working from Amsterdam. We like to see each other twice a week. It's. It's winter in Amsterdam right now, not the best time to commute, but yeah, we do make efforts to see each other once in a while.

TIM: It makes a world of difference, even just, I don't know, even a few times a year, as you get a lot out of those few times you see someone in the flesh. And I'd say this having run a fully remote company for six years: just even a little bit of real face time just adds a lot of Wantham connection. I think it's so hard to replicate that over a two-dimensional digital experience, like there must be something happening in our brains. where we know that this isn't completely real. You know what I mean?

DEBOPAM: I agree, Tim. I agree. And I don't think we should. I don't think an online meeting can fully compensate for a meet and greet, a proper handshake at the office. Thanks. Bye. Those are also not meant to do, right? I think For us, we still run most of our critical meetings in the office. Most of the leadership meetings in most of the companies still happen in person, and we highly encourage that. Not just for empathy or not just to understand. How things are going on with each other, but also to achieve velocity in some cases, it's always easier to walk up to one of your colleagues and ask them what's going on instead of you having to put something in their calendar. And then scheduling a meeting, setting up a time specifically to discuss something with them, which could have been a coffee together. So that's obviously, I think, we need to be very, very careful and very cautious about these things. Also, the content of your discussion, I think the more sensitive issues should be. Discussed face to face. I think it's just more human to do so, I suppose.

TIM: Do you feel like AI is going to be taking over everything now in terms of hiring in the next couple of years? Or are some of those things we were talking about at the start of the call fundamentally so human that AI can never really understand them?

DEBOPAM: To be honest, it's hard to say how we are going to, how we as humans are going to leverage AI 50 years from now. It, the capabilities, are evolving. AI today for most use cases is seen as an assistant. So basically they're supposed to assist you or help you or make your life easier. So we should be we should be trying to answer the question, how can I use AI or forms of AI to do what I am doing at a higher quality quicker and in a more robust way. As long as, yeah, as long as we are constantly trying to discover that or make steps to see how that is going to be possible. I think we are good. Is AI going to take over? They haven't yet passed the Turing test, so I don't think that is going to happen in time soon. But yes, are we going to use AI in a more integrated fashion? I definitely think so, and I definitely hope so. AI in hiring, I believe We're not, maybe we're talking about a generative AI and AI together right now, but yes, anything that makes your life easy, you should be doing that. I say this to my hiring team, and I also advise the same to the candidates who are looking for a job; they should try and leverage the technologies that they have at their disposal too. Yes, does that make interactions easier? I don't think, as long as there isn't any impact on the quality of the outcome, I would highly encourage people to use AI. Especially in the field of hiring, especially if you're a big company, and for a role you get, let's say, 300 candidates, it's going to terribly slow you down if you're not using at least basic tools like finding out certain keywords and stuff like that. That way, you can already do the first or second. Maybe the first two rounds of screening very quickly. So yeah, it's definitely a helpful tool. Is it foolproof? No. Was the orthodox way of doing it foolproof? No. Are we—is it going to help you do things quicker? Definitely. So I think yes. But then you also need to be careful about the ethics around it as a con, as someone who's presenting. Content generated by AI to someone else, especially to a potential employer, they should be very careful about, what they're putting in especially in the context of a resume, right? A resume talks about the width of your experience, and an interview talks about specific depths in that experience, right? It all depends on what you're trying to achieve from this interview goal. Obviously I know every interview, the goal of any candidate in an interview is to basically get hired or be made an offer, but you constantly need to also keep asking yourself, and this is across context, that. Is this the right role for me? Is this where I will flourish? Is this where I would make enough contributions to prove to my hiring manager that I am adding value? Is the company going to give me back what I am expecting from it? Yeah, if AI helps to make your life easier in determining or answering any of these questions? Absolutely. You should use it.

TIM: I'll be personally very interested to see where things go in the next couple of years. I was skeptical, and I feel like in the last maybe four or five months, I have become very, very optimistic that AI could solve a lot of the kind of structural systemic problems in hiring. And I expect we'll see like a new wave of AI-based. HR SAS products rather than existing ones that got a bit of an AI sprinkle but are fundamentally AI-driven. And once they start hitting the market, I'll be keen to see what hiring is like. I mentioned it's going to involve a lot of AI, a lot of robots, and a lot of kind of weird interviews at first. After a while, it just becomes normal that you'll be speaking to an avatar or some kind of deepfake of the real hiring manager. I don't know if that's a future utopia or dystopia. We shall see.

DEBOPAM: Yeah, look, these things are generally need-driven, right? It depends on the use case, why you want to use what you want to use AI for, and why you want to use it. AI as a term is also used very loosely. AI, or artificial intelligence, has been in practice for a very long time. The concept that is new is generative artificial intelligence, where you are creating synthetic data. When it comes to hiring, I think data scientists have been working with hiring managers, hiring teams, especially recruitment teams, and recruitment boards for the better part of 10 years now. I suppose they help them create automations around candidates screening, what kind of questions need to be asked. And those kinds of things, there has been a lot of work done around this. There are companies that offer this as a product, and certain things that you are asking a machine to do you want to govern, right? For example, it is. My model is ethically unbiased. It is my model for checking off all the items in the list that I want them to specifically do, especially when it comes to regulations. Am I screening out any kind of quality measurement as well? Am I screening or screening out good candidates? Is that something that is happening? These kinds of things have happened much more in the past. I think. Today AI is there. There is this generative AI wrapper on machine learning that you see more often, things like, Yeah, a deepfake of your hiring manager interviewing you and stuff like that, which I think I don't think is still, I don't think your hiring manager should be so busy that he is not interviewing you directly. Then it's, I think it's a different problem to solve and not essentially the quality or the empathy metric that you want to gauge during an interview. Yeah, it's definitely plausible that such a condition arises in 10 years, and then we'll see how that is being done. Maybe then you won't even need a deepfake. You can just answer questions by writing them. It can just be a chat interview. Even easier, yeah? Especially for people who don't like to have long interactions. It might just be easier that way.

TIM: It may be, and it may be 10 years. It may be two, maybe a hundred. We shall see. It's been a great chat with you today. It's been a wide range of conversation. You've certainly shared a lot of insights for that audience. So thank you so much for joining us.

DEBOPAM: Thank you so much, Tim. It's been a great morning for me as well. Thanks for talking to me.