How to Build Better Teams Through Smarter Recruiting
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Daniel Chait, CEO at Greenhouse Software, and Lewis Brown, Jr. - MA, VP of Talent Management at Comcast.
Together, we explore how great recruiting transforms teams, empowers managers, and reshapes the future of work. From the rise of AI-driven job applications to the lessons talent leaders can learn from college sports, this conversation uncovers what it really takes to attract, retain, and grow high-performing talent in a rapidly changing world.
🎓 In this episode, they discuss:
Why great recruiting is the manager’s ultimate tool
Why confident hiring creates better feedback loops
The NCAA transfer portal as a mirror for today’s labor market
How to blend AI with personal connection in the hiring process
How AI is flooding the hiring market with noise, and how to cut through it
Greenhouse is the only hiring software you’ll ever need.
From outreach to offer, Greenhouse helps companies get measurably better at hiring with smarter, more efficient solutions – powered by built-in AI.
With Greenhouse AI, you can generate stronger candidate pools faster and source high quality talent with more precision, streamline the interview process with automation tools, and make faster, more confident hiring decisions with AI-powered reporting.
Greenhouse has helped over 7,500 customers across diverse industry verticals, from early-stage to enterprise, become great at hiring, including companies like HubSpot, Lyft, Trivago, Crowdstreet and Gymshark.
Daniel Chait 0:00
So I think it's under appreciated how powerful great recruiting can be. As a manager tool, it's really easy to figure out what to do at the ends of the curve, the amazing people everybody wants to keep and promote and pay and all the things. It's the middle that's hard. One of the main reasons is because they don't fundamentally have confidence that they can bring in someone better. And so the pain of going through a long job search with a lot of uncertainty, not knowing that you're gonna get to the end with someone amazing, overwhelms the feeling that, like I may not have the right person on my team, and they stick with what they know. The gap between what managers think they can get through recruiting and what they have in their current team is what holds them back often from like, well, I don't really want to give them that feedback. You know, what if they were to leave, if you knew you can almost for sure, very quickly and reliably go out and get an amazing person, you would be a much stronger manager. You Hey.
Chris Rainey 1:12
Daniel Lewis, welcome to the show. How are you both
Lewis Brown Jr. 1:15
doing? Well, how about you, Chris, it's been a while
Chris Rainey 1:17
when was our last chat? Daniel, he was like yours
Daniel Chait 1:21
several months
Chris Rainey 1:22
ago, long ago. Yeah, luckily,
Daniel Chait 1:24
not much has really changed in the last
Chris Rainey 1:28
several months. Imagine if we did a show then, and in a show now, we would never have known. None of us could have ever predicted where we
Lewis Brown Jr. 1:37
are even have different names. Who knows?
Chris Rainey 1:41
It's so true. But firstly, how are you both? How you doing? Daniel,
Daniel Chait 1:44
yeah, thank goodness doing all right, you know, and every day brings more fun and excitement, nice.
Lewis Brown Jr. 1:50
Louis, same lot of life. There's life every day, right? But there's highs and lows and there's perseverance. So we're all pushing through right now,
Chris Rainey 2:00
amazing. Yeah, resilience is the word of the day right now.
Daniel Chait 2:04
Actually, Chris, I'll tell you, yeah, I started, I learned this lesson in COVID, because I remember, if you cast your mind back to 2020 and you know, it's just a common thing, like, it's just a courtesy, you start a conversation, how's it going? And in 2020 when you started that conversation,
Lewis Brown Jr. 2:18
that way, like, you can never know
Daniel Chait 2:21
he'd be like, Oh my gosh. Like, that's not so I started people avoided it. I started conversation. I was
Chris Rainey 2:26
saying, Hey, good to see you. Oh, that's possible, right? Yeah, because
Daniel Chait 2:30
if you ask, how's it going? Like, you never know what you're gonna get. And I think
Lewis Brown Jr. 2:35
actually, I had a friend in college from Johannesburg, and he used to complain, because he'd say, you all are asking me how I'm doing, but you don't want to know, and, oh, you're walking by when you ask. And so to that point, it's a good point, Daniel, like we should ask what we want to know. And if we do want to know how somebody's doing, be ready for
Daniel Chait 2:56
the answer. You know, I 730 this morning. I started with physical therapy. So I'm not sure your listeners really want to hear all of that. Let's just say. Chris, yeah,
Chris Rainey 3:05
that's already a good lesson, a little nugget for the audience as well. I also when the times I do ask that question, I always kind of go a level deeper. I'm like, How are you really or like, or say, Oh, I would say, how are you? But to lose this point unless, and then follow up with something specific, yeah, because then it really opens up a conversation. Otherwise, yeah, you can kind of get caught in
Daniel Chait 3:32
or you can, you know, if you want to keep it positive, hey, like, what's, what's interesting in your life that I should know
Chris Rainey 3:36
about? Yeah, well, I am really, this is really random, but we're going there. I no longer ask that question. So my six year old daughter because, because then she says, good. So I say to her every day, every day she comes home from school, I say, what's that? What was, what was your favorite part of your day? That's good. And then she goes off, right? So
Daniel Chait 3:57
questions. It was just great interviewing. It's a great interview. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 4:02
yeah. That's the first thing I learned in sales and also doing podcasts, is asking open questions, right as well. And she just goes off. I love it. I can't wait. And she just goes right. And I feel like we could learn from that, just to say, You know what? Or even some things I do in my team, a lot, in our one to ones, it's like, what's giving you energy and what's taking away energy? Oh, that's good. Chris, right? And that unlocks some things that you you know, or dispel some assumptions that I have about how someone's really getting on when you say to someone, what's giving you energy and what's taking away, and I found out 99% of the time, what's taking away energy is completely within our control. Yeah, 100% like, literally within our control. And I'm like, Oh, you don't like doing that, or I'm your bottleneck, my energy. You, yeah, yeah, what you're saying is I'm and that is the reality sometimes so but making a safe space and having that psychological safety where they can say that to me and have that conversation now. Well, it's become a way of just talking in the business, are we spending time? And what we find, found is, like, there's other members of the team that like, actually that thing that drains your energy, I love that. That's good. And they're like, Oh, really, I'm happy to do that. And it just faces really interesting dynamic. I don't even aware where to kick off, because we had such a good conversation last time we one of the things that stood out to me was we made some really cool parallels between sort of sports, athletes and talent. And I felt like that was super interesting. I think I know Lewis, I remember you shared some cool examples on that, George. Let's kick off there and have some fun, and then we can jump into some of the other topics as well.
Lewis Brown Jr. 5:43
Yeah, well, I think there's, there's always a good time to talk about sports, no matter what you you follow, who you cheer for. So it was late at night here in the US, I was watching Sports Center, and I played basketball in college, and I'm grateful for that, but I I had been tracking their two, two guys who went to UCLA. They're the O'Bannon brothers, and they were attorneys, and they brought litigation against the NCAA to essentially say, hey, there's more than scholarships that are warranted here for student athletes years ago. And they pushed and pushed and pushed, and they were kind of like the thing that broke the dam, that opened up the door for n, i, L, and for a lot of what we see in the transfer portal. So watching Sports Center, I'm listening to these broadcasters complain about how much these, you know, these student athletes are moving, and people don't stay in a school for more than one year, and coaches are starting over, and then I'm playing back in my ops reviews around talent management and talent retention and executive recruiting and Cohort Based hiring and how people are moving and they don't stay in an organization for more than a year. And the next thing you know, I start taking some notes and say, Hey, there's, there's a handful of things that the NCAA transfer portal is teaching me about the labor market. And so, to your point, we started a conversation. And Daniel, you all are really interesting, because you have several clients who play in the sports space, and you understand culture and some of the things that they've done to turn their organizations around. And so one of the ones that jumped out right away is the agency isn't the only one with agency. And I just was noticing during the war for talent, during the pandemic, that employees, individuals, were owning their agency. They were realizing and waking up to their agency and owning it, and they were expressing it, and a lot of ways, but the tables were turned a little bit, and it was really challenging. And still, I think, to a point now, it's still in challenge. It's challenging employers to engage in a different way, like, how do we show up and realize that there's multi directional agency here? And this is, this is a relationship. This is not one way relationships, a two way relationship. So that was, that was one of them.
Daniel Chait 8:15
Chris, yeah. Well, look, I think the the decoupling of kind of the individual career path from the corporate, you know, Overlord has been going on for, you know, you know, a generation, or, you know, decades. And, yeah, I agree with Louis. The you know, the the, you know, move, the sudden move to remote work during the pandemic, really accelerated a lot of that and really scrambled the playing field in a lot of ways. Of like, if you're sitting in your own house and you're, you know, on a laptop, like, it's easier than ever to change jobs. You don't even have to, you know, figure out a new commute. You just, like, close on one and open another window, and you're working a different company. And so that really did free up a lot of people. And, you know, companies were able to hire all over the all over the place. So I think that really did accelerate it. And, yeah, if you're a close follower of of college athletics in the US, which I am, for sure, like you definitely see a parallel there where, you know, when I was a kid, and you know, the 70s and 80s, you know, a high school kid would graduate, they would pick a university, and they would be there for four or five years. They really didn't have any opportunity to move, and it was not great for them, because they were the ones playing the game and putting their bodies at risk and generating all the value. But as a sport, like as a spectator, you know, you had these teams that were cohesive and players could develop skills and over time, have an identity as a team. And now, you know it's so. I'm a University Michigan grad. We just hired a new basketball coach this year, and you know, of the 13 players on the team, 11 of them weren't on the team last year. So he went out transfer portal and got kids from, you know, all kinds of different schools. And so on the one hand, it's kind of fun, you know, you get to see like a whole new thing. But on. Other hand, like, next year, I'm not going to get to read for most of those guys, because they're all and a whole new, whole new raft of people are coming in. So it's like, there's a lot of chaos too. And I think, I think it's representative back to Lewis's point of, like, some of the challenges as an employer, of building a cohesive team, and of, you know, developing talent, in a world where talent is so free and so mobile, I think it's a big management and cultural issue. Yeah, and
Lewis Brown Jr. 10:27
you mentioned a really important word there, Daniels culture, like, how do you develop and sustain thinking, yeah, yeah, when your players are changing.
Daniel Chait 10:38
I mean, maybe, maybe this is so, maybe this is self serving of me, but, but I actually think it puts more, it puts more weight on recruiting, because, you know, in recruitment, and again, like, you know, the Wolverine in me, like you listen to our new basketball coach, dusty, may he talks about, like, first thing we did was we started by recruiting the kinds of kids that would fit in with this program. And we're building a culture, and so we want people that are going to show up, ready to be part of this environment and this culture. And so I think again, from a business standpoint, as an analogy, you know, you certainly can develop and you can grow, but if you're going to hire people with the right skills, great, but you need to hire people with the right values that are going to get on with your on with your vision, because you know even even more so in a time of increased employee turnover, you don't have time to show them the ropes and to get them aligned like they got to show up on day one ready to buy in and move the ball forward in a direction that's going to be
Chris Rainey 11:36
helpful. I love this analogy, and I don't know if this makes sense to lose. How do you our thinking culture from the perspective of typically, when you support a team and the players, one of the components of that, and also in the businesses, is that they represent the local communities that you live within, and as part of us being supporting them is like the hometown kid you know, who's now on the field, you know? And that a lot of when I grew up watching ice hockey, and I played ice hockey, Shane did. We were from the area, and we played for the local ice rink, and part of the community and the culture was that, how do you maintain that part? If that makes sense, when you have what you said, maybe 90% of the players are now been drafted in from from elsewhere. Do they actually represent the culture and the communities that you serve as an organization? Well,
Lewis Brown Jr. 12:33
it's interesting because I think it, it actually poses a really important question to us is, what is our culture? And I think it's, it's, it's easy. I'm from Denver, Colorado, in the in the US, and it's easy to put 50 to 80 on a sweater and and a Yellow Sea with mountains in the backdrop and say, this is Colorado. This is, this is who we are. We like the mountains, we like elevation, we like skiing. But when you have people who are coming in and coming out, what's transferable, what's what's global, what's relational, no matter if they're from there or not, and is it still just as valuable? And I'm, let me just say this, I am not necessarily of the mindset that everything about this shift is positive. I think again, there's there's pros and cons, right? But I do think back to your point, Chris and Daniel, you know, if we parallel this to the labor market, we've been talking about power skills, transferable skills. We've been talking about mobility, adjacent roles, Halo industries, all of those things for years and years and years. Now, what does it look like when the player or the applicant or the employee has to have a real perspective of that, and almost like blockchain, move from one spot to the other and be able to advocate and connect their values to another place, and it not just the place based, and I don't know that that's
Chris Rainey 14:05
easy. I'm waiting for Daniel now to launch his talent blockchain, the marketing teams already working,
Daniel Chait 14:15
if you know me. So I was saying this the other day, like, so we've been running greenhouse for 13 years, and we were, like, known as, like, the anti fat company. So I was, I said, like, I remember when the future of recruiting was social, mobile, local, yeah. And I remember when the future of recruiting was big data, like, nope. And so I remember when the future of recruiting was blockchain, and we were like,
Chris Rainey 14:36
nope. I remember the last time I heard the word blockchain, if I'm honest, until you did,
Daniel Chait 14:42
you know, we were kind of famous for that, but, um, but I will say, Maybe this will take it a different direction. But, like, when AI and kind of conversational interfaces, Agent AI came along, large language models were like, Yeah, that's the thing. And so we're making big bet on that. And I think when I talk to you. To everybody around me, customers, recruiters, candidates in the job market, hiring managers, certainly vendors. AI is having already huge impact on how all of those people go about what they're doing. And I think we're still very early days. So yeah, yeah, I think if you're, if you're like me, and you're kind of like rolling your eyes at all the trends, I think this one is caught, caught a lot of people's attention, for sure.
Chris Rainey 15:30
Yeah, this one is not a fad, no, I don't think so. This one's not a buzzword, everyone. If you haven't already,
Daniel Chait 15:35
well, I mean, if you just start with what job seekers are doing, and I don't know when the last time either of you look for a job, the last time I looked for a job was 1997
Chris Rainey 15:43
I mean, yeah, mine would be 2020, years ago.
Daniel Chait 15:47
Okay, so I went to Kinko's, you know, and I chose between the cream and the ivory. And I, you know, put in, you know, some resumes envelopes and sent them out. And that's how you look for a job in the 90s, in the in the couple decades since then, thanks in part to companies like ours. You know, it became easier and easier and you could apply online. It was like, one click and it was like, super easy. And so like, job applications went up and up. Now it's gone a whole nother level, because what job seekers today are doing is they are hiring their own agent, their own AI agent, to apply for jobs on their behalf. Yeah, for $29 you can go get a tool that will read your resume, that will scan the Internet for jobs, that will write cover letters for you and apply on your behalf automatically to hundreds of jobs at a time.
Chris Rainey 16:32
Yeah, I'm seeing that from the CHROs I'm speaking to. They're like, Chris, we're getting the same person like, apply for like, 20 jobs in our company. What was an amazing feature of our tools has now become our biggest headache as well. So they're making it really easy on the front end. You know, you don't even need an email these days, right, just to go through the process of, you know, so seamless. You've got other people now that you can just immediately, just, you know, connect your LinkedIn profile, one click Done. And outside of LinkedIn version of being able to do that, and it's just becoming, how are you tackling that? What's the approach that you're taking? Because, yeah, so
Daniel Chait 17:12
again, I mean, I think, you know, you kind of said it's like, it's easier and easier to apply for jobs, but it's getting harder and harder to actually get a job. Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, that's the opposite, because everyone's getting lost, and this is AI arms race. So the employers are saying, like, oh, you know, we need AI because, like, I open up a job, I get one or 2000 applicants in the first day, and so I need AI from my ATS vendor to sift through all that and get back to the like, real signal. And we're like, hey, wait a second. You're telling me that the job seekers are using AI to, like, magnify and apply to more and more jobs, and then the employers are going to use the same AI to, like, shrink it back down and get to the real, like, crazy madness. Where's the arms race?
Lewis Brown Jr. 17:49
That's right, that's exactly so. So to that point, then, like, I'm interested to know how the candidates you've been talking to, Daniel, feel like this is helping them. Are they? Are they saying it's helping them? Or what are they saying?
Daniel Chait 18:03
You know, I think they, you know, I don't begrudge that if you're a job seeker. And, you know, here we are. And you know, the early part of 2025, like, it's kind of what you it's, you know, there's no reason not to do it's cheap, it's easy, it's no cost to you. Like, you got to keep up or you're drowned. I kind of have to problem is, as a system, everyone's doing it right? And so, you know, in the old days, when you were one of 100 applicants, okay, but now you're 10,000 out of 10 million applicants. Because you've sent out 10,000 job applications, it doesn't increase your odds. It just makes more noise and work for everyone else. And so it's kind of a collective action problem. So I think from a job seeker standpoint, they're like, Well, why wouldn't I do this? It seems great. I had a friend of mine who, you know, is applying for a job at first time in 10 years. He knows what I do. And he's like, You wouldn't believe this. It's like, I found this tool. It's great, you know, 30 bucks and I can apply. He's like, by the way, did you know it connects to greenhouse? I was like, no idea. Yeah, it like, automatically feels. It's like, super easy. But like, is it helping? No. How did he get his job?
Chris Rainey 19:01
Networking? You initially just took the word out my mouth at the end
Daniel Chait 19:05
of the day, all that stuff. And what's actually gonna happen is humans are just gonna human. Yeah, that's the amount of signal in any one job application is going to zero. And so the way to break through that is actually opt out completely and be like, No, get back to the individual. Put in some actual energy into the process. Go meet someone,
Chris Rainey 19:22
my friend. Go for it. Go for it.
Lewis Brown Jr. 19:25
Based on this conversation, Chris and Daniel and I, we are all open to the benefits, the use cases of AI, we play in the space, all of that. But even if you think about the people who aren't, they are the pro proliference of of proliferation of AI tools and agents and stuff makes them even more reluctant and AI and and maybe opposed to engaging. To your point to say, actually, we need to bring it down. And so Comcast is a media and tech company like we. You. Uh, that's what we do. But to your point, like we human all day long. We hire, we promote, we advance leaders and executives in the organization by their ability to have a conversation. I sit in on every vice president above interview in the West division, so Minnesota, California to Texas and every state in between. There is not one interview calibration process that I haven't gone through, where we haven't talked about the hard skill of stakeholdering and the candidates ability to demonstrate that and its relationship to the work. It's rare that we say, oh my god, they have an incredible ability to to engage with all those agents. And so I sit back in my seat and I say, Is this good or bad, right? Because it's important that we know how to human and it's it's critical, and it actually helps people land jobs, but simultaneously, we are, we're in the world of agents. So how do we do both, right? And I don't know. Just I don't have any answers. I have a lot of questions.
Daniel Chait 21:03
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we, obviously, we play, like, a very direct role in kind of the job seeking process. And for us, it is really about helping our customers, the employers, like, filter through all that noise and get to some real ground truth, get to some actual signal. And I don't think just throwing AI at the problem is actually the answer in that case to your earlier comment, Chris, there's tons of opportunity for AI to solve all kinds of problems. We're doing all that stuff. But I think in this one case, is actually about, can we find a more meaningful human signal in all that noise on the job seeker side, and, by the way, on the employer side? Because the other fact is that job seekers have wildly different behavior. Hiring Managers have wildly different behavior, and that behavior is very interesting to job seekers. If you're a job seeker out there and you're just going to like spam a million job applications, and none of them you really know about, your chances are pretty low. You're going to find what you want. But if you knew there was a hiring manager out there who was always going to get back to you, was going to move quickly, was going to actually, like, make an objective, data driven decision. You would prefer to go speak to that person. And interestingly enough, those things that hiring managers do, if do they get back to candidates, do they use data to make decisions those things? They do them in greenhouse and so we know actually, what's the good behaviors that are out there and who's doing them? And so we've been surfacing those two job seekers as a way to help them cut through the noise and get to some kind of ground truth.
Chris Rainey 22:40
When I asked CHROs, what's the biggest impact that AI has had in terms of their recruitment, none of them talk about technology. They talk about the fact that it frees up their their hiring team to become business partners and to spend time with the candidates. So they're having to completely upskill or re skill that team. It's completely transformed the function. But to your point, the focus is on the human now. So although we're talking about AI, we're talking about technology, etc, actually, what's end up the outcome of this is actually weird that we actually, yeah, exactly. It's actually had the opposite of fear that many people had, that it's now freeing up the team, and they're not even getting rid of those, those people you know, in the team which a lot of you know, many recruiters feared, you know, actually, no that's freeing them up to have meaningful human conversations and working with the business as business partners.
Daniel Chait 23:38
Not all right, because in a world where, in a world where AI is increasingly, you know, abundant and free and ubiquitous, then it's not valuable or useful. You know, okay, you got to check out on your website. That's right, my questions. And so do I? You've got an agent that's going to automatically schedule my interviews, and so do I like everyone's gonna have all the same stuff. What's the difference when I get on with you. Do we connect you share my values? Am I the team that I see myself in? You're going to see that. You're going to get that from a person
Lewis Brown Jr. 24:07
and back to the original metaphor, like with sports, right? It took me well over a year to really get ingrained in the culture of the institution and the school that I played for, and really get a sense for what it was. And frankly, I felt like, you know what, I picked it. I gotta, I just gotta. I gotta deal with it. But now employers and schools are having to signal early. This is who we are. And to your point, Daniel, leverage tools, leverage technology, leverage social media, Leverage Marketing, all of those things to signal the right things right away and bring the person through. I don't know that I've watched any post game interviews specifically for college sports over the past few weeks where they didn't talk about the coach. Is the reason why. Why they were successful, why they chose what they chose. And these are, you know, 610, 280 pound individuals who are crying at the podium, talking about the person on the other side where, you know, I wanted to go to a school because of the parties, you know, back in the day. But now it's about the person.
Chris Rainey 25:21
Yeah, just imagine if we had that same thing right for all of our leaders and managers and our employees felt the same way in every organization. How incredible that that would be. Yeah, one of the things actually to your point, no that I've been saying to a lot of my friends who've been messaging me, Chris, you work in HR, why is it not? Well, I'm sending all my CVS. I'm getting no replies. What do I do? Right? So a lot of people, I'm like, the go to guy, because they think I know everything about HR. And I'm like, my simple advice, which has been working amazingly, is literally just DMing the hiring manager on LinkedIn, and they just skip the entire like, you know if it's relevant, and obviously a far they are the right person. So, like, we've gone, like, full 360 where we started through, like, it was really important to build your network. It was really important that, you know, and that's how I've got all my previous jobs in the past, you know, through my network, or through every guest actually, for this podcast. In the early days, it was me, just DMing CHROs being like, Hey, would you share your experience? And they were like, Yeah, sure, you know, or there was a lot of no's, but who cares? You're one set closer to a yes. So most of my friends now are kind of taking that approach. But what's happening? To your point, Daniel, they're then logging that in greenhouse, right? They're logging those conversations in greenhouse. And guess what? They have the time to have those conversations now, they have time to actually respond to those people. Make it more personal where they just didn't have time to do that before suck a fool. We've kind of gone full 360
Daniel Chait 26:50
and the key thing is, what's if you're going to DM someone or, you know, reach out to someone directly as a hiring manager, let's say you're a job seeker. Like, the key thing to me is, like, what's the content of that message? And if you imagine that those were just the same spam that they're applying to jobs, you delete them.
Chris Rainey 27:05
Yeah, and we know straight away. Now we've all kind of,
Daniel Chait 27:09
dear sir Adam, you know, or like, hey, like, you know, I'm, you know, I noticed you. I noticed you've been working at Greenhouse software. I'd love to meet with you. Like, what like, of course, you noticed the founder. But if you get a highly like, I got a very highly personalized email, again, like LinkedIn message from someone, and he said, Hey, I'm a senior design in this case, he was in the design field. I've used greenhouse in my last two jobs, and it's been great for these and that reasons. But also, like, as a designer, you know, I have some ideas about how the product could be better, and I've thought about it. And here's, here's some of my bullet points. And by the way, I noticed you have a design role open at your company. I think it'd be really cool for me to take a look at working at your company. That's the template
Chris Rainey 27:53
right there. Like,
Daniel Chait 27:55
hiring manager, like, yeah, value.
Chris Rainey 27:58
I think it's one of the most important takeaways. He led with value. And he also, like every I get 1000s of DMS on LinkedIn now because of, obviously, the scale of our audience. You know, it's kind of crazy, and 99.9% of them is just like generic. But the ones that actually I can see have taken time to actually do the work, and they all and they lead with value first, without expecting something in return, I reply. I respond to those, to those, to those people. And that tells you a lot about the individual immediately, straight away, right to be able to do that. So it's gonna is, I have CHROs messaging me that can't even get a reply and never like Chris, like, I'm talking like CHROs of huge organizations that I hate, Chris, I've applied for this role at x, y and z. I've got no response. They are the perfect person for these roles, and I'm having to, like, manually introduce them. So this is going to be an interesting challenge. One of the things I have seen from a few vendors, and I'm not sure Daniel, if you're is that they're taking this approach where you, you upload your CV, and then it suggests to you jobs based on the CV, to try and stop the whole I'm going to apply to 1000 jobs. Instead, you kind of upload your profile, your CV, and then it kind in, it kind of comes back to you with recommendations and suggestions. And then you kind of go through to try and avoid this. It's still AI driven,
Daniel Chait 29:27
yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think that's a good start, although I would say that I think like finding jobs to apply to isn't really the main issue here. I think, you know, you can go to, indeed, and they have 200 million job listings, and you can put in the keyword and get to the ones that I think, to me, it's about kind of what you said a minute ago. I've heard people talk about, oh, we should put some friction in the system, like it's too easy to apply. We need to slow it down and put some friction. I think they're onto something. But I think that's a little bit of the wrong metaphor, because friction is like wasted energy, right? Friction is like energy that you apply, that it gets like. Thrown off as heat instead of doing useful work. I think of it rather as like, we want to empower both sides, job seekers and hiring managers, to apply energy to generate better signal. Yeah, it's like, instead of just like, making it so easy that he doesn't take any energy, I'm like, No, you want to, if you want to put some energy into getting a design job at Greenhouse. I want to give you a better way to do that. Yeah, right. You want to research the company. You want to say something very personalized to them. You want to stand out from this, like, if you'll put in the time, because that's actually, again, like in a world where computing and AI are abundant and free and ubiquitous, the scarce, the scarce currency is human energy. So like, I want to let you use your own creativity and energy to stand out. Make a video, answer some questions. Give me more. Give me more of yourself. Use that information to then, you know, find you the right job is way more. Is way more relevant to the job market. I think of today.
Chris Rainey 30:59
Yeah, again, yeah, no, go for it. I'll say like again. It feels like we're going full 360 because we, in the past, we did some of that and said, Oh, but we're making it too difficult. They're going to go to our competitor where it's two clicks, right? So it's like we're going back around again. But now I feel like we have a different understanding of the experience that we need to create we didn't have before. We've got a lot more data, and we have the power of AI to make the experience a lot better and personalized which we didn't, which we didn't before. So I feel like this is an amazing opportunity for us to completely reimagine that process. So that's super exciting.
Lewis Brown Jr. 31:40
Yeah, and you know, we so I lead talent management as a function. That's one of the functions I lead. And one of the things that we think about is a leader's ability to have perspective beyond their silo. And so if you think about the DM, you got Daniel on LinkedIn, AI could be an incredible tool for that individual to go in and say, help me understand everything that greenhouse is doing related to design and AI, these are the things that I've been doing. Give me a perspective about the relationship between those things, and bounce some ideas to grow their worldview or perspective and see interdependence between organizations, the skills that they have. And then back to the original part of this conversation, show up better in the conversation, even in the inbox, with you, Daniel, to say I noticed a, b and c, sounds like you all are going after D, E and F, and I've been working on, you know, G, H, I for a long time, and I would really love to have a conversation with you about that, whereas before that would take 12 conversations, you know, 15 hours of Google searching and analysis, and, you know, use the tool for those purposes to enable the conversation, not to move away from it, right?
Daniel Chait 33:00
That's exactly the point. It's about enabling. It's about helping to, you know, to bring that, that ability for people to express themselves and say who they are and what they're looking for and why they're right for you, which I think we can help them do. And I think AI has got a lot of you know, as I said, it's a big area of investment for a lot of folks, including us. But I think in this case of, like, actually matching the right person to the right job, um, it's like you said, Chris, like, we're kind of a little bit coming full circle, where, at the end of the day, you know, it's a, it's a one to one, it's a one to one thing,
Chris Rainey 33:32
that's what it comes down to, right? I do feel like, um, to your to your point, Louis, like, AI is like the great equalizer in many ways, because it you know, everyone knows how to write a write a great cover letter. Not everyone knows how to do the research, not everyone knows how to connect the dots, but you can ask those simple questions to AI, and it can really help you along the way. If someone like me, who was dyslexic growing up and struggled to reading or writing. AI has been a game changer. You know, it's helping me review my contracts, helping me make connections that I didn't even see there as well. And, you know, and it's, it's democratizing access to information that only a few had access to. So it's an incredible, great equalizer as well. So one of the things we spoke about in the last conversation, I do want to touch on, is the intersection between attraction and retention, and what is the Healthy Mix. If you remember we spoke about that conversation, and I kind of, I think it's a good segue from what we were just talking about. I don't know who wants to kick us off.
Lewis Brown Jr. 34:42
So, so I'll, I'll go because, you know, part of my function is kind of the nexus of those, those worlds. And year before last, we so we do, we do some really good hygiene. This one things that I'm proud of. A. Contest around talent management and enabling, the conversation, and one is, every month, I have an 80 minute conversation with our President, our division president, about talent. And one of the questions was, what's good? What's good look like? And we did all this research. We looked at the data. We looked at how long people stayed in roles, the people who moved, how successful were they at the next stop, how successful were their teams, all of the information that we had access to, and we came back with the recommendation. And then we went region by region, function by function, and said, Does this make sense to you? How does this sound to you? Is this helping you meet the needs of the business. Are you maintaining culture and what good is while simultaneously bringing in innovation and disruption in the right balance, in the quest? The answer we consistently got back was it depends on the needs of the business. It depends on where we are right now. So I will say I have a stated measure that I track to. So we do succession planning for vice presidents, and above all, VPS. And essentially, 10 jobs come open the goal. The stated goal is seven of those 10 jobs will be filled internally, and six of those internal fields were on a plan that that can be a lot, right, that that is, that is an aggressive goal. We've met that goal month over month several times. But then again, the question it remains, where is the space for disruption, for innovation, for what we call surprise and delight, and I would even say for diversifying the workforce or leadership team among all demographics and dimensions of diversity, from things that are observable to things that are not observable. And so for us, and for me, it kind of depends. Man, what do you think? Daniel,
Daniel Chait 37:01
yeah. I mean, it's a fantastic question. I mean, I think you know, every, you know, every departure from the organization is one more person you gotta, you know, hire to backfill more like so there's a direct relationship there between your ability to hire people that are going to stick around and grow and develop, and your ability to maintain, you know, that growth, but also it's an opportunity to reconsider and to and to hire someone different. And I, you know, I'm a huge optimist and believer in, you know the power when you get, when you get to make a hire like it can really be transformative. You know, you're, you're all, most teams are always one hire away from greatness at something. And so that's a really encouraging feeling. The other thing I'll say related to that is, I think it's under appreciated how powerful great recruiting can be as a management tool. Let me unpack that. What I mean is, when you talk to most managers about their talent, what you find is, like, it's really easy to figure out what to do at the ends of the curve, the amazing people everybody wants to keep and promote and pay and all the things, and the lousy people everybody wants to get rid of, or whatever it's the middle that's hard. And most managers, like, they, they cling to those mediocre, like, Ah, they're not really good. But like, I don't love it, but like, I can kind of live with it, and that's that's dangerous. But when I, when I, when I talk to those managers, like, why they're doing that, one of the main reasons is because they don't fundamentally have confidence that they can bring in someone better. And so the pain of going through a long job search with a lot of uncertainty, not knowing that you're going to get to the end with someone with someone amazing, overwhelms the feeling that, like, I mean, I have the right person on my team, and they stick with what they know. And I would argue that, you know, I've done this thought experiment before. Let's say you imagine, imagine walking around your department, and standing right behind every employee who's sitting at their desk doing work, standing right behind them is an ideal hire, right? And all I have to do is tap the person on the shoulder, stand up. I'm going to sit down and do the job like Wouldn't that make sure that you had the perfect person in every job like you, you would be so much you'd give so much clearer feedback. You would give so much clearer goals. You would manage so much better. And you'd have you'd have better talent. I think the gap between what managers think they can get through recruiting and what they have in their current team is what holds them back often from like well, I don't really want to give them that feedback. You know what? Feedback, you know, what, if they were to leave, you know? And it's a real management issue. So I guess I argue that investing in great recruiting and making sure that your hiring managers feel that confidence, that, like, Listen whatever gap comes up on my team if someone through internal promotion like Louis. Talked about, gets a VP job, and now I've got a gap on my director level, or somebody moves on for a better job. Because, as we talked about earlier in this day and age, people have a lot of mobility, like whatever the reason is why you may have a gap. If you knew that, whenever that happens, you can almost for sure, very quickly and reliably go out and get an amazing person like you would be a much stronger manager. And so I always think that. I always think about the connection between, as you say, like attraction and retention. That way you you bring
Lewis Brown Jr. 40:31
up a really, because I'm here, you're describing Daniel a one for one, right, thinking about the opportunity to exchange good for great. But then I'm also hearing you describe like pulling up and seeing the bigger picture, that each movement creates movement and what opportunity exists. So let's if you do have an internal promotion, you create space for more disruption or ideation or new skill sets or like. So how do you pull it? Pull actually the conversation up and move away from a one for one trade discussion, which oftentimes can be difficult, especially in executive you know, talent management, into a bigger picture to say, what does this organization need, or this function or this region, and what exists out there. And I'll say for large corporations I've worked for, for a lot of them, even the opportunity to utilize our tools and systems like a greenhouse to be introduced to people elsewhere in the organization. They work for the company, but they're a brand new recruit to us because we don't engage with them, can still have the same effect.
Chris Rainey 41:46
I love what you both I've decided, like, I forgot I was even on the show there, if I was listening to your own podcast, I was like, I'm taking so much value away from this. And I was like, Oh, I'm part of the conversation. I've learned so many hard lessons by doing what you both described really badly in the past. As a manager, I have a very large sales force. I used to manage around 300 sales reps for over 10 years. I know those mid those average performers that I held on to way too long because I was sitting there thinking, Oh, I have to then go and replace them. I was that guy, and many of us are right. And you can, you know in your you know in your soul, that you know that you there are probably some incredible talent out there, and I'm just putting off doing the work right. And we didn't have any tools back then. So back then, I had an Excel spreadsheet with sales reps from our competitors that I would check in and call once a year to try and get them. And I know that was kind of my very old school way of doing it. I'd find them on LinkedIn, put them in my sheet, check in to do that, but every time I let go of a low performer and brought in someone incredible. I remember always saying, Why didn't I do that sooner? And I'm like, Oh, it hurts. And you're like, Oh my God, this person is adding so much value to the business. Or sometimes I'm trying to force internal mobility, or someone to develop within that just don't want. It. Does that make sense? Like they just don't want, like they're people that I'm like, hey, I want you know, there's this new role. I want to, you know, I'm thinking about you for this. Some people just don't want that either, which is, there's something I lesson I learned there. I didn't want it. So when I was promoted to director of sales, I was like, You know what? I really enjoyed being an individual contributor and just really being a higher performing sales executive, but now I'm in this job as well. And then same with HR leaders. We when we first launched a business, we tried really hard to always develop and promote, promote from within. But in some cases, it was that was the right decision, and others it was the one thing that was holding the business back, and we made some recent hires over a couple of years in marketing and sales that in the marketing team, particularly that literally four, 4x star business just by one hire that came in. And absolutely, it was a game changer. We had one guy that came into our sales team, which doubled our revenue. Right right.
Daniel Chait 44:22
One higher away from greatness,
Chris Rainey 44:24
yeah. And I was, and I'm like, and then again, what do you mean? Shane, sit down and say, why did we do this sooner? Yeah, right. We were holding on to people that we out of our loyalty of just like we really want you just to work for you, but they some people just don't want what you maybe want for them, and you can't, and you can't force that as well, but yeah, one of the things I definitely it's always Oh, we'll get to that. We're too busy to do the hiring. Oh, as founders, I've got other more important things to do, right as well, but it's the most important thing. And what we found is the 90% of the challenges that me and Shane were faced. As a business is because we didn't spend the time on our hiring and give didn't give it the attention, and it was causing all of these knock on issues in the business as well. So yeah, I love I love that. What haven't we spoke about that we should? I feel like we've gone down a rabbit hole. I knew this was gonna happen with you both, because I would
Daniel Chait 45:25
love to, I would love to continue this conversation indefinitely. I am actually hosting a company wide staff meeting
Chris Rainey 45:32
right now. Oh, literally, right now. Literally. So when you said, right now, okay, all right, listen before I let you go for everyone listening, we do part two. So we're gonna, we're gonna do part two at some point. Yeah, before I let you both go, what would be your parting advice to the audience? And then we'll say goodbye, Daniel, go first. I
Daniel Chait 45:50
mean, I've said it I've said it before. I'll say it again. You're always one higher away from greatness. So lean in love that
Lewis Brown Jr. 45:56
you I'm gonna do the easy thing and actually borrow Daniels. I like it a lot. So
Chris Rainey 46:04
easy. Listen. It was always fun. Chatting to you both. I appreciate you both a lot for taking the time out. It means a lot. This is why we created the show. Wish your water best and look forward to doing part two soon. Thanks a lot. Bye, bye, bye.
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Daniel Chait, CEO, Greenhouse & Lewis Brown, VP, Talent Management, Comcast.