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Welcome to Founder-Led, featuring founders scaling 7 and 8 figure companies who share the strategies and mindset driving real growth.
Brought to you by LinkedIn Growth Engine. We help established recruitment and staffing firm owners land new clients from LinkedIn by turning their executive content and insights into a trust building inbound lead engine.
We partner with $1M to $20M+ agency founders to build visibility, authority, and trust that drives pipeline, without turning you into a “content creator.” Over the last 12 months, we've helped drive $20M+ in booked revenue from LinkedIn.
If you're done relying on referrals and want prospects coming in pre sold, you're in the right place.
00:00:01:13 - 00:00:08:13
Rohan
Welcome to Founder Lead, where we sit down with some of the sharpest founder operators to learn what's working in their business today.
00:00:08:13 - 00:00:11:13
Rohan
This episode is brought to you by Frontier Studios,
00:00:11:14 - 00:00:13:17
Rohan
a revenue minded content agency
00:00:13:17 - 00:00:15:23
Rohan
helping businesses grow their visibility,
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Rohan
authority
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Rohan
ultimately their business from LinkedIn.
00:00:19:05 - 00:00:21:21
Rohan
So if you're ready to join over 30 founders
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Rohan
are turning conversations like this into real revenue
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Rohan
while spending less than one hour per week of your time.
00:00:27:16 - 00:00:29:06
Rohan
Comment frontier below
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Rohan
someone from our team will reach
00:00:30:18 - 00:00:32:06
Rohan
Now let's get to the show.
00:00:32:06 - 00:00:36:19
Rohan
Today we're joined by Sloan Barber, co-founder and CEO of engine.
00:00:36:19 - 00:00:42:06
Rohan
Before starting engine, Sloan spent nearly 20 years across recruiting, staffing
00:00:42:06 - 00:00:43:18
Rohan
and talent technology,
00:00:43:18 - 00:00:47:01
Rohan
leading high growth teams at companies like Motion Recruitment
00:00:47:01 - 00:00:48:21
Rohan
Hired and Flow Higher.
00:00:49:01 - 00:00:52:23
Rohan
Along the way, he saw firsthand where recruiting systems fall short.
00:00:52:23 - 00:00:56:12
Rohan
While most recruiters still live and operate from their inbox
00:00:56:14 - 00:01:01:00
Rohan
what it takes to build technology that actually improves productivity.
00:01:01:00 - 00:01:07:00
Rohan
In this conversation, we talk about why legacy recruiting tools still haven't delivered on their promise.
00:01:07:00 - 00:01:08:01
Rohan
What AI gets
00:01:08:07 - 00:01:10:02
Rohan
and wrong with recruiting,
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Rohan
how the best firms will use AI to drive better workflows, better decisions, and better outcomes.
00:01:16:03 - 00:01:17:17
Rohan
Sloan. Welcome to the show,
00:01:17:21 - 00:01:18:14
Rohan
Rohan.
00:01:18:15 - 00:01:21:06
Sloane
Great to be here. It's good to see you. Thanks so much for having me.
00:01:21:11 - 00:01:39:22
Rohan
Absolutely. Well, Sloan, you spent 18 years across recruiting, staffing and talent technology. What would you say? You know, the through line has been from all that experience. And what was the gap you identified in the market that led you to want to start engine?
00:01:40:02 - 00:02:15:19
Sloane
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I've had the privilege of working alongside incredible teams of recruiters in both staffing firms and recruitment technology companies, and the one thing that has stayed the same throughout that entire nearly 20 years of experience is that it is a people business, right? Whether you're running a healthcare staffing firm, you know, a technology recruiting company, an executive search firm, or, you know, you're working with talent teams and enterprise companies, you know, who want to hire sometimes tens of thousands of people in a really effective and efficient way.
00:02:16:00 - 00:02:50:16
Sloane
What you find is that the people really care. Recruiting and talent. People really want to do a great job and they love interacting with super qualified, highly interested job seekers. With all that being true. The technology that was historically used to support these teams fell short because it simply wasn't up to the task. The work of a recruiter is highly contextualized, and up until about 2 or 3 years ago, the state of the art was keyword matching.
00:02:50:19 - 00:03:15:16
Sloane
That was it in the recruiting industry. Oh, this person mentioned JavaScript ten times. This person only mentioned it six times. This. This other person's probably better, right? You should talk to them and the ATS or whatever would would rank that higher. Companies spent a lot of money on machine learning and other things to try to make that better and better, but it never really earn the trust of the end user, which is the recruiting teams.
00:03:15:17 - 00:03:17:15
Sloane
Right? And so you'd see
00:03:17:18 - 00:03:40:09
Sloane
recruiters spend 60, 70, 80% of their time living in their inbox, living on their phone, texting, calling, sending messages on LinkedIn, you know, and talking to sometimes 20, 30, 40 people a week or more in high volume to be able to get those, you know, handful of submissions that they needed to deliver for their customers or their hiring managers.
00:03:40:10 - 00:03:59:05
Sloane
And I believe what's changed and this, this through line being highly disrupted. And to answer your question, why I felt now was the time to start engine was large language models. They happen to be uniquely good from a technology perspective at solving the problem of
00:03:59:08 - 00:04:18:07
Sloane
contextualizing a lot of text into something that has a meaningful kind of distillation that you can then use to evaluate how someone might fit with a job based on that information, and the ability for that to work well.
00:04:18:09 - 00:04:19:05
Sloane
Really,
00:04:19:09 - 00:04:30:16
Sloane
in the last 6 to 12 months since these models have gotten more effective, has now, I believe, unlocked an entirely new category of how you can build tools for recruiting teams.
00:04:30:21 - 00:04:45:10
Rohan
Yeah, really, really exciting times. So for people who haven't heard of engine before, what what firms would staffing. Recruiting firms are best suited to use a technology, and where might it not be a good fit for certain recruiting firms?
00:04:45:15 - 00:05:11:10
Sloane
So when you build any startup, you know and you're early in the game going from 0 to 1 and then trying to scale from 1 to 10, you want to find a niche and look to really service those customers in a way that's super customize to them. And so we've seen a lot of our product demand in hiring teams and staffing teams that are doing a higher volume of skilled work.
00:05:11:12 - 00:05:41:11
Sloane
So this is really prominent in health care, skilled trades, engineering, manufacturing, construction. You have a need for quite a few people in those roles and in those industries, and those people need to have a certain minimum credential or certificate, something along those lines. So there's there's an element of sort of skill match specialty and an element of sort of high demand, high volume of what we call standing up jobs.
00:05:41:11 - 00:06:01:21
Sloane
So these are the jobs on the front line, the economy. These are the folks that there's 70 million people that work in jobs like this. It's the majority. Near majority of the workforce is out in the field in some way working a stand up job. So you really want to be, I think, focused on those areas where because of that, these people are not necessarily in front of a computer all the time.
00:06:01:21 - 00:06:20:12
Sloane
So there's elements of mobile or voice, AI voice that really can make an appealing to for those particular job seekers to take a quick call on their lunch break or at the end of the day, with a with an AI recruiter, because they're not going to be sitting at their their desk with their resume in a, in a PDF or what have you on their computer.
00:06:20:12 - 00:06:49:15
Sloane
So there's a lot of sort of ways in which you have to think about these various markets and which ones are going to work well for this particular technology right now, where I think it works less well in terms of our use case, is if you're an executive search firm or doing senior level, high level search where you're getting paid a large fee 20, 30, 40,000 or even six figures per placement, I think the whole point of that is that you can
00:06:49:19 - 00:06:52:23
Sloane
achieve the goal of that by being super hyper personalized.
00:06:52:23 - 00:07:02:11
Sloane
I think that's what the customer really wants you to do, right? When you're doing that sort of higher level search. So we think about 60% of the market falls into the category of this
00:07:02:14 - 00:07:09:19
Sloane
sort of high skill, high volume credentialed workers that are right on the front lines of the economy.
00:07:09:21 - 00:07:30:22
Rohan
Yeah, yeah, really interesting work. Sounds also like there are also quite a few, you know, tailwinds, especially for businesses based in the US, you know, bringing manufacturing back on shore and some of these other industries that are also rebounding more with more with tech and with healthcare. So it sounds like yeah, things are really in a strong position.
00:07:30:23 - 00:07:57:08
Rohan
I was actually just speaking to the the chief, the previous chief product officer at HubSpot who has since left and started his own CRM company. It's called Day-I, and it's really reimagining what CRM can be in this world of now, like kind of an gentle workforce. And these frontier LM labs. And the way he compared it was, you know, legacy CRM.
00:07:57:08 - 00:08:25:13
Rohan
It's it's almost like you're looking at an eight bit photo, right? Or an image that is just super grainy because the amount of context is so much lower than what is available now for a reimagined CRM that's able to ingest every single conversation, every single kind of like data point across teams is now learning recursively and self improving based on these.
00:08:25:14 - 00:08:52:07
Rohan
All this information that's flowing in and now also able to surface insights that are much more meaningful and personalized to every user of the platform. And now he's saying that the time to value of someone signing up and getting actionable insights is 24 hours, which is pretty incredible when you think of like, setting up a Salesforce or HubSpot instance and configuring it in the workflows and the apps, and and it's just a lot of busyness before we can actually get the outcomes in the insight.
00:08:52:08 - 00:08:55:14
Rohan
So it sounds like you have a similar approach where,
00:08:55:18 - 00:09:04:11
Rohan
you know, recruiting software, staffing software is ripe for disruption. And there's also so much context because it's a very relationship driven business. At the end of the day.
00:09:04:15 - 00:09:35:16
Sloane
That's exactly right. And I think what you're describing is the if you've seen a I ran a recruiting firm, a division of a recruiting firm in New York for seven years, and we had 50 plus recruiters at one period of time. And it was super fun, you know, to be in the sort of boiler room and have, you know, 12 teams of three or 4 or 5 people, you know, on the phone and firing off emails, super high energy, and you could feel the amount of information moving through that space.
00:09:35:17 - 00:10:01:01
Sloane
I mean, it was truly there was almost like this osmosis that just being there, you'd pick up on things, as we know, like that's not the typical workplace anymore. And if you're a distributed team, like a lot of people are, and if you're in recruiting, often recruiters can and do work remotely. If you spend a lot of time in meetings and on the phone, just do it from do it from your home office and you know it's more efficient.
00:10:01:01 - 00:10:22:14
Sloane
But what you lack then is that collaboration with other folks in the office in real time. Because the real time job, right? You can't wait in recruiting. Like if you're on a staffing team and you are trying to deliver because a hospital needs ten travel nurses, you're competing with probably ten other agencies on those jobs. And it's all about speed.
00:10:22:14 - 00:10:40:16
Sloane
And so to be able to then, like you said, take this incredible amount of information that's flowing through people's brains and ears and mouth as they have these conversations with job seekers over several months, quarters and years and instantly be able to act on that and say something like,
00:10:40:21 - 00:10:49:05
Sloane
you know, let's say the AI is on with a customer call and the customer says, yeah, you know, there was that guy, Jim that you placed here two years ago.
00:10:49:11 - 00:11:11:23
Sloane
That was really great. We need a similar skill set to that. And immediately the recruiter, if they know all of the information in their ATS system, can be like, oh, I think, you know, Sally and Tina and Mark are very similar to Jim, and a lot of great recruiters can do that, but they have still limited context. If there's a team of 50 or 100 people that have been talking to, folks are only going to remember what they know.
00:11:11:23 - 00:11:31:08
Sloane
So what if you could do that instantly, right? And you're like, actually, we have three people that are just like Mark for these reasons. How would you like me to set those people up for you tomorrow to interview? Right. And you can kind of really move through the process a lot more rapidly and with a lot less effort by the recruiter on the things that I would call
00:11:31:12 - 00:11:34:08
Sloane
inputs into the ultimate service delivery.
00:11:34:09 - 00:11:56:11
Sloane
The customer comes to you as a staffing team because they need to hire someone who's very high quality, and they need to do it very quickly. That's the only reason that customer is talking to you. Okay. Yeah. And so if you can deliver that with the minimum amount of unnecessary human time, you can compress that down. You know, two, three, four acts more efficient.
00:11:56:12 - 00:12:12:22
Sloane
You think about the unit economics at a staffing firm and how you can just absolutely blow up your profit margins, like, and expand those to be much more significant, because that core atomic unit of what means efficiency in a recruiting business is productivity per recruiter.
00:12:13:01 - 00:12:27:18
Sloane
So that, I think, is where, to your point, instant contextualization of every single potential applicant in some ecosystem at a staffing firm in real time, to the recruiter or the salesperson that's dealing with the customer, is going to be an absolute game changer.
00:12:27:23 - 00:12:49:14
Rohan
Yeah, yeah. Well, I know you're just at the Sia conference here in Austin. What what is the market reception been like for the technology? I mean, it makes total sense to me, but we have many folks in our audience who are, you know, at recruiting firms and staffing firms. So I'd be curious to hear what the reception has been like from these leaders at these organizations.
00:12:49:16 - 00:13:19:03
Sloane
So we've been working, you know, like I said, I've been lucky enough to work in staffing for almost 20 years. Historically, the adoption of technology and staffing was behind a lot of other industries for the primary purpose, that the technology did not really solve the problem. So it was sort of an means to an end, a necessary evil versus feeling like, wow, I got this new CRM, ATS product, and man, my team's three times more productive than they all love using it.
00:13:19:04 - 00:13:40:08
Sloane
Like no one ever says that, right? So the way that we have, you know, and the conversations I had at Sia and with staffing leaders all the time is between 2024 and the end of 2025, sort of the last, you know, 18 to 24 months, there was a early adopter curve. 10%, 15% of the market started playing with these things.
00:13:40:08 - 00:14:04:02
Sloane
Wasn't seeing the kind of reliability that they really expected because these were the two previous generations of model, almost like GPT 3.5. We started building on it at three. And so, you know, there was lack of reliability. There was hallucination. Still, there was all these things that you really can't have if you're trying to implement a recruiting technology, 2025, you know, sort of Q3, Q4, the models made several more releases.
00:14:04:03 - 00:14:40:12
Sloane
You started to get sort of into the 4.05.0 releases on on open AI, and the hallucinations dropped dramatically. The contextualization and ability to kind of reliably and with limited bias or even no detectable bias, kind of look at resumes and summarize or, you know, evaluate to a certain extent without making a hiring decision, but at least giving you maybe some ranking or some fit or some matching or some highlights, things like that, just to give the human a little bit of an easier read and a faster path to find that signal in the noise that started to really become more widely accepted amongst those early adopters.
00:14:40:12 - 00:15:18:03
Sloane
And now sort of the next wave of what I would call crossing the chasm is, is really in full swing. I think just in 2026, I think this will be the year where you go from 10 or 15% adoption of AI tools to, you know, 30, 40, 50%. And then over the next three years, I think you will get near complete penetration of this new platform inside of any staffing firm that wants to survive, because I don't believe you can effectively compete if your competitors are adopting a technology that makes the recruiters 2 or 3, that's more productive, it's going to result in faster time to value for their customers.
00:15:18:03 - 00:15:36:23
Sloane
It's going to result in a lower cost to their customers because they can afford to do the service for less. And then you're going to have AI native recruiting and staffing firms that are going to crop up that are basically doing this right now with a very small human team as compared to these more established firms. So it's an adapter die moment.
00:15:36:23 - 00:15:37:14
Sloane
And I think
00:15:37:19 - 00:15:44:19
Sloane
the industry knows that. And they're very much in that meeting, that moment by investigating and investing in the technology.
00:15:45:00 - 00:16:17:21
Rohan
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think there's some clear like reference points as well. Like Harvey Harvey comes to mind. Right. For for legal. And some of that like paralegal work that is being automated or abstracted or really just augmented through like AI and agents. And that company has grown like incredibly fast, like multi-billion dollar valuation, I think, just the past few years, because these frontier firms just realized they can start to create, you know, real separation from their competitors, especially on work that's traditionally so hourly
00:16:18:00 - 00:16:18:16
Rohan
billable, right.
00:16:18:16 - 00:16:49:19
Rohan
You're kind of evaluated on like your billable hourly rate. Another data point is I saw ramp, you know, credit cards for for businesses. They published a study recently because they have all this data coming in for spend across all these businesses and industries where they saw token usage and token spending as a percentage of overall engineering budget. And they found that those that were higher, their growth rate was logarithmically higher than companies that had a much lower token spend, right?
00:16:49:19 - 00:17:16:13
Rohan
As a percentage of overall like engineering salary and budget. So that just goes to show that it's already happening and that separation is being created. So I mean, maybe my question back to you is like, let's make this real. You talk about specific data points, around 20 to 40% plus increase in productivity gains. Is there a like a killer workflow that you have found really drives that or just make it real with a real example if you can?
00:17:16:15 - 00:17:17:22
Sloane
So
00:17:18:01 - 00:17:18:15
Sloane
the
00:17:18:18 - 00:17:50:13
Sloane
highest impact area that we've seen here in engine, when it comes to implementing our solution inside of staffing firms and staffing teams who care a lot about their productivity per recruiter and what we call total cost per placement, which is evaluating how much it costs for you to deliver a placement to a customer based on how much it costs to acquire the job seeker, either through ad spend, sourcing time, having a team of sorcerers, whatever that is, how long it takes you to process them from a screening perspective.
00:17:50:13 - 00:18:13:15
Sloane
So this is recruiter time, phone screens, etc. and then how long it takes you, you know, in totality to place them your time to fill. And we've created a formula that really effectively analyzes based on where you implement different parts of our solution, which is either the top of the funnel for sourcing the middle of the funnel for screening, or the bottom of the funnel for sort of recruiter support.
00:18:13:16 - 00:18:38:10
Sloane
We've seen right now, because of adoption, that top of the funnel has actually made the biggest impact, and we can improve applicant quality by 30 to 50% just by running our AI campaign management and our targeting and our various sourcing tools through our partners, like indeed in LinkedIn and ZIP Recruiter, which that's where everyone is. So we spend millions of advertising with them and.
00:18:38:12 - 00:18:54:07
Sloane
Yeah, but because but because of our technology and where it layers into that process, if instead of getting 100 candidates where only ten are qualified and a recruiter having to suss through that, what if you could get 50 candidates and 20 are qualified?
00:18:54:10 - 00:19:00:13
Sloane
And if you think about that, that that is like where everything begins. Yeah. And so even though that seems like
00:19:00:16 - 00:19:08:11
Sloane
maybe it's sort of not the, the kind of like sexy AI agent doing something crazy, it's actually just really practical.
00:19:08:11 - 00:19:31:19
Sloane
And because if this technology does allow you to hyper optimize jobs, job descriptions, titles, campaigns, tactics in real time in a way that was not really possible without a human on the keyboard kind of managing all these various ad unit ad platforms. Now you can have, you know, AI doing that either through APIs or through computer use. So there's some interesting things happening there.
00:19:31:19 - 00:20:04:16
Sloane
And then I think what will ultimately be a really powerful area is augmenting human phone screen time by involving AI voice agents in the sort of what we call a recruiter screen, which is when you ask a series of 7 to 10 questions to evaluate that applicant based on their foundational skills that might be relevant for any customer in your network at some point, as well as their skills very specific to that job that they've applied for, to then determine if they're a candidate that's available, interested, qualified and within the salary range.
00:20:04:16 - 00:20:13:23
Sloane
Right. That's kind of what you're trying to figure out in that call. Well, without making any sort of hiring decision, but just giving the recruiter more context to then
00:20:14:04 - 00:20:21:12
Sloane
determine, hey, I'm going to pick up the phone and call this person because they're a great fit. I want to give us a minute of the customer ASAP, and I want a few more pieces of information.
00:20:21:12 - 00:20:44:07
Sloane
So the adoption at that level is starting to really accelerate. And I think if done right, those two things together, we believe based on our forecasts, can double recruiter efficiency at sort of a baseline. And a best case can as much as triplet meaning instead of a recruiter having to do 18 phone screens on average.
00:20:44:12 - 00:20:54:04
Sloane
Yeah, to get to a placement, a revenue generating placement for a staffing firm, that recruiter can do 6 or 7
00:20:54:07 - 00:20:57:04
Sloane
and achieve the same placement.
00:20:57:08 - 00:20:58:00
Sloane
So
00:20:58:03 - 00:21:05:13
Sloane
assuming they spend the same amount of time doing 18 phone screens a week, instead of doing one placement, they'll do three right,
00:21:05:16 - 00:21:09:12
Sloane
which would be frigging great. And everyone would be very pumped about that.
00:21:09:17 - 00:21:10:12
Sloane
Yeah, and.
00:21:10:15 - 00:21:23:10
Rohan
A3X increase in productivity, right. If you just that seems to be the simple math and placement volume and throughput and ultimately like business outcomes in terms of placements and commissions being collected. Okay.
00:21:23:11 - 00:21:23:15
Sloane
And
00:21:23:19 - 00:21:50:09
Sloane
very important time to fill, which if you're a starving firm, your time to fill is one of these numbers that is sort of a serial to some people. We really nail that down early when we implement because we wrap around all the existing systems. We're not a ATS CRM, we're an AI layer, and I believe this is how it's going to manifest, is I think there will be a lot of legacy or CRMs or databases or whatever, where you got to kind of have a central source of truth.
00:21:50:10 - 00:22:12:11
Sloane
But we view our product more as meeting the recruiter where they are in chat and slack and email on, even on a call, like, you know, you talked to it, you know, talk to it like you would a colleague. I do think it's moving in that direction from like a UX perspective. And recruiters, I think really like that user experience, because they're very good at talking
00:22:12:16 - 00:22:16:18
Sloane
to critical skill for a great recruiters talk, ask questions and listen.
00:22:16:20 - 00:22:32:06
Sloane
It's not as critical of a skill to be able to enter a bunch of data into your CRM and ATS, which recruiters hate doing, so you try to limit the amount of time they have to do that, maximize the amount of time they get to spend talking to amazing people who are really excited and qualified for jobs. And I think everyone wins.
00:22:32:10 - 00:22:53:23
Rohan
Yeah, it just sounds so compelling, obviously from the business standpoint, but also from like a recruiter job satisfaction standpoint, right? Instead of being on a computer or like filling out forms or doing manual research or hopping into different tools, it's really just having a universal chat interface. And that context is there, whether it's, you know, pulling from a phone call or
00:22:54:02 - 00:23:05:04
Rohan
internal memos or some screening documents that had and even like an agent doing some of that prescreening as well, and kind of synthesizing their analysis and kind of feeding that and surfacing that to the recruiter.
00:23:05:06 - 00:23:09:11
Rohan
So what do you now that a recruiter, let's just say
00:23:09:14 - 00:23:22:06
Rohan
yes, they can do more placements, but they have more time. How can they start to differentiate and stand out in now an AI driven world? Let's just assume all of these firms have the same technology.
00:23:22:11 - 00:23:25:18
Rohan
Is there like more marketing that should be happening, more thought leadership that goes out there?
00:23:25:19 - 00:23:30:21
Rohan
Like how do you see them continuing to differentiate their businesses and capture mindshare?
00:23:31:02 - 00:24:16:11
Sloane
So that is a really important question is if you have access capacity as a recruiter, where do you spend that time? And historically, you'd probably spend it firing off cold messages on on LinkedIn. You know, mining some database, like setting up some janky nurture campaign in some Atsu hate using. Right. All those things I think are a complete waste of time and should be completely automated by agents and where I think, and in fact must have recruiter attention is being an extension of the brand to represent your company, your customers, your industry, your team, your culture being the tip of the spear.
00:24:16:11 - 00:24:41:11
Sloane
And if you look at what makes companies hire great people, it's having a very strong employer brand and being an employer of choice in their given category or location or what have you. And of course, there's websites like Glassdoor and Deed and LinkedIn. Everyone has like kind of ratings and reviews of some of some kind. But when people really want to do, they want to know the people that work at that company, right.
00:24:41:12 - 00:25:12:21
Sloane
And if you're going to work at a company, you want to understand who you're going to be working with and telling that story and sharing and highlighting and interviewing maybe your team members or you know, the employee of the month or someone who is a real standout star, someone who represents sort of the caliber of people you're looking to hire, getting them some love and some face time and spending time with them, looking into and conducting feedback surveys internally to understand what the culture be, is sort of pulse of your company is how people are thinking about career and growth.
00:25:13:01 - 00:25:20:21
Sloane
These are all like critical parts of talent leadership that often go by the wayside, because
00:25:21:01 - 00:25:26:13
Sloane
the way that recruiting teams have often have to operate is reactive to
00:25:26:18 - 00:25:50:04
Sloane
someone quit. We need to replace them. Go, go go, put out the fire. And I do think AI gives the recruiter some breathing room that they need to one do their core job better and more efficiently, and to do things that really move the needle on what I think ultimately matters over building a generational company, which is retention, workforce quality, culture, accountability, and
00:25:50:08 - 00:25:52:12
Sloane
really mission driven
00:25:52:15 - 00:26:00:01
Sloane
talent, sort of leadership where you're bringing in people that are ultimately going to ten X the opportunity that your company has
00:26:00:01 - 00:26:05:15
Sloane
because their talent level is so high. And those are the like just hiring 1 or 2 of those people.
00:26:05:18 - 00:26:24:02
Sloane
If you're, you know, a recruiter that can make or break like an entire company's direction, right. And so if all you're doing is talking into this, like kind of just constantly trying to separate signal from noise versus sort of nurturing that garden that's going to bring those people to you over time.
00:26:24:03 - 00:26:40:16
Sloane
It's the best people in the world. They're all working and they're all always in demand. And if you want to win the war for talent, it's you can't just cold message them on LinkedIn 100 times, like you have to get them to be like, wow, I'm paying attention to that company because that seems like the type of place that I would want to work for someday.
00:26:40:16 - 00:26:55:21
Sloane
And then sure enough, when they do apply, you know you're ready. You've set up the systems where you know how to identify those a players quickly, and you can jump on that. And you don't have to be, you know, spending your time shouting into the void like a lot of recruiters feel like they do.
00:26:55:23 - 00:27:13:21
Rohan
Yeah. When you say hire like 1 or 2 specialized people, is that people to share the story or tell the story around what the company is doing, how they're different, what recruiters are doing day to day, like those proof points, those culture stories. Is that what you're referring to or.
00:27:13:23 - 00:27:52:19
Sloane
I think you need to I think you need to humanize your business because it's the last vestige of, you know, defense ability in this age. Like, here's the way that I look at my business and every business that's building any sort of AI powered solution that they want to bring to market the ability to recreate a feature like a CRM or ATS feature, which are, frankly, pretty trivial when it comes to like the actual like problem that they might solve, you know, store, resume, display something, you know, give add a note here that will help the recruiter.
00:27:52:21 - 00:28:21:06
Sloane
That would be a team of 7 or 10 people UX, UI, product manager, PRD, user research, whatever. I mean, you can quite literally copy your competitors product page into, you know, Claude code planning mode and be like, we're going to build this feature. Yeah, give me a PRD and let's implement. And by the end of the day, you have a prototype of effectively 80% of the way done.
00:28:21:07 - 00:28:25:08
Sloane
That's completely insane. Number one, that it's even possible. And
00:28:25:11 - 00:28:33:15
Sloane
you can do this. And two, that means features are no longer going to be defensible because it's like, oh, you need that feature. Cool. We'll have for you next week.
00:28:33:20 - 00:28:34:21
Sloane
Yeah. And
00:28:35:00 - 00:28:40:21
Sloane
what. So this is also true with hiring because you can no longer just be like, why do you wanna work for this company?
00:28:40:21 - 00:28:56:07
Sloane
Say, oh, they're the most feature rich CRM. And I think they win most deals because they've they've got the feature set. Yeah. That is also going to go out the window. So you're going to be competing kind of on a level playing field when it comes to I believe your technology differentiation, you might have verticals
00:28:56:10 - 00:29:06:22
Sloane
or certain data or a network effect or whatever, but those things are going to be kind of the only vestiges of technical IP defense ability that will remain.
00:29:06:22 - 00:29:28:04
Sloane
And everything else is going to move to the human level, the relationship level, the brand level. And I think primary to all that is the trust level. And if people in your market trust you and they trust your team to deliver this, they're going to work with you because they know you're going to be able to do all the same things everyone else is going to do.
00:29:28:06 - 00:29:44:03
Sloane
No one else, no one's going to do anything like I even talk to them, you know, certain clients. It's like it's all going to be the same. We're all going to be doing the same thing and delivering the same solution. It's the team that you have to decide you want to work with.
00:29:44:06 - 00:30:03:10
Rohan
Okay, cool. I'm not sure what happened there, but you kept I just let you cook because you're speaking some truth right there. So that recording is continuing to upload. So we're all good. Yeah. I mean, you're pretty much doing a pitch for our podcast, which is Founder Lit, which is great. So I just like let you continue where in a world of,
00:30:03:13 - 00:30:12:19
Rohan
in a world where information, knowledge and intelligence are abundant and are on tap, what is truly scarce and that is trust, right?
00:30:12:20 - 00:30:26:20
Rohan
And the human connection and what makes us uniquely able to express our gifts and connect with others. So yeah, I think it's an incredible time. Sometimes there's a lot of like doom and gloom around job loss and focus on productivity and,
00:30:27:00 - 00:30:34:02
Rohan
you know, some pain where there are layoffs. But I love the optimistic frame, which is what is this allowing us to do?
00:30:34:02 - 00:30:42:09
Rohan
And where is it unleashing the opportunity to to be more authentic, to share our stories, to connect and spend more time in a day,
00:30:42:13 - 00:30:49:01
Rohan
to connect with more humans, right, and just be more human once we remove the busyness of business.
00:30:49:02 - 00:31:19:20
Sloane
That's exactly right. I'm very optimistic. You know, I've I've spent 20 years in staffing. I've seen ups and downs. I went through 2008, you know, I saw the Covid kind of crisis firsthand, heard many stories about, you know, the.com boom and bust. These cycles exist and they will continue to exist. They will rapidly accelerate. That is a true fact, and it will move faster than I think a lot of people even can comprehend at the frontier of what AI is capable of.
00:31:19:20 - 00:31:56:17
Sloane
But I think that makes it really important. If you're in recruiting or staffing or talent, you are a shepherd right now, and we have to help this next sort of wave of the workforce, you know, adapt and evolve because there is a moment here that we need to meet where society has to move through this, and it's not going to be 100 years like the Industrial revolution, where, you know, you could kind of figure it out and take your time like you have to move quickly to understand how you can adopt this technology as an individual and implement it in a way
00:31:56:20 - 00:32:02:04
Sloane
that is incredibly productive within, you know, a business or entity, or start
00:32:02:04 - 00:32:13:19
Sloane
your own thing that you can do now for 100 times cheaper than it cost even two years ago. So there is immense opportunity. But I would not discount the
00:32:14:00 - 00:32:25:06
Sloane
the fear that is prevalent in society, in the workforce right now. And I don't think that fear is unfounded, but I do think it's a decision needs to be made kind of by each individual.
00:32:25:06 - 00:32:33:04
Sloane
And we need to also have leadership in our industry. And I intend to step into a leadership role in our industry to
00:32:33:09 - 00:33:08:03
Sloane
make sure people understand that there is a path here, and the math does work in our favor, because if employees are more productive, as we've seen in productivity gains over the past 200 years, and particularly after the Industrial Revolution, wages increased significantly and work for productivity was from an economics 101 perspective, the primary driver of that, and I know from my own team and customers that we've been able to successfully implement our products with, with their teams, that they are seeing that and measuring that, and that has become very real over the
00:33:08:03 - 00:33:35:20
Sloane
last 12 or 18 months. And I think it's going to proliferate throughout the economy, which means that if people are more productive, they can earn more money and they can move their way up and get into that sort of next level that they're targeting and going for. But you have to be willing to adapt and evolve, because if you are stuck not believing in this technology or not embracing it, you will fall behind in a way that is going to be incredibly profound.
00:33:35:20 - 00:33:36:16
Sloane
And
00:33:36:20 - 00:33:45:21
Sloane
I do think that is something we have to address as a society that that inevitably will happen. And we want to make sure that people that are
00:33:46:01 - 00:33:48:20
Sloane
in that boat do not get left far behind.
00:33:48:23 - 00:34:00:10
Rohan
Yeah, really, really well said. Well, Sloan, as we wrap it up here, where can folks go to learn more if they want to engage with you or learn more about engine, what's the best place to reach you?
00:34:00:12 - 00:34:11:20
Sloane
Yeah, well, you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Sloan Barber Barber, and you can also find me on at NYC Sloan. And if you want to shoot me an email, you can do so at Sloan. Slow
00:34:12:00 - 00:34:15:01
Sloane
any at engine. Engine.
00:34:15:02 - 00:34:21:23
Rohan
Beautiful. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Thanks for joining the show and look forward to doing a part two in the future.
00:34:22:01 - 00:34:24:17
Sloane
Thanks so much for. It was really great to chat with you.
00:34:24:19 - 00:34:25:15
Rohan
Thank you.