Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast about fascinating professionals, how they got to where they are and where they’re going from the lens HR, Recruitment and People Operations hosted by Martin Hauck.
Martin Hauck (00:57)
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of from a people perspective. Today we've got Jim Miller, VP of people and talent at Ashby. Welcome.
Jim Miller (01:06)
Thank you very much, Martin. It's a pleasure to be here.
Martin Hauck (01:09)
Yeah, no, it's good to see you again. I think the first and last time we had met was in the, ⁓ wonderful walls of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas at transform. Yeah.
Jim Miller (01:24)
meet 5,000 people in three hours.
Martin Hauck (01:26)
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows you and you're trying to be like, yeah, we know each other from that thing that one time. Yeah. How was how I was transformed for you guys?
Jim Miller (01:38)
It was very good. It was the second year I've been, but the company's been multiple years and it's always, we get a great reception and we just get to talk to folks who normally wouldn't sit down and talk to a company that produces an ATS and hopefully we'll leave them amazed at the product and what we've built.
Martin Hauck (01:58)
No, I mean the, the goodwill and the fandom that, ⁓ Ashby's been building up in the recruitment community is pretty wild. and, ⁓ it doesn't seem like there's any, any shortage of that stop it. That doesn't seem like that's coming to a halt at any time soon, which is really, ⁓ for the true blue recruiters out there, it's heartwarming to see, cause we've seen platforms in the past kind of like ramp up.
do their thing, kind of make you feel like ⁓ they're going to stay consistent with product updates and trends and whatnot. And then, you know, things kind of get stagnant and then, you know, life happens to a business and then it kind of just kind of fades away. And that hasn't happened with Ashby in any way, shape or form. So
Jim Miller (02:46)
think part of it, quite interesting is the moment in time we're in with all of the change around AI. I'm trying to avoid saying that word, but. How can you? With all the changes that we're seeing, it's beholden on a company to really embrace that innovation and to drive it forward. And we already had both the tech stack that was iterative. We could iterate on the tech stack, the ecosystem we built enabled rapid change. And we already had the mindset of rapid change. And then this has come along.
in the early stage of the company. So we've kind of embraced that and it just feels right. It's fascinating for me to be in the job in this company with the technology being the product that I've used for my whole 25 years, know, and ATS has been my main tool. I think I have best job in the world.
Martin Hauck (03:22)
Yeah.
No, that's awesome. And let's use that as a quick segue to go back in time for a second. That's where we start this podcast, just to kind of get a decent past present future take on from from the perspective of folks like you, right? So what's let's go into the past of Jim. I'm looking through the LinkedIn profile to brush up on things and 15 years at Google is is definitely obviously a place to start.
⁓ and an interesting one, but I want to go a little bit further back only because I find that the, the first years in any profession are probably the, some of the most transformative. Maybe you don't learn the most, but the most transformative. So yeah, your first role, how did you get into recruitment in the first place?
Jim Miller (04:29)
I was in insurance at and I was in my second job in insurance and I could see layoffs were coming. The end was nigh for the role that I was doing, the type of role. And I sat down with a friend of mine who was a recruiter and he said, you should be a recruiter. I was like, no, a bunch of cowboys. He's like, no, no. We've got this one company in London. They're an American company and they're all about quality. One of their, their.
Martin Hauck (04:48)
You
Jim Miller (04:57)
USP is they only ever put one candidate forward for a role. I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. So they sent me for it. He sent me for an interview. So he acted as my recruitment agent for this job. And I went up and I interviewed for the company and the company was Aerotech, Allegious Group, Tech Systems. They start with, you know, they own the Baltimore Ravens, biggest private staffing company in the world, think. Billions of dollars in revenue. But I was joining this tiny little London office and I got the job and I started out.
first day of training, the trainer was up on the whiteboard and he started putting brackets and commands on the whiteboard and I was like, hey, is this the same as logic gates in electronics? And he was like, yeah, it's called Boolean logic. I was like, cool, I can do this, I remember this. And that one thing has kind of taken my career off for 25 years. And I spent five years with Allegious Group as a whole in London and I ended up training a whole bunch of people. was like the lead training for Amir. ⁓
Martin Hauck (05:44)
the ⁓
Jim Miller (05:57)
different roles and led the sourcing crew within the London office as well. ⁓ and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And then Google came calling, but the, that takeaway, that focus on quality that I had all the way there back then has really followed my career. ⁓ and I've always loved the kind of picking the camera and go, and this is the one that's going to get hired and following that person all the way through and then try to re-engineer with the why if they didn't, ⁓ and
Even if you look at Ashby's job descriptions now, there's a little bit of gym from all the way back then in those job descriptions. And what Allegis Group did at the time was they sold candidates out to get the candidate to sell themselves back in, in order to show their commitment, a bit of, you know, kidology, but show their commitment for the role. And if you look at our job descriptions, it says, here are the reasons why you would not want this job.
Martin Hauck (06:37)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Miller (06:51)
to deflect
applicants, but actually to get people who are really serious about it to understand that we are too and to apply. It's carried all through 25 years.
Martin Hauck (06:59)
Yeah, no. And, ⁓ and I don't want to go into like a 60 minute, ⁓ version of, of what life at Google was and beyond, but I guess I'm curious what's, what's the biggest thing that you took away from that experience, at the big old Google.
Jim Miller (07:18)
that even the biggest companies who have got the label of being incredibly innovative fail miserably ⁓ at innovation and so on. The biggest problem I had to solve in my early days was how to get my physical offer packet for a candidate I wanted to hire into the cart that was pushed through the office in California. I was in London that then got wheeled into Larry Page and the other leaders office for them to read the offer packet to sign off the offer.
There's no process for it.
There was no way for me to get that physical item into that trolley. And people were always like, how did you go from this huge company down to small companies? I was well, Google wasn't a big company when I joined. That's the thing I had to solve for. But yeah, they're just a normal company, just like everybody else.
Martin Hauck (08:00)
Mmm.
like everybody else not yeah yeah fair fair fair play and and moving beyond google can help help us patch the the journey to from google to ashby just a little quick tour
Jim Miller (08:22)
And I kind of moved around the world a little bit. with COVID, I've now got four children and my wife's from Georgia in the US and we wanted to be closer to her family for kids support. And Google weren't willing to move me again. So an ex-colleague heard that I was interested in living in Georgia and they were a fully remote company, but they happen to be based in Atlanta. And I got a phone call within five minutes of this being public knowledge. Come and lead TA for us at Full Story. So I joined Full Story.
as the head of TA after a bunch of interviews. And that's where I selected Ashby as a product to be our ATS, replaced the previous TA tech stack there. And I love the product so much. I've been on the design team of Google's in-house ATS, G Hire, back in 2011. So I've been in that intersection of people, process, technology for a long time. And I could see a great product when I saw one. I put that in place. And then I messaged Benji, the CEO of Ashby, to say, you know who I
Martin Hauck (08:58)
Hmm.
Jim Miller (09:20)
but here's what I think I could bring to Ashby. Would you be interested in talking to me? And thankfully he said yes.
Martin Hauck (09:27)
So
this was your move into to Ashby was, wasn't necessarily an application. was a, it was a petition or a proposal, so to speak.
Jim Miller (09:41)
Yeah, there was, when I joined, was only one HRBP in the company and I didn't believe the people function and there was no TA function at all. So I was doing a lot of different things, wearing many, many different hats, but I'd been a full story for two years at that point. It was a good time for a change. The economy was doing crazy things, but they were happy with, with me leaving and Ashby was happy with me joining. It was a direct pitch to the CEO early 2023 when.
Martin Hauck (09:48)
Wild.
Awesome.
Jim Miller (10:11)
the market was being pretty brutal.
Martin Hauck (10:13)
No, no, for sure. I, um, I did a, I think a decent amount of homework, uh, before we got, got to chatting. And, one of the things that I listened to Shannon's podcast with you, obviously, um, who's awesome by the way, Shannon, if you catch this, um, and, uh, the, um, the, the one kind of core takeaway that I, I took was that sort of like,
continuous improvement is sort of like your mantra. ⁓ and the one thing that I'm finding even personally, right? Like I'm a recruiter at heart. I still have clients that I do recruitment for. I'm working with a search right now. ⁓ while I also run the people people group, but one of the things that I'm struggling with, and I'm sure a ton of other recruiters are struggling with is like, you know, continuous improvement used to be something that you could
kind of keep pace with in the sense that, you know, there's ⁓ all these, all these tools coming out. ⁓ You know, you know, I'm not going to say the word because you said you didn't want to, but ⁓ we both know what I'm talking about. Like this. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. This, this thing is here and it's just made it so
Jim Miller (11:28)
It's good and we see learning out there, right?
Martin Hauck (11:35)
kind of noisy to be like, okay, what tool am I going to use and how am I going to adapt and what courses do I take and what parts of my job are going away? So, and I giving your vantage point and having, you know, led people teams and recruitment teams and practices for, for so long, like what, what are you telling the recruiters right now that, that, you know, that are probably looking to you to like, Hey, you've probably seen some form of like,
disruption in the industry a few times. Like how would you, how are, how are you kind of giving them hope and direction in these times?
Jim Miller (12:11)
If any, mostly through isolation of the situation. So if I take on the assessment of the tooling that we want to add or for us, because it's TA technology tooling that we want to build and helping with that and drawing on their experience and bringing them into the conversations around product design functionality, some UX and early stage testing and so on. But it's really.
owning the overarching strategy for the deployment of new technology, be it ours or elsewhere. So I have a particular framework that I operate within when it comes to technology. What's my philosophy going to be for why we do this and what it means for us as a company? We actually have our AI tenants, nine of them as a company that we look at both when we're building technology and when we're selecting technology.
And then I make sure that any technology we're considering, the building or buying aligns to those tenants. And then there's the process design piece. And I'm passionate about process design being decoupled from tooling. You need a utopia process, the best possible process to reflect your company's culture when you're hiring, not processes forced on you by tooling. So we've built an incredibly custom recruiting process here at Ashby.
Because our operating principle number five is we hire frustratingly patiently, which to me is a mandate for quality. So if I anchor on that, my team have got very, very clear signal isolating themselves from all the noise of focus on quality. If we're bringing in technology, that technology would have been tested to enhance your ability to hire the very best talent and to do it either quicker or a better experience or with more human to human contact. And then.
I make sure the key piece, because this is where all the thrash happens for teams like mine, is that I isolate the expected ROI of any deployment. And the expected ROI when it comes to AI technology is time. You expect to save time. Now, Parkinson's law of productivity states, will fill the available time.
So if you don't isolate that time, ring fence it and repurpose it intentionally before you deploy the technology, you end up with your team doing work because they've now got available time that wasn't previously a priority and you get no ROI. And then they satisfied because they kind of going back to work that they weren't even interested in doing in the first place. Otherwise they would have been doing it. And only at that point do I then either select the tooling or feel comfortable that we'll deploy our own tooling to test.
Martin Hauck (14:41)
Yeah.
Right?
Jim Miller (14:57)
when I feel comfortable that we've got each of those elements of that kind of structured plan together and right. And that way we can ease the team into it. We already know what the expectation is. We know how to measure that continuous improvement off the back of it. And we've started to rinse and repeat that again and again.
Martin Hauck (15:16)
Nice. Well, you mentioned Parkinson's law there. And that's interesting when, and I've come across it and heard it and, and, know of it. can't say that I studied it in university though. ⁓ so I can't speak too much to it, but I guess I'm curious, how did you come across that principle and.
Jim Miller (15:33)
A gentleman called Luke Eaton, who posts every single day on LinkedIn about TA, ⁓ flagged Parkinson's Law to me. Parkinson was a naval historian and author who wrote a book, wrote over 60 books, and one of them was called Parkinson's Law. And it was Luke that flagged it to me and I was like, that, that's the missing piece from all of this. It's the impact of the technology and reflecting that back before you even deploy it to ensure that you get that.
Martin Hauck (15:53)
Right.
Jim Miller (16:01)
and it's not washed out.
Martin Hauck (16:03)
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's interesting. was on a panel last week and we were sort of talking about upskilling and re-skilling. ⁓ it was an event for tech for Canada. And there was this interesting question where people were just worried about AI being this scenario where people, you know, people are worried about losing their jobs and everything like that, but there's no shortage of.
work to be done. It's not as though, you know, all of a sudden, you can get your job done half the time. That doesn't mean there isn't a next step after all of those things are complete. So you just get to do more ⁓ faster. And that's sort of like the the angle that I took, I'd be curious to, to get your sense of thing, like you're thinking on that on that sort of
Jim Miller (16:58)
You either
get the same amount done, but with less people. Or you get more done with the same amount of people. Those are the two base level outcomes. And that's what I try and think about. It's like, OK, we can now achieve this. And the spin on it is the quality element. And there's so much noise about selective AI technology in TA.
That's not what I'm talking about. That's where all the legislation, the compliance pieces, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, know, the risk employers as well as vendors and the penalties and so on. That's just something else. That's the noise, but it's also where all the pain is. Assistive AI technology, taking away repetitive tasks, making things faster, making things fairer, because it actually enables you to get more human to human contact.
Martin Hauck (17:33)
You
Jim Miller (17:54)
And if you get that, the work becomes more interesting and more compelling. And yes, it might mean you need less people to do the work, and they touch more humans. They have more of a positive impact. It's kind more concentrated. But with every revolution, be it the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, opportunities were created that we didn't know or expect. And we don't know what's coming. Internet revolution was just the taster for this. That was just the big break.
The tiny little appetizer, it was the canapé that came along the last 30 years of the internet. This is the big moment in time. But it will create opportunities for people. It might just be painful for a short while.
Martin Hauck (18:26)
Yeah.
Yeah, no, the the dawn of computers didn't take away jobs. It created entirely new industries and new markets and everything else like that. And I think the same will find something to do with our time Parkinson's law or not. ⁓ And if we choose to use it wisely, we'll set set people apart, I think. You've mentioned a few times. It was interesting it you carried it with you through throughout the years, even from
your first your first role at the agency is quality. And that's come up a few times and there's a million directions we could go with. But I'm just so that got ingrained to you at such an early stage. I imagine you probably ran up against people that didn't really
You know, there's other metrics that people wanted to measure things by, right? And, and meanwhile, you, started off, I think you probably, I don't know if you'll, you know, I'd be curious to get your take on this, but like my assumption would be that you've probably lucked out in starting with an, organization that was so insanely focused on quality of hire when that's absolutely the right metric. But meanwhile, there's like a hundred metrics out there in the market and they've been prevalent for so long that you kind of have to fight.
Jim Miller (19:35)
Yes.
Martin Hauck (20:01)
to get this, you know, either respected or even used properly. So yeah, I would love, love your kind of lens on this.
Jim Miller (20:09)
The quality outlook has stood me well in my career. Leading without authority in my early days as an individual contributor at Google, teaching people what great looks like in candidates to help them get up to speed quickly, my first leadership position around rest of the world sourcing out of Google, Google London. And that hadn't existed before. And I focused on quality there.
the smallest number of candidates as an input, the maximum number of hires as an output. That was the focus for my team and everyone felt comfortable within that. The philosophical debate that went on through my career and I've seen it all over the place is volume versus quality. And they shouldn't be in isolation to each other. You've either got incredibly high quality candidates moving through the process that means you're going to hit your targets and possibly exceed them with the minimum amount of work.
Or you haven't got high quality and you need to work harder to increase your volume. But it's that equation, that balance between the two. It can't be in isolation. The highest quality of work might only produce one hire and your target's eight, you fail miserably. High volume might only create one hire and you've burned 300 ⁓ interview hours in order to get that one hire and that's incredibly wasteful. So there's that balance in between and understanding both sides of the equation. But I brought it all the way through and...
Martin Hauck (21:05)
Hmm.
Yep.
Jim Miller (21:28)
Now, quality of hire has become one of these buzzwords. And really what I was talking about there was the quality of candidate in the pipeline, likelihood to get hired, which is a slightly different topic. The quality of hire, really you've got three different outcomes. The first one, which is to me the biggest driver is a reduced amount of false positive hires. So a reduced amount of attrition, because that's what sets companies back. They have their hiring plans.
Martin Hauck (21:36)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Miller (21:58)
They've worked them all out. The math is all there. It's all tight. And then people start failing in the jobs and they have to be replaced. That slows down a company's momentum. That's the primary thing that I'm focused on when I'm thinking about quality of hire. The other two pieces is can I do more with the same number of people that I would have hired anyway? Or can the company do more? Or can we hire less people to do the same amount? Depending on which thing the company needs, whether you're a hyper growth, high velocity company, it might be the first one.
or the second one, it's can we save money and stabilize? So those are the three outcome pieces. And all of those in their own right are impact-based. So for that, you're probably talking about impact of hire. And actually, I've seen somebody else talking about this today on LinkedIn, Kevin Blair, again in the UK, talking about impact of hire versus quality of hire. So when it comes down to quality of hire for me, what I'm talking about from a TA perspective,
Martin Hauck (22:39)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Miller (22:58)
is how can I look at early indication of quality hire and then bring that back into process or tooling and then do continuous improvement. So for example, how can I use quality of hire to inform me on what the best go-to-market strategy is for our role? And we measure quality of hire in Ashby. It's a feature. It's 30, 60, 90 days, although that's customizable.
quantitative and qualitative. The qualitative questions are fully customizable. The scoring metric is one to five, five being a great hire. So it goes to the hiring manager about the person they just hired. And one of the, we've been running it for 15 months internally and it's been live for just over 12 months, I think. And one of the insights I've got is that there is no difference in quality of hire by channel. So.
Martin Hauck (23:37)
Mm.
Jim Miller (23:54)
inbound applications, referrals, and source candidates were all met out to be the almost identical quality of hire scores. They were identical for 2025, for 2024 for us as a company, to the decimal point across those three channels. And yet everyone talks about employer referrals are the highest quality hire. They've just got insight that enables them to get through the interview process at a higher pass rate.
Martin Hauck (24:04)
Interesting.
Interesting.
Jim Miller (24:24)
the net result is that they are no better than the inbound applicants you're getting or the source candidates you're
Martin Hauck (24:30)
I'm not going to challenge this to say that, you know, I don't think you're wrong, but I'll throw a curve ball here in the sense that like, so this is Ashby's data and you've got an incredible process when it comes to your recruitment. Obviously you've got a really strong team. You've got a really strong background. I don't know nor believe that that's the case for most companies out there just in general. And so I think, and maybe this is just
you know, cognitive distance, you know, rearing its ugly head and me in the sense that like, no, like specific channels do have better. And, know, I did a report when I was recruiting at coin square and it was just like, we went down the list and was just like, agency recruitment hires ended up having the least, you know, quality retention, whereas inbound referrals were the highest quality retention.
just from a candidate perspective. like that data is from like 10 years ago now, but it sits with me because that's, you know, that's, that's one that felt powerful, especially because it's sort of like validated strong feelings I had at the time. like bias and whatnot. So I guess like having, having that kind of lens on things versus like, no, this is a really, really refined recruitment process and it's been built out by experts, et cetera. Like, so naturally the numbers might be different.
How would you tackle that?
Jim Miller (25:58)
What I'm not talking about is the quality of candidate and the pass rate piece. You're not going to have a worse pass rate for inbound because you have a whole bunch of people who are self-selecting that job. There also who have somewhat of a selection lens because the employee chooses to refer them or doesn't choose to refer them and then forced candidates who've been selected because of their skill sets, background experience, attributes and so on.
Martin Hauck (26:03)
Yeah. Right.
Right, right.
Mm-hmm.
Jim Miller (26:27)
So you have those three different elements. Now each of those are going to perform differently en masse through the recruitment process. This is once they've landed as employees, the beauty of the quality of hire metrics or data that I get and we get as, or our customer portfolio gets is that it's recent, it's 30, 60 and 90 days from the hiring manager about the person they just hired. And when you talk about retention, you're probably talking one year plus, and then you've got performance review data and so on. That's that impact.
Martin Hauck (26:35)
Okay.
Jim Miller (26:57)
of higher things. So there's an element of difference even between those two metrics and so on. I'm talking about the piece that you can bring back in and do continuous improvement exercises on, even down to the level of granularity of having an A-B test between two different interview processes. If you design an interview process for a job one way or the other, perhaps you create a choose your own adventure option for candidates to go through one or the other, you can then measure that at the back end.
Martin Hauck (26:58)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yep.
Jim Miller (27:24)
Indeed, we're doing that with an AI tool right now for one of our high volume roles. You can then measure the back end, not only what were the pass-through rates, but also what was the outcome of hire in those early days. And our customers, mean, this feature usage is up 150 % year on year. Sorry, just this year since January. And over 25 % of our customers are now running live quality of hire programs at the enterprise level. Our biggest customers.
Martin Hauck (27:52)
Amazing.
Jim Miller (27:55)
it's being used really, really heavily and all of that is coming back into continuous improvement exercises.
Martin Hauck (28:01)
Yeah, it feels like it's been for the longest time, a really difficult thing to capture data wise originally, ⁓ at least from from when I was using an ATS on a regular basis ⁓ consistently and haven't haven't seen it really well done apart from from what you guys are doing. So kudos.
Jim Miller (28:21)
Yeah, getting it into the ATS and having it cross-referenceable against any other data field is really powerful.
Martin Hauck (28:27)
There's no question that you've got your finger on the pulse in terms of, you know, all things people and talent. I mean, ⁓ I, I want to start with the external first before we focus on, what you're excited about the internal in terms of like the future, but yeah, what's, what's exciting, ⁓ like present moment we, we just talked about in terms of, you know, what you're actually able to do and, and what
progressive companies are building and whatnot for tools. what are you, what are you like if you can look into a sort of a crystal ball, what are you expecting and seeing from TA teams and technology and everything towards that?
Jim Miller (29:11)
I think we'll see an enormous increase in productivity per resource, hires per resource in TA teams, thanks to the technology. That will spike with platform-based technology, because there's a real difference between individual systems and tools that are being deployed, point solutions as it were, compared to a platform that has ⁓ native, like non-bolt-on
⁓ AI technology running in series because of that compound impact of one piece of automation, machine learning, AI, whatever you want to label this stuff as running into the next. And you just get this compound impact and acceleration. That's going to be astounding because the human, I keep saying it's going to have more time with the candidates and candidates are going to grow from this. ⁓
My favorite piece of technology that I've seen so far is the feedback tokens to candidates. TA teams have never been able to give feedback at scale. It's been difficult. With the feedback tokens from AI generation from across all of the written word about that person, all of the interview feedback and so on, we're able to deliver constructive feedback, positive and negative to those candidates who are being rejected, but also producing positive feedback.
and some of it constructive actually, to candidates that are moving on in the process. So they can build on each step as they go through and they can do continuous improvement themselves on their own journey as a candidate through that interview process. And that to me is something we've, those of perhaps who are focused on quality have aspired to for a long, long, time. And now it's in reach. ⁓ Feedback we get from candidates on that particular piece of functionality is phenomenal. So you get...
more human centric approach and the 6, 7x increase in productivity per resource, of sudden the job becomes incredibly compelling.
Martin Hauck (31:17)
Hmm. Hmm. Okay. And if we shift internally, what what's got you excited about? And I know you've talked about some of the existing features. ⁓ But in internally, what what's next? What's exciting for for ashby on your end?
Jim Miller (31:35)
I mean, we're tripling down on the AI piece. Across the board, we have to. We're focused on getting the product into the enterprise space at the same time as expanding the breadth and depth of the AI innovation. That's really exciting. There's so many elements to it. So many things that I was brute forcing with enormous teams of humans before.
So that's fun, there's all sorts of different elements. We don't tend to talk too much about roadmap, but that's fun. But the big news from us is that we've just secured our Series D funding. Thank you. And that's what's going to pay for that tripling down on the AI innovation. mean, the growth, the adoption, we've doubled the customers from 1300 to 2600 in just over a year from the Series C.
Martin Hauck (32:16)
amazing.
Jim Miller (32:34)
And revenue has gone up 135 % year on year during that time. So even more than the customer adoption piece. And as you said, we've got quite the fan base within the TA community. And a lot of that is focused on the people we have in customer success and customer support who love what they do and love the customers and help with the products and so on. So we've got all of that in place. And now we can just say triple down on
the innovation to drive us forward, broader product suite, deeper product suite, and more innovation. ⁓ It's just an incredibly exciting time to be part of this company.
Martin Hauck (33:13)
Yeah, you've got a whole, whole new treasure chest to play with now to now, I guess, is there some form of like a skunk works there where you're, testing out new, new things and you know, some of these things and never see the light of day and some things do, or you have any interesting stories about stuff like that or.
Jim Miller (33:31)
⁓ I think most things actually see the light of day because one of the beauties of the product is it's almost infinitely configurable. We're putting in functionality that someone wants, but you might not need it as a small startup using Ashby. And you might not need it as a very, very tech focused company here, but if you're in a high volume manufacturing type TA role, that technology might be...
Martin Hauck (33:35)
Okay.
Yeah.
Jim Miller (34:00)
perfect for what you need at the moment. So even in some companies, they have three or four almost different instances of Ashby running in the same company at the same time, all with different elements of functionality built into their process that's all available for them. So there's that side. The treasure chest piece is interesting because we've hardly touched the Series C money.
Martin Hauck (34:23)
Hahaha
Jim Miller (34:25)
And I think Benji's words, our founder at the time was, it's just going to be more of what we've already been doing. And think that's going to be the case moving forward. The innovation piece, we do a lot of talking. We're incredibly curious as a company to TA teams and understanding what they need, what they will feel is useful and why. And then we're building it and then we're testing it internally. ⁓ I'm laughing because every time I talk about this, have to talk about we launched AI assisted resume review.
Martin Hauck (34:55)
Yeah.
Jim Miller (34:55)
And the first thing was, I'd been saying for a long time, I led Global Inbound, it one of my jobs at Google, and I was in the room with the machine learning people, when it was called machine learning, and the lawyers, and they were always like, Jim's team is cheaper because the machine learning stuff will have this operational risk cost to it for legal action and so on. I was like, all right, fine, keep doing what I'm doing. And I was like, no, no, don't, don't build it, it's selective, don't do it. And then they came up with this assistive, non-selective,
resume review functionality. don't know if you've seen it, but they blew my mind and I'm internally and I'm going, don't do this thing. And then they're going, here you go. And I'm like, this is a beautiful thing. This is amazing. And then of course I get to test it. Well, I 1600 resume reviews in a day while doing my day job and my team at Google, their weekly target was 2,500 for a week.
Martin Hauck (35:29)
You
while.
Jim Miller (35:49)
And that's just one piece of all of that stuff running in series to get the compound impact that I was talking about earlier. So that's the fun I have with this. But yeah, they blew my mind with that. So I can talk and hand wave about the thing I would like to see or not like to see what we should do, what we shouldn't do. And then these people just go away and they're like, what about this? Yeah, it's amazing.
Martin Hauck (36:13)
That's cool. That's cool. It's it's a I mean, it's probably a dream gig, right? You've been you've been in recruitment long enough to know and know that that's like your your happy place. But now you get to be at at a company that's building the tool for the profession you love. So I can't imagine.
Jim Miller (36:32)
It is great. The interesting thing is the process versus the technology. I love innovating process and to be in a place where technology enables you to do that is really interesting, but it's also a source of lot of frustration from some of our users that there's no one way to use it. There's no book you can just open and go, oh, I need to do this, this, this, and this. They almost have to be creative in their own right to
Martin Hauck (36:39)
Yeah.
Jim Miller (37:00)
create an amazing process that fits their company in order to get the true very, very best out of it. So I have a lot of fun then also talking to customers and helping them free their minds up for that's how you've always done it. But now you can do this, this or this. What would that solve for you in your business? So it's even more exactly. It's even more of a dream job because of that kind of work.
Martin Hauck (37:19)
Yeah, they start getting light bulbs.
That's amazing.
Jim Miller (37:27)
Yeah, you can probably tell by my fashion that, yeah, I just adore it. ⁓
Martin Hauck (37:31)
No,
no, Well, no, this is this has been really insightful. I mean, kudos, congratulations on the seemingly not necessarily not necessary series D. That's that's wild that you haven't touched the series C. That's that's bananas. But like, no, nothing. I'm nothing but a fan. I there the people people group anytime Ashby comes up, the whole community like rallies around it. They're huge fans.
⁓ and now y'all are doing something really cool and really special for a profession that it can be a grind sometimes. So thank you very much for, for the work and everybody for the work you're doing and the work that everybody actually is doing. So appreciate it.
Jim Miller (38:10)
I just get to talk about it. Everyone else does the hard work. Ready to go somewhere else.
Martin Hauck (38:12)
Yeah,
cool, cool. Any final thoughts, Jim?
Jim Miller (38:19)
I just.
The world is a crazy place at the moment. The, the AI revolution we've talked about and people are very stressed about the work and the jobs and so on. And I think that the first thing everyone should do is to take stock and do a risk assessment on themselves. And then identify the opportunity that they have right now to future proof, but where they work.
Martin Hauck (38:48)
Hmm. Yeah.
Jim Miller (38:50)
and themselves.
Martin Hauck (38:50)
Yeah.
Jim Miller (38:52)
And that takes some due diligence, it takes some research, takes some experimentation, it takes lots of curiosity and conversations. But if you can future-proof yourself and where you work, you will become intensely valuable. If you think about the executives of the company that you work for, they probably don't have as much insight into the technical landscape within your area of expertise as you do.
or even your leader. So if you can take that, elevate it and build the future state recommendation for your company in partnership with other folks in your team, if you can, if you're the leader, then you should really be doing this and owning this yourself. But that's the way to take control and taking control calms that inner seven year old and takes away the stress from your day to day work. And this is not just TA, this is
Martin Hauck (39:36)
Yeah
Yep.
Jim Miller (39:49)
anyone in any team can look at where the work's going, see the opportunities for technology and deployment, see the opportunities for time to be saved, identify the ROI on that, look at Parkinson's law, do all of that work and make a recommendation. The C-level executives are going to come down to your team at some point and ask for it. So if you can be two steps ahead and get ahead and do that work in advance, that's the best way.
to future proof yourself. And of course, if the worst happens, you've built some experience that can get onto your resume to encourage the next company to hire you as somewhat of an expert in this space rather than just a hand waiver like me.
Martin Hauck (40:35)
Amazing. think if we put that last piece of advice on repeat and have some nice calming music, think the whole, you know, there's a ton of people that will probably find a lot of relief from, hearing it from that perspective. Cause no, couldn't, couldn't agree more. Yeah.
Jim Miller (40:51)
you're in TA and you want to know more, I've actually got some resources for you. So first of all, we have an AI landing page on Ashby's homepage and it talks about compliance and legislation and so on. We've got our Ashby's AI tenants and our philosophy. We will share that with you happily so you don't have to build it yourself. Yeah, and we can talk about, I've even got a slide on a deck somewhere that talks about, we have our...
Martin Hauck (41:08)
Hmm. Yeah, you're doing the works for us. Amazing.
Jim Miller (41:18)
⁓ hiring excellence framework and the four core competencies that we learned from TA teams, strategy planning, of attraction evaluation, then stakeholder engagement, candidate experience. Those are the four buckets. How each piece of functionality aligns to those, and you can start to see how you can get that compound impact of these things working in series. Over the whole of your TA process, we can provide all of that to you. You don't even need Ashby, but it's the concepts.
that are there that will really help you. So if you've been lucky enough to be connected to this and have sat through this whole conversation, please feel free to DM me and I'm happy to share resources with you.
Martin Hauck (41:58)
Amazing. No, thanks so much, Jim. Appreciate it. All right. Take care.
Jim Miller (42:01)
Pleasure. Thanks, Martin.