Decoding the C-Suite: Part 5 The Market

0:17Hi there and welcome to Decoding the C-Suite, a five-part mini-series from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI. Over the series, I've been talking to five senior leaders at Smart Recruiters, seven months on from their acquisition by SAP, decoding how each function around the leadership table thinks about AI. We've covered the thesis, the people, the money, and the product, which brings us to the final lens. Today, we look at the market. We're three years into the AI boom, and the marketing noise has never been louder. Everything is AI powered, every vendor makes the same claims, and buyers are struggling to tell substance from hype.

1:02Steve Hardy leads marketing at Smart Recruiters, and he's unusually candid about all of it, from why he tells his own sales team to stop demoing to what he calls AI washing, and why the real conversation should start with business priorities rather than features. Whether you're buying technology or just trying to get your organisation to see through the noise, this last episode in the series will really sharpen your thinking. This is Decoding the C-Suite, Episode 5, The Market. Hi, Steve. Great to be talking to you. Yeah, likewise. Looking forward to this conversation, Matt. Let's talk about the market.

1:38What's going on in the market at the moment? Where do you see the gap between the challenges that your customers have and some of the ways that AI has perhaps been being marketed. Yeah, interesting. So what's going on in the market? Have you heard about this thing called AI? I was laughing just the other day. It feels like 10 years ago, do you remember when everything was green? We're greenwashing everything. Now we're kind of AI washing everything. So we're kind of like three years into this AI bubble, if you like. And people are now, buyers are now really starting to wrestle with what are the very practical applications?

2:26And most importantly, what are the real business outcomes of AI? We've gone past the experimentation. We've gone past the trials. We've gone past the pilots. And people are starting to say, okay, well, what's the real payoff here? So I think the gap that we're certainly seeing is we have to shift our go-to-market motion, how we market, how we sell, how we support, how we enable our partner ecosystem to be able to really focus on reality rather than hype. So what is the change management that we need to put in place to really drive AI adoption in an organization? What are the different processes and workflows that have to either change or be adopted to really drive AI in the organization.

3:32So we're really focusing now on moving beyond the hype, proving the real value versus just getting attention, let's say. If you're setting yourself in the buyer position here, what would your advice be to people about cutting through all of the noise? Because it is absolutely overwhelming in terms of the marketing noise that's out there. How would you cut through it? It's interesting because so many of our conversations with buyers, they want to start with a demo, right? Show me the product. Show me what you can do. Show me the features. Can you do this? And my advice often to our sellers and to our to our reps is stop, right?

4:17Really pair back, understand what the business priorities are, understand what the challenges are. What are we trying to address? What are we trying to fix? And I'm not even talking about hiring business problems, right? I'm not talking about how we accelerate time to hire or how we improve the candidate experience. I'm talking about the big business issues that the C-suite is really motivated by. How do we grow our business? How do we expand into new territories? How do we take opportunities into new markets? How do we reduce operating expenses? If we can align investments with some of those big mission critical priorities, then I think that we can be much, much more successful.

5:03So my advice to any buyer is don't get hung up on features and specs and seeing the demo, really go back and inspect what your business priorities are first and start there. And then we can have a much more meaningful conversation about how we can help address some of those priorities. That's really, really useful advice because it has always been the kind of tradition in this market that you look at the demo, you look at what it does, does it do everything that we need it to? But with everything moving so quickly, including the features and the products that the vendors have, it just becomes not irrelevant, but just so much less important.

5:43Yeah. I mean, it's funny, you know, one of our, I'll talk about marketing speak, you know, for a second. One of our most popular call to actions is get a demo, right? So people come to our website just to click the demo. But at Smart Recruiters, we're literally an innovation machine, right? We release new capabilities every single month. Since over the past year, we've had 126 new features, capabilities, new products that we've launched into the marketplace, which is 170 % more than we did in the prior year. So we're just accelerating the pace of innovation. So you're absolutely right. And that's almost why buyers really need to focus on what their business issues are, because you'll never keep up with all of the different features.

6:35It's been actually really interesting to see how our customers have responded to that pace of innovation. It was only 18 months ago that we shifted from a quarterly release cycle to a monthly release cycle. And a lot of our customers were saying, no, that's too fast. Slow down. We need time to look at the new capabilities, understand what changes we need to make internally. And every month is just going to be too fast. Now, hundreds of them are showing up on our webinar every single month. Our new feature releases, release emails are the most opened emails that we send because people are excited about the new capabilities that we're delivering.

7:22So I think there's a innovation kind of spurs curiosity and intrigue and people become very, very excited about what is possible. Drilling into what you're saying there about get a demo, because that's always been the kind of the big marketing metric in this sector. In fact, any part of the tech sector. We're moving to a place where it's all about trust, isn't it? It's kind of like, how much do I trust that this vendor is going to be able to work with me to do the things that I need to do to develop with me? How do you deal with that as a kind of a marketing challenge in terms of how do you sort of build that trust through the marketing strategy that you have?

8:02Yeah, you know, I kind of describe myself as a marketer with a capital M, right? So it's less about the tactics and the actions and data sheets and websites, etc. etc. Marketing is really about every single thing that we touch that faces off into the market. So that is a lot of those traditional marketing tactics. It's also about making sure that our sales team have the right messages and the right tools and the right sales pitch, if you like. It's about making sure that our now massively expanded partner network is enabled to sell and to implement. And it's about making sure that they have the trust and the resources ready to be able to make them successful and our product successful as well.

8:54So the bottom line is, from a marketing responsibility perspective, it's really important that all of those things are working together, are really aligned, that we're telling a transparent, honest story that's relevant to our buyers. And a lot of that is kind of go-to-market focused, right? How we show up in front of a customer, but it all fundamentally comes back to, do we have a really great product that does what it says and that we deliver on time and that we fix issues. And I feel really confident that smart recruiters now backed by the resources and scale of SAP is in a good place to be able to support that.

9:47If we do all those things, then I think that that goes a good way to helping establish trust with the market, with our customers. How does the integration with SAP differentiate you from the rest of the market? Well, we've gone from being a best-of-breed leading hiring platform to being a critical part of a much broader, not just an HCM suite, but a broader ERP business suite that has finance and supply chain. and all kinds of capabilities that really does provide us now with a one-stop shop. And there's some very specific benefits that SAP have already brought, even just in the past seven months.

10:43almost immediately after the acquisition, we took responsibility for more than, well, I think it's about 150, 160 engineers from the SAP HCM team. So we literally doubled our engineering resources overnight. As a private company, we couldn't possibly have done that, So suddenly we have the scale and the resource to be able to do more. I talked a little bit about partners and the partner network. At Smart Recruiters, we had a couple of hundred partners of various different sources, different types. Now we have more than 4 ,000 partners in the SAP network. A thousand of those have already become accredited to sell Smart Recruiters.

11:35So there's just scale on a level that as a relatively small private company, we could never really imagine. Plus as well, you know, on a cultural level, SAP people are just really great people to work with. So we found that coming together as two teams has been really powerful. And we're just out there, you know, trying to solve the biggest problems, working to help our customers be more successful. What sort of challenges has that thrown up? Because marketing function, going through change, what does that sort of throw up? Good question. I kind of go back 18 months, nearly two years. When I joined Smart Recruiters, my initial priorities were around really rebuilding the brand.

12:28We had a great band, lots of trust in the marketplace, but we needed to be bolder and more visible in the marketplace. Launching Winson, which is our AI companion, and then really kind of driving the team. And all of those things, driving the team to build pipelines specifically, which had become a little bit anemic. And all of those things were with the goal of a successful exit. selling the business, driving towards an IPO, which we didn't really think was going to be on the cards. And frankly, if you look back two years, we've achieved all of those things. Our brand is incredibly well-respected in the marketplace.

13:05And now with SAP, it has even more power. Candidly, we built more pipeline and we continue to build more pipeline every single week than I could ever imagine. And the team are really excited about the opportunity that SAP provides for them, both at a personal level, you know, to develop their career. So what we're working on now is how do we take what we've built and then how do we amplify that within SAP? And there's lots of opportunities for us to do that. You know, SAP have an amazing event platform, for example, between SAP Sapphire and SAP Connect, where literally thousands of practitioners and leaders come together to learn best practices and vision and roadmap of the entire portfolio.

13:58So we're now part of that, which again, we couldn't possibly have done on our own. SAP have a tremendous brand. We're here in New York, SAP sponsor some of the greatest teams around the world. We could never have had access to that as well, which again, provides a great experience for our customers. So for me, it all just comes down to scale and opportunity, which has just been opened up by the acquisition. How does that kind of affect focus? Because as you said, over the last two years, you've had a very, with a product launch and everything, very strong story to tell that has been told very, very loudly.

14:37Then there was the acquisition and now we're kind of at the next stage. Where does your focus go to keep that continuity, I guess, but move things forward? Well, as a leader of the function, my number one priority is always pipeline. My number one goal is to create opportunities for our sales team. And whether my team are in brand or whether in demand generation, whether they're in enablement or in customer success, I just try and keep them focused on making sure that everything they're doing on a daily basis contributes to us driving new opportunities for our customers. And I think it's going pretty well.

15:24I think we're doing a good job of keeping the team focused and on track. I want to expand a bit just to talk about marketing in this space in general, because what I'm noticing is there is a big focus on features and use cases and things that can be done. But people aren't standing up on stage in conferences or plastering it all over exhibition booths and saying, by the way, this is really complicated. And it takes time and it takes a lot of integration. So do you think that marketing is being honest about the size of the challenge? And how do you approach that from a smart recruiter's perspective?

16:06Good question. I would like to say that the smart recruiters and the SAP team are grounded in truth and reality in everything that we put out into the marketplace. And I think that's super important for buyers to understand. We spent a lot of time with our customers to try and understand the material value and the material benefit that our technology is bringing to their businesses. So since we launched Winston 18 months ago, Winston is now used in nearly 60 % of hiring processes with our customers. So just adoption alone shows that it is valued by customers. What that means is that we're cutting out about 95 % of the manual tasks involved in key parts of the recruiting stage.

17:08So what I'm encouraging my teams to do is to really focus on facts, data, evidence that we can share with our prospects. And then the tools and resources and playbooks of how they can get the same results in their businesses too. What have the customer stories coming back been like? Is there anything in there that surprised you about how people are using the system or the value that they've got from it? I'm always surprised or maybe more in awe of what customers are doing and how they're using our products and the benefits that they're getting. One particular customer that we'd been working with was trying to roll out a much more intuitive conversational experience on their career site.

17:56and candidly had been working with a competitor of ours for a number of years and had really grand plans of rolling this out worldwide on every single career site in every single location that they had and frankly had taken a long time and not made as much progress as they wanted to with challenges on integrations with multiple different platforms so we scaled that back basically said okay let's start with just one location and we managed to get Winston chat available and up and running in literally four hours on one location. And as a result of that successful test, they started to roll out more aggressively.

18:35So I mean, that for me is just a perfect example of how you can be really successful with AI without totally overhauling the entire system, but just taking it step by step and making small incremental progress. And I think that's really interesting as well, because that kind of flies against the way people think about technology, particularly in the HR space. And it's deconstructing beliefs that have been there for a really long time that have been learned through probably horrendous processes and things like that. I want to talk about the educational side of things, because there are things that AI makes possible in HR and talent acquisition that I'm not sure people even realize yet.

19:16And I'm sure that with your products, they're not being used to their full potential. How do you kind of fill that gap? How do you really help people appreciate what AI can do and the real value that it can bring to a business? Yeah, it has to happen on so many different levels, Matt, candidly. At our events, we try to spend less time on big keynotes and thought leadership and more time doing tabletop exercises and workshops and actually whiteboarding solutions with customers. On our website, we put a lot of effort and energy into calculators and toolkits and playbooks that are much more focused on the how versus just kind of higher thought leadership type content.

20:10We spend a significant amount of time and energy and resources in enablement, taking subject matter experts within our organization and making sure that our sales teams, that our SEs, our solution consultants are up to date, have accurate information that they can then pass on to their customers as well. We have communities. I mean, it's an all-in integrated set of activities to really help and support customers through their buying journey, through their onboarding journey, as well as afterwards. Plus, we've got in-product capabilities as well, which are helping guide users through the solution as well.

20:57So always more that we can do. We've got lots of feedback loops to ensure that we've got our pulse on what our customers are telling us. But I'm feeling pretty good about how we're responding to customer needs to help them get the best out of our products. A bit that we haven't actually talked about yet when it comes to trust is from a talent acquisition perspective, these systems are being used by job seekers. And employers are kind of fundamentally changing the way that their recruitment process works and what it looks like to the people that they're trying to hire. Do you think there's a responsibility from the vendors through marketing to actually build the trust with candidates and job seekers and people who are using the system from that side?

21:46Yeah, I absolutely do. And, you know, building transparent systems, having, you know, making sure that we're compliant with things like the EU AI Act, making sure that we're providing information literally at the point of hire, so that as somebody, a candidate is in the process of hiring, is going to be really important. And there's the world of hiring changes beyond recognition. So we're doing all of those things and more. We have an AI council which works with, which brings together individuals across the organization, legal, product, as well as experts from SAP as well, who's really on top of all of the changes that have happened from a legislative perspective.

22:39and then making sure that we're putting that out there in front of our candidates. I do think there's probably more to do from vendors to educate candidates. And that's certainly something that in partnership with SAP that we will be looking at. Final question for you. What does good leadership look like in an AI-driven world? Oh, that's a good question. Um, does it really change in AI, right? In an AI driven world, does good leadership really change? Uh, I'm not sure. You know, I think good leadership is all about setting the right priorities, uh, making sure that you're really focused on the most impactful activities that relate to, to business success.

23:25Um, being human, humane, you're having, you know, the interests of your people at heart. In the world of AI, I think what changes is it's critically important that everybody is using AI, is familiar with the tools, is AI competent and AI literate. It is, I believe, fundamentally changed the way that business operates and the way that we work and the very nature of work. So it's important as leaders to be on top of that. And that means taking time, clearing time for your people to be able to learn new skills and capabilities. But I'm not so sure that good leadership really does change in AI. I think it's just good leadership is good leadership period.

24:23Steve, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks, Matt. That was great. That was Steve Hardy. And that brings Decoding the C-Suite to a close. Five leaders, five lenses, and one company navigating enormous change in real time. If there's a single thread running through every conversation, it's the one I started the series with. The organisations getting this right are the ones where the whole leadership team is aligned, curious and honest about the discomfort of change. My thanks to everyone at Smart Recruiters for their time and for their candor. If you enjoyed this miniseries, there's a lot more where it came from.

25:01Recruiting Future publishes twice a week, with conversations exploring the future of talent from every angle. Subscribe or follow wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Matt Alder, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Recruiting Future.

25:25Thank you.