Real Girls, Real AI & Real Talk with Lauren B. Jones

0:00Joel Cheesman: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.

0:25Oh yeah, it's the podcast your lunch lady warns you about. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast, everybody. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined, as always, Chad Sawash is riding shotgun, as we welcome Lauren B. Jones. No relation to I'll Be Sure, by the way. She's the founder and CEO of Leap Advisory Partners and author of Real Girls Roadmap to Mastering AI. Lauren, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Well, I'm super happy to be here. Thank you for having me. And we're happy to have you. For those that don't know you out there, give us kind of a Twitter bio about Lauren. Yep. I'm the founder and CEO of Leap Advisory Partners, as you said.

1:05I have been in the staffing and recruiting industry for almost 30 years. I live on a farm in Northern California with my husband who builds race cars. I build tech stacks. He builds race cars. What kind of race cars? He builds for the BMW series. It's club racing for middle-aged men with too much money and not enough sense. just like we like them.

1:29Joel Cheesman: This is the economy for him. Well, excellent. In Northern California, it's morning for you there. What time is it in California right now? What are you farming? It's 7-11. Yeah, the roosters went off at 4.30. So you've been up for a while. So it's all good. Oh my God. I've been up for a while. Things I never thought I'd hear on one of our podcasts is the roosters go off at 4.30. Thank you for that, Lauren. It only took about 10 years of podcasting to finally hear the roosters. It's funny. We have Portuguese roosters here and they sleep in. So I love that. They drink a nice cappuccino before they get up in the morning there in Portugal.

2:06Apparently, I wish mine would drink a cappuccino.

2:10Joel Cheesman: So we've got a book that we're going to talk about and we'll get to that. But the grander issue, talking about AI, talking about we've seen all of these reports, all of these articles, blah, blah, blah, talking about adoption, not being able to reach ROI, all these different things. And I mean, really, we're still kind of like in the R &D phase of AI for companies that are out there. Should we really expect at this point to have it all figured out? I mean, that's what it feels like. Whenever you hear it on the news or you read it in an article, it's like, why haven't these companies figured this out?

2:44Joel Cheesman: And it's like, this is some new shit still, right? Right. It's very new. However, it's very new. I've been traveling the country the last four years trying to, you know, convince owners, leaders of, you know, hiring organizations that this is real. This isn't one that you can sit out. As a matter of fact, I open every keynote with who here knows how to use the internet, you know, inevitably everybody raised their hand. And I'm like, that's how many people need to know how to utilize these tools. And I feel like we're finally, you know, starting to see some waking up of I should probably pay attention.

3:18And so not having everything perfect because it's still the wild, wild west from a policy and legislation and from that perspective. But you do need to wake up, get organized, find out how you're going to implement this and get really serious about educating your people. How do we do that? And what level makes sense? My dad knows the Internet, but I'm not sure he's figured out email yet. I mean, to what degree do you need to know the Internet to be sufficient? So I think you need to know basic capability. If you're a CEO running an organization, how do you set the vision for an organization where you have no idea of the capability of some of these tools?

3:55And so at the very minimum, educate yourself on on the fundamental capabilities of some of these tools and some of the inherent risks. And there are risks just like, you know, the whole software industry in staffing and recruiting has evolved over time. And with every, you know, new buzzword or buzz technology that comes out, there is risk, inherent risk. And so you need to have your organization set up appropriately to be able to take those risks in a controlled environment. But you also need to know basic capability. And I feel like that's where some leadership is absolutely missing the mark.

4:34Joel Cheesman: I mean, it's hard, especially with all these tools. And you're trying to lead a company. Very noisy. You're trying to lead a company or you're trying to lead a talent organization. Let's just say that. I remember back in the day, the whole internet thing, back in the early internet days, there were people on teams that literally just, they took their own time because they dug into the technology. We're starting to see that on some talent teams. And the leaders are pressing for that. Who wants to do this? Who wants to work with Claude? We've got Claude co-work. Who wants to work with that? Do this.

5:06Joel Cheesman: Do you see those teams actually making a lot of progress with regard to the use? I mean, they're just playing with it right now. But do you start to see that they're making more progress in the use and adoption area? I mean, 75 % of, at least on the staffing and recruiting side, 75 % of firms say that they use AI. Only 15 % of those organizations are actually seeing ROI. Why? Largely because we don't ask the question, what problem are we trying to solve for? We're just doing AI for the sake of doing AI. And I think there's the lack of direction and what is it that we want to accomplish? We sort of give it a framework.

5:45Look at your organization and determine three things. eliminate it, automate it, or AI. And of that, you know, what is a really human, where can we spend the most time human to human? And you don't have firms that look at their organization like that regularly. They're doing this way too infrequently. And I think that's part of the problem.

6:05Joel Cheesman: Well, isn't part of the problem too, that they expect the entire thing to be automated as opposed to looking at chunks. I mean, literally looking at the tasks that are being performed and chunking out, okay, what tasks, identifying which tasks just really suck and can be automated, like interview scheduling, right? You know, those types of things. I had a six-figure recruiter in one of our trainings who's reformatting resumes three hours out of the day. That's bananas. You know, that's banana sandwich that needs to stop right now. What are you doing? You need to look at it two ways. Are your people and your technology doing one of two things?

6:41Are they revenue generating or revenue preserving? What activity are they doing to do one of those two things? And then ask your people what gets in their way every day. If you just send out a survey, that one question survey, we did it for, I mean, we do it for all of our firms that we go in and audit. But, you know, most recently we had a 90 person firm, which that's not, it's not a huge firm, but we got all 90 back because it's one, all 90 people, responded to the survey because it's one freaking question. And not only did it give us a roadmap for the entire year of all of these repetitive tasks.

7:16So it gave us this AI build roadmap, but we found out three branches had wifi problems that cost them$30 to fix. So, you know, just asking a single question might keep you really, really well informed about where there's opportunity for automation or AI.

7:32Joel Cheesman: If you don't have wifi people use your word for God's sakes, use your damn words. Use your damn words. We're seeing stories where the people are way ahead of the organization in terms of adopting some of this stuff, right? Like they're on their own with multiple platforms and AI learning new stuff. They're very curious about it. And the organization is still in a meeting like, okay, how are we going to like slow roll AI into our organization? I assume that like introduces a lot of challenges with that dynamic in corporate America. What are you saying and what kind of tips do you give companies to adapt to this new reality?

8:09So policy, education, enablement in that order. Have a policy, whether you're an individual user, have a personal policy, have your safe word for your family. I mean, it's a$38 billion fraud and scam industry right now with AI. Have a company policy. Give your people some bumpers of what they can and can't do, especially in an environment or an industry where PII sort of rules our world. There's a ton of vulnerability and risk there. So, you know, policy, education, educate your people appropriately. You know, teach them the risks of these tools. A lot of times right now we're just teaching, you know, here's how you prompt.

8:49Okay, we've moved past just prompting. Now we're context engineering. Educate your people appropriately and then enable them with the right consistent tools. Something like 80 some odd percent of small businesses are Microsoft shops. And yet, you know, many of them that we go into aren't using Copilot at all because they've heard that it's subpar and it sucks. And is it as great as Claude? No, but it's a perfectly capable tool for your frontline people. The education piece I'm interested in, because if you go back to the Internet analogy, like email was kind of easy to teach. You get letters in the mail.

9:24It's kind of the same thing. But with this, there's a YouTube channel for everything. There are tools out there. There's LinkedIn learning. There are so many things. Like, where do you push companies to go to do the education part? Or are they doing it in-house? Of course, I push them to my organization. Duh. Because I'm a selfish salesperson.

9:45Joel Cheesman: I like she's upfront and transparent, Cheeseman. I like that. We like that. We like that. Obviously, I would push them to us. But there are plenty of free resources. I mean, Claude, in and of itself, has an academy. I'd say Copilot's probably a little shy. but there are a ton of Microsoft options out there, particularly on YouTube. There are a lot of opportunities, or I don't know, maybe just sit down with AI and ask it, how do I use you? Genius. I always ask, how are you going to kill mankind? But that's just me. I want to know the secret. I don't know how it's going to go down. Because they're going to share the whole game plan with Cheeseman.

10:21Joel Cheesman: So we talk about policy. I mean, our government doesn't even have a policy right now? Well, they do. The policy is no policy. So it's like usually governments set up kind of like the test ground, right? And what to think about with regard to policy, standard operating procedures, those types of things, guardrails, whatnot. And there's really none of that to be had. So are we looking at the EU and other countries to be able to really try to start to understand guidelines, especially in an era when we have all of these large language models, these agents jailbreaking and actually hacking other companies, right?

11:02Joel Cheesman: I mean - Cats and dogs living together. Yeah. So we talk about policy and that's great to have, but you take a look at where we're at right now, it feels like we're way past that. I mean, can we put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. No, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, but there are some operational things you can just intelligent, basic operational things you can do to protect yourself, like not letting your people just use their own ancillary tools without any, you know, oversight. That's silliness. Now you've got your PII everywhere. So, you know, you're, and then, you know, if something happens, it's like plugging a boat that's sinking.

11:40You don't know which hole to plug. So So making sure that your PII isn't everywhere. But you can also look at some of the states here in the U.S. that are, you know, California, New York. You know, those are the two having a contest to see who could be more difficult to work in. But there are some. Massachusetts is coming in hot, trying to be difficult. But there there is some guidance there. And the two biggest areas of vulnerability are bias and PII. So if you know that, right, there are things that you can do to protect yourself. So write your policies. You know, we wrote, you know, a very, very basic framework.

12:18You could go to Jasper, Jasper.ai. They have a perfectly out of good, out of the box, you know, basic policy. Haven't heard that in a long time. Remember Jasper.ai? That's Jeeves' brother, isn't it? Isn't Jasper and Jeeves related to each other somewhere? Jasper and Jeeves, I'm sure.

12:33Joel Cheesman: Jasper was big at one time and then, you know, overshadowed by ChatGPT and then everything else just kind of like landslide underneath it. That's true. Yeah. I mean, Jasper was the first one that understood tonality, which is why he was so popular in the marketing space. And now that, you know, you've got Grok. No tonality whatsoever. He is so sarcastic and snarky and I love him. That's our love language on the show here, actually. Sarcasm. Snark. Yeah. Lauren, you wrote a book. Tell us about it. And why did you write it? Well, you know, writing a book about AI is a little intimidating because as soon as you write it, it's out of date.

13:13And I think we're on our third iteration of, you know, updating it. I wrote it, though, to put a framework of, you know, how women protect themselves, how they protect their families, helping them understand some of if you've ever read the book, How Women Rise. We have, you know, we have some behavior like rumination, overcomplicating things that we tend to do in the business world. And we're doing that same thing with AI. We're asking really good questions. Is it safe? Am I going to destroy the planet? Is it cheating? Women are just asking different questions than men. And so when I did a little bit of research on this, I felt compelled to write about it.

13:55Joel Cheesman: So talk a little bit about the research then. Jump into the research. What did you find that actually just stuck out and was either good percentages in data or very bad? It started with, again, me traveling the country, training and talking to executives and just noticing behavior from women, either sitting in the back, not asking questions, being exceedingly reserved, very, very skeptical. And so when I saw this firsthand, that's when I started looking at McKinsey and Gartner and looking at what women might be up against now, because a lot of women do part-time roles, you know, they may be caring for a family.

14:32And so you look at those jobs, and those are very repetitive jobs of receptionist, you can have a voice agent, you know, There are a lot of jobs that women traditionally hold that are going to be consumed by AI. So now, you know, AI is not going to replace you. Someone that knows how to use it will. I wrote the book to make sure that women knew how to use these tools and that they had something that would guide them as to how to do it safely and maybe give them a little bit of confidence that the planet's not going to be on fire. It's not, you know, raining hellfire if we use these tools. And it's certainly, most certainly not cheating.

15:09Who's the audience for the book? Who do you hope picks it up and reads it? Well, I hope every career-aged woman picks it up to read it. I hope every woman that is at home taking care of a family or managing a PTA budget. These tools can be amazing for your personal life as well. I want to teach them to think entirely differently. It's also for men because we built the Real AI Agency, which is our training course, because men were knocking down our door. we want to be trained too. And what we try and help everyone see and think differently, you've got to think about the negative space. What in my day, I have a brain dump agent who would have thought at the end of the day, I don't know about you, but right before I go to bed, everything floods through my brain.

15:55All of the things I didn't do, I should do, right? And so now I just talk into my handy dandy little claw dispatch. And I have a little agent in the morning that gives me, here's your personal to-do list, and here's your work to-do list. It's just about thinking entirely differently. What are the things that take up my brain space? And so, male or female, we want to teach you how to think like an AI architect. With me, it's what I ate and drank the day and what I shouldn't have eaten and drank and what I should have. And it's usually what I shouldn't have eaten. Yeah, it's usually, yeah, it's not usually good for me.

16:27Now you can build yourself a nutritionist. You want a macros counter. I've I've got a travel agent. She does my entire agenda. I need a copycat recipe book for Taco Bell items. That's what I really need, Lauren. Let's rock. Let's party. If you can write a job description, you can write an agent. And so we certainly can make your Taco Bell agent.

16:49Joel Cheesman: I don't think anybody needs a recipe for exploding diarrhea cheese. Mexican pizza recipe. Yes. So we've seen over the last 30 plus years, I mean, humans have always resisted. change. And this change is coming much faster than most. The internet came fast, but it still has not, it's not coming as fast as this change into automation and agents and AI. So when you're writing the book and you're talking about women overthinking things, right? I mean, I think women overthink things because they're much smarter than us dumb men. We just don't overthink because we don't have the capacity to do that. So it's much easier for us, keep it simple, stupid.

17:30Joel Cheesman: But at the end of the day, if you're overthinking things and you're not adopting, you're getting in your own way. How do you get the reader out of their own way? Right. A confused mind does nothing. One of the best quotes I've ever heard. And so what I want to do is unwind the confusion. You don't need to be confused. Stop overcomplicating it for the love of God. Take one task a day, one task a day that takes up your brain space and make a determination as to whether or not you can automate that, you know, either with an agent or automation. And I think you'll find when you start asking yourself that question, honestly, from macros nutritionist to a travel agent to a brain dump agent, we have an agent that we have like a braggadocious agent that follows your accomplishments at work so that you can continue to build your resume.

18:21There's so many applications for these things. And we just don't think or ask ourselves regularly, male and female, what takes up our brain space? And where do we do our best thinking? And what are the topics where we do our best thinking? How do we do that the majority of the day? And then what are the tasks that are taking up that really great, you know, thinking time? You have children, as Chad and I do as well. I know there are a lot of parents out there struggling with, what's this AI thing mean to my children's future? What kind of skills should they be learning? What sort of advice do you give parents of kids of both sexes, what they should be teaching, what kind of environment they should be putting their children in to thrive in the future?

19:02I think we need really good reasoning skills, which seem to be a lost art with some of our younger generation, and really good kind of common sense. But the reasoning skills is one that I think is really important. We also have to educate our children on the dangers. And, you know, I've got an entire chapter on safety. So I I think we need to help our kids understand what to do, what not to do and what to look out for. Start with that kind of personal policy that that's the best place to start.

19:34Joel Cheesman: This is interesting, though, because we're looking at society as a whole. We take a look at social media, the impact of social media. Instacart DoorDash can arrive on my door. Right. So I don't have to go out and actually see people. Right. I can just stay in my jams. Then I've got my phone in my hand all the time. And if you're ever walking out, you see everybody not looking at each other, not saying hi, just looking at their phone, watching TikTok. Who the hell knows what's going on? Right. So when AI is introduced into this, it takes all of that. Right. You're just talking about having somebody plan a vacation for you.

20:07Joel Cheesman: I don't even have to call anybody for that anymore. Right. I can just have my AI do it. But what about all of these different AIs that are personal AIs? their friends, right? As we start, and to Joel's point, you know, we're seeing adults that are getting hooked into these things. Kids are, and we're saying, I think as Facebook just, our meta just got nailed for over, you know,$500 million with regard to their negative impact through Instagram. This just seems to be snowballing. I don't know that AI is going to help any of this. So taking what you just said, how do you take that even further to ensure that no more harm can happen from AI since it's already happening through all these different levels I just talked about?

20:53Again, I think it is proper education. So I've got my youngest daughter's in law school, right? So immediately her first year, she's in her third year. That's a flex, right there.

21:03Joel Cheesman: That's a flex. I love that. I got a teacher and a lawyer. But my first question or first week of law school is like, what's the sitch with AI? And her professors were split down the middle. She's got half that really want to teach them how to use these tools so that they are in a really good space to essentially not be threatened by them. And then another 50 percent of professors who are like, absolutely not. Don't even touch it. Don't even talk about it. Don't sniff about it in here. And so I and I think we're going to battle with that for a little while. And so my response to that in an uncertain environment is to create certainty through a proper education.

21:39And I think, again, kids need to know the risks. They need to know what a predator looks like. They need to know this is not a therapist. You know, you've got some very, very sad stories very early on about some of these tools. And so, you know, this isn't one that parents can sit out either. Much like, you know, social media wasn't one you should be sitting out. We have very stringent rules for our girls growing up. You know, at 28 and 25, it was like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were the things that we battled with. But we've talked very openly. So I think transparency with your kids is super important.

22:18Do not stick your head in the ground on this one. Chad, I don't know why you look at me when you talk about sitting around in your pajamas at home all day. I don't know why you chose me to sort of stare at when you said that. Don't stand up, geez, man.

22:29Joel Cheesman: Do not stand up. No, no, nobody wants that. Lauren, you've been around almost 30 years, almost as long as we've been around. Is AI making recruitment better? I think it will. I think that there's, I think it will. I think there's a lot of slop. You know, as a matter of fact, we've got an agent called the Stop the Slop agent. There's just a lot of sloppy content out there. You saw, I don't know if you, there was a news story the other weekend where a professor put Madagascar in his, in white font on a test. And 33 out of the 35 kids didn't even edit, you know, their submission for the final. Only two got a grade, everybody else failed.

23:18Well, therein tells me they weren't taught basics on what AI can do, what it's not capable of, that human intervention and human oversight is fundamental to this tool. So we can't just, again, this isn't one we can sit out, but this isn't one where we have to trust but verify. You can't just send all of this slop out into the world and expect to get a good response. Garbage in is garbage out. And so when people say AI doesn't work, no, you don't work. And, you know, I want to. I don't work. You don't work. You don't work. You know, I want to sass back. You can't handle the truth. You know, if you put slop in, you're going to get slop out.

24:01You can't go to AI and talk to it like Google. you need to set up your set up an operating system. That's what we teach, you know, that you've got to set up an operating system. And I'd say nine out of the 10 of the companies that we go into global instructions aren't set up preferences aren't set up memories aren't turned on how do you make something more until you wouldn't hire a person and tell them write a blog for me, right? And then go, Okay, bye. You wouldn't do that with a person. Why would you do that with AI? And so it's this you get a lazy output when you put lazy in. And I think teaching our kids that, you know, what you put in is what you get out.

24:39And again, human oversight is a requirement. We'll be in a better space. But until such time, we're going to continue to see hot frickin garbage out there.

24:48Joel Cheesman: Hot frickin garbage is policy education enablement. That's to stop the slop. And this is Lauren B. Jones. The name of the book, Real Girls Roadmap to Mastering AI. Lauren, how can somebody connect with you and or, oh, I don't know, maybe go buy the book? Well, the book is available on Amazon. You can find me as the goat leader on LinkedIn, which is probably another podcast because we live on a farm and we've got goats. But I am the goat leader. It's a double entendre, greatest of all time. And I have a goat farm, but you can find me under the goat leader on LinkedIn. Excellent. Forget the goats.

25:24The rooster woke me up at 4 a.m. You're welcome, world. You're welcome, world. Chad, that's another one in the can. We out.

25:33Joel Cheesman: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad. The Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout-outs of people you don't even know. And yet, you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar. Blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com.

26:23Joel Cheesman: Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out.