Brainfood Live On Air - Ep411 - Employer Branding in the Era of AI Generated Career Sites - Who Owns the Story?

0:04I just had a wonderful tour set up by the company that essentially invited me to speak here. They just hired a driver. They actually seconded one of their team members to be my driver all weekend. Can you get us an admin? Yeah. And they basically hired the tour guide for me this morning. So they gave me a really interesting tour of the old town here in Sarajevo. And it was great to have a chat with them. young guy, Benjamin, only 19 years old, sort of doing his summer job. And not only did we have a very educational tour around some of the historical sites here, but also, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to him about careers and stuff, you know, like how to think about what he's doing, because he was very inquisitive about the work I was doing.

0:48And as a young kid, I'm actually very interested in how teenagers are thinking about work today. you know how are they thinking about this world where they're hearing about AI they're hearing about cost of living crisis are they hearing about job displacement like

1:04Hung Le: what are they doing they do know they do know you know I told you I have grandkids and my grandson is my oldest grandchild is in high school now believe it or not and he he actually reached out to me, Gigi, I need your help. Because he had to write a paper or something at school. And so he was asking me all kinds of questions. I told him to be a plumber. That's my advice lately. Not a bad... He's like, no way. Not a bad call, because it's something called basically a novel configuration. Well, basically, there's a non-standard way to wire up a house and a non-standard way to to plumb a house. And this changes with every house.

1:48It changes with all the regs and it changes with individual interpretation of the regs and the house. So it means that most plumbing and most wiring is non-standard, which ultimately means that a human being is often the better option to fix it than a robot. So yeah, be plumbers. Maybe that's a good idea. Folks, let me know whether we want to be a bit more future focused in future brain food lives because should we get more teenagers on the panel and get their thoughts on what the world of work looks like? I'm increasingly aware that I'm losing touch with the younger generation simply because I'm getting older.

2:26And I'm now like 25 years into my career, 30 years into my career. That's a long way past sort of being that first, second year person in work. I just wondered whether that would be of any interest to anybody. Let me know in the comments whether that's something you want us to do a little bit more of. Anyway, welcome to Brain Food Live on Air, bringing it to you every Friday, no fail. It is episode 411. It is going to be a great show. I've got Deb Andrichuk. How do you pronounce your name, Deb? You've got to give me one more time. Andrichuk. Andrichuk.

2:59Hung Le: It's okay. My own family didn't ever know how to spell it. I still don't think they do. So don't. Yeah. They can't spell it. They can't say it. that's it it's a tough one but um great to have you on the show um and uh whilst we um whilst we let me just do the av and checks firstly on this uh firstly uh audio folks um can you hear and see me in uh crowdcast let me know in the chat whether that's okay um and yeah i think there's also captions which is good stuff um happening here uh we should we should be live streaming here on linkedin even though these days i'm not even sure whether linkedin works for me anymore Let me know whether the audio and visual is fine on LinkedIn.

3:39Let me know in the comments there whether you can hear and see me. Okay, we have some people saying, thank you, Rob. Very good. Confirming both, which is good stuff. Okay, Deb, why don't you introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do? Yeah, sure.

3:53Hung Le: I'm Deb Anderchuk. I am the head of client strategy and growth at Jovio. And for those of you that don't know who Jovio is, we are an adjunctive platform. We help candidates make their way through the hiring journey and we're helping employers convert more of that talent. I have been in this space for over 25 years. So weird to say out loud. And I've sat all around the desk. So I've been vendor. I've been agency. Agency was bought by Shaker. I went client side and now I'm pulling it all together. the tech, the media, you know, all the things, candidate experience and able to use that here at Dovio.

4:35Hung Le: It's been a fun ride so far. Yeah, it's great that they have you on board, actually. I think it's a very good hiring policy by them to get experienced practitioners with that breadth of kind of coverage across the domain to basically be able to put the bridge between a sort of vendor and customer. I think that strength of understanding is going to be a real differentiating factor. Jovio, by the way, great supporter of Brain Food this year. You may know them as a kind of a programmatic advertising solution, but they've massively expanded in scope over the last 12, 18 months or so. And really, they are now a product that is there to help companies anywhere before the ATS.

5:17That's probably fair to say, isn't it? So if you're a talent attraction at scale and you need to have an optimized solution, particularly one that is going AI native, Jovial is a product for you to look at. And in fact, the topic of today is very relevant because Jovial actually have sort of solutions that address career site development, don't they, Deb? Yeah. And topic of today's conversation is exactly this. You know, what is, everyone is becoming more capable of producing things. I remember back in the day to create a website, you need to hire a web agency to do it. It will cost you like tens of thousands of pounds to do it and several weeks to produce something that you would not be able to iterate on, change.

6:05And you're basically signing a five-year contract for them to do change management and updates, content and stuff like this. World has totally changed. Now anybody can produce a website through vibe coding. Therefore, anybody can produce a talent-orientated website what does that mean for us in recruiting and how does that change things like talent attraction and we're going to bring some guests on to talk us about this but i want to also bring on ashley first because i want to explore exactly sort of what the solution is that jovial have provided for for this circumstance obviously career sites a career site building this is something that you want to provide if you are in front of an ATS, what exactly is Ajovio able to do and enable TA teams to function on.

7:00So Ashley, I hope you've managed to, I hope you can hear and see us. Let's see if we can get you on screen here. I think you need to fiddle with the camera and the mic to make sure that you are on. Let me know when that's okay. If there's a problem, obviously, also let me know. I think I'm in. I think I'm in. There she is. Let me push you into. There she is, Ashley Collins. Great to see you, Ashley. Good to see you. Sorry for my boring wall. I've got a picture of an octopus that I have not hung yet. Oh, we do like cephalopods here. I'm a big fan of all of those creatures. So, yes, I look forward to seeing it up on the wall when it's there, Ashley.

7:43Ashley Collins, I think everyone knows you already, but why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do? Yes. So I am the newly titled Director of Agentic Recruitment Solutions here at Jovio. So I got a bit of an expansion with our platform evolution, which is awesome. But I am probably the best suited to take everybody on a tour of the backend platform. I spent my whole life in there. So excited to show you all what's going on with careers. sites. Yeah, let's have a look at this. Before you share screen, Ashley, talk us through it. What is this thing? What's the two-liner as to how companies need to understand this agentic Creosite builder?

8:27Yeah, absolutely. So on one side, the platform gives talent acquisition and recruitment marketing teams AI-assisted generation. It's a no-code visual editor and with a conversational assistant that will edit the site for you in plain English. On the other side, it gives candidates an intelligent AI-driven experience. So smart searching, commute-paced discovery with seamless ATS integrated applications so that everyone can find the right role and ultimately complete that journey with minimal friction. Very, very good. Can you show us it in five minutes? I will do my absolute best. assuming I can find the screen share function over here I might need to make you a speaker or something give me a sec yeah it says only hosting speakers why have I done that um how do I change your role um here we go role change speaker I need to default you permanently as speaker Ashley okay folks whilst Ashley's getting on with this I want to address the poll you can see on the right hand side of your screen a quick question yes no don't know is your career site currently built by natural language prompts let us know in the comments and the votes on that folks see where you're at generally with the concept of website building with, you know, are you leaning, for instance, on technical people to do this?

10:07Or can you do it in natural language? Okay, Ashley, what have we got here? All right. So we are in the Jovio platform in the career site builder section. So this is the CMS function that the talent acquisition recruitment marketing leaders would come into to stand up a career site. Because the process usually takes about two to three minutes, I won't go ahead and do a full build. I'll just show you how you can launch into that process and then show you the editing functionality in a site that has been pre-built. So you've essentially got three ways. You just come in here. You can describe the site, so build from a prompt, which is what we will launch using one of the pre-built fonts that are prompts that we have in here.

10:54But you can also just input a URL so that all of the branding details, colors, fonts, et cetera, get pulled over, tone. It will pull images, things along those lines for that first setup. Or you can generate from an artifact. And this one gets me really excited. This is one of the newer capabilities in the platform. So let's say you're working with Quad or OpenAI or or whoever your corporate LLM of choice is, and you generate an HTML, you could actually upload that and have that built into the platform directly from your own artifact. But for the sake of speed, we're just going to use a prebuilt prompt.

11:38You'll name your site, I'll call this one brain food. If you are not building from the URL, If you're using the URL, it will pull all of this over automatically. But the platform does allow you to preload branding kits and knowledge hubs so that you can use it across different things, whether it's career sites, landing pages, campaigns, whatever the case may be. So we'll select that here. You'll pick your knowledge base, and you'll create your site. So really just a couple of steps there. And as I said, it takes about two to three minutes for that first instance of the site to generate. We won't sit through that.

12:19We will hop into one that has been pre-built, but it'll just continue building over there on the side. But what I really want folks to see is just how easy this interface is to interact with. You have your assistant on the side. It does have some preset things that it will and won't do for safety. So it won't do a single prompt, a complete site overhaul. You edit page by page. It won't let you embed anything other than the code snippet for the chat so that you don't destroy an entire site. So there are some guardrails in here to prevent destructive user behavior, but really, really simple and easy to interact with.

13:04The real goal is just to give you that first baseline, but allow you to customize the site to ensure that it has that human touch. It is resonant with your brand. You can also do complete SEO audits and overhauls in a matter of minutes directly through scanning the site. You know, enable anything that you want to be able to enable. like if you do want the site with a chatbot, if you want to disable that feature, if you want to plug in your Google Analytics, if you want to update your knowledge bases, all of that can be done from within here.

13:43And then just to give you a sense of what the output can be, this is actually the site that was built for the example that I was just in the backend of. so nice and dynamic this one was embedded with the with the chat bot you can click into no i can't because i've not integrated with the ats yet but just to give you a sense of what comes out on on the other side of that that's really cool i mean wordpress is over isn't it i mean christ um we've been waiting for this sort of drag and drop sort of build. You don't need to have to fiddle around with stuff. You just work purely on the interface and what it looks like.

14:34And that's basically what non-technical people care about. And you can have all of the technical stuff just inserted into the flow. Question on this sort of product as is. I know Jovial would want this to be part of an integrated solution, you know, to say, hey, listen, this works great as part of the entire Jovial platform. But a lot of people listen to this, we think that's too big a drink on one gulp here. Is it possible for me just to use the CareerSite Builder and then give me a taste, so to say, whilst we work out whether this is the right sort of partnership to go forward with? Yeah, absolutely.

15:17And if you're not coming in whole hog on the CareerSite, you can also So use it for landing pages first if that is a softer entry point for you. So, you know, that's really the goal is to make it easy for folks to use what they need now without having to do a complete overhaul of everything. Yeah, the smaller the decision, the better, because when it comes down to these huge sort of calls, sort of TA need to make, they're so, I think the feeling is now it's very difficult for anybody to do due diligence. so to make a big sort of irreversible decision now is almost something that's stopping purchasing from happening because the tech is moving so fast vendor capabilities moving so fast it's very hard to say okay this is the right one for me because it's the right one for me today is it the right one for me tomorrow um we don't know and we do have a builders program that folks can apply to as well.

16:19I think the URL is buildersprogram.jovio.com. And it would essentially allow you to get some free credits to get access to the platform and test some of this stuff out as part of that due diligence so that you can really get hands-on with the platform capabilities, what you might want to use before you have to make an investment commitment. That's really good. If there's a link anybody can share in the chat, please do that because I think these programs are very, very useful for us to get on with. Great stuff. Thanks for everyone who's voting in the poll, by the way. Look to see this. Actually, you might be interested in this.

16:56It's a small turnout on the vote, unfortunately. But we have zero people saying yes, their career site is built in natural language prompting. So I guess this is really early. No is predominant. There's a don't know, which I thank people for saying. And we've had people in the commentary say the same, using sort of still software engineering in-house maybe or using a partner to help build. It's still something that just takes ages to iterate on. So one of the values I think of self-build is obviously your control is going to be 100%. And if you do want to make changes or you want to make a radical alteration, or maybe there's a particular episode or a moment in the day or a moment in the year that's significant for you or your business, you can just literally create it within a couple of minutes and have it up there absolutely good stuff ashley okay i'm gonna move you out of gallery thanks for jumping in and doing the demo stick up the picture of the octopus we want to see that on the wall next time you'll have it it'll be ready for you great stuff uh great to see ashley on to do a demo like that Wasn't that interesting, folks?

18:04Does it spark your interest in terms of how, you know, whether you want to get access to a product like this? And of course, the wider topic that we want to discuss in panel today is also what are the implications of the diffusion of the capability to build websites. Back in the day, Deb, I hope you don't mind me saying, but you did mention you were a grandma as well. So I think I can kind of lean into the idea we're probably similar generation. but like in order to get any changes in the website there'll be massive review process there'll be all kinds of things going through that was annoying but it also meant control um it also meant that you had absolute every single letter every single word every single image you were part of controlling that so eb was very powerfully centralized in that era now anybody can just build this on the fly could be a hiring manager could be a ceo decides hey don't like my career site, going to do something different.

19:01It could be multiple career sites suddenly being built, right? Because when it's diffused like this, potentially you get, oh, actually, I work in the engineering department, we need a different message from the guys in sales, I'm going to create my own career site, and off you go. And I can anticipate a scenario where suddenly, the sense of control has escaped TAEB. And I don't think that's necessarily good or bad thing, I just want to debate it and see whether that, you know, how we feel about it. Your thoughts before we bring on our guests, Deb, how do you feel about something like this, that the empowerment of, it's almost like giving the keys to the car to your kids for the first time, isn't it?

19:42I mean, you're terrified, but then, you know, isn't it a good thing? I don't know.

19:46Hung Le: I do think that, I think it's great that we've gotten here. You know, it wasn't that long ago that you had to go to comms, legal, all the places to get approval for whatever, you know, content change you were taking. And then you had to wait for either your partner to do it. So your agency or maybe it was in-house. You know, I've worked somewhere that we had a really terrible CMS and it would literally take weeks because we would try to go in and update and the system wouldn't accept the change. so seven or eight tries later than it would actually accept it. So yeah, this is going to change everything.

20:29Hung Le: Do I think that it will cause widespread panic and tragedies in-house? I don't think so because there's still guardrails there. It's not like you can just go out and publish and link that to your corporate site. So I do think that there's enough guardrails in place that we can protect the brand. And definitely the way that you build is through a knowledge base. So, you know, if you don't want folks to be able to ask questions outside of that knowledge base, we can protect that too. Yeah, really good. Okay. What are your thoughts, folks? Let me know in the comments, good or bad, this type of decentralization of product build.

21:10I'm going to bring on some of our guests here. We see Brian and Bas sort of active in the chat there. So they're on straight away. I think Mo here is also here. So let's bring her on. And we have Jason also joining. So let's bring Jason on in a bit as well. Guys, we've just invited you to the chat. You're in the green room. I just want to make sure your camera is on and the audio and your mic is on as well. Just have a fiddle with it if that is not obvious to you. And we'll make sure that as soon as I see you, camera on and mic off, or mic on, should I say, then I'll bring you on to the show. So, okay, everyone's in the green room.

21:50That's good stuff. Bas is here, I think. Camera on, sir. I think so. There he is, Bas van der Haartart. Bas, great to see you, man. Great to see you, mate. Great stuff. Bas, people obviously would know you already, but why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do? My name is Bas van der Haartart, and I basically run the biggest corporate careers website research in the Netherlands. and I host an event next Tuesday where we give the best site the award for the 20th year running. Yeah, it's actually an incredibly long and tenured sort of event in the Netherlands and brilliant that you've done it.

22:33It's like one guy has basically made this happen. So please share the link in the chat to your event, Bas, in case there's still tickets to go because I think if you're a Dutch person, Dutch speaker, and interested in this world, you should certainly attend that. And Bass obviously has done some really interesting research on the state of career sites in the Netherlands as well, which I think is a very good baseline to bring you in on. We have Brian here, Chaney. Brian, great to see you, sir. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What is it you do? Hey there. I have not built the number one career website solution in the Netherlands.

23:11I have been doing this work for now over 22 years. So not that it's a competition. I think some people, it's not about the years. It's about the mileage. So I will say I've been doing this for a long time and most recently left Intercom's and Talent brand head role at Crunchyroll for anybody out there who's anime fans. But right now I'm focused on elevating People Brand Collective, which is a professional organization for people who do employer brand and recruitment marketing and internal comms work. So I have battle scars and am slightly triggered by some of the conversation that you all were having around career sites a little bit earlier.

23:56Yeah, I love some of your annoyance there, Brian. We'll come to those points in a bit. I think it's worth teasing out. Just to be, I agree, we need to be very precise with what we're talking about. we have Modi our accounts here as well Mo great to see you my dear can you quickly introduce yourself who are you what it is you do? Hi yes I am also very excited to be here interesting topic interesting set of panelists I would say as I know some of you and some of you I don't but that's okay I am not the person with that track record not saying that I'm awfully young but also not hitting that 20 year mark I've spent the whole of my career in recruiting and branding nevertheless I think I'm currently in for maybe 15 years or so and currently looking after the employer branding strategy for BCG and Boston Consulting Group but also always supportive with several communities like the People Brand Collective of Brian which I would definitely recommend to check out for example and also lovely to be here, thanks for the invite Great to have you on the show Brian, why don't you share the link to the People Brand Collective on the chat in case anybody wants to apply to join.

25:08We have Jason here as well. Jason, great to see you. I've been catching up. Great to see you over in Nashville, of course. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself, Jason? Who are you? What it is you do? Yeah, Jason Pistolka. I run a consulting firm and I am an advisor for Jovial. prior to doing my consulting work, I ran recruitment operations at HCA Healthcare. So we went to market with 4 ,000 different brands. And so we had very complex websites, million plus visitors a month and 100 ,000 hires a year. So career site development functionality is near and dear to my heart. Yeah, fantastic stuff.

25:52Folks, I've just shared the LinkedIn in URLs to everyone who's on the panel on the chat there. So I would say if you're interested in EB in any shape or form, please do make sure you connect with all of the people here. Basfander Hattard, I'm going to go with you first. What do you think of kind of this decentralization of website build? You personally have been diving in hard in the building of these assets. I think your website, for instance, for the event has been built in a vibe coded manner. So in one respect, you're an advanced user of this technology. On the other aspect, how do you feel it lands at the enterprise level where suddenly you have this potential of lots of different sort of interpretations of company story coming out?

26:41How does that make you feel? How does that make your customers and your contacts feel about how we do talent branding and talent storytelling? telling it's funny pretty much the only site that isn't five coded is the event site um all the rest behind it is pretty much five coded but the site itself to be honest wordpress still the best or the easiest to do there which annoys the hell out of me but um it's easier that way to get it right but uh yeah no it's um i've i've actually i was recently talking to a guy and he was like yeah do we still need a branding agency, et cetera, et cetera. And during our meeting, he was like, look, I already vibe coded the front end of the website.

27:29And I'm like, yeah, and now you're going to connect it to your ATS. We've got something like GDPR. Are you sure anybody's going to sign off on this? It was a semi-public organization. If anything goes wrong, everybody, the media will go completely bananas. no way in hell anybody will accept this. Now, if you've got something like Jovio, which sets the guardrails, also probably build in that it's the ATS connections and stuff like that is secure, then we might go there. But what I see is, I recently did five sessions for Anstad and I asked everybody, like, who's using an AI tool at all? And I think max 20 % of the people in the room, which were TA leaders, employer branding, mainly employer branding, even used a tool.

28:33Most of them, when I asked which tool said Copilot, when I asked why, they said because we're forced to use it. All the other tools had a specific reason, but co-pilot was always because my company tells me that's the only thing I'm allowed to. And they're like, I'm not using this. I don't know how to use it. And the companies just aren't making people even experiment with it. Yeah, so what I hear from you, Bas, is basically actually the usage of AI is still quite low, generally speaking. if it is being used it's it's basically especially in corporate level it's being very tightly controlled so co-pilot microsoft co-pilot may be the only thing that they can use therefore there's no possibility of creating um you know this this this vision of me saying you know anybody create a website and stick it up there generally is not happening at least for certain size and scale or organization maybe it happens for smaller scale businesses but perhaps then impact and value is also different.

29:42Okay, Brian Chaney, going to you. You were very keen on the chat to describe the different types of things we're talking about. I wonder whether you could just replay to the audience who may not have been able to read the chat what you mean by the different types of, I guess, career assets that might be created either before or after AI, but certainly now more so with AI's enable this out. So what is the taxonomy of these assets that you described in the chat? Yeah, so initially really I'm just talking about, we say career sites, is it career pages, right? So is it a page? So a career site really is like the site, right?

30:26We say career site all the time. We're really, what we mean is, oh, that's the page people go to to search for jobs, right? Versus, oh, here's where all the content is that talks about the experience, the EVP, all the things that we're selling. So it's determining, okay, does the head of engineering, well, maybe the head of engineering, does the head of finance actually have the ability to go vibe code a career site? No. But what can they do? They can create a landing page, or they can create a job family page, something that tells a story specific to their value proposition. And I think that's really important to call it out.

31:02Yes, they could go off and do that. Do they have the information? Do they have the guardrails? Do they have all the things that they need to tell that story? Like nine times out of 10, they don't, which is why I was like typing guardrails. You got to have guardrails in the chat. So I do think it's important to have that distinction. I love it. I just came from a world where I had to convince the person who had designed a career site that the software engineer five years ago had designed the career site and was fighting, trying to figure out why do we even need to change the thing? And I'm like, how long has it been since you've searched for a job?

31:39So understanding that we're fighting for the experience, we're fighting for the job seeker, we're fighting for the people who need to get that information, and we're fighting an uphill battle. So yeah, so fighting against IT resources, fighting against even fighting once it got set up, fighting against the content management system to Deb's earlier point. It just wasn't it wasn't a great system. We figured out how to use it and we got to the point where we could actually update our own content. But we had to fight to get to that point. They didn't even want to do that. Yeah, absolutely. So I see almost like a nested sort of thing.

32:16You might have a master career site that's completely owned by the company. no one can start contradicting that you know that's the official position on their policy on their inclusion or whatever it is you put your stuff up there and then perhaps we might have a future where individual teams or individual departments might have a particular page to describe hey this is how we roll and perhaps that's where you get a lot more personality emerging and I wonder whether that's actually not a bad sort of way to actually end up thinking about it because different teams have different personalities um and if you work in different functions actually your experience might be different so um this kind of brings into play the concept of employer brand um as a corporate brand but also as a team-based brand um because there's different vibes there isn't that true modiara comes because working for bcg global organization you can't tell me there's a single there's a single experience working there um different regions, different groups, different focus on region, right?

33:17It's got to be different. So do you see this as a future where you get kind of individual, sort of more and more individuated career stories being told by these pages? Yes, yes, definitely. I've had many thoughts while you were all talking. First of all, I was thinking, yes, if everybody can build a career site, then the career site stops being the competitive advantage, right? So knowing what to say, having the proof and to whom you're saying it, that should then be advantage. But where do you then store that? So I sort of feel for that core page where we're maybe not seeing the career side as the primary destination, but start thinking through it as like part of the data and as a content infrastructure that basically services your employer brand.

34:04And on the back of that, I thought, OK, what if we provide some vibe coding tools, which within BQG should be in a almost like compliant sandbox where people could then go out, prompt, you know, with approved components and data points and then going through some automated compliancy check in an ideal scenario for us. that is then making sure that it's connected to the ATS, the GDPR proof, all the things that Bas was mentioning in the beginning. So you then have some sort of hyper-personalized controlled publishing with that main career page as your core house in a way. So it's not really replacing, it's just adding one thing to the other.

34:51I don't know if that makes sense. Many thoughts. It totally makes sense. As I see what you explained perfectly, Mo, I mean, I don't even want to summarize I think it was very clear how you described. But as I understood it, you're saying actually CareerSight may just be like a content engine that supplies approved content to the vibe-coded stuff that maybe local managers might want to go ahead and build. Yeah, and I think that this is what I've shared with you before, like separate from this brain food, is that I'm doubting more and more and more if that career page is our entry point, right? Because I'm currently overthinking, okay, hey, everybody's searching for careers through LLMs, and how do we tackle that?

35:30Which your career page is a source that will be included in that LLM. So how important is it to invest in, you know, an excellent user experience? Which I actually recently did a research on. And do you know what the most important thing is for an LLM to turn you up if you ask for the top 10 employers on a certain brand value? No, not clear. The first letter of your company's name about 50 % of everything was A to letter E. Oh, then I'm in the right box. Yes. DCG turned up quite a lot. You know what? That has massive employer brand implications. Imagine the surge of companies being relabeled at the A to E letter level.

36:15The Zs of this world are going to be done for. Across all different AIs, right? I hired a master's student to do the research, and she came back to me like, I don't believe the results I'm getting here. So we've done full circle then. It's like AAA air conditioning service and everything else. The LLMs are back to where we were with the Yellow Pages. I just typed that same thing in there because I'm over here going like that. So there's limitations on the LLMs now. So we are just at the beginning. I know we feel like we're like, oh, we've known about this for three years. Well, we've been using machine learning and natural language processing way, way longer than that.

37:05So but in the grand scheme of things, we're really early. And so these things are set up in very limited hierarchical ways. So not only are, to Baz's point, not only are they prioritizing A through M, but they're also choosing frequency over quality or value. So if there's an industry and there's multiple best employer lists, they're actually giving priority to the companies who are listed more, not to the companies who are listed higher. I don't think that's going to stay, right? Like, I don't think, Baz, to your point, I don't think it's going to stay like A through M and everybody's going to rename.

37:47I think it will evolve. But right now, that just tells us how limited this really is based upon what people need to get out of it. Yeah. Sorry. A little more research, actually, Brian, you said listed most. It depends on which LLM you're using. And there's one of them in there who acknowledges Reddit comments above anything else when it comes to your brand. Multiples. Yeah, not just one. In one, you saw it in extreme measures. They all use it. But if I'm not mistaken, was ChatGPT would actually really emphasize that. and others a little less? I think there's a whole bunch of different career site stories here, though, because we're talking about companies as if people are going to the LLM and saying, where should I work?

38:44But there's still so many places that they're going to the career site because they know where they want to work. And this is so common in health care. If you're a nurse, et cetera, you know the hospitals that are near you. You know their name. You know their reputation. You don't go to an LLM and ask questions. You just go to the career site. Over 50 percent of the hires come off of the career site. So I think big brands, the Googles of the world, et cetera, are always going to have traffic come to them. And the career site becomes also properly done a good source of information for LLMs to pull from.

39:14So there's still a big piece of this. And so for the people who are saying that the career site is going to die going forward, I think that really the impact is going to be very different company to company and industry to industry.

39:27Hung Le: I also think that job seekers are, we have, we've spent so much time educating them on what to look for out of an employer. They're not naive. They know if they're interested in a company, they should go to the career site because if they can go and see, you know, what does the UI and UX look like? What is, how old are the images? That tells them how much senior leadership in that organization cares about talent. That's what I honestly think. And I think if you're going to a site that looks like garbage and the experience is garbage, you know that your onboarding experience is probably not going to be that great too.

40:09Hung Le: And everything else that follows. And not just that, Jason, I recently actually did a research for one of the hospitals in Rotterdam. And I asked LLMs to compare the four hospitals in there. and basically 95 % of all the feedback it gave me came from their career sites. And it said, if you value job development, this is the one. They're the best on education. This is the one that pays the most because their pay grades are the highest. This one is actually renowned for their culture, work-life balance. And that was everything he took. Actually, he took 95 % of it from the career website. Okay, so what does this tell us then?

40:55This tells us that career sites basically are, we should keyword stuff, career sites. We should just go back to old faithful. Let's get stuff in there. Let's get mass quantity. Let's get loads of video. I'm a quantity merchant. You know this. You know this, guys. I'm not going to try and kid anybody. I don't believe in quality per se. I think quantity is overwhelmingly better. Just do more, more, more, more. Is that what we're saying? Are we agreeing then? No, no. To give you an example, which the LLM put me back was the hospital I was actually working for was the one that focused most on development and career development.

41:41And it literally said they don't just talk about this, but they have this great section on career development. And here you can actually look on all the trainings you can do. So it was looking for consistency within the website. What do you say your brand is? And can we actually, within the website, find evidence of the fact that you actually focus on development? That's literally what the LLMs told me. Well, that could be achieved. We're in the trust volume. But anyway, like I say, if you do everything all the time, you're going to get there. But anyway, let's go to Brian. You wanted to say something about this.

42:20How do we think about career sites if we know that LLMs are actually mining this? Does it alter our policy? Is our policy just the same? Is it just another version of SEO, for instance? There's no difference in our behavior. It's the steps above SEO. So SEO is still the baseline. It's still the foundation. You need the content. You need it to be indexed. You need your keywords to be there. But you also need to build on that. It needs to be reinforced by third-party content. It needs to be structured in the ways that LLMs can pull the answers that they need to the questions that they get. So I'm going to say this and take a drink of whatever beverage is nearest, but it's your FAQs for your career site so that people can understand, oh, here's the answer that I can supply.

43:07And that gives the LLM its quick hit, right? I want to be able to give you what you're asking for in a verifiable way. So it's that, it's frequency, and it's third-party placement. So I'm sorry, you know, Boz, if this is triggering for you, but it's Reddit, it's Glassdoor, it's built-in, it's other sites that have published content. And believe it or not, it's also LinkedIn, not the company page, so don't get excited too quickly. But it's in the user-posted content attributed back to the company profile. So it's what people, it's really, it's the actual user generated in some, in a lot of cases, employee generated, but it's user generated content that talks about that experience in a referenceable way.

43:55So that gets heavily picked up and indexed by LLMs as well. So it's not the same thing. We have to build on it. But I want to, I want to post something. So as we're thinking about this, why are we not just supplying our own career LLM as our career page? Why are we not letting people choose their own path? Is it trust? Is it that we think that we're only going to feed it certain things that we want people to know, right? Or is there like a third party? Like, do we have to go to the third party? We have to go to ChatGPT or we have to go to Claude or we have to go to, sorry, co-pilot. but but do we have to go to these places to get the answers that we need i'm just i'm sitting here thinking okay well if there's a defensible way to have an llm as your career site then it's going to pull those things and it's going to give companies the chance to respond to the stuff that's out there i'm just i was sitting here going why is that not the career site because you're now we're really slow i mean bass you've done some research on this haven't you in terms of like the availability of chat interfaces on enterprise career side.

45:03So what is the number there? It's like, it's the crazy low, right? 11 % this year. Of how many companies? And the 563 biggest employers in the Netherlands. 11 % have a chatbot. That's probably not too far. Deb might have a little more context.

45:25Hung Le: I don't know the number off the top of my head. No, not like a current number, but to me, that feels about right. Somewhere between 10 and 20%. But I'm not just talking about chat. I'm talking because your career site is like, here's all the stuff that we thought you cared about that we could get through legal and HR approvals, right? So that's essentially what career site content is. It's what we want to say about ourselves. And chat is like, do you have a problem? Do you have a question? I'll answer it for you. But I'm talking about making the chat experience the site, right? And making that like, let's, let's go on a journey.

46:04Let's be, let's, let's talk about like what this actually means for you and have it be natural and have it feel whether it's like a conversation, whether it's like, like walk, like handholding people because the chat is that, that, yeah, in the, in the actual chat says, I love wasting time with chat help bots. The confidence they exhibit is remarkable right it's like it doesn't feel like a good experience a lot of the time which is probably why 90 of the companies aren't doing it but but i do feel like you know because she's actually in the seat to be able to do this mo would you ever allow a chatbot to be your company career website i mean we have a chatbot on the company group 8 obviously and we have a lot of questions also more questions than the average um client from the website chatbot vendor that we are kind of that we've contracted and i think it has something to do with the nature of the candidates that we um that we try to attract so they ask a lot of in-depth questions and we've seen that it's actually contributing to our conversion in a way um so yeah from my point of view it is possible and I think coming back to Jason's point the question may not be if people stop visiting career sites or start using LLMs in a way that's why I shared my comment in the chat before I think instead of asking candidates to navigate through the pages and find okay this is relevant for me maybe it's just an experience that becomes more conversational you know like understanding who we are who are you what are you looking for and then trying to navigate them and I feel that that is happening a lot within our chatbot currently.

47:52I think the chatbots I still see on almost all the sites, though, are pretty stupid. They're not well developed from a knowledge base. I've gotten it to answer stuff off of the web. Walmart's chatbot, I uploaded my resume and my son's resume, who's a high school grad, and we got the same job matches. So, you know, it's a pretty sad state of affair with most chatbots out there. And I think that, you know, we're in a world now where people can get stuff delivered to Amazon in two hours, right? The rest of the world's moved so far. And so much of the stuff we're doing on CareerSite still feels like ordering from Sears and Roebuck.

48:36So there's just a lot of work that needs to be done with so many of these sites. It's funny. For everybody's reference, phone books used to be how people looked stuff up. And Susan Roadbook used to be where people bought things.

48:54It's actually the very first chatbot I once bought was there just to show people where they could find it on the career site. Because the career site was so terrible, but I was a corporate communication forbade me to change anything. so I literally bought a chatbot where they could ask the questions which were on the career site and we were just showing them the links because the chatbot understood the questions yeah and we're still not much past that I guess no but I think we are moving fast to a different future aren't we where we the argument on quantity by the way was a little bit sort of tongue in cheek but also not because you talked about quantity, frequency, and stuff like this, Brian.

49:42But I don't think LLMs necessarily look at things like ratio. They just count the number of, right? So if you, for instance, you're looking at the number of times you talk on your career side about how inclusive you are, you might say that 10 times out of 10 ,000 words. You may say 10 times out of 100 ,000 words. LLM is still going to look at it as 10 times. so it makes sense in my opinion to just stuff the hell out of it and I know we don't want to say that because we're all nice people in EB but if you're going to do it practically quick and dirty wouldn't you record wouldn't you kind of encourage that way in the same way of getting like loads of employee generated content let's just get everyone to do a video don't worry about the quality control just find a way to filter it out in in after it's been produced maybe you know you could even get your chatbot to automatically remove content that doesn't sort of falls under the bar in some way, you know?

50:41So it's all like, let's just get a high quantity to produce, and then you put some sort of filter in to get rid of. And that creates like just a much more messy, but much thicker bit of content that the LLM can draw on. Am I making any sense to anybody? Do people agree, disagree? Let me know in the chat. There are people doing that already today with content creation engines that allow people to go ask their employees to record video to provide the questions and walk them through that video creation process. Then to edit the video once that's done, making sure that it meets brand standards and or ties into EVP pillars and other things that they can have baked into the backend.

51:26They're doing that today and they're asking people to do it. And it's flagging. It's having people approve that content or not. So somebody could say something that's either not true or it's got outdated data or or or or. And that's being filtered out. So I do think we're looking for a quantity of it, but there's still a quality filter. And I think that's one of the most important things because there's a reason why you don't give microphones to every single employee when you're at a function, right? Some people speak a specific way. Some people hit specific things that you know are most important.

52:07But I do agree that the truth is somewhere in the middle. it's about the middle. Yeah. So, and again, we're talking about where are we going to end up in my mind, right? And so please tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking, where are we going to end up in the next three to five years? Or where are we going to end up in the next like six to 12 months based upon where the technology is now? I see what we're doing and I see that we're moving so fast that I know that the capability is going to catch up with the expectations that we have on the people doing it today. Yeah, really good. Chris Herron in LinkedIn has got a really, really interesting question.

52:49I'm going to bring that into the chat in a moment, but I've just noticed the time. We are fast coming to the end of this show. Good evidence of a fantastic conversation. But folks, Brain Food Live is a show that is there to start a conversation, never to end it or to be a bottleneck for it. The best thing we need to do is to continue the conversation after we come off air, which we need to do in about 10 minutes. And the way to continue the conversation is, of course, to connect with everyone else who's currently participating in it. And the way to do that is very straightforward. Just grab your LinkedIn URL right now, stick it in the chat stream, and then connect to everyone else who's done it.

53:25If you're watching this on LinkedIn, please do the same. Just grab your LinkedIn URL, put a comment into the chat stream, and then basically it's a self-declared list of folks you can connect with and talk about this topic. So make sure you do that, make sure you connect, and make sure you continue this dialogue when we come off air. Okay, I'm going to bring on this concept that Chris has put in. I think it is a little bit down the pipe for us. I don't think anybody's actually answering the question or even posing it, but let us be the first. He's talking about local LLMs versus cloud-deployed LLMs, there is a theory to say that if you are dependent on all of the open AI, Anthropics services, Microsoft, and so on, they're all training the same sort of large language model at the end of the day.

54:18All of the information you put into it is getting trained into a single thing. So it should homogenize the production that it then spits out. And that obviously leads into a very interesting question for us in EB, because we're all here to differentiate, right? So how do we differentiate when everyone starts sounding the same? In the same way how CVs are all starting to homogenize, EB pages and EB source stories might start homogenizing. Is the solution to have a local LLM downloaded, air-gapped, doesn't go to the cloud. It's just trained purely on your own internal information. And you'll be able to express your company's story in an increasingly unique way, which hopefully will mean that you'll get the messaging to the people that you're looking to recruit and who would thrive in your business more so than just using what is effectively a standardized, you know, goody two shoes type EV.

55:16What are our thoughts on this? It's a little bit beyond, I don't know if anyone's doing it, but is this what's going to happen 12, 24 months down the line? Jason, let's go with you first. I'm sorry, you broke up on me? Jason, you weren't paying attention, were you, man? That's okay. I'm joking. I'm happy. No, go ahead, Mo. We'll come back to you, Jason. Go ahead, Mo. Yeah, I've been thinking about this, but then more from a content creation point of view, as I think that there's a lot of EB agencies and EBA agencies that are now in the same boat. Like, you know, are we producing new campaigns and narratives with LLMs or not?

55:54And will everything become everything? I feel that this kind of relates to the point that I tried to make in the beginning as AI makes it easier for everyone to create content, that distinctiveness and that ownership should stay within the employer space and maybe therefore also owning the source material on your own local LLM, if that is possible, right? Depending on the resources that you have. So yeah, I think that would be my point for now. Jason, does that help for you? I think the big thing with all of this, though, is we can develop all kinds of content and put it on our site, and even LLMs can help you develop that content.

56:36It doesn't mean that people are going to use it and that they're going to interface with it. So like everything else, data is what should ultimately drive this. And that's one of the beautiful things with AI is we can digest every page of that career site. We can tell what the engagement looks like on that. You know, how far are they going through the various pages and inform ourselves into what we need to build? Because also often we think we know what candidates want to hear, what's going to sell to people, and then it just falls flat. So, which is why, you know, you do real testing with real users on things ultimately to get that kind of feedback.

57:16Hung Le: That's why you need an employer brand leader who's strong and can go out and get the stories from the people that are inside the four walls. If you can't differentiate and everything, I mean, because to Brian's point earlier, everything is homogenized already. Everything already does sound the same. So, I mean, that employer brand leader needs to be out there getting the stories, the videos. I mean, it has to be personalized and localized or it's not going to resonate. I will also shamelessly plug our career site and say that we do SEO, AEO, and GEO optimization, and we can also do audits. And we also have a way to get you out on Tatchikati.

58:01But your brand needs to be not just aspiration, it needs to be real. And so a lot of these employee brand leaders will say, this is what it's like to work for us. But the reality is, if you go out to Reddit, that's not what it's like to work there. This is what I mean about local LLMs, though. If you have a local LLM that's trained by default on operational data, then you can actually tell what is actually happening in the business. It's not a story. It's literally whatever happens. You can start saying things like, hey, the average amount of time people spend in meetings in our business is, you know, two hours below our market average compared to our competition.

58:40You can say, hey, listen, the average team size of our organization is this compared to the competition. And that's no one reporting it. It's literally just your organizational intelligence reporting on the information that you have within the company. I don't think you want that information in a cloud source sort of LLM, though. So I think you might be able to do it on a local LLM that you can switch on and switch off. Anyway, coming to the end of this, final words to the people who haven't spoken yet. Bas van der Hatte, 12 months down the line, in fact, looking even further, where is the future for career sites and EB folks in general?

59:18How does it look to you as an outsider basically interacting with these functions? What do you see them doing that's different than it is today? I think focus is going to be so much more important because what you said about just mentioning stuff a lot, what I found in the research is that companies that focus on specific brand values and deliver the data to support that on their career sites show up more. So I think we're finally getting to an employer brand that's not vanilla, anything for everybody. And unlike what Jason said, we're not trying to invent what people want to hear. We're actually going to talk about what we are.

1:00:02And I see that moving, especially in the scale-up scene where now a lot. And yeah, localized LLMs, and they can still be in the cloud because I actually built, like I told you, the careers data site where you can ask any question on 20 years of career sites research, but it only answers based on my data, but it's still with the Anthropic API. Very interesting. Okay, Brian Chaney, last word to you. Give us a bit of a forecast. How do you see the EB world changing 12 months down the line and career sites specifically? I see, like regarding career sites, I see them becoming more customized and not intended for broad consumption.

1:00:51I see here's the information that's existing, that's available now, like the functional, just hard data. And then I see more customized content being created. And to Baz's point, and to your point, thinking about the LLMs providing a local hosted LLM that walks people through a process. Because right now, everybody's worried about trust. So you called that out. And I'm like, why would you trust? People don't trust career sites today. So why would people trust an LLM that's housed as the career site for a company if there's conflicting data elsewhere, unless it's within the process and unless there are specific guardrails around what information is shared?

1:01:35So I see trust playing. I see there being a gate in between people getting access to like a local hosted LLM that can walk them through that process. So once they're determined to have those qualities, the experience, the things that people are looking for, they get access to that local LLM to walk them through that process because they want them bought in. They want people with the information that they need to be successful, including why should you not be here? Because they want to screen people out for that too. And I think that's the other thing that people are a bit afraid of today.

1:02:13Hung Le: Really afraid. I think comms and PR would die. Well, they think they would die too, but that doesn't happen, right? And so I had to push through that in my last role because if your ICP as a consumer is somebody with a credit card, then yeah, they don't want to scare anybody. They want people spending that money. But you have to appeal to the people who are going to be successful, not just appeal to the people with a pulse. Yeah, so we need to have different measurements, don't we? And this goes back to maybe another story for another time. But how do we measure, let's say, the reduction of applicant flow from a career site, but the improvement of the hires that you make from it?

1:03:00Right now, it's still about, oh, we're getting tons of applications from this place. But do they actually convert into hires? Do they actually convert into successful hires? Those are questions I don't think anybody has been able to put together an answer for. But maybe that is the conversation for another time. Okay, we are out of time, folks. So I want to thank everyone for joining the show. Hope you've enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. What a really interesting chat produced by this wonderful panel we have. Time for us to thank them and say goodbye. So Jason, great to see you. Thanks for jumping on into the show and adding your tremendous value to the show.

1:03:36Mo, great to see you as well. Wonderful to connect. I know I'm back in the Netherlands before the end of the year, but if I am, I'll make sure I'll come and say hello. Brian, great to see you, sir, on screen and in real life in recent days. So hopefully we can continue that rolling forward. Bas van der Haartart, great to see you again. And we'll hopefully keep in touch soon. We'll see you soon. And Deb, thanks for being co-host and joining this and kind of leading the way and guiding this conversation. It's been a fantastic chat. Okay, that's it, everyone. I hope you've had a good experience. Have a great weekend.

1:04:11We're back next week. As usual, we're going to be talking about how to assess for human judgment. Have you heard this term, folks? Human judgment is the thing that's going to be left for us to do because AI is going to do everything else. No one else is asking, hey, well, how do you hire for human judgment? Seems to me we've got to just do more human judgment, don't we? It's like, how do you hire for human judgment? Can anybody assess for this? We've got Jason Arverbrook joining us. We've got Dr. Richard Clayton joining us. We've got Joseph Brantway joining us and hopefully Gerianne, the clerk, joining us as well from a psychometrician point of view, where we're going to be discussing this very point.

1:04:45If we only care about human judgment, isn't it about time we came up with a sourcing and assessment strategy for the thing we say we care about? That's happening next week. Make sure you join the show. If you like the show, just follow the channel. It happens every week. If you're watching this on LinkedIn, you can follow my channel. It broadcasts there every week as well. OK, that's it. Have a good weekend, everyone. We'll see you next time.

1:05:08Hung Le: Cheers. Cheers.

1:05:13We ended the session.