2114 – Leveraging AI for Optimal Recruitment Results with Bahia AI's Delaney Thompson

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1:05With us right now, it is the co-founder of Bahia AI. I may have said that wrong. Delaney Thompson, it's you. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to be talking about Mia. Your product is the world's best talent source, obviously leveraging AI. but very exciting for a friend that's listening to this conversation. You guys are absolutely doing all the right stuff in terms of leveraging all of the AI tools that are out there. And I'm hoping maybe, Delaney, we could talk about that because I think that that's just so incredible. In fact, I would encourage, as of when we're recording this, I want you to go to this website.

1:47It's bahia.ai, B-A-H-I-A dot A-I. And I want you to see Mia and this video, the spokesperson. And oh my God, does that look realistic? Delaney, thanks for joining us. Awesome. Thank you for having me, Josh, and for the intro. So yeah, as Josh mentioned, I'm one of the founders at Bahia AI, and we're building Mia, an AI talent sourcer right now. So that's okay. So you didn't want to do the spokesperson stuff then? So on the website, you mean? Yeah, right. Right. You don't need to. Yeah, no. And actually it was interesting because most websites right now have that really captivating video on it.

2:31So I was looking on Fiverr for most entrepreneurs know the service Fiverr to find freelancers to do it. And then I found this tool that did it for me. Talked me about, I would say about a day to do that. But just by the time I gave her all the prompts on what to say and stuff. But yeah, pretty incredible. Okay. And so then you hired somebody to use tools out in the market. Is that what you did? No. So we were looking for a person to do it. And it was going to be probably a couple hundred dollars, up to a thousand. And then you're looking through the portfolios and trying to figure it out. But I just found this tool myself.

3:05And I gave it all of the prompts. I picked a face. And it even made the script for me. I went in and edited the script and added our own graphics and stuff. But yeah, that is completely done by a tool just by me. And I'm just for background, I'm not super technical person. I mean, like to get into that, but how AI tools can kind of make you a technical person. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's, you know, it's real language programming. You know, I figured out, Delaney, I'm actually a really great programmer when I don't have to code. Exactly, me too. I can just use real language prompts and like, man, I can create some pretty amazing stuff.

3:50So I know one of the great tools that's out there, I know Flux is pretty great. What did you find? What did you use? So for that video we use, it's called Synthesia.io and it's actually really cool. Can you spell that or do you know how to find that? So it's S Y N T H E S I A dot IO. Okay. So yeah, even we've used it for our YouTube videos for instructional videos on instructing clients how to onboard. So there's tons of different use cases and they have templates and they have a bunch of different avatars you can use and they all look like real people speaking. Goodness. Goodness. This is crazy.

4:35You know, I've seen some use cases. You know, it would be pretty hard for me to give up the opportunity to kind of talk directly to a client. But here's there's a few use cases, right? There's there's cases where we have a lot of written content. And, you know, if someone just wants the non because, you know, I listen, I think to present in front of a camera takes some skill and practice. If you're doing it off a teleprompter, good luck. Most people are terrible at that. Looks awful, looks fake, you know, that sort of thing. So then you go the other direction. It's like, okay, well, I'm either going to memorize it and that's going to take forever.

5:16Or then there's your third option and you could just wing it as best you can with your notes. And again, that's also going to still be a lot of work. And people, I know this from coaching, me doing media coaching and PR with people is, you know you end up having to do a lot of editing or it's just like man you said this you should have said it this way you started talking about this like it's it's really hard to get something just so polished and have it look good right and so you know for someone who's like oh my god I've got like you know um you know for think about this like um you know this is maybe silly but But, you know, to people who either produce a lot of written content, people who produce a lot of audio content and they have no video.

6:06But meanwhile, you want to serve an audience that either wants something to read. Well, that's really easy. You just take your transcript into ChatGPT and create articles, you know, work on it, finesse it and, you know, clean it up, polish it and that sort of thing. But going from like audio written to video, you know, you could either map out all this work. I'm sorry, I'm going on and on, Delaney. I don't want to lose you. No, but I'm just thinking in terms of like workflow and at least getting this to market, it may not be the ultimate superior solution, but by golly, you can have something for your clients or future clients or customers, you know, within a week, as opposed to months, because you never get around to it.

6:49Totally. And yeah, just to elaborate on your point too, even aside from making this kind of fake video of this person talking, using Synthesia. There's also a few other tools that I'd recommend like Opus Clip, it's called, O-P-U-S. I'm not sure if you've used that, but that's pretty crazy. Opus Clip, yes. One long-term video or like long-form video, sorry. And yeah, make it into a bunch of short-form content that you can recycle. And yeah, I think it's a really exciting time to be an entrepreneur and have access to all of these tools at your fingertips, be able to produce things like you said, some things that would take months and basically in days or hours.

7:27So yeah. Well, and if you want to, like I said, if you want to go on Fiverr and hire someone at this caliber, you know, again, I'm just kind of watching the video, you know, you could do it cheap through Fiverr and you, you know, may or may not be good, but this is fantastic. Like even when I asked you, like I, there's, I honestly just think you hired a model here. I, there is no, and I'm, I feel like I'm a little savvy. The background is a little like I can tell, I mean, but it's really great. So anyway, to, to our friend that's listening to an audio conversation, they're like, this is getting uninteresting, Josh, just go to bahia.ai and you can see this for itself.

8:08Okay. So tell me about Bahia itself. Thank you so much for indulging me on all the AI conversation. I always, you know, anytime I see really great use cases, I love talking about it. Yeah, always nice to share those kinds of tools too and not gatekeep them. So, but yeah, but a bit about Bahia. So we just actually launched at the end of May, beginning of June of this year. And what we do is we built an AI agent to completely automate talent sourcing. So you give us your hiring criteria, all of the information, like anything that you would could think of that you'd be looking for in an ideal candidate.

8:43And we've built an AI tool that identifies profiles that are a high match to that and then automatically engages with them, pitching the role and the company. And then for the end user, you're only looking at them once they are interested candidates who want to speak to you and are interested in the job. So that's in a nutshell without going into a big demo of what we do. Well, so tell me about the current, like, tell me, give us a lay of the land for the marketplace right now. Yeah. So basically how the idea came to be, my co-founder was hiring for a couple of roles and we had a different business at the time that was focused more on candidates, helping candidates find remote jobs.

9:24So we were kind of already in that HR space and she was like, wow, this process is super broken. Like you're constantly sifting through resumes, you know, with like things like Easy Apply on LinkedIn and Indeed and stuff. People are just like mass applying to jobs that they're not qualified for. So as the hiring manager, you're sifting through all of these resumes. Also using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, super expensive, like five figures a year easily on one seat. So and still, even though you're paying for that tool, it's still super manual to go through and like reach out to each candidate and pitch the role and stay on top of the communication.

10:04So we found a way to just automate that entire process. And with the rise of AI agents and as I mentioned, a non-technical person these days can be super technical. So we found a way to get it done without either of us being coders. And we are working with developers now as we're building our more robust tool. But get that MVP out there, man, get in the market because you will learn. So I would assume in what you're what you're talking about, I just think is so brilliant, right? As opposed to, oh, my gosh, we got to build this finished product. And that is such a terrible way to bring a product to market because you just have no idea.

10:42Now that you have something in the market, you can focus on the important work, which is your business plan, like your marketing plan. Like, how are you going to get this in the hands of people? Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about how you took this product? You basically took, I don't want to call it an MVP. How would you describe it? Like, what was it that you went to market with? Yeah, good question. So it was an MVP that I actually built using a no-code, low-code software. And we basically just stitched a bunch of tools in the back end, you know, using different automation tools like Zapier and everything.

11:17but we stitched everything that we needed in the back end to a database that we just made look I would say okay on the front end it's functional people can go in approve and reject candidates they can see it but we went to market with that and we were surprised like within the first couple weeks of just cold outreaching people and it's actually funny the first customer that we had we were working off of a google sheet and then we were like okay let's like now that we have a paying customer, we could probably build something a bit better. And yeah, started closing some pretty big companies like 500 plus person companies on our first MVP.

11:54And now we have 17 customers on our first MVP. And now we're building a more robust B2. But yeah, like you said, like we had to make sure we had product market fit before we invested any money into developing and making this huge platform, but that's where we're at. All right. Well, so why is, you know, why is, but like, why do we need this now? Why not other solutions that are in the marketplace? So with ours, it's, we found a lot of the competitors were still super manual and it was like, they were built, it was built more like a SaaS in the sense of the user's going to go on and still be super hands-on.

12:38Whereas what we want to build is something that's completely automated using prompts and have that autopilot like always on mode. So that's where we branded it as Mia. And like Mia is your AI talent sourcer. Mia's on the clock. Mia is the talent sourcer doing everything that a regular talent sourcer would be doing, but based on the custom rules that you set it. So, you know, you could have the rules like I want to reach out to 200 high match candidates with this messaging and click on and it'll just do it on your behalf. So that's where we are really differentiating ourselves in the market. I think just because we've come to market now at a time where AI agents are so big and people are starting to utilize these rather than wanting to just add an expensive tool to their tech stack, really.

13:25So that's where we kind of want to differentiate when in our marketing and go to market strategy. Well, you know, and it's interesting. You know, for somebody who's looking at potentially using a tool like this, are there any concerns? What would you say are maybe some of the chief concerns that they might have with using something like what you've designed? Like, I don't know if you're getting feedback. And I would imagine you're using that feedback to iterate. But what are you hearing in the marketplace right now? Yeah, so I think the main misconception with using AI is that people still want that human element.

14:01And we're not trying to replace the human element. We're just trying to scale the manual work that goes into up until first response, I'd say. So after the candidate responds, then it's human. Like then you're talking to a human, they're booking the meeting. And but yeah, I'd say that's the main misconception. Like we had a demo with a pretty large company and they were like, you know, human experience is important to us. And we totally agree. Like we're not trying to like, basically, we just want to scale the manual part up until like the contacts made. So in the platform, there would be a place where, you know, the candidate has responded, then you take over.

14:36So then you're like, you know, sending the meeting link, like there's still ways to automate that, but it's still like, we would like to say AI powered, but human led in that sense. Yeah. Well, you know, and it's, it's really interesting. Would you mind maybe just talking about if you can kind of go back to this topic, because it's just come up so, so much in this conversation, your tool is again, just another example of this. Listen, I think that we as leaders can sometimes get stuck into routines and it's easy to keep things that aren't inherently or necessarily, they don't necessarily feel broken, but we don't know, I guess maybe what we don't know or what we're unwilling to research or research or find out.

15:21Or, you know, I think that there's a skill to always, you know, it's like being curious or just, you know, just evaluating every, you know, evaluating your stack every single time, you know, asking, is this the most efficient way of doing things? I mean, you could be paying tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in extra labor costs because you're not leveraging AI. But, you know, naturally with this, we want to step into this cautiously. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Would you maybe talk about that process? Because, again, Delaney, I mean, this is something obviously that comes up with your solution as well.

16:00Again, I think anyone can run a test, but, you know, they may not even have the curiosity enough to know to run the test kind of thing. Yeah. So actually one thing that our business coach had said to us once, which I thought was really interesting is to do a time versus energy audit on yourself. Like look at your day and see how much time are you spending on certain tasks? And then is there a way to automate it? And then also just even putting a dollar value on your time almost like what is an hour of my time worth? And if I'm spending an hour of my time doing this, then can I pay that amount of money or way less most of the time to have a tool to do it.

16:36So I think just zooming out and actually looking at, yeah, where am I spending most of my time? Are there tools? It really takes a quick, even chat GPT chat to say, hey, for this manual task, can you recommend a tool? I mean, of course, you can Google it. But most of the time, I would say there's most definitely a tool out there to automate whatever you are spending time on that is taking up your precious time that you could be selling to customers. You could be talking to customers. You could just be more hands-on in your business. And yeah, I'd say time and energy audit. What? Let's say that again.

17:12I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say, just to summarize that, a time and energy audit, I would say, on your time. I like that. Do you know, tell me more about what a time, just to pin on this, what's a time and energy audit? I like that term. So we use a template. I'm sure that there's something on Google I could look up pretty quick, but basically, yeah, just looked at our day from 8 a.m. until like just the working hours and just looking at actually how do you spend your day? And then if you say, okay, I'm spending, you know, an hour prospecting at this time, then just search. Is there a prospecting tool that's going to do it for me?

17:50And then what could I, what could I be doing with that hour? Right. Could I then be like actually having conversations with people. Like there's obviously things in business and life that you can't automate, but if there's anything that you are sitting there and manually doing, I would say there is most definitely a tool. I agree. You know, even for this time, I'll just tell you what I'm already doing. Like I'm already in chat GPT looking for a custom GPT that might be programmed to do time and energy audits really well. Start there. I mean, it's, you know, maybe not a polished off the shelf solution it might be a little nerdy to work with but hey if you're competent in you know gemini or chat gpt or an ai tool fine look there first if you already have a subscription well delaney thompson co-founder of bahia.ai uh less complexity more results again it's your world's best talent source or the website bahia.ai uh you can go right to the website um pricing can you talk a little bit about how pricing works?

18:54Yeah. So with our pricing right now, we are charging on a per roll basis. And that includes up to a certain amount of approved candidates in front of you, which we'd go into more in depth. But when we do switch to our new platform, it will be on a credit based system. So that will change a little bit. But yeah, if you want to talk pricing, definitely happy to get on a call and even see if it would work for work for you and your team. But yeah, that's how we're doing it right now. And that's something that we're iterating. Yeah. Having, you know, I have some friends who are recruiters. They're in the recruiting space.

19:28But think about how much, like if you're working with recruiters, like they're valuable. They're general. A good recruiter is worth their weight in gold. That said, good one's not cheap. Now, again, it's just kind of cost of doing business kind of thing. But Delaney, it's like, if you can supplement that at the very least by running a couple of tests? Why not? Delaney Thompson, co-founder of Bahia.ai. Delaney, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Have a great day.

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