Why your Employees Feel More Productive but your Revenue Doesn't Show It! - Findem

15:54Shane Driggers:Really where the differentiation starts to show up, if that makes sense.

15:58Nate Sokolić:That's helpful. And then, you know, I guess, Shane, Shane, for you in a practical sense, you know, and maybe seeing how the product works more closely, like what's your experience with it? And what do you think that your team gets out of it?

16:16Shane Driggers:Yeah, I think that it's pretty simple, actually. What Nate, the example Nate just provided, think of someone on your team that does recruiting. And I actually did this role earlier in my career, which is executive search. And you're going, you're creating a spreadsheet or putting it on paper, whatever your method is. And you're identifying all the people that you need to target based on industry, all these different factors. And you're putting it together and tracking it, right? But you're spending a tremendous amount of time. You can make mistakes. You can get false readings. And it's static.

16:49Shane Driggers:It doesn't live because you have to go back in and update it. And if you take that in the capacity that a recruiter that I spent doing that activity, which took me away from actually connecting with people, which is the role of a recruiter is to connect, to connect opportunity, right, to talent. And now there's a tool that actually does that for you. And it's way more smart or it's more sophisticated than what a human could do on their own. There's not enough hours in a day to do that. And it costs far less at the end of the day because you're taking that saved capacity. It's not sunk in cost.

17:23Shane Driggers:You're actually taking that capacity and pushing it towards the things that truly matter, which is connecting people. And so that's what I saw in the product initially.

17:33Nate Sokolić:Great. And then, you know, Nate, you brought this up, but you're doing a big launch around Findem Studio. So what is this? What's Findem Studio?

17:42Shane Driggers:Absolutely. So I think, you know, Findem's journey has been kind of a couple steps, right? And we started in SaaS where we built best in class workflows and we've productized it. Right. And so the consumption motion of that is, you know, your users, they go to the tool, they learn the tool and they're going to extract value from the tool. And we do. We have a lot of success with that. And the next thing has been, OK, all that data that we have allowed you to essentially get access to through these pre-baked workflows that your recruiters need to learn. A few months ago, we had a soft release of what we call Findem Studio, which is basically our front door for outcomes.

18:19Shane Driggers:And that exposed our MCP. So that gave access to all of the data that Findem has, the labeled, structured, organized data directly into an LLM where you can ask questions and get information back, get people back, get graphs back to tell you a story. And where we are today, and I'll contextualize, is the release of Findem Studio, which is that same thing one step further, which actually delivers outcomes and work that's verified that actually offloads a particular part of the motion. So the analogy here is, let's look at like Claude and Claude code. When an engineer was, how did it start? An engineer would put their code base and they would essentially say, give me feedback on how to make the code better.

19:04Shane Driggers:that essentially is mcp right now with find them studio is the analogy is like cloud code where those engineers they don't just want feedback on their code base anymore they actually want the system to deliver them working code that can go in front of their customers and that they can deploy that evolution is essentially what we've done here where you can ask for a market map you can ask for a succession plan you can ask for an inflow outflow report and we have partnered with practitioners to essentially define what these outcomes are. And we have layers of validation and verification on top of our data that gives you an outcome that you can trust, right?

19:41Shane Driggers:So it's an outcomes engine, really, that's agentically driven to meet a user where they are and to deliver an outcome.

19:48Nate Sokolić:Okay, so I'm a recruiter. I'm running a search for, maybe I'm doing an executive search for my company. We're looking for, you mentioned a CFO earlier. We're looking for a CFO. So what am I going to find in Studio? What am I going to use it for? Am I going to use it to come in and present the strategy? What would I do?

20:09Shane Driggers:Absolutely. So it's going to meet you where you're at. You're going to say what your goal is. And it is going to take you through a structured methodology to get you to an outcome. So let's say a market map, right? So a market map is an agent that we have inside of Studio. And it's going to take you from where you're at, get information that it needs to deliver on it. And it's going to go and do the work and bring you back a deliverable. Now, what's interesting about all of this is that we've added some real infrastructure to make sure that the deliverable that you get is something that you can trust.

20:37Shane Driggers:And there's a whole framework around that, which basically relies on three specific things. Number one is the data, right? So better data contextualized. That's the foundation that we already have.

20:47Nate Sokolić:That's why it would be better than like I could maybe go do this on Cloud, but Cloud doesn't have the contextual data that Studio has.

20:54Shane Driggers:that's one that's one thing that they don't have the next thing that they don't have is methodology and that's where someone like Shane comes in because all of the agents that we have inside of find them are sponsored and built with practitioners like Shane that says this is what the best in class thing looks like right so we haven't coded the methodology like have you ever gone and clawed and you type something in and then you type it in again and you get two separate responses that are packaged two different ways how do you get to the same high fault yes I

21:22Nate Sokolić:I have.

21:22Shane Driggers:Yeah. How do you get to the same high quality output every single time in something that you can trust? We have encoded those technologies into it. Yeah.

21:32Nate Sokolić:That's interesting. And so, okay. Yeah. I think, and if we just take the market map example, if you were trying to create a market map, maybe, you know, take the clods aside, whatever. It takes a long time to get all of that data to create. Like, you know, I don't know. I haven't created one in a long time myself, but I'm guessing it takes a few weeks to do. Right. Because you got to do all the research. You got to find stuff. You got to put it all together. And this is doing it in. Yeah.

22:07Shane Driggers:Minutes to hours. Right. I think, you know, really, and this is the third leg of differentiation is when you do something and find them, It's not just going to give you the output on our data, but it actually shows all the work, right? If it decided Shane, it's going to validate Shane. It's going to show you all the places where it found Shane to triangulate to show you that Shane is actually the right person. And it's going to give you the dossier, right? So the data, the workflow, and the verification and validation, it's almost like an analyst, right? It's like, you know, when you first said that market map as a junior researcher, a junior analyst, like you put it in the Excel, you organize it and you and you gave it to the more senior recruiter to basically like evaluate it.

22:50Shane Driggers:That type of handoff is the type of handoff that we're enabling, not just the magic delivery. Right. And so I think it really is full circle work that you can trust is work that you can see. And I think we're enabling the ability to basically get that across a number of use cases, both in talent acquisition, but also more broadly across the HR function.

23:09Nate Sokolić:Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Go ahead, Shane.

23:11Shane Driggers:Can I jump in here, Jessica? Yeah. So I think to build on that, I think Nate framed it up beautifully, but what about the next level of order, which is you're doing a CFO search? Well, you're not doing that on your own. And you're actually partnered up with a CEO and probably likely others to run that search. And part of that is, cool, like, where are we going to go? You're defining what the role is and taking in the requirements and then using that to work with Findem. But now you have something that you can go back and have a conversation with the CEO to say, here's what we found. Here's the data.

23:46Shane Driggers:Do we trust the data? Let's debate the things that we have questions about. Let's dig into those. It creates a launch pad that is so unique and differentiated from, well, I did some Google searching and here's what I put together in my spreadsheet and I polished it up and made it look really pretty. And that took four and a half hours of my time and I missed my kids' soccer game. Like just pull the thread on this. I mean, it's so much bigger than just the core of what you're getting. It's the halo effect, if you will. And those outer rings matter a lot, I think, in finding a CFO. It's multidimensional.

24:24Nate Sokolić:Yeah, for sure. Well, let's – and I think, you know, the story of FindEm will maybe organically come through this conversation. But both of you are out there in the world. Shane, you're making friends everywhere. Nate, you're talking to potential customers and customers. And I'm advising HROs and CEOs, and we're talking about AI and how to get it adopted internally. And everybody's kind of doing it a little bit different, right? There's no sort of playbook that anyone's working by, which I actually think is good because we don't need a playbook yet for this. But when you talk to folks, what is the thing that you're finding that they're struggling with the most?

25:16Nate Sokolić:You know, find them aside.

25:18Shane Driggers:Yeah, it's a great question.

25:23Shane Driggers:I think the modes of consumption are changing. And the definition of what you expect from someone that delivers you AI is very different than how people are used to consuming. So even very simply, before it was transacting, I said this a couple of times, but like SaaS is you're selling the opportunity to achieve ROI. General access, like there's a tool, there's workflows, and your ROI realization is going to be dependent on your person learning that tool and extracting value from that tool. And there's a glass ceiling on it. And change management's really hard at scale. Yeah. I think the promise of AI, if we do this correctly, is clear, measurable outcomes and ROI.

26:06Shane Driggers:And that doesn't necessarily, that doesn't have to be big, big things. It can be very small things. Right. And I think, you know, Jane's example of his talent in flow, outflow agent that he helped us build, right, I think is a very good example of a clear and measurable outcome that took someone a certain amount of time, certain number of steps that you can get in a consistent way. and that can scale up to more robust workflows. Yeah.

26:31Nate Sokolić:You know, I think one of the things that I hear, and I think you're touching on this, Nate, is that people are using a lot of things, some things we know about, some things we don't know about because there's so much out there and people can get access to these new tools, platforms, whatever you want to call them easily. but and and we survey our employees and they tell us they're more productive however we don't actually see more productivity you know in product innovation we don't see productivity directly correlating to the bottom line increasing revenue right so that's you know one of the things that I think some of the folks I'm talking about are struggling with like they're like We're using it a lot.

27:20Nate Sokolić:People are embracing it, some more than others. However, it's really kind of hard to measure because it's a little bit all over the place. And we're not seeing, even though people are saying they're more productive, we're not actually seeing that productivity in the business and impacting the bottom line. Shane, do you have any thoughts on that?

27:39Shane Driggers:I have so many thoughts. I think it comes back to a couple.

27:42Nate Sokolić:Do you hear the same thing or is it just the people I'm talking to? Okay.

27:45Shane Driggers:Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think a few thoughts, maybe like the meta point, which is back to tech. And I think Jessica, you kind of touched this elephant. Oftentimes what I've experienced in the companies that I've worked for is that tech wags the tail of strategy. It's like, hey, there's this cool piece of tech and it's like, cool, like how are we going to use it? Instead of, hey, we have this problem that we want to solve. We built this strategy. What do we need to enable it? And so you have, anytime you start in that place, I think you're on a fool's errand. because you're going to drift so far from where you wanted to land.

28:17Shane Driggers:And then you're going to declare that it didn't work. Well, it didn't work because you didn't start with the strategy and say, what are we actually trying to accomplish? This is what company's biggest challenge today is. What is our strategy with AI? What do we want to accomplish? And then what must be true? What are those conditions in order to get there? And I don't think companies are taking enough time. They're treating it like a 20th century tool like SaaS or worse yet on-prem. Instead of this is a new technology, what do we want to do and how are we going to get from point A to point B without that ugly, messy middle where things go to die in a Venn diagram?

28:58Shane Driggers:And I think that is the opportunity.

29:00Nate Sokolić:Agreed. And one of the things that I've been talking to a lot of companies about is that you really have to, and you're touching on this, Shane, you really have to think about this from the first principle perspective. You have to kind of ignore your situation today because you cannot just slap on all of these things to your existing ways of working, to your existing organization. You actually have to kind of go back and saying, if we were creating this from scratch, how would we create it? What would we do? And I think a lot of folks are creating on top of what they already created, which isn't actually helping anyone.

29:43Nate Sokolić:And, you know, and you're spending a lot of money on tokens, whatever it is. And sure, maybe people feel more productive, but you haven't gone back and redesigned because that's really what you have to do. You have to redesign the work and not just, you know, what you're going to be doing in recruiting and how your recruiters are operating, but how finance is going to operate. And I think you also have to be very cognizant of, you know, the framework of what should be human led and what should not be, you know. And there's some things that can be AI led. However, maybe they shouldn't be.

30:30Shane Driggers:Yeah, I think that's a fair question. And where I go to is, you said this, Jessica, and the way I kind of manifest for me is that we're going to incur more tech debt. That I think is actually already happening. Yeah. We're placing technology on the edge of autonomy instead of placing humans there because that's where actually humans belong. And putting AI at the core of your organization so that things are connected. Like if you think about these integrated ecosystems that we work in, where strategy falls down is that it's not connected up to the top line of the company. And so you're working on a bunch of widgets that actually don't, that look cool, but they don't actually effectuate what you're trying to get after.

31:17Shane Driggers:and I think that's why companies need to slow down and say like how do we want to actually use this at scale what does that look like what do we not know and put those characteristics into your strategy and build so that you can measure them and test them and be aware of them not starting is not a good strategy and starting without enough thought sitting in the problem is not a good strategy and replicating the past is not a good strategy so I think this is why people are all jammed up on like, where do we go and what do we do? So we'll collect more debt and we'll test. And wherever you give your energy and attention to is going to take you away from the things that you truly should be giving your energy and attention to.

31:57Shane Driggers:So then it comes to what as operators we always face is how do you prioritize the work of a team?

32:02Nate Sokolić:Yeah.

32:03Shane Driggers:Which is really difficult. Getting down to the task level of jobs is going to be really, really important. And John Boudreaux, if you're familiar with John, you know, has spent his whole career, you know, researching and looking at the ways in which people work. Because that's what it's really about is like work gets done through other people, whether that's through a human or through a bot. And now it's more complex because now you got to think of two personas that are very different. And how are they similar? Right, right. If I may add to the best, the worst strategy is not leaning in at all.

32:36Shane Driggers:And I think the best strategy is people are people who are finding small, pragmatic, practical ways to enter into the journey. And, you know, and I think, and I've said this a couple times here, and I really do believe it's a differentiator of what Findem has to offer because there are different modes, like we have the data, but we have different modes for how you can consume SaaS, whatever it is. Many of the partnerships that we're entering into right now are two, three year transformation partnerships with the goal of maybe starting in SaaS, consolidating the tech debt and trickling in agents in year one in particular places with the practitioners like myself, where we're making sure that they meet you where you're at.

33:15Shane Driggers:Right. And then trickle more in year two, trickle more in year three and transition off of maybe some of the legacy modes of consumption. And I think, you know, this motion doesn't have to be zero or a hundred. It just has to start somewhere, wherever you're comfortable. And you're going to know that as a leader, you're going to know what is the appetite for technology? Who are the people that you have? What's the culture? What are the constraints? And figure out what's the right trickle and where are the biggest pain points. And the reconciliation of that is the starting point. And then with proof points, if the whole premise of AI is ROI, the proof points will be clear and trickle in a little bit more, find the next problem.

33:51Shane Driggers:trickle on a little bit more. And I think that is the way where I'm seeing people who are, you know, who have achieved impact. They started small, right? And they found the way to start, won't take them on that journey.

34:02Nate Sokolić:Yeah. I think that that's good advice. It's similar advice that I give. You know, Shane, I want to talk to you because, you know, we both held the role. I was also called the chief talent officer. And so we've both been, which, you know, was complicated when we became an entertainment company and, you know, I was getting scripts and, you know, headshots. But, you know, HRO role is really complicated, right? You said in it, I often describe it as the hardest outside of the CEO, because CEO is pretty hard too. But outside of that, it's the hardest C-level role because it has so many different things coming at it.

34:46Nate Sokolić:So you, of course, are the HR, you're the compliance, you're the recruiting, you're the talent, you're all of those strategies. Then, you know, you're the chief diversity officer. You're also the COO in many ways. And now all of a sudden you just got this new promotion. You're also the chief AI strategist, right? And so we just keep getting promoted, which is interesting. We don't get the salary increase to go on top with all of those promotions, but that's a different discussion. But there's a lot in this role and it's really complicated. And I think I see a lot of CEOs getting frustrated because, you know, we all know that they want things yesterday and they like to see impact and work.

35:42Nate Sokolić:But this is a little complicated and a little hard. So what's your advice to the CHROs or the head of people at various different companies to navigate not only the relationship with the CEO and how to help strategize through this evolution, but also the rest of the team?

36:03Shane Driggers:I think that there's a number of us, certainly the three of us, that have grown up in systems that were created for us. And we have worked within those systems. We have iterated, made things beautiful that weren't beautiful, things that were complicated, simple, all amazing things. But we didn't create the system. And my point on this is that in human resources, not only do you have to be a human thinker, you must be a system thinker. and we know you must be a business thinker. So it's three distinct interlocks. And the system one is coming, I think, to the forefront right now in a very profound way because if you can't think of the wiring, the architecture on the back end, I think it paralyzes people.

36:52Shane Driggers:And I just had this conversation with a former colleague and I think we need to build a bridge. There has to be a bridge for people to go over and not everybody is capable of building that bridge. So who in your organization does think in systems, does think in a business context, and also is able to connect the human. And that's where the magic is at. And so don't try to add bullshit on, for lack of a better word, to your current architecture and your tech stack. Start with a blank page. And that's where you got to start to think in those spaces.

37:29Nate Sokolić:I agree. And, you know, everybody's always looking for like what Meta did, what Google did, right? But like, you know, I think and whatever you're trying to solve, you need to think uniquely about your business. But I think in this context, you certainly have to think about uniquely about your business. There's no playbook that is going to be designed for you, right? And this is about your business, which is different than any other business. and your people are different than any other, you know, businesses people. So yeah, I think you're right. And I would, I would give the same advice. And, and, you know, again, you, this is a massive opportunity, I think, for the people function, if we can step up to the plate and, and, and hopefully we will.

38:16Nate Sokolić:But if you, if you, if you can be that strategic partner for, for your business and help them redesign how work is going to work for the future and, and actually how that's going to, you know, impact the bottom line, you're going to, I don't know, you have that opportunity to do this right now. So I just hope everybody's taking it. Yeah.

38:40Shane Driggers:I always thought, Jessica, that the dot-com boom was like the gold rush of our time. And it most certainly was a gold rush. This is it. This is orders of magnitude greater. Yeah. And I spent time at the TED conference, which was ironically titled AI and Humanity. and no one at the time, this is about a year and a half ago, had an answer on humanity. It was everybody was like looking through each other's skulls. It's like, oh gosh. But there's opportunity. And if you are willing to participate in it and understanding where you have gaps, being curious about those gaps, seeking others to your left and right that have that strength and leveraging, it all goes back to curiosity and growth mindset.

39:21Nate Sokolić:Yeah.

39:22Shane Driggers:Because if you fall back on what got you to this place, you will fail.

39:28Nate Sokolić:Yeah. Agreed. Goodness. So much pressure. There's so much pressure. Okay. We're running out of time, which is super unfortunate. You know, I'm going to do what I do to all of my guests, which is put a little pressure on both of you. And I always ask my guests to leave the listeners with something inspirational. So what, what do you want to leave us with today? Nate, you're first.

39:52Shane Driggers:I think it's on the heels of everything that we've said. I mean, I think Like now more than ever, the ability to write your own story, you have more tools than ever to be able to do that. And I think the impacts opportunity is greater than ever within an organization because those levers can be really personalized. But I think you just have to make sure that you are, like you said, very reflective on what your organization needs, what your problems are. And now the tool set is so expensive and the partnership motions are so powerful that you can solve the real problems that you guys have inside of your organization.

40:29Shane Driggers:So, you know, being really introspective will actually, I think, push the needle both in terms of dollars, but I think more importantly, in terms of just like broader impact on what your team can do.

40:40Nate Sokolić:Yeah, absolutely. All right, Shane, your turn.

40:43Shane Driggers:yeah I I think that for what's front of mind for me and I don't know if those listening will find this inspirational but the intent is that which is we're in society as a whole and then the microcosm of that inside of each company we know what that looks like we went through COVID and all these things in life then things that codify us and things that separate us but what I would encourage people to lean into is understanding that society is brittle, it's anxious, things are nonlinear, and they're incomprehensible right now. That is the state of mindset for many people. And so as a result, they're breathing in fear.

41:25Shane Driggers:Help them breathe in oxygen. Tell them you don't know exactly what's going on, but you're following the puck. I think the ultimate currency moving forward in this world is transparency. And as a leader, if I'm speaking to the leaders, whether you lead people or you're a thought leader, speak from a place of truth because that will connect and codify you. If you're going to give the old corporate bullshit one-liner like, well, yeah, it's not going to land. People are, it's not, I'm telling you. So like, just speak from your truth and find the solutions together.

41:59Nate Sokolić:The truth works. The truth works. Name of the podcast. But anyways, that is true. And both, thank you. that was both inspirational and thought-provoking. So I know our listeners are going to take that into their week and hopefully do something with it. And just, y 'all, follow the puck. Nobody has all the answers. Follow the puck. That's great advice. Thank you guys so much for coming on today and telling your stories and talking about Find Em. And y 'all, listen, go out and look at Find Em because it is pretty, pretty cool. I think you're going to like it. You may become a fan just like Shane.

42:35Nate Sokolić:and maybe you'll work there just like Nate. Who knows? Thank you guys both for coming on the show and thank you to Fynne. We're so excited to be partnering with you.

42:45Shane Driggers:Thank you so much. Thanks, Jessica. So much fun.

42:47Nate Sokolić:Thanks for listening to TruthWorks.