00:00
Matt Alder
Resumes, shortlists, interviews. Every part of the recruiting process was designed around the limits of human time and resources. What happens when AI starts to take those limits away? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from EightfoldAI. EightfoldAI’s interviewer agent is transforming how organizations hire. Powered by Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence foundation, the AI interviewer is an autonomous and assistive agentic interviewer that thinks, adapts and evaluates like your best recruiter, operating 24, 7 across time zones and languages while assessing every candidate fairly and consistently. It works across the entire interview process, from initial screening to final assessment, enabling teams to make faster hiring decisions, deliver a seamless candidate experience and complete interviews in under a business week so you can find your best fit talent. To find out more, just head over to Eightfold.ai. That’s Eightfold.ai. Hi there.

01:32
Matt Alder
Welcome to episode 771 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting has always been shaped by the time and resources available. Resumes are short because recruiters only have a finite amount of time to read them. Interview shortlists are small because hiring managers can only meet so many candidates. The whole funnel narrows because no human team can evaluate everyone who applies. None of these are strategic choices. They’re simply workarounds for the limits of human capacity. AI agents can screen hundreds of candidates in a matter of hours and delivers structured evidence for recruiters to review. The data coming back is already challenging assumptions about how these processes should work, while the growing influence of AI on who progresses through the hiring process makes questions around ethics, fairness and regulatory compliance impossible to ignore. So how should TA leaders re architect their processes while keeping them responsible?

02:39
Matt Alder
My guest this week is Sachit Kamat, Chief Product Officer at Eightfold AI. In our conversation, Sachit shares early data from AI interviewing at scale and explains why it’s time to reimagine recruiting processes as the traditional constraints around time and resources are starting to fall away.

03:00
Matt Alder
Hi Sachit and welcome to the podcast.

03:03
Sachit Kamat
Thanks Matt. Thanks for having me on.

03:05
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?

03:11
Sachit Kamat
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I’m Sachit Kamat. I’m the Chief Product Officer at Eightfold. We’re an AI company in the HR technology space that have been operating for the last nine years. I’ve been with the company for the last five years and we’ve been Innovating on a number of things related to AI.

03:26
Matt Alder
Fantastic. So let’s dive straight into AI. So very much. You know, the biggest word of last year or the biggest words of last year were agentic AI. Everyone was talking about it, everyone seemed to have a slightly different definition of what they thought it meant. But I know that there’s still a lot of uncertainty and confusion in the talent acquisition community about what does this actually mean and how does it change things, how is it different from the chatbots and automations that people have been using for a long time? So what’s changed with AI and why does that matter so much in terms of the way recruiting works moving forward?

04:06
Sachit Kamat
Yeah, so the definition of agentic I use is basically a piece of software that can operate autonomously of a human and it can do it in a way where the human doesn’t actually have to be present in front of their machine right. While it is running. And so why is that important? Because quite simply what that means is while we’re getting a cup of coffee, while we are getting our sleep at night, while we are doing other things in the workplace, the agents can be running and they can be making us much more productive than we’ve ever been before. And a great example of this is a product that we at Eightfold have launched called the AI Interviewer Solution. We what this does is it effectively takes, you know, the ability to interview a candidate, which would potentially be one.

04:51
Sachit Kamat
You know, basically a human would accomplish this in a way where it would be a single conversation at a time and it would be done in a way where you couldn’t have, you know, basically only a certain number of conversations. Give, given the eight hour workday that we all sort of have a limitation off. Right. Instead of that an agent is able to run effectively infinitely. It’s a world where hundreds of candidates can be interviewed in a matter of hours, thousands of candidates in a matter of days, and it completely changes the way that we think of recruiting. Right, which is a process where all of these different checkpoints in that process have been instrumented in the past based on human limitations.

05:31
Sachit Kamat
Now it’s a question where those human limitations are lifted and you can basically unleash a level of productivity that has never been possible before in this industry.

05:40
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point because, you know, resumes being a few pages only interviewing a proportion of people for a short amount of time, you know, as you say, these are all kind of standard things in recruiting that have been formed because of Human capability and time and all that kind of stuff. What about the candidate side of things? I mean, what impact does it have on the candidate experience? I mean, I asked that because there is a lot of, you know, talk about AI interviewing. There’s a lot of discussion that it might not be the best candidate experience or candidates want to talk to humans. What are you seeing from what you’re doing?

06:21
Sachit Kamat
So I’ll give you some data points that we have seen in practice of having this technology now live for the last two to three quarters. Right. And what we have noticed is that more than half of the interviews that are actually being conducted using this technology happen outside of business hours. They happen nights, they happen on weekends, they happen to be conducted in situations where the candidate just has the time and they can press a button and start the conversation. And I think that is a major shift in the way that this industry operates. Right. Because you can free people up to effectively engage at a time when they find most convenient. So that’s the first part that we’ve noticed. Now, it is also true that the technology is still at its infancy. Right. So is it the same quality as a human?

07:05
Sachit Kamat
And I would say that on the one side of it, which is the human side of it, where the ability to make eye contact, the ability to really understand the person, you know, in terms of their, the way they speak, the tone, you know, how engaged they are, these are things that the technology currently doesn’t do particularly well. But on the flip side, it is able to conduct the interview in a consistent way. It is able to conduct it in a way that’s fair. It’s able to do it in a way where it can be concise. And a 12 minute conversation, 12, 13 minute conversation, which is what we’re averaging at the moment, is sufficient to extract the context it needs to determine, you know, that the, is the candidate a fit for a position.

07:48
Sachit Kamat
That’s the sort of advancement we’re seeing, which is there are some things that it is better at and then there are some things where we still need to work on the technology a bit more.

07:56
Matt Alder
Yeah, and I suppose let’s dig into that just a little bit more from that sort of human AI split, because I think as you kind of lay out there’s some obvious ways in which AI can do things that humans can’t. Do you think that the technology will be able to fully replace humans or is there always going to be that sense of, you know, humans are kind of really important part of this process?

08:19
Sachit Kamat
I Think for the foreseeable future, you will have a situation where the AI and humans are actually working together. Even in the example that I just laid out, right. It’s a scenario where the AI is automating the repetitive operational tasks that the recruiter would perform. But the, you know, the element of human judgment still comes into play, which is instead of the recruiter actually being present with the candidate, they’re able to review the evidence in a concise fashion that the AI has organized. Right. So they always have access to a video recording of the candidate, they always have access to the transcript and effectively the summarization of what the conversation was about. And they are able to review and then make a judgment based on what they see in terms of the fit of the candidate.

09:02
Sachit Kamat
So while AI makes it easier, it does not automatically make a decision on the janitor.

09:07
Matt Alder
No, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And I think one of the interesting things about the way that AI is working and what it makes possible, I know that a lot of organizations are just sort of plugging AI tools into their existing workflows, but that’s not really kind of making the full benefits of what’s available. There’s a kind of real argument that this is the opportunity to redesign workflows and think about TA and TA teams differently. What’s your, what’s your perspective on that?

09:39
Sachit Kamat
Yeah, so it’d be interesting to sort of describe how the recruiting funnel operates today and why it has been constructed in that fashion. Right. Because again, we as humans have the limitations of the, you know, the standard 40 hour work week. And it’s a situation where, you know, all these specializations that have been created, where there are sourcers going out and finding candidates, you know, reaching out to hundreds of candidates and getting maybe a handful of responses. Then, you know, you effectively translate that into, you know, 15 to 20 candidates that get screened, all because of the limitations of the workweek. And then you have, you know, maybe four or five candidates that you take forward to, you know, basically the on site interview process, et cetera. Right. This is a just a standard example of a recruiting workflow.

10:23
Sachit Kamat
It has been constructed primarily because it has not been humanly possible to talked to hundreds and thousands of people before. But now that limitation is lifted, I think we can foresee a world where more of the screening actually gets done by these AI agents. More people effectively get a chance to, you know, effectively put, throw their hat in the ring for some of these roles. And then it’s a scenario where the quality that you’re able to get on the other side could substantially be higher just because of the larger pool that you’re considering. So in a lot of ways, it is time to actually reimagine these processes that have existed in the recruiting world for many decades in a way where some of the major constraints that we operated with are completely lifted.

11:06
Sachit Kamat
So one of the things that we talk about at Eightfold is how do you think about rearchitecting processes for agent scale? And that is something that we’re working on with some of our clients right now.

11:15
Matt Alder
And what would your advice be to.

11:17
Matt Alder
All the TA leaders out there who are looking strategically at their processes?

11:23
Matt Alder
I mean, processes. Where should they start with this? What are the first steps?

11:28
Matt Alder
How do you go on that kind of transformation journey?

11:32
Sachit Kamat
I think the first thing to do is just take a look at the way that the recruiting workflow operates today, and then you identify the bottlenecks that have existed as a result of where you have applied human effort in the past. Right. And you know, the interesting thing about recruiting is that those bottlenecks are everywhere throughout the entire process. And then if you start to think about where you could potentially solve problems using some of this agentic automation that is now on the market, you could fundamentally reimagine the way that recruiting works in a. In a way that can you. Where you can make a business case very easily right to your stakeholders within the company.

12:06
Sachit Kamat
Because you could see material ways in which the time to hire, the cost to hire, all of these major metrics that have been the, you know, sort of the way that people decide to make investments here, all of these can be substantially be transformed using AI.

12:22
Matt Alder
Obviously, AI in hiring is attracting kind of intense legal and ethical scrutiny at the moment. How do you make sure that you’re approaching AI responsibly? Building trust. The systems are fair. And from an organization hiring perspective, but also from the candidates going through IT perspective as well.

12:43
Sachit Kamat
Yeah, so this is obviously something. Regulation in this industry has obviously been a major focus, I would say, over the last few years. You know, we as a company about five years ago, started to engage with many of the regulators and built a responsible AI council, including third parties that have run some of these regulatory agencies broadly in the industry, including in the US and Europe. And what we learned from some of those engagements is that there is a way in which you can be responsible about the types of data that you use to make determinations on who the right candidate for a role is. How do you ensure that when you are constructing these AI algorithms that can operate at massive scale that they don’t inject bias into the system.

13:29
Sachit Kamat
And what are the methods with which you can quantitatively test whether or not your algorithms are doing the right thing? These are established processes now that we have iterated on over the last half decade, and we will continue to do so in a way that establishes fairness, responsibility and trust in this industry. And I think there are obviously a lot of new laws that will be created over the next few years and we want to be at the forefront of that. So an evolving industry landscape, but one that we have always been at the forefront of as Eightfold.

14:00
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And what kind of questions should TA teams be asking suppliers or looking for when they’re trying to build this out responsibly?

14:09
Sachit Kamat
I mean, the first thing is the examples of the types of audits that have actually been created on these systems. Right. Because one of the things that we do is we do publish a yearly audit that shows how the system is operating, the quantitative data behind the decisions that it is proposing, and how humans are evaluating this and making decisions. Right. So there are established standards in the industry as a result of some of the local regulations that have been playing out here in the US and Europe, and audits are a great way to do that. The second is to actually look at some of the customer data that’s out there. Many of our customers, interestingly, have put out their own data behind using AI in the recruiting and employment space, broadly.

14:51
Sachit Kamat
So I would encourage folks that are looking to evaluate some of these systems to look at some of that data, because the data is one great way to effectively determine are these systems that are behind the scenes helping people make decisions, are they making the right decisions or not?

15:06
Matt Alder
And a final question. What does the future look like? I mean, how? You’re obviously working in the product space, you’re kind of building the future to a certain extent. How are things going to develop over the next two to three years? What have we sort of got coming down the pipeline?

15:23
Sachit Kamat
Yeah, look, the ultimate goal is quite simple, right? Which is eventually we want to bring down time to hire to zero. Right. And I know that is, you know, it’s a very long term, like, target, right, which is like we’d have to take away all of the friction in the world that exists when it comes to employment. But I do think that the agentic systems that are being built today will get us closer and closer to the point where in the next two to three years, for many roles, it’ll be possible to actually make a hire in under an hour. And I think that is, you know, that is an achievable target that we can hit as a result of all of this amazing technology that is being built now. Would that apply to all the types of roles that people hire for?

16:05
Sachit Kamat
Probably not. I don’t see companies hiring a CEO in an hour, for example, but I do see for a lot of the broad based hiring that most companies do, there is a possibility where some of these technologies push it forward to the point where more people are able to raise their hands and say they want a shot, more people are able to get evaluated. And then on the other side of it, we are able to get to a world that is more fairer and moves faster and helps economies effectively move faster as a result of some of these technologies that are being built.

16:35
Matt Alder
Absolutely. Sachit, thank you very much for talking to me.

16:39
Sachit Kamat
No worries at all. Great being on your show.

16:42
Matt Alder
My thanks to Sachit. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.