The future of recruitment – 3 powerful Sourcing Hacks with Steve Bartel

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, founder and CEO of Steve Bartel.

Steve Bartel:
Well, we talked about some of the trends that we’re seeing in this market. So I do think the future of recruiting is going to shift more towards all in one platforms that can do a lot more of the stack. I do think that AI is going to be a really important part of that. I also think that AI is going to be most effective when it’s built directly into an end to end platform instead of as a point solution. Because like you said, the data is the important part of AI. And if you just take AI sourcing, for example, you wouldn’t want AI going and spamming the market without any context about who is this person. They attended an event, they applied, they were referred. You actually want an end to end platform that can capture all that in one place to provide a single source of truth that then the AI can leverage.

On top of that, you can feed it all the relationship context. I think AI is going to be a huge part of that story. I think recruiting is going to continue to become more data driven like it has over the last 510 years, and it’s going to get better. Here’s the cool thing. With better products, better technology, AI helping automate a lot of the manual, tedious work that’s going to free up everyone in recruiting to do the fun part of the job, right? Like interface directly with candidates, show up as a strategic business partner to the rest of the organization. Like recruiting is just going to look fundamentally different in the next few years, even next three years. And I think it’s going to be awesome.

Thomas Kohler:
Steve and I talked about the origins of Gem and how they created an sourcing tool initially and now have an all in one recruiting platform powered by AI, which includes an ATS CRM, AI sourcing, scheduling, talent marketing events, and a career site. And we also had some stories on the founding story and a lot of insights on how to leverage sourcing, reach out, opening rates and many hidden gems in our episodes. We basically put it on the table.

Today’s guest, Steve Bartle, founder of Jam. And I’m really looking forward to this episode because I think a lot of people here in the talent acquisition space in Europe or Germany know Jam on the surface. And now we have the chance to get more out of the founder directly and also the CEO. So happy to have you here in the show, Steve. Maybe we start with a short introduction about yourself.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Short intro? Well, I’ve been working on Gem for the last, wow, almost seven and a half years now. And on my end, my background is mostly on the engineering side. So when I graduated school, I started at this, what was a tiny startup called Dropbox when it was 25 people, and then saw it through incredible hyper growth over the next four, five years, it grew to 1500 people in four and a half years, and very quickly was thrust into leading engineering teams as an Eng manager less than a year out of school. And through that experience just spent a ton of time hiring. And that was our number one priority back then at Dropbox.

Andrew, the CEO, Aditya, the VP of engineering, did a great job of just telling us, hey, if there’s anything you can do to help with recruiting, that’s our number one priority. And so really leaned into that more than most. And I think that’s ultimately what led me to go start jam and be inspired to build something for recruiting teams.

Thomas Kohler:
And how did you came up with the idea ultimately? Was there a trigger moment?

Steve Bartel:
Oh, there was, and it’s one that we actually don’t talk about very much. The funny thing about founding stories is a lot of time to get rewritten for the press once you get big enough. But I never really liked that idea. And so I’ll tell you what happened. We were actually looking at a completely different idea in a different space. Me and my co founder Nick Booshak, we teamed up to start a company and we, we were basically random walking through startup idealand and thinking about what to focus on, what to build. And we were actually looking at a completely different idea in the sales space. And while for a lot of reasons, that didn’t end up being the right company for us to go start, mostly actually because we just didn’t have as much experience with sales.

So we didn’t think we were going to be uniquely able to go build that company. It gave us a ton of exposure to all of the amazing technology that sales and marketing teams have. We were focused on that idea for two full months. I think we talked to something like 70 different companies about how they run their inside sales teams, vps of sales, sales managers, sales reps, and we thought to ourselves, holy cow, recruiting and sales are remarkably similar, yet recruiting teams don’t have nearly the same level of sophistication in terms of technology as these sales and marketing teams do. And that was the little insight there that led us to think like, huh, I wonder if we could catch recruiting up. I wonder if we could take some of this great tech that already exists in sales and marketing and bring it to recruiting. Especially because a lot of the most modern recruiting teams, the fastest growing companies, they were starting to think about the recruiting a lot more like sales and marketing. Rather than waiting for people to apply, they were going out there and engaging with passive talent and using a lot of the same tactics as sales and marketing teams to bring those folks in the door.

Thomas Kohler:
Nice. And when you think about the founding story, what was in terms of the company’s success, the breakthrough? Because I think now you’re quite established, you are very well known in the talent acquisition space. Was there also a trigger moment along the company history where you said, okay, yeah, this was really something where we broke through a very big ceiling or just really after something bigger?

Steve Bartel:
It’s a good question. I think actually that trigger point was the day we decided to go start gem, because from there we went and talked to 50 different recruiting organizations about how they’re hiring talent and more specifically, how are they getting the right talent in the door. I think there was another trigger point here which gave us so much confidence that we were on the right track, which was when we talked to 50 companies about this stuff, about 30, 40 of them were still managing all of this in spreadsheets. Like all of their sourcing, their events, maybe their talent marketing was over in a point solution. But there wasn’t really a single source of truth. There wasn’t really a system that was purpose built for proactive hiring, for getting people passive talent into the funnel. But the most cutting edge recruiting teams back then, the top 1020 percent of the companies, they were adopting sales and marketing tools for their recruiting. And so we talked to them, and companies like Dropbox, they were using Thenbloom.

I remember back then, Mulesoft was using Salesloft. We saw a number of companies using outreach and especially on the sales automation side, a lot of the technology that automates the cold outbound for sdrs and full cycle AE’s, it was being leveraged by sourcers and full cycle recruiters to automate their sourcing. We’re like, bingo. That is the thesis. That was the insight. And then we saw it play out in so many customers and from there everything just kind of fell in place.

Thomas Kohler:
Cool. So, totally makes sense on an abstract level. You said that a sorcerer might have a similar job than an SDR and a recruiter more than an AE. And then you just abstracted certain use cases and problems and then derived gem for it for recruitment. Totally makes sense. In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. When you look into the future, what is your vision for gem?

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, so in those. I mean, the initial insight with Jem was exactly like you said. Sales and recruiting are remarkably similar. The job of an SDR is so similar to the job of a sourcer, the job of AE so similar to the job of a recruiter. But even from early days as we were talking to customers, our vision became much bigger. And it was those 1st 50 customer conversations that really helped sharpen and hone in on that vision. Because as we talk to folks, we realize that unlike in sales where you have Salesforce and that’s actually a pretty good source of truth, it’s a database that captures both your active opportunities that you’re working, but also all of your passive relationships. In recruiting, there just wasn’t a good source of truth.

What companies were stuck with was the applicant tracking system. But that hadn’t fundamentally changed in 1020 years. To catch up to this new way of recruiting, most ATS didn’t even have the notion of a prospect record or a person record. All they had were applicants and you couldn’t even tie multiple applicants. When you look at enterprise applicant tracking systems, you couldn’t even tie multiple applicants to the same person. When you look at the success factors, isims, Oracle to Leo, it’s just literally an applicant record with no knowledge that these same seven applicants are all the same. Like human. Right? So there just wasn’t a good source of truth for recruiting.

And then beyond that, there was no way to manage and track your passive talent, right? These ATs didn’t help you with any of the work that happened before people apply. So very quickly our vision became, how can you build the source of truth for recruiting? Now, of course we had to do that in steps. We couldn’t just go outright and build everything all at once. So after we made gems initial like sourcing automation product to help automate a lot of the manual, tedious work that goes into sourcing, we very quickly set our sights on a talent CRM, basically a company’s source of truth for all of their passive talent relationships. And then we said, well, what more workflows can we pull in at the top of the funnel? And we set our sights on recruitment events, talent marketing and branding with branded email campaigns forums, talent communities. And then we kept hearing from our customers that analytics was a really tough pain point for them. And so we built the first ever full funnel analytics that tied all of the work that teams are doing at the top of the funnel to all of the work in the ATS to bridge that gap. Right? And now I’m really excited about the last year or two because finally the time has come for us to go build our own ATS.

We’ve been building that and it’s going super well. We already have 100 plus customers leveraging it very quickly after launch and I’m super excited to continue to invest in that and actually bring it up market so that it can serve the needs of our mid market and enterprise customers, which is really where our sweet spot is. We have a ton of mid market and enterprise customers leveraging the rest of gems platform.

Thomas Kohler:
That totally makes sense as well. And in your LinkedIn you also describe it, right? So all in one recruiting platform powered by AI. There’s also a later question how you power it. And also ATS, CRM, sourcing, analytics, scheduling, talent marketing and events and a career side, everything that you need actually as a recruiter. And funny enough, the first ATS I used was HubSpot because I would say I trained myself in recruiting by just openrest and I never found like ten years ago something where I thought, oh, that’s actually cool. But we were hiring a lot of salespeople initially and everybody was talking about CRM systems, like Salesforce obviously, right, but also other upcoming CRM systems and HubSpot I think ten years ago really started to nail it and innovate fast, right. With a great user experience. And when they launched a new product back then, I think even when the drift CEO when they launched then or rebuild the whole product experience, HubSpot was kind of designed new and I thought, wow, it’s really cool, you could use it for hiring and then we just use it for hiring.

Steve Bartel:
That is literally our thesis playing out dozens of times in potential customers. And I heard so many stories like that. People were using HubSpot, they were using large enterprises, were using Salesforce as their system of record in recruiting. Gosh, we got to be able to do better if we build something purpose built for recruiting teams.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely. And a smart move there. And also great that you also saw this already seven years ago. And one question also on the name, how did you come up with the name gem?

Steve Bartel:
Oh yeah. So when we started it was funny. We picked our first name in about 2 hours. What happened was we were talking to a friend and he’s like, steve, Nick, today is the last day to apply late for YC. Like, you missed the regular application, but like, they have late applications that they take for up to, like, I think a few weeks, three, four weeks. And today is literally the last day. I’ll make you a rack. You should totally do it.

And we’re like, oh, should we do YC? Because we had just talked to 50 customers. We hadn’t built a single single line of code. We hadn’t built any product. We’re like, yeah, well, we really believe in this idea. We’re going to go focus on it and maybe YC could help supercharge and accelerate our path. And it totally did. But the first name was Zensors and we’re applying to YC back then and y combinator, for those of you who don’t know. And we’re like, we need a name.

Shoot. Like, what are we going to call this thing? It’s like, well, I guess we’re starting with sourcing. And back then there were a lot of Zen startups. There was Zen prospects, Zendesk, dozens and dozens of Zen products. And I think it was meant to capture the idea that the product was actually nice to use. And we’re like, all right, why don’t we look up different Zen names that could make sense? We looked up Zen sourcing was taken. Zenrecruiter was taken, and then we looked up Zensourcer and we’re like, oh, cool, like the domain exists. Let’s go buy it real quick.

Include it in our YC app. And if we get into YC, we’ll call it Zensourcer. And so that was how we, that’s how we landed on the original name, Zen Sorcerer. And it was actually a really good name for us for the first year or two where we were just working on building the very best sourcing automation product because it was super descriptive in terms of what we did. But we always knew we were going to need to change the name because it didn’t encompass our bigger vision for where we wanted to take gem beyond sourcing. About two years in, right after we raised our series A from Excel, we started to think now might be the right time to change our name. In fact, we have this fundraising announcement coming up which we could use to get the word out about our new name. We had seen some other peer companies of ours do that effectively.

And so that’s when we began the process of trying to find a name. And we thought it would be fast, but it actually took eight months to land on what was ultimately gem. And I’m so glad we spent that time because I love the name. I think it’s got all sorts of cool tiebacks to recruiting in terms of finding your hidden gem. Right. Which gem absolutely helps you do. I love it because it’s cute. Think of the swag internally.

We have all these gem shirts that say you’re a gem and we get to call our employees gems. It’s just so you’re totally making. Yeah, but it was actually, I mean, this is probably a longer story for another time, but it was tough to secure the domain because three letter domains cost a lot. And originally when we reached out to the owner, the price point that she wanted for it was way too high for a startup of our stage. But we were able to get creative and find a price point that worked, but also structure it in a way where we lease the name from her for seven years. And so that way we were paying monthly payments against the lease. And for startups, that’s a really good strategy to go buy a really expensive domain because if you’re successful, you’re going to go raise a ton more money than you ever had at that early stage and that cost becomes insignificant if you’re not. You just give back the domain. And that’s great for them too, because now they’ve pocketed some of that money along the way and they get it back and they can resell it.

Thomas Kohler:
Was it seven digit the price?

Steve Bartel:
I’m not going to comment. It might have been eight.

Thomas Kohler:
It’s also a trend then.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
Okay, so and just…

Steve Bartel:
Oh wait, sorry, sorry. Let me do the math on that. No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t eight.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. Also maybe a shout out to one colleague of mine, Karim Ahmed. He was a global sourcing leader at Hellofresh. I think you’re a customer of yours. And he, I hired him one in once into a company and then we dived into a bit of sourcing to structure the sourcing function, everything. And then he showed how we leverage it and use it. And I was like, wow, that’s really, really great. We need to leverage it as well.

So also shout out to him, I think he really was the first ambassador, ambassador I met. And they really built out a talent sourcing tech map where champ was on the. Definitely have it on your shortlist for sourcing piece. But now it’s more than sourcing. That’s also good. And I think now also more AI came into play, but also previously, two, three years ago, there was also some intelligence to it. Right. But how did you power AI back then and now, and with the whole boom, how did it impact your product?

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So the interesting thing that’s happened over the last year or two. Before the last year or two, a lot of AI use cases were a lot harder. You basically had to hire machine learning and AI specialists and engineers. You had to train up these big models using tons of data, and then you had to fine tune those models with tons of customer data. So your AI had to be very bespoke to each customer, and that created a lot of pain points for customers where it was really hard to get time to value because you’d be training the model for a role and it wouldn’t even get good until you fill it. So the really cool thing that’s changed in the last year or two is with these generative AI models that’s basically made all of that old AI technology obsolete, and it’s made AI way better. It’s also unlocked new ways of leveraging AI.

Whole conversational AI has unlocked new use cases because previously the other challenge with AI was it was more of a black box where you didn’t know why it was making the decisions that it was. But now you can actually literally tell the AI to tell you why, and you can give visibility into the algorithm, and you can give a lot more control into the algorithm by allowing your end users to submit prompts in a structured way. AI has just gotten way, way, way better. Previously, we actually thought that most AI solutions didn’t work all that well and didn’t drive all that much value for customers. We actually waited and we waited for this technology breakthrough to happen in the last year or two, and then we started to invest. Previously, we had a few smaller use cases of AI, like we would automatically detect your replies and whether they were interested, not interested, or follow up later, or even custom reply reasons, because that was like a really well defined use case that we knew we could nail. We knew we could get it right, we could get it accurate and drive real value for customers. But now, with the advancements in generative AI, we are threading it through every aspect of our product.

We started with draft creation and personalization, because that’s a very natural use case of large language models. Anything involving text is a really great use case. We built that directly into gem sequences so that AI could help you personalize that first draft. And then of course, you could review it tweak it if you need to, and also to help with sequence creation. Because a lot of customers, when they first jump into gem for the first time, especially if they’re newer recruiters or maybe they’re like hiring managers recruiting for the first time, they might not know exactly what message to put. And that can be a cold start problem when you’re setting up a four stage email sequence and you need to have different follow ups for every stage. Those were the very low hanging fruit initial use cases. Now we are expanding that and threading it through the rest of the product.

The three major use cases we’re working on are AI sourcing so that customers can identify external talent that could be a good fit for their open roles. We are working on AI ranking on top of your inbound applications so that customers can more quickly sort through the most promising ones and get back to them first. Especially in this day, where something like 20% of our customers have more than 1000 applicants per role. That’s crazy. That’s wild, right? And so we’re looking to help there. And then the last use case that we’re building is around candidate rediscovery. Because when you open a role, of course, it makes sense to start with the folks that you already know about, the folks that have raised their hand and applied, the people that have attended, attended one of your recruiting events, the folks that your team has already identified and sourced, that could be a good fit for your company and for your culture. And so those three AI use cases are the places where we’re focused now, starting with AI sourcing, which is launching in May. But we already have it in the hands of early access customers and then expanding to AI ranking and then candidate rediscovery in the second half of this year.

Thomas Kohler:
Nice. Cool. And you also have a lot of data, obviously, right, as you already shared, like 20% of your customers have more than 1000 applicants on a role.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, it’s wild. And I mean, it makes sense. We’re working with a lot of the biggest and best companies out there that have really great talent brands and get a lot of interest in inbound. Right? A lot of the fastest growing AI companies like anthropic and scale, but also a ton of like, large enterprises, you know, six Fortune 50 companies, UnitedHealth Group, companies like that.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas@pplwise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. That’s, I think, really interesting when we talk about AI. Why? Because when we compare this, for instance, to, let’s say, a greenhouse where maybe a lot of earlier stage startups or companies just start using it, or maybe a ton of tools in a certain region in the world have an end to end solution where you can do more than just recruiting with it. Right. That’s usually not an ideal solution, but for a small company, might. Good enough, right? I don’t think that they really can leverage AI.

Why? Because they have a data problem. But with mid market and enterprise customers or organizations, you maybe don’t have that data problem or with a lower likelihood because usually they have, I would say, more senior staff. And also it’s way more complex to manage talent acquisition or recruiting there. So you also need to get the data right to even make decisions, because you cannot just look into every problem by yourself. Right? You need to analyze and you need to have a meta view to it. So you also share a benchmark report every year. Maybe you give us some insights about what are the top trends you see or some hidden gems of your data.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, totally. And before we do that, I mean, I think, I just wanted to comment, like, I think you’re kind of spot on that the more data you have, the more challenging it is to make sense of it and the more valuable AI is. Right, so companies that are seeing thousands of applicants per role. Yeah. Like AI, to help stack rank their inbound, is going to be much more valuable than a small startup that might not have very, might have very few applicants just because it doesn’t really have a talent brand. Right. Like nobody knows who they are. Similarly, our customers that have millions and millions, sometimes tens of millions of records in their CRM plus ATS combined, our enterprise customers being able to start with those folks first and use AI to identify the silver medalists, the gems, so to speak, amongst that massive sea of records.

Super valuable. I did want to clarify though, while we work with some of the largest enterprises in the world, six Fortune 50 companies customers, we’ve also won the hearts and minds of many of the fastest growing tech companies. We even have a free for startups program that has thousands of small startups that are fewer than 15 employees leveraging the entire GEm platform for free. I think Gem is actually one of the few and maybe only companies in our space to both win the hearts and minds of startups while earning the trust of large enterprises. We definitely talk a little bit more about some of the larger companies that we partner with just because that’s where a lot of our case studies are, but we span pretty much every company size.

Thomas Kohler:
It totally makes sense as well. And also your strategy makes sense in terms of offering it for free in an early stage because I think that’s also important for the listeners. So if you are starting early, maybe leverage. If you go to another provider with an ATS, you already pay between five to six k a year for a below ten employee contract. Right. So that’s maybe a quick win. Then you don’t need to use spreadsheet or any crappy tool out there.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, exactly. And you can use a purpose built recruiting platform instead of a spreadsheet or an ocean dock or whatever it is. Airtable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the cool thing is, because we have every product all in one. As you graduate from that startup program, we can actually offer the complete end to end platform at a pretty reasonable price for startups that are scaling from 15 to 100 employees. Yeah, thanks for the plug.

Thomas Kohler:
Cool. And now to the insights based on your data, what you see or do you have some trends you see at the moment? Because I think you’re, you’re sitting on a lot of data and you also release an annual report. So maybe we can just give a bit of ideas to the listeners.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, I’ve got so many. So we have a few different reports. Actually taking a step back maybe. Let me talk about the three biggest trends that I’m seeing in the industry and then we can jump into the data. I think the three biggest trends that I’m seeing in the industry is one, the explosion of AI. Now every recruiting team is trying to figure out where does AI fit into their stack and their use cases. It’s even being mandated top down from CEO’s at many larger companies. We just need to figure out how to leverage AI everywhere in our stack, across every function.

That’s been really cool. Certainly an area where JeM is investing a lot and will look to help. The second is really an explosion of inbound. I think the number of inbound applicants has increased something like 40% year over year, or maybe more. I forget the exact stat, but that stat about 20% of our customers have 1000 plus applicants per role, blew my mind. Right. So that’s become like a much bigger problem for customers, for the industry, and actually for candidates too, because recruiters have to spend so much time getting through their inbound that they can’t provide a great candidate experience anymore. Right.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah.

Steve Bartel:
And then the third trend that I’ve seen is a lot of companies being asked to do more with less. And that’s what’s driving, I think, this shift in the market towards consolidation and looking to end to end platforms that can do it all. Those are the three highest level trends that I’ve seen over the last year and a half, two years, especially as budgets have become tighter and CFO’s are looking at things with a lot more scrutiny with every company, every tech company out there looking to preserve their Runway. In terms of data, I mean, I love data. I geek out about it, actually. At Dropbox, one of the teams I led was our analytics team and helped start the data science team there. So this is like a personal.

I love it. It’s a personal passion of mine. I’ve got a bunch. One report that we publish every year is all about outreach best practices. So at the top of the funnel, when you’re sourcing and reaching out to passive talent, what are the best recruiters doing? And what kinds of strategies and approaches have real lifts in terms of reply rate, interested reply rate, and actual ROI. One of the stats that I love is that if you send four messages to a prospect to passive talent, you’re only going to get about 50% of the replies from message number one. If you’re not sending follow ups two through four, you’re actually leaving about half of the replies on the table. And that’s kind of wild to think about because before jam, a lot of recruiters would just go into LinkedIn and fire off one inmail and then forget about it. So you can literally be twice as efficient in the same amount of time by dropping somebody into a sequence with four stages with automated follow ups.

Plus you’re going to get a little bit of a boost just from reaching out over email instead of Inmail, because especially in tech, a decent number of people have their Inmail notifications off. So that’s a stat that’s held true since we started Gem.

Thomas Kohler:
And I think also additionally something for tech hiring. If you also just source on LinkedIn, you’re limited because I think there are even more engineers on GitHub than on LinkedIn. And if you know how to analyze a push or pull request in the domain of every repository, you find the email address of someone.

Steve Bartel:
Yep, yep. And that’s also why, you know, gems along GitHub and, you know, dribble for designers and about 50 other sites where people might find talent, including healthcare sites, doximity, practice match, etcetera. Like, we’ve really expanded the number of sites that we’ll sit alongside because we want to be able to help with any type of recruiting. Another cool insight is personalization, especially if you’re going after harder. Harder roles to fill, can have a huge impact. I think something like customers that leverage gem AI for personalization get a 40% increase in their response rates. That’s on top of the kind of automated follow ups. So that’s comparing people that are sending a four stage email sequence without personalization and then a four stage sequence with AI personalization.

So those benefits just compound, right, because they multiply together. So that’s like another really cool one. And the nice thing about AI is it’s kind of reduced the barrier to personalization because that used to be the trade off, is you used to have to spend a lot of time on it. Now you still want to review that draft and maybe make some tweaks, but it can help get you 70% of the way there. Yeah. Another cool one, open rates. So one of the biggest predictors of open rates is what time of day and day of week you send. And this is the fascinating thing about open rates, is it changes every year, because as more people start sending on the times of day and the day of the week, that gets a better open rate, it starts to saturate it, and then you actually want to be sending out a different time.

And it just shifts every single year that we pull the data. So hot off the press this year, surprisingly, some of the best times to send are on Sundays. And. Yeah, have you seen that too?

Thomas Kohler:
I do my main outbound prospecting, summarizing calls for customers or leads I’m in contact with or executive candidates. I do it on Sunday afternoon because usually they prepare the week on Sunday afternoon.

Steve Bartel:
Sunday at 03:00 p.m. it’s. You nailed it. Sorry for, you know, sharing your secret just now. Everybody’s gonna get flooded on Sunday.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah, I think it’s, you know, you also need to have people that want to do that. But of course, you can schedule on Sunday as well if you write it on Friday, also possible.

Steve Bartel:
Here’s the wild thing, though. It actually varies a lot depending on the Persona. Right. So if you’re reaching out to executives, interestingly, if you’re reaching out to engineers, if you’re really reaching out to sales reps, yeah, Sunday is actually a pretty good time. One of my theories around the sales reps, and this is actually always been the case. Like, it’s consistently, Sunday is a good time to reach out to sales reps, is because a lot of the best sales reps are prepping for their week ahead on Sunday. Um, and, uh, yeah, anyways, that, that’s just the theory. But interestingly, recruiters, um, both in this last year’s benchmark report, but also from the one I remember a few years ago, Wednesday, uh, Wednesday morning is like a pretty good time to reach out to recruiters. I don’t know why. Do you have any theories?

Thomas Kohler:
No. Yeah, maybe because Monday, Tuesday, they’re busy over the weekend with all the applicants that came in.

Steve Bartel:
Yeah, yeah. With their thousands of applicants and they haven’t even checked their email yet.

Thomas Kohler:
Maybe.

Steve Bartel:
Yep, that could be it. That’s funny. Anyways, there’s a whole lot more set of benchmarks around outreach that I can share a link to. We open source and publish free 80 page report on this every year. So I’ll share a link with you after our call.

Thomas Kohler:
Great. Steve, that’s already the end of our episode. We are a bit over time, but I want to ask you one more question. How do you predict the future of recruitment?

Steve Bartel:
Ooh, well, we talked about some of the trends that we’re seeing in this market. So I do think the future of recruiting is going to shift more towards all in one platforms that can do a lot more of the stack. I do think that AI is going to be a really important part of that. I also think that AI is going to be most effective when it’s built directly into an end to end platform instead of as a point solution. Because like you said, the data is the important part of AI. And if you just take AI sourcing, for example, you wouldn’t want AI going and spamming the market without any context about who is this person. They attended an event, they applied, they were referred. You actually want an end to end platform that can capture all that in one place to provide a single source of truth that then the AI can leverage on top of that and you can feed it all the relationship context.

I think AI is going to be a huge part of that story. I think recruiting is going to continue to become more data driven like it has over the last 510 years, and it’s going to get better. I mean, here’s the cool thing. With better products, better technology, AI helping automate a lot of the manual, tedious work that’s going to free up everyone in recruiting to do the fun part of the job, interface directly with candidates, show up as a strategic business partner to the rest of the organization. Recruiting is just going to look fundamentally different in the next few years, even next three years, and I think it’s going to be awesome.

Thomas Kohler:
Love it. Thanks. Really enjoyed to have you on my show. And hopefully, once I’m in San Francisco, I can say hi.

Steve Bartel:
Let’s do it. I’ll hit you up when I’m in Germany.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. See you. Bye.