I recently chatted with Matt Plummer, VP Product Strategy at ZipRecruiter, to kick off Conversations with Craig, a new feature we’re launching here on InsideTalent that I’m really excited about.
I enjoyed talking shop with one of the smartest product guys in the business, and hope you learn as much as I did from Matt about the current state and future roadmap of digital recruiting and hiring.
It’s a conversation I’m looking forward to continuing at the 10th Annual TalentNet Live Recruiting Conference, taking place December 6 at the Toyota North America HQ in Plano, Texas.
ZipRecruiter is a premier sponsor of TalentNet, and they’ll be sharing their expertise and insights along with industry analysts, influencers and top talent leaders at some of the world’s biggest brands.
At this year’s TalentNet, I’ll be sitting down with Matt’s colleague, Brian Carillo, Director of Enterprise Sales for ZipRecruiter, to talk about the state of job boards and how ZipRecruiter’s innovative approach to AI is helping reshape, and redefine, the future of online recruiting and digital hiring.
While the event is sold out, you can still be a part of the TalentNet conversation by using the #TalentNet hashtag on any social network. After all, there’s going to be a ton of amazing content from over 40 speakers and 300 participants, both records numbers for TalentNet’s biggest event yet.
It’s only fitting, considering that TalentNet Live is celebrating 10 years of bringing together talent leaders, practitioners and solution providers for what’s become the largest annual recruiting event in Texas and the Southwest.
When you’re the biggest in Texas, you know you’re doing something right. And we’ve been doing it for a decade – and look forward to the next ten years of intimate and impactful conversations.
Conversations With Craig: #TalentNet Edition feat. ZipRecruiter
Below are highlights of the conversation between Craig Fisher of Inside Talent and Matt Plummer, VP Product Strategy at ZipRecruiter.
It has been edited for clarity; check the embed below for the conversation in its entirety.
Craig Fisher: Matt, catch us up on ZipRecruiter.
Matt Plummer: 2010 is when we got started. Then, about 2015, we started to look at some of the problems with the sort of “post and pray” model, if you will. And a lot of it came down to discoverability.
We’ve really just learned that for the most part, job seekers aren’t really good at searching for jobs. They don’t understand how skills and abilities transfer, too.
Well, that, and recruiters spent too much time trying to do Boolean based searching to find people with the right skills and everything.
That’s when we set out to build sort of our first major technology innovation around matching, which is really our base.
And then, we really started thinking about the third wave that we’re getting into, which is not just discovery of jobs and matching those jobs with candidates. It’s really about creating human connections between recruiters and job seekers or candidates.
Because right now, both sides of the marketplace, effectively, are complaining about a black hole. We’ve always known about the black hole for jobseekers, where they apply and never hear back. But now, a lot of recruiters are complaining about not being able to get ahold of job seekers.
So, they find a good candidate. They try and reach out, and they’re not getting anything back. This is a material problem, a real problem to try and solve for. And we think, oddly enough, that using artificial intelligence, we can create more interactions between recruiters and candidates. That’s what we’re really excited about.
I think we continue to sort of keep that differentiation between, you know, the traditional job board model and what we’re doing at ZipRecruiter.
With AI, the regular communication that can be employed on the candidate communication side with a bit of automation is a game changer. It really does assist in creating sort of the human connection.
Matt Plummer, VP Product Strategy, ZipRecruiter
We have a great team in Tel Aviv, Israel, who have helped build that up. For our second generation of matching innovation, it’s really more about discovery based recommendations.
If you think about the Netflix model, you can sit down and fire up your Netflix app on any device, on your AppleTV or whatever. You’re recommended content, and a lot of consumption on Netflix comes from that model. So, we just kind of took a cue from that.
And then, we really started thinking about the third wave that we’re getting into, which is not just discovery of jobs and matching those jobs with candidates. It’s really about creating human connections between recruiters and job seekers or candidates.
Because right now, both sides of the marketplace, effectively, are complaining about a black hole. We’ve always known about the black hole for jobseekers, where they apply and never hear back. But now, a lot of recruiters are complaining about not being able to get ahold of job seekers.
So, they find a good candidate. They try and reach out, and they’re not getting anything back. This is a material problem, a real problem to try and solve for. And we think, oddly enough, that using artificial intelligence, we can create more interactions between recruiters and candidates. That’s what we’re really excited about.
I think we continue to sort of keep that differentiation between, you know, the traditional job board model and what we’re doing at ZipRecruiter.
With AI, the regular communication that can be employed on the candidate communication side with a bit of automation is a game changer. It really does assist in creating sort of the human connection.
CF: Why does the black hole exist to begin with, do you think? How did we get here?
MP: It’s because recruiters are too busy, and job seekers are too busy, and it’s really difficult for active candidates to keep up without a massive spreadsheet or some really good system to help keep track of all the jobs they’re applying to. And passive job seekers, they have jobs, right?
So, I mean, it’s very difficult for them to even respond in real time most of the time. And so, you know, a little bit of that automation goes a long way when you start to understand and learn how to make passive job seekers responsive.
There’s this whole process that happens today that’s pretty transactional, right? You’ve got maybe a recruiter posting a position, a job seeker discovers and applies to it, but there’s no real connection there.
CF: What is ZipRecruiter doing to change that?
MP: Well, earlier this year, we rolled out our first version of a product that we call Get Recruited. It’s an interesting process that kind of flips the hiring process on its head. So, when a recruiter is opening up a position, we’re going to use our technology to show them candidates that we think would be a good fit for the role.
And then they can selectively go through with a brief overview, and say, yeah, I want to invite, you know, maybe these five recommendations, and the invitation actually comes in from the recruiter. So, it’s not ZipRecruiter recommending the positions, it’s the recruiter saying, “hey, I’d like to actually invite you to apply, get to know you a bit better.”
And that really kicks off an interesting sort of virtuous cycle of the recruiter identifying candidates. The candidates get this fairly, you know, customized greeting to apply, and you’ve got this sort of familiarity already there between the bran and the recruiter, and we’re seeing some pretty good early stats on that change of engagement between the two parties.
So, again, it’s just a little technological hack, if you will, that kind of nudges those relationships along.
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