HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics include HR Tech, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week. Shows are typically 15 to 30 minutes.
Past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, Ultimate Software, McLean & Company, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, Talent Board, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Want to be featured on the show? Learn more here and contact publisher@hr-gazette.com
HRchat Podcast
Revolutionizing Recruitment: Harnessing AI's Power with Amit Matani
In this episode of the HRchat show, we look at ways AI is impacting recruitment processes. The guest is Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound (formerly AngelList). Amit is a visionary leader with extensive expertise in all things startups, hiring, and AI in tech recruiting.
Questions for Amit include:
- Please introduce yourself and tell us about the mission of Wellfound
- How has AI impacted your personal and professional lives?
- The brand changed from Angelist to Wellfound, was that deliberate - supporting the launch of new products?
- What are some unique features of the product? Why would founders want to use it, and why do recruiters want to use it? Are there different benefits depending on who’s using it?
- Is Wellfound just a product for startups or can larger companies use this as well?
- What roles are being replaced by AI?
- How do you see AI changing how people hire?
- How do you see AI changing how people get hired?
We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. In this episode, we look at ways that AI is impacting the recruitment process. My guest today is Amit Matani, ceo of Well-Found, formerly Angelist. Amit is a visionary leader with extensive experience in all things startups, hiring and AI in tech recruiting. Amit, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today. Thanks for having me, bill. I'm really excited to talk. So, amit, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes and telling our listeners a bit about yourself and, of course, the mission of Well-Found?
Speaker 3:Well-Found is our mission. Since the very beginning, we've always been about trying to help everyone find their team, really no matter where they are. Our belief, which I really share, is that the right job can really change your life and the right team can change the world. For me, I've spent a lot of my career in startups, and so this is an important thing for me. The first job that I got ultimately led me to my second job, to my third job, and you can see how, for me, if I hadn't had that first job, I wouldn't be where I am today, and so it's been something that I've been really passionate about for a while, because I think the right job can really set you on the right trajectory.
Speaker 2:Listeners. The focus of this episode is AI and the way that that's impacting the recruitment process. Amit, I wonder, over the past few years three, four years, something like that what changes have you seen in the ways that you work with others, but also perhaps things that you do in your personal life, that have now been impacted by more and more intelligent AI?
Speaker 3:I think it's wild because I feel like a lot of things have happened, and not just for myself, but even my parents who are a little bit older, my dad. He's kind of at the tail end of his career but he's still working, still loves doing it, and one of the things he uses AI for every day is when he sends emails out. English was his second language but he used the chat to BT to figure out is he phrasing it correctly and stuff like that, which I think is kind of really cool. For me it's so much. I still do analytics on our data, sometimes I write code and stuff like that, so for those things it's been spectacular. I can learn something so much faster now when I drop it into chat to BT or use GitHub co-pilot or something.
Speaker 3:Even with my kids, if they have a question, you can basically ask chat to BT the question and they'll come back to you and you can ask it and explain it to me like you would explain a three-year-old. We just did this yesterday about how pipes bring water to the sink and I was able to ask chat to BT. It was able to talk back to us and we were able to have a conversation. So it's been kind of wild. The other thing that I really enjoy doing using it for is solving writer's block. A lot of times I won't know what to say or how to say it, and I can just write stream of consciousness into the thing and it'll come back with some ideas, which are usually not great but a good starting point for me to kind of move on to the next thing. So it's been in terms of a technology that I've adopted and used significantly. It's been kind of one of the bigger ones in the last few years.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's talk a bit more about Wellfound. I'd like to understand from the perspective if you're talking to HR folks and leaders within organizations, because a lot of the companies that you work with are on the smaller side site, so perhaps they don't have HR teams, or that HR teams are one. So when you're addressing leaders as well as HR folks, what would you say to them in terms of your service offerings makes well-found different?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so our belief with recruiting and job seeking is that, you know, it's great when it's kind of human to human, when candidates and employers can actually take the time to get to know each other and have conversations and potentially even work Together before kind of deciding whether to move forward. But look, there's just so much noise now getting in the way of that real human to human connection. And I think over the last you know decades, like, we've done a great job. The internet's done a great job to basically give access to opportunities to everyone in a major way, right Like it's expanded it considerably. If you're a recruiter, you can basically find any candidate in the world, and if you're a candidate, you can find any job in the world. But the problem is going from kind of that massive amount of information to figuring out which one is a good fit for you or a good fit for your company, and we just haven't done a great job doing that right, and you end up people just are inundated. So recruiters can get hundreds of applicants for a job when they're searching for candidates. They can go through thousands of applicants and I mean candidates in a, you know, a job search, I mean a candidate search and get maybe three, four or five responses, and then candidates are kind of do the same thing on their side. They're just like, well, you know, I'm gonna shoot this application into a black hole, I'm never gonna hear it back. So it behooves me to kind of apply to hundreds of jobs so I can kind of hear a response. And so with all this noise, I think it just gets in the way of creating Like a good experience. And so for a well-found, what we've always tried to do is how do we increase the signal to noise and how do we reduce the friction to getting on a call? You know, the ideal goal for us is five, five minutes or five calls a week for ten minutes of work, right.
Speaker 3:And so what we've done differently over the years is two things. So number one it's really focusing on a niche, for basically startups is kind of our niche, where the candidates on our platform are looking for jobs that are startup. The companies on our platform are startups and generally, just with that We'll have a better response rate for both sides, right. If you're going on LinkedIn or another another tool, you're not sure if the candidates gonna be interested in your type of company, but when on our platform, there's a higher likelihood that will happen. The other piece is just having a lot more information up front and help you make better decisions. You know we were one of the first or probably the first big job platform that actually Required salary and equity on the job listing, because we were like, hey, we don't want to waste anybody's time To, you know, applying your jobs that are not gonna be good fits.
Speaker 3:But there's other things. Like you know, when a candidate wants to look at a profile, especially early-stage startup, you know they want to look at the founders, they want to look at the team, they want to look at the culture, and so we offer a lot of that information that you probably wouldn't find on another platform. The same thing for companies Candidates tell us kind of what they're looking for next, not just kind of what they've done, and that also gives companies a better time I mean a better opportunity to like decide, you know, is this gonna be a good fit for me, is this candidate gonna be good fit for me? I mean, and generally, you know, on our platform, our core platform, you can get if you're doing sourcing, you can get anywhere from like a 40 to 50 percent response rate from candidates or interest rate from candidates, whereas, like on other platforms like LinkedIn, it can be closer to four to ten percent. So it's a lot more efficient for these companies as well as the candidates, and that's really what we focus on.
Speaker 2:I've got a quote from you here. Our new name embodies that spirit of discovery. I like it, Amit. I like it. Tell me a little bit about the why behind changing the name from Angelist to Wellfound.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we actually Angelist. I joined Angelist about almost 10, 11 years ago now and it was 10 people and we were building products to help the startup ecosystem and we built two products that kind of exist to this day. One product was helping startups raise money. The other product was helping startups build teams, which became Wellfound and over the years the main customer for the product was the startup founder. But as the ecosystem grew, as startups grew I mean like in 2010, 2011, 2012, your name brand companies were maybe five people and it was just a much smaller world but the ecosystem grew and a lot of things changed, specifically on our side.
Speaker 3:On the talent side, we went from the founder doing the recruiting themselves to having teams of recruiters doing the recruiting on our platform.
Speaker 3:We went from basically a very small pool of candidates to millions of candidates around the world and on the venture side they went more into kind of the higher end of the investment ecosystem and so both sides didn't really serve only just the startup founder, but they also served investors from the venture side and for us, candidates and the company was bifurcating enough that we decided to split the companies up. So we had about four years ago we became Angelus Venture and Angelus Talent, which is us. And then over time it was becoming obvious that that overlap was really confusing to a lot of people and so we decided about a year and a half ago to change our name to something that better represented who we were right People looking for jobs, people looking for finding talent. We weren't a list of angels doing investments and stuff. So that's why we decided to name kind of be in control of our own destiny and be able to talk of ourselves differently, but still kind of maintain our history with Angelus OK.
Speaker 2:So you're mentioning that, certainly at the beginning, you're working perhaps with more startups. What's the proportionality there now? Are you guys also working with medium to larger size organizations on a regular basis?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so we have. I think our sweet spot for the largest group or largest demographics tends to be between, well like 11 to 250 employees is roughly kind of where we're at. Usually you don't have a recruiter or maybe you have one, two, three recruiters. But we also have multinationals and some of the top 10 companies also using the product. So it really spans. When we think about companies with 500 plus, that still accounts for somewhere around 25%, 30% of our platform. So it's not insignificant. And we also see this as a big area of growth Because ultimately for us, startups don't stay small forever. They either grow or they die, and we really want to grow up with our companies as they kind of find more success.
Speaker 2:OK, so you guys help find, for example, developers. How, as AI impacted certain job types in the last couple of years, what have you guys seen in terms of job roles which perhaps were very much in demand only a couple of years ago and huge salaries were being offered, lots of benefits and so on, to actually now a lot of generative AI has replaced with junior roles. Are you seeing that? Tell us what you guys are seeing.
Speaker 3:In our own data. We are not seeing that exact thing yet, and partially because we really focus on software developers, operations, marketing, salespeople, which I think hasn't been. We are not the space right now where it's replacing these types of roles, but we have definitely seen that these types of roles are taking advantage of it. There is a quote, and I don't remember who it came from, but it's like you are not going to be replaced by AI, you are going to be replaced by a human who uses AI. I think we are seeing a lot of that now, where candidates have more, where these roles are using AI tools on a day to day basis, and the ones that are accepting and embracing them are seeing huge speed increases in their productivity, while the people that are not are not. I think one of the things that we have seen throughout is a big shift towards candidates understanding the tools that are in front of them and the ones that are embracing the tools tend to do better.
Speaker 3:It's fascinating, especially from the candidate side, how the process will change when you have essentially an assistant available to you at all times.
Speaker 2:On the flip side, I will challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less so I can use it for my sound bites later on. On the flip side, in terms of employers, how has AI impacted the recruitment process over the last two or three years?
Speaker 3:I think the biggest part of the recruitment process is sifting through noise. I think maybe not in the last three years, but where we see it going is that basically, you are going to have an assistant that will be able to personalize every single candidate that you look at and provide you additional information on why they are good fit to your job. For example, looking at a company, looking at a candidate's profile, seeing a company and not knowing anything about it. Instead of going around googling five different things to figure this out, you will be able to say this candidate worked at this company. It was founded by this ex-unicorn founder. It's a good fit for you because of this, this and this. People do this already, with complex bullions and everything else. I think all those are going to go away. People are going to be scrolling through lists of candidates anymore. They are going to be given great recommendations that are personalized to them with the information they need to make decisions. I think that is going to massively just change the process overall.
Speaker 2:Okay, very good, very good. You are not going to believe this is a meet, but we are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation. My next question for you what else should folks know about Wellfound? Where will you guys be hanging out this year? Are you off to any events? Have you got any announcements that perhaps you haven't shared with us just yet?
Speaker 3:So for us, we're just super excited about where AI is going, for both the company and the jobseeker. That vision I mentioned before about five calls a week with 10 minutes of work it always felt far away because the technology just wasn't there. And for us it feels like the technology is there now and we've basically been rebuilding our products from the core with AI in mind. The first product we built called Recruiter Cloud. Basically, you give us a job listing and we'll have interested candidates on your calendar the next day. We've launched that last year. We've seen a lot of great traction. We're continuing to improve that and we have some major launches for that product this year.
Speaker 3:And I'm really excited about the candidate side, where we're going to be able to kind of bring that similar process you tell us what you want and you'll get great matches on your calendar the next day. We're going to be able to launch tools like that soon too. So just overall really excited. And I think it just brings access. I mean it'll feel like having a great recruiter in your corner or great source in your corner, but at a scale that works on the internet, and so that's where our heads are down and try to make that awesome and build that out. Recruiter Cloud is already out if you want to give it a try, but we're going to be launching a few new things over the next few months to kind of really build on top of this new platform that we're making.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So if folks want to learn more about Recruiter Cloud, well Found. If they want to connect with you. How do they do all of these things?
Speaker 3:Just go to WellFoundcom and you can see links to all our products and there's always a link to email me at Meet at WellFoundcom. I'd love to hear anything people want to say or want to talk about.
Speaker 2:Rock and roll. Well, that just leaves me to say for today, a beat. Thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.
Speaker 3:Thanks, for having me Bill, it was fun.
