00:03:28 · CJ Gustafson
[00:03:28] S1: Before we get too deep into how AI is changing hiring, when you were describing Greenhouse, I had this visceral reaction of having to do planning without an ATS before. And there's always this trade off of, like, when you go to set the budget, because we're about to go through annual planning season right now, Paul, where you have the people, the butts in seats today, then you have the list that's being worked through by the recruiting team to hopefully fill, and then you have the heads that you wanna hire for next year. But there's always this no man's land, this area where these these heads that weren't hired this year somehow... Some people think they're in their budget, some people don't know that if they're in their budget, but like, it's like this parking spot analogy of like, there was no car there before, do I still have the parking spot to put the person? So there are probably a lot of people driving to work right now nodding their head just saying like, yes, I've had to do this five dimensional chess before.
00:04:16 · Paul Todgham, CJ Gustafson
[00:04:16] S0: Our business is growing pretty nicely. So I haven't had to navigate too much of that challenge in my last couple years here. In lower growth experiences, and again, I've been in some lower growth environments in retail and others, you know, you have this dynamic where you get off to a slow start to the year. You gotta pause a bunch of heads that you said you needed to pause, maybe they were approved in budget. Maybe you've paused them two forecasts, maybe six months. And then you get to the fall. And the cost of those heads now is not the cost in that fiscal year. It's gonna be the cost in next year, right? The annualization impact. [00:04:46] S1: Sure. [00:04:46] S0: And so, mean, it's a challenging and interesting dynamic to basically have to tell people you did the right thing by delaying the heads. You don't have budget for it. You gotta basically fight for it again. And knowing it's a repeated game, how to make sure that's not too punishing of the people who do the right thing versus those who just fill every role they can just so they've got annualization and whatnot. But yeah, I've had to work through that many years. I empathize with anyone nodding their head in the car. And thankfully we haven't had too much of that to worry about in the last last couple years of Greenhouse, but it's but it's certainly something I'm used to.
00:04:46 · Paul Todgham, CJ Gustafson
[00:04:46] S0: And so, mean, it's a challenging and interesting dynamic to basically have to tell people you did the right thing by delaying the heads. You don't have budget for it. You gotta basically fight for it again. And knowing it's a repeated game, how to make sure that's not too punishing of the people who do the right thing versus those who just fill every role they can just so they've got annualization and whatnot. But yeah, I've had to work through that many years. I empathize with anyone nodding their head in the car. And thankfully we haven't had too much of that to worry about in the last last couple years of Greenhouse, but it's but it's certainly something I'm used to. [00:05:16] S1: We always talk about salary and benefits. You said it's probably 70% of the cost. Right? 70% of the cost walks on two legs. But now every person might also come with a growing stack of software and AI tools. Do you think that fundamentally changes the hurdle rate for adding headcount?
00:05:33 · Paul Todgham
[00:05:33] S0: The jury's still out on whether AI, you know, will lead to growth in employment or contraction in employment. Right? I mean, most breakthrough technologies have brought similar fears, as I think we're facing now, that jobs are going away but have actually expanded employment. Now, AI may be different. Right? And and... But, you know, we'll see. No doubt, though, there's a tremendous amount of disruption, obviously, in employment driven by AI, and we're seeing that, you know, at Greenhouse. Greenhouse. On the hurdle rate part, I think there's a couple considerations. I mean, first, you do need to weigh the higher costs, but weigh them against higher productivity of a given employee as well. So the productivity might actually be rising faster than costs. The higher is more important, but not necessarily harder to fund or change your hurdle rate. On the downside, a lot of us, pretty much all of us in finance are feeling pressure to demonstrate a return on our AI investment. And again, that can be hard to do, particularly when you're in experimentation phase or when everybody's getting 10% more productive, but you aren't losing bodies or whatnot. So I know one way folks are doing that is just by putting pressure on backfills. Right? Instead of saying, hey, is there a chance we don't need to you know, fill this role? Flip flip the script. You gotta justify that this role gets filled and and can't be done by AI and org changes that allow us to be more, you know, more productive.
00:06:44 · CJ Gustafson
[00:06:44] S1: You're totally right. A ton of the CFOs I talked to on this podcast, Paul, they're saying they're really pausing when it comes to backfills, and it's either to take that budget and reallocate it into something. It could it could be tokens. It could be a tool. But also just to rethink, is this the same role that we need before? The environment that that person, maybe they worked there for three years, came into, has changed so much. We should take a beat and not just immediately backfill for the the role we had.
00:07:11 · Paul Todgham
[00:07:11] S0: Yeah. And I think often by the time you're at the backfill, you're kind of a little late. I mean, it's still the right thing to ask all those questions and take action. But when it comes to a back fill, it's a binary thing. It's a yes or a no. Right? And the hiring manager is 90% of the time they're a yes. And if you get two levels up in the org, or VP, or your ELT member, a lot more likely to question whether this person needs that role, and we can make do elsewhere. An exercise I found very helpful, rather than wait till you have the backfill, is ask folks to stack rank their sub functions within their team. And, like, here are the ones that are... You know, I most need investment and are least impacted by, you know, productivity gains that are going on. And you don't wanna question those backfills. That might take you a while. Right? Like, spending two months to justify an AE is two months of lost new business. Right? Versus the ones that are on that list near the bottom or in the bottom half that, hey. When these roles free up, I'm gonna, you know, I am gonna reorg, and I'm not gonna backfill. And then then it's more about holding people accountable to what they've already done, and it's less of a binary issue of one backfill and more of a 200 person sales organization. Show me the, you know, the 50 most critical and and the 100 that are in the middle and the 50 that are, you know, least critical, for instance.