SmartRank: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Keith Hulen

Many companies find themselves inundated with over 100 applicants for a single job vacancy, often resorting to traditional job interviews to make their hiring decisions. However, this process can be time-consuming and inefficient, leading to a significant investment of resources for just one hire. How can we address this challenge and ensure that we secure the best talent? Is there a solution that streamlines the hiring process and improves the quality of hires? In this episode, join us as we sit down with Keith Hulen, the Founder and CEO of SmartRank. Keith brings his extensive experience as a Hiring Manager spanning over two decades to the table, and he's here to discuss an exciting and groundbreaking solution for talent acquisition and optimizing employee-to-employer connections. SmartRank, the AI system Keith developed, revolutionizes the hiring process by not only saving valuable time and effort but also ensuring the hiring of the top talents for your business. Tune in to discover how SmartRank leverages and predicts top talent for your business success. --- Listen to the podcast here: SmartRank: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Keith Hulen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’m going to talk to you about something that’s near and dear to me because I think it causes a lot of suffering in this world, and that is this inefficient daunting process by which we go about finding jobs or finding employees, basically connecting an employer to an employee. This kind of really drawn-out process where people are submitting so many cover letters, so many resumes, reading so much, is what keeps a lot of people fearfully clinging to jobs that are making them miserable and a lot of business owners trying to hang on to employees that are just simply not working out and I personally think that we’d be in a much better state if we were to find a more effective way to connect these people so that if something isn’t working out, if someone is miserable or if someone’s not getting the job done, we can much more easily move on without this fear of what comes next and how much work am I going to have to put into what’s coming next. And that’s one of the core motivations for my guest today, Keith Hulen. Keith’s business is called SmartRank, more effective way in which to kind of sort through all the resumes, cover letters, or whatever employment materials that we get when we put out a job posting. --- Keith, welcome to the program. Yeah, thanks, Stephen. Glad to be here. Glad to have you here. S, Keith, first of all, let’s start by talking about your story. What motivated you to start SmartRank? What were you observing in your field that you had been in for a couple decades before that? Yeah, so I’ve been a hiring manager for over 20 years, and me along with all of my peers over the last 20 years have all felt the same way about the hiring process, which is that it was fairly dysfunctional and it needed some sort of improvement. The hiring process, as a hiring manager, from just my perspective, hadn’t changed in 20 years. It didn’t matter if I was at a global 500 company or a startup, it didn’t matter if I was dealing with an internal or an external recruiting team, the process, the tools, everything was almost identical. I mean, very small nuanced little changes between each one of those but, for the most part, everything was very, very similar and it was very frustrating. And so when I set off to want to start my own company, I knew that this was an area that I really wanted to explore further. What we ended up doing was not coming in with any preconceived ideas. I knew what our problems were from a hiring manager standpoint, I had spent a lot of time hearing from my friends and colleagues and peers about their experiences and I knew what mine were, but what I really wanted to do was understand more from the recruiting side and the applicant side what their challenges were so I just started scheduling hundreds of meetings and we just started meeting with people and asking them what are the biggest problems you have, why are those your biggest problems, understanding more about their process and tools, and we really started to come up with some consistent themes and consistencies we heard in their answers that eventually led us to create SmartRank. So, I think this is something that a lot of people experience, whether you’re a product manager or whether you’re starting your own business is that you come in with your ideas, you have a hypothesis, and then you conduct these interviews to kind of test that hypothesis or learn something more. From your 20 years plus experience as a hiring manager, what were your maybe like top three, these are the worst problems, and then how did that get amended by what you learned through all these interviews you conducted? Yeah, well, there’s one that just screams out and that’s the one where there’s a massive disconnect between an understanding between a hiring manager and a recruiter of what the qualifications actually are to do a role. So, I’m going to share a statistic with you and the audience here that is one that I’ve seen a bunch of times. So, 80 percent of recruiters say that they have a high to very high understanding of the role that they’re hiring for. Conversely, 61 percent of hiring managers say they have a low to moderate understanding of the role. The recruiter, you’re talking about they being the recruiter, right? Yeah, the recruiter, exactly. So, just in that, that’s just one data point, there’s a bunch of data out there that supports this. You’ll see like another article I read not too long ago said that hiring managers say, on average, half of the people that are put in front of them from an interview are even remotely close to the qualifications they’re looking for. So therein lies I think the real genesis of the problem is that recruiters many times think that they are getting the detailed information of knowing what they need to know to go and find the right person. The hiring manager knows that they don’t have the detailed information. They don’t want to spend the time and the energy to try and make recruiter a subject matter expert. And let’s just face it, that’s an unfair ask that you take somebody that’s been a recruiter for, doesn’t matter, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and say, “Hey, now, you’re gonna be hiring for a full stack software developer,” and there’s no way that recruiter is going to be a subject matter expert in a full stack software developer. I mean, look, even if they’ve been a developer at some point in their career, unless they’ve been a developer at that company doing that specific role for that particular hiring manager, they wouldn’t be able to have a detailed understanding of what those actual requirements are. And, usually, when I talk about requirements, recruiters are always like, “Oh, yeah, no, I do a really good intake meeting and I know exactly what they’re looking for.” No. These are keywords, these are phrases, these are questions that only hit the tip of the iceberg. It’s what job descriptions say. We spend countless hours wasting our time filling out, editing, redoing, rewriting these job descriptions. For what? For keywords that don’t mean anything. If I say, Stephen, are you proficient in Excel? What would you say? I would say yes. Yeah, great, me too. What does that mean? Does that mean you can build macros or that just means that you know how to like expand the columns and create a couple of colors? That’s exactly right. And just because you put in something like extreme proficiency or —- these are all completely subjective. So, unless you define the rules of the game, unless you define what that proficiency means, then you’re never ever going to really truly be able to capture what that qualification actually means.Share on X And therein lies the real problem right off the bat is that the basis for what the recruiters are out there looking for are not the right things. They’re looking for keywords. And so that’s the main reason why, whenever you send out a job description, you get unqualified candidates that come in to you and come into an interview and you probably get a lot of qualified candidates that are pushed out, not even brought in, not even given a second look, just given that standard, “Thank you for your application and your interest but we have a lot of other candidates,” blah, blah, blah, email message that a lot of people get when they apply for jobs. I’ll just say a few things really quickly about just job descriptions alone. Number one, you’re going to push away female candidates right off the bat. Why? Because, statistically, females need to satisfy 100 percent of the qualifications before they will apply for a role. So, if you have 10, 12, 15 qualifications on your job description, then, if a female doesn’t feel like she can do one of those, even though she may be your best candidate out of everybody that could have applied, she won’t even apply. You won’t even get a chance to look at her because she’s not even going to apply for the role. Men are 60 percent, statistically, is what we would need to qualify for —- and, by the way, I feel like that’s probably even high. This is a psychological thing, right? Like when a man looks at a job description and matches two-thirds of it and he’s like, “Oh, I might as well just apply,” whereas a woman is more likely to say, “Oh, I matched 90 percent of it, but, oh, I don’t match this one, I shouldn’t even bother.” That’s purely like a psychological conditioning type of thing. That’s exactly right, and the more vague it is, which they’re all vague and ambiguous, but the more vague and ambiguous it is,...