Harnessing AI to Transform the Job Search and Recruitment Process

Harnessing AI to Transform the Job Search and Recruitment Process

Host: Trish Steed

Guest: Fred Goff, Co-Founder & CEO of Jobcase

Today, Trish sat down with Fred Goff of Jobcase to talk about the potential of AI to transform job search and recruitment processes.

– Harnessing AI for job search and recruitment

– Empowering workers through AI and community

– Overcoming barriers for marginalized groups

– Democratizing skills assessment in the hiring process

Thank you for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Transcript follows:

Trish 0:32
Welcome to At Work in America, you are here with Trish Steed today, Steve Bosee has the day off. So you’re going to just hear me and my expert guest that I have on board, Mr. Fred Goff. Fred, welcome to the show.

Fred Goff 0:47
Thanks, Trish, great to be here.

Trish 0:49
Well, for anyone who’s not familiar with you, which they should be because you’ve been on live with us before, I know you’re very well known as an expert in the industry of talent and HR and recruitment. But before we do that, I want to just take a minute and talk about what we’re going to discuss today and give a little brief bio of you if that’s okay. In today’s show, we are going to be talking about harnessing the power of AI to revolutionize your job search process for both the job seekers, as well as the employers, we’re also going to touch on the state of recruitment marketing a little bit, and what to expect in the years ahead with that, I think you’re the perfect person to guide us through this, Fred, obviously, you are very experienced, you have been the Co founder and CEO of Jobcase. And you’ve emerged as a leading voice in our industry on all of the issues around the future of work, such as the AI impact on labor.

Trish 1:48
Again, I know I’ve heard you talk about that before. And for anybody that’s missed the live that we did with you a couple months ago, we’re gonna really do a deep dive especially on that you have been characterized as amplifying the voice of the worker, which I love, right, as someone who’s been in HR and recruitment for a long time. I know that the advocacy piece of what job case and you and the team there do, really helps bring to the forefront people who might not have a voice currently in the community. And prior to your career as a consumer internet entrepreneur, you enjoyed a successful career on Wall Street. You’re originally from Toledo, Ohio, and as a first generation college grad, congratulations. Holding a Bachelor of Science and Economics and a Master’s in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University, and a master’s in management and technology from MIT. You welcome all outreach that might help empower job cases to achieve their better tomorrow. So welcome to the show.

Fred Goff 2:49
Thanks Trish. I don’t often hear my bio. I love that my team got Toledo in there. So hello to anybody from Toledo out there.

Trish 2:56
I feel like I don’t know about you, but I love like when bios are personal because you feel like I think also the part about being a first generation college grad, your family has to be so proud.

Fred Goff 3:08
Yeah, I hope so. I’m proud of them, too. I think that, you know, we hire a really incredible team here at Job case, and I never believe you have to be a first generation college grad or even a college grad to really understand the population we serve is very much you know, 70 by 85% of our members do not have a college degree. People often call us the working class, LinkedIn. That’s kind of who we are. But it does help to walk that path a little bit. I think where you kind of come in understand that whether you have a degree or not really doesn’t make as big a difference as our society sometimes seems to think it does. So yeah, I’m proud of people with a degree and proud of people without a degree.

Trish 3:50
I’m glad you, you share that. Because I think that when I’m the same way I first in my family to go and go off to college and get a degree but my first job was actually with Manpower, running an industrial, predominantly industrial temp office. And so working predominantly with people who did not have that same background was really helpful, like at a young age, because then you have an appreciation for how you do need both both types of employees. Right, it both brings such a different wealth of information and experience, I think to a workplace.

Fred Goff 4:23
I think so. But I do think we probably came up in our generation and world where it was a bit of snobbery around degrees and a lot of blocked access. And, you know, we’re amongst the voices advocating for skills based hiring other things, because degrees tend to block a whole bunch of groups, that that wasn’t the intention. But I think that the the world is going to accelerate that. I mean, I’m sitting here in Boston right now, and bu just announced there next year, tuition is over $90,000 a year I heard that, at some point, it just becomes prohibitive. So I think the acceleration of breaking down barriers that you know these superfluous Less requirements. I think core economics are gonna start to help us break that down. So it’s all good.

Trish 5:06
Well, you know what I mean, before we get too much into that, because I definitely want to dive in there. Could you tell maybe for anyone who’s not familiar over overarching what job case, does who you are, I know the mission is immensely important to everyone at Jobcase.

Fred Goff 5:23
Yeah, appreciate it. I mean, in a nutshell, Jobcase is an MI ML empowered, artificial intelligence powered social platform dedicated to empowering workers, we’ve grown to being the third largest online destination for Career Services, according to comScore and others. And if you go to Jobcase.com, you’ll see, as I mentioned earlier, why the press calls us working class, LinkedIn, our whole sense of empowerment, is about really distilling it down to helping people figure out and achieve that next step. And it used to be prior to the LLM kind of breakthrough and q4 of 2022, that it was dominantly, about the community itself, helping figure out and achieve and increasingly, now we have artificial intelligence, helping our members figure out, but you still need the community of other people to help you achieve it, right, so that it’s a powerful one, two punch, artificial intelligence and community to empower people. And then the only other thing that let your listeners know about our viewers is job case, Inc has two parts. There’s everything I just described. But the technology that we use to power our own websites, we licensed others. So for example, wherever you’re sitting in America today, go to your newspaper, and if you look close, you’ll see that either how you’re powering, say, Chicago Tribune, or Seattle Times, or KitKat times, if you’re looking to hire somebody, it’ll say, powered by Jobcase, if you’re looking for a job, it’ll say Power BI Jobcase. So our technology powers, employer solutions, and job search for nonprofits, government for profits, like newspapers. And so we have both sides, like how we serve our members. And the concept is the more place that we can power where our members are, the more we can serve them, the more data to aggregate so that we can be more relevant for them.

Trish 7:11
Thank you for describing sort of those two different buckets, if you will, because I think that, you know, before we started recording, we were talking about AI in general, right? It’s something that you don’t always know, who’s been involved in artificial intelligence for a number of years, some people still think it’s a little bit on the newer side. But I sort of feel like that’s being aware of of Jobcase, like you’re saying, people are probably already interacting with Jobcase and may might not even know it, right? It’s sort of right under their nose, if you will.

Fred Goff 7:43
I think that, you know, we grew up kind of Intel Inside, if you will. So we’ve been a very large provider of talent. But historically, it was through a lot of other branded names that you might know better. And it was only about four or five years ago that we really came out as our own brand in a very definitive way, and then kind of escalating since then. So yeah, we’ve been there. And to your point about a I mean, I left managing money on Wall Street to start an artificial intelligence based hedge fund back in 2004. And that worked really well till it didn’t. So we’re a company that knows the power of AI, and he knows the limitations of AI. But we came into this space back in, in even precursor to 2015. But Jobcase launched in 2015. And since launch, and even beforehand, we’ve been a affiliate of MIT’s computer science, Artificial Intelligence Lab. And so that AI and machine learning techniques are just core to everything we’ve done always for anybody, we’ve served our members or our clients. But later in this talk, we’ll get to I do think there was a massive inflection point in q4 2022, when open AI launched chat up to three and a half. And since then, this is a it’s a different world.

Trish 8:58
i agree. I think if nothing else, for anyone who might not have been aware of how artificial intelligence machine learning and all of those aspects, were impacting both your personal and professional lives before November of 2022, certainly after that point, right. It’s all over television. It’s all over. You know, everywhere you look right podcasts and things you read. So you mentioned I want to go back for a second, you mentioned that it was about five years ago, where you really started to kind of want job case as a brand right to be more noticed. Did that coincide with the pandemic at all? Or was that more because workers were struggling and needed? I don’t know more insight?

Fred Goff 9:42
We had to do more with our own trajectory. We had more resources, more ability to leaning into brand but the the mission in the launch towards that was in 2015 when we launched the Wii. And I think it’s actually interesting at the point that we launched I found ourselves to be kind of a lonely voice in the for profit world. advocating for workers, there was plenty of allies of ours in the nonprofit world, I mean, whether it’s a Byron and opportunity work, whether it’s Maria Flynn and JFIF. Even think tanks like Joe fuller over at Harvard. But in the for profit world, we found ourselves to be a bit more of a lonely voice and advocating for workers. And what we had seen then is that they really needed it that the future of work was going to be very much characterized by anxiety about the future increasing. And our thought was that if you lean into it, a lot of the trends that can be very daunting can be extremely empowering. But where do you find that information. And even if you do organize the structure, the information and reduce the drudgery of the friction about navigating through, you still need other people to help you write the killer app underneath as you need someone to say don’t give up. I’ve been there too, because so many people have stories underneath whether it’s a prior court involvement, or whether they have restricted shifts, because they’re caring for a family member at home, or et cetera. And so it’s that powerful one, two punch of trying to organize and bring helpful information, and also other people that can help you walk the walk and talk to talk.

Trish 11:09
I think that’s so important to have both those elements, right, because maybe before Jobcase was around, when I think back to even being younger, myself looking for jobs, it felt very much you felt alone, there was no sense of community. It was difficult to I think networking, right? I started out of college and had a job for oh, gosh, 10 years before I really had to, like get out there. And I thought, oh my gosh, I I’m mom, young mom, and there’s no way to network. So what I do love, I love that it’s that combination, though, where you have a community of people, could you maybe share a little bit about that, you know, if I’m, if I am a job seeker, and maybe I do have a little bit of a record, right? Sometimes people don’t know where to go, they don’t know where they can go to even talk about getting hired, what they would be able to do, and I think they limit themselves that becomes the barrier. How does the community through Jobcase, help them feel like they’re part of something bigger and that they do have opportunity?

Fred Goff 12:10
I think there’s probably two dimensions that we could probably have a breakout session for hours talking about. The first dimension is just kind of better information. Right? So example if and this is just an example. I don’t know the specificities. But if for example, Home Depot were declare that they were going to hire people with a prior court conviction or prior felony conviction. And by the way, 22 million Americans with a prior felony conviction, and you’re not supposed to this country have a permanent vocational penalty for the rest of your life if you serve. So let’s say a national brand has said that they will hire the reality of life is that doesn’t mean your local manager is gonna hire right? So there’s an informal network, that how do you navigate that that’s, that’s one place where the community helps each other where they can say, No, this, this company is better this morning with that one in Natick hires, not in Framingham in the Boston area, whatever. But there’s another dimension that we mentioned, which is just empathy, it’s that don’t give up and see it. I think that I’m very fortunate that I grew up in a family, you know, we weren’t economically rich by any means. But we were family rich, right. I had parents who told me I can do anything and brothers that supported me and et cetera. And sadly, there’s a tremendous amount of Americans that don’t have that kind of support structure. And so having people have job case where somebody else can say, don’t give up that happened to me to you know, try this. When there’s so many isms people run into ageism, and sexism, and racism and all sorts of problems. That little thing makes a difference. I think we might have been taught before I get all these, all these letters, that line up here, I’m so appreciative of job cases, they’re up in line, and they’re never saying thank you, Fred, or Thank you, job case, are always saying, Thank you, I found this other person on the platform who supported me, right. And that’s what’s really kind of powerful. But I would also say, what we found is that that’s powerful in these kinds of green shoots of our community, but putting artificial intelligence coaching behind it is like turbo thrusters. And that’s what’s happening with Jobcase in the last year.

Trish 14:15
That’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit about specifically, I know that, you know, we’re kind of high level about artificial intelligence, how is that actually embedded into the platform? So that it does enable those connections and maybe like, supercharged them, like you said.

Fred Goff 14:32
Yeah, so I’ll answer that question by maybe providing a kind of a map to graft on to when we think of what happened in in in q4 24, with this, this kind of seismic event that I think was just the culmination of decades in the last 100 years or so as we get compute power moving forward. What was really seminal about that moment what I hope anybody A that is listening to this. internalizes is the old proverb that the best time to plant a tree 20 years ago, the next best time today, you should not be scared about moving forward on AI, it’s unstoppable. But it’s also if harness well gonna be really powerful for you. We think that fundamentally, you know, there’s a fella named Nicholas Negroponte, who formed the Media Lab at MIT in the 90s. And his view is what I think is coming to fruition. And he had said, in a conversation I had when I was lucky enough to be at MIT, he had said, the breakthroughs that we had seen, were going to be nothing like the breakthroughs we will see. And this is like in 1999, or something. And he said that so far, computer power and etcetera had only been able to be harnessed by people who understood binary understood languages that stood on top of binary, that it was a very thin layer, set at the point that computers can speak to humans, instead of humans learning how to speak to computers, he said, then we’re going to unleash the kind of productivity and kind of exponential growth for our species that we’ve never seen. That’s what I think happened in q4 2022. Computers have started to understand how to speak to humans, you don’t have to program to program you can write a prompt and anyone can prompt engineer. And so this is now not something that happens in the corner. This is should be something that happens at every part of your organization. So when we think about when you ask the question, where do you put it into the product? Well, first, you got to start with your team. So think there’s three dimensions that people should think of one is your own culture, your own processes, your own organization, and, and it’s got to be prolific, you’ve got to change your performance reviews to include this, you’ve got to change your l&d to include it. It’s got to be in the culture that you encourage people and you celebrate it, like, you can’t just say, oh, somebody down the hall can help you. It’s got to be, you know, the next one is it’s okay to do linear improvements, I think in our space stretch, having job descriptions, right automatically, having resumes reviewed, automatically having skills inferred automatically. There’s all sorts of very kind of pedantic line of sight. Evolution that a couple years ago would have been a couple year project to try to untangle ontologies and skills from one company and other.

Fred Goff 17:14
Now you have a translation machine that can do it in like a month. All of that is kind of what I would think is more linear adjustments. And we’ve got all of those. What I find more interesting, though, is the disruptive ones, where you go to the core of the problem and say, How can we think about the problem differently. And we think about the the job matching, and career progression of workers with employers. You want to break down this world that we’re currently in. I mean, people don’t talk with what were boxes, right? Like, that’s just how we evolved. What they want to do is to say, I want a job close to home that pays me at least 20 bucks an hour, and I gotta be home by four, because my mom or something, right? Find a job on that, right. And I don’t need just a job, I need a career, I need to get better. I wish I would have gone into nursing, how do I do that, and et cetera. So our investment has been on the consumer side at rethinking how we create agents that aren’t just skins on top of Chachi Beatty, or anthropic, but actually informed by the decade of data where we bend the scale of the third largest in the country, informed by the depth of information we have about people and formed by unique models we’ve got from Jordan community in jobs clicks that we’ve been seeing, so that it’s got this depth underneath it, but it’s got a sentient interface that allows people to be very natural. And then from that we can help them career Pat, on the other side, that gives us such depth of information that when we look at employers, and trying to serve them, get them really strong candidates and strong employees. It allows us to focus on quality in ways that weren’t possible before at the scale that we now can. And we think equality, of course, you want someone that’s close proximity to where you want them to work unless it’s at home. But there’s intent fit and match fit, right. And so the intent fit is really key, especially when you get to folks that don’t have advanced college degrees, right? So software engineers aren’t going to do so much. But when you when we staff people at a warehouse, they might come from all sorts of walks of life. So it really matters what do they care about? What do they want to do that as well as the match fit, which is the required or supported skills and how you can infer those either from skills and etc. It just gives us a depth of ability of solving quality issues for the way our employers talk about it that also help our our members, I mean, they don’t want to apply to a job where they get automatically declined for it. And so I think that that’s what I would say people should look at as one is get across the culture, your whole organization to it’s okay to do just linear things like job promotion stuff, but really rethink the core problem and think how this technology can approach it differently, such as different modalities talk to a coach instead of mentor.

Trish 19:54
I love all those. I’m like making notes frantically for myself too. Are you always I feel like I learn something every time we talk. So I know that the audience’s as well. One of the things that just really I wrote down specifically talking about, like thinking about the problem differently. And I think that sometimes, especially if you’ve been in a culture of certain org culture for a long time, you do get a little bit of groupthink, even if you’re a creative person, right? And so using, I use chat GPT, like does now it’s like, you almost can ask it questions that you were afraid to ask anyone else, right? That might sound stupid or right, unintelligent, or why did they ask that? Right? So in a way, not only is it empowering employees in new ways, because of the depth of information it can pull from? I think it also, I don’t know, I almost think of it like that. That quiet assistant that’s always there and never thinks that anything you ask is too ridiculous, right? You can ask any question and you can refine how you do it. It kind of leads me to my question for you, which is, I think back to working in HR. And something like social media when that was sort of new, right? We felt like, oh, HR needs to be experts in social media, if we’re going to understand how to use it for business. And what we learned is that you really need to reach out and find out who in your company is already leaning in hard on that particular skill. Do you think that whether it’s aI more generally, or generative AI more specifically, are we missing? Maybe experts with that are like under our own noses with our employees that we currently have that could be helping us? Maybe get better at it?

Fred Goff 21:35
It’s interesting. I mean, I think you definitely are in this sense. I think that different companies are having different approaches to Gen AI. And I think we’re fears run amongst about it. You have tighter rules. And I guarantee you companies have really tight rules. So I know what I’m thinking of right now that says Nobody’s allowed to use it. And I know, amongst our best employees are using it prolifically. Right. So yes, I think it’s possible. But here’s what I think is probably the, the salient point, I think I would wish that all HR groups understood and enact which is this is an ability to leapfrog This is not like other technologies. This is not something that is prohibitive to access. This is not something that is difficult to understand and, and leverage. This is extremely accessible, you can go to Udemy, go to city Khan Academy, just take a prompt engineering course this weekend, you can do one in a weekend, and it will help you understand you can write programs, you can do Excel, you can answer questions, it’s, it’s a simple course, I’ll help you understand that. And here’s why that’s so important. You know, David Archer is, I think, I think we think of a lot of similar things. He’s an MIT professor, that’s been studying wealth, inequalities and things of this nature among workers. And he made a lot of news in the last week, because he’s come out with this, this punch line quote, where he says AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle skill and middle class part of the US labor market. And historically, people have rightly or wrongly ascribed David that he thinks technology’s hurting the middle class or whatever. And he’s pointing out no, this is different, because you can access this and you can leapfrog your your potential to be productive. And this is what Jobcase is striving to do for our members, not just our employees, and what all of our listeners can do for themselves. If you’re intimidated by this, you’re gonna lean back and I ascribe to the the concept that AI won’t replace your job is somebody who is harnessing AI well, but here’s the thing, it’s not let artificial intelligence scare you. It’s not this. It’s as simple as now they speak our language. It used to be hard. I used to have to learn Python or SQL or right now, it’s easy, you can just talk to it and good things come out. So lean in, in those hidden people you’re talking about can be the person themselves with just like a weekend of work.

Trish 23:59
And see that’s what I’m getting at. Because I think that we sometimes think, oh, it has to be someone with these multiple degrees or a certain job. And it’s not right, this, we all have access on our phones. And almost everybody has a phone regardless of what your background is your socio economic status, right? Everybody’s got phones, and they can they can learn this too. And I would say, Gosh, I mean, when you’re thinking about job descriptions, or future positions you’re trying to fill. To me this seems like the easiest way to really get that skills focus.

Fred Goff 24:33
And then here’s the beauty Trish. So if you have somebody who’s spending their days doing that, now you can take the linear off now they can spend their time thinking about a more disruptive thing that they can do. Right let’s get the menial tasks off. It’s done. We’ve solved that and you can harness this to now we can unlock more creativity more impact. So that’s kind of the point like it’s it to me it’s it’s not dissimilar to you know, when it’s a toy are we different scale, but when you had NetSuite come out like in the whatever 70s 80s, etc, people might have thought that display CFOs. But what is the CFO today is doing, Deb is doing m&a. It’s unleashed a lot of increased compensation power for that person, we can do that across the whole economy now. And so that’s really what Jobcase is on. And if we’re successful with our mission, we’re going to help empower workers, but every Jobcaser, who you hire, whoever the person is listening to this is going to bring the culture in of being not intimidated by technology, trying to harness it for what for the growth of the company that hires them. So we think it’s not just good for the members, but good for our clients who hire our members as well.

Trish 25:46
I love that. I think just democratizing that skill set, right? Instead of sort of pigeonholing people into what you think they can or can’t do and bring to your your organization. I think, for many years organizations have missed out on hiring really good workers who are adept and might you know, what I always found, I don’t know if you found this in your career as well, I’m assuming Yes. But I was always shocked when I was younger, when you’d find people that are maybe doing something outside of work, maybe they’re really into gardening, or maybe they’re, you know, a deacon at their church or do bookkeeping, for some little side business, right? They’re an Avon lady, or whatever. But they people go out and naturally build skills that don’t fall under their job description. And then I feel like as the company, we’re missing out on all those skills. We haven’t had a way to harness more the totality of the individual. Do you think that like the way we’re looking at skills now and employees now and candidates now? Is that better? Because of we’re sort of looking at them more holistically?

Fred Goff 26:57
Well, yeah, it’s gonna be kind of tailor to suit us. Here’s what I’m thinking if they hear ya. On one side, I feel like you were in the room when we formed Jobcase in 2015. We literally were talking about this, I noticed that that there’s plenty of people remember, our example was like the the stay at home mom that was coming back to work, and there’s so much bias against her resume. But if she was like running the coffee cup at church every Sunday, we’re like, Oh, my God, organizational political skills, like, how can you surface that so Hallelujah to what you’re saying. And with skills with new gen AI approaches, even impediments skills, people can harness this technology and jump over very quickly. That said, I will share with you kind of a state of American workforce right now now versus like, pre pandemic. So in 2019, like we were a lot of us in the skills based hiring, let’s remove barriers. Let’s empower workers. We’re very excited when the business roundtable at 168 CEO say they were going to navigate their companies by stake stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder primacy, which included treating workers better and cetera. We thought that was great. We were a little skeptical that they would land but we wanted to be allies to help them land that. And right after that, we had the tragedy. And sometimes progress happens after tragedies with George Floyd’s murder, and a lot of focus on dei and a lot of funding. And it doesn’t take a genius to draw the line between skills based hiring eliminating some friction for people of color that have been blocked out from the labor force before for lack of getting FAFSA for lack of union degrees.

Fred Goff 28:39
So there was a tremendous movement towards advocating for skills based hiring. And I believe that similar to what you’re talking about, sea level enterprise is on board, they get it right. There’s a tremendous amount of them. Governors are on board. They’ve been scrubbing, superfluous requirements. But we’re in the ground game in telling you the NIMBY problem is not solved, right? The the same hiring manager that is cheering on and so proud of Brian Moynihan, when he does things for the whole enterprise of Bank of America is still looking for the UMass Dartmouth grad, not looking for somebody without requirements waiting for somebody else to hire them without a degree. So I think that we’ve won the mindshare in the executive suites. Certainly, the nonprofits and epic advocacy for workers, like Job case are working the ground game, but the hiring managers in between need better support systems. They need to be rewarded for doing this because right now they have asymmetric risk. They gotta jump on board, but they probably don’t have it included in their performance reviews. Did you expand your workforce for diversity? Did you expand your workforce including for degrees in diversity? So until we rebalance risk, rewards and incentives and performance measurement for the hiring managers, they are going to continue being an impediment now. because they’re not great people, they’re great people, but we have to fix the rest of the system so that their good intentions land well. And so I think that’s where we’re at. So progress to be sure, but we still got the last mile. That’s all.

Trish 30:13
Yeah, I’m glad we have the progress at the C suite, because that will over time may take a long time, they’ll trickle down to those hiring managers. But right now, I think hiring managers in general, I mean, for good, or whatever you like the status quo, there’s no reason to shake things up, right? Because you’re shaking things up, and you may not have the control you currently do. So working in HR, might be opposite.

Fred Goff 30:38
If you’re the hiring manager that just put a bill for 200 grand to get your kid going through the college degree, it’d be worth something. So I think that’s it’s a tough, it’s tough to get changed. But I You can see it coming. And I think that I do think the C suite can change it right away, they can change it right away by changing performance review policies and incentive structures, right? The people react to incentive structures. So they could, if they follow it through with incentive structures, it could change a lot faster.

Trish 31:05
And that’s really an HR impact too, because you’re then seen as the expert, you’re the one guiding the company through that process of incenting people differently. I know, way back when I was in professional services that we were talking about that, you know, this I’m talking about, like late 90s, right? And talking about, we knew then that managers will not behave differently if we don’t give them compensation differently based on wanting what we want them to do. And yet here we are almost 30 years later talking about the same thing.

Fred Goff 31:35
But you got to start with I think it’s what’s helpful is to say, look, let’s assume good intentions, let’s assume good action. So we’re not. And I think that’s also you know, we see that across the board, we don’t need to assume some late 70s construct of union management, right? It doesn’t have to be adversarial. It can be advocacy. We’ve seen union management, I grew up in Toledo, as you mentioned at the top of this conversation, and there was times next to Detroit, you can see it working really, really well for the company. I think if you assume that good, then you say okay, what in the system is stopping this from moving forward? This isn’t a bad actor issue. This is something systematically, and and that is a very empowering thought because you can move it and now on top of being able to move those behaviors, anything that historically was still a little problematic for but how do we accelerate contribution skills or whatever, honestly, this new AI driven world and how fast it can launch you ahead, to achieve things without having to sit in a classroom for two or three years, is is incredibly empowering. Thus the David Archer point that this can be really restore the middle class, because you don’t need to go sit in a classroom for four years, and have $300,000 of debt in order to accelerate. That’s what’s so exciting about this.

Trish 32:50
I love that. And I love that you’re tying that together, I think to just to mention that, you know, when you’re talking about the sort of being the blue collar, LinkedIn, it’s to me, it’s there are so many people I know you have, you know, kids of college age, I do Steve does as well. And it opens your eyes, I think to all of the other careers. I’m saying even college age, like I just said that like, yeah, they’re college age, but they’re also trade school age. And they’re also maybe the the people that need to go out in the sea, even they are just in normal conversation. It’s so ingrained here. Yep. I guess my question for you, is this right? I’m a leader, I’m sitting out there, I want to be more open in my hiring, I want to have my eyes open, right? I want to get rid of that language that’s just embedded in the way that we think that is normal. What are some ways that I can partner with job case? Now in kind of get that started in my organization, so that I’m making an impact on changing that process? What can I be doing?

Fred Goff 33:54
I appreciate it. Well, we can start on the ground game, we are the third largest online destination, we provide, you know, hundreds of 1000s of job applicants every single month, every week, proudly to employers around the nation. We have 60 70,000 small and medium sized businesses, with our partnerships with newspapers and such and we have almost every enterprise through agencies or direct so if we’re, if we’re not working together, we should because we’ve got the workers where where the workers are. And that can be as simple as job promotion and providing candidates to your feeds that have the benefits of what we’ve been working on for the last six to nine months on quality proximity fullness of resume, intent, fit match fit so that it increases the efficiency of your own operations. That’s just kind of ground game line of sight. In addition to that, we have some of our closer partnerships. We’ll have real estate within the Jobcase community we call hubs, and that allows us to get your brand out and that’s not just for prospective candidates for your current employees. We have over 120 million members As guarantee your employees are on job case to show. And so getting that word out is also there as well. And then beyond that, we have some pretty, pretty interesting things around disrupting and accelerating what you can do in your HR department with regard to AI coming down the pike. But today, it’s pretty simple. You should be in the community in the hub’s and that’s dirt simple with, we do everything for you. And you should be hiring our members, our members are awesome people 15% have college degrees, 85% don’t, but all of them are very empathetic supporting of each other. I mean, who, who wouldn’t want this kind of person on their team, right? They’re helping each other proactive, they’re open to new technologies to move forward. Like, these are great people, and it would be awesome if they could help your company grow as well.

Trish 35:47
I love that. So everyone, please reach out to Fred, Fred, where can people find you? Where is this if they want to learn more or connect with you personally?

Fred Goff 35:56
So I guess, jobcase.com/hire. That’s where the team’s got set up, where you can kind of just say, hey, I’m interested, feel free to reach out to me directly, either on jobcase.com Or on LinkedIn, Fred Goff. I guess I’m probably the only one from Toledo in this space. Maybe? I don’t know. Maybe there’s another one. And we’d love to meet more of the market and Toledo. Exactly. And I was so excited. Trish, I’ll tell you when I found out we we had great partners like in that and McClatchy and Lee and newspapers. But I will confess it was kind of cool. When we got the Toledo Blade, because I grew up reading, it’s kind of fun to see. And the other thing I’d say is I’m we are big advocates at the macro level on how you can treat workers better in general. And, in particular, see ourselves as some of the emissaries given our T cell relationship and others of helping organizations understand how to harness AI, and things we didn’t get into, you know, how to avoid, you know, bias gaps, how to how to do it the right way to empower. And so we can just have a conversation about that I’m happy to help anybody who, anybody who’s advocating for their own workforce, or friends of ours. Good.

Trish 37:05
Well, we’ll have to have you back on because I mean, our time flies by right. So we can we can jump in and cover all those in more depth next time. But thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate your time. I know all of our listeners do as well. Please Like he said, reach out to him on LinkedIn or on jobcase.com Definitely be be looking at your own way that you’re hiring. If you’re demanding that someone have a college degree, give it a second look, you might not need that there might be other skills that are equivalent or even superior to having that college degree, people can prove their worth and their intellectual capacity and their their physical capacity to do great work in many other ways. I know, for example, I was talking to my daughter recently, and you know, she’s a sophomore in college. And I said, it’s really not even about what degree you get. It’s just showing that you can start something and complete it right. And there are so many other ways in the world to show that as well. Right, demonstrating your your work with a prior company can certainly be equivalent to having gone to college. So if you’re, if you’re an employee currently, or you are someone who’s looking for work, also connect with job case. And I’m getting to the community today.

Fred Goff 38:23
Thank you. And don’t be afraid of Gen AI either, run through that door.

Trish 38:26
Thank you see, you can help them with all these things. So anyway, thanks again. Please join us for all our other episodes. You can find them on HRHappyHour.net. We’re also on YouTube, LinkedIn, you name it, we’re everywhere. So please check out all the show archives. Final shout out to Steve, we’re so glad that you are able to get a moment off today. But we know we’ll have Steve back on the next conversation for sure. I know. He’s got lots of questions too. So thanks again, everyone. Thank you

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