Hire Calling
Hire Calling
Exploring AI's Role in Revolutionizing Recruitment With Varun Khurana
Are outdated hiring practices slowing you down? Join us for an insightful chat with Varun Khurana, co-founder of Wayfaster, as he shares his journey from employee to entrepreneur. Frustrated by recruitment inefficiencies, Varun and his co-founder built a cutting-edge voice AI solution to revolutionize high-volume hiring.
We dive into how AI is reshaping recruitment—streamlining resume screening, optimizing interviews, and enhancing efficiency while keeping the human touch at the forefront. But as AI evolves, does it threaten recruiter jobs or simply refine them?
Get the inside scoop on AI’s role in hiring, its impact on job markets, and the future of tech-driven recruitment. Don’t miss this episode! 🎙️
Additional Resources:
1. Wayfaster
2. Mass Recruitment: The Complete Guide
3. How Is Artificial Intelligence Changing the Recruiting Process?
4. Can You Trust AI to Handle Recruitment?
🧠 WANT TO LEARN MORE? Be sure to subscribe and check out 4 Corner Resources at https://www.4cornerresources.com/
👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Blog Articles: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog/
👋 FOLLOW VARUN KHURANA ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vkhurana2/
You're listening to the Hire Calling Podcast, your source for all things hiring, staffing and recruiting. I'm Pete Newsome and my guest today is Varun Khurana, founder of Wayfaster. Varun, how are you today? I'm doing great, pete. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining. You are doing something pretty exciting in the marketplace right now, so I'm super pumped to hear more about it. You and I have not spoken before today, so that's always a fun thing. Where all these questions I'm asking they're genuine because I don't know the answer, it makes for a more exciting interview, I think.
Varun Khurana:I'd love to hear it. Hopefully we can tell you a little bit more about Wayfaster and what we're working on.
Pete Newsome:Let's start from before we get to that. Tell me a little bit about your background and, ultimately, how you came to start Wayfaster.
Varun Khurana:Yeah, absolutely. So there's two of us there's me and my co-founder, shreyas, and a little bit of context on the company. So Shrey was an early engineer at Checkr, which I think is very familiar to people in the staffing and HR space, for doing background checks. I was at Instacart, which is a marketplace that does grocery delivery, grocery delivery and other things now as well, and we noticed a couple of different things at those companies, because those are both companies that A in corporate hire a lot of different people, but also the customers they serve hire a lot of people as well. So Instacart will hire a lot of delivery drivers.
Varun Khurana:Checkr works with a lot of high volume light industrial staffing firms drivers. Checkr works with a lot of high volume light industrial staffing firms and the issue you notice is that, as you need to hire more people, it actually scales exponentially cost and time wise to hire these people. So at Instacart, when you vet delivery drivers, it costs. It goes like that Same thing with all the staffing firms Checkr works with as well. And we also, when we were working at corporate, we ourselves, as mid-twenties people, were doing a bunch of interviews and when you're 25, you have no idea what you're talking about in an interview.
Varun Khurana:You're just guessing and it's the best thing that you can hope for is just you don't mess it up. And so we always knew it was a problem to both interview people in the thousands of people, like corporate does, and also in the hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, as you see some of the bigger staffing firms, bigger marketplaces in the world do, and there wasn't really a modality to how you'd actually interview more people efficiently. The way you'd do it in the past is you'd do a one-way video interview. You'd give them a text message chat, which I think everyone hates. Every candidate hates. Every recruiter hates it too.
Pete Newsome:What are you getting out of that?
Varun Khurana:And then Shrey had also been, like the first engineer at a company called Deepgram, which builds text-to-speech models, and we started to see this voice AI thing was like a real thing that was happening and it was very much for us having a problem that we'd seen before many times combined with now having the technology to actually solve it at scale in a way that didn't exist before. I think that's the magic of magic background of any good startup. Right, it couldn't have been done six months ago, two years ago. You have to hit it on the right point of time.
Pete Newsome:Necessities, mother of invention. Right, you saw a need in the market, you lived it. How did you make the leap? I mean going from being an employee to a founder. That's a big step. Needless to say, anyone who's done it knows that very well. What was the catalyst for you making that decision and saying, hey, this is something I need to solve?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, I'll give you the honest answer, which is that we were both working at corporate jobs in 2022, where the company wasn't growing that fast anymore. It was a crypto down cycle at Coinbase, where Shrey was, and I was.
Varun Khurana:At Instacart, which has really slowed down growth by that point, and it was something we knew we wanted to do. That being said, we went through many failed ideas before we landed on this one. It wasn't a linear leap where we quit our jobs and then the next day, wayfaster was born. We worked on some really great ideas I think that we might have missed the boat on like software for private equity firms and we also worked on some really terrible ones.
Varun Khurana:We had like index funds for crypto influencers, and these are all learning experiences, and I think it was like six months to a year of really just fliling around a little bit and figuring out a problem that was really worth solving, with a solution that we had a differentiated viewpoint on, and it was a very nonlinear transition that I don't think enough people talk about. When you're first starting a company, which is it's never the first idea right.
Pete Newsome:Yeah, it rarely is right. If anyone could come up with a great idea, it would be easy, right, and it's not. I certainly can appreciate that. But I hope, through all of that you did, if you had Bitcoin, you did hold on to it. Through all that, I hope that wasn't one of your bad decisions you made along the way.
Varun Khurana:It's hard starting a company. You're very poor and I'm very grateful to Bitcoin for staying with me through that entire time time Nice, absolutely.
Pete Newsome:So we're not in 2022 anymore, thank goodness, and hopefully we don't go back there. So then, when you guys decided to start Wayfaster, you lived the problem you decided to experience. Describe the product for anyone who's unfamiliar with it. What problem does Wayfaster solve?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, absolutely so.
Varun Khurana:If you're a staffing firm I'll put this in the context of staffing our HR team, which is, like the statistics show, that you get to about half the applications that you receive, and the ones that you do receive, you're not answering that person right away, even if you end up answering them eventually.
Varun Khurana:And the two key metrics that everyone has decided really matter in hiring are time to hire, which is how fast can you contact someone and get them through your funnel, and then the number of applicants, especially if you're staffing where your pay is paid for each incremental person that you're interviewing and able to place. And those two go hand in hand. And really what we do is we build voice agents that think and sound like humans, so they have the same conversation that we're having today that can actually interview people as soon as they apply. So the minute someone applies, they get on the phone with one RAI interviewer. He runs their screen. That seems very familiar, very comfortable. We're able to process a lot of metadata out of that. So an audio recording transcript and then what we call structured outputs, which are things we automatically extract from an interview and push back into your ATS.
Varun Khurana:And really what it is your recruiters are then only speaking to qualified candidates, but you've also interviewed all of your candidates on a smart timeframe, so you're cutting down your time to hire. You're getting only qualified candidates for your recruiters, and you're doing it at a relatively low cost too, which is the tertiary benefit. At the end of the day, it's about having great people and getting to them fast. If you can cut some costs in the process, too, it's not a bad thing as well.
Pete Newsome:I'm more than a little excited about this evolutionary step because technology has made recruiting more difficult than it was previously. I'll share what I mean by that. I'm old, so when I started recruiting, we would run ads in the newspaper. We would have resumes faxed to us or mailed. I was excited to check the mail every day as a young recruiter, if you can believe that.
Pete Newsome:But each resume you had you received as a recruiter meant something you had to get the most out of that conversation. You had to really hone your skills on building meaningful relationships and building rapport quickly with someone and gathering as much information as you can from a can. So you really invested time in that individual right and you had to in order to survive because you didn't know where the next resume was coming from. And I was away from recruiting for 10 years before starting Four Corner Resources, which is now 19 years old. So it's been a long time since I've been back. But in between, monstercom was born and CareerBuilder and through those products and others like them and now OneClick Recruiting, it's become the opposite. You get a flood of resumes for any job you post now and it's taken that art that was necessary to become a good recruiter completely out of the equation and it's become this mess of a volume game where, if you get 500 resumes within an hour or two which happens for a lot of jobs as a recruiter, it's just not realistic to go through this and the best candidates can be buried. It's first in, first out, and ATS systems don't do a good job of ranking. You know all of this right, and anyone in recruiting does, and the problem that I've been trying unsuccessfully to solve for years was how can I put a job posting up and have some sort of a screening email response, right, hey, rune, thanks for applying. Confirm these five things before we put you in touch with the live recruiter or schedule. You live right To take away all that kind of garbage on both sides, right? Candidates, there's no price to pay for just clicking and applying to a million jobs, and recruiters don't have the ability to go through them. So it was really asking candidates to take an extra step in order to engage with the recruiter life, but that was impossible to solve, which is crazy. You're going to don't tell me there was a solution I didn't know about and you knew what it was and existed all along, probably, but I couldn't find it, and so now what you're describing solves that in a much better way than an email ever could.
Pete Newsome:Right now, you're having a live interaction, or as live as it can be, through AI, which I think counts, and everyone wins right, the candidate gets immediate feedback or gets to hear from someone, the recruiters get to spend their time in the most quality fashion, which was the goal all along. So I say all of that to say I'm really excited. There's no question there. I just want to let you know I personally and professionally think this is a solution that's so needed in the market, and you can't say that about every technology that comes out. But let me ask you about the potential downside to it. So I'm Gen X, right, so I'm early 50s. You still have a lot of boomers. I am not early 50s. You still have a lot of boomers, and I'm not a boomer. You still have a lot of those. In the workplace, you have millennials this is somewhat new interacting with AI. Tell me about the, the rate of people willing to interact with AI. What are you seeing? What is it? What is the data show?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, first of all, you mentioned something called mail.
Pete Newsome:I'm not really sure what that is, I'm just you let me know Is that it would come on a horse with a carriage behind it and they would. Yeah, so it was. I'll tell you about that later.
Varun Khurana:Yeah, I definitely think that. One thing I will add to what you're saying is not just the influx of resumes. So you're seeing this with like Indeed and LinkedIn are almost 50% of recruiter spend in the US now and they're known for easy applies, so the volume is higher than it is ever before. But the flip side of the AI boom has actually been for candidates. It's super easy to replicate what a company's ATS is looking for from a job description.
Pete Newsome:Two years ago at least your resumes.
Varun Khurana:You could filter out the candidates with a little bit of higher intent and use some keywords. That gave you like it wasn't a perfect filter, but it gave you something.
Varun Khurana:Now, all those resumes look alike too, so you don't even know where to start if you're a recruiter, which is what is making this a really good option for recruiters, where they just get something, a first pass filter, now that an ATS filter isn't working at all. But just to directly address your question, around downsides, we always tell companies that please don't use this for an executive search. We've seen companies try to interview CFO candidates and I was like that is a horrible idea. Please don't do that, because it's really good for it's really bad for roles where the recruiter has to sell the candidate just as much as the candidate has to take the job, and I think that there's a lot of jobs that exist, especially on the mid-tire levels of any industry. It's a two-sided conversation and recruiters are going to be able to sell in a way that AI can never do, no matter what any of these products are promising you.
Varun Khurana:I do think that the candidate reception was one thing that I was really scared of, and it's been overwhelmingly positive, and one of the reasons has been like it feels like candidates feel like they're heard and like they're getting a response that they normally wouldn't have had. I think there are certain verticals where people are less responsive than others To your point. I don't think it's an age thing. It's actually more about the vertical you're serving. So we actually see less of a delineation around like age or gender or anything like that, but more so hey, if you work in a warehouse versus you work actually in a construction industry.
Varun Khurana:Construction actually loves this. They love to talk on the phone, even with its, even if it's ai, but we see something like industrial. The response rates, depending on the brand and like company that they're interacting with, actually vary quite a bit, and so I would say to sum that all up is like for higher precision roles, higher cognition roles, like this is not a tool that should be used, because it is actually very much on the recruiter to sell the candidate on the first call. I would say for the rest of the roles non-exact roles of the world I think it depends on how much leverage your employer brand has and how much goodwill you have with the candidates is also one of the big key components there as well, if that makes sense.
Pete Newsome:It does. I'm surprised about your comment about the age thing, though I wish I could quote it. I should have had it prepared for today. I read an article sometime in the past few weeks saying that Gen Z prefers to interact with bots versus humans, and who knows, you see all kinds of crazy articles. You never know what's true, necessarily but it resonated with me.
Pete Newsome:I thought that makes sense, right. I have four kids age 16 through 24. They all have phones that are in their hand 24-7. I'm not sure that I've ever seen them speak on the phone and they certainly don't pick up when I call. That's my first-hand experience and I just think it makes sense, right, that the younger you are, the more open you are to technology. But what you said makes sense as well, which is higher volume positions. I think this is a more natural fit, for as a recruiter, I would generally associate that with just a pure volume of applications that we receive, not because it's a different level just from supply and demand, which ultimately is tied to the level. So it's been the same, perhaps, but for a different reason.
Varun Khurana:Yeah, one of the interesting things about the age thing, which is we've slowly been indoctrinated up to this point without kind of us realizing it, like, my parents have been using Alexa for years now right in our house.
Varun Khurana:It never works, but it's been there, and I think we've moved towards bot-based text.
Varun Khurana:And then we have these voice devices we're talking to and then we're seeing some stuff with the LLM companies themselves coming out with products like this, and I think that adoption curves slowly creeped into older generations as well, to the point that a lot of them are very used to interacting with this tech, even if they don't directly know it.
Varun Khurana:And it's one of the earliest things we used to measure, because our calls would take eight, nine seconds to connect when we first built this out and where the tech was a little more nascent. And we would always try to get a good gauge on how people reacted to when the bot first spoke to them. If we didn't tell them ahead of time, if we just triggered a phone call and there'd be some confusion for a couple seconds. But we were always really impressed with how smoothly people would understand this was a bot, hear it and go with it if we didn't tell them. Now, obviously, as a company, we have all these measures in place where we give people practice calls and it's an amazing candidate experience. But even in those earliest days.
Varun Khurana:People just go with the flow and they've been using this tech for years and they just don't realize it. And that's what's crazy about this.
Pete Newsome:That's a great point. We do use it and we don't even think about Alexa being a great example of that. I get a kick out of my wife interacting with it because as Alexa fails to respond, her tone changes and she thinks, if she's like harsher with Alexa, we'll do what she wants, which I think the only thing we use it for is setting an alarm to get up in the morning. That's the extent of what Alexa does for us. Let's break it down so we'll use your example of a warehouse position. I think that's a great one, a construction role. So I put my job posting on Indeed. Applications start to come in take over from there.
Varun Khurana:What happens? Yeah, absolutely so. We're a company called Wayfaster and so our goal, as you can imagine, is just speed, primary first, and the way it works is you'll apply it. That application info will get sent to an ATS and staffing is full horn primarily and more corporate. It can be anything from Workable to Ashby, depending on the type of company.
Pete Newsome:As soon as that happens.
Varun Khurana:What we'll do is sometimes companies will have a default ATS filter, Sometimes they don't. One of the benefits is you can interview every candidate, so you don't necessarily need one with Wayfaster. So they apply, we trigger a link to each of those candidates. The company decides whether it's phone or video, depending on the role. With a warehouse, it's more than likely phone, and a big reason why it's phone or video depending on the role with a warehouse.
Varun Khurana:it's more than likely phone, and a big reason why it's instant is like we find 80% of applications actually come between the hours of five and nine, and so it's when someone's frustrated at their current role, especially a warehouse, and they're like fuck this, I'm going to apply, excuse the language, I'm going to apply to another job and like we want to get them as soon as they're in that frustration point so that they are able to really go through the application process.
Pete Newsome:They take the interview out of that.
Varun Khurana:We'll pull out. We'll first onboard them, tell them hey, this is an AI on behalf of staffing firm that we're representing. They'll run through a list of questions, Some of it which is pre-populated, some of it which is actually generated on the fly from AI based on what the candidate is saying. From there we'll take out the results, transcript recording, some outputs. We'll take all that data, We'll push it back into the ATS. We can set the filters on which there's an accept or reject decision, and then we schedule a follow-up recruiter interview with a real recruiter, if need be and if they're qualified, and then we schedule a follow-up recruiter interview with a real recruiter, if need be and if they're qualified. So we essentially go from application to the point where they book their next call with the recruiter in the span of maybe 10 to 15 minutes.
Pete Newsome:Love it. So the job rec can come in at five o'clock, the recruiter can post the ad, go home for the night and, in theory, come in the next morning and they have meetings booked with zoom. Whatever phone call with actual candidates who've already been screened by the ai. Is that it in a nutshell?
Varun Khurana:yeah, that's exactly it, and for some industrial roles you actually can actually just have them show up to the job site by the next day. Because if you've automated your stuff around compliance and background checks and you're like we just need a light filter in terms of checking a couple check the box items here, we can actually go through that entire workflow from within your ATS, depending on how advanced your recruitment system is Now.
Pete Newsome:Would that come from a preloaded list already that exists in the ATS, or could that also work with applications who are coming in live for the first time?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, so that's actually the beauty of it is we do both. So we actually a lot of the times. One of the craziest things I learned about staffing is the way it works at a lot of staffing firms is you'll put up a role, they'll have spent all this money on Indeed and you need five people at a warehouse and they'll have 15 people apply. They fill those five people with those 15 people, then they'll have 70 other people apply and then they never talk to them. The next they fill those five people with those 15 people, then they'll have 70 other people apply and then they never talk to them. The next time they fill the role, they just post that same ad on Indeed, and it happens so often and it drove us crazy.
Varun Khurana:So we actually tell companies two things. We're like look, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to actually go just interview everyone in your ATS that's just on the backlog. They may have switched positions, but this is valuable data that you never talk to these people and then from there, every person who applies we also interview. So we actually do it both ways where we want to interview companies existing ATS database and their backlog and also for every new applicant that comes in. The goal is holistically like you're never missing a good application that could potentially be valuable to your firm.
Pete Newsome:So if we did the scenario where we said we want to clean up our ATS and every staff and company has a need to do that, I suspect right, all my peers and friends do.
Pete Newsome:And at Four Corner we have roughly a million candidate resumes dating back as long as 19 years ago candidate resumes dating back as long as 19 years ago and I would estimate that only about half of those are clean today, but the fact is that is gold that's sitting beneath the surface, that I can't really get to for various reasons and, at the very least, it's impossible to keep up with people right, no matter how good your intentions are.
Pete Newsome:It's impossible to keep up with people right, no matter how good your intentions are. It's just not practical For the scenario you outlined. Just to run with that, those 70 candidates that came in, you really didn't have a practical way to address them because you've already filled the position of yes, you want to look forward and we all mean it, would love to do that in a perfect world, but we're on to the next job, right, and it's just the reality of it. So we lose money by pausing to do that as an industry. You know that I'd love to clean up my whole database, so if we wanted to do that, would we just come up with a list of questions and give it to the AI to say, hey, look, this is what we want. We want to find out what the candidates are doing today.
Pete Newsome:And maybe we set a call with the recruiter if they're on the market, on and on, there's so much benefit to that, and is that? But is that how it would work?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, that's a lot of the time. Staffing firms come to us and look like they're a lot it's still a very new technology and they're worried about, hey, how are candidates going to react to this? And we tell them, like look like your response rate on your past ats candidates can be way lower. They change numbers. They're happy in their new job, like maybe they're in between things like your contact information is off, so maybe we were able to reach half as many as we would with new applicants. But we tell them, like let's just try it out on your backlog of candidates.
Varun Khurana:We can theoretically at least try to interview all of them and even if 10% of them end up responding and updating that information, like you mentioned, it's still it's something that you would have normally. Not even that 10% isn't coming to you. And so we try to go to companies and tell them here's where we're going to do first lift and then we can kind of transition into new candidates because I think they see the value of hey, this has worked and we were able to get some information intake and it wasn't a hostile experience for the candidate. It was actually pretty good for them, for the ones that did pick up, and that's how we start the relationship with most firms. A lot of the time, and you implied this earlier.
Pete Newsome:But I just want to clarify you never try to pretend that it's not a bot, right? That's communicating to the individual, right up front. That this is an AI conversation, right? Yeah, yeah.
Varun Khurana:I think we came to the conclusion. It's like we don't think people are stupid, which is what I think people who stop try to pass off their AI as humans assume of humans. And we tried avatars at some point and, Pete, let me tell you, people hated that. Nobody wants to talk to an avatar Nobody, it turns out.
Pete Newsome:Yeah, I listened to your demo. It varies, steve, right? Is that the name of your AI voice? Yeah, sounds real and we're getting close. Right, we're getting there. Did you see the new Megan Fox movie on?
Varun Khurana:Netflix yet? No, I haven't. I'll have to check it out.
Pete Newsome:Subservience. Basically, it's a robot who lives as a caretaker, nanny and let's just say the husband. Let's just say the robot is Megan Fox and looks like Megan Fox. You can just imagine how that goes. We're seeing this blend happen really quickly. But I think people don't want to be fooled either. That's just human nature you mentioned a few times. So back to the database. I just want to, because that is such an impactful thing Give me an idea before we move on to pricing. How does your pricing structure work, because that's a lot of work. I don't know where the heavy lifting comes in on your side from a data standpoint and software, but generally speaking, you don't have to get precise with it. But how does it work generally? Yeah, I would say just the.
Varun Khurana:It's not directly answering the question, but one thing that we've been very conscious of is that it's not just the time you're saving from the interview. With every interview there's a post review of the interview, even if you give them a transcript of recording and all that stuff. And part of being way faster is that we actually want to pull out the key inputs the recruiter can just take a quick glance of okay, this person has 22 years of experience, this role requires two. Let's just this is a no-go or we just update this information. So we try to post-process them and pull out the key inputs that you're looking for there to save the time on like what we call like the post-processing the transcript.
Varun Khurana:And the reason I bring that up is like that, I think, is like a big thing for us is we're able to automate that process. So it's actually not that hard for us. Whether it's 15 candidates or a thousand candidates, it's actually relatively the same lift from us, except for the infrastructure costs. In terms of like automation, it's pretty much the same. We transparently just charge based on volume. So if companies want to and that is completed calls too, and a completed call being anything longer than 30 seconds, and the volume, as you can imagine, pricing scales down with the number of calls that you're committing to for the year. So if companies want to do 100,000 calls, it's going to be significantly cheaper than 5,000 calls. But that's how we price.
Pete Newsome:You mentioned a few things earlier. You mentioned targeting large staffing companies and you also mentioned corporate versus a recruiting firm. So differentiate that. But also tell me if there's a company size that's really in your sweet spot.
Varun Khurana:No, I don't think we see companies that run high volumes at really low volumes, like, for example, marketplaces. Sometimes we'll interview tons of people and actually have five, 10 people on the team, and then we also go up to really big light industrial staffing firms.
Varun Khurana:So we don't have any size constraints in terms of size of company, like generally we've seen our sweet spot is like a firm with, whether corporate or staffing of roughly about a hundred people and above. But I think the biggest denominator is just like volume of applicants because, and how many positions you're looking to fill, because at the end of the day, like you only need an extra set of hands, whether that's through AI or human, if you have enough application volume coming in, and I think as long as you have a large number of applications, I think we're a pretty good fit for you.
Pete Newsome:Can you quantify that? What would you consider a large number? Yeah?
Varun Khurana:I would say roughly, at least 500 to to 2000 a month is like at the very minimum. I think is targeting. What about?
Pete Newsome:per job. Is there like a? Was there a job that would be? We talked about levels and I associate the levels also with the supply of candidates. Right, there's go hand in hand. There's not gonna get a thousand applicants for a CEO. One click apply. There will be, but we're going to try to screen that out as best we can. And the job post but is cost effective for a job where you'd get 20 applicants, or do you need 200?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, I would say it depends on the like real answers. It depends on how you're doing it today, which is, if your recruiter, if you get seven applications and they're all pretty good applications and recruiters able to get to them in an hour, then you don't really need us.
Varun Khurana:If the recruiter is overwhelmed that they have 500 applications or 50 applications or whatever that number is and they're like we're having trouble filling the role fast because I can't get to applications fast enough, then we're probably fit. There's no hard and fast number. Obviously, as you can imagine, if you're hiring people by the bushel and like hiring 50, 100 people a day, like you know, it's going to be a little more acute, just statistically speaking. But we just want to go to places where we can help the most, as opposed to looking at any direct sizes. But in terms of staffing, it's usually seen that benchmark be like once you cross that 100 person threshold or even like lower.
Varun Khurana:We've seen like 25 better, like more on the RPO side or more light industrial, where they're doing more with those 25 people. That's where we've seen a lot of traction so far.
Pete Newsome:Do you see a difference so far in acceptance or willingness to use the product?
Varun Khurana:on corporate versus staffing Sorry, say that one more time.
Pete Newsome:Have you seen a difference in just willingness to step out and adoption, if you will, of AI and corporate hiring versus staffing?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, I would say staffing using like a DMS or like one of these heavy enterprise companies, and I think in corporate obviously that's the mandate from HR but the business kind of goes and lives on even if you're not able to do that. Like Domino's would love to get people in the door faster and get people placed and have their jobs and their stores, but Domino's will live on even if it takes them another two or three days to do it, because they have an infinite pool of applicants. And I think that employer brand that you have as a corporate generally tends to do you some wonders and it's not mission critical though it is like a huge problem, whereas in staffing like that is the whole business model right and I think that's where we see like recruitment services is like a little more acute than corporates.
Pete Newsome:That makes complete sense. Listen, you mentioned what drove you crazy earlier. What drives me crazy is companies who are willing to just sit on job openings when we measure how fast they're filled in hours, sometimes days at most, and they measure in weeks, sometimes even months, which is crazy to me, but that's reality. So I completely I'm not surprised at your answer at all, knowing what I do about that. It seems to me anyone who's sending a lot of screening offshore is you've rendered that completely unnecessary or am I missing something obvious? Because I think speaking with a bot or AI, or Steve in your case, is a much better experience than speaking with someone overseas where there's a language barrier. Let's just call it for what it is. You've really take all of that out of the equation. Yeah, it's funny.
Varun Khurana:So we sell three big things to companies. We sell them speed, quality and cost. And when it comes to in the U? S, when we take things off the recruiters place and put them qualified candidates you only interview qualified candidates. We're usually selling them on speed and cost, right, like maybe you don't need that extra pair of hands. When it comes to offshoring, we're actually often selling quality as well, whereas, like the AI out of the box, not only is it faster and more cost efficient, though that cost Delta, as you can imagine, is a lot lower offshore. Actually, just the quality for both the candidate and the types of questions that are asked and the responses generate are actually significantly already better than a lot of offshore interviewers, and I think we're going to, as the AI's cognition gets better, like that gap is going to continue to increase for us offshore. So I maybe, pete, you can point me to them, but I actually haven't come across a lot of staffing firms that outsource this stuff to offshore.
Pete Newsome:Really.
Varun Khurana:Yeah, very rarely we work with BTOs, but that's for completely to interview their offshore people, as opposed to the process.
Pete Newsome:You know it's almost necessary to compete effectively in the VMS space. If you live there, that's really hard to do exclusively through American recruiters, just because of the cost, as you mentioned. So call it offshore, call it nearshore. I see most of that first level screening happening there, versus with US-based recruiters. So I'm surprised that you're not encountering I figured that's who would flock to your product first. It was organizations like that, or maybe I think it's still new. I don't know how many clients you have so far, but I see this evolution happening fast and I'll tell you I was at the TechServe Alliance conference. It just took place two weeks ago. Were you there out in Arizona?
Varun Khurana:I missed that one, unfortunately.
Pete Newsome:So, techserve, I usually go. I wasn't able to make it this year, but the feedback I got was that AI integration is a hot topic and everyone's trying to figure it out. So, look, I think you're in a great space. You're probably a very busy guy these days. As a result of that, I think you're solving, as I said earlier, a big problem for nearly every staff and company. There's any kind of volume, right? Yeah, any kind other than, like you said, executive search. I see that as an exception, but for everyone else, man, this is you're at the right place at the right time. So last question AI, future of AI. We hear about singularity. There's a lot of scary things out there. We've got drones flying over New Jersey, not too far from you, right? It's crazy time. What do you think? Are you excited? Are you nervous? Are you both? What do you see happening?
Varun Khurana:Yeah, I can maybe give you two answers. One is like in recruitment space, and then the second is more so in the kind of general AI spokes, I think, within recruitment. Like recruiters, I think enter best at selling candidates and there's a part of the economy where that's never going to go away with that human touch and whether that's corporates, staffing firms, no matter what role is, every staffing firm knows it's always best to keep a great relationship with your potential candidates.
Varun Khurana:And I think that's going to continue to be true, no matter how good AI gets, and there's certainly, I think, other parts of the stack that are going to get automated, especially as candidates learn to leverage AI in a way that's more effective for generating resumes or auto-populating texts or cheating on assessments and all these different things, and I see this being a constant back and forth on AI versus AI.
Varun Khurana:When it comes to AI broadly, I think there's things I'm super excited about and there's things that I'm terrified about. Right, like, we work at the cutting edge of models and it seems like they're starting to asymptote a little bit without better data, but you can imagine, with a lot of effort and a lot of money, that's going to get better and unblocked. And I do worry, like most people in tech do, about what purpose humans are going to play if these models get really smart. And I think that is scary, because I believe humans need work and we like to do it. Despite how much we complain about our Zoom meetings and the mundanity of a lot of it, I think doing Excel for six hours a day it keeps us sane. And I do worry about if we automate some of these jobs, like the AI line's always been like, we'll find new careers and new roles will pop up and I'm sure they will, and I think that's maybe an unfounded concern, but it's something that I worry about.
Varun Khurana:I also not to throw a new wrinkle at you, pete, but I'm starting to see the pace of AI as it applies to robotics really speed up, and so there was always this concern about these real world jobs will always be there, and now I'm seeing these robots that can, like using LMs for spatial awareness, do a lot of retail jobs, do a lot of like fast food jobs and all this stuff and that to me is actually the craziest stuff I'm seeing. It's like these humanoid robots that leverage AI in a way that I never saw coming in my lifetime, so that's always freaks me out.
Pete Newsome:It's happening with such rapidity, right? I think that's the thing that I worry about in the workforce people being prepared for is it just? It happens almost overnight and from the minute chat GPT was released, entire professions have almost been rendered moot and irrelevant. I just I worry about it a lot. I worry. I look at you know young people in school right now and getting degrees and things that are going to be completely unnecessary. We're spending so much time and money. And then, like you said, the robots. I mean every week it seems like Elon's putting a new video out of his robot that he thinks is going to be a $20,000 product within the next couple of years that we're all going to have at home. It's bigger, faster, stronger, smarter than everyone else, and you add dexterity on top of it and you go. That's a problem.
Varun Khurana:Huge problem Terminator. Very real documentary. It seems like I would say, when you speak of degrees, my one piece of advice to any listener who happens to be listening to a staffing podcast under the age of 22, pete, I'm sure you've got a great audience. I'm not sure many of them are still in school, but do not get a.
Varun Khurana:CS degree, because that seems to be like the way that we're able to generate code seems to be especially suited to LMs and what they're able to do and not scale really well, and it's freaking me out how easy it's becoming to build software a lot of the times you mean my 22 year old who's in grad school for for cybersecurity Probably. Cybersecurity is going to be huge because we're not going to be able to tell what's real or not?
Pete Newsome:I think it will. I think it will be. I get what you're saying about, about programming and coding. Is that? And I've even seen I've even generated code, and I don't I'm not technical at all through through AI that I handed to my developer. He's like yeah, it's just a matter of doing what I need to do to implement it from there, which is crazy, right. Never would we have thought that, even just a couple of years ago.
Pete Newsome:But when it comes to recruiting, we're not going to solve the world's problems At least I'm not. So I'm going to worry about recruiting and you're young enough, maybe you can. But I think it makes us even more valuable as human recruiters, because I think our job, ultimately, is to not assess for things like hard skills right, that's relatively easy and whether it's really a good fit right on things that just I don't worry about AI taking from us, because you have to still be able to separate what's said from what's implied and all those things. Can AI get there one day? Probably, I think I'll be on the beach by the time that happens Hopefully not under it. But yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of changes that are going to be challenging, but I think recruiters are safe for a while. I really do.
Varun Khurana:I think so too. I'm very bullish on the future recruiters. I think they're just going to be doing to your point like different work and like more managing the soft skills and especially I think Four Corner does a decent amount of IT staffing and I think there's the misalignment between when the recruiter is doing a skills assessment with the candidate shouldn't exist, but someone still needs to assess can that candidate communicate well and do some of these softer things?
Varun Khurana:And AI is never going to be able to judge that in the way that humans can, and that's both endearing and good for you guys. I think too, over the next couple of years, as, like AI, to your point, eliminates a lot of jobs that maybe don't have those benefits.
Pete Newsome:Yeah, it's going to make us better and you're a big part of that. I love what you're doing. I can't wait to see how you progress from here, and I'd love to have you back on in a year let's see where what's evolved since then, if you're willing to come back and talk to me you may be already from what I know.
Pete Newsome:Maybe you're the AI and I just don't know it yet. But, bruin, thanks so much, man. This has been a lot of fun and everyone thanks for listening, and I'll put all your contact info so everyone can find Wayfaster in our show notes and check it out. It looks like a great product, so thanks so much for your time today, yeah product, so thanks.
Varun Khurana:Thanks so much for your time today. Yeah, thanks for having me on, pete, appreciate you having me on. And yeah, it's just wayfastercom if you guys want to check this out Awesome.
Pete Newsome:All right, everyone. Thanks for listening.