Transcript

Max Armbruster
I think finally, now that we have, everybody has a tool which is free. You know, ChatGPT is free, Gemini’s free, that can generate perfect resumes every time. Now, that might be the death of it. Finally.

Sylvie Milverton
Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is Talent is Everywhere. We are here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people. So, my guest today is Max Armbruster, who is the CEO and founder of Talkpush, and is also French American just like me. So, we have this very nice thing in common. Max has been building a software for 15 years and building his company Talkpush for ten years. And I think what’s interesting is that he was a recruiter before starting software so he comes to this problem of recruitment and HR from a practitioner’s point of view, perhaps rather than from a technologist point of view, though he has a very cool technology, which we’ll see. Talkpush is a platform for recruitment automation and so today we’re gonna talk about how to spot and retain, hidden talent so why don’t we start with that question. Why do you think, Max, that traditional hiring criteria often fail to identify the right talent?

Max Armbruster
Thank you, Sylvie, enchanté. Merci de m’accueillir dans ton podcast. And, I was just thinking like French American. It’s a wonderful thing to be. But it’s also, it’s also a little bit bittersweet in the sense that. Truly, nobody really likes Americans and nobody really likes French people, so we’re, we’re at this weird.

Sylvie Milverton
Right, right. It depends, it depends where you go where, where you find friends and where you find enemies.

Max Armbruster
Yeah, so I used to think that I could switch from one to the other, to, to adapt to the crowd. But it turns out that there’s actually a lot of people who don’t like both. So.

Sylvie Milverton
And so really, actually, I’m also, I was born in Canada, so in fact, sometimes when I get in that awkward situation, I pull out the third nationality and it’s safe.

Max Armbruster
That’s nice. Yeah. Everybody likes Canadian, so you’re safe there. Yeah. So, your question was Yeah. The, the broken bit about, about recruitment. Well, you know, what we’re trying to solve is, is when you’re young and you’re applying for a lot of jobs. I, I don’t know if you’ve ever been unemployed. Me, I was unemployed like for a short amount of time, 20 plus years ago. And, I, I would, I would send like, you know, dozens of resumes every day, and sometimes I would look at a job description, I’d get really excited, and I thought to myself, as, you know, as a 22-year-old, I thought, well, I know I can nail this. I know I can do this, but I don’t have it on my resume. But if they only gave me a chance. You know, I know I could get this job and I know I could do a good job and, and, you know, nine times outta 10, I never even got a call back, an email or anything other than thank you for being in our database. So, yeah, I think, I think I, I’ve been trying to solve that problem in a way ever since, which is, you know, you should let talent talk to you and, and give, give them a chance, to shine during the application process, even if they don’t look good on paper. But practically, it’s hard to do.

Sylvie Milverton
Right? And a lot of people, you know, whether it’s like, don’t look good on paper or don’t exactly match ’cause they don’t exactly know what the job is. And so in fact, sort of organize your paper so that the person looking for you. You know, who knows what to pull up on your resume, you know, is a challenge. You can’t, it’s like we can’t read everybody’s mind.

Max Armbruster
Yeah. Yeah. And then that’s where the, the old cover letter used to come in. Right. Now if, if you ask for somebody to write a cover letter in 2025, I mean, the odds that this cover letter will be written by the human and not by ChatGPT are very low. It’s, it’s so easy to generate these documents at scale and I guess, you know, I’m a little bit in my, I, in my AI bubble. Maybe it hasn’t hit everybody yet, but I’m sure within a couple of years, cover letters will be completely a thing of the past because, and everyone will be able to write something absolutely perfect for every, every job. So, so that creates another problem. So now, so now how do you really know, you know, how do you really know what someone’s motivation is?

Sylvie Milverton
Yes. And I think the other thing that’s so interesting about AI, and I see this, you know, I’m not right now looking for a job. Obviously, but you see on LinkedIn so many people looking for jobs and it’s like with AI, on the one hand, it’s like reduced a lot of the friction, but we almost need it to like increase some of the good friction, like the idea that you post a job and you get 500 applicants, like all automated. To your point ChatGPT wrote the cover letter, the resume, you know, it’s all just looking for keyword. It’s you know, overwhelming to the person hiring and also back to the person applying. How do you stand out and how do you show like who you really are? Like it’s too easy to apply for jobs.

Max Armbruster
In, in a world where resumes and cover letters can be done, very cheaply and very perfectly by everyone, they’re obviously not a good screening method anymore. People have been saying, you know, the resumes are on the way out for a long time. And, you know. I think finally now that we have, everybody has a tool which is free. You know, ChatGPT is free, Gemini’s free, that can generate perfect resumes every time. Now, that might be the death of it finally, which is, there’s no more barriers to, you know, I used to make the, the joke or I don’t know if it’s a joke. I used to make the comment that. Well, unless you’re hiring somebody to write resumes, unless the job is actually to write resumes, why are you asking that for that document is the, unless you’re specifically hiring somebody to write resumes. But, but you know, actually now everyone can write resumes perfectly well, so even if you are writing, so that job wouldn’t exist. And, and, I, I, I work in this space, so. I know everybody’s trying to solve the problem. Some people are doing it by kind of going back in time and saying, we have to meet everybody face to face, you know, in sort of a, in a room with no access to any phones where we can look at them in the eyes and and interview them. And of course the technologists are trying to go in a different direction and, you know, we’re trying to find out a, a way we can, we can ramp up on the technology side so that we can use technology to screen candidates, and where we’re getting genuine answers. And, but it’s, it’s, it’s complicated,

Sylvie Milverton
Right? Yeah. So any pilots, I mean, yeah, we can see the specific example, but maybe like more broadly, like how, what do you. What is, in your opinion, you are building, this company, you know, the role of technology to enable an efficient hiring approach. Like if in, you know, for those of us, like a little bit, you know, related but outside, you know, beyond like words search in resumes, beyond looking at like what school, beyond, you know, those things and as you say, you know, young people who haven’t had all that experience. So how, what is your view of like the right. Or your conviction about the role of technology and enabling this approach.

Max Armbruster
So somebody who would be coming in from outside of this industry might say, I wanna hire the best person every time. And that statement is wrong, unless it’s, it is, you know, very well qualified. Because if it’s the best person as in went to the best university, went to the best school, worked for my competitor, that you know, that that may work at some level. But, but generally speaking, that’s not the best hire. The best hire is not the best person on paper. The best hire is the person who’s gonna perform well at that job for a long period of time. And so retention is really a key element. What is gonna be correlated with retention for your company? It might be, oh, actually we have, we have a pretty flexible work schedule and good benefits. So we’re gonna attract single moms and they’re gonna, single moms tend to stay with us longer and they’re happier. For example, you know, it might be a demographic like that, or it might be, you know, we. You know, it might be a, a, a psychograph, a, a psychographic, dimension where a certain, a certain mindset, a certain way of thinking matches well with the culture in that company. And, you know, it might be a, it might be a bro culture, it might be a girl culture, it might be, it might be a Chinese culture. And, and so. You know, we’ve been taught in talent acquisition that we should equalize, normalize, and eliminate, eliminate all bias. But sometimes I think that’s a little bit missing the point that, you know, companies are trying to build a culture where people are gonna feel at home and, and they’re gonna stay a long time. So I’m, I’m not advocating for screening through, you know, demographics, but I’m saying that. You know, a lot of the thinking for talent acquisition needs to shift from who’s a perfect fit on the job description to who’s gonna stay in this job a long time and, and perform well. And that’s, that’s the harder problem to solve. And you know, that that can only be done by, by digging into the, the candidate’s motivation and maybe a little bit their personal history.

Sylvie Milverton
Yeah. And also it’s almost like that the company, you know, you figure out what are your values and what are the kinds of people who are gonna fit well here and so that the best person, you know, entre guillemets, maybe isn’t the one that went to the fanciest school, but is the one who matches with like the way we do things here, and the one who matches well with the tasks that are required to complete, to complete this work, which mostly is a process that one doesn’t imagine can be well enabled by technology. But now, you know, with AI, you know, there’s lots of things. So I don’t know if we should try our little demo here where, Sam can check out if I’m gonna be good for a job. What do you think?

Max Armbruster
Yeah. Thank you for, thank you for being open to the suggestion, Sylvie, I, I would love for you to, to, to have a chat with Sam. Sam as I, I was telling you before the call is this, this AI who, which can interview candidates and, all that we feed Sam is the job description and in, in your case, I, I didn’t put the resume, I just put your phone number and your email and for the job description, we, I went, we went with the Formula One driver. I and which Sylvie, I I’ve met you in person. You’re, you’re the right size for a Formula One driver.

Sylvie Milverton
Small.

Max Armbruster
But I, I don’t know. Is that, is that a job where you think you could perform basically well?

Sylvie Milverton
That’s fine.

Max Armbruster
I don’t know if it.

Sylvie Milverton
I learned to drive in the, in the, late eighties, early nineties on a stick shift car. So maybe that has some skills. Let’s see.

Max Armbruster
Right. So you got the right height, you know, stick shift I think, I think you’re a shoe in, yeah, my, I, I would love for you to, if you don’t mind, be interviewed in French ’cause we. I’ve done this demo many times in English, but we’ve released this product now in multiple languages. And, you know, I, I, you know, since, since as a fellow Franco American, I’d love for you to, to try it out in French, if that’s okay?

Sylvie Milverton
Yeah, let’s try. Let’s see how my car vocabulary is in French. It’ll be, it’ll be a good test.

Max Armbruster
Okay. So when you’re ready, I’ll trigger the call and then I’ll mute myself, while, while you talk on speaker phone. And hopefully, your mic will, will, will pick it up.

Sylvie Milverton
Great. All right. I’m ready.

Max Armbruster
Great. Yeah, it should take about five minutes and here we go

(Interview with Sam the AI recruiter)

Sylvie Milverton
Okay, that was good. I don’t know if I’m gonna be excellent for being a Formula One driver, but that is pretty good of the way it, you know, ask good questions and you can definitely get a sense of the person and their background.

Max Armbruster
Wow. Thanks. Thanks for playing along. Yeah, thank you for, for the feedback as well. And, it’s probably not gonna be used for Formula One drivers, but the, it’s just, at least we, we got the concept and, and,I think you, you, you know, you get a couple of minutes on the phone with somebody and naturally you have an instinctive understanding of who they are. And when I say instinctive, maybe another word is biased. So, you know, treasure’s grounds, nonetheless, if, if you give somebody a chance between, do you wanna listen to somebody for a couple of minutes or do you wanna look at their resume? To make a decision on who they wanna work with. I think for a younger person or for, you know, an entry level job, a lot of people will choose. I, I’d rather listen to them for a couple minutes. It’ll gimme a better, better sense for it.

Sylvie Milverton
And actually to get some real life stories about that. This reminds me, so I work with a, a, a assistant and she’s in the Philippines and I found her through, you know, one of these platforms that have, you know, hundreds, thousands of people on it. And we have an amazing working relationship, but the way I did it is very much like this, though, not really tech enabled. I had a really detailed job description of what I needed and then I had the people who I chose who looked like they could match, book a really quick call with me, 15 minutes, and that’s all it took to get the sense of like. Are they organized with their camera? Is their computer good? Do they, you know, come on time? Do we have a nice vibe? Has the level of English like, is this gonna work? And really quickly, so maybe it’s biased, but the bias was like. Do I want to work with you every day, which I think hiring is biased in some way ’cause you know, you’re inviting them into your life.

Max Armbruster
Yeah. Someone’s likability and compatibility is not something that you can outsource very well. it’s every, every individual manager, you know, has, has a certain inclination. So, I think the role of AI there is. Give me an unbiased, clean, fair assessment on these 2000 candidates, and tell me who has the right motivation and who’s got the right, the right profile. And, and I’ll take it from there. And, and at least I know that I’m starting off with a truly fair talent pool where I didn’t, I didn’t select based on. You know, a resume scoring, which may not be so relevant for the job that I’m hiring for. And, and I didn’t apply my, my human bias or, or my HR team’s bias to the screening by, by taking away people if they come from the wrong country or they’re, they’re in the wrong demographic profile. ’cause you know, there’s, there’s a lot of focus in EU about we’re both only on, on nous sommes tous les deux dans l’UE, et il y a beaucoup de législation à ce sujet. A lot of focus on the EU AI Act, which is saying that it has to be transparent, it has to be fair, et cetera, et cetera, and, and well documented but yeah, it, it’s, it’s for me, it’s, it’s very strange because the AI does what it’s told. If you tell the AI I’m looking for somebody who has experience in sales, it’s gonna ask that, you know, it’s not gonna ask that. And, and, you know by the way is gonna, is gonna score you higher if you’re a guy or if you’re, you know, 30 years old or something like that. Like, it doesn’t make sense because the AI just follows the instructions. In the case of what I’m doing, there have been ais in the past where they do a correlation analysis and they, they try to come up with a regression analysis. They try to come up with correlating factors. And so, you know, there’s been some bad press in the past about an AI favoring certain segments of the population based on their profile. But this is not how AI is built today. You know, today is built very purposely. Like, do this, get me this information, rank people that way. And it, it’s not gonna be looking for correlation where it doesn’t need to look for correlation. So it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna purposely eliminate candidates because they’re in the wrong demographic. You know what I mean?

Sylvie Milverton
Right. And also I feel like it’s like a much more open, I mean, listen, we’re all biased in a way, and biased in a good way. Back to the culture like. Who did I hire as my assistant? Well, again, it had to match with like the way we work our culture, the things that are important to me, the measures of success. And like there’s a big world out there of lots of people and you know, not everyone is gonna match with that. And I can completely see how. You know, Sam, the AI recruiter could, you know, I didn’t have to make so many calls so I could just do it myself, but I could imagine that if I was hiring for a whole call center, hundred of people that I could, you know, train it to say, I’m looking for people with this sort of empathy who are organized in this sort of way, who organize their time in this, who have this sort of vibe when they come to work. You know, what are the, what are the values that we’re trying to, you know, show and what is the way that we work and. To somehow at scale have to do that. And again, I think in a five or 10 minute call you can find that plus some other things, you know, written. And whether it’s a resume or maybe more like a test task, like how can you check, does the person have the ability to do this or can they learn quickly? It seems fair.

Max Armbruster
Yeah. Yeah, and building this, this, this tool that you experienced just now it, it just took a couple of days from one of our product managers. It wasn’t even built by an engineer. So it’s very easy to build these things now with prompts and, and to tweak ’em in a certain way. So. You could, you could tweak it to be much more inquisitive, you know don’t cons. For example, I could tell the AI, don’t consider that the answer has been provided to you unless there’s a real world example to to, to support the facts. To support the statement. So, you know, the AI would know, okay, I’m not gonna move pass this question until I’ve tried two or three times to get the facts. Or, or on the other hand, you know, be, be effusive in your compliments to the candidate. Tell them how wonderful they are, if you wanna do something which is a little bit more salesy and like, you gotta come and work here and we love you kind of vibe, you, you can do it that way. So there’s all, all kinds of tweaking you can do. Well, but what’s nice about it is that you know. . You can be you as an employer at scale and you can, you can, you can interview, you know, kind of going, tying it back to my problem when I was 22 years old, I could, I could get 10 interviews a day in a world where this, this AI became democratized and I’m sure I would’ve gotten a job a little bit sooner. If that happened.

Sylvie Milverton
Right. And it’s so interesting ’cause it’s like before AI, you know, the only tool we had was to figure like, how do you do this initial screening? It’s like, well look where you went to school or what you did. And you know, before I, now I have an MBA and I work in a business startup and I was a CFO, but before that I started studying French literature actually. And I have a master’s in French literature and my undergrad was in religious studies and humanities. And it was actually really hard. To get like, quote unquote a business job. But I mean, like my brain and my intelligence was no different, but the signal of my CV was like, oh, you’re somebody who wants to be a college professor. But I did not wanna be a college professor. And I think actually I would’ve been not a, a very bad college professor because I don’t love teaching and I don’t love managing students, and I don’t love a university. No, none of that. And so it’s interesting, like now we have so many more tools to be able to say like, what are your skills? What are your dreams? What are your interests? Instead of just saying like, did you go to this school and did you study this one thing? Which up until pretty recently was the only way that you could, you know, figure these things out.

Max Armbruster
I, I agree. I and, you know, I, I was just thinking about your, your background and then you went to do the MBA. I also have an MBA by the way, but, but ironically I have this rule in Talkpush where if anybody’s got a, if we get any candidates with an MBA, we don’t even consider them.

Sylvie Milverton
And so what are some other, just, do you have any like specific examples like where you’ve seen. Like some unconventional hires or like even at scale?

Max Armbruster
Well, the, you know, the, the two best hires I did in talk push on the, on the business side, on the engineer side for engineers, I still, still did pretty traditional hiring where, you know, we would, we would do a technical assessment and so on. But the two best hires I did on the business side, both were come coming from completely different industries. And they were, you know. One, one of them was, was running a gym. Another one was doing online education in, in Venezuela. And, you know, no software experience, no technology experience, nothing. I mean, on, on paper. They wouldn’t even have gotten an interview, but because when they applied, we, we collected their, their audio, we asked them open-ended question and, and so on. You know, we, we ended up hiring them because I, I, I. You know, they, they, they clearly stood out from the rest. And, and what’s great about hiring somebody from outside your industry who doesn’t have the credentials is not only you expose, you know, you have a much broader talent pool to choose from, but they’re more likely to stay just because they’re learning so much. You know, if, if they’re coming in and they’ve never worked in technology, if they’ve never worked in your environment, you know they’re gonna think. If, if they really are interested to move in that direction, then they’re gonna be so grateful for the opportunity that you’ve given them. And, you know, I, and, so yeah.

Sylvie Milverton
And I’ve had, I’ve had a similar, yeah, I’ve had a similar, a similar experience sometimes like, you know, where, where you least expect it. Yeah. And I go back to the same thing, like none all of these AI tools and all the way, it’s like, first you have to know. What are you looking for? And then when you realize what you’re looking for, and often what you’re looking for isn’t a school or a credential, it’s like, what is the output? I have a company, I, I need to hire someone because I have a problem I need to solve, and I need these tasks to get done, or someone to think through this or trying to achieve this outcome. So it’s like, that’s what I’m looking for, you know? And then what are the ways to find it? yeah, no, this may make total sense.

Max Armbruster
You know, I alternate on this problem of like, should you hire for culture or should you hire for skills? And it does feel more fair to hire for skills, but at the same time, in 2025, skills are becoming cheaper. You know, it’s easier to become an expert in 2025 because we all have access to these great mlm’s. And so I could pretend I’m an SEO expert, even though I know nothing about it. I could pretend I’m an anything expert at this point. If, and if I’m curious enough and hardworking enough, I could become that expert with enough help around me. So, so, I think in 2025, you have more than ever you have to hire for sort of the, the culture match and is this somebody who’s gonna love working here for a long time?and the skills are secondary. Like, we’ll, we’ll get to the skills eventually because you know, everybody can, can pick them up along the way. And, that, you know, a statement like that I didn’t think I would’ve made a few years ago because. Obviously skills seem like the more rational, rational Cartesian way of hiring. But, but, but these days, I, you know, kind the world is kind of being flipped. I think. I, yeah. I just saw the, the CEO of Replit this week who was announcing that he’s not gonna advise anybody to study engineering and coding anymore because, you know, everything can be coded by AI at this point. So, and, and he’s, he’s a guy who’s spent his whole life. You know, teaching people how to code. So it’s, it’s a very new and, yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it is a new one. New one.

Sylvie Milverton
I had a, a similar feeling the other day. I was, I’m building still, I’m building a very complicated Excel model, which I’ve spent like a lifetime developing this skill, and as I was doing it, I just had this feeling like I am still the Excel queen, and yet this is a skill, but in the next five years is probably gonna evaporate from a utility. But anyway, well, the same way that I know how to drive a stick shift car and I learned to type on a manual typewriter and I can rewind a VCR tape, I guess so will be the way, the way of the Excel clean. But it’s good. This is an amazing chat. Maybe you can just tell us if people wanna find you or find out more about Talkpush. Where, where can they look?

Max Armbruster
Wow. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Talkpush.com. And if you want to create your own Sam to do your own interviews. In English or in any other language, you can go to talk to Sam.AI and it, you can spin your, your own instance and you can start interviewing candidates free of charge. You get, you get your first a hundred minutes for free, so you can, you can play with a concept. It takes five minutes to activate and, you know, just, just a place to have fun and, and, and see what the AI can do.

Sylvie Milverton
Amazing. We’re gonna, we’re gonna check it out. Well, thanks Max. This was a, a great pleasure.

Sylvie Milverton
Thanks for listening to this episode of Talent Is Everywhere. Make sure to subscribe if you like what you heard, and give us a follow-on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on all things career mobility and talent development. Is there a topic you’d love for us to cover in a future episode or a guest you’d recommend?

Drop us an email at hello@lynxseducate.com. And if you’re looking for support on your talent development strategy, head over to lynxeducate.com to learn more about our career mobility solution. That’s LYNX educate.com.