Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of the culture profit. Today we’re diving into something called the rush cycle. How AI is changing recruitment and strategies companies can use to build high-performing teams without risking a bad hire. Joining us today is Josh Hill (Guest) all the way from the land down under in the south part of Australia. So, thanks for joining us,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Thanks for having me.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Josh.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah, the extra down under part. Down under down under. Yeah.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): But I’m looking forward to this chat.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It’s always good talking to somebody from Australia because even if the content isn’t good, which it will be, you can just enjoy listening to your accent. You’re checking all the boxes right here. I love it.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): I actually have nothing of value to say. I’ve just come here to speak lots of different words over 40

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, just compile them together. Um, but a little bit about Josh.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): minutes.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So Joshua Hill is co-founder and superhired and VP of culture at people in culture at tier 11. So you can look at his shirt if you see the video. A former army infantry captain, he applies lessons from leading soldiers under pressure to fix what’s broken about modern hiring. He’s obsessed with building talent density teams where exceptional people make everyone around them better. That’s cool. And because the opposite is so true as well, right? You have just like one. We’ve talked about bad actors in our episodes before and you have just one of them and it creates kind of a domino effect.

 
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And so I think the reverse is true and I love that term talent density. That’s very cool. That’s like good actors, right? Yeah. A bunch of good actors make more good actors because they all learn from each other. I love that. So tell us about um a little bit about your background in Australia, what you’ve been up to and what led you to now starting

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah. So,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): superhired.ai

 

Josh Hill (Guest): uh, as you introduced, um, I’ve been in the military, well, I was in the military for quite a quite some time, for 10 years or so. And during that time, I came across, uh, quite a lot of different experiences. But it really made me realize and made me think just how much I want to stay in the people space um long term particularly around performance and management and leadership and uh how to build great teams because I I truly believe that the best work is done when people come together and I think that’s definitely going to be the case uh into the future as work becomes more inherently like complex particularly how it’s used to be uh in the past compared to how it used to be quite transactional.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): I think after having spent some time in the military, I got to a point where I wanted to flex more of that and provide more of that service to a company and to a different environment, particularly uh at tier 11, it’s fully remote and it’s a digital marketing agency, so it’s quite high tempo when it comes to the adoption of technology and fast-paced culture. There’s actually quite a lot of similarities between that company and that agency that I work at now and threads of what makes teams successful and effective in the military. It’s uh I don’t really think that it truly matters uh where the team is whether it’s on the sporting pitch or you know on the battlefield so to speak or it’s quite corporate. There’s definitely common threads of what creates and nurtures talent density. And after taking a lot of those lessons I learned from the military and applying them at tier 11 and I’ve been in the HR role for like 3 or 4 years. I’m now starting to think, well, how do we really take some of these principles and start applying them to hiring as being one of the biggest levers of talent density in my opinion because it really is the first point in which someone enters an organization and a company does have and should take the lead and does have the most control over that engagement and how it starts and how it’s nurtured and how and who we allow people into the organization.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): for the people that we’re talking to and then doing that same due diligence with the candidates. You know, this isn’t just a job. This is potentially lifealtering um very specific context that we’re looking at placing you in and how is that going to align with what you truly want from work and um how is that likely to evolve over time as well based on your life situation. And just that level of due diligence is just not not visited really at all throughout hiring. In fact, the opposite is being emphasized. So that’s kind of what I’m playing with at the moment in that space, which has been super

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, definitely. I think matchmaking is a great term for that as well.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): exciting.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And uh yeah, I just think about you starting a business and you’ve found uh you know, we are also self-employed, started our business um and you have to find that hole in the market, the piece that’s broken the and then have the solution that fixes it. And I completely agree that that is something that needs to be fixed.
 

 
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So yeah, I really like the terminology of the work product that you mentioned.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It’s like um selling the experience of doing a job to a candidate and the company culture, the employee experience is kind of like the packaging um that’s layered around that work product because you have this experience at a company doing a certain thing, a certain job function. So, I really like that. I I also am wondering if you could expand on um that like the density concept that you were talking about just for other people listening like what does that mean like what what’s a that was the first time I’ve heard that term so yeah so maybe go a little deeper on

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah, of course. So, talent density is a concept uh from Reed Hastings at Netflix. So, it’s been in circulation for a while, but it’s quite simple and it’s quite intuitive. It basically refers to when you look at the team or the company or the group of people that you have in front of you. And this is an important caveat in the context of what you’re aiming to achieve and what you need from people in terms of the value that they’re contributing and the vision that you have and the objectives that you’re trying to move towards.
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): What is the density of talent in regards to do you have a high proportion of people that are helping you move towards that goal consistently and reliably? And when we start to talk about talent density in that regard, which is about having not just colloquial like, oh, we’ve got a players, it’s no, we’ve got people that are highly motivated, highly engaged, that are putting in discretionary effort, that are able to deploy their skills in this particular context repeatedly and are able to exhibit behaviors that we have as a company and as as a leadership team have decided that are conducive to the service delivery with it with our clients or the the delivery of our products. And it’s about it’s rooted in measurement. Like you can’t measure talent density if you don’t know what talent density is. But it’s it’s about having a northstar when it comes to what is the purpose of hiring,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): what is the purpose of performance management, what is the purpose of culture development. You know, as vague as these terms are, it’s about first understanding what is our northstar as a team, as a company, what is the strategy to get there?
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): What do we need from our teams in terms of their ability to achieve these outcomes to push the business there? And then even at the granular level, knowing exactly the seats in the company that we have, like how do we measure success and define them? And when we’re able to do all of these things, we’re able to assess, well, do we have the right people in the right seats? And when we know we have the right people in the right seats, we increase the density of the right talent in the right seat. And that just creates this degree of momentum uh in a business and alignment that you don’t need to be obsessed with the tactics and the management and these very traditional perspectives of, oh, I need to make sure I’m controlling. And it becomes more about putting the right people in the right seat and then dictating outcomes um and being outcomes driven rather than super super fixated on on uh outputs uh and how the work is done rather than setting the why and the what and trusting the team.
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): So that the way I’ve communicated there is a bit more of a mature kind of approach I think to what was originally put together. But ultimately when we hire we’re hiring for talent density. So in order to move the needle on that front you need to understand when you’re hiring the entire like you’ve said work product that you’re actually hiring to and what talentity looks like in that particular work product. So discovery is a word that I use a lot and it’s central to creating any product. You need to do discovery. You need to talk to clients. You need to talk to customers. You need to talk to the people building, using, interacting with products in order to understand well what are the opportunities for further development? What are the biggest pain points? What solutions should we build? You know, a lot of HR practitioners traditionally will have a meeting or or a quarterly planning session and say, “Okay, I’ve got a good idea. Let’s create this solution based on no discovery,
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): but we think it’s the right thing to do because that’s what a HR team should do.” Such as, “Oh, we need a new performance management process.” It’s like, no one asked for that. like what do what do the team actually need to allow themselves to step into their roles and provide more value? That’s talent density. How do we enable that? Let’s talk to our c let’s talk to our customers, our employees and understand what’s getting in the way of them achieving what they need to achieve in their job

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): dayto-day. If we can remove those barriers, then we increase the talent density of the company. Um so talent density isn’t so much as the human as far as how they are enabled in the company to do their job as well. So it’s I’ve kind of taken this concept and I’ve kind of made it a whole lot more complex but it’s good for us because this is really what drives our hiring methodology. You know, a lot of hiring a a lot of hiring agencies and hiring professionals,
 
  
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): they get told, “Hey, we need this role. We need it tomorrow or yesterday.” And here’s a job description. Just get us something like that. And a lot of hiring professionals are like, “Oh, okay. Well, um, I’ve got some people that I found two years ago, or I’ve got some people I can easily scrape from here or there, or let’s just throw them over the fence and let’s get them in quickly.” like that process is completely agnostic of discovery and understanding truly what is the work product that we have and what do we need to succeed and then infusing that in the hiring process so that we’re truly getting the right people in.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. So,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So yeah,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): so what you’re talking about when you and I we talked before this call and you mentioned the rush

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): cycle which is the opposite or it is what you’re saying where they just throw them over the fence but it’s the opposite of what your processes are when you said you’re over complicating it.
 
  
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I really think you’re just slowing it down,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): making sure that the processes are in place so that that rush cycle isn’t is is not causing the turnover and the the non-culture fit, the bad actors,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Exactly.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): all all those consequences.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah, that’s exactly right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Tell us more about it from your perspective,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): not from mine.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah. So, the slowing down component is the most important part because slowing down, I mean, you’ve heard the term, you know, how slow. Uh, and a lot of people profess that but don’t live it. But it’s not just high speed for being slow. like we want to hire quickly but we want to hire slow in the sense that we’re doing this due diligence.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Right.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So if you can do the due diligence and hire fast that is the ultimate goal because speed and momentum in anything if you’re efficient and you’re achieving the outcomes is effective in business.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Like you want to be quick because that gives you a competitive advantage.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): However,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): being quick at the expense of all of this discovery with hiring creates these ramifications throughout the business that cost a lot financially. Um, there’s so much research out there and you could even ask any business owner that they know they can feel the tangible financial pain when you’re in this hiring cycle of getting the wrong fit into the company. Not only that, it’s the intangible things that are harder to measure. The ripples that are created when you bring in the wrong person. The erosion of confidence in the teams and the leadership’s ability to hire the right people. It’s like digging your heels in for a company, right? It just slows everything down.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So there’s so many far-reaching impacts of bringing the wrong person into a team and then recycling that same uh error. So by slowing down, what it does is it enables you to first start and what and this is how I kind of share this with leaders and companies and business owners and hiring professionals.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): It’s the first instance of understanding your work product. So, slow down, do some internal interviewing, talk to previous people you’ve hired or recent people you’ve hired. Get an understanding of the process, uh, what’s working, what’s not working, but also understand why you’re hiring the role that you’re hiring, and what outcomes that that role is is expected to achieve amongst all the other expectations from all the other stakeholders that will be interacting with this role, whether it’s the hiring manager, the team leader, colleagues, like there’s no secret source to doing this. It’s just you need to slow down and do the discovery. Qualitative, quantitative, whatever you need to do to gather the data, you gather the data. And then the beautiful thing about this is that once you have all this data, you understand beyond any other company that’s I guess not doing this level of of discovery, you understand exactly what you need and it enables you to then sell and market the work product to a much more polarizing, transparent, clearer level than any other competitors.
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): So when we hire, we send out like this thing called a job map, which is like a fivepage complete deep dive into what the role is, your expectations, and success metrics. We send them a deck of like the company, the values, the team dynamics you’ll be going into, the amount of clarity and polarity you can create actually starts to source, help you source and filter from the get-go. Because we have people that look at this material and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, that is not aligned with the work product that I want to subscribe to as a professional.” Or they’re like, “Holy sh that is exactly what I want.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): I’m willing to go above and beyond in the recruiting process now to give you whatever more data you want. Five interviews,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): This task, that task, you know, like you put me through it because I believe in the vision of what you sold me as a product and I want to sign up to that.” That’s a very powerful thing to do.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, it’s like a seller and a buyer, right?
 

 
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And I like I liked how you brought up having like a slide deck because when we

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): sell Moim, our software product to a potential buyer, we have a deck that explains, you know, the pain, the solution, implementation, like all those things and it it’s packaged in a way that can be easily

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): understood. But then you look at a job description and you’re just like, what is this? Did I just step into a 1970s public library or something? Like like give me a little bit more to go on to where I can just internalize this and

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yes.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): see what I’m getting myself into. I think Yeah, I think we need to do better at selling and buying when it comes to

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Oh,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): hiring.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): here’s what’s here’s here’s this is this is where this process is fundamentally broken right now. It’s at this it’s at this point um more than others. It’s the connection between potential buyers and sellers in the job market.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): We’re relying still and to your point the 1970s library style job descriptions. Like I would say it’s even like 1700s vibes, right? Like you look at resumes and CVs.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You didn’t even have a typewriter yet. You’re being

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah. It’s like the the resume and the CV was created by

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): nice.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Leonardo da Vinci. Like that’s how old the concept is. Like you can Google that. I didn’t even know that. I was like,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): how old is this stuff? It’s like, yeah, Leonardo da Vinci was the first one to think, hey, maybe I should put my details on this paper and call it curriculum bite something or other. Anyway, it was picked up then by factory owners in the industrial revolution as a means to be able to quickly screen and assess someone’s ability to do a thing. But the problem is the ability to do a thing in the 1700s in a factory is fundamentally different to how workers are done today.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): In a factory,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thank you.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): I stand in a spot and I connect this widget to that widget and I’m good. I do that for seven hours and then I can go home for maybe 15 hours because I don’t know. I see it feels like working conditions back then were not as good as they are now but you know what I mean. So they would so people would be standing there doing the same thing repeatedly and if I was hiring a factory worker and I looked at the CV and I saw that they worked at three other factories assembling this widget, I could make a pretty fair guess that hey the context are fairly similar enough that I can make a safe less risky assumption that they could come here and assemble this widget. Now we use the same document and we make the same inferences

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): from previous companies, previous experiences, credentials, skills. You look at a CV and how vague it is and it lacks so much depth and context. Not only that, it’s created by the individual in a manner that’s highly biased towards how they want to be perceived.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): And then you add AI on top of that to the point that they can now autogenerate hundreds of these a

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): day and you get to a point where the signal loss has completely deteriorated and you still have hiring managers that are relying on this as a means of sourcing. And because of the nature of this situation,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Heat.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): companies are now being forced to use applicant tracking systems that have keyword automations and all sorts of AI to compete against that. And now you have this AI in a lose-lose situation in which both humans on both sides of the fence may as well just go to a coffee shop and check out while these AIs are just battling each other and it doesn’t serve any purpose. So what is missing is in this relationship between both buyer and seller and both and in this matchmaking process is getting back to the first principles when it comes to doing proper discovery. And the rebuttal I guess and the friction with this is well how do you do that at scale?
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): you know, how do you do this level of discovery and this level of due diligence? That’s so much work, Josh. Like, I’ve only got one person to recruit. I can’t play this game right now. And it’s tough. Like, we’ve institutionalized and developed technology and systems to perpetuate what’s broken right now. And when I am in a position where I have to give advice to candidates, it’s quite difficult because one part of me is like unfortunately the solution doesn’t exist currently and you need to play the game to a certain degree. And the other side of me is like it’s s***. You shouldn’t need to play this game. So what are the other ways that you can kind of stand out as a professional? And that’s through getting back to first principles again. Networking, being a thought leader, leveraging your expertise, focusing your expertise on something, um contributing value, building relationships, uh being vocal about contributing to communities. Like it’s just how would you do it back in a village back in the day?
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): You’d go out and you’d advertise yourself and your skills and your labor and what you can provide. uh and doing that through the means of a very one-dimensional document is not the way to do it right now. So uh and the same applies to a company. You know, if you’re relying on résumés and keyword scanners uh to do the heavy lifting of your sourcing, you’re competing in the same pool that every other company is competing in right now. And the data that’s leveraged to uh in that competition to make these very important decisions is getting more and more diluted and more and more noisy. And when you think about the data pool as well, it’s so thin. Like you, what data are you working with to make these sourcing decisions? You’re relying on a one-dimensional document plus maybe some information you can scrape from LinkedIn. Everyone’s playing the same sample. You need to get out of the sand pit as a company and be sure that data can be useful but start to look at other signals as to whether someone is the right fit or not for your context.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): But you need to understand your context first. So that’s where it

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think there’s a lot of irony in what what you’re saying when AI is used on both

 

Josh Hill (Guest): begins.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): ends. We’re suddenly trying to matchmake robots and when you’re looking at culture fit, it’s so important to have the human connection. And it’s it’s hard to like you said if if a robot is saying I’m amazing blah blah blah

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Right.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): blah blah about the person the bias right it’s it’s impossible for um a nonhuman to interpret that of how they actually are they would just interpret what the robot says right so and and it’s it’s completely

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Exactly.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): biased and uh so I’d love for us to just get into a little bit more on uh superhire.ai AI and how the use of artificial intelligence is affecting the hiring process and how it can be used in a better way. Yeah. What’s what’s the better way to do

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): this?

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So principally I believe and this is the common thread throughout superhigh and the way I approach hiring at the moment and it may change in the future depending on how crazy AI gets because the trajectory of AI is an unknown and I think when I speak to this I’m speaking in the now and probably the next 5 years.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): AI needs to be an augmentation not the primary driver of hiring. So there’s a spectrum that exists right now with how AI is being leveraged. And I wouldn’t even just apply this to hiring. I would apply this to generally like how a company approaches it all the way through to how a professional approaches it when they’re doing their own individual work as an individual contributor. You can either completely offload something to AI and let it take the complete lead and not even be in the loop. And there’s benefits and cons to that as there is the complete opposite where you’re really taking the front seat as a human and using agentic or automation software to I guess be the be the thing that you delegate to uh when and if you need it in order to make you move faster, do better quality work, etc. So I think hiring right now it sits uh somewhere uh in the middle if not lingering towards the left which is we put our hiring partners and I think hiring managers and recruiters need to be more intentional and focused towards creating relationships and digging deeper and leveraging their emotional intelligence and representing the fundamental human to human connection when it comes to hiring which I still think is very very very valid and important because we are inherently emotional things we’re not digital like at least yet fully deterministic agentic things I don’t think we we we will never be right unless Elon Musk’s neurolink cooks us but hopefully that doesn’t happen so hiring is very hiring
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): is a very emotional thing uh it always will be I I believe and it should And a lot of companies are leading in right now with being very AI heavy and AI led. And I think certain parts of the hiring journey can offload more towards that side of the spectrum. But at superhigh what we really try to do with the discovery as an example and I can kind of step through maybe the hiring journey quickly to explain how and where we’re leveraging this.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That would be great.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So throughout the discovery phase, this is ultimately a combination of both. So we use a very high human touch approach when it comes to interviewing and when it comes to connecting with people in the client’s business or in the business that we’re hiring because we need to understand the stories, the emotions of people and their experiences of what it’s like to work in that company, in that team. What are the dynamics? Talk to me about your leadership style. Let’s talk about culture. What do you aspire the culture to be?
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): What is it? What is it now? Okay, let’s do some discovery to confirm or deny your assessment of what the culture is like. All of these things, if I send out a qualitative survey, you’re not going to get the data that’s as rich as it needs to be for the hiring journey to be as robust as it needs to be to build talent density. If you treat discovery at surface level, you’re going to get surface level results throughout the whole journey. So we have an approach where it’s quite human-heavy with the um with the discovery piece but we use AI to help us

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): determine uh and interpret the results of the discovery. So once we have once we have a lot of the data,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Oh.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): we definitely use AI to help us sift through large quantities of information and to help connect dots and identify patterns. That’s what it’s good at right now. That’s, you know, we meet AI where it’s at and right now it’s good at interpreting and looking through large quantities of information and to make sense of it.

 
Josh Hill (Guest): Um, because ultimately throughout the rest of the hiring process, particularly with the initial discovery with the candidates, it’s still very humanled. And because it’s still human-led, the human needs to understand the results from the discovery and needs to understand what are we hiring and why and what is the work product of the company that we’re hiring for. So the human is the interface that’s interfacing with the candidate. So if the human is the interface,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): they need to be a good interface. Uh so a lot of the discovery that we do, we kind of repackage and use AI as I guess a bit of a training tool, a bit of an ecosystem for us to be able to teach ourselves more and quicker about the company that we’re working in and working for. So what that looks like is um I might create hiring packages and um interview guides and uh you know I might have some a database a knowledge base ready to to quickly plug some questions in there the candidates may have lived on a call to help me orient quickly to answering things.
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): It’s a companion throughout uh the initial discovery calls with the candidates. uh we use AI quite heavily to help us create simulation tasks and um I think we’ve been experimenting quite heavily with simulations recently but in the military the best training I ever did was the training that as safely and realistically as possible replicated the actual conditions of what it was like to be uh on a mission doing certain something um whatever it was. So that’s the principle that we are trying to embody right now with our simulations is with all of this discovery and all this data, how do we use that information to create realistic simulations that embody and kind of represent the reality of the company and the context. and we put candidates through these experiences so we can see how they act, how they behave, how they communicate and and this honestly the creativity and and the sky’s is the limit with that depending on what the company is able and willing to invest. Um ultimately I think the best simulation that you can run is getting someone in the business and paying them for a paid trial and performance and getting them communicating and interacting with clients and the team.
 
  
Josh Hill (Guest): Um but you can see that there’s no AI involved. you just you just get them in, you get them operating. Um, but if you want to recreate that,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): we use AI as much as possible because it can be helpful. Um, and actually I think that’s quite telling just that fact is that if you do want to replicate and get the best results, it’s actually completely agnostic of AI in that regard. Like if you want to simulate the real thing, just do the real thing if you can your hiring process. Um, but that’s a leap that requires additional investment and a reframe of hiring as being one of the most important activities a company can do because then you’re willing to invest in it. But a lot of companies aren’t there yet. So the investment appetite is not there. So now we’re using tools to try and replicate it as closely as possible. Um

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, it makes me think of staffing agencies and you know having someone temp jobs.
 
 
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. join a company on a temp contract basis as kind of a sample. Sampling is very effective marketing in a lot of applications. And you know,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You’re at a grocery store and they’re giving you a sample of ice cream. You taste it and you’re like, “Oh, that’s good.” And it’s sitting right there. You know, it’s the same with the talent market. That’s how I look at staffing agencies.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Okay.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Um, but it’s honestly very intriguing the approach that you’re taking and um I think it’s very valid. I know for other people listening today, uh we would definitely encourage everyone to to check out superhire.ai to see, you know, more about this approach that Josh is leading. As we kind of wrap up here with um the end of the episode, any kind of last final thoughts before um closing?

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Well, I think I think um look, I think ultimately one thing I didn’t do is this part of the discovery that is missing right now is identifying and tapping into what truly drives us at work.
 

 
Josh Hill (Guest): Like why do we want to work or why do we need to work? And it’s such a dynamic thing that shifts so quickly depending on our own personal situations. And the way I like to frame it is why do I hire my job and what do I hire my job to do for me? And it’s a bit of a reframe and it’s based on Klay Christensen’s job to be done theory that we all hire things to do jobs for us, right? Like I hire a hammer not to hit holes in a wall, but I hire a hammer so that it can hang pictures of my family. You know,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Right.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): It’s this same thing like I hire my work to give me a sense of connection and accomplishment and belonging. Or maybe I hire it simply because I want prestige and status and I want to be part of an industry and I want to have a very high tempo workforce. Or maybe I just really need to provide for my family and I hire my work to give me safety and security and compensation and benefits.
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): So we all want different things and it shifts and a company is also shifting in its work product and what it needs. So, it’s a very dynamic thing in this matchmaking process. And I think for people listening, if you it’s a very it’s a very powerful thing to know what you want from work. Just doing that discovery and understanding that for yourself. And I think a lot of the time we go through work, we go through life and we’re not quite sure why we’re in this job or what we’re getting out of it. So I think it’s important to make time to conduct that self-reflection and that introspection of what am I getting from work and what am I not getting and how do I move towards getting more of what I truly want from this relationship with my workplace. Um and when you can find a workplace where you’re getting more of that because I don’t truly think you can get all of it. That’s unrealistic. But when you can get the majority of what you’re truly looking for, you’ll suddenly find that work isn’t so scary on Sunday and you actually start to put in more discretionary effort.
 
 
Josh Hill (Guest): You start to feel more fulfilled. Your performance goes up. The value you create increases and good things come from that. Um, so with all that said, I’ve actually created an exercise where people can do this and it’s a it’s like this card sorting exercise where they can it facilitates the self-discovery um across these different dimensions and then it gives you the results that you can take and put into an AI LLM and it can kind of act as your coach and you can kind of start having these conversations with chat to your and we’ve been getting some very interesting results.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Is this something okay?

 

Josh Hill (Guest): So I can send you the link to that and H,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Is this something you pay for or is it free?

 

Josh Hill (Guest): it’s free. I just built it. I vibe coded it in Lovable,

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): actually.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Oh,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): It’s

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): wow. Awesome. Well, we will definitely add that link to our podcast.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): It’s

 
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Um, definitely check that out. Every one of our highlighted articles. That’s super cool and very forward thinking of you,

 

Josh Hill (Guest): cool.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Josh. It seems like you like to read books. Are you a reader? You seem well

 

Josh Hill (Guest): I ha I am I love research.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): researched.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): I’m a bit of a nerd, but I haven’t recently cuz I’ve been building a lot of stuff. So, I want to get back to it.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You’re only able to build because of all the research you’ve done, right? So, Yep. But thank you so much for your time today, Josh. U I think we have some really good things to to fix this problem with discovery and using

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): AI in the hindsight after because we’re always if we’re using AI to create, we’re just creating what already exists. But if we are using AI to interpret data, I think that’s absolutely the way to go. So, thank you and such a good note to end on with that self discovery of what brings meaning and purpose to you. So, thanks for your time today and everyone check out our highlight article and stay tuned for the next

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): episode. Yeah, thank you Josh.

 

Josh Hill (Guest): Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you.