Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Today, we’re welcoming an accomplished author, public speaker, and hiring expert to talk about efficient recruiting. This guy really knows his stuff, and it has become a good friend of ours. Since we met over a year ago, at anchor, I feel kind of weird saying that because I didn’t. That’s true. That’s true. Yeah, you are gonna read that so I just

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): you could always say three minutes ago I mean you do that that’s really

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, I mean we’re friends now. Yeah, since I met over five minutes ago. Yeah, that’s right. You read that person, then all and then I’ll leave it. Okay, that sounds good. Today, we’re welcoming an accomplished author, public speaker, and hiring expert to talk about efficient recruiting. This guy really knows his stuff and has become a good friend of mine, since we met over a year ago at Nhr conference. Let’s give a warm welcome to Steven Jay Smith. Chief hiring expert at Applicantpro, Thanks for joining us, Steve

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, here I am. Can I raise the roof? I guess they won’t see

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Here we go. So Steve was fired from his first job for illegal activity. Can you tell us more about that?

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Absolutely one of my favorite stories. And I wish my mom was here because she tells it way better than I do. So I was born and raised in Las Vegas and there’s only two things you can do in Las Vegas. You can either gamble or hunt Lizards, and let’s just say I was not on the gambling side of things and so I was really good, my friend and I got really good at catching lizards. We had trap sets all over the desert and we would catch lizards. I developed this relationship with one of the local pet shops and he wanted to start buying lizards from me, because one of the things I was able to do effectively is I could catch them and they would not lose their tails.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): And I was a big deal because most of the time one of their reflexes is they throw their tail off. And so I was really good at this and so I would sell lizards to this local pet shop. One day I come home from school and my boss is literally sitting in the living room. Speaking with my mom and…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wait, how old are you at this point? Okay.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): I’m like Okay, so I’ll get there, I promise. So I get home and he’s there and he explains the situation. He says, Unfortunately I’m gonna have to let you go. And, I’m devastated. I’m like, “What do you have to let me go?” I’m giving you a good quality product. I’m providing the right types of lizards and stuff, and he was making some good money, and I was making $500 a month as. Yeah. It was good money. I take my friends out to Burger King and buy whoppers and stuff. So in essence, he said that one of the lizards you sold me was

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): an endangered species. It was a horny toad, it’s one of my favorite lizards. It’s called a horny, toad has a little jack-lantern back and horns are kind of like a bearded dragon, but just way better than they eat ants for the most part. So I told them about this lizard and he said, because of this, I got caught and now I have to let you go. And he says, I’m really bummed by this. But the biggest reason I came here is to talk with you at your house and talk with your mom. My mom was like she had no idea. I was doing this job, she had no idea. and so she was kind of like, what is going on but he’s like, Yeah, I have to let you go because I couldn’t admit to the people, when they came in and did the audit, I couldn’t admit that my dealer wasn’t 11 years old.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): 

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Size 11 years old. So I got fired from my first job for illegal activity. There you go.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, Awesome. You’re getting started early at 11 that you’re making it happen. I’m impressed horny tub.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): and it was funny because when they took the job away, I ended up becoming the first paperboy for the area of Summerlin for the review journal. And so then I would start delivering newspapers and things like that and in the area to maintain my income.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. …

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): so there you go,…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): you’re staying here.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): there’s like

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You’re five hundred dollars a month back from doing newspaper routes. Wow.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): For the most part that, paper route was not as effective, but I would collect cans and bottles and I would talk with the foreman because there’s a lot of construction going on back then and I would And so they would pay me to clean up some of their little construction sites and then I would go, basically recycle the copper wire was the better. I got the most for that was 90 cents a pound back then. But yeah, so I would just recycle stuff to try to maintain it.’t like I said it was not as effective But, I spent all my money on baseball cards. The baseball craze was going on at the time and so that’s what I did. And, I have some Star Wars cards, too. So,

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, we were. That’s what we’re gonna ask you about next. Tell us for anyone. Who’s seen this on video? They’re probably wondering what this Yoda Christmas tree is hanging?

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, …

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That’s all about it.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): so this tree has been up for almost seven years now. And, in my role, I’m in sales, right? So, I do a lot of sales calls, customer support calls and things of that nature, and it’s not necessarily a pet peeve, but I hate when people want to break that ice by talking about the weather, it just bugs me. I don’t care about the weather, but what I do care about is Christmas and Star Wars. And so, inevitably 95% of the time somebody on the call is going to ask about the tree. They’re just going to ask and so they always ask about the tree…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): which leads to a conversation about Star Wars and Christmas. for me and then I’ll show you for those of you that see the video. There’s my hopper is Master Yoda himself and you want me to show this

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

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): This is made of paper and so you cut it out of paper and it’s known as a Star Wars snowflake. They have Marvel’s Harry Potter ones. They got us patterns online.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Very impressive.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, I was more akin to the Star Wars snowflakes. but yeah, it takes two to three hours to cut it out with a little exacto knife. but that’s…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah,…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): why the trees are because I don’t want to talk about the weather. I want something else.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I mean, It works on me and then you get to talk about something you like to talk about, that’s good.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah. Works out really well.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And I have to say Steve you’re definitely a man of many talents and very good at finding value wherever you go and whatever the environment is around here. Which leads us to how you joined applicantpro, give us a little bit of background about applicantpro and what you’re up to there.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): So, if I was a recruiter for several years prior to working for Applicantpro and, this was back in the time when bit I mean basically it was the recession for the real estate industry and I was in the mortgage industry as a recruiter. Back then there’s this concept called an applicant tracking system. They were brand new. They were just coming out. They were helping organizations post their jobs to the major job boards and kind of funnel them as a hub into an area where you could manage the applicants. Back then I was just using Excel spreadsheets. So I had macros in myself so I could send off automated emails from my Excel spreadsheet. I was kind of weird with Excel but it was just inefficient right? And…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You’re an Excel master,…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): a lot.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): not a Jedi master.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): I don’t know about a master but what it could do at the time it was very primitive when I look at it right?

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I don’t want a princess.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): His primitive on what I was trying to accomplish. So I met Tom. I met this guy named Ryan Kohler.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): And Ryan had been kind of asked to build an applicant tracking software for smaller businesses because back then applicant tracking, it was five figures. Small businesses could not afford those types of things and I thought, we need to start targeting this smaller audience And so he had built the framework for the applicant tracking system. him, and I met in September. I think it was in 2008 and he’s like, Hey, I’m starting this company. I’d love to bring you on, from a sales perspective. You can help me sell this. You have a network, people in this industry already and I was kind of on board and then it got to the point where the company I was at was going down fast because the real estate industry was just tanking. And I was like, what, Ryan, I’m on board. And so in December, I started with him and that first year, sold about 162 systems to 162 companies and…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): we were able to create enough revenue that we just started. I mean, it was really effective, we would start with a free trial.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Cells and get people kind of addicted if you will at first, give them the ability to actually use it and they just loved it and it was inexpensive. And so I felt like I was giving back to my recruiting roots and my HR community by providing a software service that was much cheaper than what was available at the time. And I was really targeting the underdogs. I mean, that’s really what it boiled down to. not targeting, we weren’t going after the enterprise solutions we were going after the mom and pop shops and the small companies. three to 500 employees at the time and it just skyrocketed. It went really well. So, I’ve been there for 16 years now and it’s just gone. 300 employees over 11,000 clients worldwide for the most part and it’s fun. Because like I said, it’s my area of expertise. I was a recruiter to begin with. And now that I’ve worked this for as many years as I have, I’ve seen a lot come and go. In fact, I wasn’t

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): to go speak in the state of Alabama for a while because I had the gall and one of my presentations but way back when to say that monster and crew builder might not be around in the future and unfortunately Monster was sponsoring the event that It,…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): luckily I just spoke in Alabama again this year, so I guess they’ve accepted me back. But it was just funny because we saw where indeed is one of the top job boards today based off of search engine technology which was just a brand new concept So I was just excited because we knew where that was headed and so we partnered with indeed

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): And in fact, we’re considered a platinum partner indeed. We’re the only ATS that has been platinum, partner, two years in a row now since they started in 2023, and it’s just fun because indeed will kind of experiment with some of our clients, when they have new features, they want to add and we just provide better value to our clients because of this partnership. And there’s a lot of rules you have to follow. Indeed, there are a lot of rules, but we educate our clients. We’re really big on education. And so that’s part of the reason why I wrote a book and do a lot of the speaking because I wanted to really educate people on how to effectively hire so,

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay, tell us more about your butt and what the inspiration was there.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, so, here it is. It’s called the hiring tree laws of applicant attraction. And yeah, I’ll tell you really briefly. So, for the past 10 years, my buddy has owned an apple orchard down in Santaquin Utah. And he is a fourth generation farmer, you kind of took over.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): And in taking over a farm, he has a family, he’s got five kids, it’s a pretty big family to take care of and he had a lot of contracts with, Walmart and a lot of the local stores, but there was not a lot of money in that. And so he decided I want to start going to the markets and I want to actually go to the farmers markets and give my product directly to the consumers and he needed help and so Myers, I had three daughters. And so they started selling in the markets and helping him set up along the entire Wasatch front, which is just a mountain range here in Utah. And so, we started selling at the farmers markets to the point that our marine market, we’re making anywhere between 2500 to 5,000 in a weekend for him and so effective.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): We talked about Apple Tree over the years. My friend, his name, Kent Pine Pine Farms Pine with a y, n e. and what he did is he would sit down with me when I went to the farm and he would show me how apple trees were. He would show me how to take care of them and show me how to grow them. And so suddenly, this analogy came into my mind that, gosh, this is a lot like the hiring process. It’s like a tree.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): We all want to go into the orchard. We just want to pick the fruit off the tree indeed, and a lot of these job boards are the orchards, right? We just want to go in and just get all the applicants we want, but there’s a lot of leaves. You got to sit through.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): And so, what I did is, I created this analogy starting with the roots where you have to have deep roots, and then the actual branches of the tree. And when you have a balanced tree that feeds the nutrients correctly out to the branches, then you can produce the fruit. You can actually attract the right types of people to your organization to grow it effectively. Does that make sense?

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): So that’s kind of this. So, the analogy came because my friend would teach me how to do apples, and I just related it to the hiring process. And I created this analogy to kind of educate people on how to effectively develop their own hiring tree for their organization so that you can attract the right fruit. And that’s really what it’s all about. And when you follow those principles, you’re guaranteed to get more applicable and better quality. So that makes sense.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): But, Yeah,…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): That’s kind of how it was. Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): not totally. I like the backstory too and it definitely has a lot to it, especially from your lived experience and working with your

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): So the only system cool, I actually have this on my desk now, my dog tried to eat this at one point and she stepped all over it, but this is the original diagram that I created.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): When I was in the process of writing the book, That’s kind of glared at it,…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That’s cool.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): but this was the actual original diagram. And so I wrote it out and kind of did the branches in the roots and things like that. And so, this is the original diagram that I kind of wrote down, some people say they start something on a napkin, mine was just on a sheet of paper. but, yeah, that’s my original diagram to kind of start the concept of the book. And then it took about nine months, I actually wrote it for all intents and purposes. I wrote it fairly quickly. But I’ve been teaching these principles, optimization and algorithms, and search engine optimization and marketing principles. And I’ve been teaching this for 15 years so I already knew the information. It was just a matter of putting it into a digestible book that you could read and actually understand. Right? So

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And a framework like that makes it so much easier to relate to, and also, to see how the different principles work together. Your diagram is, honestly, really cool for me, because when I wrote my book, The Review Cycle, I actually wrote out or drew a picture on a piece of paper and I ended up going through six iterations before the final model was,…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Kind of cemented in clarity and then that’s where the actual content started getting built upon for the book. So it’s really neat to see that original. Yeah, there’s always a backstory in a lot of effort and…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): It’s fun. It’s fun,

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): lived experience that goes into creating something. Tell us a little bit more. I mean I know we’re talking about fruit here but give us a little bit more meat. Yeah.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): What? So if you break the tree into three parts, you’ve got the trunk, and then the root system is really your executive team and employees. It amazes me how often a manager will come to the HR department and just give them a sheet of paper with a job description and say Here, go find somebody, and that’s the extent of the conversation with too many employers. That’s kind of the process. Here’s the job description: verify, it’s okay. And then we just post it online. I call it the post and pray method. We just post it and pray. We get people for it and so there has to be a lot more communication so in a tree it’s a root system. A taproot is like a carrot, so it’s like this huge long root that goes about 20 feet into the ground. So hold it in place, which is your executive team, and then you have these fibrous and feeder roots that come off of that, they collect all the nutrients, which is your managers and your employees. If you don’t have managers employees, that can feed the nutrients into the executive team that then feeds it up into the

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Tree. You’re not going to have an effective hiring process. That’s why a lot of businesses when you first start

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Employee referrals is usually the number one way to build an organization. It’s one of the branches but it’s the most effective because of this concept of having this communication with employees. When a company is small, you can have much better communication. But as you grow, sometimes that communication breaks down. And so this is trying to help them understand that this communication can’t go away. It has to always exist. The trunk part of the process is your application process and your job ads. And I do a lot of education on the job because there are too many organisms in about 80% of companies. Today, I still use a job description but if you think about it, indeed as a search engine, and as a search engine, your job ad has to be search engine optimized, which means you actually have to spend time on it. You actually have to write it in such a way that the search engine ranks you so that you can get better traction. So imagine you spend all this money on the job board but when they get to your application they drop out of the process. What a waste of money. And so that’s why this trump part is so

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Coordinate, making sure you’re using appropriate job ads and that your application process. Doesn’t. Stop them from applying or keep them from finishing the application. And so, that’s why you have the trunk. And then, the branches are just the elements. The most popular branch is the optimization branch because it deals with search engines but you have education. You have your company website, social media now and even AI to a point. And so there’s a lot of branches, if you will within the tree that, if you only have fruit, if you will from one branch let’s say we just use job boards and that’s only one branch. You are limiting the value of your tree and you’re limiting the quality of the fruit. And so in play referral programs and educational institutions and other areas where you can also drive traffic, if you will and produce fruit. That’s why it’s so important to have a balance treat because if you can imagine, if you have a tree with one single root, as soon as the storms come that trees gonna fall, it’s

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Not going to be able to stay up but when you have a tree that has multiple branches and it actually looks like a tree not only is it beautiful? But again, it produces the quality fruit that you need for the rest of the duration of that tree, and apple trees will last about 50 to 60 years. That’s a long time. And so, if you establish this tree effectively, it should last you a long time. And even when you have kind of the down times, because sometimes the job boards aren’t producing as much, then the employee referrals can pick up on that, And kind of make up for it and so when you have this balance it makes it a lot easier. So you don’t lose any momentum as you grow the organization, So, there you go. That’s probably like the elevator pitch, right?

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It sounds like there’s so much depth that can be driven from that analogy, and clearly we need to read your book because I’m sure there’s even more in there. I’ve got my coffee here

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): One of my favorites is the gopher, you’ll read about the Gopher in there. because there’s other elements that impact the tree, not just,…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): okay.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): and I talk about those elements like the Gopher,…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Great.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): the insects, the bugs, and things like that. And those also are part of the hiring framework. And so, when you recognize those things again, it helps you create a very beautiful tree. So anyway, yeah, hopefully you’ll enjoy it.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It’s really.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): It is designed to educate and in fact I had a lady up in North Dakota, she’s one of my good friends and he was Nicole. She’s the state director for North Dakota Sherman for quite a while she read the book, and I guess in her backyard, she had apple trees. And she says, Steve, I read your book and I went outside and actually did some of the things and I have fruit on my tree this year. I was as Wait a minute, you didn’t get anything out of the hiring part. She says, yeah. I got that, too. But that’s why her apple tree actually produces fruit. Let’s do a purpose.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That’s amazing and two strands of advice here. So if you don’t mind giving us a little bit more background on one of the particular stories, Steve I know there’s a ghost story in your book, talking about the insects and…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yes.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): the gophers. Can you tell us a little bit more about the ghost story?

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): So Ironically, but also planned. It’s Chapter 13. Of the book is the last chapter in the book.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Right.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, it fell right into place. It’s interesting when you write a book and Matt I’m sure you can probably attest to this when it just falls into place and you’re doing something that is worth your time and it’s worth the effort and things just fell into place with this book. So, Chapter 13 is about what we deal with in the workplace, which is ghosting. There’s this concept, and in fact, did you know that when I was doing my research for this? There’s a word called disapperation you’ve never heard of.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): No.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): So Disappreciation is a Harry Potter term. It was actually a word that was invented by JK Rowling because this operation did not exist prior to that. And so I used that in the book because I’m just fascinated with the word, but this operation is like they just disappear, and that’s exactly what happened. So, in the hiring process, there are four areas: You can lose them at the application, you can lose them at the interview stage, you can lose them during the onboarding and orientation stage. And then you can also lose them once they are employed with you for a certain amount of time and they leave, And there’s this concept called quiet quitting that entered for a little bit after covid. but in essence the roots of ghosting all occur for the same reasons. And so when you learn how to mitigate ghosting in these parts of the process where you make it, it is actually exciting for them to work with you and to apply with you, and to be on board with you. This is all about employee retention, but also about the candidate experience, as they’re going through the hiring process. And so when

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Learn how to mitigate certain elements there in the book. Obviously addresses some of that, then you can actually eliminate ghosting. Ghosting is up almost 28%. It’s the highest we’ve ever seen and in the history, at least in my time, in the Recruiting World, almost 20 years. Ghosting is higher than has ever been, and it’s because applicants are a little apathetic, right? I mean, if you think about it, if you’re just posting a job description, it’s the same as everybody else. You don’t stand out. A lot of people treat it like dating today. They just want to swipe right? And

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): If you think I’m cute, let’s go for a phone screen type thing that’s what they want, so you have to think about how an applicant applies it. I mean, think about would you two want to go apply for a job and spend 15-20 minutes on an application? Nobody wants to do that.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): No.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): They just want to be able to apply really quickly and send their information over and say, Hey if you think I’m a match. Okay, let’s do a phone screen. Actually talk about this and have a conversation and…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): it’s if there’s a fit there. so, your job ad has to attract people if somebody reads your job ad and it just sounds like everybody else. When you call them, they’re more likely to go, but if your job ad gets them feeling like, my gosh, I can’t wait to hear from this company. I hope they call me. This sounds like me, I can’t wait to work for them. When they have those types of feelings from your job at the beginning, you start mitigating the ghosting because they’re actually excited to hear from you. They want to hear from you too often. We just threw out the job description.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Which does nothing to excite them. About what it’s like to work for your organization so that’s what it is. It’s not an actual ghost story per se. It’s just about the concept of ghosting and how ghosting has impacted the hiring market now more than ever before in the past and how to truly mitigate it and keep that from happening. So you can be just better off. I mean, if you follow the principles of the hiring tree, I promise you will mitigate ghosting. It’ll happen.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It may not be an actual ghost story, but it’s still pretty scary.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah. It’s funny I asked and I was like, Can’t you have any cool ghost stories on the farm because I was totally wanting some type of ghost story to make a part of it but he’s like, No we don’t have anything. He’s like sometimes he says, Sometimes Grandpa Pine would let his apple cider sit for a while and then, add a little bit of yeast and it might create some delusional stories but nothing that

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And yeast. You had some good stories. All…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, that yeast room is true.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thank you for joining us Steve, any final words of wisdom before we wrap it up. I know everybody will be able to check out your book. We’re gonna have a link there, and a link for applicantpro, so you can learn more about both of those. and Steve is an incredible public speaker. So we’ll put a link there to follow Steve as well. If you’re wanting to have him level up your next event, so,

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah, the only other thing I would add is AI is kind of a taboo topic for some companies in part because it may not even be accepted yet in the organization, but the beauty of AI, especially when you look at the principles in my book, I almost need to write another version that the hiring tree the missing branch and then just do a book on AI, because AI can be an effective tool to help you rewrite your job. When I talk to a lot of people about writing their job as they like, I don’t have time for that. Guess what? Now you do because if you use AI and how to feed the right principles into the prompts, you can create a very effective tool that can literally spit out a job for you within a few minutes and…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mm-hmm

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): and you can effectively follow the principles that are already taught within the book. so AI had just barely been starting to come out when my book came out and so it was such a new principle. Nobody really knew what it was. Yeah, I wish I had kind of waited because then I could have added AI as a 14th chapter and just made a whole bunch of that…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Which is okay, timing is everything but yeah, ai is such a great tool. And I think for those of us who are thinking about it or not, quite sure how to use too many people. Use a search engine. They just want to type in a sentence or two or they want to ask it a question. you’re gonna get a Google answer that way. So you have to understand how to effectively use it. I already created an acronym for the term idea idea. So as I do, I present on this one, here’s how you effectively create your idea, follow these five principles when it comes to your prompts, build the prompts and then use the prompts and so when you follow that process you will be very effective at using AI especially in the HR world. So that part’s exciting, we don’t have time to go over details on that. But I’ve already developed the process. Like I said, I should probably just write you’re part of the book.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Maybe. But hey, you can definitely share more on LinkedIn about that. And I’m excited to hear it. And I had a mentor of mine that he told me I was trying to figure out something on Excel. He said, Sometimes you have to slow down to go faster. You have to figure out what’s the right formula to automate your process instead of doing it all manually.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Why? Did you? Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And I think the same is true with AI, just like what you’re saying to all those people who are writing those job ads, take some time. We’ll figure out…

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): how to optimize those prompts and Steve’s framework. There is definitely something that can help people accomplish that. So yeah, thank you for sharing. That was a great add in And once you get good at that principle that will save you a lot of time that’s

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): absolutely. Like I said, I’ve already taught it at a lot of conferences. I’ve gone to just this year, I just implemented it as part of my and it makes my presentations 90 minutes instead of 60. But it’s so worth it and everybody that we’ve had those sessions where they just rave, they’re this was the best session of the conference because I can actually go back to my office now and immediately implement this. and that’s what I’m all about. When we started applicantpro, we were really firm. Let’s educate. Because human intelligence is never going to replace artificial intelligence. It is the king, it’ll always be king because you can’t effectively use artificial intelligence unless you have an element of human intelligence that already exists in order to use it effectively. So my focus is human intelligence. I got that from my mom’s teacher. So I grew up with a teacher my entire life and so I educate first and then when you educate I just feel like it just makes everything better. So,

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Amazing. Definitely.

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): But thank you, Mom for that. Shout out to Mom.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thank you so much and so good to have you on today. I’m excited to explore Burke’s book more and everyone make sure you check it out. And we’ll post those links on our highlight article and thanks for your time today. It was great.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thanks. 

Steven J Smith, SHRM-CP, PHR (Guest): Thank you  for having me.