Ep 827: Agent To Agent Recruiting

Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

The episode explores the evolution of recruitment from high-volume, noisy automation toward a sophisticated 'agent-to-agent' matching model.

Key takeaways

• Current AI usage in recruitment often 'supercharges' noise by enabling mass applications and mass outreach, leading to candidate and recruiter burnout.
• Jack and Jill use 20-minute voice interactions to build rich professional profiles that go far beyond simple keyword matching.

Main topics

• AI-driven recruitment
• Agent-to-agent matching

Notable quotes

AI has made it easier than ever to apply for a job and easier than ever to contact a candidate. And the result is a level of noise that both sides are starting to tune out of.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a roadmap for moving recruitment away from volum

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Support for this podcast comes from Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill are two AI agents changing how people find jobs and companies find great people. Jack gets to know what professionals want from their careers. Jill gets to know exactly who a company needs to hire. Together, they make warm introductions at the scale of the internet, matching people on far more than keywords and skipping the application altogether. Find your next great hire or your next great job at jackandjill.ai. That's jackandjill.ai. AI has made it easier than ever to apply for a job and easier than ever to contact a candidate. And the result is a level of noise that both sides are starting to tune out of. So where does the signal come from when everyone is using AI? Keep listening to find out. Speaker 1 (0:59) There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine than in all the ages of history. Speaker 2 (1:14) Hi there, welcome to episode 827 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting is generating more activity than ever and less connection. Candidates are using AI to produce polished applications at scale. Employers are using AI to screen and reach out at scale. And the result is a level of noise that's eroding trust on both sides. More automation applied to the same processes will only make this worse. Solving it means rethinking how matching works, with a depth of understanding on both sides and transparency and fairness designed in from the start. So what does this look like in practice? My guest this week is Matt Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Jack and Jill, whose AI agents work on both sides of the hiring market. In our conversation, Matt shares why supercharging existing processes deepens the noise problem, how transparency and independent auditing build trust in AI matching, and where human judgment remains essential. Speaker 3 (2:21) Hi, Matt, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Matt. Good to be here. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you just start off by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about what you're doing? I'm Matt Wilson. I'm one of Speaker 4 (2:35) the co-founders and the CEO of a company called Jack and Jill. And Jack and Jill, we do two things. We've built two agents, Jack and Jill. Jack works for professionals and helping them land their dream job. And Jill works for companies, helping them hire amazing people. A little bit more color on that. Jack works on behalf of professionals. He gets to know you, your background, what you have done, and what your dream job would look like through looking at your background, looking at a CV or resume, your LinkedIn profile, but then importantly, jumping into about a 20-minute phone call with you, much like you would do if you're getting a coffee with an exec recruiter to tell. to tell them about who you were and what you want so that they can then go out and represent you out in the market. Once Jack's got that really rich picture of who you are, he gets to work for you, looking over every public job listing that is posted every day. So I think it's about 14 million jobs a day that he's screening through on your behalf, looking for things that are really interesting, not using keyword searching, but really... looking with all of this rich contextual information that he's got on you. So just continue monitoring to see if anything really interesting comes up and then sending that to you over WhatsApp, over email, as you instruct him to. From there, he can support with applications. You can do mock interviews and practice with Jack on voice calls, get feedback, and then all the way through to actually getting an offer. getting comp benchmarking specifically tailored around your profile through to even practicing going in and negotiating the salary with the employer. So it's really end-to-end support that's free for professionals out there in the world. And we've got close to half a million people across San Francisco, New York, London, and beyond that are working with Jack, and Jack is representing them like a Hollywood agent would be representing an A-lister. Speaker 4 (4:33) On the flip side, we've got Jill, who's doing a very similar thing for companies, really going deep, understanding what a company is looking for. Again, much like a great executive recruitment partner would be doing, peeling back the layers of what's actually important in a role for a company. And then utilizing this large network of professionals is able to make these incredibly high signal-to-noise introductions between the professionals that are working with Jack and the companies that are working with Jill. We're working with about 5,000 companies. Again, across the UK, Europe, and the US. The company itself, we're just under 18 months old. We're just a relatively young company, and we are split as a team between the UK and the US as a company. Speaker 3 (5:19) So tell us a little bit more about why you founded the company and why you got it to work this way, because there's all kinds of different flavors of AI in recruiting, but there aren't many people kind of working along these lines. So why this? Why now? It comes back to thinking about the process of getting a job Speaker 4 (5:35) from the perspective of a professional. And I think the way that people go about finding their next job. It's this insanely inefficient, unoptimized, luck-based process. So what are the ways that people typically will land a new role or even figure out what career to go into in the first place? Maybe they'll apply for jobs through companies' websites or through job boards or through LinkedIn. And there, I think the ability to search over the vast number of jobs that are out there. It's just incredibly poor. It's a huge job just to go through and browse all of the openings out there. So you miss a whole bunch of stuff and you then spend a whole bunch of time putting together an application. And most of the time, those aren't even being read and you're not even hearing back from those. So this is a pretty kind of soul-crushing process, super time-consuming. And unless you are in a... intense full-time job search, your ability to actually do that, monitor the market and apply for things is really small. So you're only seeing this tiny corner of what's possible. Another way might be if you're lucky enough to have a network, maybe you get introduced to somebody in your network. Again, that's great, but you're only seeing this tiny, tiny corner of what's possible out there. The third way, maybe you go and work with an agency recruitment firm. Again, They're only representing a very small number of clients. So you're, again, only exposing yourself to this tiny corner of the universe of what's possible. And they think that for one of the most consequential decisions that you make in your life, one of the most important things you do in your life, there's got to be a better way. And for the first time in history, we now have a technology that enables us to... get this really deep picture, this really deep, nuanced picture that was only really possible with the human before, but to combine that with the scale of the internet and the scale of technology. So we need to take the best bits about working with a job board, the infinite scale, the infinite number of opportunities that you can get, but then combining that with the depth of understanding of an amazing executive recruiter that's working for you to help you. optimize your next move in your career by looking at the entire totality of what's possible in the world. And that was really the kind of the driving mission behind the company was to say, okay, how do we make that possible? And I think, as we spent more time thinking about that, it became really clear to us that you needed to work on both sides, both on the employee side and on the professional side in order to get the depth of understanding and the connectivity that was needed. When you look at what most people are using AI for in the kind of top of funnel for a recruitment perspective, whether it's on the candidate side or on the company side, it is about taking the existing processes and supercharging them. Okay, you're a candidate. Let's help you apply for 1,000 jobs. That was what you were doing before was applying for one. Let's make you do 1,000. And then