Scaling Hiring Expertise Company Wide Through AI Agents with Kyle Gatlin, Arrive

Hiring managers need better support, not more documents.

Kyle Gatlin, Head of Talent at Arrive, joins Shannon to discuss how his team built an AI hiring agent to guide managers through the recruiting process across 70 countries. Drawing from his background in education and talent operations, Kyle explains why accessibility, structured interviewing, and candidate experience became the foundation of the project.

Kyle shares how his team turned a 15-page hiring philosophy into a scalable internal tool, partnered with engineering and AI leaders to launch it globally, and improved hiring consistency without removing the human side of recruiting. 

This episode also covered why strong recruiting teams should challenge inefficient processes and help hiring managers make more confident decisions.

Key takeaways:

1. Structured hiring creates confidence: Clear interview goals help teams make faster and more accurate decisions.
2. AI improves accessibility: Hiring managers are more likely to ask questions when support feels immediate and judgment-free.
3. Small launches scale faster: Starting with one focused AI use case made adoption easier across the business.
4. Candidate experience reflects operations: Organized internal processes create stronger candidate trust and engagement.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Meet Kyle Gatlin

(02:00) Why AI agents matter in recruiting

(05:00) Turning recruiting philosophy into an AI tool

(09:20) Building structured interviews and intentional hiring steps

(14:11) Partnering with engineering and AI teams internally

(18:10) How AI supports recruiters instead of replacing them

(21:13) Testing tone, accessibility, and hiring manager adoption

(25:44) Are recruiters spending more time with other activities?

(27:00) Better candidate experiences through process design

(32:34) Where to connect with Kyle

Transcript

Kyle Gatlin (00:00):

When I first started in my kind of AI journey, it's this grandiose idea that was almost the blocker. It's like, okay, I'm ready to go hiking. I might as well go up Everest. And I had the opportunity to sit down with some product managers and they kind of reframed the way I look at things. It's always build small and then build out.

Shannon Ogborn (00:22):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all‑in‑one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from Seed to IPO and beyond. I am more than excited to be here in Atlanta today with Kyle Gatlin, who leads global talent acquisition at Arrive, where he oversees hiring across more than 70 countries for a portfolio of mobility brands, including ParkMobile and EasyPark, some of which you all might be familiar with, which is all unified under one company and culture.

(01:16):

He spent the first chapter of his career as a high school teacher. Shout out to the current teachers and so many former teachers that I love to work with. So he did that before making his way to talent and building on experience also across RPO, high growth startups and global TA leadership. He has scaled teams across the US and Europe as well. And while he is deeply people focused, his real passion lives in TA operations, some of which we're going to talk about today and the data and systems that make hiring work at scale. So thank you so much for joining us, Kyle.

Kyle Gatlin (01:48):

Yeah, happy to be here.

Shannon Ogborn (01:49):

Like I mentioned, we are going to be talking somewhat in the recruiting talent operations space on a topic that I think people are going to be very excited about, which is AI agents and how we can improve hiring, particularly internally, internal systems with that. So taking a big step back, when you think about why this matters and why teams should consider doing things like building AI agents, what comes to mind for you?

Kyle Gatlin (02:15):

I think it's ease of use. It's scale. It's kind of a single source of truth. When you need to update a document shared with a ton of people, that document could get shared and just sprawls throughout the organization. When you build this centralized, you only have to update one thing at once and it's good for the whole company. And I think that's been the biggest game changer.

Shannon Ogborn (02:37):

Yeah. And I know one of the other things you mentioned was that people are more likely to ask an AI agent a question versus asking a hiring manager or a recruiter because they just feel like, "Maybe that's not a question I should be asking."

Kyle Gatlin (02:55):

Yeah. People are scared to ask what they consider to be dumb questions, but a lot of hiring managers don't hire every single day. They don't hire as often as go‑to‑market teams. Maybe this is their first hire in a couple of years or their first hire ever. And so it kind of reduces that embarrassment or trepidation to come into the process and say, "Hey, we've laid everything out for you. You can access it just as easy as you want. You can ask it any question you want and it will tell you the answer that you're looking for.

Shannon Ogborn (03:26):

" I love that because like you said, when you're a hiring manager, yes, you're a hiring manager, but you're also a manager. You're also maybe doing IC work. You're doing so much to support the organization in ways that aren't related to hiring. And I think it's easy for us on the recruiting side to forget because we work with them mostly in that capacity and not in all the other capacities that they do. And it's easy to forget that these folks have a job and it's not necessarily ... Hiring is an important job, but it's not their only job.

Kyle Gatlin (04:00):

And recruiters are so in tune with the hiring process. It's hard to remove yourself from that to kind of put yourself in the shoes of someone that hasn't hired a lot. What are the little things that they don't know or wouldn't realize that you just know so well? And this kind of removes that layer as well. The goal is not to make everyone an expert. It's really to make expertise accessible.

Shannon Ogborn (04:21):

It's important now because there's so much information and I'm just thinking of like Google has the world's worst search in Google Drive and I can't understand it. You are the world search experts, but I can't find anything in there. So just making this accessible to everyone I think is actually incredibly important as you're hiring across 70 countries, just the compliance alone.

Kyle Gatlin (04:50):

You could have the world's most organized type A Google Drive and I promise you hiring managers would come to you every day and say, "Where can I find the job description template?"

Shannon Ogborn (04:59):

100% agree. When it comes to what you all had have done, tell me a little bit about what that is and how it resonated.

Kyle Gatlin (05:11):

Well, we're trying to unify, you mentioned a couple of brands. We're the sum of many parts, different cultures, different hiring processes. And our goal was to look for efficiencies and effectiveness. I think that's the goal of any recruiting process. And while some people have different opinions, I wanted it to be backed in my philosophy, our TA and culture philosophy, peer reviewed articles and studies as well, and put that together in one place where everyone could access and feel confident in building a recruiting process. Another way for TA to kind of stand on something and push back, have that empowerment to say, "I don't know that this fifth step is really necessary. If we couldn't assess in three, then we probably didn't set it up correctly in the first place."

Shannon Ogborn (06:00):

And the pure density of information, if someone's truly looking through a document, it's just too much to consume. Even if I think about content, best practices and principles, being someone who's heavily in content now, there's just really no way to make that information more tangible in like, "I know what to do with this.

Kyle Gatlin (06:25):

" Yeah. As a teacher, you learn, you have about 15 seconds of attention before you lose someone. And if I ask someone who doesn't hire very often to read a hiring document, they're just not going to do it. I know that. Everyone knows that. But when you give a document to an agent, it doesn't matter the length. It's going to take the question, find the right answer and pull it out very, very quickly. And that's the kind of benefit of doing it in this format.

Shannon Ogborn (06:50):

And that's the 15 seconds. It's someone asking a question, "I know what I want to ask, but I don't know where to find the information." And it regurgitates the information customized to the question, which reading a document's not going to do that. It's like, "Okay, I have this question, but I still don't understand what to do with my question with this information. It's just information." So I think the density can definitely, in that wall of text, it just makes it impossible. I'm sure being a former teacher really has helped. You're creating instruction, right? You're creating an instruction guide for your company.

Kyle Gatlin (07:28):

Being a teacher, you're teaching math to people who don't want to learn math and being a recruiter, you're trying to teach good recruiting philosophy and candidate experience to people who are more focused on the business aspect of it. So I want to remove that and allow them to feel empowered to make a great candidate experience working with their TA team and have the knowledge base to make those decisions and push the best process forward.

Shannon Ogborn (07:53):

Empowerment is, I think, the perfect word for it. I think this is, from my understanding, a lot how you built this was largely based on a document that you had been working on for even longer.

Kyle Gatlin (08:06):

Yeah. I was working on this document and it was getting longer and longer. Every accumulation of my career and articles I was reading and people I admire in the field and it just kept going on and on. And I realized very quickly the only person who wants to read this is me. And I really want hiring managers to feel ownership in their process because when they feel that ownership, then they feel ownership in the decision making and when they feel that, then we have a much better success rate of onboarding and essentially success within the company. And so I think that was like my true goal and I just wanted to know how could I remove these roadblocks, these barriers to entry of getting this information that took me 10 years to really kind of settle in on and give them to hing managers and as quickly as possible.

Shannon Ogborn (08:59):

I think this is an important note though that you can't just build an AI agent out of nothing. A lot of what I've learned from doing the podcast is, yes, like AI plays has a big part now in some elements at the same time there's still like very foundational works and practice that go into making those successful. Can you break down a little bit about the document and sort of what was in the document that helped the AI agent be successful? What were you including in your very long document?

Kyle Gatlin (09:33):

Ultimately, it has to be kind of based in this foundational knowledge of what you want. If you want a company that runs 10 interview rounds, then if you put that in, that's what the agent's going to give you, right? We distilled what exactly we wanted, what the process should look like and really focusing in, especially in this time of AI on these skills-based interviews. What does a rubric look like? What do good questions look like and what do good answers look like, right? I think there's a lot of spiraling questions. So tell me about a time you did this. Oh, my team was involved in this project. That's a good answer, but tell me about what you did in this project. What was your impact? And getting away from this kind of generic kind of word salad answers that maybe are AI enhanced or help from candidates, but really just letting them open up and say, "Tell me what you did."

Shannon Ogborn (10:29):

Take some credit.

Kyle Gatlin (10:30):

Right. What's the action? What was your result?

Shannon Ogborn (10:33):

But I know that you also drew from external sources as well, which you referred to a little bit earlier. Talk to me about the importance of that. So you have your core document that you've put in there that you have worked with the team on and then you are also pulling from external elements that you find important.

Kyle Gatlin (10:51):

Yeah. I mean, I think again, like coming from academia, you always just realize you are not the most knowledgeable person. There are people in this industry that have a lot more experience and knowledge than me and I lean on them and there are peer reviewed articles that actually are based in data. If you're going to be someone who's focused on data and recruiting, why would you not also be focused on data from scientific studies about why this works and why this doesn't? And so I think that was like a really big factor for me going through Harvard Business Reviews or other well respected documents that could help me kind of formulate my own thoughts and then push it out to the rest of the company.

Shannon Ogborn (11:35):

I also think it helps people understand the why. We obviously have our industry knowledge of why you should do things. We know that there's a million peer reviewed articles out there that say certain things, but not everybody knows that. This is not a hiring manager's area of expertise. It's the talent people's area of expertise. And I just think especially for people who have that more data oriented mindset, you're not taking anecdotals only from the sample size of your company, but you're also putting out there, "Hey, structured interviewing is actually important because there's been literally a zillion peer reviewed studies on structured interviewing being the highest predictor of job performance."

Kyle Gatlin (12:23):

A hundred percent. Yeah. And part of the core piece of this document is saying that every single step should be assessing something specific and intentional for the job and really looking at the candidate from a whole perspective. So when you do a debrief or a huddle afterwards, you can say, "They're good in this section, they're good in this skill, and then we're comfortable and enthusiastic to make the hire."

Shannon Ogborn (12:48):

Enthusiasm is super important because candidates can feel that. They feel when you're enthusiastic about hiring them versus they're like our second choice or we're not sure. Candidates definitely can feel from the hiring managers when the hiring manager is just absolutely fricking stoked to have them. So being able to make those confident choices and having the information to do so is super important. I'm curious, how long did it take you to create this document? Because it seems like a real labor of love.

Kyle Gatlin (13:16):

Yeah. This is not an easy task. This is not a put it into AI and get it done in a day. It has to be tested. It has to be read. It's about 15 plus pages. Some of that is some diagrams in there. If you do want to review, it is a very readable document. I have read it several, several times, but I don't expect anyone else to. So just putting the document together, pulling from different leaders in our organization, making sure we're pulling in our culture questions, a lot of work that our leadership has done as we've come under this one brand, making sure that's in there, not just as an addendum or not just as a side piece, but really woven in, right? Arrive Curious, Arrive Focused, Arrive Together. How is that in every single part? And so making sure it's really present throughout the whole document.

(14:04):

So it took me about two months of working with several different stakeholders, several different people to really get it done.

Shannon Ogborn (14:11):

When it comes to, I guess on the note of stakeholders, and this is why it popped into my mind that you were just talking about, did you work with anyone internally on building the agent? I think a lot of talent people can become intimidated by everything that's out there and it's hard to get started. Did you work with anyone on this concept and execution?

Kyle Gatlin (14:33):

Yeah, I had a ton of help. We have an incredible engineering team and everyone's willing ... Part of our culture is that curious, right? And to kind of shepherd people's curiosity into different areas. So I reached out to the data team. I'd reach out to the newly formed kind of AI initiative team, our brand ambassadors, people and culture leaders that we have as well. So our chief AI officer was very much like, "This is a great use case. Let's put some resources behind it. What help do you need? How can I help you? " That was really huge for me to kind of get it over the finish line.

Shannon Ogborn (15:08):

I love that talent teams are getting to partner more with other people in the organization when it comes to AI related stuff. We have a lot of talent people who are quickly becoming experts in AI, but a lot of people just generally in this space, in any space, there just hasn't been enough time to become an expert. So being able to partner and work with teams that have been doing adjacent work for years is hugely impactful to be able to just tighten up the project and really get it to where you want it to be because that's not necessarily our expertise area.

Kyle Gatlin (15:49):

Yeah. I think you see this fear of just this AI replace, right? And it's really an AI enhancer for me. I think when you think beyond your kind of intro to AI of, yes, can it write my email? Can it write my outreach and can I put it in a campaign? That's great. I think those are incredibly useful, but how can it also help your team focus on the human connection, focus on the candidate experience, creating a great candidate experience, creating a great hiring manager experience and essentially distilling a lot of information to a lot of people very, very quickly. And that kind of thought process is the real kind of mindset shift for me where I was like, "This is where we need to go as TA, right? This is what we need to focus on. " It's super impactful.

Shannon Ogborn (16:39):

And I think for every time a talent leader, especially someone who's leading a team is able to step out and be like, "You know what? I'm going to take a risk on this because I think it's something that we need to learn. It's something that we need to do. It's the way that we all need to move forward." And the top down aspect of participating in AI and using AI in your daily work is the modeling is very important top down. I feel like the organizations who have been the most successful with it that I've talked to so far are ones where the leader is like really ... I mean, I think there's always cautious optimism, like be careful, right? You'll follow the policies of your company, et cetera, et cetera. But just having that mindset from the top down is huge.

Kyle Gatlin (17:24):

Yeah, absolutely. I encourage my whole team. The company initiative is there as well, but it's just this use it as much as you can, test it as much as possible, validate the information, right? If it's not moving the needle for you and it's not saving you time or making you more effective or more efficient, don't feel forced, right? There's some people who still take notes by hand and be doing that- Are you

Shannon Ogborn (17:50):

Looking at me? This is a direct call out, you guys.

Kyle Gatlin (17:54):

So it helps you create a candidate experience and really pay attention and be involved. That's great. I think you still should do those things.

Shannon Ogborn (18:03):

Leverage looks different for different people. You had mentioned something about emails and tone. When I think about building an AI agent, one of my curiosities is always, how do you get the tone right? Because you want, I presume, you want your employees to feel like they're speaking to someone from the talent team, not that they're just talking to a robot. How do you finesse that?

Kyle Gatlin (18:26):

There's a lot of different kind of tools and tricks you can use to prompt it to sound like yourself, right? I can talk into it and this is how I talk, this is how I write, right? Read all of my emails that I've written. I think it's just important telling it what to do is like what not to do, right? Don't sound like this. There's a lot of syntax things that sound very AI and I don't want to sound like that. And so I always put those in to make sure that it sounds as real as possible.

Shannon Ogborn (18:54):

Yeah. And like generous tone of, I'm so glad you came to me with this question, not, this seems like something you should know already. And it's kind of wild that if you don't tell it to not do that, it could actually default to that and then people don't want to use it.

Kyle Gatlin (19:13):

Yeah. And that's where the testing came in. It was having other people tested in the organization that have never hired or might not hire that are early in their career, that are later in their career. It's like, what questions would you ask it? Because I'm saying, "Hey, I want a job description for this. I want to build an interview," but they're saying, "What do I do now? I need to open a job. What do I do? " And so we went back and added how to open a job record at our company. What's the process? Where to go? Here are the links. And so we just kind of kept building it and got it into a really great place that can function.

Shannon Ogborn (19:47):

So you all launched this in April-ish timeframe and as I'm understanding it, you've already done the continuous improvement and expanded from the original scope, which was kind of the hiring framework to also include the full hiring journey because it's what people have questions about.

Kyle Gatlin (20:04):

Yeah. It was one of the most asked questions. How do I hire at Arrive? What do I need to do? Where do I fill out a request form? What information do I need? After I fill it out, what's going to happen? And those are the first questions everyone came to us and said, "This is really what I want to know. " And once they got those answered, they would say, okay, the agent is then prompted to say, "Great, are you ready to build a job description? Here are a few clarifying questions I need to help you build this out. " And so that was kind of the feedback we got very early on and we made the changes adjusted and that's what's great about it. You make one change one place and it's good for 4,000 people across the world.

Shannon Ogborn (20:46):

4,000 people across the world, that's a lot of people.

Kyle Gatlin (20:49):

It's a lot of people. And that's

Shannon Ogborn (20:50):

A lot of world.

Kyle Gatlin (20:51):

A lot of different languages too. This kind of removes that barrier. We have people in France, we have people in Spain. English is a language they might speak, but you don't know how well. And so it kind of removes that barrier as well and it allows us to reach even more markets that we support. I have French speaking recruiters, but if they're not available, the agent always is.

Shannon Ogborn (21:13):

That is actually an incredible point, especially across time zones, across languages. Although there are a lot of companies where there is a sort of minimum expectation of we must have at least like X overlap of shared language, that doesn't mean that's the person's native language or that they're in a very complicated document on complex topics are going to understand all the nuance and that's actually something I didn't really think of. I guess the other thing that comes to mind is 4,000 people across the world, how do you get the buy-in for that? What did you all do for that change management? Because I think there's people who really lean into AI and there are people who are like, "You know what? I'm going to contact the recruiter anyway, even though I could use the agent." How did you get people to buy into utilizing the agent?

Kyle Gatlin (22:06):

I empower my team to kind of promote this self-service model and say, "Hey, this is a great question. I'm sure you have more. Please use this agent." Anything that it can't answer, I'm happy to jump in. We're going to do this together anyway, but you can do all the pre-work and our time together will be more efficient. I push it into our people leaders Slack channel where I kind of constantly promote it and say, "Hey, new faces around, here's this thing, please feel free to use it whenever you want to. " We're still going to get the questions. It's always going to happen, but we push people to it as much as possible.

Shannon Ogborn (22:43):

Did you find yourself needing to create a sort of training or anything like that that would prompt people to just be more aware of it? I think awareness of these things actually is one of the more significant blockers. Did that come up at all?

Kyle Gatlin (22:58):

Yeah. So we did build a training. The teacher and me couldn't help it. I would say it's less training, more awareness campaign. Can I put it on our learning management system and make it required for people managers? Absolutely can. And so now you can go through this five minute training, understand it really does focus on our values a lot, but hey, this document exists. Here's how we hire it arrive. If you have any questions, here's an agent. It will answer anything about this document that you might want to know.

Shannon Ogborn (23:26):

So who takes that training? Is it required? Is it more loose?

Kyle Gatlin (23:30):

Right now we're still kind of working out a few kinks, but the plan is to push it out to require for people leaders. It's five minutes. I think it's more valuable than the five minutes they will spend looking through it. So yeah, we're going to definitely push it out to them.

Shannon Ogborn (23:44):

Well, from all of the peer reviewed research articles that I've read about trainings, top down requirement is actually one of the biggest indicators of completion. There you go. There's data right there.

Kyle Gatlin (23:57):

Exactly. Yeah. This is exactly why we're doing it.

Shannon Ogborn (24:00):

You had talked a little bit about some of the results, especially around humanity, but when you think about outcomes, even though at this time it's only been about a month since you've gone live with it, what have you noticed sort of anecdotally or directionally?

Kyle Gatlin (24:19):

Less questions, more efficient interview processes from hiring managers, the recruiting team giving feedback than saying, "I can stand on this document as a place of security to say that's not how we should do it. I think we should push towards these more efficient processes." We recently had a candidate reach out. They accepted an offer, which was great, but she made a point to say, "This was the most efficient interview process I've been through." It's a two-sided coin. When you optimize for the internal hiring, you're also creating the same experience for the candidate. A candidate doesn't want to sit in three interviews and answer the same questions. They want to talk about their experience and their skills and feel like they're being assessed really well so that they can feel like they had a fair shot at getting a job that they feel qualified for. Otherwise, they wouldn't applied or answered your in mail

Shannon Ogborn (25:13):

100% everything that a company does in their internal process and consideration impacts a person on the other side. It impacts people internally too. It impacts how well somebody can interview. It impacts how well the recruiter can sell the opportunity. It impacts the candidate and what they feel the experience is. Candidates can feel if you are organized. They really can and they can really feel when you're not. 100%.

Kyle Gatlin (25:42):

Yeah. I've been through the processes myself.

Shannon Ogborn (25:44):

Yeah. No, exactly. Do you find that recruiters are getting to spend time on other activities that they would maybe normally not have as much time for because some of the questions are deflected sounds like a negative word, but I don't think it is. There's questions that they were previously getting that might be deflected. Is that giving them time back?

Kyle Gatlin (26:05):

Yeah. I think some of the impact is immeasurable as with many things that you do, but having less questions is great. Having more impactful candidate conversations and the confidence to push them through the process that you're a fit for and this will assess you well and candidates then moving through a process. It's no more ... One of the main intention of the document, the agent is to say is to not get through a third, fourth interview and just say, "I just don't know. " After three, after four, that's kind of where we draw a line for 95% of the roles, you should know. You should definitively know yes or no and know is just as good to know that- Totally.

Shannon Ogborn (26:48):

Just commit. You should be able to confidently commit.

Kyle Gatlin (26:51):

Confidently commit and let's move on. Let's not waste our time that's valuable. Let's not waste the candidate's time that's valuable, right? It doesn't mean this is a bad candidate, but they might not be a fit for our needs and that's what we're assessing for.

Shannon Ogborn (27:05):

100%. I'd imagine that there's a lot of possibilities moving forward, like so many possibilities where it might feel overwhelming of like, where do we take this next? When you think about the scope of where a foundation of this can go next, what are you most excited about?

Kyle Gatlin (27:23):

I think for me, when I first started in my kind of AI journey, it's this grandiose idea that was almost the blocker, right? It's like, okay, I'm ready to go hiking. I might as well go up Everest. And I had the opportunity to sit down with some product managers and they kind of reframed the way I look at things. It's always build small and then build out. And for me, that was kind of institutional in me getting this done because of course I have tons of grand ideas for it. Well,

Shannon Ogborn (27:55):

It's like the phrase, how do you eat an elephant

Kyle Gatlin (27:59):

One

Shannon Ogborn (27:59):

Flight at a time, which is so morbid and gross, but you get the point. You can't boil the ocean in one day. You really have to take buckets out.

Kyle Gatlin (28:09):

Exactly. That's

Shannon Ogborn (28:09):

An analogy I just made up.

Kyle Gatlin (28:12):

Exactly. And so for me, it's so many things. I want to add addendums to say, we want to assess for this thing for this team. Maybe engineering does have a very specific or each engineering team. I would love to make this public facing for candidates. How candidates, I have the knowledge to show up and be successful. Of course, we're using AI or just emails to say, "Hey, here's how you should prepare. Here's what to expect." What if I could automate that and use this document as kind of the foundation for that? This is how we assess people. You should know. It would be great and useful information for you. I'm not trying to gate keep anything, right?

Shannon Ogborn (28:50):

Setting candidates up for success, I've never really quite understood organizations who are like, "We intentionally tell you nothing and we tell you that we intentionally tell you nothing because we want to organically know that we're making the right choice." I'm like, "Isn't there something to be said about people being able to prepare and preparing well? Isn't that kind of like what work is? "

Kyle Gatlin (29:10):

It's 100%. You

Shannon Ogborn (29:11):

Don't go into a project with no context. You always have some context.

Kyle Gatlin (29:16):

Are they going to come to our organization and not be told anything and then be expected to go and be successful now?

Shannon Ogborn (29:22):

Honestly, in some places.

Kyle Gatlin (29:24):

Potentially. Not in

Shannon Ogborn (29:25):

Arrive, but at some places, maybe.

Kyle Gatlin (29:27):

Potentially. Which is

Shannon Ogborn (29:28):

Not right

Kyle Gatlin (29:29):

By the

Shannon Ogborn (29:29):

Way.

Kyle Gatlin (29:30):

Of course. And I think if the questions are correct and the assessment is looking for the correct things, even if the candidates had the questions beforehand, you should still be able to assess them fairly.

Shannon Ogborn (29:40):

I 100% agree. It doesn't make it unfair. In fact, it makes it more fair if everybody has access to the same information, which I think on the candidate side is what is so compelling about the AI agent is that anyone could go in and ask whatever questions they want. They all have access to this information, they can all find out the same things and Different candidates have different curiosities and questions and just being able to ... Every time I've had to interview, which hasn't thankfully been for a while, but every time I've had to interview, I'm prepping late hours of the night before an interview and I'm like, I just wish that I could contact the recruiter and get this question answered before because the context could be the difference between you answering the question in a way that actually resonates with the audience or not.

(30:30):

And just that twenty four seven access I think is a really powerful unlock to people for both internal and external, especially a lot of people work from home now or they work remotely and it's like, I can't just go stop by your desk and say, "Hey, I have this question about this. " And we chitchat for a minute and then I'm like, "Hey, I have my answer and I'm out. " People need more access than I think it brings the silos together.

Kyle Gatlin (30:55):

Yeah. Our recruiting team spread out. We're across the world. So interacting with hiring managers that we are not in the same time zone and we may never cross paths, but I want them to have the same information as the person that sits right next to me. So this democratizing all of the information that recruiting has, we're not gatekeeping either. We want you to be successful in hiring. We want the candidate to be successful. Our goal was to be stewards of the business and grow and grow effectively with the business.

Shannon Ogborn (31:28):

Yeah. I love this message. Well, anything else you want to add about this?

Kyle Gatlin (31:34):

Yeah, I think I just want to reiterate. I really wasn't intending to make everyone an expert. There are experts in our company and different areas. I happen to be one of the talent acquisition and leaning on my team and the leads and the people who have been part of the company and the culture were really important, but I wanted to make all of our expertise as available to everyone and not hidden behind even the most well organized Google Drive but accessible whenever you want it. That was my main goal and I think we 100% achieve that.

Shannon Ogborn (32:06):

I love that for you. And I'm very excited to see how this evolves, especially on the candidate side. In my dreams I do like a Shark Tank update. Where are they now? In which case I would love to hear in the future how this has worked out for candidates.

Kyle Gatlin (32:23):

Yeah. Well, we don't have anything quite yet, so no candidates reaching out to me asking me, but it is on my roadmap. It's the one thing I want to do next. I think it's the most impactful.

Shannon Ogborn (32:33):

Totally.

Kyle Gatlin (32:34):

Yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (32:34):

100%. Amazing. Well, we are going to move on to our final three questions. If you want to hear what hiring excellence means to Kyle, what his recruiting hot take is, which I'm very excited about. And one thing he would tell his earlier career self, you can head to the extended version on YouTube if you're not already there. Well, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Kyle Gatlin (32:59):

Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn. You can reach out. I will answer any questions. I don't gate keep. I don't charge. I like to be an open book. I think that teacher in me is always about giving and trying to ... I want to see everyone get a job. All right. And I hope I can help in any way. So follow me on LinkedIn. Reach out anytime.

Shannon Ogborn (33:19):

A rising tide lifts all ships. I genuinely believe that there is nothing that I wouldn't try to help someone with as best as I could. You might be flooded in your inbox, but that's a later problem. This is super helpful. This is really going to resonate with people just because everyone's trying to find the highest leverage ways to utilize AI at their companies, whether that be for internal, what you're all working on, what you hope to achieve with candidates. So I think people will get a lot out of this. Thank you for joining us.

Kyle Gatlin (33:50):

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (33:53):

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