Zero Friction, Infinite Resumes, No Hope with Nathan Labenz

Joel Cheesman (0:00)

Dude, it turns out that Winston, Smart Recruiter's first AI hiring sidekick, is taking all the grunt work out of Recruiter's Day. Things like candidate screening, scheduling, all the admin garbage no one actually wants to touch, Winston can do it all.

Chad Sowash (0:17)

Man, you know I'm a fan of using new tech that takes the boring, repetitive crap out of a Recruiter's Day and allows them to have more time to connect with hiring managers and candidates.

Joel Cheesman (0:29)

Yep, Winston is doing the heavy lifting while Recruiter's kick back and do the actual hiring stuff. You know, like talking to people.

Chad Sowash (0:37)

I really dig that Smart Recruiter's is evolving out of the legacy ATS model and embracing cleaner processes using AI. With most ATS providers, it's like, hey, 2003 called and it wants its 30-minute application process back.

Joel Cheesman (0:53)

No doubt. It sounds like Rebecca and the team are using Winston to push Smart Recruiter's into the future, while the ATS vendors are basically on an AOL dial-up modem with a dashboard.

Chad Sowash (1:05)

With Smart Recruiter's, Winston does the grind and the recruiters get the glory.

Joel Cheesman (1:11)

For more information on superhuman hiring with Winston, visit smartrecruiters.com. That's smartrecruiters.com.

Chad Sowash (1:19)

Start using Winston today or I guess you can stick with me.

SPEAKER_3 (1:25)

Now we return you to our regular scheduled program, In Progress.

SPEAKER_4 (1:29)

Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts.

SPEAKER_5 (1:40)

Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark.

SPEAKER_6 (1:44)

Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast.

Joel Cheesman (1:48)

Yeah, it's the podcast your lead singer warns you about, also known as The Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is riding shotgun as we welcome Nathan Labenz to the show. Nathan is the host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast, which is very cerebral.

Chad Sowash (2:09)

Too cerebral. How do you get on this show?

Joel Cheesman (2:11)

Yeah, Nathan, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

Nathan Labenz (2:16)

Thank you. I'm excited to be here and looking forward to this conversation. I think it's going to be a very interesting one.

Joel Cheesman (2:20)

It'll be a nice switch up from your CNN interviews. This is the clown news network.

Nathan Labenz (2:26)

We'll really have time to unpack things here in a way that they don't.

Joel Cheesman (2:29)

No doubt.

A lot of our listeners that don't tune in to CNN may not know who you are. What's the Twitter bio? What's the elevator pitch on Nathan?

Nathan Labenz (2:37)

Yeah, I call myself these days a full-time student of AI. For most of my career, I've been an entrepreneur, started a tech company. I was running that company in Detroit, my hometown until a few years ago.

I'd always had a long-standing interest in AI, but of course, there wasn't really all that much AI happening until we hit a couple of key thresholds. I remember being in the hospital waiting room just before my first son was born in 2019 reading about GPT-2 and being like, oh, wow, this seems like it could be something. GPT-3 followed the year after. With GPT-3, I started tinkering a little bit and actually made a little bot to talk to my grandfather who had Alzheimer's at the time. That didn't really work. It was a little too slow. But the idea that AIs could start to talk to us in natural language was really fascinating to me. My company turned out to be perfectly positioned to be an early adopter of language models and also image generation, image understanding. There were several things happening at once. And my big eureka moment was realizing that all these different modalities of AI, the text generation, image generation, and so on, were all working the same way. Basically, the same underlying architecture, same mechanisms, same basic processes of data collection and training, were making all these things advance really quickly.

And that, for me, was like, oh, wait, if this same kind of structure can do all these different things, this is going to go really far. We're going to see these systems do everything, and we're going to see them be really integrated. And so at that point, I was like, you know what? I need to go all in on understanding what is going on with AI. So that's been my project for the last four years now.

Joel Cheesman (4:11)

Did the brain chip go in your baby right after birth, or did you wait a little bit?