HR Leaders: Why Recruiting Is Going Back to Basics

Chris Rainey [00:01:05]:
Adam, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing?

Adam Godson [00:01:06]:
Yeah, Chris, great to be with you. I'm doing well. Two days in a row, you're stuck with me.

Chris Rainey [00:01:12]:
Let's go, it's a good day. What brings you to London, my friend?

Adam Godson [00:01:14]:
We came here for our Conversation Club — a gathering we have with our clients in EMEA. Just a time to get together as a community, talk about talent acquisition, do lots of listening to the challenges people are having, share some of the things we're thinking about, and get feedback and validation. It's one of our favorite times of the year, and honestly one of the things that really drives our innovation at Paradox.

Chris Rainey [00:01:36]:
I hear a lot of companies try to do their own version of this, but this was the first time I got to experience it, and I felt like you and the team weren't just talking the talk — you're walking it. I loved how engaged your customers were, both in driving product innovation and just the openness to take feedback and share new innovations with the room.

Adam Godson [00:02:11]:
I think one of the things that's made us different as a software company is that we were built by practitioners — people who've been in the industry — and we listen a lot to them and want to build with them. That means having the authenticity, and frankly the vulnerability, to put our customers in a room and take the heat if something isn't going well, while having the confidence to show up and perform too.

Chris Rainey [00:02:40]:
It must be motivating for you and the team, knowing you're driving toward the right goal — not based on gut feeling, but on what people are actually voting for with their dollars. That's the real customer validation.

Adam Godson [00:02:56]:
Exactly. It's interesting — you'll meet a product manager somewhere else who says, "How do I even find customers to talk to?" And I'm like, "I've got a thousand in my phone."

Chris Rainey [00:03:05]:
That's rare, though. I work with a lot of players in this space, and it's very rare to see that close a connection with customers.

Adam Godson [00:03:17]:
It's an intentional choice. We decided to build the company a different way. We understood the playbook for how you're "supposed" to scale, and we said, let's do the opposite. Having every customer with your cell phone number has its downsides — something goes wrong and they're going to hit you wherever you are — but it's a perspective we've held: be customer-centric, and it's worked for us.

Chris Rainey [00:03:46]:
Every CHRO I interview, when we talk about AI, the first use case they bring up is talent acquisition — moving from process-heavy recruiting to AI-enabled hiring at scale. I saw people dip a toe in last year, and this year they're fully in. Where are we right now in that TA transformation?

Adam Godson [00:04:16]:
We see organizations at very different points in that life cycle. We've been doing AI in talent acquisition for more than half a decade — at the time you had to squint to see it, but now it's mainstream. You don't walk into a room anymore and have to explain what you're even talking about. It's an understandable business problem, and we've been at it long enough to see transformative results: taking time-to-hire from 60 days to seven, from 21 days to three, increasing sales per labor hour by 4% — which is hundreds of millions in revenue. The results speak for themselves, and there's still a lot to do. It's a pretty inefficient process at most companies, and we're here for it.

Chris Rainey [00:05:10]:
With your customers especially, what are the problems the best TA teams are actually solving with AI? There's so many areas within TA you could tackle — what are the top ones where you're seeing real success?

Adam Godson [00:05:26]:
We recommend looking at areas of inefficiency — where things are slowing down, where people are getting stuck — and starting with the easy wins. We see a lot of people start with interview scheduling, and interview intelligence, which were actually the top two voted topics at our event. I solved the problem of interview scheduling back in 2011, so it's been 15 years for me. At the time, people railed on me — "this is going to be so impersonal, you're automating the interview schedule?" And I'd say, "I don't think people want this to be personal." What we discovered is people don't want self-actualization from an interview-scheduling moment. They want it fast and right. Playing phone tag for three days to land on a time is awful — let's just get it done, book the room, handle the logistics over text, and move on.

Adam Godson [00:07:00]:
We've learned all the corner cases over the years — we schedule more than 35 million interviews a year, so you learn a few things: room bookings, panels, stacks, tests, locations, all of it. We've collapsed a process that used to take three to five days down to 90 seconds. We ask people how their scheduling experience was, and 99% say it's great. And that win creates momentum — "great, you nailed that, let's do screening next, let's do reminders, let's do hiring events" — clearing the friction that's been preventing teams from hitting their goals.

Chris Rainey [00:07:39]:
One of the things I thought was really cool that you shared was the agent's ability to handle rescheduling — someone says, "I need to reschedule, I'm not feeling well," and the agent just handles it.

Adam Godson [00:07:52]:
On the surface it looks like an easy problem — I'm scheduling an interview, how hard can that be? But then someone calls in sick, you need to sub interviewer A for interviewer B, there's a whole panel, and a chain of communication that has to happen. There's real complexity there, and frankly agents are good at it, people are slow at it — we've built a better way.

Chris Rainey [00:08:14]:
It's a no-brainer once you see it — it knows everyone's availability.

Adam Godson [00:08:19]:
It is a no-brainer, but it's really just the first case. We see the way talent acquisition processes run changing more broadly. Showing an early, strong success story with clear ROI gets the next transformation project greenlit — it's the beginning of how companies find talent and people find jobs becoming AI-centric. Starting with those quick wins makes a huge difference.

Chris Rainey [00:08:47]:
When you and the team look at new product features, how do you think about the balance between automation, recruiter judgment, and human connection?

Adam Godson [00:08:58]:
We approach it 180 degrees differently than we used to. Most of my career — I've been in HR tech for 20 years — was spent standing at a whiteboard figuring out what the tech could do, and putting people wherever the tech couldn't. Now we go the other way: we ask where we want the human connection to be, what humans can uniquely do that makes something feel special, and design that first. Things like — if someone comes in for an onsite interview, we want that to be a special experience, and we measure our close rate on it because that matters. We design the human elements first, then assume the tech can do mostly whatever else is needed, rather than the other way around.

Chris Rainey [00:09:57]:
I love that — and it feels like we've come full circle, where power skills and human skills are becoming more important precisely because AI is freeing up capacity for recruiters and hiring managers.

Adam Godson [00:10:21]:
If we do it right, the result is a more human experience. I actually think this is a moment where talent acquisition leaders have a moral responsibility to design good processes. There are plenty of ways to just use tech to spam each other on all sides — we're already seeing that with spam applications — and create a world nobody wants to live in, full of second-order problems. Or we can do thoughtful, well-designed application of technology and build a system that reduces friction between talent and jobs and genuinely makes the world better. That's the reason I do this — I see how happy people are when they're in the right job, and how companies perform when they've got the right talent.

Chris Rainey [00:11:09]:
Interestingly, I met a couple of TA leaders at the event who were actually hired through your platform — it had come full circle for them.

Adam Godson [00:11:28]:
That's really fun. It's still somewhat novel to see AI in the process — scheduling an interview, answering candidate questions — so we get a lot of comments like, "that showed me the company was innovative." Done well, there's still a brand lift to using AI in the hiring process.

Chris Rainey [00:11:50]:
I also wanted to ask about onboarding — the lifecycle and the moments that matter, which used to be whole separate products, and now you're bringing into the platform.

Adam Godson [00:12:09]:
AI lets you create a personalized experience at scale — the communication, recognizing the moments that matter, letting people check in. I think we'd created some false walls around our products over the years and hadn't thought deeply enough about the candidate's full journey. Someone applies to a brand they respect, wants to check their application status — and then the moment they're hired, everything changes, a whole different set of systems kicks in. So we think about that as one experience: getting you from "yes" to your first day, making sure you're hyped and have what you need, checking in along the way. On day one, there's a big welcome message, here's what you need, save this number if you have a question. Especially for frontline workers who have lots of options and spend their time out in the world, being able to do that by text and WhatsApp is a big deal — answering a question by text, sending a happy birthday message from the team, celebrating someone hitting their first week and first paycheck. Those moments add up, and they also build the infrastructure for what comes next — learning content, performance content, task management, all through the same channel.

Chris Rainey [00:14:00]:
Recognition was another one you mentioned — with frontline work it can be hard to feel part of the organization. How do you communicate culture so people feel that connective tissue?

Adam Godson [00:14:20]:
It comes down to having that broader brand identity. People experience the store or location they work at as how they experience the company, and results can vary wildly by location — it can be the Wild West out there. Giving companies more control over that brand experience means it's not just down to the individual manager; employees feel part of a broader story. As work gets more flexible — you don't just work the Third Street location, you work five different locations at different times — that broader story matters even more.

Chris Rainey [00:14:57]:
What do you believe the next generation of recruiting teams will be able to do in the next couple of years that we never thought would be possible?

Adam Godson [00:15:09]:
The identification of talent and the reduction of friction in labor markets — really knowing who's available and understanding the talent market completely. So much of what I'd call process delivery, the logistics of hiring, will get so much easier. But convincing people to join is going to get harder, because roles are so available — you can raise your hand and apply to multiple locations easily. There's a real pro and con to that.

Chris Rainey [00:15:51]:
So in a lot of ways this is a back-to-basics moment for recruiting — the actual conversation is what separates you.

Adam Godson [00:15:57]:
That's it exactly. As AI makes many things easier, we crave human experience even more. Look at how many coffee shops are in this city — I can make a great cup of coffee at home, espresso machines have never been better, but people still crave that human experience. What's valuable now is what's handmade, what's unique, not mass-produced. Even this year, more than ever, our CHRO community has told us, "Chris, we need more in-person events, we need to get together" — in a world where we're so disconnected, people crave that connection, that humanity. And as more things commoditize, human connection is going to matter more, and nowhere more than in talent acquisition. The skill of actually recruiting someone — convincing them to join, building relationships over coffee shop meetings over time — will be the transcendent skill of the next era.

Chris Rainey [00:17:06]:
Looking ahead, what are you most excited about?

Adam Godson [00:17:13]:
Frankly, I'm excited to keep making a difference on the frontline — getting places staffed. One of my favorite notes from a hiring manager was, "I love my job again because we're fully staffed." Anyone who's worked a restaurant or retail shop knows how great a fully-staffed night feels, and how bad it is when someone's out sick in the kitchen — it ruins the whole night. So being able to cause that good in the world matters to me. I love it when the stories come in — "we reduced our time to hire, we're staffed, our stores are making more money" — even getting mentioned on earnings calls because the hiring process made a business difference. Connecting that whole chain of events together is what makes me legitimately happy.

Chris Rainey [00:18:09]:
Before you go — where's the best place for people to connect with you or the team, or try to join the next Conversation Club?

Adam Godson [00:18:17]:
Please do — find me, Adam Godson, on LinkedIn and X, as well as Paradox.ai.

Chris Rainey [00:18:27]:
I'll drop the links for everyone wherever you're watching. Good to see you again, my friend.

Adam Godson [00:18:30]:
Likewise — good to see you. Thanks for the conversation.