[00:00:01] Amy Adler: Hello, this is your host, Amy Adler. You're about to hear some amazing insights about hiring through the experience of a tech expert whose name is Elizabeth Anderson of Lunarlab IO. We talk about COVID letters, applications, hiring, and how AI is impacting all of these, so stay tuned. Elizabeth is an incredible resource, and I'm so glad she and I had the chance to speak. But first, a few notes. First, I hope you'll take a few minutes to subscribe so you can listen to the prior episodes of this podcast and tune into future recordings. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and a dozen other of your favorite podcast streaming platforms. Oh, and do share the podcast with your friends and colleagues who might also benefit from the work we're doing.
Number two. And relatedly, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I encourage you to subscribe also to the Job Search podcast, also on all of those platforms.
That is a series of five to ten minute soundbites of job search advice presented by yours truly. There are about 70 of those episodes, so tons for you to dig into.
Third thing, if you love what you're hearing and think you'd be a great guest on the show, then please do reach out. I'm on LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/in/amyladler, so find my profile and reach out. Connect with me. Fourth, if you are in the midst of a job search and need crucial advice or resume writing expertise, please check out my services fivestrengths.com – https://fivestrengths.com. thanks for listening. I appreciate you so much, and welcome to another episode of Amy Adler's how I hire.
[00:01:59] Amy Adler: Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of how I hire. My name is Amy Adler, and as you all know, I am a resume writer and you can find
[email protected] dot. I am so excited to be here today with Elizabeth Anderson to talk yet again about hiring practices from the point of view of somebody who was in the trenches every day.
Elizabeth is somebody I connected with on LinkedIn as she was posting about her practice at Lunar Lab, that's Lunarlab IO and her experiences as she was hiring for her own company. So of course I reached out. We had never met before, never spoken, but my inquiry prompted a conversation. We had a fabulous time. And of course I said, hey, we have to have this conversation upfront and personal because I think the listeners out there are wondering about, dare I say, the impact of AI, as well as a number of other things on hiring practices and how hiring managers, especially people in the C suite, like Elizabeth, are thinking about these practices. So that's my purpose here today. And with that, I am welcoming you, Elizabeth, to how I hire. Thank you so much for joining me. I really. I can't tell you how excited I am.
[00:03:27] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
[00:03:30] Amy Adler: Awesome. So maybe we could start with just 5 seconds on kind of how you got to where you are and then we can dig into the whole AI question. I know that's part and parcel of your life, too.
[00:03:41] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah. So, you know, I have been in tech for a long time and did project management for ages and then release management. The kind of inside joke at my company is that I have done every single job in tech except for writing code, so. Been in tech for a long time. I actually started my own company a few years ago, Lunar Lab. That is my own company. I've been in senior management for many, many years since for that.
And yeah, so what we do is any kind of software, we help people with the UX, design the strategy, project management, any kind of user research or validation that they're doing. And we do a good bit of AI consulting in conjunction with a lot of these products that we're talking about right now. We work with every single industry and we've even worked on hiring apps and even some AI enabled hiring apps. So we've kind of done it all within our time in the tech industry.
[00:04:38] Amy Adler: Well, if anybody out there listening is like me, that makes me salivate. First of all, you have an incredible background, and, you know, women in tech and all that is near and dear to my heart. I don't know if I ever told you I did. A Covid project for me was to get an associate's degree in computer science because I wanted to.
But anyway, the notion that AI plays so heavily into, if not the practice, but certainly the conception of job search and hiring, I think people are assigning it a way bigger position or a higher order impact than maybe it does have or should have. I guess I'll ask that question.
But the reason that, like I said, I originally reached out to you hinged on this post. I guess we must have been either connected or connected to people who are connected. I don't know what it was, but I saw what you were saying. And to paraphrase if it's okay, at the time, you were hiring for a social media manager, which inherently is a writing heavily based role. There's got to be writing and social media management.
And I'm going to actually just read the comment that you made about your experience in receiving what looked to be hundreds of applicants or applications?
It says job applicants. I know you're sending out tons of resumes, but please do not use chat GPT to write your cover letters or emails or resumes. I can tell it looks identical to 20 other cover letters I just read, and I truly mean identical. I've seen at least four that were literally the exact same wording.
[00:06:30] Elizabeth Anderson: So this has happened so many times when we have been hiring recently. And I will say that post was just born out of the frustration of I do actually go through all of the resumes and cover letters that we receive, and I have a whole philosophy about that and I know that's a real time suck and we can kind of talk about that more. But I do read those things because I think that it's important to show our candidates the care. Like I want to extend care to them because they took time to respond to our job posting. And then just seeing really more than ever before in any other hiring round that we have done, this particular hiring round was felt just like an onslaught of chat GPT. Because chat GPT, I mean, it has a very distinct voice, you can tell, but it wasn't even just the voice of these things. It was. It was truly that several of them were, were near identical to each other and was really kind of incredible just seeing the flood of them that were coming through that were so. And you can really make, you can tell. You can tell when you're reading them.
[00:07:38] Amy Adler: Well, the extent to which there's so much to unpack in what you just said. There's the I read every single resume love that. I truly do. And I recognize how time intensive that must be. And I recognize the frustration in your words by your own very clear statement that these resumes and cover letters are coming through with kind of no thought behind them.
And I'm even going to put out there that there are services, I don't know what they're called or where to find them that will do this all for you and then sort of tweak your content, plus or minus, I guess, and send your resume and cover letter out to jobs you're not even qualified for. And it's just messing up the system. Anybody who's on LinkedIn following recruiters at all will see these comments and I think, you know, you're the ultimate recipient of this kind of mismatch between technology and, like, things you can do, technology can do, but maybe it shouldn't do.
And of course, on my side, I'm hoping that people recognize the value of really well written stuff because I like words. I like writing resumes.
I don't know, I want to do good work for good people. So figuring out as even a first cut what doesn't belong in the even the maybe pile.
[00:09:07] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah.
[00:09:09] Amy Adler: Is probably, I don't know, relieving or frustrating or annoying.
[00:09:13] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah.
Yeah. It's funny with these, because there is such a gap between the technology and what we're trying to do in a lot of ways. So I don't ever want to be unempathetic to our job seekers because I know that it's really tough out there and I've been a job seeker before myself, and I know what it's like to send out just dozens of resumes. And I know that people don't have time to, like handcraft, you know, like poet laureate level prose in a cover level, a cover letter. And I don't know that we, you know, we want that or want to ask for that. And a lot of times when I say cover letter, I don't even mean, you know, a traditional cover letter. A lot of times these days a cover letter can just be as much as just a simple email. Like, hey, I saw your job posting and that is absolutely critical. Like, we must have, like, if you send me an email with no subject line and no body and an attachment, I'm not going to be opening that email.
So there is like, there has to be some kind of like, hello, it's me. I'm interested in your job. I've attached my resume. Like, that piece kind of has to exist in a lot of ways. And, you know, I don't want to be unempathetic to our job seekers. I don't want to sound like that has to be anything greater than, hey, it's me. Here's my resume. I hope you will consider me, but I do think that we need to have a little bit more care involved in that than, you know, the same exact chat GPT message that I've gotten over and over again. And I mean over and over again.
[00:10:48] Amy Adler: Yeah, I really didn't appreciate the similarity, you know, with the same job posting into chat DPT. It doesn't know anything else.
One person's access to the data set isn't going to be all that different from somebody else's.
[00:11:05] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, and the post was really funny. That post really took off because I think a lot of people were feeling kind of defensive about, you know, hey, maybe I have used that. One of the comments that struck out to me a lot in that post were people who were saying things like, well, it's not fair if you, as the, you know, as the hiring manager can use AI, but I can't. And, you know, that's not fair to me. And I thought that comment was really interesting because I'm not using AI in the hiring process for a lot of reasons. As a person who works in AI, I am not using AI in my personal hiring process at all. I don't let it touch it.
But I also think that there's an overestimation of how many hiring managers are using AI. I don't think that it's as many as people think that there are. And I think that a lot of that is born out of the frustrations of there are so many jobs to apply for and so many applications get, you know, go out. And I think that people are, you know, they do get rejected from jobs. And it can be sometimes easy to just blame AI. Sometimes the problem is the job seekers resume, but a lot of times the problem is just, you know, the fact that we really kind of have some time constraints around hiring. And sometimes people do get rejected, like for just various reasons. I used to know a hiring manager, this is horrible. Like 15 years ago, I knew this guy and we were just getting a flood of resumes in the industry at the time. And, I mean, it would just be like 400 resumes. And this was back in the days of paper resumes. And this guy took half of it. He just took the stack and cut it in half and threw half of them in the trash and was like, I can only go through this number of resumes. Like, it is like logistically impossible for me to go through more resumes than this right here. And so all those people got, the best candidate could have been in that rejected pile that he threw in the trash can. It could have been the absolute best candidate.
But to his point, it's very, it's difficult. You can't get through 400 resumes and when you've got to hire within the next week because, you know, you've got this critical thing going on. So I think the whole system itself is kind of has some broken spots to it. And I think there's a lot of frustration around where those broken spots are. And there are some things about that system which I'm not, I'm not defending, but there are some things about, like the entire system of hiring that are sort of unfair. And boy, I would like somebody to fix all of those. But it's a, I think whoever can, like, truly, genuinely fix the broken pieces of hiring instead of just throwing band aids on it. That person is going to make so much money because, you know, there are just some pieces that are very frustrating. But I don't think that as many people, as many hiring managers or recruiters are using AI as what some people.
[00:14:07] Amy Adler: May believe, for sure. And thankfully, we're not in a situation where we have literally printed out 400 pages on desk. We have this applicant tracking software, at least recruiters do. I don't know if you're using it or if you're just using emails, but I think the suspicion on the part of job seekers comes from the fact that they know. I mean, this is literally what's happening. They're taking their documentation and their information and uploading it somewhere.
I think literally every recruiter I've ever talked to and people whose posts I read who probably don't know I exist, but I follow them avidly, assure their listeners, their readers that this is just a giant database of content that the applicant tracking software is built for receiving resumes, but it's no more complicated or sort of strategically different compared to a database that would hold, I don't know, accounting numbers or sales information or, I don't know, whatever else. It's just a place to hold information. Which then I think people get very squirrely about that, saying, well, if my data is somehow in some sort of technology based system, that you now out there have the power to do something nefarious, and I think it's easy for them, or maybe it's self protective for them to say, well, you know, my resume was auto rejected because then it is for them to say all the things that you have said.
And especially in the case of the COVID letter situation, not having a cover letter is a bad idea, but expecting decent writing for a writing job.
[00:15:56] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah.
[00:15:58] Amy Adler: Don't tech recruiters or hiring teams often require coding tests to prove you can do the coding? They don't expect you to write Shakespeare. They expect you to write, you know, whatever.
[00:16:08] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, I'm usually just looking for, can you communicate with another human? I mean, it's not like, you know, we're not talking about, like, asking anybody to jump over hurdles here, anything like that. I just. I just want to know that people can send an email.
And so. And there are two. There are these multifaceted, you know, pieces of that where sometimes I'll get, you know, sometimes you'll get the chat DPD. Sometimes you will get, you know, a pretty. Pretty decent, like, hey, hello, this is. This is me. Please look at my resume. I would be interested in working for you. Like, that's great. It does not have to be the most beautiful. I just need to know you can communicate. And then there, there's also this sort of subset where, like, I will get an email with no subject line and it'll just say resume attached. And I'm like, I need more than that too. You know, I need to know that people can, like, send an email and communicate because communication is really important in just about. I mean, I can't think of a single job where communication is not important. And I work in tech and we're kind of known for, you know, being an industry where you just sit quietly with your headphones on. But that's, that's actually not what goes on in tech. What goes on in tech is that we're communicating with each other all the time about everything and that's how we build these really great products. So I just, you know, I'm not asking for a ton. I do just need to know, know somebody can send a fairly basic email. But especially in a role that requires content, writing is, like, particularly important and necessary. And, you know, I would argue not too much to ask.
[00:17:43] Amy Adler: No, I mean, I think even among the younger set who don't seem to love email all that much, you know, sort of overdose texting or whatever dming of whatever type they know how to write an email, you know, there's a certain pattern to it, right? Like literally there's a subject line and then there's the email.
So following the etiquette of it is not asking a ton, it's not taxing somebody's skill set, but it might belie the fact that a lot of those resumes that you or emails that you did receive were generated by a system that wasn't designed or was designed badly to mass email.
I can only wonder, given the absolute hundreds of messages that you getting.
[00:18:36] Elizabeth Anderson: It is, and it will be so fast sometimes when we will send these. Particularly we found for when we post social media marketing roles. That is just a really crowded field and there are a ton of people in that field. There are also a ton of people trying to break into that field. Kind of like you alluded to earlier, we get a lot of people who, you know, don't, don't have the, have not worked in this before. We'll say, you know, we need two to three years experience and we'll get a lot of people who are like, you know, don't have an Instagram account, even their personal one. You know, or so who just don't really meet the qualifications. And so I try to vary. I try to, you know, I respond to each one of them. I look at each one of them.
We always, we, I think it's really important to always respond to people. I know a lot of companies don't do this, but even once people get into the interviewing process, we always make sure to, we tell them we're going to let you know either way, like, if you got it or not. Because I don't like to, I don't like to be ghosted and I don't want to ghost anybody else. So we let them know and we'll give feedback if they ask for feedback. So we let them know. If you want feedback on what happened, we always give them feedback. And it's, and it's funny with that, too, because I think for job seekers, it can be so stressful and you can make so many assumptions about why you didn't get the job that, oh, I must not have been doing good or I must have been bad or, you know, whatever. But a lot of times it just comes down to somebody just may have like, slightly more experience in one particular area. So we just hired the social media marketing person and we ended up having a lot of really great candidates in those last final interview rounds. And they asked for feedback and the feedback really was, is like, you were amazing. You were so good, you were so well prepared, you knew your stuff, you had the strategy down pat. Like, you knew what you're doing. We just ended up going with somebody who has a little more experience in this industry and is a little bit better on the graphic side. And when I talk about a little bit better, I mean a little bit better, do you know what I mean? So it's not, I don't ever want job seekers to go away feeling like they've done something wrong or bad because so many of them are amazing. And when we get into those hiring decisions, my gosh, it's like, it's terrible to have to decide between a bunch of really high quality candidates who, you know, you know, you can, you can get to the end of the hiring round and wind up with ten people who, like, you literally cannot make a bad decision here. Like, they're all so good, you know, and it's terrible for the hiring manager to have to make that call because you can only hire one of them and they are all amazing. But I don't ever want the, I don't ever want job seekers to think that they did something wrong. If they're perfectly wonderful, which so many of them are.
[00:21:26] Amy Adler: I cannot help but observe that the brand you have just described as an employer is extraordinary.
You nailed it. There's so much in the way of ghosting. There's so much in the way of bait and switch. I mean, just every kind of bad practice, every kind of ghosting on both sides, right?
I have heard of everyone, job seekers at every level, getting ghosted by recruiters and employers, and, of course, employers being ghosted by candidates, even those who've been hired. They don't show up the first day or. I don't even know. Like, all kinds of things are happening stuff.
[00:22:19] Elizabeth Anderson: I definitely. I definitely had a call with a guy once that I think a different person came to the second interview. Like. Like, I'm 99% sure it was a different person. It was utterly weird. So, I mean, some weird stuff is.
[00:22:33] Amy Adler: Going on out there, but I do wonder if it's all reactionary and the economy is not what it used to be. The world got very strange very quickly in the last, I don't know, 18 months.
I mean, well, of course, from 2020 onward, things were weird in one way, and then things got weird in a totally different way.
[00:22:53] Elizabeth Anderson: It's been weird. Well, millennial, and it's been weird your whole life, I guess.
[00:22:59] Amy Adler: It would have been your whole life. Yeah, I guess I had the dubious privilege of. Of seeing what, you know, some sort of normal life looked like prior to.
Well, prior to everything. Like, prior to Google.
That's a lot.
[00:23:14] Elizabeth Anderson: Early on in my career, I worked in banking and in 2008, and it was just, oh, my goodness. Oh, you want to talk about a weird time to work in an industry? That's when I was like, I'm out of here. I got to go work in tech.
But, yeah, I do think a lot of it is reactionary. You know, the. The system itself has, like, the system of hiring has so many problems to it. And for us. So my company, we work on software products, and sometimes those are hiring products. And so our job is to look at systems and kind of deeply understand the systems and deeply understand, like, where the problems are. And a lot of times we are band aiding the system of hiring, but the system itself is sort of inherently problematic. And what I mean by that is, okay, you've got a job. You can fill this job with one person. And the sort of building blocks of how to get there. Not necessarily. And the process may be different in every different company, but the building blocks of how to get there is. You have to tell people that there is a job, right. And then you have to find people who are interested in the job. And so people have to let you know that they're interested. And then you have to go through those people and figure out which one has the most experience. And then at some point you have to talk to them to know if they would be a good fit working with you. And then you have to pick one of them and hire. And those are sort of like the building blocks of it, but there are all these different ways that we work through that system. But those basic building blocks of like, let people know, find out if people are a good fit, talk to them, pick one. Right.
That is sort of the crux of all of this. And those things are the core pieces that I feel like have to happen in whatever system. But then we put these systems on top of it and some of the systems are broken. So I don't want to discount the fact that there are absolutely 100% there are AI assisted hiring software out there that is being biased towards people. That truly is. And it exists. It is out there. I don't think it's as widely used as people think it is, but I know, because I work in this industry, I know that there are software products that are biased and discriminatory, and I know that they're being used in hiring, and I think that's wrong.
But I also know that there are human systems that are biased and discriminatory, meaning that there are human managers out there that are just looking at resumes and saying, you know, this person is a woman and I'm not going to hire them. They're old and I'm not going to hire them. They have a funny name and I'm not going to hire them. That's, that's a real thing, too. And so there is this bias in the system that exists and it sucks and it's so frustrating and awful for, for hiring managers and job seekers. And, you know, the system itself is kind of broken. And I wish there was a way that we could sort of overcome those things in, in a way that's fair to everybody and in a way that gets those, gets the best outcomes out of the system but still uses kind of those main building blocks that we like that are fundamentally important. Like I have seen over and over and over companies that are trying to do things like eliminate interviews, and I think that is a terrible idea.
[00:26:42] Amy Adler: Our listeners can't see my utterly baffled expression there.
[00:26:47] Elizabeth Anderson: Oh, my gosh, it's wild. And I think that's coming from a place of, like, well, interviews are. Time sucks. So, like, nobody likes to go to an interview. Nobody likes to prepare for an interview, and it takes a lot of time for hiring managers. So let's just get rid of interviews. All of those problems are true. People don't like preparing for interviews because, like, you're going to do something and take a bunch of time and you don't even know if you're going to get the job. And it's really stressful, and you don't know if you're about to walk into some nice hiring manager or, like, a total jerk, which has happened to me before, you know, you have no idea. And then the hiring manager is like, oh, my God, I have, like, all these things in my calendar, and now I've got to interview all these people and they're all going to be perfectly lovely, and now I'm going to have to make a decision on which one to hire. So. But it's hard. But that doesn't mean that we just, like, scrap interviews altogether. But maybe there are some ways to fix interviewing. I guess one of the things that we have been trying at our company that's been really successful is that we send all of the interview questions ahead of the interview, which is kind of every time I tell someone that, they're like, what are you doing? That's crazy.
But we, it's what we have found with that. The reason why we started doing that was because we wanted to be a more fair to neurodivergent candidates or candidates who experience anxiety, and we just wanted to level the playing field a little bit so it'd be a little bit more accessible. But be letting people prepare, I guess at our company, we want people to be prepared. So, like, why would you not let them prepare for an interview? And we also want to set people up for success and let them do, like, their best work and their best job that they possibly can. So, like, why set someone up for failure? So we want to see someone, like, at their very best. And what we have found from doing it that way is that everything goes so much more smoothly. The candidates come in, like, the interviews are so incredibly efficient. There's not, like, a lot of him and. And actually makes the interviews faster, which we did not expect. Like, we. That was just a happy side effect. So the interviews go faster, the candidates are happier, we're happier. It's a more level playing field. But also it helps us with our decision making because we can really look at, okay, this is, they had, they all have the same amount of time to prepare. And they all have the same question set and we asked the same questions and here's how they responded. So there's so many benefits to doing it that way.
So maybe if we could just. So I said all that to say, like, if we could fix the individual components of this hiring process and just sort of address those a little bit better, maybe that could help.
[00:29:27] Amy Adler: Thank you. I'm reeling from your story.
It's amazing.
But to me it absolutely draws out the sort of the line of thinking that the problem was hiring. The hiring process is too onerous for job seekers and hiring managers. So AI, or all the tools that lead up to interviewing or not interviewing or hiring, how can we take the human element out of this to make it as simple as possible? Well, that backfired. Right. That's obviously, I mean, that was the whole reason human eyes started talking is because the system didn't, didn't do what you anticipated it was supposed to do. So you've pulled back more toward the middle, but standardized things in such a way that it simplified the process. So, I mean, you could literally, technically, I guess, put a, an email, standard email, and send it to literally fill in this form and get this email set of questions. Probably not what's going on. I don't want to speak for your hiring process, but you could literally take the human element out of that and the questions would still get to the candidate. They'd still have time to prepare. And in the end you have, as you say, a sort of a standard data set to review, which doesn't take the people out of it or the human element out of it, but it doesn't rely completely on some sort of artificial large language model that is going to be inherently biased or whatever.
I've definitely been part of interviews as a candidate and as a hiring manager actually, where we had standard questions and for just that reason. But it was chaotic candidate, it's chaotic as a hiring person. So taking all of the, I'm looking for the right word, like the things that could go wrong out of it, like the variation out of the system probably does way more than AI ever could to level the playing field.
[00:31:21] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, it's funny with that because we did end up automating sending the questions. So basically what happens is I didn't.
[00:31:30] Amy Adler: Want to put words in your mouth.
[00:31:33] Elizabeth Anderson: What we ended up doing was we make the decision like go no go for the next round, and then we email them to, to set up a time. And as soon as they select one of the times, it automatically sends them an email and says, you know, here are the thank you for signing up for your time. Here are the questions. So it's very fast in that way. And then once we get into the interview, we always ask them, did you receive the questions? Because we just want to make sure before we. And if they say no, which we've not had anybody say no, but if they do say no, we're prepared to, like, pause the interview and say, okay, well, we want to make sure you have plenty of time to review the questions. I think that with automating systems, and again, this is just me who works in automating systems all day, every day.
That's our job, is to make systems faster and better.
When it comes to automating things or implementing AI, I tend to think that we want AI solutions, and AI is very good at managing large data sets or automating things. And we want AI to sort of stay in its lane on what it's actually good at versus what humans are good at. And I think that just industry wide, there's a lot of, like, smashing them together. Like, why are we using AI to do all of the fun, interesting parts of being a human and not like the horrible drudgery of being a human? And so when we can use AI systems to get through the horrible drudgery and the automation pieces, I think that can be a really positive thing. But we always have to have some human oversight of all of these systems, and we have to have humans who are the ones who are making the real decisions. Because AI, it's such a misnomer that we call it artificial intelligence because it's not actually intelligent, right. It's not creative, it's not smart.
But we are very, we're also kind of limited in our language that we use to talk about as, because we say these things like it thinks, right, or it creates or it hallucinates or like it does these things. And those are very human words. And so I always caution people that when we are thinking about AI, generally, we just want to make sure that we understand that it is not a human and it cannot replace, like, these human elements of our processes and systems that come down to, like, decision making or understanding or critical thinking. Like, AI cannot do those things. And those are such a core part of hiring. But we can use it, and we can use automations for, like, the boring drudgery, like sending the interview questions. That's fine, but we don't want it to write the interview questions, and we don't want it to ask the interview questions, and we don't want to analyze the data from the interview questions using AI, because at the end of the day, AI is just, you know, it's a computer and it is coded in such a way that it brings all of the coders biases into it. And so whatever data set you're using or whatever, you know, if you're using a specific data set or if you are using a specific algorithm, you can really hard code bias into your systems. And the example that I always give when we were talking about hiring apps is, let's say that you have a job opening at a bank, and in that bank you have historically only had white men working in that position. If you feed a bunch of data into an AI system and you say, find me a candidate, just like every person who has successfully worked in this job before, well, what do you think it's going to do when it encounters a black woman's resume? She's not going to get the job because the AI system is going to say, oh, well, only white men have been successful in this job, therefore I should only hire white men. And so that's what I mean when I say that we can really reinforce these biases with our AI software and we have to be very careful about it. And that's why I always say we need to make sure that we have real humans who are doing the decision making piece of it instead of just trying to offload that onto computers.
[00:35:34] Amy Adler: I appreciate hearing that so much back in the day. This is like maybe in high school when I was doing like Pascal, if you can imagine that.
Yeah, go ahead and laugh. All good.
But sort of the thing that was impressed on me that I never forgot, and whether it was, you know, using spreadsheets or databases or anything else, is that computers are really fast and really stupid.
[00:36:00] Elizabeth Anderson: Yes.
[00:36:00] Amy Adler: So, and, you know, the garbage in, garbage out kind of a thing.
And they will do exactly what you tell them to do. I mean, plus or minus the large language model, which is not an area of expertise for me, but they'll do what you ask them to do, just as you said. And if you say, find somebody that looks like these five people who were good at this job, that's going to be a problem. As a matter of fact, there is one of the ats out there that literally asks permission for candidates to, can we use your data that you're applying with to compare, like past hires to new hires or whatever it was? And that prompted a whole discussion among colleagues, like, what is happening here? Like, nobody knows. And I think this lack of sort of insight. We're all outside looking in resume writers and coaches on behalf of job seekers who really don't have a clue because they're not doing this every day.
They automatically go to the worst. They assume the worst. And I can see why.
I think there has to be, by the way, a healthy sense of sort of self accountability in the process. But I can see why people are going like, well, this crazy thing is doing stuff without any oversight and humans out there are relying on this only and they're not thinking the way humans should. Obviously, you're completely countering that with everything you said. But I think it's easy for job seekers to go there because it takes away some of that responsibility and assigns a reason, whatever it is a reason for. They're not getting a particular role. But you know what? Nobody's talking about. Let's turn this around.
I didn't even think about this before.
What about the person who does get the job and thinks it's all about a technical system evaluating them and picking them for some reason? Like how does that make somebody feel about their candidacy? I mean, don't people want to be selected because they fit all of the perspectives and qualifications and needs and goals and all of the reasons, equity too, that they, they should be considered for positions that machines can't do and now all of a sudden they're being picked by an AI tool.
[00:38:20] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, yeah, no, that's totally true. It's funny with the whole system has so many kind of issues to it and I think it's so fair for job seekers to be frustrated whether they get the job or not just because of the way that the system is set up and the way that it works at a lot of different companies because at the end of the day, and we don't like talking about this, like it's really kind of uncomfortable to say it, but there's a lot about, about hiring that is just inherently unfair. You know, I mean, it goes back to that guy I mentioned earlier that just threw half the resumes in the trash. That's unfair. And, you know, it's, it's unfair that, you know, there could be a really great candidate for their job, for the job, but like maybe they just don't have the experience on paper yet, so they get rejected in that first round and that sucks, right? Like, it is unfair. And there are systems that are like ATS systems that are being used unfairly to reject a lot of candidates. And I think that is true. I think job seekers are right to be frustrated. On the flip side, I think hiring managers are also frustrated because we do get a lot of, you know, kind of B's resumes sometimes, like we do after there's a certain amount of, you know, waiting through resumes, it's never going to be a good fit for the job or people who aren't actually interested in the role. And there's a certain amount of sometimes we get ghost, you know, even when people do get the, get the interview. So I think there's a lot of frustration that is totally fair on both sides. And it sucks to talk about the ways that the system is inherently has some unfairness built into, like, and I'm not talking about hiring at specific companies. I'm just talking about hiring, like, broadly as a system. There is some unfairness that's going to happen, and it's fair to talk about it. I think that it's important to talk about it because we need to talk about it in order to, like, acknowledge the problems and fix the problems. But I also think it can be really easy for job seekers to kind of tell themselves some stories about what is really going on when the, when the reality might be, oh, my gosh, there could be, like, a million reasons that you didn't get the job. But, like, you know, if there are any job seekers listening to this, please keep applying. Please, please, please keep applying and do not get discouraged because there, you know, it is promised. I promise you, it is almost never you. Like, a lot of times with hiring, and this is, you know, we just see this sometimes. We just, you know, one time I hired somebody for a particular project management job, and we had a project that was coming up, and this particular person had worked on an almost identical project to that one. Now, there were other people that were perfectly qualified. There were other people in my hiring list that would have maybe been on a broad level more qualified than that person, but that person had worked just on this one project that we had this project coming up, and it was nearly identical. And I was. And so they were perfect for that role. Now, that doesn't mean that any of those other people were bad. In fact, funny story, ended up becoming really good friends with some of the job seekers in that situation and, like, getting to know them more personally because they were such good candidates. I was like, I want to connect with you and keep you in mind for future positions because, like, you were such a strong candidate. I just needed to hire this other person because they have, like, five years direct experience with this one thing that we're about to do.
And so sometimes it's not you. You know, that's just my main message to job seekers. I promise you, most of the time it's not you. Like, there are so many outside factors that can go into hiring and I just want job seekers to know that, like you are valid and you are wonderful and you're going to be the perfect fit for somebody and then. But sometimes it just doesn't work out for that one particular thing.
[00:42:23] Amy Adler: I, I don't have a lot to say after that. That was, I think, a message that every job seeker should hear, that they are amazing and whole and really good at what they do and just.
[00:42:44] Elizabeth Anderson: The.
[00:42:44] Amy Adler: Best they can be. And your demands for whatever they are point you in a certain direction but with the confidence that they'll be snapped up somewhere else.
[00:42:54] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah.
[00:42:55] Amy Adler: Equal excitement.
[00:42:57] Elizabeth Anderson: Yes.
[00:42:59] Amy Adler: So we've gone all around this topic and I wish we could talk for another hour about literally everything. This has been an amazing experience for me. I think this is going to open the eyes of many a job seeker because we don't have access to this and the coaching industry should. So thank you for being so transparent and so open and willing to come and talk to me today.
Elizabeth, it has been delightful to have yet another conversation about all things job, job search, but especially the AI part.
If people would like to reach out to you or find you, what would be the best way for them to connect?
[00:43:53] Elizabeth Anderson: Yes, I am on LinkedIn. It's Elizabeth Anderson.
I recognize that that is an ungoogable name. It is very, very bland. So if you're searching for Elizabeth Anderson on LinkedIn, try Elizabeth Anderson. Lunar lab and Lunar Lab is all one word. Our website is lunarlab IO. Those are the best ways to reach me and I love connecting with people on LinkedIn so would be happy to frequently share my thoughts about, you know, the hiring process, I guess what? Can I have one final thought? Oh, please. Okay, final thought here. Just something that I was thinking about when we were talking about COVID letters is I do want to impress upon everybody the power of a really good cover letter. So I just wanted to tell a really brief story because I know we're right at the end of time. We once had a guy apply through our sort of general application on our website. We did not have a role, had not even thought about the role that this guy would do. He was a content writer and at the time it was not even on our radar that we needed content writing or wanted it or anything. His cover letter that he sent in. When I say cover letter.
The form itself is just like, who are you? What is your email address? You know, why are you interested in working with us? And that was it. And in that form, this guy wrote such a good cover letter that I called him that afternoon, and within a week, we had a job for him, like, which we just invented because his cover letter was so good. So I do want to impress upon everybody how important this cover letters can be. I'm not like a cover letter advocate. I don't even like reading cover letters as a hiring manager, soul sucking to have to read through all of them sometimes. But his was so good that we literally found a job for him that did not exist. So please, please do your cover letters. They are not a relic of the past.
[00:45:48] Amy Adler: Thank you. Well, I don't know what I mean, really. I've been stunned into silence, which is kind of bad at a podcast, but for so many reasons.
I think you have literally debunked every myth out there, that everything from COVID letters are a thing of the past. AI is rejecting your resume, and you only should apply for jobs that exist because those are the only ones you could ever be hired for. This has been.
I hope people blow up your inbox. I hope people blow up my inbox, because I would talk about this from now until forever.
But thank you for being so, so open about some topics that are, frankly, pretty touchy.
[00:46:37] Elizabeth Anderson: Yeah, always happy to. This was really wonderful. Thanks for having me on, Amy, thank.
[00:46:42] Amy Adler: You so much for being here. Elizabeth, it's been so great. I hope we speak again soon.
[00:46:46] Elizabeth Anderson: Same. All right, have a good day.
[00:46:48] Amy Adler: Thank you.
