DE Talk | Fixing the Application Black Hole with Dalia’s Sam Fitzroy

Season 8 • Episode 2

In this episode of the DE Talk Podcast, host Shannon Offord sits down with Sam Fitzroy, co-founder and CEO of candidate conversion platform, Dalia. Bringing over 15 years of industry experience—including key leadership roles at Indeed and The Muse—Fitzroy offers a candid look at the friction points plaguing modern recruitment. Together, they break down the flaws of volume-based hiring models, the impact of AI auto-apply tools flooding applicant tracking systems, and why making job applications overly complex harms both candidates and employers. Fitzroy also shares how talent acquisition teams can optimize content for generative AI search engines and previews Dalia’s upcoming candidate-support initiative designed to ensure job seekers never feel alone in their search.

About DE Talk

The DE Talk monthly podcast features honest and open dialogue between powerhouse industry experts on a variety of HR topics ranging from OFCCP compliance advice to emerging recruitment marketing trends, equal employment opportunity initiatives, and insightful solutions that help infuse new life into your HR strategies.

Episode Interviewer

Episode Guest

Transcript

DirectEmployers Association (00:00):

Get ready. The DE Talk Podcast starts now. Insightful conversations and dialogue helping you put the human factor back in HR.

Shannon Offord (00:08):

Hello everyone, and welcome to the DE Talk Podcast. I am your host, Shannon Offord, VP of Partnerships here at DirectEmployers. And today I am very fortunate to be able to be joined by Sam Fitzroy, co-founder and CEO of Dalia. Many of you may know Sam from his time at Indeed and The Muse. Sam, welcome to the DE Talk Podcast.

Sam Fitzroy (00:32):

Thanks, Shannon. Happy to be here.

Shannon Offord (00:34):

Before we get started, why don’t you talk a little bit about your time in the industry and about why you decided to start Dalia?

Sam Fitzroy (00:43):

Yeah, so I started in this industry in 2008 at Indeed. It was a long time ago, but I have really fond memories of that time. I started there when it was somewhat of a smaller company and stayed there for eight and a half years. That’s where I met you working on partnerships. So that was my main focus there was building ATS partnerships and then partnerships outside of the US globally with job board platforms, ATS providers, any sort of tech that would connect with Indeed. So I was there for almost eight years and then I left and I went to The Muse and The Muse was a great experience. It was like the opposite of Indeed in many ways. It was very much a let’s figure it out as we’re flying kind of situation, whereas Indeed really had a lot of things figured out pretty early on.

(01:25):

So it was what I felt was a true startup experience and I just loved it. The business had a lot more challenges than Indeed did, and it was somewhat of a rude awakening coming from a company that had been so successful and dominant to go to a company that was somewhat struggling. Nonetheless, I loved it and that was really the experience that got me interested in doing my own thing with Dalia. And so I started Dalia eight years ago now to tackle what I think is still one of the biggest challenges in our space, which is this black hole of an experience for job seekers. And my position on this has evolved a little bit, but the origin of it was that job seekers weren’t getting great experiences on career sites. They would connect, they would seek out more information, but they never really got anything.

(02:06):

So they were kind of in this black hole, but then they also would apply to a job and never hear back. And the situation remains the same today for the most part. There’s been a lot more automation for sure, and people can get scheduled and take the basic steps a lot more quickly. That’s been great, but people still don’t hear back from companies on why they didn’t move forward in process. People, I think, feel more alone than ever in the job search. And so that’s really our goal is to fix that and solve that for job seekers.

Shannon Offord (02:32):

Awesome. Well, like you mentioned, you’ve been in the space, I guess we both have for a long time. And what do you think is fundamentally different about where we’re headed over the next five years compared to where we’ve been?

Sam Fitzroy (02:43):

I think now there’s a lot more high powered technology at the fingertips of the vendors in the space than there’s ever been before. If you have the budget to use it and you use it the right way, you can do some really interesting stuff. And that technology is also available to all the customers. I think that there might be a big difference in the next five years in that the companies who are really innovating and trying to push forward internally might be able to start jumping ahead of the vendors who in the HR tech space haven’t been the most leading edge innovative companies. And so I think that creates an opening for either other players in the space who really want to pursue true innovation and do something different. They can do it with new technology that’s available a lot faster, but also the employers can have a part in the development of things in a way that they couldn’t before.

(03:30):

So I think that’ll be different.

Shannon Offord (03:31):

One thing that I’m seeing are a lot of players that aren’t coming from the space, people that are from outside and they’ve seen that our space has been a little slower to adapt and change and to switch directions a little bit. And these new players are coming in and building tools faster and getting up to speed real quick and getting their product out there a lot faster.

(03:52):

So obviously, I spent a lot of time at Monster and back in the day where companies were posting and praying and waiting for applicants to come, do you think we’re getting past that or do you think that that’s something in the next five years that’ll change as far as employers sitting back waiting for candidates to apply?

Sam Fitzroy (04:08):

I really don’t know if that’s going to change it, but I do think that as long as one of the big basises of hiring is job postings and posting a job in order to receive a job application. It sounds so simple when you say that, but the reality is that is a major part of the hiring process for most companies. It doesn’t have to be, but it is. As long as we have job postings, then I think you are going to have people applying and there’s going to be more of that. There’s going to be certainly more volume. We’ve seen that already because of all the automation that’s been put in place via this newly available technology. So yeah, I think as long as there’s job postings in the mix, then yes. However, there’s some players who are outside the industry coming in who are removing job postings from the process and trying to make this model work.

(04:55):

Jack and Jill comes to mind. I really love what they’re doing because they really pushed forward and got to market first with a concept that I think is going to become more commonplace, just connecting job seekers directly to recruiters or hiring managers. No job postings needed. So I mean those sorts of things excite me. I think completely changing the way hiring done is possible. But to your question, as long as there’s job postings, I think we’re still going to have the application challenges.

Shannon Offord (05:19):

Some people out there think that Google changed the way people find jobs or found jobs. And a lot of people also think that Indeed kind of changed the way that people search for jobs. Now with this whole AI craze that’s out there and a lot of people talking about AI, they think that AI is going to change the space again. Where do you think the next major disruption in recruiting is going to come from?

Sam Fitzroy (05:43):

Just to think back, Indeed, they did a lot of things that were really different at the time, but I’m not sure they changed the way people search for jobs and look for jobs. People wanted what Indeed offered before Indeed existed, and they were searching on Google and attempting to run searches on the major job boards at the time, but the results were just not good.

(06:02):

And so I think the major leap that Indeed took for job seekers was putting all of the jobs behind a search index, which inherently makes the results better because when you have a larger pool to draw from, you are able to serve more relevant results no matter how good or bad your matching algorithm is. It’s a fact. Indeed had better results because they had more inventory. I think they just provided a better tool for a process that job seekers were already going through and searching. And I think it’s still the same today. Job seekers are definitely using ChatGPT. In fact, we see a lot of traffic now, but the things that they’re typing in and asking for are very similar to what they type into Indeed or Google. So I don’t know if it’s going to change the way people try to find jobs, but I think it’ll make it easier to find the right jobs faster if these systems use more of the information that job seekers have available.

(06:51):

The most common search on Indeed is a blank field. There’s nothing in the what box. I think most people don’t know that. It’s blank. And then there’s just a location because people are just looking for jobs in a location, but no keywords at all. It’s number one search. And so in ChatGPT or Claude or Google, I haven’t really seen data yet of real legitimate searches from job seekers and what those look like inside those systems. But based on what we’re doing in job seeker support, I highly doubt that most searches are sophisticated and long tail. I don’t think it’s going to change the way, but I think if we collect more information from people about them, about their history, about what they want, and we prompt that and we push for information from people, that’ll change the outcome. And I think we have the opportunity to do that now that we haven’t had that before.

Shannon Offord (07:35):

It is so interesting when you start looking at searches that job seekers do, you think that they’re going to be very specific and you’re really

Sam Fitzroy (07:42):

You like to think that, right?

Shannon Offord (07:43):

Yeah, but they’re really not.

Sam Fitzroy (07:45):

No.

Shannon Offord (07:45):

I was talking to a few of my friends and giving them suggestions on way they should search and they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t search that way.” And I’m like, “What?” They’re like jobs in Indiana that is going to give you a bunch of results and you’re going to have to weed through a bunch of stuff to get to what you want.

Sam Fitzroy (07:58):

Absolutely. I think most of the search tools that are out there today are built with inherent bias. And I don’t mean that in the scary way that many employers might think. I mean it in the way that the people who design the job search are thinking about themselves and not the audience. And they’re not able to break away from the idea that you sit at a computer, you work at a professional type job, and you might think a lot deeper about your next role than 90% of the people who are going to use your product. And so we do job seeker support mostly for job seekers looking for hourly roles, high volume type roles, and we do phone support, we do chat support. I talk to these job seekers and it’s very, very simple. It’s straightforward. It’s like, “I’m looking for a job that pays this amount of money within this many miles of me that has this benefit.

(08:46):

That’s what I need right now. What job can I do?” That’s the vast majority of it for the working population in the US. And then a lot of jobs have highly trained skills and you’re not really going to deviate out of that type of job. So you know the job.

Shannon Offord (09:00):

That’s a good point. We keep hearing employers say that they’ve got enough applicants right now, but they don’t have enough of the right applicants. What can recruiters do today to better track the talent they actually want?

Sam Fitzroy (09:12):

We’re working on it. It’s hard. I think as an industry, we’ve made really slow progress towards solving this friction problem and this volume problem. Most industries based around volume, especially the job board industry. The money they make is literally tied to the amount of volume they deliver. They deliver more volume, they make more money. How crazy is that? That is the system that employers have to participate in because there’s no alternative. Employers are oversaturated with application flow, but to your point, not the right ones. I think they probably do still have the right ones in there, but it’s so much harder to find them within all of the noise. I think as long as our industry, the marketing products in our industry, when I say marketing products, I mean job boards, have a model that’s built on delivering volume as the primary objective, this is going to be a hard thing to change.

(09:58):

Shannon Offord (09:58):

We literally talk about that all the time, about how you generate all these applicants and you know that the majority of them aren’t going to be right, but that’s literally how the system is set up and that’s how companies get paid.

Sam Fitzroy (10:12):

Yeah, that’s it. The employers that we talk to, the people running TA, I feel like they’re just stuck. They’re stuck in the middle within this problem. They hear from the top, from the C-level, we need to see top line metrics. We need to see application volume increase year over year. That is a C-level top line metric in so many large high volume companies. And the TA teams are like, “We have way too many applications.” All the things you just mentioned, quality, we’re wasting, it’s inefficient. At the bottom end, if you ever tried to go to a team of recruiters and turn off Indeed Apply, watch what happens. It’ll be a rebellion. They won’t have it. They’ll lose it. And there’s this battle from below on the recruiters who are doing the work with candidates. They don’t want to see that volume dry up in their pipeline, but in the middle you know there’s incredible waste.

(11:01):

So the TA teams are in a really hard position where they’re trying to create efficiency, but the two ends of their companies are pushing for inefficiency. Really hard dynamic.

Shannon Offord (11:11):

It is interesting. I used to be a recruiter way back when, that’s how I really got into the whole TA space. And the recruiting company I work for, we always just talk about, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to send one candidate over. It’s going to be the right candidate.” And almost every employer we work with, they said, “Hey, we want to see five candidates.”

(11:31):

And we’re like, “Well, this is the right one.” So why do you want to see others? And I think the system just set up obviously this way where they want all this volume, they want all these options, which is in the end, really pretty inefficient. Just a lot of wasting time, it sounds like.

Sam Fitzroy (11:46):

It is. I mean, it creates a lot of inefficiency. And then there’s some companies who have tried to put a difficult application process in front of people to fight against this, which I think is just a huge mistake because again, going back to the bias in the process, let’s say you’re trying to hire a senior chef to run a big unit at a Sodexo location. And actually Sodexo is paradox. I think they’re a pretty good apply process. I don’t want to pick on that, but let’s just say you’re a senior chef, you’ve been working as a chef your whole career, you want to get this job at Sodexo, but they use some really difficult ATS that’s hard to apply to and the process is lengthy. You don’t own a computer. You don’t even have one. You use your phone for everything. So this barrier that’s been put in front of you is a test of your computer skills, but you’re a chef.

(12:36):

Good

Shannon Offord (12:36):

Point.That’s

Sam Fitzroy (12:37):

What’s happening today.

Shannon Offord (12:39):

Yeah. And you should not be graded on your computer skills. Your skills as a chef should outweigh how good you are at using the computer. Yeah.

Sam Fitzroy (12:47):

It should be as easy as possible for the right person to apply to a job that’s relevant for them, in my point of view.

Shannon Offord (12:53):

No, I 100% agree with you. I mean, you used to hear that whole situation where the economy is really good, you want to put barriers in place to make sure that you’re not being overrun with applicants. So you want to make the application process a little harder, but when times are bad, you want to make it easier for people to apply, which really doesn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, your application process shouldn’t change based on what the economy’s doing. It should really change based on who you are as a company and making sure that applicants can apply to your jobs easily. Anyway, I could talk about that all day long

Sam Fitzroy (13:25):

Yeah yeah

Shannon Offord (13:25):

That’s definitely an issue that’s been prevalent for years. So as more job seekers turn to some of the large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini and others to discover opportunities, what should recruiters and employers be doing to make sure their jobs are found and recommended to the right candidates?

Sam Fitzroy (13:42):

That’s such a great question. We talk to our clients about this all the time, and we do something on our side that I think we recommend to all of our clients, and I think most employers should be trying to do this as much as they can. If you want to get yourself ranked and served as a result for job seekers who are looking for your type of job or they’re just looking for a company like yours, you want to make sure that you have content that answers the questions that they are asking. And I think it’s easy to say that, but there’s a pretty big gap between the content that gets created and the actual questions people are asking because the people creating content don’t know the questions that people are asking. They guess and they assume. They don’t know what they are, but you can know what they are.

(14:23):

So we do job seeker support. It’s core to what we do, and that means job seekers are replying to the text messages that we send. They reply to the emails that come directly to DaliaHelp.com and we have full service support. It’s human, plus we have AI on the backend to help augment that. And we transform the most common support requests into content. Generally, the most common thing we get asked for is, how do I check the status of my application at company XYZ? So we publish all that in a Zendesk repository. We send that to job seekers where it’s relevant, but that content also ranks really high in ChatGPT. So if you search in ChatGPT, how do I check status of my application at Walmart? We’re generally the first thing that gets recommended and the content comes from Dalia. So if employers use what they get back from job seekers directly, the questions they’re asking them about their company and then transform the answer to those questions in content, they’ll start to rank and they’ll start to actually get clicks because it’ll be unique content that’s relevant to them.

Shannon Offord (15:21):

Are you seeing more and more employers try to do that or are they still kind of behind or don’t know that that’s what they should be doing?

Sam Fitzroy (15:27):

I haven’t seen any employers do it to that level. I see a lot of employers who are creating the same kind of generic content they’ve always created, but now wrapped in a how-to bullet point format because that’s the format that is generally referenced by the LLMs, but the content is not changing. The content is the same content. It’s just flat and generic.

Shannon Offord (15:49):

The good thing is I’m learning too right now, so this is good.

Sam Fitzroy (15:52):

That’s what I observe, but

Shannon Offord (15:54):

No, this is good.

Sam Fitzroy (15:55):

Yeah. Job seekers want to know if you pay more than the competitors nearby, and are you going to cover a portion of childcare and transportation, if that’s what job seekers really want to know.

Shannon Offord (16:04):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Back to the whole job search piece, do you think that we’re ever get to a point where job seekers don’t really go out and look for jobs themselves and if maybe their AI agent that is really going out and looking for opportunities and presenting those opportunities back to job seeker?

Sam Fitzroy (16:22):

Yeah, for sure.

Shannon Offord (16:23):

If that’s the case, what do employers need to do for that as well?

Sam Fitzroy (16:26):

It depends who wins with the product in that area. So if Indeed is the one who wins that, what an employer needs to do to prepare is get their checkbook out and get some budget. However, if somebody who’s trying to actually innovate puts out a product in this space, then I would say employers should try to learn the product, try to understand the behavior of job seekers as best you can, understand how they’re changing, and just be flexible. I wouldn’t rush to the greatest new thing that gets a lot of buzz on LinkedIn. Look at the results, make sure things are actually working. No matter what new technology there is, you should always be able to measure the effectiveness of the dollars you spend, and that’s easier now than it’s ever been. But I remember we used to talk about ATS tracking all the time, right?

(17:11):

So that stuff is available. Employers can track their media, the flow, everything all the way through the hire on almost every single ATS in the world and you can do it accurately. So I think as long as you have some sort of measure about what is this new technology delivering me for the dollars I’m spending, then just measure and keep your open mind about what’s coming.

Shannon Offord (17:30):

It’s just so crazy how this industry’s changing so fast. I mean, for the longest time it was just post your job, go search some resumes, you’re good to go. And now it’s changing so fast. Every day there’s something new popping up and I get tons of calls from people going, “Hey, what do you know about this? What do you know about that?” You constantly have to stay on top of it. It’s even a lot when you’re on this side of the house, when you’re in the industry and you’re not on the other side trying to evaluate what tools you should be using.

Sam Fitzroy (17:59):

It’s crazy. There’s so much coming from a lot of different places as well. If you want to have a fun little experiment, go on Instagram. I mean, I guess you could use TikTok. I don’t know. I’m old. I use Instagram. So go on Instagram and just start typing in apply for me, apply to jobs, AI apply, and start clicking on some of the content. And then you’ll start getting served the ads for the AI apply solutions that charge you 49 bucks a month to apply. And you’ll be in shock about the number of different brands there are that are doing this all in the last 12 months, over a hundred of them.

Shannon Offord (18:34):

Yeah. You know what? I’m glad you went there because I was kind of going in that direction with my next question. Obviously there’s all these tools out there that help you apply to hundreds of jobs and you could do it so easily. How should recruiters really distinguish between application volume and genuine candidate interest? And does that force us to rethink what a qualified applicant really means? If people are just blasting out resumes, they don’t even know what jobs they’re even applying to.

Sam Fitzroy (18:59):

Yeah, that’s definitely happening, especially if you pay for one of these tools because the point is it’s applying jobs for you. You don’t even know. I think it depends on the comfort level your organization has with the volume and what kind of volume you want. So if you know that that’s going to come in and you’re going to build a system and a plan to handle that and you can turn that into an advantage for you, then cool, go in that direction. I think that that’s definitely an option. Most companies I talk to find the additional volume of these kind of disinterested or people who don’t even know they’re applying to not be helpful. It’s kind of clogging things up. And so I would say just make sure your ATS takes the most basic steps to block robotic process. And that’s just like Cloudflare security, maybe doing a two-factor authentication or just some sort of short code so that you know it’s a person who has to deliver you something that only a person could do and not a bot could do.

(19:48):

Captures are easy to get past, which is the basic thing. But I would say if you don’t want the volume, just try to lock your core system down so you can’t get the volume. Today, most ATSs, you can automate the browser and apply to their jobs. There’s very little security.

Shannon Offord (20:03):

I actually saw this meme the other day. It talked about how job seekers were using AI to apply and employers were using AI to screen. And because of that, no one was getting hired.

Sam Fitzroy (20:17):

Well, people are still getting hired, but you’ve got the agents working against the agents and everyone just has to spend a little bit more money now to take care of the problem.

Shannon Offord (20:25):

I think this is one of those situations where you really have to be willing to expand your thoughts and be willing to put money places maybe you thought that you wouldn’t have to.

Sam Fitzroy (20:38):

Yeah, that definitely seems like you’re pulled in this direction whether you want to go or not. And who knows when the market changes, what will the dynamic be then, right?

Shannon Offord (20:46):

And I think you almost have to put money in places kind of ahead of the game. So if you think the industry may be going or within the landscape may be going in one area, maybe you put a little bit of your budget there just to get ahead of things.

Sam Fitzroy (21:01):

It’s so hard to budget this year for companies we’re talking to. They’re having such trouble figuring out and getting their budgets approved because like you said, there’s so much change. There are so many new vendors that they’ve been considering the second half of this year. And then on top of all that, you have all the variability and changes with Indeed, which most companies have the bulk of their media budget there.

Shannon Offord (21:20):

Yes

Sam Fitzroy (21:21):

It’s hard to peg. They all think they’re going to have to spend a ton more money on media. So they’re kind of having to balance that threat really for budget against the SaaS innovative tools they want to use. It’s so hard.

Shannon Offord (21:35):

It’s much more fun being on this side.

Sam Fitzroy (21:37):

Yeah.

Shannon Offord (21:38):

I know that a lot of people out there are starting to really think about how skills-based hiring, that AI really can start to understand a job seeker skills and experience and kind of package that up. Do you think the resume will become obsolete at some point just because of AI and how AI really can package up people’s skills and their experiences?

Sam Fitzroy (21:59):

No, I don’t think so. I think what a resume is is going to change and evolve, but I think there’s always going to be the concept of a resume, which is just, I’m just going to tell you my professional story. Here it is. I need to lay it out for you. Even as we move towards skills-based hiring, the example I think of when I hear about this is Vivian. Vivian, the solution in healthcare. And they do an incredible job of gathering verification of skills for healthcare workers, certificates, licenses, credentials, and they put it all together along with a resume into this fully stacked profile that validates all the skills that this person needs to have do this highly skilled job. And because of that, hospitals pay a premium to get candidate flow from Vivian because it’s all this pre-vetted person. But is it a resume Vivian’s delivering? Kind of. It’s just a richer profile. You know?

Shannon Offord (22:50):

I would agree with that. You hear it all the time about, oh, resumes are going to go away. Do we need them anymore? Should we go to more profile based or whatever? There’s some things I feel that in our space shouldn’t change, but I think given an opportunity for a job seeker to really tell their story through their resume is one of those things I feel is just fundamental to our space, really.

Sam Fitzroy (23:11):

Yeah, I think they’ll be around, but they might all start to look the same.

Shannon Offord (23:14):

So tell me what’s next for Dalia?

Sam Fitzroy (23:16):

We’ve been head down for the last nine months working on something that we’re launching very soon, but it’s going to be a solution that’s built primarily for job seekers to help them with what we’ve identified as the core problem in job search, which is a lack of support. We do support all the time, as I mentioned, and what resonates with me the most about what we learn is that just people feel generally alone when they’re looking for a job. They feel like there are resources out there, but it’s really hard. It’s a job to get a job and it’s hard to do that job on your own. More and more now, the resources or the things that are disguising themselves as resources are just tools designed to take your money. And so we’re seeing a lot of that AI applies solutions. So now job seekers have to contend with all of this as well.

(24:05):

So I think it’s becoming just a pretty treacherous time for job seekers. I don’t mean to get dark, but they also have this looming fear of how is AI going to impact the availability of my job in general? So I think people are worried about that. The big AI companies are doing a terrific job pumping up their IPO price ahead of it by fear mongering about the dangers of our system. There’s so much hype right now. I think long-term, it’s going to be incredible for society and we’re going to have a lot more jobs. I think everyone’s just running in fear right now. But I think for job seekers, we just sense that feeling, so we’re launching a product to address that, to allow them to finally, for the first time, not feel alone in their job search, have a true companion, a team dedicated to getting them a job that never stops until they get a job.

Shannon Offord (24:51):

Sam, it’s been fun talking to you today. What’s one thing that you may want to leave our listeners with before we wrap up?

Sam Fitzroy (24:57):

Go to RecFest.

Shannon Offord (24:59):

For you guys that aren’t familiar with RecFest, it’s a really cool event, outdoors, definitely a unique TA event. If you’re not already registered, it would be good to see you guys down there. Sam, again, thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to reach out to you, what’s the easiest way to get ahold of you?

Sam Fitzroy (25:16):

They can reach out to me at sam@dalia.co, D-A-L-I-A.co. That’s the best way. Awesome.

Shannon Offord (25:23):

Well, Sam, thanks again for joining us today. I definitely appreciate your time and your insight. It’s always good to talk to someone who’s been in this space as long as you have, so appreciate it.

Sam Fitzroy (25:33):

Yeah, likewise, Shannon. Great to see you.

DirectEmployers Association (25:35):

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