DE Talk | Too Many Applications, Too Few Hires: What AI Is Really Doing to Recruiting

Season 8 • Episode 6

Steven Rothberg has spent 30 years in online recruiting, and he has watched plenty of “silver bullets” come and go. He thinks AI is the latest one. In this episode of the DE Talk Podcast, host Shannon Offord of DirectEmployers Association sits down with Steven, founder and chief strategy officer of CollegeRecruiter, to talk about what employers are getting right and wrong in recruiting today. Steven explains why getting 1,000 applications for one opening is often a self-inflicted wound. He also explains why AI-polished resumes mean most applicants now look qualified, which today’s recruiting tech stack was never built to handle. He shares simple tips for using AI to write job descriptions that still sound like you, and explains why job boards that start screening candidates take on new legal risk. Plus, learn how plain-language AI searches could replace “jobs near me” within five years, why long applications drive off your strongest middle-tier candidates, and why Steven predicts there will be more recruiters five years from now, not fewer.

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 Association. And today we are very fortunate to have Steven Rothberg, founder and chief strategy officer of College Recruiter join us today. Hi, Steven.

Steven Rothberg (00:27):

Hey, Shannon. Good to see you again.

Shannon Offord (00:28):

Nice to see you as well, and welcome to the DE Talk podcast. Before we really get into the meat of the conversation, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about you and how you got into the industry and how you founded CollegeRecruiter?

Steven Rothberg (00:42):

Yeah, no sweat. So I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada. For those who don’t know their Canadian geography as well as they know the back of their hand, it is basically dead center in Canada. So think right above Grand Forks, Fargo, North Dakota, the Minnesota, North Dakota border. And from the age of 13, I knew that I wanted to leave. Anybody who has ever spent a winter in Winnipeg would absolutely understand what I’m talking about. So I figured I would go east, west, or south. I ended up going south, moved to Minneapolis, came here for law school, graduated, and was working in my first year out when I decided that I wanted to enjoy my life. So I actually left law and started a business in, well, this easily dates me, 1991, which that business ended up evolving, never pivoted, but it evolved into CollegeRecruiter. So CollegeRecruiter is a job search site, think Indeed, but early careers.

(01:43):

We connect about a million, a million and a half, mostly young adults, those who are early in their careers with mostly larger employers. So our employer customers, a lot of them are actually Members and we’re global. The candidates, whether they’re students, recent grads, they use our site to find part-time, seasonal, internship, entry level and other early career opportunities.

Shannon Offord (02:09):

Okay. And what year did you start CollegeRecruiter?

Steven Rothberg (02:12):

Yeah, the first version of the website went live in 1996, which is right about when Yahoo went live and two years before Google, so 30 years. So we’ve seen some things and we’ve seen a lot of the same things over and over again where a lot of other people think they’re new and we just know it’s Groundhog Day all over again.

Shannon Offord (02:31):

Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. We’re going to cover a little bit about recruiting in 2026, maybe touch on some AI, maybe the future of job search, then maybe even talk about a little bit of strategy and this whole skills based hiring that people keep talking about. So what do you think employers are getting right and what do you think they’re getting wrong in regards to online recruitment today?

Steven Rothberg (02:57):

The thing that I am very encouraged about and have been for several years now is that a far higher percentage of employers, now it’s a large majority, are actually data driven when it comes to online recruiting. If you and I had been talking for sure 10 years ago, maybe six, seven years ago, what I would’ve said to you is that a large majority said that they were data driven, but actually were very gut driven. It was more of a beauty contest. We like our sales rep. We get these, I won’t call it a kickback because that would be illegal, but we do like the trip to the Caymans each year for their annual conference. And if I only have to spend $100,000 and my budget’s a million, I’m good with that because I probably would’ve spent that hundred thousand anyway. And then I’m going to use some data that probably the vendor gave me to justify those purchasing decisions.

(03:54):

There still certainly is some of that, but now I think that the vast majority of employers are actually using data. Interestingly, what one employer uses to determine where they should be spending their money is really different than another. And that’s a good thing. That’s not a bad thing because their needs are different, their budgets are different, their candidates are different. The thing that I find that they’re really getting wrong is that they’re still really struggling with something that’s actually really easy to solve, and that is too many applications.

Shannon Offord (04:30):

Yeah, we continuously hear that employers are getting a lot of applications, but they’re not just getting the right types of people. So they’re trying to sift through all these candidates and it takes them such a long time to get to the ones they actually want to interview and hire.

Steven Rothberg (04:45):

Absolutely. In a lot of cases, probably most cases, candidly, it’s a self-inflicted wound. I’ll see a lot of employers who will complain about getting a thousand applications for one opening. Virtually every ATS can be configured to automatically inactivate a position or a rec after X number of days or Y number of applications. So some employers will say, “Well, I don’t want to automatically inactivate that rec from the ATS if I’ve received say a hundred applications or 200 applications because what if the 201st application is actually the best?” My response to that is if you’re going to wait to see if that 201st application is the best, then it’s far more likely that you’re going to lose the best candidate who was one of the first 200 because they’re not going to stick around. It’s a little bit of a hoarding mentality. It’s the, “I’m so afraid of making a mistake that I’m unwilling to allow myself to do something correctly.” So please stop complaining about getting a thousand applications if you only want to hire one person.

(05:57):

Now, if you want to hire 50 people, getting a thousand applications is a wonderful thing. So it definitely really depends upon the kind of role and the employer’s hiring need. Another thing that I see that I think in a couple of years will be a lot better is that although most large employers are now using some kind of performance-based pricing, cost per click, cost per application, sometimes with programmatic technology, sometimes not, very few of them really understand what a click to the ATS is worth and what a application is worth. They haven’t really sat down and done the math, and it’s okay if your head of talent acquisition, if that’s just not a good skillset for them. If they have somebody who’s managing those campaigns for them, an advertising agency, a programmatic vendor, whatever, those organizations are very well equipped to back that out and say to you, “Hey, Shannon, you’re looking to hire customer service people in a market where there are lots of them, so 50 cents a click or $7 an application is a good rate for you.

(07:16):

I’m looking to hire a nurse anesthetist in Minot, North Dakota. I probably need to be spending $190 for that kind of role.” It depends too on how mission critical that role is. Is it okay to leave that seat empty for two months? Or if you leave that seat empty for a week, are you going to have people dying?

Shannon Offord (07:34):

Good point. The online recruitment industry has been around a little more than 30 years and you’ve been a part of it pretty much the entire time. What’s been the biggest shift you’ve seen in how employers attract talent? And you know what? I’ve been a part of it almost the entire time as well, so I do want to point that out.

Steven Rothberg (07:51):

I kind of feel like in a few minutes, you and I are going to be sitting across a dining room table in a nursing home and asking each other if we’re finished with our jello, which by the way is one of the most wonderful foods in the world. But anyway, the red is better than the green, but a green is absolutely a good second. In all seriousness, the thing that I feel is that employers are doing so much better is similar to what we were talking about a minute ago is being data-driven. When you and I got into this, Monster was the king of the hill, deservedly so. They were far better than the alternatives, although people loved to hate them. That’s kind of the case with anything that dominates in any industry. People love to hate the winner when that winner just does nothing but win.

(08:37):

You see that now with Indeed and LinkedIn. Those organizations have executed brilliantly for year after year after year. Have they done everything right? Of course not. None of us do. But what I see is in the mid to late ’90s, Monster was the default, not totally because they performed better. Very few employers were measuring performance. So what was it? It was the Super Bowl ads, it was the parties, it was the swag. I don’t see employers today choosing to advertise on Indeed because of Super Bowl ads or Indeed doesn’t run… Well, actually, I think they did recently, but that’s not why they do that. Employers choose to advertise on Indeed or LinkedIn or Dice or CollegeRecruiter or any of the others because they really believe that that’s where they’re going to get the biggest bang for their buck. And that’s a healthy thing.

Shannon Offord (09:38):

I used to work at Monster. Obviously you probably knew that already, but people used to say in movies and just out in the wild, let’s go use Monster. And now there’s definitely a shift. You start hearing, go use Indeed or go use LinkedIn or whatever, and you’re like, oh my gosh, this whole thing has totally shifted away. But people are really more focused on results than just the brand anymore.

Steven Rothberg (10:00):

Yeah, absolutely. And it was kind of always fun seeing you dressed up in the monster costume too. So those of us of a certain age can picture the monster in our minds. I actually came back from, I think it was probably a SHRM conference with one of the little stuffed monster things and gave it to my infant daughter who fortunately that was not one of the reasons she had nightmares because it was a pretty cuddly little toy.

Shannon Offord (10:24):

I actually got to ride in a monster blimp before, the Trump blimp, that was way back when. So let’s shift gears a little bit. And I mean obviously this is a topic that a lot of people are talking about and that’s AI and recruitment and marketing. How was AI changing job search behavior and what does that mean for employers?

Steven Rothberg (10:42):

AI is so similar to what I have seen over and over and over again. And again, if you’re in the industry for 30 years, you kind of see these cycles, these patterns. AI is the latest silver bullet efficiency tool, and without a doubt, it makes employers a lot more efficient. You can get those thousand applications and you can turn your AI loose on them and seconds later you have them all nicely ranked, scored, matched, use the word that you want. On the candidate side, they can do the same, right? They can very quickly, very efficiently apply to hundreds or thousands of jobs, but efficiency is only part of what we need to be paying attention to, both on the employer side and on the candidate side. It’s at least as important that we pay attention to effectiveness. Are you hiring the best people, not just in the least expensive manner?

(11:42):

So I’m bullish on AI. I’m bearish. I’m very negative about the way that it’s being used now by a lot of employers. A lot of employers are just looking at it as a way of saving money, and the result is in a lot of cases pretty horrifying that the AI is not producing the right results. It is surfacing candidates to employers that the employers say, “Well, the computer told me that these must be the best people, and so therefore they are, and therefore I’m going to present these top three people to the hiring manager.” But the hiring manager has no idea who is number four, five, six, 97, 98, 99. I hear over and over again, mostly from the tech vendors, but you know they’re saying this to the employers too, that it kind of stands to reason that when you put the candidates through this essentially matching algorithm, the ones who come to the top are the best qualified.

(12:47):

And my question to them that I have yet to receive an answer that makes any sense is how do you know? If you never hire the candidate who’s at the bottom of the ranking, how do you know the candidate at the top of the ranking is actually better? You believe it to be true, you want it to be true, but when you get called into court to defend your hiring practices, that doesn’t sit very well with the judge or the jury. You have to know, you can’t just believe.

Shannon Offord (13:20):

Well, let me ask you this question. Do you think that AI also can slow down the hiring process? I mean, I’m out on a lot of the social media tools and I keep hearing that job seekers are using AI to apply. And on the flip side, the employers are using AI to sort through the candidates, but yet it feels like no one’s getting hired. Do you think that it can slow down the process as well? And one thing that you mentioned about seeing who’s better, for the most part, you continue to see job seekers using AI to write their resumes. So a lot of these resumes look very similar. So I’m having a hard time understanding, or if I were a recruiter, who’s better and who’s not?

Steven Rothberg (14:03):

I think AI in general is not improving the employment space for exactly the reasons you outlined, Shannon. However, I would not want to be the one employer who says, “I’m not going to use AI micro kind of level because the macro is bad.” You don’t want to be left out of that because you’re still going to get in all those AI-generated AI-assisted resumes and you’re going to be putting yourself at a disadvantage to the other employers. So that’s why I say I’m bullish on AI. I absolutely see the massive benefits to the employers as well as to the candidates, but I think we’re like toddlers with a new toy. We don’t really know what to do with it yet. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s entertaining us. It is making us happier, better, but I don’t think that we’re really using it well yet. The thing with the candidates, and if I can expand on what you were saying about all the resumes kind of looking the same, that’s absolutely a real thing.

(15:09):

I struggle, I go back and forth with does it mean that AI, whether it’s ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever, is it hallucinating? Is it creating fake resumes? You see that terminology? Sure, there’s some of that, but I think far more of those resumes that now look identical or very, very similar. I don’t think that it’s so much inventing qualifications or saying, “Hey, Shannon doesn’t have that degree, but I’m going to give him this degree or I’m going to make up stuff about the work that he did at Monster where in fact he didn’t do that.” I don’t think it’s that big of an issue. I think what’s actually happening more is that more candidates are doing a better job of writing their resumes because of AI. So if you had 10 years ago, a hundred people applied to a job, probably 80 of those resumes would’ve been so poorly written, they would’ve done such a poor job of communicating the qualifications of the candidates that you as a recruiter would just screen them out.

(16:18):

“Well, this person doesn’t have the degree. They don’t live near here. The job title that they had recently was wrong. They have a spelling mistake. You would’ve just screened out the 80 and only focused on the 20. Now it’s the other way around. Now 80 of them are actually well-written and they do have the relevant job titles and they do show the degrees that you might’ve had that were relevant to that role. And that’s why I think we’re seeing a lot more resumes that are similar. So I actually don’t think that we’re seeing more people that appear to be higher qualified than they used to be. I think what we’re seeing is that the same number of people are highly qualified. We’re just more aware of it now. And you know the terminology like false negatives, false positives? I think 10 years ago we had 80 false negatives.

(17:13):

We thought these people were poorly qualified, but they actually weren’t. Now what we’re seeing is that what a shock. The vast majority of people who apply to a job are actually qualified for it and recruiters, the whole recruiting tech stack is not well set up for that. We were set up well to knock out 80% of applications for obviously being not well qualified and our systems just can’t handle what to do when it’s actually the other way around.

Shannon Offord (17:43):

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Very good point. How can employers use AI without sacrificing authenticity? Glad you struggle with this by the way.

Steven Rothberg (17:52):

Authenticity, if it’s okay, I’m going to go off on a very slight tangent here because I want to distinguish something. There’s a difference between being authentic and being authenticated, and that’s a big issue. Authenticated is I know that Shannon is a real person. I’ve met you in real life. We’ve shared some laughs together. I don’t have to wonder, is the person on the other side of that monitor actually real or just somebody pretending to be Shannon? You probably have friends and family members who would love just to have somebody pretend to be you occasionally, but that’s another podcast. That’s the Dysfunctional Thanksgiving podcast. The authentic is being who you really are, not like that you’re a fake person, but that you know what? This is a very autocratic organization or this is a very startup environment and things are just kind of going a million miles an hour in a million different directions, and so you better be a person if you’re going to work here who embraces change and embraces chaos.

(18:56):

But if you like a very regimented nine to five, tighten that screw a thousand times, then go home kind of life, this is not a place for you. AI can do a really good job of ferreting out those details if you allow it. Rather than saying to the AI, here’s my job description, rewrite it so it sounds good, it kind of begs the question, good to who?

Shannon Offord (19:24):

To who? Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (19:25):

Yeah. Have it interview you because it’s remarkable the questions that… I primarily use Gemini for that kind of stuff. It’s remarkable how Gemini will come back and it’ll ask me a series of questions and then it’ll basically say, “I think I have enough information. Is there anything else you want to add?” Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Fully recovered lawyer. I get paid by the word, so I usually do want to add some more. And then it’ll come back and it’ll say, “Based upon what you told me, here’s how I would write that.” And I’d like to see more people do that. It reminds me a lot of the actual process when you sit down with what used to be common, a copywriter, somebody who would sit down and help you write something, a ghost writer. They’re going to ask you a whole series of questions.

(20:17):

They’re not just going to say, “Shannon, give me a five-page document and I will rewrite it.” They’re going to interview you and find out what really matters here. Who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to get them to do?

Shannon Offord (20:31):

One thing I see all the time is I think companies struggle with trying to use AI and also make it like it’s still them and it’s not the thing out there that’s trying to imitate them.

Steven Rothberg (20:46):

Yeah. Two tips that I do all the time, I have it built into Gemini and the other LLMs that I’ll use, is train it to speak in your voice or to write in your voice. So if you’re somebody like me who’s blogged a lot, that’s really easy. If you’re not, upload some stuff that you’ve written, upload some emails, some Word documents, whatever, so that it understands how you write and then instruct it to always write in your voice. The other thing that’s really helpful is… Actually, I said two. There are three. Another thing that’s really helpful is to tell it to write at an eighth grade level. Very few people will be able to comprehend even 12th grade level writing, but almost everybody that’s literate can comprehend very easily eighth grade writing. And then the third thing is to always instruct it or remind it not to write like typical AI.

(21:41):

And definitely that last one, I have to keep coming back and it’s like getting a mallet out and hitting the AI over the head because boy, does it love to write like AI. The truth is that AI writes like AI because a lot of people write that way. AI didn’t make up M dashes. AI uses M dashes because people like me love them and I do love M dashes.

Shannon Offord (22:06):

I do too. Big fan actually.

Steven Rothberg (22:10):

So everybody who’s listening, you can hate on us. We deserve it.

Shannon Offord (22:14):

I don’t even know when I started using them. I just all of a sudden started. So love them though. What role do you think job boards and aggregators play in the whole AI powered landscape?

Steven Rothberg (22:26):

Our industry is veering into staffing, and when a job board starts to do screening and selection, that’s when a job board ceases being a job board and starts being a staffing company. There is nothing wrong with being a staffing company, but if you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and act like a duck, you are a duck. I’m the co-host of a podcast called the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. And one of the things I keep saying, and I think eventually maybe somebody will listen to me other than my dog, is if you are a job board and your business model is advertising and you collect the application and pass it on or you send the candidate to the ATS where they apply, you’re not screening and selecting and therefore you’re not responsible for the bad acts that the employer might do.

(23:19):

When you start to get into screening and selection, if the employer illegally discriminates against a candidate, then you are just as liable as that employer. I guarantee you that employer in their contract probably has an indemnification contract, especially members that are larger and have more bargaining power, they’re going to shift that liability to the job board. I think you can see that now with the Mobley versus Workday lawsuit, right? There is no doubt that Workday was doing screening and selection. If you read what the plaintiff’s written and you believe it, Workday was absolutely acting with screening and selection as part of the service it was delivering to its clients, and therefore it’s a staffing company and therefore it has liability. There’s nothing wrong with having liability if you go into it with your eyes wide open. You get behind the wheel of a car, you have liability.

(24:14):

But who would say, “Oh, I don’t want to have a car be on the off chance that I might get sued because I get into a traffic accident.” It’s a risk that we’re willing to incur so we don’t have to walk two miles with a couple bags of groceries. And it’s the same thing in our industry.

Shannon Offord (24:28):

That’s fair. All right. Enough of that AI stuff for a while. I know we talked a lot about it. It’s just such a hot topic. You’ve got to touch on it.

Steven Rothberg (24:36):

The AI told you you had to, so there you go.

Shannon Offord (24:39):

Well, I wish that were the case, but it would’ve made my planning for this a little bit easier. Will candidates be searching the same way for jobs in five years as they do today, or where do you see the shift coming with that?

Steven Rothberg (24:51):

I think we’re starting to see the shift now. College Recruiter is doing very little of it, so this is not a pitch for our services or anything like that, but what I’m starting to see are a small number of job boards and other talent acquisition technology companies that are getting integrated into Claude, Gemini, et cetera. That kind of reminds me of the old AOL model where you went into a walled garden and the content that you had available to you was just that little piece of the internet. And then people discovered that they didn’t have to just use the piece of the internet that AOL made available to them. There was this whole other world out there. But what I see happening with those sites, one of them is called Sonic Jobs, and it’s really interesting some of the data that they’re releasing. Sonic Jobs used to be kind of a traditional job board.

(25:44):

They’re all in on their integrations with Claude, et cetera. They’re publishing data about the searches that candidates are running, the kinds of searches that candidates run when they’re in Claude. It’s really different than when they’re on Indeed or LinkedIn or another job board. If you go to a typical job board, by far the number one search term used is the word job, and that includes Google. After that, it’s stuff like part-time, jobs near me. It’s super vague. And then people, candidates wonder why they get really bad search results coming back. It’s not Indeed’s fault that you typed in those keywords or is it? And I’m not picking on Indeed here, I’m just using them as representative of the whole industry. What we as an industry have not evolved into and what I think we’re going to is truly plain language searches. You should be able to type in, “I’m a nurse, but don’t like nursing.

(26:46):

I’m looking for something different that pays 80 to 120,000 dollars a year and is located within five miles of my house. What do you got for me?” I think five years from now, that’s going to be the norm.

Shannon Offord (26:59):

Yeah, I actually had a conversation around that as well. I think that is the norm. We’ve actually done some work with Sonic Jobs and seeing some of that information that comes back, you wouldn’t assume that people would be that generic in their search, but they are.

Steven Rothberg (27:13):

Until very recently, if you went to Google and you typed in a search for, let’s say you won an airline ticket to go to Austin, Texas, you’d type in flights to Austin would probably be the search that you would run. Now Google basically makes it unlimited and you can type in something like, “What’s the cheapest airline ticket between 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM on August 24th taking me from Indianapolis to Austin, Texas?” And Google will come back with good search results. So as people are getting used to Google, they’re going to start to demand of the ATS and job boards and others in our industry that their searches on our sites should be the same, should give them the same capabilities as what they’re getting on Google.

Shannon Offord (27:59):

Right. I totally agree with that. What’s one part of the application process that frustrates candidates?

Steven Rothberg (28:05):

Having to type in the same information over and over and over again. Job seekers don’t understand, nor should they have to. Why when they go to an ATS or to a job board and they have to upload a resume that has their name on it, that has their phone number on it, that has their jobs listed, why do they have to type all of that in all over again? Employers have application creep.You’ve heard of technical debt, application debt or creep is the same thing. Five years ago, somebody encountered an application that they don’t want to see that kind of application again. And it’s not necessarily terrible, but it was just kind of like, “Oh, we should have a knockout question to deal with that.” And then 180 more of those applications, now you’ve got 180 knockout questions. It’s disrespectful to candidates to require them to go through this really long application process in order to weed out outliers.

(29:15):

That’s an area where I think AI has a lot of promise, is to help us weed some of those fantastically qualified candidates who are in Bangladesh and applying to work at a Chick-fil-A in Indianapolis. That’s just not somebody who should be applying, but do you really need to have a knockout question for that person or can you just say, “You’re in Bangladesh, I’m sorry. If you move to Indianapolis, please contact us.” The AI can help a lot with that. The other thing that candidates really despise is the fact that the application process is so opaque to them. Even just when they’re applying, they can’t tell is this a two-minute process? A 20-minute process, a two-hour process. Tell them there are five steps to this process. You’re in step one. There are four more to go. This step typically takes five minutes. The whole process typically takes 40.

(30:13):

Tell them, and then you won’t get that kind of drop off. And you’re also going to get more good candidates who are going to think, “Oh, wow, it’s only going to take me 12 minutes to apply. I thought it was going to take 40, so I will apply.” A lot of employers think that by creating bad friction that they improve the quality of their hiring pool. The opposite is true. When you put people through too many hoops, you make them jump through too many hoops, what you end up doing is you get the most desperate of candidates apply. You get the people who are the worst qualified and you get the people who are the best and you get rid of the whole middle. Ideally, you want the best, some of the middle, none of the worst.

Shannon Offord (30:53):

Very good point. What recruiting trend do you feel isn’t getting enough attention right now?

Steven Rothberg (30:59):

I would say the lack of well-qualified applicants into a small number of roles that a lot of employers are still really struggling to find well-qualified candidates for some roles.

Shannon Offord (31:14):

What’s one prediction you have about recruiting over the next three to five years that may surprise employers?

Steven Rothberg (31:21):

I think there are going to be more recruiters five years from now than there are now.

Shannon Offord (31:24):

Really?

Steven Rothberg (31:24):

I do. I’m a bit of a history nerd. When I look back at history, whenever there has been a technological innovation, what it does is it greatly brings down the cost of whatever it is that’s being produced. But the demand doesn’t change. So if you go to your old economics class, when the supply goes up and the demand stays the same, costs come down. So think back to a room full of typists. 50 years ago, it was almost always a room in big companies. It was a room full of middle-aged white women sitting there banging away at manual typewriters. Then electric typewriters came in, word processors came in, computers came in. Are there fewer typists now? No. Everybody types now because the cost of typing fell through the floor. I think what we’re going to see is recruiters doing a lot more recruiting and a lot less paper shuffling.

(32:19):

The cost for a recruiter to hire someone is going to drop through the floor. And so companies will be hiring more people. Probably the turnover will be higher. We won’t stay at those jobs as long. And I think that recruiters are going to spend less time saying, “Shannon, how about 2:00 PM next Tuesday for an interview?” And instead they’re going to be like, “Tell me about that class you had in high school again, because that was really interesting. That really pertains well to this job.”

Shannon Offord (32:44):

Bullish on the labor market over the next three to five.

Steven Rothberg (32:48):

I am.

Shannon Offord (32:49):

That’s good news. That’s good for our industry, right? That’s really good news. Well, Steven, I appreciate your time today. It’s been fun. We could obviously have this conversation for a lot longer period of time, especially since you and I have been in the industry as long as we have. We’ve seen a lot and it’s been a fun journey so far. So any parting words you’d like to share with our audience?

Steven Rothberg (33:11):

I think that I would just like to remind everybody on the employer side that TA tech vendors like we are, the organizations that support everything that we all do, we are in the most honorable profession that we can be in. We help people become self-sufficient and there’s nothing that you can do that’s more honorable than that.

Shannon Offord (33:31):

Thank you. That’s a very good point. I tell my wife that all the time actually.

Steven Rothberg (33:38):

But you still have to take out the garbage, Shannon.

Shannon Offord (33:40):

I still do. Well, Steven, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure and I hope you have a great day.

Steven Rothberg (33:45):

Cheers.

DirectEmployers Association (33:46):

Thank you for tuning in for another episode of the DE Talk Podcast. Stay connected with DirectEmployers on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, or subscribe to receive updates straight to your inbox by visiting DirectEmployers.org/Subscribe, or you’ll receive notifications of new episodes, webinars, events, and more.