Season 7 • Bonus Episode

In this episode of the DE Talk podcast, host Shannon Offord, VP of Partnerships at DirectEmployers, sits down with seasoned executive and strategist Brad Boggs, founder of JobFlow. With over 20 years of experience in the recruitment technology space, Boggs shares how his new platform uses “powerfully simple” AI solutions to fix the broken cycle of mass job applications and overwhelmed hiring teams, ultimately building more inclusive and effective hiring pipelines. Whether you are a job seeker looking to stand out or an employer looking to slash your time-to-fill, this conversation offers a roadmap for navigating the evolving AI-powered recruitment landscape.

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.

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Episode Guests

Transcript

DirectEmployers (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 (00:09):

Hello everyone and welcome to the DE Talk podcast. I am your host Shannon Alford, VP of Partnerships here at DirectEmployers. Today we’ve got an exciting conversation, someone I wanted to have on the podcast for quite some time. Unfortunately at one point I got sick and then he got sick and then I started traveling for work and then he traveled for work so we weren’t able to connect. But fortunately today we both are healthy and we both are in our offices. So we’re able to get out today and talk a little bit about him and his new company. So today I’m very fortunate to have Brad Boggs from MyJobflow.com joining us today. Brad and I have known each other, gosh, probably 15 years now. He was on the job board side for a while and now he’s branched out and become an entrepreneur. So Brad, welcome to the DE Talk podcast.

Brad Boggs (01:10):

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here and as you mentioned, a lot of anticipation coming into this podcast, A lot of buildup towards us both being here, being healthy, finally sitting down for this conversation. So excited to be here.

Shannon Offord (01:23):

Been a long time coming. I know I mentioned you were in the job board space for some time, but just give us a little bit about you and a little bit about your background.

Brad Boggs (01:33):

Yeah, so I’ve been in the HR tech primarily job board recruitment technology space for gosh, the last 20 years. So building solutions to help people get back in the workforce or get in the workforce period and help hiring teams hire better people quicker, smarter, has really become my life’s work. So I started in the job board space in a sales role that was a company called Lat Pro and DiversityJobs.com. We were one of the first diversity job boards out there of any type. I became president and COO of that organization for primarily known as DiversityJobs.com for the last five years of our existence prior to selling the company to Circa and I was there for about a year prior to joining College Recruiter and getting involved in the early career student recruitment space. And the last three years I’ve been building Jobflow as a way to build powerfully simple AI solutions to help people land better jobs with fewer job applications. So what we do is automate job search and recruitment workflows for the job seeker or for workforce and career staff responsible for employment outcomes.

Shannon Offord (02:44):

So how did you move from kind of the job board space and being in that space for a long time to deciding to become an entrepreneur and starting your own thing?

Brad Boggs (02:54):

Great question. My role at DiversityJobs.com, we are always trying to come up with better solutions to solve the problems that we’ve been hearing about for 20 years. How do you search for the right job? How do you apply to jobs better, smarter, faster, dealing with new technologies? How can hiring teams comb through all the applicants so they can truly find the best candidate? How do you speed that process up or make it more efficient? So I’ve always been involved in creating solutions like that. I just started with all the new AI tools coming into the fold. It just became so much easier even on the weekends at net night to build little tools to try to solve some of these problems. So it started with after hour projects trying to solve the big problems that job seekers fundamentally still deal with and hiring teams still deal with. So it was an easy pivot and once we had something that was in production that job seekers were using with great success, I decided to branch out on my own full time.

Shannon Offord (03:56):

And how’s it been so far doing that?

Brad Boggs (03:58):

Exciting. Fulfilling. Any entrepreneur jury there’s ups and downs multiple times a day, right? But so exciting, so fulfilling.

Shannon Offord (04:07):

So I want to dig in a little bit. I know you briefly just talked about what MyJobflow.com does. Can you just talk a little bit more about the platform and how job seekers are utilizing the platform today?

Brad Boggs (04:21):

Sure. We started by automating the job search process for job seekers. They were the primary customer joining the platform. So they started by onboarding their current resume, like a resume writer might sit down with a candidate to ask them questions to dig in deeper so that they can provide better information on their base resume, better examples of what they really did in that role, specifics about what they accomplished, why that mattered. We do that in an automated fashion to improve a user’s based resume. Then we go out and with AI agents find them ideal match jobs to their skills, transferable skills matching their education job preferences they have with one click. We will tailor their application materials referring to their base resume. We will coach them on their fit for that specific role. So they have a great understanding prior to applying of how well they really match up with that job. If it’s not a great fit, we want them to understand why and what they can do to close that gap or to be encouraged and apply with confidence knowing you know what, I’m a great fit for this role and here’s why according to how well I match up with what the hiring manager’s actually looking for.

Shannon Offord (05:31):

And do you think the tool is really helping candidates better articulate their skills?

Brad Boggs (05:36):

Absolutely. I mentioned that Jobflow helps people land better jobs with fewer applications and that’s intentionally because much of even before AI of the job board and recruitment industry has gone the way of easy apply such that a candidate can apply to hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs in rapid succession and they’re typically applying with the same generic resume to that number of jobs, right? So employers are buried, but the candidate also didn’t really have the opportunity or take the opportunity I should say, to show all their skillset in relation to what each job was really asking for. So I might have 50 verifiable hard skills and soft skills and all of those mentioned on my 10 page resume, but I probably need to filter that thing down to two pages and make it really stand out in relation to what hiring manager A is asking for versus hiring manager B.

(06:33):

And if I have an understanding of what they’re looking for and where I match up, I can better understand my fit for the role or I can have something that called out for me. They’re asking for a CPA. You didn’t say that you had that. I can’t tell if you do. We’re not going to add it in for you. We don’t want to make up details you don’t have. We’re going to call it out. Do you have that? If so, let’s add it in. If not, you might want to refer to these resources to go take the courses to get your CPA. So you’re eligible for those types of jobs.

Shannon Offord (07:00):

It sounds like the intent of this platform is not to just shotgun resumes all over the place. It’s really, it’s narrowed down the scope of the jobs you’re trying to apply to and have a tailored resume to just those specific jobs.

Brad Boggs (07:17):

That’s exactly right. Intentionally because as I said, easy apply took us down one direction and the first maybe even more vocal AI tools that we hear about. Certainly if you’re on LinkedIn you see things like AI that applies to a thousand jobs for you while you sleep at night. In my opinion, that’s the wrong direction. The industry has already been heading down and that doesn’t do the candidate any good. We know it doesn’t do the employers any good, they’re just buried. They’re still largely manual reviewing applications as best they can. So it’s impossible now to get through the full stack. So what we do is intentionally opposite of that. We show people the top matches daily from roughly 6 million jobs that we look through from 200,000 employers to show the top three to five that really match the candidate 90, 95% match to the candidate.

(08:11):

So they can see the ones that they’re best suited for that they’re probably going to be most interested in If they want to apply to more outside of that, absolutely they can use the platform across any job site that they actually choose on Indeed, LinkedIn, the employer’s ATS. But we’re trying to show them these are the best matches for you, here’s why. Let’s get your application paperwork polished up as best we can in light of what they’re asking without fabricating who you really are on paper and get you an application in so that you have a much greater chance at success. And what we’ve proven through our method is we help candidates land four times the number of interviews on just a fraction of the applications. They save 74 hours of manual work in the process and they gain employment five weeks faster than benchmarks. So it’s not just helping the job seeker cut down on all this manual and guesswork that they’re doing. It’s actually helping the employer too because they receive much higher quality applications. But the fact that they hire these people mean they’re excited about who actually shows up to the interview. This person is who they said they were on paper and I was impressed there and they’re moved to employment faster.

Shannon Offord (09:20):

How can these tools help career changers or veterans non-traditional candidates compete more effectively?

Brad Boggs (09:28):

Great question. One of my favorite use cases is, I’ll use two examples. Last year we saw federal workers laid off, fired, in droves. They came out of federal service with a federal resume that was 12, 14 pages long that listed all your daily job duties. And these people wanted to see what they were qualified for in the private sector and get applications in. And none of the information on their documents made sense to private sector hiring managers or the private sector hiring managers would not take the time to decipher that document to understand how the person was qualified for their role. So what we built was a custom flow for that federal use case that condensed their work history down into two pages, translated their federal service into something that made sense more on a skills basis to the private sector hiring managers so they can easily see this person did this job but here’s really what they did and what they accomplished.

(10:25):

That actually makes sense to my role. I want to interview them. Works very much the same for another favorite use case is transitioning military veterans coming out of the service. They don’t speak corporate, they speak military. How do I coming out of service describe to a private sector hiring manager what I really did and what I’m qualified for and the leadership capacity I have. So what we did is translate their military service into something that makes sense to the private sector, hiring managers focus more on the transferable skills, show ’em relevant jobs that the transferable skills are related to and help cut out all this manual guesswork in prepping their documents in relation to those jobs because it’s a huge need. We should not ask people who’ve been in service to jump through all these hoops to gain employment when it’s tough enough for people who’ve already been in the private sector.

Shannon Offord (11:20):

Yeah, I think there’s always been this big debate like who’s responsibility, is it the job seeker, like the veteran job seeker to translate their resume or is it really the employer’s job to understand those veteran resumes as they come in? I think that debate’s been going on for probably since veteran started transitioning out of the military, but I think the tool you have really makes it easy for both.

Brad Boggs (11:48):

Yeah, I think so. There’s probably no wrong answer. Yes, it’s the candidate’s responsibility. We’d probably ask them to jump through too many hoops. I think private sector hiring managers have a responsibility to really review the candidates to see how well it could fit, but there’s a lot to go through and they’re already buried as we talked about to begin with. And then we also have workforce development teams staffs, your cities, your counties, your workforce development boards that have special programs or where I am in El Paso, we have Fort Bliss that has their transition assistance program. So they have entire staff set up to help these transitioning veterans to do this kind of work to meet with them to help with resume writing and resume tailoring and job search assistance. And it’s all great, but there’s just too many people who have the need too many jobs coming at you too quickly to help them. So our platform for workforce staff gives them the ability to 10x their efficiency and probably help 10 times the number of people because they don’t have to sit down with everybody individually and help them with the documents and coach them through and do all this career assistance work. We can meet them wherever they happen to be searching and actually need the help. So not replacing the workforce staff but really augmenting them, allow them to multiply their effect.

Shannon Offord (13:03):

My guess would be because of this tool and because of tools like yours that it would probably really increase the confidence level that our transitioning servicemen and women would have as they apply to positions because they’re not as worried about is this employer going to understand my resume?

Brad Boggs (13:22):

Exactly right. And even before they get to that point of will this hiring manager understand my resume, going back to the job search piece, they have a hard enough time understanding what types of jobs I should really be searching for. What am I qualified for? I can browse Indeed and LinkedIn, how do I really hone in on what my experience relates to? Do I search for project manager? What does that even mean? So there’s a lot of guesswork that goes into what we do that we can use tools like AI to help make those connections for us in a meaningful way.

Shannon Offord (14:00):

I think it’s so important. A lot of our transitioning service women come out and they don’t want to do what they did in the military. It’s just like a lot of people who go to college, they get degrees in areas that they don’t necessarily plan to go into once they graduate. I think all these people, all these employers think, oh, you know what? This person did X the military, they’re going to want to do this when they get out. But that’s not the case. And I think a lot of these transferable skills that they have with tools like this actually will put other jobs in front of them, not just the jobs from what they did in the military.

Brad Boggs (14:39):

Yeah, exactly right. Your experience is great. Here’s what you did. Here’s how that transfers or translates to this type of career, this type of occupation have you thought about being in this industry that’s all related. So for them to even understand what’s out there so they can make that type of meaningful transition is absolutely impactful.

Shannon Offord (14:59):

Let’s switch gears just a little bit. I know we talked a lot about the job seeker side, which obviously is super important, but I want to focus a little bit on the benefits for employers. You keep hearing and all this out there about you’ve got tools that are applying for jobs for job seekers and you’ve got on the other side, you’ve got these tools that are really looking at all automated tools, AI driven tools that are looking at these candidates and there’s not really a lot of human interaction happening, but like you just mentioned, there’s still a lot of employers that are doing this manually, but are tools like yours, are they making it easier for recruiters to I guess, assess candidate fit more quickly?

Brad Boggs (15:45):

They are. This is obviously a big topic in the industry on both sides of the market. Job search and recruitment. We’ve been hearing probably for a couple years largely from the candidate side that my resume is getting rejected automatically and employers are using all these AI tools to reject me and I can’t get through the screening. And that has largely not been AI driven. So there is some misconception in the industry actually when I started down this path with Jobflow, I thought using AI on the recruitment talent acquisition side was much more prevalent than it actually is. I think talent teams are still fairly gun shy about using it to evaluate candidates because there’s been some high profile cases like the Workday, some discrimination cases, so they want to use it. I think they’re open to using it. It’s it’s still used sparingly I would say.

(16:43):

So largely when candidate resumes are automatically rejected, it’s around rules that the employer has set up in their ATS to look for the education. Did you meet this requirement? I said, you have to have, you’re just getting kicked back automatically when you don’t meet those rules. We are starting to see more adoption at the recruitment talent acquisition level where they’re using AI to help them screen and make sense of keyword terms that they’re using to scan resumes. So we still say that reviewing candidates is largely a manual process and that is because recruiters by and large are still searching their ATSs to look for candidates who match these certain terms. Maybe it’s my job title, maybe it’s a couple of key skills and probably only looking at the short list of matches who have those skills. So if you applied, even if you met the application deadline, you do not automatically get reviewed. You get reviewed if you match what the employer is searching for, if they’re manually searching their ATS. So that concept is now starting to be augmented more with AI to help with the searching. But recruiters I would say are still fairly gun shy in using that certainly to make hiring decisions. They don’t want to touch that.

Shannon Offord (18:04):

Well, like I said, I mean they don’t want to use those tools to ultimately make the decision for them. They may assist in the decision, but it’s definitely not going to be, the final decision is not going to be made from any AI tool. At least not now.

Brad Boggs (18:19):

Right? Correct. So the best use case to help automate the recruitment is automating a lot of the prospecting and sourcing for skills-based assessment. AI is very good at understanding in this candidate profile or the resume as they presented themselves, do they have these verifiable hard skills? Did they show examples of these soft skills? Do they have the right education? So cutting down in the amount of manual work required to source through candidates to get through to your shortlist is one of the main benefits of using AI on the recruitment side.

Shannon Offord (18:55):

Do you think this is a situation where employers may start to see a broader, more skills diverse candidate pool, maybe not the same old applicants they’ve historically seen. They may start getting new pools of people just because it’s a more skills-based versus what school they went to, the whole reliance on the whole pedigree thing?

Brad Boggs (19:18):

Yeah, I think so. Certainly you’re shortlist anymore doesn’t necessarily come from, they graduated from Harvard or Stanford Business School. We now have the ability to see across the entire market who actually has the experience I’m looking for and the verifiable skills so I don’t have to stick with the same shortlist anymore. So yes, I think it levels the playing field and gives more people an opportunity to be surfaced as a great match for that job. And there are tools, however, like you mentioned, the AI tools that apply to jobs for you while you sleep in this a agentic fashion, maybe they candidate didn’t even know about that. Those are adding noise to an already muddy process. And so we do need to look at minimizing how much we’re utilizing those tools because they would be the ones to fabricate without knowing in a verifiable way if the candidate actually had this skill, this education, this experience, how much are those models making that stuff up just to make everybody look like the perfect candidate will just further an already muddied process, I would say, right? So it’s not like, yes, AI is absolutely useful and we should just plug it in, everyone run forward. We’re still going to have to take it in baby steps and make sure we’re adopting the right tools, the right models, and that we keep ’em in check and there’s constant collaboration with the talent and recruitment side as well as we build out this future of how this is all going to work.

Shannon Offord (20:44):

Have you been able to talk to people in TA about how tools like yours improve time to fill and just overall recruiter productivity?

Brad Boggs (20:54):

Yeah, we have. So we’ve talked so far about the job search automation side to our platform, which is helping the candidate either build or improve their base resumes, the job matching, coaching on their fit, helping automate the application process. We also have the opposite side of the platform that we sell primarily to workforce development boards and workforce agencies. And that is for their shortlisted employer partners to onboard. We ingest their jobs to present to them the top matching candidates based on skills and requirements to their jobs. So we’re already doing this to save the weeks, the months of resourcing, prospecting work that talent teams are having to do. If I received a thousand applicants from my job, I really only want to talk to the 20 people that are a hundred percent matched. They meet this absolute requirement. I have to have these skills, A, B, and C. We want you to have a faster way to talk to those 20 people who are a great fit to get them to the inner view stage quicker, right? We’re not talking about removing people from the process, we’re talking about excluding all the noise so the people can actually make connections with the real job seeker much quicker in a more meaningful fashion. That’s the whole idea behind our work.

Shannon Offord (22:15):

Well, and I would think that the conversations during the interviews were probably between the job seeker, the recruiter, even hiring managers. You could think those conversations would be so much better now.

Brad Boggs (22:28):

Yeah, for sure. If who you say you are on paper shows up to the interview, absolutely. That’s a much better conversation, less screening time look like you might be a pretty good fit to this role. Tell me a little more about your experience to find out it’s not a match. So excluding a lot of the time and guesswork that’s going into it on both sides, so those 20 people who are excited about that role and a perfect fit can have that conversation with the hiring manager. It’s a much different conversation and interview at that point. Absolutely.

Shannon Offord (23:02):

So my guess from the conversation we’ve been having that there’s probably this feeling that this is raising the overall quality of job applications just across the TA landscape as a whole. And it’s not just this, I’m going to shotgun resumes and there’s really a clear distinction between tools like yours and some of the other tools that are out there because I think employers probably think they’re all the same.

Brad Boggs (23:27):

Yeah, you’re probably right about that. I think there’s still a lot of hesitation in the market about AI and its pitfalls and what it is doing or can do and should do. And so there’s probably a lot of people who paint AI solutions with the same brush that it’s dangerous and probably misused. There’s some fantastic use cases that we’ve proven out where it’s very beneficial to both the job seeker and the recruitment hiring manager side. And that’s what we want to focus on is building that type of quality experience. So the people who are absolutely qualified for the role, have a much better opportunity to land the interview and get hired so they can move to a place of employment much quicker without the hiring manager also having to spend weeks, months interviewing noise, right? So it’s all about quality and much more meaningful connections. Absolutely.

Shannon Offord (24:22):

Do you think your tool could really maybe accelerate the adoption of skills-based hiring or is that something you thought about?

Brad Boggs (24:31):

Yeah, I think so. Especially when we’re coaching candidates on fit. I think there’s a big way we can, it’s not a pivot, it’s really tangential is make sure candidates understand when they’re not a great fit or when they want to become a better fit to understand the skills-based learning and training they could do to be a better quality fit and help direct them into those. And from the employer side, really understanding and being able to give skilled assessments on the fly to help with the screening, the interview process. This opens up that path in a much more efficient fashion, I would say. So I see that growing, absolutely.

Shannon Offord (25:13):

And do you think tools like yours can really help with the whole skills alignment? Do you think it can help really lead to more stronger, long-term fit or is that something you haven’t thought about?

Brad Boggs (25:26):

Yeah, no, I think, so. We talk with a lot of upskilling and training programs and one of their biggest pain points is the people come out of their training with all these skills that they can verify, but they’re still having a hard time getting in the workforce or pivoting out of the job they had into one that they’re really now set up for long-term success. And so a tool like Jobflow and others in the market can make the connection from the upskilling training program to employment much quicker. We can now verify they have these skills and here are the jobs that they’re really set up to excel in and get them to those interviews and hires to accelerate employment into something that is going to have much more long-term success. They’re not taking a short-term job that’s not a great fit because they had to, because they just have to earn a paycheck while they continue looking. That’s unfortunately the reality in this market a lot. So tools like AI, if used correctly, can accelerate and cut through all the noise to understand the true skills connections that will set people up for meaningful work.

Shannon Offord (26:36):

Well, I have two more questions for you and you probably have answered them, but I want to make sure that these are two takeaways that people are able to get from our conversation today. Biggest win for employers with tools like yours?

Brad Boggs (26:53):

The biggest win for employers and talent teams is saving weeks, months, sourcing, prospecting, candidates, trying to weed through to find ideal shortlist that they really want to interview, who meet all the requirements, have the verifiable skills that they want to interview because those are the people they’re absolutely going to hire. So getting from point A to point B in a much more efficient way is exactly the win for talent teams. That means they can accelerate hiring and employment can get to the face-to-face peopleto people connection much quicker, cut out all this back and forth, the scanning, all the manual work that still goes into the recruitment process.

Shannon Offord (27:36):

Follow-up question. Biggest win for job seekers?

Brad Boggs (27:40):

Biggest win for job seekers is being able to find a meaningful job that they’re qualified for, land that interview and get placed months faster than they would just doing the same old thing, searching job boards every day, getting 15 job alert emails every day using easy apply, banging my head against the wall with hundreds, thousands of applications just trying to land something. So filtering again, all that noise out to find the jobs that I’m truly most qualified for, that match exactly what I’m looking for and helping me present myself in the best light I can to that hiring manager so we can have a productive interview and I can land this job without all the hassle.

Shannon Offord (28:25):

Well Brad, thank you so much for joining us today. I definitely think the conversation was well worth a wait. So again, thank you for battling through sickness and travel has to actually hop on with us today and be a huge resource for our members and our listeners and also to job seekers who may tune in. If people want to get ahold of you, what is the easiest way to do that?

Brad Boggs (28:50):

My email is Brad, Brad@MyJobflow.com. Our website is MyJobflow.com. The company’s Jobflow. Connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me there, Brad Boggs. I’d love to continue the conversation.

Shannon Offord (29:04):

FYI people out there who are listening, if you do message Brad, he is very quick to get back with you. It’s one of the things that I really like about him is if you’re going to email or message him through LinkedIn, he does get back to you real quick. So again, Brad, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it and look forward to our next conversation.

Brad Boggs (29:25):

Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. All the best.

DirectEmployers (29:28):

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 where you’ll receive notifications of new episodes, webinars, events, and more.