Recruitment Done Right: Hiring Great People in the AI Age (James Dooley & Mads Singers)

James Dooley: Where do most companies get it wrong with recruitment? Today I'm joined with Mads Singers, who's got a very successful recruitment company worldwide. Virtual assistants, remote workers, the lot. Obviously, you do a lot of business coaching. Where do you think people, business owners, are getting it wrong with recruitment now in the AI age?

Mads Singers: So the biggest area is cutting time, right? Most business owners I work with, they always tell me, "Oh, I'm not good at recruiting. I'll just hire someone." "Oh, we desperately need someone right now, you know? Oh, my friend Bob, here you go." Right. Recruitment is probably the most important thing you do in a business. Like, because the difference between hiring even average people versus great people is gigantic. Now, the difference between hiring great people and horrible people is life and death in a business, right? So, most business owners, because they just, "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good at this thing," they, they don't invest the time. Like, here's the thing. If you run a business, if you want to build a big company, it is the most important skill to grow and develop, is really hiring the right people. Because if you get the right people on board, everything else becomes so much easier, right? So for me, definitely the core aspect of this and where people get it wrong is they're not investing in learning how to hire better. They're not investing in, uh, even putting the right descriptions together. I mean, it sounds silly, but having a good role description of what you're looking for is key. And in the beginning, my, my personal preference and what I tell people to do early on, that so many people, they, they do this job description and they're like, "Yeah, there's 17 things they need to do." I'm like, "Pick one." And what I mean with that is if you hire an individual and they get just one thing right, that should be able to more than pay for them. So focus on the one thing that you want them to be able to do and do well, and then develop on that. Right? So if someone, if you bring someone in who is, I don't know, amazing at, um, doing link building, for example, or amazing at running ads, even if there's other things you would like them to do, the main thing is that their core skill is more than worth it to have them in your business. They can then start doing more and learning more over time. But you really want to focus on the core skill because the amount of business owners I see that's trying to hire someone to do seven different jobs, and you will never find someone who's great at doing seven different jobs. And then with regards to recruitment gone wrong, I want to try and put a spin-off on it with regards to artificial intelligence. Now, there's a lot of people, a lot of business owners that are getting FOMO. There's a lot of business owners that are getting shiny object syndrome. A lot of businesses are thinking we need to be embracing the LLMs, whether it's Codex with ChatGPT, whether it's Claude Code. If someone wants to now say, "We need to embrace artificial intelligence. We need a recruitment drive," what do you think they could end up doing wrong if they're looking for recruitment in the AI age?

James Dooley: Yeah, I, I think actually AI can be very, very helpful. And it can both be helpful in doing things like job descriptions... [Snorts] ...but it can also be very helpful finding good interview questions that is very relevant. And what I really like the most is actually looking, recording all the interviews you're doing, and actually get an AI feedback. Because a lot of the time when you're recruiting in the early days and you don't really know what you're doing, you can get a lot of good feedback from AI in terms of things it's picking up that you might not have thought about. Now, saying that, if, if you aren't very experienced, it can be very, very helpful to utilise a recruitment agency to at least help you bring down the number of candidates that you're looking at, right? Because, like, recruitment process can be very daunting, and particularly if you don't have a lot of experience with it, right? But putting out a job ad, getting hundreds of applicants, trying to sort through them, like, that can be a lot of work. And by utilising an agency, you can get them to do a lot of the front work. Now, as the business owner, you always want to make the hiring decision, and you always want to do the final interviews yourself. You don't want to have someone just tell you, "Oh, this is a good guy. Go with them." Right? Like, you want to have a good feeling. And what I, what I tell people is that if you're interviewing a person for a role and you're not very, very confident that that individual can do the job well, don't hire them. Even if they're the best you found. Many people, they go, they put out the job ad, they get a bunch of applicants, and they just hire the best one, even if they're not confident that that person can do the job. And that kills businesses because you're way better going to do the whole process again, even though it takes a bunch of time, but finding someone that you're comfortable with and believe can do the job really well. With regards to looking to recruit then, what's the best way? Obviously, you've got AristoSourcing. So, if someone's looking to hire some virtual assistants or they're looking to hire in-house staff or whatever it is, should they be using a recruitment agency like AristoSourcing and why?

Mads Singers: I, I generally recommend particularly smaller companies do it. Like, when you have a company with a couple hundred people and you have full-time HR staff and so on, then it's... They can often help you a lot with, with a lot of the process, right? But for smaller companies, it usually... Recruitment companies cost money. But often the amount of time that I see business owners spending on it, like, it can easily be 100, 200 hours sometimes in, you know, going over the entire process A to Z. And again, for most business owners that is very expensive time, right? So generally for smaller companies, if you're not experienced doing it, recruitment companies can be very helpful. But I would say even from my point of view, uh, even going down the road, we would often supplement some of our companies with recruitment. So if we're hiring for a particular executive role, we might want a recruitment company to go look. Um, so there's many, many scenarios where, where doing that can make sense. Just like in every other part of the business where if you're doing something that you're not the expert at, if you've never run ads and you suddenly want to start running ads, well, hiring someone who knows what they're doing is a great way to, to increase your likelihood of success.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I always say if you need the roof fixing, you go and get a roofer. If, like, we've done one, check out the other episode in the description about time management. I don't want to waste my time on recruitment, which I'm not great at. When finding the, the candidates initially, then doing them first interviews. I want it all laid on a plate to go, "We've, we've interviewed 350 people and here's the best five. Go and have a look at these five." And I don't mind looking at the five. I just don't want 350. I don't want to be doing the outreach and setting up all the descriptions, not knowing and not, not, not knowing what does work, what doesn't work. The amount of horror stories that I've heard with recruitment is... I think it's just easier to come to somebody like yourself at AristoSourcing, saying, "Look, this is what I need. Go and find it. Thank you very much. I'm happy to pay for what you do." I.e. I'm happy to pay a roofer to come and fix my roof. And I think it's pretty much as plain sailing as that for someone like myself. Anyway, we hope you like the episode about recruitments that have gone wrong or what people seem to do wrong with recruiting. I think it's more important than ever to recruit the right people in the AI era. Make sure you check out the episode about how to build a team in the AI world. Mads, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.