Jared Black
Stop "Post and Pray" Hiring — Build AI-Powered Systems That Find A-Players | Jared Black | Ep. 2
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"If you don't know what makes that person successful in your eyes in their first 30, 60, 90 days, you're reaching and they're probably gonna fail because you're just gonna be changing your mind on them and pivoting every other day, so to speak.
Key Takeaways
- ◆Jared tracks personality assessments on every hire and has found that everyone still with the company after years shares the same core personality traits, proving personality alignment predicts retention more than résumé skills.
- ◆His five-step signature method is X factor (what makes someone great at the job), verify skills (put them in the environment, don't trust the CV), align on values (misalignment always leads to failure), personality assessment (track it by department), and confirm growth (if they want SVP in a year and you can't offer it, they will leave).
- ◆The post-and-pray hiring strategy posting on job boards and waiting fails in 2025 because nearly 80 percent of the talent market is passive, meaning they are working and performing but open to the right opportunity, so you must go find and engage them directly.
- ◆Jared's AI software identifies and ranks talent in minutes, then creates personalized outreach sequences so his team focuses on engagement instead of wasting hours on manual discovery, cutting client costs to a fraction of traditional recruitment fees.
- ◆A bad hire can cost six figures or more once you factor in opportunity costs, training time, department labor, and lost revenue while the seat is empty or underperforming.
- ◆Look at the last three to five people promoted in your company and ask why they were promoted, those traits are your real core values, not the mission statement on your website that no one can recite.
- ◆In five years a 50-person company will do the work of a 500-person company today by managing swarms of AI agents or workflows that handle 60-plus percent of grunt work, leaving humans to focus on high-value service, relationships, and expertise that AI cannot replace.
Full transcript
Show
Chad
Most companies think they have a hiring problem. Too many applicants, not enough good ones. Positions open for 60, 90, sometimes 120 days. And every week, that seat is empty. It's costing them. It's lost revenue in team mode and momentum. But here's what my guest today will tell you. It's not a hiring problem. It's a process problem. A process unlike luck can be fixed. Jared Black is the founder and president of New Vine Employment Group, a staffing and recruiting firm based out of South Florida. That's placed talents across the country from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles to right here in DFW. Jared didn't come up through traditional recruiting. He spent years in B2B sales and new business development. before making the pivotal into the staffing. That outside perception that sales-minded process first lends is exactly what makes the way he builds hiring systems so different from everyone else today. Today, he's doing something most recruiting firms aren't even close to, architecting AI-powered hiring systems that cut time to fill up by three times with slashing recruiting costs more than half. Jared, welcome to the show. I've been looking forward to this one.
Jared Black
Thanks for having me.
Chad
So Jared, just kinda hopping in here. before we get into business, take me back to when you went from selling flowers and jet fresh to building a styling firm. What was the pull?
Jared Black
Yeah. So my family's actually in the flower industry. So I was, I was born into that industry. My, my great grandfather was one of the first people to import tulips from Holland and bring them into New York city and sell on the flower market and 28th street. So anyone who's been on, you know, been to Manhattan, been to 28th street flower market, they know exactly what I'm talking about. But, uh, so my great grandfather did that. My grandfather worked with him. My dad worked with my grandfather that my dad branched off, did his own thing. Years later, my family relocated to South Florida and my dad and my grandfather kind of worked together in a importer distributor model, is basically Miami is like the gateway to Latin America and South America. So most of the flowers that come into United States coming through Miami and then they're distributed that way. So my role in that company was to sell into distributors, importers, wholesalers. wedding event people, anybody who would resell flowers in a mass scale. So if you're in, you know, Dallas area and you want to get married, you're going to go to your wedding event planner, they buy their flowers from a wholesaler locally, or they would buy it from direct from Miami. So we would arrange those, those transportations, shipments or anything like that. So that was my context. And that was, you know, usually who I would sell into, but throughout that process, it was a very difficult market to sell into. Very competitive, especially in Miami. was very dog-eat-dog. A lot of people just undercutting each other, know, price gouging and it was a race to the bottom. And so I had this idea that I wanted to sell into mass market and I wanted to sell to grocery stores. And that was really still early on. You know, that's a very common thing now. You go into a grocery store, there's flowers everywhere. Very good quality flowers.
Chad
Hmm.
Chad
Yeah. yeah. That's where I go for Valentines. Yeah, exactly.
Jared Black
Exactly. I mean, the retail florist is dying very slow. I mean, now very quickly, but back then it was, it was slow death and they couldn't keep up. They were just kind of like outdated and they weren't attracting their customers. Fast forward to today's model. It's very common. You go into a grocery store, you buy your flowers there and you get good products, good, good selection. but it wasn't like that back then. So it was growing. was getting more in demand, but there wasn't, you know,
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
There wasn't the channels weren't as established as they are today. And I was trying to go to bat with these big guys. And I can tell you it was not easy, very difficult. They control all the power. They tell you the price, they tell you the profit margin, they tell you the selection, they tell you deliver or you're canceled and that's it. Like you play by the rules or you get out. And grocery stores are very cutthroat. And what led me to staffing, what led me to recruitment, was that
Chad
Wow.
Jared Black
I was dependent on staffing companies in Miami to bring me the talent to fulfill the needs of the grocery stores. So I needed to hire warehouse people. needed to hire production workers. So what we would do is we would bring in product from all over the world, not just from South America, but we would bring it in from Central America, from Holland, from South Africa, from all over the place, Canada.
Chad
Yeah. Wow.
Jared Black
California, mean, everywhere, we would bring flowers into Miami and then we would custom make these arrangements or these bouquets. And then we would sell those bouquets to grocery stores. And it did very well, but it was hard to control because we didn't really own the infrastructure. didn't own the products. didn't own the farms. So pricing was hard. Availability was hard to maintain. So it just became a juggling act. But the hardest part was the people, right? Because the biggest cost other than the actual product was your labor. And because
Chad
Wow.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
the labor was so inconsistent due to the, you know, I would say the low performance of the staffing companies, it threw a wrench in our production every single week. And so after years of doing this, we realized, or I realized like there's a need here because I started talking to all my colleagues in the flower space. Hey, what are you doing out there? How are you getting people? And everyone was doing the same thing. And it was just relying on the same vendors. And I was like, this is my aha light bulb. I need to do this. This is where I need to go out, offer a need to the market and I started a new bon employment group strictly as a staffing company. And I went out to all my existing colleagues at the time and I said, you know, this is, this is what I'm doing. I know your business. I know the flower space better than anybody else. as least in the, in the staffing arm, give me a shot. won't let you down. And those who did, you know, we delivered, we didn't let them down. We performed very well and, and we led with service, accountability, deliverability, transparency. And these were our core principles. These were things that I found I needed and that I needed to deliver on. And so we were founded on those principles and we delivered on that promise. And that's how we got started. And we've done very well, but our first two, three years were very, very successful because of that.
Chad
So you think it was, it kind of leads a little bit like, it sounds like you, when you started New Vine, you went out and fired up. What's happening in the staffing industry that just, it's not working. Like what is it that you felt needed to change? And that's what you made your core principles, which I mean, smart, right? Do it different than everybody else.
Jared Black
Yeah.
Jared Black
Yeah. I mean, I had, yeah, I had people showing up to work with like a sticky note and they would say, it's just my first name on it. They had no idea what their job was. They had no idea what they're supposed to be doing. They would show up unprepared without the right attire. They would show up without the right tools or at the right, you know, equipment. They were working in 35 degree coolers with shorts and tank tops. And they would show up to work like that. Like they were not prepared or aware whatsoever. They would get there. They would see the cooler. They turn around and walk right out. And so, I mean, just.
Chad
Wow.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
You know, no accountability from the, from the agency. They're like, Oh, sorry. That's, know, best we could do, or, you know, I don't have anyone for you. Sorry. You know, too bad for you. So zero accountability and you know, you can't run a business like that. So something had to change.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Wow.
Chad
No, and it goes back to communication, right? Breckett chain communicating and really setting people up for success. coming to you to, they need a job, they need a place to work and they're coming to you to rely on you to help them with that. you know, a little information in the beginning would help with those situations walking into where shorts on working at a cooler. Cause it, cause it, yeah.
Jared Black
It goes way past communication. mean, communication is simple, but if you don't even care about the success of your client, you don't care about communication, you know? So it's just a philosophy. these were businesses that were just operating off of, hey, I'm the only one here doing it. No one's going to challenge me. You know, I have all these people coming to me asking me for the same thing. And, you know, if 40 % of them are successful, then okay, that's a win by me.
Chad
Mmm.
Chad
through.
Chad
Hmm.
Jared Black
and the rest have no other alternatives, so they're just gonna keep coming back. So it's kinda like in baseball where you can strike out seven out of 10 times and you're still a good hitter, right? No, like that's not the case, not in business, especially in a business as volatile and as dependent on seasonality as flowers. Flowers is basically, have Valentine's, you have Mother's Day, and maybe you have Christmas season. That's it, if you fail those two out of three of those holidays, your business is done.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
That's it, right? So walk me through what a typical hiring engagement looked like for your clients three years ago versus today. What's fundamentally changed now? What's different?
Jared Black
Yeah. Well, fundamentally, everything's different. Everything's changed. Technology is different. Times are different. Demand is different. Labor. Everything's changed. Back then, early days, was very much, know, companies didn't have a clear, consistent way of attracting talent. Didn't have a clear, consistent way of managing workers and keeping them coming back because it was very unsexy labor type work. know, was, know, grunt work, warehouse, production.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
forklift operators, manual work. So that type of environment, was just about the client focusing on their business, let us handle the people part, right? So we would get to know the client, we'd get to know the candidate, and then we would match the two. Who is a candidate that would be successful in that environment? Why would they be successful in that environment? You know, what were the skills that they needed to have? What were the traits that they needed to have? What would make them be a long-term employee versus a short-term employee? Who wants seasonal work? Who wants long-term overtime work? Right? So we've got to learn about these things. We have to learn about the business. We have to learn about the candidate. And because we took the time and consideration to understand both parties, we were able to make a reasonable match and those people had success in those environments. Fast forward a little bit. You inject more technology and then you inject the speed for deliverability. You inject you know, better metrics for management, you know, why someone's working, you know, and having success in this environment, why somebody didn't. So we change all of that. look at all these different variables, but over the, over the years, we've kind of developed our, what I call my five step signature method for hiring or for placing somebody within a business to have success. call us a five step signature method to hiring a players. Now today we're more focused on traditional direct placement. So.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
high impact employees, people who are skilled workers, highly desired, competitive positions or areas of knowledge. We still offer the staffing. The staffing is still a core service that we have, but that is just, I would say it runs itself, so to speak. We have our core business, we have our suite of products and services there, but the real sweet spot and the challenge and where people are having a very difficult time in winning talent is in that high skilled, high impact player. Because the times have definitely changed. The labor market has definitely changed. we look at our five step signature method and we, same principles as we were founded on, we look at the company, we look at the business, we look at things like core values, mission, key traits, skill sets, what the company stands for. And we look at the talent.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
And we married those two, but we married in a way that is predictively successful.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
So, no, it's really cool. talk about like bottlenecks. What is the biggest, I guess, when you're talking to these potential clients, you need to put staffing in those. What's kind of the common theme you hear from most of them? Because I would imagine you see some commonalities, doesn't matter what industry they're in, bottlenecks that they have. for those listeners, like what are some of the... Because maybe somebody out there going, yep, I deal with that. Yep, I deal with that.
Jared Black
Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
What are those kind of bottlenecks that you see that it's pretty much coming out as you see coming out?
Jared Black
Yeah, yeah. mean, just today, I had a conversation with a client. It probably had this conversation 10, 12 times a week, but basically their process is broken. So most businesses, just don't have a talent. They just fail to have a talent acquisition process that's consistent and that keeps up with today's talent market. So post and pray method where everyone just goes to the job board, whether it's LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, pick your choice. doesn't matter. You post on a job board and you pray that the right person is going to find it. There's a failing strategy in 2026 doesn't work anymore. Barely worked in 2015. Work doesn't work at all in 2026. Essentially what you're doing is you're fishing in the smallest least populated pond available, right? The talent, the available talent there is just not the talent that most companies are looking for or wanting to hire. So two things happen either one, they get no applicant traffic there. So people are not applying whatsoever. So now they're just reposting and just kind of hoping that this catches on somehow.
Chad
True, so true.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
Or it's the opposite where they get too much application traffic, but it's the wrong applicant, right? Unqualified, unrealistic candidates who are just not a good fit for the company, whether it's experience or skill set or whatever the case may be. So now the client is now wasting precious man hours of sifting through hundreds of resumes who are just not qualified or they're getting nobody and they're wasting time on that side of the scale as well. both
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
Problems are different problems, but from the same process starting with the post and pray So today's environment is just you have to be good at going out and finding the talent and then engaging with that audience Nearly 80 percent of the total talent market today is passive talent. So that means passive talent They're they're working they're performing and they're not actively looking but they would be open so they'd be open for the right opportunity, but you can't
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
rely on just active talent today. It's less than 20%, less than 25 % of the total.
Chad
That's a great point because if they're good, if they're quality, right, they're good, they're probably have a job. They're probably working today. And so, you you have to be able to reach them because they're not, like you said, I think such a great point is, know, actively looking is there's a very small, right? Passive, you know, people that are in a job already, you know, those are the ones that you're probably going to want to talk to anyway, right? So,
Jared Black
most common secretion. 100%. 100%.
Jared Black
Exactly. So either you want somebody who's currently working for a similar industry, you want somebody who's working for a competitor, you want somebody who has a recent experience in the vertical or in the problem you're looking to solve. All of that comes to the fact that you need to find someone who's currently out there and they're so busy performing that they're not actively shopping, right? You have to find them, you have to identify that, and then you have to go engage with them and you have to offer them something that they don't currently have or that they can't get at their current employer.
Chad
Alright.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
whether it be an opportunity, a title, compensation, leadership, work-life balance, you know, all the above potentially.
Chad
So true, so true. let's, cause this happens all the day, all the time, companies hire, you know, they hire people, they bring them in and this is like, this is a really bad hire. So you talk about, you and I kind of talked before a little bit before this podcast is, you know, reducing costs 60, you say, know, 68 % I've seen reduction in costs. You know, give me a real example of what, you know, maybe what that looks like for a company because
Jared Black
Yeah.
Chad
If I'm hiring somebody and I've talked to you and you're like, I can reduce 60, 80 % of your calls probably trying to hire somebody and here's how I do that. Give me an example of what that actually looks like. Because think people would, like ears would turn on, like tell me more, right?
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a couple of ways that we can, we, we solve business. I'd say we, we would solve the pain point of mis-hires in one way, but we save money in another way. Both could be looked at the same way, but let's just say saving money wise. traditional recruitment process, if you're working with an agency or recruiter, they're going to charge you recruitment fees. most recruiters, and I talked a little bit about this, you know, I have on my YouTube channel, but basically.
Chad
yeah.
Jared Black
90 % of recruiters will become redundant in the next two to five years, maybe even sooner than that. But the reason why is because they're not adopting technology. They're not leveraging the tools that are available to them that would reduce their front end costs or reduce the cost to the client or the end cost to the client. So really what that hat, what that looks like is you pay high agency fees for slow work, right? And it's very manual. It's very slow. It's, and it's not really, you're not really getting anything other than
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
the recruiter's gut instinct, or maybe their potential network that they say they have exclusively, which nobody has an exclusive network anymore. Anything that you have or have access to, I could go and pay and get access to and vice versa. Someone can do the same to me, so to speak. The real value is how good they can engage with talent and then how can they present your offer to that talent, right? So it's understanding the problem that maybe the talent needs to solve for.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
And then pitching that opportunity, meaning the client's opportunity to that talent, to bring that person relevant or bring that person to the client. That's really the value that you should be getting with a recruiter. Now, how we can save businesses money is the way that we package that up. So we have a service, we call it Vine. And basically through that service, we leverage our proprietary AI software that we built out that identifies and discovers the talent front end. And then it grades and ranks that talent and then brings it into a basically in order that our team can then just prioritize and reach out to that talent. So we're not wasting so much time, energy and effort on the front end just doing discovery. We've already identified the talent in basically minutes. And from that point, we then can create a personalized outreach sequence that feels very...
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
It's highly personalized, it's highly engaging, and it feels like somebody took the time to really understand my wants, my needs. Really, we're not just spamming people, we're not blasting cold messages. We're reaching out to somebody who may benefit from this opportunity, truly benefit from this opportunity, and they're a great fit, they're experienced, they're professional, they're somebody who can bring value to the business. So it's a great synergistic relationship between the client, the candidate, and us bringing all this together.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
So we save money to the business because that costs a fraction of the cost of traditional recruitment fees. You're not paying for per placement. So that eliminates the front end costs. And on the back end, would say the long-term way of saving money is reducing your risk of mishire. That's probably the most hidden. It's the largest, most hidden cost that most businesses never see. Because the mishire could cost six figures depending on the role on the back end, right?
Chad
Yeah, sure.
Chad
Yeah. it could be more. mean, being a former executive and being in companies, I've had recruiters that I've used many times and I've spoken with recruiters and I don't know how many times I can tell you that we've hired somebody and placed them in and you, cause this is a lot of like what people don't realize, there's a lot of time and money and development. And you you're pretty much upfront that cost. and hopes that they turned out and returned that money back to flat because it's a good, if you are really good when you're a couple of hundred thousand dollars invested before they even see results, right? They want, and then if you invest that time and you get them up in training, which is man hours, I mean, it's a lot of time just for them to not be able to do it and merely on, you know.
Jared Black
Exactly.
Jared Black
Exactly.
Chad
Just a miss, it happens. I would say more common, yeah, it's a lot.
Jared Black
You have opportunity costs, training costs, the time of your labor, the departments, potentially loss of revenue while you're waiting to get this person onboarded. I mean, there's so many factors there. And then just the cost you're paying this person while they're training or while they're learning or while they could be coming onboarded into the company. It's just, I mean, it's a massive number. You know, I think the last time I looked at it, it's like somewhere between 250 to $350,000 on average for a regular professional, an average professional.
Chad
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Chad
Easy, easy, easy. I had this conversation this week with a couple of clients and talking about the same thing. Very often I find this in businesses that a company, as they grow, the first thing most business owners think about is I got to put somebody in that job. I got to get somebody to take that.
Jared Black
Yeah.
Chad
And then they go out and they hire that person, right? They bring them on, they pay them probably, you know, a lot of money. And then it's like, they're over here doing what they've always done because that's the process that that's just who their, their talent. And then the owner of the company, his vision's totally different. And very, very few times I find that owners go, okay, what is my core values? Who am I and what I want to be. And, you know, we all have mission statements, but very rarely do they use mission statements. It's just a tagline. But what is your core? I always tell people, think about what your four core values are that you care about as a company. And then, you know, I try to help people like you, like build out your plan and your process before you go hire somebody and say, here's my planning process. Now need you to coach it. You know, rather than them trying to coach it with their way off in another world and you're over here. It's like, it never works. It's like you're putting heads off time. So,
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
There's there's a I have like a cheat code for figuring out your core value because a lot of companies like you said They have their tagline or their mission statement that's posted on their website. That's garbage Nobody gets hired by that because most companies can't ever recite it to be honest, but here's what here's why I say This is how you can figure out what your real core values are Look at the last let's say three to five people in the company who've been promoted Why were they promoted what about them led to a promotion? Those are your core values
Chad
They do. Yeah. No, no they can't.
Chad
That's it.
Jared Black
They're hardworking, they're disciplined, they're team players, know, they're customer considerate, you know, versus what gets fired or demoted, right? Showed up late, unreliable, unaccountability, you know, those things are your, like your non-negotiables. And these are the things that you really stand for because you're rewarded. You have rewarded this in the past. So that's how companies can really just solve for their core values in a very finite way, let's say. Exactly.
Chad
That's right.
Chad
So true. So true. Jared, when you talk about AI, AI is big and I know you're, I do AI. I know you're involved in AI and it's, you know, there's a lot of people that's, you know, a little scared of that. When did you start, I guess, when you're looking at your company, when did you start integrating AI into your workflow? And what was the first moment that you kind of like, man, this is going to change everything. Bye. Yeah.
Jared Black
I remember exactly the exact moment. It was the day that chat GBT went live and went viral. That same exact day. I remember seeing it and being obsessed with it. And then for that next week, I was, I basically did nothing else except play with chat GBT. And I was just like, this is going to change everything. Everything will change after this. And, you know, I've talked a little bit about this in the past. Like there's always been advancements in tools and technology, but this is like going from
Chad
hits.
Jared Black
you know, like swords and knives to a nuclear bomb. you, you the jump is so significant that it's changed everything. And from that point on, I wanted, and I'm not a technical person. I'm not an engineer by trade or anything like that, but I became obsessed and passionate enough to learn everything I could about AI. I tried to build something then, but I, again, I'm not a technical founder or anything. So I didn't really have the groundwork to really understand the development side of it. until
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
2024 was when we had made enough advancements technologically wise to allow someone like myself who isn't a traditional engineer and isn't traditionally educated in software development to be able to build something and put it out into the marketplace. so around that time is where I was like, that's where I spent most of my time. I'm like, okay, how can I productize this technology and bring it to
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
my customers, how can I give my customer a better service, better value by leveraging this technology? And by 2025, that's when we release, that's when we release Vi.
Chad
Yeah, it's really, I'm not a technical person either. I tell you, the amount of, you know, I look at AI and this kind of will lead into the next question, but I look at AI like this, it's here, it's not going anywhere. Whether you like it or not, it's here. You got to think of it almost like, and this is going to age myself, but when the email, when the website... Like the WWE web started, like the internet, like the whole beginning of that. You you think, you think about that time and you think about like the, the amount of people like, you know, what is this? I take that time and that feeling compared to where we are with AI today, but AI is about 15 times even more powerful than that was at that moment. That's the only way I know how to explain it to people. Like.
Jared Black
Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
It won't be a matter of, you know, you can't even have a company without a website. Like I don't care what company you have. You got to have a website, right? It's unheard of. We're going to be at a place 20, 25 years, maybe sooner where AI is going to be immersed into your company and you're going to have to do it. You're not going to exist if you don't.
Jared Black
It's, I mean, it's just, you know, it's a, it's a, an adoption thing that I think will similarly follow the adoption cycle of, you know, websites and the internet. Like we talked to, I think a little bit about this as well. It took 20 plus years for people to mass adopt websites. Like from the, was still very small percentage of the total market that we're saying, I need to have a website for my business. Right. And then
Chad
Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
Absolutely.
Jared Black
things had changed over that time to say like what type of website, we went from websites to then mobile apps, right? And then you had to have an app for your business. There's still a lot of changing that's gonna go on and AI is following that same trend. There's still a very small percentage of people that are all in saying AI is everything, right? I don't think you need to be a AI evangelist or an all in.
Chad
Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
push your chips to center table on AI, you can adopt AI in very small increments and still be very successful and still be in a very small percentage of the total adjustable market. You just got to do it in a way that I think brings you back your time, especially if you're a small business, you got to find those little windows of, hey, I'm spending three hours a day in my email, I need to get out of my email. If I can just consolidate that into 25 minutes, I just gave myself two and a half hours, three and a half hours back in my day that I can be.
Chad
Yeah. Absolutely.
Jared Black
more productive or doing something else, especially if you're a, you know, a solopreneur, you're a tradesman. If you're an HVAC person, if you're a repairman, electrician, those are the people who are going to have tremendous value because they're the only ones who are going to be able to do what they can. And AI is not going to come fix your lights. is not going to fix your plumbing for you. So you got to be on, you're going to have more business you're going to know what to do with. And if you're not leveraging AI to be able to take calls, take appointments, book meetings, all of this, you're, you're dooming yourself, right?
Chad
Absolutely.
Chad
No.
Jared Black
There will be an adoption. It's just gonna be slower than most people give it credit for. And just like the internet, mean, the internet, it was there from one day to the next, but at the same time, it took 20 years for everyone to just get comfortable with it.
Chad
Absolutely.
Chad
Yeah, I think that's the thing, you know, and that's exactly, you know, with what I do and my company and you and I kind of talked a little bit about this is I'm not trying to jam AI down people's throat. don't, I don't want to do that, but I think that you nailed it. Like if I always, I've said this a lot to people is I want you to think about the top two or three things in your day as an entrepreneur or business owner that you're spending a lot of time doing. that you would love to be doing something else that you really are passionate about. That's a great place where I can help. try to help them with AI integration is taking that time away and some automation and giving them more time to do what they love. It keeps them passionate. It keeps them excited. It keeps them engaged in what they're doing and they're not, cause as we all know, business owners, right? It's so easy to get called over in.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Chad
I gotta go make sure my emails are flowing correctly and I gotta make sure these calls are coming in and these forms are being filled out. And it's like stuff that's just like, I don't wanna deal with that. Like that's the way I look at it for business. Start small, get comfortable with it. If it gives you back four hours a week, that's a win. Like let's do that, start with that. So this is, yeah, yeah.
Jared Black
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jared Black
I'll give you great, just a little anecdote there. I was in Colorado this past weekend. I called an Uber to pick me up at five o'clock in the morning from my hotel to get to the airport. Uber no showed me. They basically told me, and I booked it the day before. They basically told me at five o'clock in the morning, sorry, we weren't able to locate you a driver. And they left me. And I'm trying to book another driver, trying to book another ride, nothing, right? So right there, technology has failed me. And now I'm scared. Calling cab companies, I'm scouring, nobody's available. It's five o'clock in the morning, in the middle of the mountains, nobody's available. And so I go to Google and I just start looking local limo services, couriers, whatever, anybody, right? Finally, somebody picks up the phone and it's five o'clock in the morning. said, I'm stuck, I need to get to the airport in the next 30 minutes, can you help me? And he goes, I'll get you there. And so in 15 minutes later, I got a driver, came, picked me up and got me to my flight in time. As they're closing the gate, I got to the flight. And it reminded me that at the end of the day, no matter how great technology is and how convenient it could feel for us, nothing will replace a human and the service of a human being. So I keep that. use that in my business. We use AI, but nothing will change the human element. And because of that person, I got to, I got to get that person's information and share it, but because of that person, made it home and
Chad
Absolutely. Absolutely. So true.
Chad
Yeah. And that's a human. That's a real person. There's no technology. This is great. And this is actually, I think something that I'd love to talk to you about next is I think this is the, this kind of leads into that. you know, cause this is a fact, this is kind of leading to a lot of companies, a lot of business owners are still skeptical. They're very, very skeptical. They think AI is like, hey, we're going to lose this human element.
Jared Black
without a woman's of a real person.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Chad
I want to talk a little bit more about that because I think you're right on that point that you're making there is don't think of it as replacing humans because we'll never replace humans. won't. Processes is different than a human. Processes and procedures is totally different than a human. But what would you say to them, like a person out there that's sitting here, maybe listening to this going, yeah, man, I hear that, but I'm just scared like a human element.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chad
Elaborate a little more on that, like, you know, in your belief in your company, what you're seeing.
Jared Black
Yeah. So I look at AI as a tool, nothing more. Yeah. If you were, if you were in the gold rush era, you had your pickaxe and your shovel. That was your tool, right? if you're a formula one driver, you have all these engineers that are giving you advancements and changes to your car to make your car even better and perform better. It's a tool, right? And like any great tool, it can only be wielded by the person who's, who's using it, right? Like If I don't know how to use a certain, you know, 3d printer, I can't make the product, right? If I don't know how to use a certain drill, I can't craft certain things. So it's just a tool. And what you want to do is you want to expand as a business owner, you want to have as many tools in your tool belt as you possibly can yourself the best advantages. So if you're just kind of on the fence with AI, you don't have to jump in both feet. You can look at it from a
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Absolutely.
Jared Black
test and see perspective. And what I mean by test and see is maybe you don't bring full AI into your business, but maybe you want to try one part of your business, or maybe you want to pick one task in your business, like you said before, that's draining your energy and just solve for that. Or look at what your team is spending the most amount of time on that requiring extra man hours and labor and solve for that. And so it's a good way to kind of get your feet wet and understand like,
Chad
Yeah, great.
Jared Black
Is AI something that we can build on or do we need to invest further on it? Do we need to more sort of do some more research? At the very least, you save yourself some couple hours a week. If not nothing more at the best, you give your customers better value at a lower price or maybe a more profitable number for you as a business owner. And you're going to deliver something that is going to be expected going forward. So when I say expected, I look at buying cars. When you used to go to a car dealership.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
You'd have to sit there, get ready to negotiate for two, hours. The car dealer was slimy and snake oily and he was going to like get you and you're like, I'm not letting this guy get me. But then the internet created basically all the information that you can gather in the world. And it gave you transparent pricing options, different dealers, different, you know, availabilities, and you go into a dealership prepared. And if the dealer did not.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
improve their sales process, meaning leave with service, leave with value, deliverability. Nobody bought their cars there and they went in a different direction. They bought their cars elsewhere. And so they went lost or they went out of business. So they were lost. So every tool will force every business or every new technology will force every business to level up because it will become the expectation. So if you're in a business and whether you don't believe in AI, but your competitor believes in AI and they start leveraging AI,
Chad
Yep.
Chad
That's right, so true.
Jared Black
You have no choice now because now the client is expecting this, right? Just like I expected Uber to be there without a doubt. I expected that because every other time I've ordered an Uber, showed up except for this time, right? So if you're in a space where your competitors are going to be leveraging these tools, you almost have no choice than to step forward and learn, at least learn, if not implement, learn the differences or create a different.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Absolutely.
Jared Black
a differentiation that is so valuable and so unique that no AI can replace it. I.e. this person who picked up the phone at five o'clock in the morning and got me to my
Chad
Yeah. mean, thank God he did. Right. You'd still be in, in, in Colorado. You wouldn't be happy with it. Yeah. No kidding. So, last question kind of on the, on the AI and we'll move in kind of the last part of the show. you know, if you, if we always like this question, cause it's like this hypothetical, right. If we fast forward five years, let's just say, we're moving head five fours. what does a fully optimized.
Jared Black
We'd be having this call in Colorado, rather.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Chad
hiring operation look like for a 50 person company that gets this right today? What does that look like? What do you think? Top of that.
Jared Black
Is the 50 person company like a recruitment company or like how do mean?
Chad
Yeah, like an operation, for like a, you let's say, let's just say you're working with a company, it's a 50 people company, you're looking at some optimization, know, what is, if we moved ahead from day to to five years, what does that look like for them? What can they expect kind of, you know, where this is moving?
Jared Black
Yeah. Yeah.
Jared Black
I think, I think in the very near future, we're going to have many organizations that will be leaner, less people that are doing more high value, more impact work. they will be managing swarms of agents or swarms of AI workflows or, or, or AI. Automations that will do 60 plus percent of their work or 60 plus percent of their grunt work. So.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
Let's think about, you know, a mortgage company, right? You're writing, underwriting deals all the time. There are underwriters who spend time analyzing deal. That will probably be eliminated by AI, right? Unless you have a senior underwriter who's basically overseeing agents of AI underwriters that are doing that task for them. Right. So now what becomes the value of a mortgage broker is the mortgage broker value who writes the best deal or who has the best access to. different programs with different financial institutions, right? Who can understand different metrics? Who understands the laws? Who can get you different breaks on taxes or grants or whatever? That becomes the value. It's the service, right? So for me, the future, a 50 person company, let's say five years from now, probably does the work of a 500 person company today, right? Whatever that looks like. I mean, maybe manufacturing is probably an exception, but you know, if it's a service-based company or if it's something that provides a...
Chad
See ya.
Chad
True.
Chad
Wow. Wow.
Jared Black
B2B service or a digital service or something like that. If there's not something physically needed, I think there's a 10 X output from that 50 person team in the future. And when it comes to hiring, you still need to implement a human element because you are hiring humans. You just need to be able to, one discover to engage and three attract. So
Chad
Yeah, I ask who.
Jared Black
If you can't do all three as a company, you'll always be losing to companies who can and you'll kind of be fighting an uphill battle in the talent acquisition game. And like I said, I have a signature method to kind of like solve for that, but you know, I share that with our clients and companies are welcome to reach out if they want to know more about that, that's what you have to do. You have to be able to discover talent. You have to be able to engage with them and you have to be able to attract them. And you do this.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
all the time, even when you don't need somebody, you need to build a pipeline. If you always have a pipeline, like what drives me crazy is that companies treat recruiting like a one-off, but if you look at sales, sales, like if you needed to sell, you wouldn't go outside and hold the sign like I'm selling something. You would build a pipeline, you would get leads, you would pitch your products or services, and you'd have a sales flow, right? Recruiting is exactly the same way. You just have to build a pipeline and you always are selling your opportunity.
Chad
Yeah, so true.
Chad
my... I do. So much.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
That's true.
Jared Black
even if you don't need it. the best thing you'd have is a demand, which is a line of people who want to work for you or would work for you, and you don't have an opportunity for them, right? That's the best thing you could have.
Chad
So true, so true. So talking about you, you your leader mindset and scaling. So you're in the business of placing great people. That's what you do, right? So I have to ask, what's your own philosophy for building your internal team? What is it? Okay, okay. Yeah.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Jared Black
I drink the Kool-Aid. Whatever I pitch to my clients, I do the exact same thing. So here's my five-step signature method to hiring A players. First, you want to solve for the X factor. Understand the X factor. This is something that is unique to an individual relative to the job that you're filling for. So what makes somebody great at their job? That's the X factor. Second, you want to verify skills. So just like anybody,
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
they're gonna go through an interview process. Most people just take the CV as truth, right? Like, it's Bible. Who says it's Bible? It's because they gave it to you? Like that doesn't mean it's like they say what they say they can do, they can actually do. So you have to verify the skills. Either you put them in the environment, let them do a dry run, put them with the team, let them shadow something. You need to verify skills. Then you wanna get aligned on values. This is what I talked about earlier. If you're not aligned on values, nothing will overcome that. Meaning if you...
Chad
Yeah, that's true.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Agreed.
Jared Black
are a Wolf of Wall Street type of environment and you have somebody who is not that type of person, they are going to fail, right? And the opposite is true in any other case, right? So just if the values are not aligned from like what the company stands for and the culture that they have, the person is not aligned with those values, they will fail eventually. Fourth step is gonna be personality assessment. And this is something that I've been pushing really hard the last two years. Personality, I think is super, super important. And I have my own
Chad
Yes. Yes.
Chad
Absolutely, absolutely.
Chad
I would agree.
Jared Black
Yeah, I my own testament to this. I've been tracking personality assessments for the last three and a half years. So I have personality assessments on everyone that I've hired and the ones who I fired, the ones who've quit, the ones who are successful. And basically everyone who's successful and is still with the company and has been with the company for a long period of time, they all have the same common personality traits and there are clues there. So you need to be tracking your personalities across the different team members and personality traits can differ dependent on the departments they sit within.
Chad
Absolutely.
Jared Black
So skill sets and sales, personality traits and sales are gonna differ from accounting or from operations and so on and so forth. So you wanna track these things and understand, hey, here are the traits of successful people, here are the traits of the unsuccessful people, we're gonna solve for this, right? And then the last thing would be growth. You need to confirm what the growth tract is. Meaning, if somebody comes in and they say, I wanna be SVP by next year, if you don't have an opportunity to give them SVP by next year, they will leave you, right? So if you're not solving for growth within the original hiring process,
Chad
Yep.
Jared Black
you're just setting yourself for a turnover in the next 12 to 24 months, whatever that looks like, right? So, and it's okay if it's a short-term hire. If you hire somebody and they say, hey, listen, I really want to go do my own thing in the next year and they have a really valuable skillset and you're like, I can use your skills for 12 months. That's cool with me. Come work with me in 12 months, you go do your own thing. As long as everyone's on the same page, like this person is supposed to be with us for the next 12 months, then that's fine.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
But if you think like, oh, I'm gonna have this person as a lifer and they leave in 12 months, you're like, whatever happened? It's because you didn't verify the growth potential. Those are the five steps.
Chad
Yeah, so true. I love it. Oh man, that's so good. So great. Great, great nuggets right there, Jared. They really are. So last part here we're going end up is I call it the rapid fire. I'm just going to short sweet. I'm going to ask you a question, you know, one or two sentence. Don't overthink it. Just, just throw out whatever, you know, comes to mind. So this would be kind of fun. So here we go. You ready for this? All right. Best hire you ever made and what made them stand out.
Jared Black
Shoot. Let's do it.
Jared Black
I'm going to say internally, it's somebody that's still in the team. So a few years ago, she had no prior recruitment experience, but she's somebody who'd overcome a number of challenges, somebody who worked in a number of different, I would say customer facing ESC type roles and environments. just a really great, personality aligned to, you know, the services that we, we offer. And she's continued to thrive and grow within the organization. And so what made her a great hire was I looked past the experience. I looked past the on paper experience and the past professional experience. I looked at what are the core values? What is the personality? What, what makes her special or unique to this organization? She has the X factor and are, or do we offer growth for her? Can she continue to grow and develop within her career that she's looking for? And can I offer that to her? And all those were a yes. And so we've, made that decision to hire her and she's proven to be a great, great team member and a great hire.
Chad
Number two, biggest mistake founders make when they're starting to scale.
Jared Black
The biggest, let's see, let's keep it relevant to hiring. So when you're scaling your hiring, I would say not really understanding what you need or what makes the hire successful. So the way I advise my clients is when you're looking to hire somebody, whether it's the first person or the 10th person, you need to understand their 30, 60, 90 day goals.
Chad
Yes, I agree.
Jared Black
If you don't know what makes that person successful in your eyes in their first 30, 60, 90 days, you're reaching and they're probably gonna fail because you're just gonna be changing your mind on them and pivoting every other day, so to speak. So if you don't know what they need to accomplish in their first 30, 60, 90 days, it's gonna be a hard hike.
Chad
So that's so good. All right, number three, one tool you could not run a new vine without. Okay, love Slag. Love Slag.
Jared Black
Slack. Everything, Slack is essential, is my central communication hub. Like everything flows through Slack. I love it.
Chad
Is it the greatest? It is absolutely one of the greatest tools, I agree. For a book of resources that change how you think about your business, book or a resource, something you read, something you saw, kind of made you think differently about your business.
Jared Black
We'll be right
Jared Black
Ooh. I would say early on in my career, love Dan Martel's, Buy Back Your Time. I think that's a great book for anybody who's trying to experiment with AI. He's really big on AI and you will learn a lot from him. But if you want to read that book, it's a great place to start. The one thing really got me focused on tackling project by project, not looking at, you know, trying to drink water through a fire hose, so to speak. So getting really focused on one specific thing. And I would say key person of influence by Daniel Priestley is also a really great book. And it's about, you know, building a personal brand that is going to outlast and, and overvalue or outvalue your, your, any business that you're a part of. like you look at Russell, uh, uh, what's it's, um, why am I blanking Virgin? Virgin, is, uh, Brunson, right?
Chad
That's a good one, yeah.
Chad
Yes, Virgil Ronson, think his name, yes. No, we're killing it, yeah.
Jared Black
We're butchering it, but Virgin, right? You think I'm literally destroying my point because I can't think of his name right now. the point is Richard Branson. Sorry. I don't know why I go at Russell, but Richard Branson, Virgin, right? You don't think of the company first. You tend to think of the person first. And there's a lot of different examples for that. Like you think of George Clooney or you think of, you know, any other celebrity, but the personal brand tends to outweigh the business. And that kind of changed my thinking around how we brand and market ourselves.
Chad
Hmm.
Chad
That's great. That's great. Well, we are coming to a close here. This has been fantastic. So I really appreciate your time here and kind of in the end, mean, this is, I'll probably cut it right there. So we'll just, we just want to finish up with you. So you did great. You was awesome. I hope, did you enjoy it? Was it easy for you? Yeah. Okay. I tried to solve a really good conversation with you. So.
Jared Black
Yeah, fun. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad
So as we, as we end, always kind of like this little last part. try to, try to flip the lens a little bit like for you. so before I let you go, said, I like to, I like to flip the lens. want you to kind of tell me if you spend your day solving problems for other business, and I'm generally curious what that looks like on the inside of yours. If you're doing it all the time for somebody else, what does that look like inside your own?
Jared Black
What does hiring look like inside my own?
Chad
Yeah, like for you, you spend a lot of your time solving problems for other businesses, whether they're coming to hiring and things like that. What is it like for you inside your own? I guess my question is, is not going to be on this, but just kind of a little bit like what that looks like for you.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jared Black
Yeah. for me, it's, I'm always, you know, kind of like we just talked about buy back your time. I really believe in that. And so I continue to look at places that I'm spending a lot of my time and I evaluate are these high value tasks. And so, you know, like just recording a YouTube video, like, how can I make that process more efficient? Right? How do I, how do I come up with the ideas faster? How do I
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Chad
Yeah.
Jared Black
write the script faster. How do I edit that script? How do I shoot? How do I produce? And so I'm looking to leverage those things, leverage technology, leverage automation, feedback loops, whatever, to buy back my time and give myself more time to focus on other things. So I used to spend a lot of time recruiting. I used to spend a lot of time in sales. I kind of eliminated all that, automated as much as I could or hired people that needed to do the task. And so, Yeah, that's kind of, know, again, like I spent a lot of time studying all the different automation tools. I spent a lot of time understanding the different LLMs, AI and how to best leverage that. And because of that, I've been able to pretty much solve any problem that I want to solve. You know, if I see it as a problem, I'm focused on solving it. I can solve it. Yeah.
Chad
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, you know, I think, um, you know, you're, think your whole business mantra, what you do, everything, I think is really, really cool. Uh, I think you and I, I align a lot on some very similar on belief and processes. Um, you know, for me kind of, you know, I've shared a little bit about what I do and I think, you know, I'd love to do some things, you you bring them in, you hire them.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Chad
But you also run into companies that are missing some of that. I think you mentioned this the last time we talked is like, you don't necessarily work on the processes and procedures AI can bring or automation for some of those things. Any opportunity that, you know, even myself, when people were asking about recruiter, I'd love to share your information and would love for you to do the same with me. think there's some, you know, I don't know how much
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Chad
You processes that you specifically need help with AI, but if they ever runs into it, I'd be happy to listen to some of the clunkiness and say, Hey, maybe this works or this doesn't work. But I think, you know, just keeping us both in mind as we process through some of this stuff and work with different clients that we're probably going to run into some synergy where, Hey, I got somebody that could probably help you. need to talk to them. I think I mentioned in the very beginning, like
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Yeah, yeah.
Chad
I find it, being in an executive world and you have too, it's amazing to me at how many companies just do not have the core principles of who they are and how they function within it. And they're trying to be two years down the road and they haven't fixed the groundwork yet. I see that so much happens time after time again. so,
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Yeah, yeah.
Chad
That's where my passion is, is trying to help them put some of that in place to help them. I got a guy I was working with, just spent like two weeks with him trying to figure out what is it you want to be known for? What does it mean? They have a hard time getting that out. They don't know. It's crippling.
Jared Black
Yeah, because I mean, most of them spent so much of their time just like trying to figure out business that they haven't even thought about it. But I got to jump into another call. But Chad, can you send me your if you have like a like a customer facing either like a site or like a landing place or where you want somebody to see. So if I talk to someone, I can refer them to you. Also, thank you for your information.
Chad
Mm-mm. Yep.
Chad
Yeah. Yeah. I have a website. I'll shoot you a website and do all that stuff. I'll do this editing on this and I'll send it to you. And then you will, it also go on live on my YouTube page and some of the others. I've got some virtual assistants working with some stuff, fixing some of the script stuff now. But I'll get you a copy this and you can use it however you want to see. So Jared Mann, great talking with you. Thanks so much.
Jared Black
Mm-hmm.
Jared Black
Perfect. All right. Thanks. Appreciate you. Thanks.
Chad
All right.
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