David Bloxham [00:00:00]:
When you’re training people, I always say, if you are good at your job and earning loads of money and absolutely on fire and really, really valuable, the one thing you haven’t got time to do is update your cv. If you aren’t very good at your job, you’re looking for a job, you are desperate to find a job, the one thing you’re going to do is update your CV. So I always say, never, ever go on the CV, because the best CVs are not the best people necessarily. Right. The CV is just a document. Right. You have to have a, a conversation with people.

Karissa Breen [00:00:44]:
Joining me today in person is David Bloxham, CEO of gcs, recruitment specialist. And today we’re discussing the changing face of work around AI skills, skills and the future of employment. So, David, thanks for joining me and welcome.

David Bloxham [00:01:00]:
Hi there.

Karissa Breen [00:01:01]:
Okay, so David, you’ve been in the game A while, since 1996, as you’ve informed me, and you’ve really seen the tech talent landscape traverse through multiple waves. And this is a really important question because sometimes when we’re not looking in retrospect, we don’t see a path forward. So you’ve sort of seen the dot com boom, cloud transformation now, AI quantum, et cetera. So when you sort of look back, how does this current moment compare to previous disruptions? Does history really repeat itself?

David Bloxham [00:01:33]:
Yeah, I think it’s definitely an interesting question and I think it’s good to look back in the mirror. What I would say is, since I started in 96, in IT recruitment, I’ve always felt that going forward it becomes more and more important and the job of being in it, you know, programmers, software engineers, service desk, systems administrators, project managers, testers, has always been a difficult dark art that is very difficult to get into and therefore it’s kind of protected in some ways. So I think as technologies have changed and as it’s improved, the one thing is that from when I started, you know, we were using faxes and cards. You know, it has become more and more prevalent in our worlds from all those smartphones, PCs, Internet, web, blah, blah, blah. So you become more of the basis of all hiring. It’s just become more and more common, more and more valuable and more apart the way the businesses work. But to kind of go back to your question, historically, new things have come. So the iPhone was invented, people are using less PCs or whatever the Internet Changed the way people were hiring, but there’s always been something new.

David Bloxham [00:02:50]:
And then you would kind of move to this. It was quite interesting when you look historically that AI has in some ways changed the game in two ways, in my opinion. First is it’s not so much of a dark art anymore because obviously there’s a bit of a. But it’s quite easy to now interact with a computer and make it do things because you are basically natural language giving it prompts and you can do more with a computer and you can make it code. So we saw a huge boom after Covid in terms of people hiring over hiring, probably social media companies. It was our best couple of years. And then we saw a real tech slump because we saw immediately, even before people were talking about it, this AI bubble or whatever. But AI really, really hurt the level of software engineering jobs on the market.

David Bloxham [00:03:44]:
So we went from that being 48% of our business to it being about 12% of our business, just due to the volume of jobs. And that was due to the fact that people were realizing they didn’t need as many people to be coders anymore. And that was one of the biggest changes I’ve ever seen. So I think historically it’s always been there’s new things coming on, the market’s growing, et cetera, et cetera. I think the change with this one is while there will be new jobs potentially there might be not the same level of volume, but also different people we think can access these jobs. And it might not be your average computer science graduate or whatever. So I think there will be a change, and I think this is a bigger change than the ones we’ve seen in my many decades of IT recruitment.

Karissa Breen [00:04:29]:
So there’s a couple of questions in there that I’m keen to get into because like you’ve just said, you know, over the last couple of decades, you’ve seen this, but this has been the. In terms of velocity, what’s changed has happened really quickly. What do you think now moving forward with. Obviously you’re CEO of a recruitment firm, so is it going to get more competitive? And do you see if we have three cohorts of people, you’ve got the top high performers, the middle average, and then the low performers. Do you see now that the average, average sort of performers are either going to have to force themselves to be a high performer or they’re probably just going to go to the bottom? Because now we’ve got AI that’s going to replace a lot of these average workers. Like you said before, we don’t need as many people to do certain things. So now it’s going to force people to level up or you’re going down.

David Bloxham [00:05:17]:
I definitely, definitely think that this is a wake up call for people within the industry in terms of technology changes. And there are many processes and methods can be done. So I definitely agree with you that there are different types of jobs. I think as a recruiter it’d be difficult for me to say average people, but let’s say there’s different levels of like seniority, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, the way we see it is that offshoring has been a huge part of it jobs. You know, we are going to get this, these pieces of work done in South Africa or India or, you know, a non US or European location for cost. I would suggest those would be the types of roles that would be more easily automated.

David Bloxham [00:06:01]:
You know, the process jobs. And when these, these companies say there’s huge amounts of job losses, they don’t necessarily say where these job losses are going to be. I would suggest that more of the process. But we talk already about graduates getting into the industry. I do think that like you say, it is important that people find niches. They find roles that interact with a, that potentially, like we talk in don’t mean kind of technology of functional versus technical roles, you know, and I think there’ll still be technical roles, but functionality and working with users and being a gateway to automation and AI systems. I think these are really, really important things that people should really think about. And I 100% agree with you that anyone listens to this podcast should think, how can I make my, my skill set viable in a world that’s going to be a lot more automated? I don’t think it’s impossible.

David Bloxham [00:06:54]:
I definitely think they should think about it. And that’s the same for recruiters, probably the same for podcasters. Everyone’s got to be thinking about how do I make myself viable in this world because the world’s going to change.

Karissa Breen [00:07:04]:
And then would you say to extend on that a little bit more competitive industry? So I’ve obviously speak to people at your level, executive level, and people in Australia, where I’m from originally, now I’m living in the U.S. there’s not as many senior roles as there used to be at the moment, or there’s not as much people moving roles. So how do you sort of see the competitive landscape if you’re operating at more of a senior level? Like, is it going to be really fierce competition out there no matter where you are, uk, Australia, usa. What does that then look like? Because now we’re sort of shifting towards. You’re going to have to have a little bit more than a degree in 20 years in being a developer, for example.

David Bloxham [00:07:44]:
Yeah. I mean, one thing to say is, you know, we talked from my side. So the story of 2000s for GCS is that Covid was very tough and, you know, our experience probably mirrors the IT industry in terms of talent, in terms of agencies. So 2020, Covid, really hard, had to think about how recruitment could work for the first three, six months. Then massive, massive, you know, brilliant years. Everyone was hiring everything all the time. Then two quite tricky years where people don’t hire as much. I would suggest in the last 18 months, again, it’s been a really, really.

David Bloxham [00:08:21]:
It’s been a really big boom time. There’s a huge amount of investment, more investment that I’ve seen for probably since everyone went to mobile applications. You know, there’s more investment now within IT than there’s been for decades in AI, but it’s still it, right? So you still need these people. And most of the jobs that we’ve got have links to AI. So we very much focus within the core technology areas, DevOps, cloud, applications and cyber. And also we have certain sectors and industries. Everybody is investing huge amounts of money. Right.

David Bloxham [00:08:58]:
So my advice to executives, again, would be to really understand the network that you have and the skills that you have could be realigned. But if you’re trying to kind of get the job that you used to get five years ago, those jobs have changed. So you have to realign. And I think nobody knows that we’ve talked about this before, nobody really knows. There’s no. I mean, there’s obviously AI training courses and that sort of stuff, but unless you are. Have worked for OpenAI or maybe Microsoft or one of these companies, you don’t really know how this works, though everybody can. Everybody’s on a level playing field, right? So anyone can retrain themselves to be a, you know, a cto, but with a real emphasis and focus around AI.

David Bloxham [00:09:41]:
You know, I see it all the time, you know, you know, software companies doing it, adding, oh, yeah, you know, Workday, ServiceNow, that sort of thing when we’ve got AI integrated into our systems. But you’re probably not that different. But I think it’s the same for candidates. So I agree with what you’re saying is that if you’re trying to sell yourselves in the way that you were selling yourself before, I think you’ve got a problem, but it’s not that difficult to realign yourself. But we’re. Yeah, we’re seeing people that are really struggling because their skills have been quickly outdated.

Karissa Breen [00:10:09]:
Okay. So that leads me to my next question. So there’s a lot of talk online that you’re probably reading. I’m reading, obviously, in media, big players, aws, Salesforce and Friends, they’re just changing up their workforce. So this is obviously making employment seekers, whether you’re junior or senior, nervous because it’s forcing them now to go, well, I’ve got to go retrain. Well, now I need to do more work. No one really wants to do more work if they don’t have to. But now would you say we’re in this paradigm where I said before these high performers, to stay at that level, you’ve got to keep pushing hard, or the middle cohort of people, they’re the ones that are probably going to suffer because they have a choice on how they’re going to go.

Karissa Breen [00:10:47]:
And like you said, how people are putting themselves forward five years ago isn’t going to work.

David Bloxham [00:10:51]:
No. Everybody is going to have to kind of work harder. Everyone is going to have to kind of change how they work. I think if you look into the figures of those businesses, it’ll be interesting to see the types of people that they’re letting go of, because we work with some of those businesses and they’re definitely still hiring people. So like you said, they’re transforming their workforce. You could argue that some of these companies should be thinking about, you know, we do a lot of training and, you know, recruit, train and deploy work as well. Within our Innovation Hub brand, they should really be retraining their staff, not letting go of them, because that should be probably cheaper as well. You know, they should be doing those types of things as well.

David Bloxham [00:11:26]:
So I am positive about the changes this, this will bring for everybody. Maybe I’m a, you know, a look on the bright side of things, but, you know, this will enhance work. I think to enhance work, I don’t think it will reduce work.

Karissa Breen [00:11:38]:
So I’ve been working for 15 years and what I’ve also seen to add to that is working for big corporations, there’s sometimes there’s a phase where we’d outsource everything to an Accenture in France. Oh, now we’re going to insource it in the next seven years and we’re going to hire all these internally. Oh, now we’re going to do a bit of outsource, a bit of insource. So it’s just moving the chess pieces around a little bit so the same sort of people are there. But again, if you’re not pushing up into that high performing category, you potentially are in a position where you may be let go and you may struggle to get a new role.

David Bloxham [00:12:09]:
You know, yes, like it happens and corporations change their strategies, but there are also companies that are growing exponentially and hiring exponentially. Right. You know, so Nvidia has obviously been around a long, a long time, but is now the world’s most valuable company, or at least it was maybe when we did this chat. It might not be next week or something like that. Right. But. But people in the know like you and me might have known who they were, but no one really knew who they were up until probably four or five years ago, really. I mean, obviously if you were lucky enough to bought some shares from them five years ago, then well done you.

David Bloxham [00:12:46]:
But they’re hiring huge amounts, you know, and there’s other AI companies like OpenAI, you’d imagine they’d be hiring huge amounts. Right. There’s a company’s growing as well. So I think one, one, there’s a transformation in terms of people, companies, workforces, but also there’s a transformation in terms of who the big players are and who are the people that are really stretching and growing and building the technology market. And I don’t think, I think the landscape of the big players will probably change as part of this as well. You can see a world where it won’t be Apple and Microsoft, it might be Nvidia and OpenAI in five years time, maybe.

Karissa Breen [00:13:28]:
True. So then where my mind went, as you were speaking, is now that people can work from. We have augmented workforce in India, wherever it may be. How does that, given your experience, how does that make employment seekers nervous again to say, well, they can hire someone else from overseas cheaper who are going to work those crazy hours. Where does that sort of sit with you?

David Bloxham [00:13:50]:
That question, from what I’ve seen, and this links back into the cyber world from what I’ve seen within all industries, the move. And you could see Amazon doing this, you definitely see the banks doing this. The move is to have more workers working in office. Right. I think politically within the US obviously this is a big thing as well. So personally, I think that the move will be to have more workers in the office and more people. We’re in the US right now. We’re speaking.

David Bloxham [00:14:21]:
I’m here in Florida with you, not. Not with you, because I come to see you for this podcast that would be lovely. But we’re here and I think there’ll be more drive to hire people onshore in office. And I do think that links into cyber. You know, I’ve been having quite a lot of conversations with managers and one of the reasons why they’re doing this is because they can’t. Like when they’re hiring hybrid people or something, they can’t actually trust that these are real people. You know, we have a lot of problems in the US with fake candidates. So it’s something that we have to be aware of is that it’s quite easy now, you know, the end of the cv, you know, anyone can write their own cv.

David Bloxham [00:14:57]:
Anyone can get GPT to write a CV for them. It is a bit of a. Sometimes a worry is, is this person the real person? And also is the person that I speak to, send off to the job going to be the person that turns up in those interviews? And we haven’t had an example, I know of a lot of examples where the person was interviewed for the job isn’t the person that starts working.

Karissa Breen [00:15:18]:
But don’t they get found out eventually?

David Bloxham [00:15:19]:
They can’t get found out eventually. But what after they’ve got the password for the company? After. You know, I was saying the other day, like, if you think about what you give people in an interview, right, let’s say that person is a bad actor. And when you’re sitting in the interview and you’re telling them all about the projects you’ve got going on, the software systems that you’re using, and how they’re going to help you with these problems if they were a bad actor and you’ve just basically given them all the intro to their whole. Your whole software system, and if they start for you, which I have heard, you know, instances of anecdotally, then you’ve given them all the passwords to your system. Now it’s much harder to do that if they’re in the office with you.

Karissa Breen [00:15:55]:
Historically, it went from. I mean, when I started working, it was five days in the office. There was no work from home. That wasn’t even a thing. And then in recent times, probably even before 2020, there was the one day from home or once a month from home. And then obviously in 2020 it was full remote because we couldn’t go into the offices. And then I think in 2021, there was. People were starting to come back into the office because they’re like, I’m getting lazier at home because I don’t have anyone breathing down my Neck in the office, losing my mind at pretty much.

Karissa Breen [00:16:23]:
And so now in 2025, almost into 2026, we’re starting to see people do the full circle of we want you back in the office. I’ve also heard of people wanting to be paid less because they don’t want to commute into the office depending on where they live. I’ve heard this a lot, people in Australia, in the US as well. What do you think about that?

David Bloxham [00:16:41]:
It’s something that, you know, sometimes when we work with companies we do for a particular, very, very niche skillset. We’ve set up like virtual teams. Right. And that can work quite well because obviously then you’ve got people in lower cost locations. So yeah, we have seen it. I think it works quite well for, you know, particular. So if you are one of a hundred people that know a very, very specific skill set, you could probably go and sit in. I don’t know where you’d want to sit, but let’s say you can go and sit in the Maldives if you wanted to and do your job and everyone’s happy and you can earn great money and sit on the beach and do your job.

David Bloxham [00:17:16]:
I think that’s possible. I think when you come to DevOps or you know, Azure Engineer or something like that, where there’s a lot more candidates, I think it’d be very difficult to kind of sell that. Most of the lower cost options I think is when they’re offshoring to classic offshore delivery centers in India, in South Africa, in the Philippines, through either your own ODCs or the kind of offshore partners that lots of companies use.

Karissa Breen [00:17:40]:
And so then you mentioned before that you’ve seen more investment into AI roles in these big companies ever before. So what does that then look like? So investing, they’re recruiting for people, obviously AI, yes, it’s been around, but not to the same fidelity that it is today. People don’t also know what sort of roles Potentially people are coming and asking me what roles there are. I’m not sure. I don’t have all the answers. So can you shed any light around what are these roles going to look like? What is it that people want from these job seekers?

David Bloxham [00:18:09]:
100%. So there’s certain sectors I think that are really going for it. Like say for instance, biotech is something that we’re seeing huge surges in these types of roles. Right. The reason why you’re seeing surges in biotech is because the profit margins on new drugs are so huge that it’s worthwhile investing in AI. Tools, machine learning tools, in order to help you produce a drug better and quicker. So, you know, there’s other ones, defense, financial investments, that sort of thing. That’s where a lot of the investment is going.

David Bloxham [00:18:38]:
It is across the board. But let’s, let’s use biotech as a, as an example, right? In the past, the research scientists would work in a wet lab and they would do experiments to work out whether this drug was going to be good. And they still have to do that for the, you know, the FDA or whatever. But, you know, it’s, it’s something that now can be automated a lot. So when they look for research scientists, what you actually kind of come behind is this is all data work, right? So a lot of the roles are data, you know, and then a lot of the roles are building the cloud and the platform, DevOps, et cetera, et cetera, DevOps with ML and then machine learning engineers, which is really like the software engineering, the coding, that sort of thing, to basically set up and construct artificial or virtual labs, you know, so they get the data, they theoretically work out the problem and that’s how they kind of build the drugs. Now what’s interesting about that is generally what we see is people creating their own LLMs. They’re not just using Copilot or ChatGPT, right? These companies are building their own ones which are very specific, okay? So we see a lot of specific industry experience as well. So when we’re looking for, they still call them research scientists.

David Bloxham [00:19:55]:
We work in the tech recruitment business. So they’re one of the girls that does this market for us who put up loads of research scientist roles. And I’m like, why are we doing research scientists? This isn’t our brand. But when you look at the spec, it’s, you know, you need a data science degree. You’re basically a data scientist. So a lot of these AI roles are data roles, you know, because you have to get the data right in order for the model or the machine or whatever to read it. So that’s the majority of the roles. Then you’ve got the cloud people, then you’ve got the ML roles, and then you’ve got the, you know, the UI interactions kind of at the other end.

David Bloxham [00:20:31]:
Then you’ve obviously got functional roles, project managers, et cetera, et cetera, because they need to understand the projects work in different ways. Because if you’ve got to build a language model that’s a different type of project and different types of outputs. And then what’s interesting is we work in two core Pillars and your listeners will love this. We work in two core pillars, right? AI. The investment in AI is almost intrinsically linked in our point of view to cyber. If you’re investing a lot in AI, then you’re basically investing in the value of your business being a machine. So therefore, if someone could hack into your system, they could destroy the value of your business by destroying your machine or shutting your machine down. As we’ve seen so many times.

David Bloxham [00:21:13]:
I saw you see in Australia, us, uk, these businesses have been destroyed. So the investment in AI almost exactly links the investment we’re seeing in cyber because there’s no point investing all this money and then leaving that system to be hacked again. I’m sure your people you’ve spoken to using AI, the bad actors, are much more powerful, is a kind of an arms race in some ways. So we’re seeing a lot more investment in terms of cyber. AI security is something that we’re really seeing. And so I think for me there is a number of different jobs, the old tech jobs, but they’ve been, you know, almost upgraded for the AI world. They are quite industry specific. So, you know, knowing this is the industry that I’m going to learn how to do in AI is key.

David Bloxham [00:22:02]:
There’s a lot of money in it. You know, like we’re talking to, you know, graduates who’ve done data science who are getting like 400, $500,000 salaries just because they know data science and they want to do AI for an investment house and they’re getting 20 offers. So there is a, you know, that could be a bubble thing, but you know, this is real, you know, so some grads are doing well out of it.

Karissa Breen [00:22:25]:
So then what roles have you seen that just, you haven’t seen much of lately? They have gone by the wayside, not needed. Is there any roles like specifically you can call out?

David Bloxham [00:22:35]:
That’s a really, really good point, is I haven’t really thought about it so much in that because I’ve been talking about these are the new roles, right? So Help Desk has always been like level one engineer, you know, service delivery, that sort of thing. These are roles that we’re genuinely not seeing. Things like ServiceNow, ISSMs, that sort of thing have taken up a lot of that. But now they integrated AI facilities into their systems. That is something that has really been hurt. Straight programmer roles, as I said, this was the core part of our market. Java, Python, xxx, you know, these are key, key parts of our market. And these, the volume of these roles has gone down exponentially and Then I think for me, you know, your classic project managers, you know, you know, your classic business analysts, et cetera, et cetera, who don’t really have, who are just kind of working on other types of integrations.

David Bloxham [00:23:29]:
The other thing that we’re not seeing so much is, you know, big ERP implementations like you said, the Salesforce, that sort of thing. I mean Salesforce is really changing itself to be an AI tool in some ways. But yeah, why would you spend billions on an ERP or CRM implementation? If you’re kind of thinking to yourself, but in a year’s time, can I just type the stuff into my AI and it’s going to give me like these are all your customers, then you need and I’ll do this for you, and I’ll do this for you. So yeah, we’re seeing less of these types of things.

Karissa Breen [00:23:57]:
What about like QA testers?

David Bloxham [00:24:00]:
I think people still need to test these systems obviously with we’re sort of seeing roles like prompt engineer, you know, that in some ways are QA testers. So yeah, I think we’re still seeing that because there is still huge amounts of development elements and you still need to test these things. We’re also seeing quite a lot of kind of, you know, the AI trainer roles, AI consultants. We’re doing quite a fractional work with companies. So this is quite interesting, this whole fractional element. So there’s these people that we work with both in cyber and in AI who, who are real leaders in their market. And again, if your listeners are listening to this is like this is a good thing to get into, right? Because everybody’s thinking about how can I get into AI? And as soon as they think about how can I get into AI they start to think about, well actually if I’m going to invest with this money, I need to protect this. So how can I improve my cyber? If any business is not thinking about how can I improve my cyber while living in today’s world, I’d be amazed.

David Bloxham [00:24:56]:
Right, so we’re seeing a lot more fractional stuff. So it’s a bit like a non executive director, you know, you know, people spending two to three days a month over a period of time really, really working with companies to advise them on how to make this change. Because there’s a lot of medium sized businesses that can, you know, they could really change their whole way of working and you know, they’ve got to stay ahead of the time but they haven’t got the money that a kind of a tower capital management or pfizer or something like that have got. But they still need to do it, they still need to say it. Cause they will get, you know, eaten up in the world. So we’re seeing quite a lot of this kind of fractional work. People kind of really thinking about this. So yeah, there’s, there’s lots of ways to kind of round it.

Karissa Breen [00:25:39]:
So then with industries are you seeing as well? So for example, if you’ve got a background in banking and finance, stay in that field. Originally it was like people really general and really broad. Is there more of a focus now? There’s more of an appetite towards being hired for roles that have a industry vertical that they’ve specialized in versus being general?

David Bloxham [00:26:00]:
Yeah. So to go back to the. What we’re seeing is that generally companies are using, obviously using GPT technology, but developing their own language models, specifically around which they own, but specifically around their particular industry. So the driver is always like when we get a role, you know that GCS is very much focused on the broadcast telco market. So when they need a DevOps in ML, they’re not saying, but they find they can work for banks or they can work for pharmaceutical industries. They need them to have come from a competing industry, a competing company. They need them to have that background. So our suggestion would be if this is how you’re retraining yourself, if this is how you think about future proofing your career, double down on your industry, double down on how it can be automated, how these projects can kind of work, how your experience of the industry and developing within it or working within it can be used to help people get the advantages that automation brings.

Karissa Breen [00:26:57]:
So if you were to draw a timeline, David, in your mind, or walk me through it, how long do you think this investment into AI will go on for? Do you think it’s going to be the next five years? It’s going to be hardcore doing this and something else will pop up. We’ve seen sort of these waves and as you look back and reflect on your career, you’ve seen these waves happen. Right. Is there any sort of fidelity that you can provide around the timeline? Like what are we looking at now as of 2025, but then 26 beyond.

David Bloxham [00:27:26]:
When I think about how different things have progressed in my career generally there’s a kind of three, four, five year cycle of different types of things. The previous big one before AI in my opinion, was things like moving into the cloud and data centers probably six, seven years ago. And there was a huge amount of investment before that, before that with mobile technology. You know, xxx so it kind of goes backwards. So I think five, six years is how this is going to run forward. We see things like quantum and that sort of thing kind of coming behind that. So who knows what that’s going to mean. But that’s probably not going to hit us for this type of thing.

David Bloxham [00:28:02]:
Things that have driven, in my experience, the industry or held back the industry are either new technology inventions or just the economy doing well. So everyone’s expanding and the things that have hurt these jobs have always been that the economy, you know, less hiring due to X, you know, wars, you know, downturns, recessions, etc. Etc. But I think that this one is, is almost, it’s such a huge change and it’s such an arms race between businesses and it’s such a game changing win if they get it right that I think they will continue to invest. The one thing I would say is again, I don’t know in your experience, I don’t think yet, except maybe in some of these biotech industries or something like that, potentially in kind of other industries like kind of fintech, et cetera, et cetera, that anyone has really, really found a absolute game changing kind of model that is going to be so much better in AI than it was before. So if you look at productivity or profitability or something like that, if I just look at my recruitment industry hat on, right, There is many, many, many AI tools in recruitment that have been invented and there’s all these like Mercore I think they’re called or 10 billion valuation. I don’t think they’re game changing yet. So the only thing I think is with this whole AI bubble is that maybe someone in a year’s time will say like this isn’t actually that good.

David Bloxham [00:29:30]:
Someone said to me it’s kind of over hyped and underrated. Maybe in a year’s time someone will say well yeah, it’s cool, you can have a chat with it and I’ll answer questions about stuff, you know, who is who and that sort of thing and it will kind of organize your email or something. But it’s not actually a game changer. It’s quite easy in recruitment, right? So we have a certain amount of people in our industry in our company and there’s a certain amount of sales. Really your only investment, your only cost in recruitment is your people. So your cost of your seat, let’s say is 7 and the productivity usually is 10 and that’s generally your profit, right? That’s how it works. The only way you could see that AI could work is that the cost of your people might still be 7, but the productivity is now 20 because you’re using AI tools. That would be a very, very easy way to look at your business.

David Bloxham [00:30:19]:
Look at AI and say they’ve invested all this money in AI and now they are doubling, tripling their profit. I haven’t seen anyone doing that yet.

Karissa Breen [00:30:29]:
Do you think there’s a potential. So do you remember in 2020 there’s everyone, this hype around, it’s all about the metaverse and NFTs and Web3, and then that’s fallen on deaf ears. I don’t believe that’s the case for AI, but perhaps that hype cycle may cycle down, would you say, in the next 12 months or.

David Bloxham [00:30:47]:
Yeah, it’s really, it’s really interesting because you and I have been in the industry and been alive for this amount of time. When someone tries to explain blockchain or NFT or Web3 to you or me, we’re both intelligent people, we probably think, yeah, yeah, that sounds. The metaverse and that sort of thing sounds quite cool. I can’t really see it. Like, it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t really blow my mind, like, wow, yeah, I really want to invest. Like, I know some people invest in NFTs and loads of people own bitcoin and that sort of blockchain, but it doesn’t really get through to everybody. Whereas if someone shows you AI, it’s a little bit like I read once about money, right? So money, as soon as someone shows someone money, they understand it intrinsically and you can never go back from money. So there’s tribes in the Amazon have never seen money before, but as soon as you explain someone money, they will never go back from it.

David Bloxham [00:31:39]:
AI is the same. As soon as someone shows it to you and you see it, you’re like, wow, this is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. It’s just amazing, isn’t it, that what it does is amazing. And I think that’s what’s different about these other technology advances is everybody can use it, everybody can see that it could be a benefit. Everybody will walk away thinking, this is either the scariest invention I’ve ever seen or the greatest invention, or both.

Karissa Breen [00:32:05]:
This is interesting because what I’m starting to pick up on now interviewing people like yourself in the industry is everyone’s like, they’re getting fatigued with synthetic deep fakes, you know, constant bombarded of ads and TikToks and short form videos. That are frying people’s brains. I’m actually starting to see it full circle on meeting face to face, going to live events and not doing online webinars. So then that leads me to my next point is the future of recruitment. Where do you see that? Because a lot of people said, oh, you know, it’s going to be automated. But a human being like, yes, okay, people have leveraged AI with certain tooling and I’m not a very good person on paper. You look at my CV and say, kv, she’s out the door, get me in person. Is a very different situation.

Karissa Breen [00:32:47]:
So how do you see the future of recruit recruitment playing out now with AI and people saying, oh, but you know, we filtered all these CVs out because we use this word and we did that. What does that look like in your eyes?

David Bloxham [00:33:00]:
Well, I hope because of what I do, you know, it’ll be fine. I think that the recruitment industry, like we said throughout this thing and needs to kind of up its game. You know, there are lots of things it doesn’t do well and it can’t be an average industry. So we need to use these tools to help our customers to hire people better. Right? You know that, that is. How could that be? We can move much quicker, we can find people better, we can make the process better. That like you, like you said, I think that there’s elements of our job, right? One of them is match. So you give me a requirement, I find a person.

David Bloxham [00:33:34]:
That is what a lot of these AI tools can do quite easily. They can match people. But.

Karissa Breen [00:33:40]:
But is it the right person, though?

David Bloxham [00:33:42]:
Well, they’re probably going to give you 10 and it’s probably going to be able. So I’ve got like a million people, let’s say I got a million people in my data lake, right? It’s going to be able to go through and find 10 of those people and say, we reckon these are the best people. And it is cleverer than just looking at the CV. It does match up background, does match up LinkedIn, it does get you to 10 good people, but at like a.

Karissa Breen [00:34:04]:
Rudimentary level, it’s clever.

David Bloxham [00:34:06]:
So I think, you know, one of the things we do is recruiters work off a black book, as you know. You know, like what a recruiter really should do is you should give me a requirement. And you’re thinking to yourself, that person I spoke to last week, they’re the best person for the job. I’m just gonna call them and tell you about them and that’s it, That’s a black book. And you can’t. We can automate that, but it’s not gonna be as good. But sometimes that’s hard.

Karissa Breen [00:34:26]:
Right, but then that’s what you meant before, by increasing the process to be quick.

David Bloxham [00:34:31]:
Yeah, yeah. So you can go and get to your black book quicker. You can remind yourself easily.

Karissa Breen [00:34:35]:
Well, that person’s gonna respond, hey, David’s calling me. It must be for something good.

David Bloxham [00:34:38]:
Yeah, exactly.

Karissa Breen [00:34:39]:
Happy to answer. But then when someone outreaches you on LinkedIn, which often happens, I run a company. Oh, we’ve got this job for you. No, you don’t obviously.

David Bloxham [00:34:47]:
Read my. You’re sending me a cybersecurity job because I’m a cyber security podcaster. But you think, like, the AI thinks that, like, I do cybersecurity, which is.

Karissa Breen [00:34:56]:
Totally wrong, which therefore lets the whole industry down.

David Bloxham [00:34:59]:
Totally. Yeah. And you get. So, I mean, I put a job up and I got 175 applications. This is senior role. Senior role, working for GCS, running a consultancy division for us. So it’s a good job, right? 175 applications. Now, I don’t often advertise jobs, so maybe every job I’d advertise would be 175.

David Bloxham [00:35:18]:
But there was eight people in there and there was CTOs of JP Morgan, you know, heads of division for, I don’t know, but there was a hundred people there that have obviously been auto applied and wrongly. So I went through all of them and said, sorry, just made me laugh. I was just turning down the a CTO of JP Morgan. It’s like there’s no way this person wanted to do this job for a little old gcs. So I think that some of the processes, again, enhancing it will help us, it will help us to find people quicker, it will help us to reach out to people quicker and it will get clever and it will be able to find these people. But there’s certain things, right, sometimes you look at the passive people, these people aren’t there. You need my head, you need my network. So you might have identified that this person is good for the job, but they’re not just going to do it.

David Bloxham [00:36:05]:
I mean, you know, getting hundreds and hundreds of emails every day. I’m sure you get, you’re running a business, you look at your inmails, you’re like selling me stuff. I can make your podcast more successful. I can use this media tool, dah, dah, dah, dah, right. You know, and you just ignore all of them. Right? But if someone’s to call you up and make a kind of pitch to a human being. And obviously, AI can do AI sales, which I think are just horrible at this moment in time, you know, So a human being calls you up, you know, builds a rapport with yourself, you know, oh, you’re from Australia. I’ve been to Australia once.

David Bloxham [00:36:38]:
It’s really nicely, like, AI can do that. Right. So then there’s the. There’s the specialist recruitment, which I think is where the industry will go, but also there’s facilitation. So when you’re looking for a job, who’s going to prep you for the interview? Who’s going to have those chats with you about, oh, but, you know, my. Sorry, I can’t make the interview, you know, just has happened today. Like, my kid’s ill, you know, a bot won’t really care or understand about that. So I care because I want you to get the job.

David Bloxham [00:37:08]:
So I’m going to try and call up the manager and say, look, you know, was he. Carissa was going to be here today, but it’s really sad. Like she’s got, you know, a child or a dog. Is he all, you know, something? I don’t know what it can be, but. Or, you know, I can facilitate this when you give me the offer, you know, for the job. And it’s 10k below. He’s the bottom. Like, it’s always like, well, there’s an advert on the UK telly where they’re.

David Bloxham [00:37:30]:
I think it’s an Indeed ad. And there’s like, the manager and the candidate, they’re sitting there and they’re having this weird conversation about money. The joke is, so, how much money do you want? You tell me how much money I want. And there’s this weird thing and they say, indeed can sort this out for you. But I always say to my wife, well, that’s exactly why you need a recruitment consultant, because people don’t like talking about money. But if you tell me I want to hire that person for 100,000 and I say, well, they want 110, Carissa, how are we going to work this out? You’re like, well, that’s your job. You work out. You get them to me for 100,000, I say, well, I can get for 105, you know, or if you give them two days working from home per week, then they’ll probably do it for 100,000.

David Bloxham [00:38:10]:
But you can’t have that conversation with an AI, not yet, anyway. We think facilitation is a huge thing that people don’t really think about if you imagine the amount of calls you have with your recruiter when you’re finding a job. We’ve looked at it, it’s 16 calls, 16 calls on average from when I first send you to when you start. And they’re very specific, very personalized calls, which you needed because you want to have a good experience, right? So we think specialization, niche, facilitation. So maybe the search might be easier, maybe it might make us more productive, effective, responsive. Because I know sometimes people think, well, I give this job to my recruiters and give me anything. You know, maybe we might become better. Maybe the agencies that invest in recruitment might do better than the agencies that don’t, just because they can do their jobs better.

David Bloxham [00:39:01]:
But there’s certain elements I think and hope that we would, we could do that no other bot could do. And also no other client would want a bot to do.

Karissa Breen [00:39:10]:
Because there’s some more nuanced things that perhaps AI, like I said, I use myself as an example. I don’t have a university degree. I may not come, but in person it’s very different. So I’ve always, people always said, you’ve got to meet Carissa first and look past. You need a recruitment person saying, look past the cv. She’s really good in person. And that’s how I’ve always gotten those jobs, because I’ve met the person like, yep, cool, we’re on. So I think that that’s something that AI isn’t going to detect by reading my profile 100%.

David Bloxham [00:39:37]:
You know, I always tell a funny story in recruitment, right? So when you’re training people, I always say, if you are good at your job and earning loads of money, that absolutely on fire and really, really valuable. The one thing you haven’t got time to do is update your cv. If you aren’t very good at your job, you’re looking for a job, you are desperate to find a job. The one thing you’re going to do is update your CV. So I always say, never ever go on the CV, because the best CVs are not the best people necessarily. Right? The CV is just a document, right? You have to have a conversation with people. The other thing is there was like, sometimes you just see, how the hell did that person get that job? I look at CV ones kind of like, how do they get that job? Then you call them up like, so, oh, I see now that makes sense. Yeah, they know someone or they just haven’t got a great cv and then.

David Bloxham [00:40:30]:
But like, they are actually brilliant, you know, And I, I always say to people, please, we call it, I call it. I probably invented the terms like CV blindness. You know, for instance, when you find a really, really good candidate in recruitment, it’s really hard to look at any others in your mind. There’s the perfect person. I’ve fallen in love with that person. He, she’s going to get the job. And then you look at all the other CVs and they’re all the. None of them.

David Bloxham [00:40:56]:
You’re comparing them to this perfect person that you’ve seen and they’re always going to lose. So you have to. I call it CV binders. Like, you’ve got to stop this. Just call everyone, speak to them, talk to them.

Karissa Breen [00:41:06]:
I hear your point around the agent side of it. So I’m in media, I work a lot day to day with PR or public relations agents. So they, if they’re an agency, they either work with their client, whether it’s Oracle, you can have those high conversations like, hey, I interviewed this person. Wasn’t great. Bit hard to say it to the person you interviewed, though. So that function, whilst it’s transforming itself to what it used to be, those are the sort of things that we rely on. The fast turnaround time. Hey, you know, so and so got breach.

Karissa Breen [00:41:33]:
I need a comment now. Those are the things that you can run. You can have those more upfront, honest conversations that. I know that they’re going to handle it better with their client than I may have because they’re obviously trying to impress media people to make sure they say the right thing. And the PR person wants to get the media thing over the line so they can, you know, goes towards their KPIs. The other, the, the company, the vendor wants it for the press. So I do see that person, that function being really important, that it. Yes.

Karissa Breen [00:42:02]:
Whilst some things can be automated, people are a quick WhatsApp or quick message is what.

David Bloxham [00:42:08]:
Totally. Yeah, yeah. And it’s just in our, it’s in our DNA to, to do this, you know, to, to make these things happen, to kind of follow through paths and conversations and communication and also just, you know, memory, just. Oh yeah. Because I, you know, I met that person the other week at this conference and that could be the perfect person for this job or, you know, can help me out and building these networks, I think. So I keep going back to this. I think it will enhance, if you do it right, it’s going to enhance you and it’s going to enhance your service and it might even enhance your career if you do it wrong or you ignore it. I think you’re in for a very difficult next phase in your career business world.

Karissa Breen [00:42:51]:
Is that what you would probably, if you were to sort of sum up where the industry is thinking about careers longevity, reinventing themselves, building those networks. And for example, I’ve spoken to people that have either been made redundant, they’ve moved on and they’re like, I don’t know anyone, and they struggle. I’ve had a lot of, quite a lot of people at the moment contacting me saying I can’t get job, like, well, you know that you potentially could get redundancy or something’s happened and you don’t know anyone, you need to build that network constantly. So then what would you sort of, couple of things to conclude today, David, what would you say, like just long longevity for the career networks, maybe, you know, building relationships with recruitment folks like in your business, what other sort of things can people have to make sure that they aren’t having that anxiety around? Well, if I get made redundant or I don’t have this skill set that they’re looking for, that there is always other pathways forward?

David Bloxham [00:43:47]:
Yeah. I think that the great thing about this world that we’re talking about, this automation world, this AI world, is it’s incredibly easy to inform yourself and be involved with, you know, and people are genuinely interested in it and you can create new networks even from that. There’s huge amounts of training, there’s huge amounts online, it’s easy to use these programs, these tools and almost like reinvent yourself. I see it so much in CVs that builds on this skill set within your company, put yourself forward as a leader within these projects. You know, I know within our own industry where we’re looking for AI super users, if my company sent around an email saying, was anyone interested in helping us with our automation tools and becoming an AI super user, I’d be the first person to respond. And to be honest, as CEO of a business, even at a very large, like the group we work with, thousand people, one and a half billion turnover, I like to see myself as the CEO who’s the most into AI. You know, you have to be that person because everybody wants your input. Right.

David Bloxham [00:44:45]:
You know, if you are have a large longevity within a certain industry and someone’s doing an AI project within your company, they do want to speak to you because they want to know how it actually works. Like how does your company, how do the processes work? How are you going to do it? So, yeah, I think increasing your network, increasing your knowledge putting yourself out there, like you said at the top, like basically putting yourself outside of your comfort zone because the world has just switched. But not necessarily, I think totally bad way. That is the end for you. It’s just a lefter.

Karissa Breen [00:45:16]:
And then lastly, David, any sort of closing comments or final thoughts you’d like to leave our audience with today?

David Bloxham [00:45:22]:
Well, firstly, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to I do my podcast myself. So it’s been a pleasure to see you in action, Carissa, and I’ve certainly taken lots of lessons from you. I think based on this conversation that we have and looking at my 30 year technology recruitment career is in my mind is another step forward for technology. Step forward for technology in terms of jobs, opportunities, growth, the economy, how we are going to improve people’s lives. So I’m positive about it. I think there are problems to overcome and I think it will cause change. But for me, you know, and I’ve been thinking about it more as being speaking this is a positive thing for work, for people, for the world.

David Bloxham [00:46:08]:
And I think that’s my final message and I really think if people embrace it and use it for good, it will be a good thing.