The Smart Way to Use AI in Talent Acquisition with Theresa Fesinstine

Hello again. All of you. Wonderful, darling recruiting talent acquiring a jarring munchkins out there in podcast land. It is I rob Stevenson here with another installment of top talents me and I have a magnificent guest for you today. She served in myriad roles in our space. She was a VP of HR over at News America marketing. She has had various consulting and advisory roles. Currently, she is the founder over at people power AI Teresa Fest and Steen Teresa, welcome to the podcast. How the heck are you today?

Theresa Fesinstine 1:27
I’m amazing. Ron, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here and to talk everything HR and AI and just really have some fun conversations. So thanks again for having me.

Rob Stevenson 1:38
Heck, yeah, I want to start with non AI non HR stuff, because you and I share a similar crusade against receiving notifications. So oh my gosh, tell me about turning off all your notifications. And what if any adverse effect it’s had on your life.

Theresa Fesinstine 1:56
Actually, I would say it’s only had a positive effect. So as a general sufferer of anxiety, used to drive me crazy to sit and get like little pop ups on my computer. So one day I went through and I was just like To hell with it. I turned them all off. I’m very active in the places that I look. So my email, my Slack channels, things like that. So I wasn’t so worried about not getting notified. But I just feel like this world that we’re in right now of just like, and I’m a huge fan of immediacy, but like the immediacy of like this notification is sitting on your computer, just to just drive me nuts. And so I think my life is a lot more calm now. I’ve never had anything come up certainly since I did this that was like, if somebody really needed me, they called me. And that’s the only situation that is like emergent in my experience. I laugh because my husband right now I think has around, like you said 12,000 Something notifications, waiting in his email. And I’m just like, what’s the point? All it does is cause anxiety. What about you?

Rob Stevenson 2:56
Yeah, I would say start with turning off the badge icon on your phone and apps and see how that feels like when like someone has their phone out. And it’s just like a minefield of red badges. None of them are useful to you, and particularly the email one that’s like 12,000, like that’s just stressing you out. Maybe not think it’s stressing you out on a low grade level. It’s just reminding you how behind you are. And I think you do sort of train people how to contact you. And they will learn that if it’s an emergency to call you. And look slack is meant to be asynchronous communication. A text is asynchronous email is asynchronous. If you get an email at 4am You’re not expected to respond to it at 402 but a phone call is like a bomb going off. So if you call me unless I’m in a meeting I will pick up and I will talk to you right away but anything else can wait and since I did that, I feel like my anxiety is a lot lower and I have not personally maybe my co workers would disagree but I’ve not personally felt any adverse effects of this.

Theresa Fesinstine 3:51
Yeah, me either. I think the other thing that I have to probably get a little bit better at now that I’m a solopreneur is just answering the phone like if you really need to get to me just text me it’s a lot easier but I know if like my parents or my in laws or my husband call me then there’s something something I need to talk to them about mostly with my husband’s it’s getting him the smoothie wants so a lot of critical insights getting getting exchanged there.

Rob Stevenson 4:20
You know how now it’s like the when you go to text someone and they have Do Not Disturb on it’s like Teresa has her notification silence and you can click the notify anyway button. Your husband’s like, Hey, can you get me a smoothie notify anyway?

Theresa Fesinstine 4:35
I love that. I always I see that more often in Slack, where it’s like this person is asleep or whatever and you’re like, too bad. This is super important. I have an AI question to ask you.

Rob Stevenson 4:45
I’ve never used the notify any way button because I feel like it’s a boundary people are putting up but there’s so much tension between me and that button. Teresa, I can’t tell you. Every time I see it on my album. I want to press you so I want to go through this person’s boundary Eat, and Pina

Theresa Fesinstine 5:02
oh my gosh, that’s so funny.

Rob Stevenson 5:04
But yeah, I also have a sinister view of notifications, which is that it’s not there to help you, it’s there to like, suck you back into whatever app and increase their doubts and their mouths and their user activity time. So these apps, they trade on your attention. And the notification is a great way to get your attention. And just to suck you back into your phone, it’s like even the rays to wake. So it’s like you pick your phone up. And without pressing a button, the screen comes on, I turn that off, because it’s like, oh, I just like move it on my desk. And then I see all the text and whatever on my screen that I didn’t get buzzed or beep done. But now they’re there. And I pick up my phone. And guess what now I’m sucked in. And next thing I know, I’m just scrolling the Explore page on Instagram, right?

Theresa Fesinstine 5:41
And honestly, the worst part of that is like, I don’t need to help with that. I don’t need help getting into my phone more getting hours. No, spending more hours, like scrolling through my reels is just never been. Never said, Boy, I really wish I had some more time for that, because I do it probably too much anyway. Yeah, I think the day that I turned off, I went into my phone. And I literally just like, there are a few things that I’ll still allow, that makes sense. But for the most part with all the apps that we you know, out of 800 apps, I don’t need notifications from all of them telling me that there’s a new activity or something that has nothing to do with me. It’s just as I said, like the anxiety that I feel around every other thing doesn’t need to be amplified by something on workaholics app.

Rob Stevenson 6:26
Correct? Correct. That maybe people out there can build to silencing their slack and Gmail. Let’s start with silence Washington Post’s silence your New York Times. Yeah. And silence your Apple news. Silence your ESPN, like, you don’t need to have your phone pinging you for those kinds of things all day.

Theresa Fesinstine 6:42
Or even the other things like Duolingo Duolingo has got the benchmark and like sending you notifications because they do not want you to miss a day of learning Italian, you know,

Rob Stevenson 6:52
they really don’t blame me for a while. But now I kind of respect it. Like Duolingo refuses to be ghosted, like no, no, I will not go away. You’ll throw your phone into the ocean before I stopped pinging.

Theresa Fesinstine 7:04
You said you wanted to learn how to como se DJ? Now you? Well. You’ve got it. Yeah, there.

Rob Stevenson 7:11
We had a deal, Theresa. Yeah. Yeah. Theresa at some point here. We’ve got to start the show. Yes, let’s do it. I want to hear about people power AI. But I would love if we could just first maybe sprint through your career a little bit. Would you mind sharing a little about your background, and then how you wound up founding this new company? Yeah.

Theresa Fesinstine 7:30
So it’s funny. My dream when I was was younger was to be a psychologist. And after I found out the amount of time you have to spend in school, in order to get there, I thought, This is not for me. So I went into advertising and journalism was my major in school. When I got out of there. I did marketing for a few years. And through that, those early days, I was introduced to training and development where I spent probably the first seven years of my role. In 2000, I moved to New York to run training and development for news, America marketing, which was a division of News Corp since been sold off and is a new new named company now. But at the time, it was a really amazing company, very collegial, very collaborative. And I was able to really realize a lot of my potential there from learning how to work in a business, learning how business runs. Very Luckily, the training and development department there was housed within HR in my former role it was in sales. So it’s kind of a shift there. And then really was very, very lucky to work for that company in HR because it had a very HR friendly CEO, the leadership team really invited and really there was no question of whether HR was a part of our business conversations was a part of strategy conversation. So I always feel like I really lucked out in that situation. I worked there for 15 years, took on a lot of different gradually increasing roles within HR, eventually becoming the vice president leading a team of 15 people across the US and Canada. And in 2015, I decided to transition from News America marketing, I became a consultant for a few different companies going through transition. I really loved that experience of working for smaller businesses, because news marketing was such an enterprise scale. It was the first time I really understood what it was like to be a small team, a team of two or three people managing a business. And I did that for about three years in between random I went to culinary school, I’m a certified chef, which I and my husband both love. And then I joined a company called SAGE Realty. And that was a really amazing organization. It’s a commercial real estate company in New York City that the CEO now is the great grandson of the founder. And so it’s 100 and something-year-old company commercial real estate was very traditional HR does not typically play a very strategic role in those organizations, especially in small business. And so again, very pleased to have chosen an organization to join where I was working hand in hand with the CEO to develop our vision mission values with the organization itself as well, recognizing that after a lot of the people that work there had been there for quite a long time. So in July of 2020, I decided to finally start my own business, I’d really been thinking about that for a long time. And at first, the focus was on building an organization where I supported and did consulting on culture development within organizations. And as I was going to work to build my website, it was November 2022, I was trying to find tools, I had been playing around with this tool called Chat, GPT. And writing haikus about culture and using it for silly things, and started thinking about how it could help me build my website. And really, from there, my passion for AI got really Supercharged. And so I’ve spent this past year working to educate myself and to educate others on the benefits and power that AI has for the future of business.

Rob Stevenson 11:21
Since you have that.ai, top level domain, I feel compelled to ask you about where we are in AI in our space, obviously, since is the focus of your company too. But there’s so much hype in HR tech about AI, really, for the last like 10 years. And I feel like only in the last two or three, has there been legit strides taken in this industry in AI? Would you agree, disagree? We would you kind of place HR in terms of its AI utilization?

Theresa Fesinstine 11:50
Wow, that’s a great question. I think that for myself and for others in HR, other HR leaders, I think it’s been happening, but it hasn’t been. So in our face, there have been advances in the way HRIS systems are using information, aggregating data, initially selling us on the idea that the analytics within their tools are going to revolutionize the way we do our work. But it really hasn’t been happening because what you have is a lot of things on the back end that we weren’t really aware of. And I think what another challenge is that the AI tools that have been launching prior to 2022 weren’t creating enough productivity and simplicity for a lot of people to be able to use those tools effectively. So even if you had functionality that incorporated natural language processing, or AI in some other facet, it wasn’t necessarily something that we understood or had the time or energy to be candid to really put into place, particularly anything happening over the past three years, there was too much other top priority things to focus in on that just didn’t give us the space to really engage in in AI. I think that’s a part of when I started to think about my own experience and the ways that we were working. And I started to get a lot more involved and educated on AI, it started to really become a passion for me to figure out ways that AI is just a solopreneur could get the word out and start sharing the importance of what this is going to look like for our business. And I think right now we are in the early stage of that kind of innovation ramp where the tools are really going to start working to save us time. But I think we needed tools at the beginning and earlier stages, to give us the time to even look at those other options. And HR, I have this wheel that I use in some of my presentations that just goes through even pre COVID. Like these are the 12 facets of work that HR leaders are expected to oversee, managed to the highest. And we’re trying to get like, you know, talk about strategy that’s just like the day to day part of my like shit that’s got to happen in order for our businesses to run. And so to think that, yeah, there was this kind of interesting technology, and you were kind of hearing about it over way in the back. It wasn’t a priority for a lot of companies. And to be candid Even today, there are a lot of HR leaders who understand that AI has this potential. They’re starting to see that the potential of AI is much closer to home, maybe giving us more freedom and more flexibility so that we can start digging into it. That’s certainly been happening in the conversations that I’ve been having. I think it’s now the volume is getting so loud that it’s hard to ignore.

Rob Stevenson 14:48
So what are some of the tools and trainings you’re offering down this road?

Theresa Fesinstine 14:53
Yeah. So before I jump into that, one of the things I think it’s important to recognize certainly in the conversations in the sessions that I’ve had. And the feedback that I’ve had is I think HR leaders sit there with these sorts of dueling, I call it sort of the dueling voices of legal versus ego. And HR leaders are often aligned with our legal teams for compliance and risk aversion and things like that. And that makes total sense. But I think this is a space artificial intelligence and learning and understanding how it can impact our work and the connectivity that we can build through that efficiency is really enough to make us step forward into our legal team and challenge a little bit more challenge that we need to wait or challenge that it’s not our role, or it’s not our function. And then there’s also this ego side of us that has some security challenges. It drives me crazy to hear about the fight for HR to have a seat at the table. It’s just absolutely ridiculous. To me, HR is the only team in the organization, the only leader in the organization that really understands what each other department functionally is working through their challenges. Were like the central post of what’s happening within a company. And to think that we’re not having more of an active voice in the boardroom is really unfortunate. And so to get back to why I felt like this was something that was important to put together. And what I teach is the idea that HR leaders are more empowered or should feel more empowered than ever to talk about what is happening within our organizations, we were, for the first time ever, during COVID likely looked at as the decision maker for how things need to be handled for communication strategies for business strategies, operational strategies, in the way that we worked and operated our businesses due to the health and safety concerns. add on to that the challenges of the social environment that we live in, and all of the challenges that we faced over the past three years for social justice, and like our voice is very different, and should be a lot louder. And so the things that I teach through working with my clients are anything from just the initial, like, let’s do an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, where we go through from the very basics of where it started, what it is to the exciting news that everybody can be a prompt engineer, it’s like an exciting little title everybody can have, and how to create strong communication, and then to even much deeper things where we’re talking about doing readiness analysis with their organization, figuring out what their tech stack looks like, in what ways can their HR tech staff be augmented with AI tools that can help them be more efficient and effective with their organization? And one of the big things that I’m on a consulting standpoint, working one on one with HR leaders, is really working just to bolster their confidence and being able to what do you say, what are the questions to ask, how do you share this news? If your boardroom isn’t talking about it? how impactful would that be for you to be the one you as the HR leader to be the one to bring the conversation to rise because at some point, it’s going to happen for every company, it doesn’t matter what industry. And I think HR is the right person to lead the charge with AI integration.

Rob Stevenson 18:10
When it comes to the seat at the table question. I’m always intrigued by that, because I’ve spoken to plenty of folks on this show, who do have a seat at the table, who are on the talent side on the HR side, obviously, and who report directly to the CEO who speak to that individual every day who reschedule meetings with me because they’re prepping for board meetings. And so it’s not like, as a breed HR is just completely excluded. There are plenty of people who have the quote unquote, seat at the table. So I guess like my question is, does HR not have a seat at the table? Or if you believe that you don’t have a seat at the table? Is that a you problem? Is that like a general career thing and less than HR specific thing?

Theresa Fesinstine 18:52
I think that there are different groupings. So you have the enterprise level, or financially more successful organizations. And I don’t know if that’s even the right designation. But there are a lot of companies that do understand have that CHR o seat, but I would argue that even though they’re at the table, do they feel confident in the voice that they have at that table, because even speaking for myself as oftentimes the only woman in the room, there are dynamics that happen that can cause you to not feel confident raising your voice or, or shifting the focus. And I really personally worked on that for the past five, six years on challenging authority that’s sitting in the room, recognizing that I was of equal authority in the room, regardless of who else was there. I worked with a group of fairly evolved humans, you know, they were very thoughtful leaders, and we still had to have the conversation and my CEO was very aligned with me on this in recognizing that that one point he had to say okay, Teresa is not going to be the one to take them in. or to take the notes. And I don’t think anybody else in that room understood why that had to be said. And in fact, having a conversation with our CFO at the time, he said, Well, I think you just take good notes, you’re like, good at it. And I was like, okay, that no, that’s not a good excuse for the woman, to always be the person who’s doing the administrative function. So I don’t even know that even if we’ve got a strong seat at the table, and we’ve got strong personalities and confidence, that we’re always using our voice to impact things. Because I don’t know that HR topics are always viewed as financially driving topics, right? I think that needs to change, we need to really look at the value of people and the value of the function a lot differently. And that’s a whole separate podcast episode. And then you have what I do, I do a lot of work with less tenured directors of HR, HR group teams of one or two small teams, a lot of times in the startup world, what I’ve seen is hiring young talent, who is very full of excitement and enthusiasm, just like I was I would have been like right in line to take a director role when I was 23 years old, I would have been like, Yes, that’s me, and had no idea what the hell I was doing. So for that conversation, the seat at the table for the less-tenured director of HR who’s working for a startup really isn’t at the table. Those are the opportunities. And those are some of the people that are feeling challenged with being able to say to the CEO, or the CFO, or the COO, we need to make changes, or we need to look at this, or we need to address x situation with the competence because they don’t even oftentimes have mentors or other leaders in HR, who can help guide them through what to say how to say it, give them that support and guidance. And then they just end up becoming more administrative. The company eventually sees that they need a senior level HR person or a people leader, but they haven’t been cultivating that talent that they already have. And it just ends up causing some frustration and some disappointment. So I think long answer even longer. I think we have some of us have a seat at the table, a lot of us still don’t. And for those of us that do finding our voice and making it a little bit more prominent, and a little bit more directed towards financial outcomes, is going to be really important.

Rob Stevenson 22:24
Yeah, a quick note on the Oh, but you’re so good at taking notes thing. Like, I mean, surely anyone in that room is capable of taking notes. And if you’re ever confronted with that, like, oh, but you’re so good at this thing that is a poor use of your actual talents. I don’t know. Just don’t accept that people out there. Do not accept that. fireback Oh, you think I’m good at taking notes? Sure. I’ll take notes, I clean a mean toilet. Should I go do that instead of being in this meeting? Like, come on? It’s not about what I can do. It’s what I’m here to do.

Theresa Fesinstine 22:50
But I think what’s amazing, Rob, is that for that simple example, that it seems so obvious to me, when I talked to my male CEO and said, Did you realize that this is even happening? It was a no course. And it wasn’t malicious? It was just unconscious

Rob Stevenson 23:09
bias. It’s just, it was just something of misogyny that lives inside this country. Exactly. Exactly. So I’m glad you didn’t accept that. But I really appreciate your answer writ large to see the table question, because I think we can dismiss the idea that it’s like this campaign against HR or the people function. And so rather than asking, like, how can HR go see the table that maybe people shouldn’t be asking how can I get a seat at the table, like HR can and in many examples does have an influential role in large organizations, but it is dependent on the individual being up to that task or pushing that rock uphill a little bit. It sounds like,

Theresa Fesinstine 23:48
yeah, and I know, for me the value of mentorship in my early career, I had strong female leaders that set the tone by their actions and behavior for what that looked like. But I know a lot of leaders, male or female may not have had that. And if you don’t have somebody that you see, speak truth to power, if you will, or challenge authority, and really hold strongly in their perspective that one of the things that I tell my mentees when I’m working internally, or I have direct reports, is that like you are the smartest person in the room on what you’re talking about. You have the most knowledge and you just have to get past the butterflies and get past the worry and get past the idea that you’re gonna get fired. If you say something that is offensive. A if you get fired, it’s the wrong place to be. There’s tons of jobs out there, you’ll find one. But if you can get through that and in a professional way, say, I think we need to take a step back and look at this differently with confidence, integrity, caring and authority. You start to build that place for yourself. But it all starts with that first time of pushing back a little bit, seeing how it feels and then try I a little bit more when the time is right and when it’s appropriate, but I don’t know that everybody has had I know a lot of people that I’ve worked with women in particular that come to me after working for other organizations that don’t have confident, strong leadership above them.

Rob Stevenson 25:15
I think we’ve got to the root of this was initiative, we made a breakthrough here on the show. It’s a breakthrough to me anyway, which is that, okay, there are more women in HR than men. It’s like a stereotype. Okay, so it’s not even a stereotype. This is just This is data, there are more women in this field. And so this is lean in. This is like an issue of women in the workplace, as opposed to HR in the workplace. So when we say how can HR get a seat at the table, what we’re really saying is, how can you forge a meaningful, respected career as a woman who has frequently like in the example, you shared Theresa frequently finding themselves as the only woman in a room?

Theresa Fesinstine 25:49
Yeah, obviously, I’m biased as a woman. But I can tell you the things that CEOs have said to me, throughout my career of working, that the women on my team, whether it’s, obviously, we’re, I’m gonna throw out a stereotype. If you have women in the boardroom, probably 80% of the time, it’s either HR or marketing, and HR and marketing are typically those teams that when something needs to be responded to, they are raising their hand, when there’s a deadline, it gets done on time, when you’re filling in insights in there done effectively, like, I absolutely agree with you that it is about the individual. And it is about that individual getting appropriate mentorship, guidance and support to know that they can have those conversations. And that’s why especially any company that A has an HR leader reporting into somebody other than the CEO, I always recommend that they have a mentor, that that company, they fight to get a mentor for themselves, if they’re reporting into the CEO, and they are less than five years, less than six years in their career, that they fight for those dollars to get a mentor to get a coach, somebody that can help them that has the experience that they need just to even bounce things off of because it’s it’s a tough position with everything we have to do in HR, it’s really challenging to be able to get it all done, when you’re not feeling like you have the authority, or the confidence to push back on the things that are really important.

Rob Stevenson 27:19
Yep. Yep, of course. Well, one of those things that’s really important, and a way to emerge as their strategic business partner is to really understand the coming wave that is AI or the wave that’s already here in some cases. So I’m curious, when you imagine an HR leader who is really thinking about this in a holistic strategic way. What does that approach look like?

Theresa Fesinstine 27:40
Well, I think the thing that is surprising me the most right now, and I understand it, but I’m working very hard by having conversations like this or doing other sessions, or just, I offer a lot of free guidance through my blog posts, or I just launched yesterday, and initiative to have clinics once a month, where I just offer time, whether it’s it might be one on one, it might be by group that’s going to vary each month, but where it’s just an opportunity for HR leaders to come and learn about AI, I think that there are so many pieces of the job function in HR, that are administrative and time consuming, certainly. And that comes up a lot. There’s a lot of ways you can use artificial intelligence to alleviate some of that administrative burden. simplest option, which I know a lot of people are already aware of. But the process to create job descriptions, the process to create job postings, all of that, especially with a new position can take weeks, and being able to understand how to properly use AI so that you get the output that you want is a huge opportunity for HR leaders, I can give you a list of five things that you could do. Do it AI immediately, right now perfect. Job Description, Generation One, performance review analysis to candidate sourcing and writing of employee feedback analysis for generating ideas for your organizational engagement exercises, five, crafting the communication for those exercises, developing and developing a coordination plan for interviews, developing interview questions for your leaders who probably are asking the same damn questions every time they interview, and they probably sound a lot like why do you want to work for our company? Which is not a good interview question. It’s a great way to validate the greatness of your company. Yes, terrible. So

Rob Stevenson 29:39
to me all done. You promised five and you rattled off eight or nine.

Theresa Fesinstine 29:46
And I could go for more. But the idea is how do you simplify that time and then use that time to do more strategic things. And the other space? Where I think it gets really interesting is the organizations that are developed Being technology and using AI right now natural language processing to do things we have not been able to do in the past efficiently, like qualitative analysis of editorial content and performance reviews, or in personality or behavioral analysis. So, if you think about in the past, I worked for news, American marketing, we had under my group, at one point, let’s say we had 800 people that were writing performance reviews, how the hell were we supposed to go through all of that to understand not necessarily, for that one individual person, but for the ability to analyze across our entire organization? What were the gaps, skill gaps that needed to be addressed through training and development? Who are the people that grew the language that they used, were providing indicators that they were flight risks. So there’s all of this analysis that we really have not been able to codify and synthesize into actionable outcomes, because it was just too time laborious. It’s like, okay, that sounds like a great idea. But we’re now performance reviews are timed at the end of the year, a lot of times, with Benefits Open Enrollment and compensation discussions, and year end reporting and everything else. So it’s just unrealistic. Amazing companies out there, too, that I’ve worked with, and have gotten to know companies like Inca companies, like watercooler. These are organizations that are working intensely to create new AI tools for HR teams, not necessarily the integration of what’s happening in your HR system. But what’s going to be really interesting in the future, is looking at the tech stack for HR, what that looks like what kind of tools we can incorporate so that our time isn’t spent doing the analysis, that’s not our sweet spot. Our sweet spot is taking information and connecting with people connecting managers to understand when they have a flight risk on their top performing employee, how we can turn that around understanding who are the actual toxic employees within our organization that aren’t overtly toxic, but are doing things suddenly, that can be caught through natural language processing to understand what some of that language means, and how that can be utilized to create better organization. So for me, my whole thrust is building organizations that have better culture. I think AI is a diamond in the rough for helping us make that happen.

Rob Stevenson 32:28
Definitely, the tools and resources exist out there, folks, I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again, do not be afraid, right? This is a way for you to get much better at your job. Sounds like that’s your perspective to Theresa. Oh, yeah, we are creeping up on or perhaps well past optimal podcast length, but only because I got carried away having such a good time chatting with you, Theresa. So at this point, I would just say thank you so much for being with me here on the show loads of information. I just really appreciate your time and your expertise. So this has been a delight.

Theresa Fesinstine 32:56
Awesome! I have had a great time too. I love talking about AI I love talking about HR and people leaders. It’s my sweet spot. And I love sharing the message and appreciate what you’re doing to give guidance, feedback, excitement, energy, and information to the community that we live in.

Rob Stevenson 33:16
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