Llama Drama: WorkLLama’s AI Revolution

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[00:01:43] Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soosh and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark.

[00:01:58] Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. We are live from the Daxter booth on Unleash in Las Vegas.

[00:02:15] I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always Chad Soosh is here and we are excited to welcome Sugu Dina Karen to the show. He is the VP of product at work. Lama. Sugu, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Did I pronounce your name correctly?

[00:02:33] I did. Money. Awesome. 10 attempts. Awesome. Money. Awesome. Money. So we'll get to work Lama in a second. A lot of our listeners don't know who you are. Give us a little bit about you from a personal angle. What do you like? Sports, family, walks on the beach.

[00:02:48] Walks with the dog. Love it. Walks with the dog. What kind of dog? Yeah, one dog. I've got a six-year-old white golden retriever. Oh. Yeah, it's named. Golds are awesome. Truffle. Truffle Valentino. Truffle. Truffle Valentino. That's a good name.

[00:03:01] And we'll get to the company name in a second. Not so exciting. Also, a lot of our listeners won't know work Lama. Give us the elevator pitch on the company and what you do. Give you that in a second.

[00:03:13] So we are a unified AI platform for everything talent. So at the core of work Lama is a talent marketing, talent engagement, ATS, as well as a high-wall and recruiting engine. So that's what we do. We focus heavily on contingent as well as direct sourcing.

[00:03:29] And we're also beginning to play in the enterprise space more and more. Okay. That's a lot, man. Yeah. That's a lot. It's not pretty. That's a pretty wide tam. I mean, that's- Lamas can bite a lot at a time apparently. Apparently. Because they've bitten off a lot.

[00:03:42] They carry a lot of weight though. Yeah, for sure. A lot of weight. You got the AI, which means you've got to have some type of conversational AI that's there. We do, yeah. Which is what's the Lama names? Because you've got to have a little Lama head, right?

[00:03:54] So like, I didn't come up with a name. Okay. Who already did a fantastic job. Don't make excuses. We'll talk about Tina in a second. But yeah, the idea behind the Lama is that they do the Havelifting for you. Okay.

[00:04:07] And that was what we wanted to be for our customers as we do the Havelifting for them. And we were talent focused. We've always been about talent. We want to make sure we take everything away from the talent,

[00:04:19] make it as easy as for them in their career journey. That's been our vision for them is to find what they enjoy the most and use the best of technology available for us to make it as exciting and easy for them to find what they need.

[00:04:31] So you're head of product. The generative AI revolution is in full swing. It's here, kids. Talk about the last 12, 18 months in your business and how things have changed. Your perspective has maybe altered due to the generative AI and what's out there now. How is that impacting products?

[00:04:49] So we take a slightly contrarian position there. Obviously, AI is here to stay. No one's debating that. AI is doing a fantastic job with what it's doing right now. But what we're seeing in the industry is a lot of the Grammarly type work.

[00:05:02] Like, we can write job descriptions for you. We can write emails for you. And we're trying very, very intentionally not to jump on that bad wagon. Our AI in the past has always been very intentional.

[00:05:15] So we're trying not to just have anything in there that calls it AI. So what we're trying to do is bring in a lot of what we call contextual knowledge that we know about our talent and our customers

[00:05:27] to then use gen AI or the best of technologies out there to make it more contextual and useful. Obviously, there are parts of it where our competitors continue to go on with a lot of AI power solutions. Oh yeah. We want to make sure we're not lagging,

[00:05:40] but we also want to make sure we're not another copycat of what a co-pilot is. We're trying to be very intentional in what we put out in the market. Well, being intentional in your space. Right? I mean, the Microsoft co-pilot is very broad.

[00:05:52] It does a lot of things, but it's very, say it's very wide, but it's very shallow at this point for the data that it has available to be able to train off of. You guys though, more specific, more workforce data.

[00:06:06] So how quickly do you think that more of the focused domain-specific players are going to be able to get this AI piece right? Because they're not looking at broad trance of data. They're looking at very small and focused, although ones that could definitely help

[00:06:25] from a process methodology, from a matching, those types of things. What do you think about the space and the actual domain players? Will they get this right faster than the broad-based? For sure. I think what's already happening.

[00:06:37] It's not that it's going to be breaks through technologies that will come two years from now. It's already happening. What technology providers in the HR space have always had is the data. That a typical like an LLM might not have been able to train on.

[00:06:50] So we've had the data for a while. What I think it will change drastically is now the interface. It's no longer going to be just a search and filtering. It's no longer just going to give you a click-click-click to get to what you need to be.

[00:07:05] It's going to be more conversational. It's going to be more, I'm looking for this. Can we do this? And then further just kind of go through that process of asking the right questions to what you need to do. Right. So good engagement is what you're looking for now.

[00:07:18] Which is where I think the differentiation will come from with what we're seeing in the ice. Which makes sense, which we've seen a lot of companies do. So the LLMA carries a lot of weight and you guys provide a lot of services.

[00:07:29] I'm looking here at marketing, scheduling, engagement, etc. Talk to me about the competitive landscape. You're in a lot of people's pie, if you will. How do you look at the competitive landscape there, Mr. LLMA? Here's how we've always taken this.

[00:07:46] And this is just coming from me as a product person, is work on what your customers and your users want. And then you have a product that's better than competition. So we've tried to take that position where we're not intentionally looking at competition to see what they're doing

[00:08:02] and what can we do to be as powerful as competitive. It's always been what is our customer looking for and built for them. And to your point, what that's done is we've been able to achieve a suite of products

[00:08:15] that are able to replace a lot of point solutions for our customers. So rather than a customer saying, and this is an interesting word that I heard a lot, it's called orchestration. If you've been in the sessions, you hear orchestration a lot.

[00:08:29] And what that is is actually telling me that our customers are going to have to figure out how to use product A for talent marketing, product B for ADS, product C for scheduling, and then orchestrate what they need out of them.

[00:08:43] And for us it's always being, I call it the integration nightmare. I call it, okay, orchestration is just a fancy way of saying it's going to be a hard way to get to what you need to do. So you're talking about all these different point solutions

[00:08:54] and then trying to integrate and then orchestrate the process methodology. Exactly. Yeah. No, that sounds like a bitch. Yeah. And for us it's always been one platform, one solution. We'll get you to what we need. And the approach we've taken to the market is customer first,

[00:09:07] so we always work with our customers. We partner with them very, very different. Everybody does that. They're doing that. Let's talk about the stuff that you guys do different. Everybody talks about that. Let's get out of the talking points here. Yeah.

[00:09:18] We're going to talk about the really cool shit that you guys are doing and talk about how you're, from our understanding, you're partnering with DAX drop. That's right. How does that actually work? Okay, listener, how can you help your employees become more productive? I have answers.

[00:09:34] How about automating manual and repetitive tasks, giving meaning to data, then allowing that data to actually drive decisions? And how about matching people to your jobs quicker? Well, wait. The Chad and Cheese has a new LLM? No, cheese man. I'm talking about Tex Colonel. Ah, okay.

[00:09:56] That makes more sense. What I'm hearing is the groundbreaking concept of wait for it. Yeah. Simplicity. Seriously though, seriously. Tex Colonel cuts through the complexities like a tortilla chip through some hot nacho cheese. Oh my God. Really? Nacho references already. Anyways, Tex Colonel brings efficiency and productivity

[00:10:18] to your operations. Tex Colonel seamlessly unifies your tools and data to drive efficiencies and success. Tex Colonel is creating new opportunities for your recruitment journey, kind of like adding guac to my barbacoa burrito. Oh my God. How about extracting meaningful insights from data? I mean, that's something.

[00:10:42] Swiftly matching people with jobs, automating repetitive tasks. Who knew such advanced concepts were even possible in the land of human resources? We did, Chad. We did. Dude, wrap it up. I'm a little hungry. Imagine that. Okay, listener, get ready to use today's tech to drive efficiencies and productivity.

[00:11:06] Visit TexColonel.com. That's T-E-X-T-K-E-R-N-E-L.com. Nachos. Are you struggling to attract the talent you need today? Do you lack visibility into where your recruitment ad dollars are really going? There's a better way. Acquire ROI is a programmatic job advertising platform built to optimize your budget and supercharge hiring.

[00:11:35] Acquire ROI automatically manages and measures recruitment ads across job boards so you can allocate your budget based on insights, not hunches. Get to quality candidates faster and cost effectively scale hiring across roles, all while gaining complete visibility and control over your recruitment marketing investments.

[00:11:54] Say goodbye to manual guesswork, inconsistent performance, and wasted spending. And hello to optimized automated campaigns that produce qualified applicants. At Acquire ROI, we make job advertising easy. Visit us at AcquireROI.com and start transforming your talent acquisition today. So you know obviously, I mean,

[00:12:13] Daxter has been a phenomenal leader from AI search investment. Yeah. What Daxter does is fit really, really vulnerable ecosystem, right? So our users don't have to leave the ATS. Right. White labeled right into the system. Right. It's fully embedded. Yeah. It makes the ATS more productive, right?

[00:12:28] And Daxter does a phenomenal job of getting the candidate data, parsing, indexing, and provide a unified search experience. Uh-huh. So for us, it's leveraging Daxter's AI capabilities on top of what we already have to provide this rich search interfaces for our customers where they run the

[00:12:43] search within Daxter. Okay. And then they leverage everything that work Lama does, like our talent bowling capabilities, our shortlisting capabilities, our automation communication capabilities. But they sit right in the middle of it, which I think makes the integration with Daxter very, very powerful.

[00:12:57] Okay. I mean, because technologies like Daxter really do, they do the heavy lifting. Yeah. To be able to parse, to be able to contextualize, and then to be able to, perspective-ly, you know, be that search infrastructure or matching infrastructure. Is that how you guys are using them?

[00:13:11] Kind of like in totality? That's exactly what we're doing. Okay. Daxter also searches local databases, which is great for our customers. Yes. And then also goes out to like the LinkedIn and the Monsters and they're able to provide kind of a unified way of saying,

[00:13:23] hey, here's your top 10 talent doesn't matter where they're coming from. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, back to carrying a lot of weight. Yeah. Because I'm a guy who knows about carrying a lot of weight. You guys raised 50 million big ones last year. Say what? Yeah. 50 million big ones.

[00:13:37] You're at 139 employees according to LinkedIn based in Georgia. That's just a side note. We're on a lot of Georgia. Alpharetta. And that's it? Okay. Alpharetta, yeah. So the $50 million, talk about the future. What's the money going to be used for? I assume new products, features are coming out.

[00:13:53] We've talked about the past, the present. Let's talk about the future. I mean, it's all going to my pocket. My paycheck. Yeah. Hello. Drinks on Zugu. Let's go. Yeah. We've focused a lot of that $50 million in growth and expansion from an R&D standpoint, partnership and

[00:14:10] partnership integrations is a big part of where that's going. Okay. And AI research. We're building a lot of our internal AI teams to build some of this out. So that's another big area where that investment's going. And obviously the last part is acquisition. Oh, the big A word.

[00:14:27] Acquisitions. Take into that one. What are you looking for? What are we shopping for? Suga's going shopping. What are we shopping for? Come on. Let's talk about this. If you're in the market for direct sourcing, we're here. We're here in the market for 80 years.

[00:14:40] We're here in the market for talent marketing, talent engagement. Gotcha. So we got you anyway as you want four ways, one way. We got it. That is Zugu Donacarin. I mean, Dina Karin. There you go. For our listeners who want to know more about WorkLama,

[00:14:56] where would you send them? Go to worklama.com or check us out on LinkedIn for more. Or we've got a nice booth here at Unleash. Can we find that right there? Eat your food, Dina. That's right. We got to go feed Dina. Free Lama's. That is it.

[00:15:10] Live from the Daxter booth at Unleash in Las Vegas. We out. Thank you for listening to what's it called? A podcast. The Chad. The cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts of people

[00:15:32] you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar. Blue. Nacho. Pepperjack. Swiss. So many cheeses. And not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:15:58] That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out. The Jim Stroud Podcast explores the discoveries and trends forming the future of our lives. Brain to brain communication.

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