Verified on day one

Welcome to Know Your People from First Advantage, a show about trust in a changing world.

The rules, the technology, the way people work, what customers expect, all moving at once. Trust has to keep pace, and it’s two way. Organizations trusting the worker, the worker trusting organizations, and consumers trusting the provider, and it’s always changing. Trust is established on the first job and reearned on every job after.

This isn’t a show that hands you answers. We sit down with the people who live it, trust and safety leaders, those working in regulation, and the experts chasing fraud. The honest version, not the easy one. Let’s get into it.

Hello. I’m Maureen Lally, the chief marketing Officer at First Advantage, and I welcome you to our Know Your People podcast.

And I’m delighted to have Erin Schroeder with me today. She is one of the most informed and curious minds I’ve come across in this industry.

Erin spent seventeen years in the staffing and contingent workforce industry. She’s deployed the tools, built the systems and the programs around them, and she dealt with the implications when something went wrong when a worker that no one had ever physically met. She came to the workforce industry from journalism. And she remains curious and has never lost the habit of investigating and looking for answers. She wants to know why, and she keeps asking even after most people have stopped.

She left the industry this year after many years in it, and has the opportunity now to reflect on the industry from the outside rather than from the inside right in the middle of it.

Erin, welcome to the show. We’ll come back to what you’re doing now a little bit later on, but I suggest that we start now by giving the listeners an understanding of your experiences in the staffing industry.

So you were in the staffing industry for seventeen years, and you’re not in it anymore.

What did the job actually look like when you went into it?

Oh, thank you, first and foremost, for having me. I’m very excited to be here chatting with you.

It has changed. It has evolved quite a bit in seventeen years. I think when I reflect on it, it’s crazy to think it’s been seventeen years. And in some respect, it still feels like that day one when I walked in and we were doing cattle call interviews.

So I actually got my start in commercial staffing in the light industrial industry.

And we had the long conference room table at the front. I was with a regional staffing firm. We sat at the desk. We would schedule six to eight people at a time. They would sit around the table filling out their paperwork. And as they each finished their onboarding paperwork, they would approach the desk. And you would do this quick fifteen minute get to know you, do their I nine, get them to sign off on a background check.

As gross as it sounds now that I am seventeen years in, you would walk them back to the bathroom and conduct their drug screen in house. So it was definitely a different time. We didn’t have the tech that we have now.

When I think about technology and staffing, at the time in which I started, that’s a system to just place people, and it acts as a CRM with our clients. It was where we were communicating anything with our clients, like understanding their background check requirements, making sure we had copies of contracts, using it for invoicing, using it as a sort of a note taking system.

I think my old boss would laugh now, I’m sure, if we went back into the old bullhorn.

You would see my journalism come out a little bit in that bullhorn section because I would type every note like it was the conversation that we were having. So if a a contingent worker called in, it was I said this, and they said that. And so you had a full script by the time I was done.

Over the years, I think staffing and contingent labor has really been a great place to try technology.

It’s a very fast paced opportunity.

It spans every industry. In my seventeen years, I worked with, you know, final mile distributors. I worked with companies that manufactured tires. I worked in the banking space. I worked with tech companies, with computer companies, call centers. So it spans, it touches just about every industry out there. And so it’s a great testing ground for any kind of new technology or opportunity that’s out there, But it also leaves the door open for a lot of opportunity for bad actors, a lot of opportunity for those kind of testing grounds to not go the way you hope.

It gives us that opportunity to address those things and make it better before it kind of rolls out to everybody.

But by the same token, there is this opportunity for bad actors to kind of find their way in the door. And it has been that way even before we started moving down the path of e verify, before we started moving down the path of these app based technology platforms that are sending out contingent workers.

So one, what you’ve just described, what do you think has changed the most over those years? You just you described your early years. What would you say changed the most since then?

I think it’s the embracing of technology.

I think technology has allowed us to move even quicker.

In some respects, I would say that has been a good thing.

We’re able to do more with less.

At the same time, we are constantly trying to do more. And as we continue to try and do more with less, we start to lean even more heavily on that technology. And the old adage of inspecting what you expect, you become trusting of all this technology.

And once you’ve worked a little bit in the tech space, you start to realize just how often in the background things can go south and where you have these controls and opportunities for human intervention to make sure that it doesn’t go too far south.

But if you become too comfortable and you’re not doing the questioning and you’re not root causing issues as they come up, it can become very easy to let the technology do its thing and way after the fact you’re finding out that it wasn’t doing what you expected and you’re getting yourself into a little bit of trouble. It turns into issues with clients where clients thought that you were doing a certain screen that you thought your system was running, and it wasn’t. It turns into legal cases, safety issues that can come up.

So I think the technology piece has forced us to be more creative, but it has also given me a big appreciation for having that foundational understanding because technology can get it wrong just like humans can. It’s when they are joined together and they’re firing on all cylinders that you reap the rewards of that technology.

Yep. Great. Thank you. So you’ve mentioned a case to me involving two sisters.

Can you share this and please maybe start at the beginning? Yeah. Of course.

So I think when you and I first met, we were talking a lot about identity.

And that’s a that’s a great opportunity for tech as we think about how can tech evolve, especially in the staffing industry where we might meet a worker once and never see them again or only see them when maybe they need to do some kind of update or something goes wrong with their check and they stop by.

So often, you’re meeting these workers, you’re meeting them for thirty minutes or less, and then you’re sending them out to the client site. And the client did not meet them before they started often either. Occasionally, you have clients that interview, but more and more we’re seeing clients really trust their staffing partners. They’ve built great relationships. Their staffing partners understand their business. There’s not a reason not to trust that the things are happening that the staffing partner has committed to in their contract.

And so that worker shows up, and they do a great job.

And the client loves them and they continue working. So that was the case we had here.

We had an individual and her family actually had just moved into the area and they were all looking for jobs. And that is normal. We see a lot of, you know, one person gets a job. And then if anyone else in the family is out looking, they’re like, hey, we had a great experience with this staffing firm.

They have tons of jobs. Go check it out. And sometimes they get placed with the same clients and they get to ride together. And it’s just it’s a great opportunity for them.

In this instance, we had two sisters.

And one had all the correct paperwork to complete her form I nine and returned an e verify of employment authorized.

And the other had already gone through this process at another staffing agency and was not able to get a successful employment authorization.

And so what they had done is they had the one sister go out on the first day and show the ID because the client, in order to get access before you had your badge, had to show your ID and shows her ID. She works that shift. And then the next day, her sister starts working there as her. And she goes to a different staffing agency down the road, successfully completes her I nine, gets a new opportunity. So now they’re both working at different places through different staffing agencies.

And probably thinking to themselves, the work authorization for this particular person, I think had like two years on it.

And I think there was this thought that by then either they would be on board and everything would be fine or the sisters work authorization would have come through.

Unfortunately for them, they had temporary protective status. And if you’ve paid attention to the news at all this year, you know TPS has been a hot topic.

Many of the countries that were afforded TPS have had it revoked. It’s been in and out of the court systems.

And the sister who had her employment authorization was receiving notifications from our HR compliance department that it was time to do a reverification because of this TPS status that she had had.

Oftentimes when people come in on these TPS statuses, they might come in on one status be working and they get a card with a new status and they just don’t tell you.

So as part of our process, we were reaching out to anybody who would come in on this status. We did our own internal audit of all of this. We pulled our own reporting. We were proactively contacting all of them. So sister with work authorization status responds to that, successfully completes an updated I nine, and gets everything taken care of for that and continues on her way. The sister who was working under her sister’s name has now also gained some sort of work authorization. And so she thinks to herself, I will use the TPS situation to update my documents.

And she proceeds to tell our local team. Oh, by the way, I had a name change.

As the explanation for why the new identifying documents do not match the name that she has been working under.

I had a great HR compliance specialist. She loved i9s. I don’t think I could have ever gotten her off of i9s. I think she’ll be doing i9s until she retires. She loves it and good for her.

But she spotted it quickly. She she clocked it immediately. And so one of the things I was asking her as the less educated person was like, wouldn’t the the status numbers be the same? Wouldn’t certain things carry from one document to the next even with a name change?

And so when we approached the sister who was working for us, she immediately said she needed to go get something from her car and has not been heard from since. And that is often what happens in these scenarios is once they’re approached, than fight it, they just turn around, walk away, and try again somewhere else.

So nothing in that process really failed. The check passed, and the check was right. So what was the question that nobody thought to ask?

I think the challenge that we have in staffing when it comes to the overall process is often we are interviewing people before we have available jobs.

You are looking to create a pool of candidates so that when a client has a need and it’s an immediate need, you’ve got workers at the ready. Or you have clients who are saying to you, I have an upcoming need. I want you to start hiring ten to fifteen people. And so you start that process pretty early.

You don’t continue checks ongoing most often. And I think that’s where we drop the ball and where we stop thinking about those things is that whole inspect what you expect. Throughout the process, once she came that first day, the trust had been established. You very quickly establish trust and rapport when you work in staffing, both as the recruiter and the on-site manager, but also as the employee.

And if they give no reason to question it, even if they go by a different name I mean, so often these workers do. They go by nicknames. When you do an investigation, you can’t get anybody’s first and last name from another person. So I think the things that we weren’t considering throughout the process is after all the checks are done, how do we stay in contact with the correct worker and know that the correct worker is always the one showing up?

And who is responsible ultimately for doing that? Us as the employer, the client as the customer, and kind of the joint employer situation, who should be the one staying in contact and maintaining those relationships to make sure that these are our workers? And I think looking back on it, when you have a high volume like this particular customer this customer has three hundred temporary workers.

It’s almost this is like the exact scenario for somebody who is desperate and just looking to make money and feed their family to take advantage of.

Well, thank you for sharing that. Yeah. I’m gonna shift the conversation a little bit now to AI. So as you know, AI is on both sides of the hiring table right now. We’re interviewing with it.

Employees and prospective employees are answering with it, and people are using it to apply for jobs and to even interview for jobs. What does that actually look like in practice based on your experience?

So AI has entered just about every aspect of hiring at this point. And I think you hit it on the head right off the bat. It’s on both sides. So we jokingly laugh in the HR space that AI at this point is interviewing AI.

I think one of the things that we’re really focused on now in my current role is we want AI. We want people who are AI capable. We want them using AI. We want them to demonstrate a capability and a curiosity.

The piece that we often see missing is the knowledge and the critical thinking behind that. Again, I talked earlier about you start to trust. You start to buy in. You know, a couple messages with ChatGPT, and it seems like it knows you really well and it’s feeding you back really legitimate seeming answers. Suddenly, that’s that’s all you’re you’re using. And you almost stop start to not trust your own thought process because you’re like, I didn’t think of that.

But the reality of it is it is in every aspect of hiring.

Where I see it work really well on the employer side are the kind of transactional things.

Scheduling is a great opportunity to make use of AI calendars, reminders that can go out, reminders that can go out internally to remind a manager to review candidates and to disposition those candidates. I think it’s a great tool to prep for an interview. If you’re looking at a resume and you’re trying to say to yourself, how does this skill from another industry translate? What made this person think, hey, I can do this job? I think that’s a great opportunity for AI to help you find those questions that will help you understand, is this somebody who can make it at my company?

The piece that I see AI starting to struggle with and I see a lot of, like, staffing agencies in particular want to use it for is the interview itself.

I get weary of that for a couple of reasons. I think seventeen years in staffing with fifteen of those on the HR side, not the pure recruiting side. The back end HR side dealing with the law, dealing with law firms, dealing with government agencies and discrimination complaints, there are too many ways at this point for technology to inadvertently pick up on our own biases and to inadvertently create opportunities that are obstacles for people who maybe are not divergent in their thought process.

When I was working at a agency that was building out an AI interview, one of the things that they spent a lot of time talking about is like this interaction right here.

Am I looking at the camera? Am I smiling?

Am I acting professional? Are there certain like things that people are doing on the AI interview? And I think there’s a couple of things that happen.

If you’re neurodivergent, eye contact is hard oftentimes.

Most people don’t want to be told to smile more. People get incredibly nervous in an AI interview. They get nervous in any interview. I’m nervous talking to you right now and I I adore you.

And I feel comfortable and confident in what I’m talking about. But you still you get those nerves and AI can’t always pick up on that yet.

And so one of the things we were really committed to was using the AI to allow people to go through the process fully in app and do that on their own time, give them that benefit of that opportunity. Using the AI to help us score in general how they did if they mentioned certain keywords in a certain way to show that they demonstrated that knowledge. But having that human intervention where we had humans watching the interviews because there were times that our AI interviewer would say, well, what else do you want to add? And these employees, these potential employees were getting very upset by the constant question because it felt like you didn’t finish the answer. But the reality was she can’t engage with you the way you and I can engage. And one of the things that we were clear on is she shouldn’t be telling somebody right or wrong answers.

And so you’re a little limited when you’re building out interviewing like that.

And so we were really passionate about making sure that people have those opt out opportunities in the states where that is required, that they had an opportunity to say if they needed an accommodation that did not include an AI interview, and that we had humans involved in that process as a sort of fail safe to pick up on things that quite frankly, an LLM LLM has not been trained on yet. They’re just they’re not the tech’s not there yet.

Right. So just kind of closing this out now. What would you say is the best practice both from the employer as well as the individual who’s interviewing?

Let’s start with the individual who’s interviewing because I think that’s the easiest answer of the two.

For the inner individual who is interviewing, I think you should use AI. I think you should take the opportunity to make use of a tool that’s available to you. Just like if you were gonna Google research a company. I would tell people who need to interview, look the company up, see what their mission, vision, values are.

You should not go into an interview not knowing what you’re interviewing for and who you’re interviewing with. Should look things up on LinkedIn. AI can help you with that. It can make things faster.

It can find that information in a way that maybe you wouldn’t have known how to search. Searching on the Internet is a skill. Like, I went through classes for that in college and journalism.

Now, with with A. I. Tools, it’s conversational. You can ask the exact question and it has an intuitive it knows because it’s been asked so many times and it’s learning from previous conversations and so it can help you get that information faster.

I think the other piece, I talked about it from the employer side, looking to see how this person’s resume ties into your company. I think that can be done with the person interviewing too.

I think now more than ever, we have great opportunities to try new things. We have tools that can help us overcome obstacles that previously we couldn’t. And so if you wanted to make a career pivot, AI is a great opportunity for you to study and to help you translate your own knowledge into the vernacular that the company you’re interviewing with is speaking in. I don’t encourage it to lie.

I encourage it to help you communicate with the people that need to hear it. Because often in an interview, it is pretty easy, whether it’s nerves, whether it’s you just speak very plainly and the company you’re interviewing with doesn’t. There are lots of ways that during the interview process, you kind of shoot yourself in the foot. And so I think AI gives you that preparation opportunity.

I do not encourage people to let it take away who you are during that interview process. People hire on personality more than anything else. And I think no matter how many ways HR tries to prep hiring managers not to do that and to hire for skills, knowledge, and ability, the biggest impact is whether or not you can mesh with the people you’re interviewing with coachable. And I think AI can help you position yourself and present yourself in that way.

From the employer standpoint, you’ve got to have human intervention and you’ve got to monitor the technology that you are using.

One of the great things about the different technology partners that I’ve worked with that have incorporated AI, like First Advantage, is they’ve had conversations with us as customers to say, here’s what we’re thinking about. Here’s what we’re introducing.

They have given us the opportunity to ask the right questions.

Laws are starting to come out about use of AI in hiring. And as employers, it is on us to make sure that the vendors that we contract with respect those laws, are doing the bias testing that some of these laws require, and are willing to be open and transparent about that with us. Because ultimately, the lawsuits, for the most part, sit with the employer, although the the workday situation shows us that it’s heading towards the vendor as well.

So you have to have somebody who can stay on top of that stuff, who can be that voice with your vendors. You have to trust people that have the institutional knowledge.

And you have to have people who can bridge the gap between your engineers and the people who have that knowledge of the laws of the industry that you’re in of the actual processes.

Because where AI works best is where it takes the burden off of everyone, But it is replicating your process in a way that feels very human to everybody involved in it. And so I think a lot of times, as companies, we say often, we’re introducing AI so that you can do the things you like to do. You can do the fun stuff. You can do the human stuff.

No one knows what that means in reality until you start introducing it. And oftentimes, what it means is that you have to hire somebody who can facilitate the AI in a meaningful way and stay on top of that AI. And I think that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity for people, especially kids coming out of college now. There’s this great opportunity if you can glean the knowledge of people who came before you and have critical thinking, but be someone who facilitates AI. You have a great career ahead of you because that is what everyone is looking for in that talent pool right now is quite small.

Yeah, great. I think that’s a great summary. Okay, we’re gonna talk a little bit now about accommodation. So you handled accommodation in your previous role. Has the conversation changed in the last couple of years?

It’s interesting.

I think it has and it hasn’t.

I know we talked a little bit about this. I’m very passionate about accommodations for a number of reasons. It was one of my first major HR projects. We were a government contractor, and the new OFCCP regs were coming out.

And so I was learning about section five zero three and and all that, and I built our accommodation process from the ground. We didn’t have one. And so that was that’s kind of my baby. I love it.

In twenty twenty one, I got diagnosed with a chronic health condition and suddenly it became even more real and I had even more empathy than I think I had previously.

One consistent thing that has been there from the start is often people do not know their rights under the law, and they do not want to do anything that would make an employer doubt their ability to do the job. People do not want to lose their jobs. They want to meaningfully contribute. They don’t want to be looked at differently. And so more often than not, what I see is people struggle.

And they struggle quietly, and they struggle quietly, and then the threat of losing a job comes into play. And now suddenly that impact, that fear is immediate, and we want to explore all the avenues.

And so I think a lot of times, people don’t recognize where the opportunities are for them to get that help and support.

And there’s a little bit of a lack of trust in our employers that they’re going to do the right thing and that they’re not going to try and hire somebody who doesn’t have these needs.

That conversation, I think, has become a little more difficult in the last couple of years. I think as we have started to say, maybe DE and I swung too far in one direction, or maybe it’s just not as meaningful to people as it once was, or maybe we are currently under administration that just doesn’t see a value of it and companies are adjusting to fit that narrative, we’re seeing people not want to have those conversations. And when they get an HR rep on the phone who can walk them through what that is, who can walk them through their rights and their protections and what an accommodation can be, it can be life changing.

The number of times I’ve talked to temp workers who had no idea that that was an option, they’ve gone through twenty companies and never knew that there was a way that they could have meaningfully contributed without feeling like a disability was a problem, it’s a lot. And they cry. And they get upset. And they want to meaningfully contribute.

And so this is another great opportunity, I think, for AI is there are so many chronic health conditions out there. I do use the job accommodation network, Jan. I use that frequently. It’s a great resource for people.

But if you don’t know what something is, I promise you Claude or ChadGPT or Gemini can help you figure it out and could probably tell you some accommodations that your company could provide.

And I think where companies get it wrong is they don’t create that welcoming environment. They don’t broadcast that you can go to HR or talk to your manager.

Or you have an extremely understanding manager who just says, yeah, I’ll accommodate you and doesn’t put you through the process.

And then something at the company changes, and now that accommodation can’t be an accommodation anymore, and we’re in a weird spot. So I think AI creates this opportunity for the employee to be able to do the research and understand, hey, what what could an accommodation look like at this company? Because it’s going to be different based on the work environment, based on the industry you’re in.

It can also help them figure out how to communicate it in a way they’re comfortable with. It’s really hard to talk about your own medical condition.

And it’s really hard sometimes to think in the context of your job, how your medical condition is impacting your job. Sometimes you don’t even realize it. Sometimes it’s very obvious because it’s very visible. For employers, I think it gives you that opportunity to, one, build your accommodation process if you don’t have it yet, because I strongly encourage you, the more upfront you are about it, the easier that is with your employees and the better it is for you legally.

And then two, if you don’t know what an accommodation could look like, you can feed your job description in. You can feed what the person’s requested in. You can say, where is the point of friction going to be?

What opportunities do I have here? Is there something on this job description that maybe isn’t essential that is impacting them that we can remove? So I think there’s some great opportunities here to make that process more effective and not feel like you have to be a medical professional. You should still be engaging with the medical professional. They have medical professionals that diagnose them. They should be telling you what an accommodation needs to look like. But you can figure that out in the context of your business by making use of technology.

So looking across all of that, what’s the operational thing or the process that you would want organizations to go and look at? And most of them just aren’t doing that right now.

I think it’s hard to say specifically because the one I think people beg for is the same one that they don’t make use of because it’s easier to just ask your friend at work how to do something or where to go to find something.

I think companies have spent a significant amount of time building out beautiful intranets full of documentation that no one ever goes and looks at.

But what I’m starting to see a lot of employers do is build out these conversational chatbots within their systems and tools that would help their employees educate themselves.

I think the gap here at this point when we’re talking about tech is more around how we encourage employees to use it. I think oftentimes, like I said earlier, we say, is going let you do all the things that you enjoy doing and all the tactical stuff that’s kind of annoying. AI is going to do it for you.

We think by saying that we’ve set them up to embrace it. The change management on this is going to be much longer, and it’s going to look different with different populations.

I think where I’m enjoying use of it right now, and I’d never thought about it in my previous companies, is doing my day job and then thinking, do I enjoy doing this? And is it a repeatable task that I could build a Claude skill? So right now where I’m using it is when I do benefits comparisons. It’s not my bread and butter, but it’s part of my job.

And I can build a skill that will say these are my current benefits. These are the benefits we’re considering. Line them up against each other. Give me pros and cons.

Tell me what that cost impact is. And I can just say Claude, here’s two docs. Go to work. And it does all of that for me.

If we can help our employees see those opportunities, give them some ownership in building them instead of just saying, oh, yeah. Here. I built this for you. But letting them use their expertise and their knowledge and their buy in to build it, I think we will see those operational opportunities.

They’re gonna be different across orgs depending on your own mission, vision, and values in your industry. But they’re gonna start to make themselves very known because employees aren’t going to feel like they need to hide them from us anymore. I think where we’re getting it wrong is we’re saying, here’s a tool. And we’re saying, it’s gonna do this part of your job. And that’s the end of it. And we’re not allowing them those opportunities.

Right. Well, how about policies, company policies? Is there something that companies have written down that has stopped being true and nobody actually went back to go and take a look at it?

I mean, I would say for sure, every every company that I engage with these days. I mean, so let’s go back to my my staffing roots. One of the things that we often did was we built in client specific onboarding in our tools. So a lot of companies onboarded Bullhorn. Lots of companies have these opportunities now where you can build very specific workflow journeys for employees.

And so we would get client specific paperwork, and you could tell looking at it, it hadn’t been looked at since nineteen ninety, but no one has ever questioned it. So I think that happens pretty frequently.

Right now, I think a lot of companies focused on the DNI situation because it was pretty in your face from the administration that that was going to be an area of concern.

I think technology usage and how we go about using it, how we engage with social media, where we’re putting information into AI, those are all policies that are going to continue to evolve. And companies should definitely be looking at that frequently.

Anywhere where you are introducing AI and you have a policy that outlines the process itself, it’s out of date if you’ve introduced AI and you haven’t updated it. And I think that’s happening more and more frequently. It’s almost impossible without using outside tools, six fifty outside legal counsel, managing a calendar, saying, I’m gonna look at this quarterly.

Almost everything that we have written from a policy standpoint is likely out of date unless you are regularly and routinely have somebody looking at it. And it can’t be HR, the only ones looking at it. Because a lot of these policies are derived from different departments, and only those departments know what has changed.

But I think the big thing right now is how we use tech. I think a lot of companies are using tech in a surveillance way and probably don’t have a great policy writing about how they’re using that. I think there’s probably companies that have introduced different background checks throughout the time of your employment and maybe haven’t done that in the best way if they don’t have a good partner who’s saying, hey, continuous backgrounds need very specific policies. So I think there’s anytime you’re starting to make those shifts in your processes, one step should always be go back and look at any documentation, including your policies.

Right.

Yeah, good point. So if no one ever physically meets anybody anymore, what is verification actually verifying?

Well, depends on what you’re verifying.

Think when we say in the scope of interviewing, it’s what we said earlier. We’re we’re probably just verifying that someone knows how to use AI at this point because AI is interviewing AI.

No matter what, we as employers have a couple of responsibilities that I think are critical. One, we have a duty to ensure that these people are authorized to work in the United That’s you can’t get around that. We are bound by that. So we should be verifying that they are who they say they are and that they are able to work in the US.

The second thing we have as employers is a duty of care for our employees. We have a responsibility to provide a safe work environment. Even if that’s not a physically safe work environment because we’re not working in the same work space, you have a right to a work space that is free from harassment, free from discrimination, bullying. You have a right to having a work environment that allows you to thrive, that allows you to be successful, that allows you to bring your best self to work and meaningfully contribute. And I think we as employers employers should be verifying that the people we’re bringing into the workspace, whether it’s ours or our clients, fit with that.

But I think it’s it’s becoming harder and harder. AI has become so sophisticated.

I mean, I’m sure that our AI product at my last company has probably interviewed AI a time or two. And a human probably watched that video and thought that that was a real person being interviewed. I’m confident that that is happening. Deepfakes are getting better and better.

And so I think that’s where companies like First Advantage come into play. You guys have great opportunities for tech to be embedded throughout an employee’s life cycle, especially with these tech enabled platforms where people are, you know, having their identity checked throughout the time that they’re showing up to different client sites and things like that. I think that’s where these are going to become more and more critical.

Because for employers, we can’t can’t take those responsibilities to heart and do those things if we don’t know who we’re putting in those places. And the the negligent hiring opportunities only continue to grow if we’re not doing our due diligence on the people that we’re placing at different work sites.

Right. Yep. Understood.

Okay. Amazing comments, amazing thoughtful approach to a very complicated topic, and it’s only gonna become more complicated. What are the one or two things that you would like to leave our listeners with?

That maybe we haven’t already covered or you think are real important things that we should all be Yeah.

Aware of? A couple of things.

I think AI can be super scary, but I think it can add so much to our work experience.

We have to just like social media, just like our phones. We have to know when to hit the pause button and take the step back. We have to use our critical thinking skills.

If we mean what we say, which is that AI is here to help us and to allow us to do the human touch, allow us to do the things we enjoy, the strategy, the engaging with our clients, then we need to be thoughtful and considerate in how we introduce that.

I strongly encourage you to find those opportunities for your employees, but to hear them as you’re building these out.

The more voices that are heard, the better your technology is going to be.

And I think it is not a crockpot. You cannot set it and forget it, especially with what we talked about today.

Those bad actors, their tech is also improving. And so you have to constantly be monitoring and asking yourself, is this still doing what I intended it to do?

We have a great opportunity with data to look at how our tech is engaging and say to ourselves, is this the right tech? Is there an issue here? We can spot trends quicker than we ever could.

And yet, I think sometimes because we’re so busy chasing the next new opportunity, we forget that foundational piece, that that data is available to you, and you can use it to target how you are introducing technology into this to help empower your employees and enable them to be the best, most meaningful contributors you can find. And I think when we have employees who are engaged and feel supported and feel like they’re learning and they have a voice, then they are even more productive than you can ever imagine.

And I think we need to be careful considering a lot of places are targeting people who already have these skills. These are new skills. But the pool is limited. So you have got to use change management to help educate and develop the teams that you have now.

And you cannot put a price on that kind of loyalty. The kind of loyalty that you get from someone who feels like they’ve been empowered and supported by their employer, it pays out in dividends. So where you have those opportunities to bring that human touch to the tech, I definitely encourage you to do so. And if someone is struggling with the tech, if you can just add an extra ten minutes to support them.

I don’t know if that’s me growing up and realizing that there’s pieces of tech that I’m like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is a thing. But an extra five minutes from someone goes a really long way to helping get somebody even further along. And it can help somebody be more successful than they ever dreamed of being.

Erin, thank you so much. I so appreciate your time and your generosity, and I know we’ve all learned some very important things.

Thank you.

Yes. Thank you for having me. This has been fantastic, and I really appreciate you putting this together. It’s our pleasure.

That’s it for this episode of Know Your People. Everything we covered is in the show notes. Follow wherever you’re listening so the next episode finds you. Know your people from First Advantage. Trust in a changing world.