[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted small business podcast host. I'm here with Bill Casco, who's going to introduce himself and let us know why we should trust him as an expert. [00:00:12] Speaker B: That's a loaded question. Listen, thanks for having me. You know, 21 years in the business of the recruiting and staffing industry has been quite an interesting ordeal, to put it mild. But, you know, just building the company and the marketing piece and what we've built behind it, and really a different way to do business and a different way to market, and especially from just the search engine side and the way that we have done things that we started 20 years ago, we still. It's interesting today. I'm kind of blown away because we're still one of the few that really understand it and get it. And so it's been a trusted and true model, which people laugh about it sometimes because started the company based on what's called the Costanza theory. And if you're a. If you're a Seinfeld fan, then you would have seen that episode where George does the exact opposite. For those that don't know, he's in the diner sitting with Jerry, and everything he does opposite seems to work. And Jerry says, hey, that attractive girl just looked at you. Why don't you go over and say hi? And he's like, she wouldn't talk to me. And he says, well, the opposite works. Then it should. And George goes over and says, hi, I'm George. I'm unemployed. I live with my parents. I'm 40, and I'm balding. And she kicks the chair back and goes, have a seat. And that was kind of the same idea. How I started the company 21 years ago was that philosophy was not just our. It was truly like our business model, but it was interesting because it wasn't just one piece. It was just the tip of the iceberg. And it led into every piece of the business that led us to where we're at today. [00:01:49] Speaker A: That's interesting. I think there's kind of truisms that they float out there. Oh, you should never do that. You should never do this. But I find that a lot of the people that promote those truisms haven't actually run a business or. And there's a lot to be said about, you know, being forthcoming in your marketing and not pretending that you have the prettiest dog. If you're running in a dog adoption. Adoption company, you know, like, hey, we've got ugly dogs. Some people want ugly dogs. [00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And it Was interesting because in the beginning we, I remember because we, we have a lot of things that are, again, they're kind of industry game changers. They're things that we've disrupted the industry. Right? So our five year placement warranty, what we originally did was different. And I can remember people calling in the beginning and saying, no, that you guys run a staffing agency and executive search firm. That's not how you do it. This is how you do it. And I'm like, wait a second, what? We don't tell us how we're gonna do our business. I mean, did you go to Starbucks and tell them, no, you can only serve hot coffee? I mean, did somebody say that at some point? And that's kind of what we did, was to say we're gonna do it different. And so we're gonna do it different based on the ideal way in our industry where you had, you know, 20 salespeople and 10 recruiters. Instead we had one salesperson and 20 recruiters. Because my belief was the one with the best candidate was the one who got hired, not the person who had all the job orders and the positions that were open. So we just did the opposite what everybody else did, and it was the same way. And the way that we sold our model to people was that that's the way that everybody else does it, that we don't do it that way. And what's interesting is 20 years later now, I think we actually kind of opened up that Pandora's box because now we have just a plethora of different ways to do things, but they still can't grasp the idea. Which was one of the first ones, which was present your client with options, you know, bring options to the table. When you have a business, don't just have the menu. I mean, throw the menu out, come up with options and ideas. I discovered just recently. This is embarrassing. 21 years later, I just discovered, and it's only because I was noticing it myself, but no one, there are no businesses in our industry that have a pricing page. So when I go to a website and I'm looking to buy some type of, maybe an AI agent tool or something new and fancy that just came out. I mean, a SaaS model type of a thing. The first thing I look at is like, all right, what's their pricing? Right? I mean, that's the first thing. Well, I discovered one night looking at stuff, I went, why don't we have a pricing page? And then I started looking at competitors and I looked at over a hundred and there's like 7,000 companies in our space. I can't find one that had one. So what did we do? Created a pricing page because people. And then we found out people go there. It's like the number one thing they go for because they can't find the information. So when you start doing the opposite of everybody else, it will, it will work. Now I tell people when they call and give me a hard time about it. No, it doesn't work. You're right. Don't do it. Stay. Stay away from it. [00:05:25] Speaker A: It's wild. [00:05:26] Speaker B: But that's how we drive traffic. You know, that's the traffic. We knew that people wanted to find our website and do business online. Why make it difficult for people? I mean, I built our first website in front page if that tells you how old and antiquated it was, right? [00:05:46] Speaker A: And we hadn't got one. [00:05:49] Speaker B: I had an online chat 21 years ago. Nobody had an online chat 21 years ago. Why did I have an online chat? Because I was a one man operation trying to be a recruiter, salesperson, hr, web guy, admin and everything else. And it all of a sudden became relevant to me that I needed to figure out how to be more efficient in what I was doing. Solved a problem, was able to let people ask questions they didn't have to get the phone. Then I realized scheduling people was difficult. Create an online calendar, make it so they can book 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Why is it the companies in our space, especially service business, you only take phone calls during Monday through Friday from like 8 to 5? Because it's convenient for me. So as an example, I did an intake call with a client this weekend on a Saturday afternoon. The client said, you're the only company that I've ever seen that takes phone calls on Saturdays. I go, oh, we take them on Sundays too. We have a small window. Why not? Why, why base it around us? If you're a service business, that means you should be available to them. So look at your model and figure out how to change it. I'm not that smart of a guy, Jeremy. I'm just going to tell you. I'm just, I'm not. These are just stupid things that I have stumbled on over 21 years and realized that business people, stupid. [00:07:17] Speaker A: I agree. I think it's kind of the hospital model of things. It's like, oh, hey, you know, this is how a hospital is set up. You come into a huge uncomfortable room, no privacy, and the nurses, you know, are at the desk and they'll listen for the beeping of your monitor. You know, my wife was pregnant and she was in the hospital laboring for two days. Before I ask, can we turn off this beeping? Like, oh yeah, just push this button. We're like, we've been listening to constant beeping 247 because you wanted to be able to hear the beeping, which you actually don't need to hear. You can see that information on your nurse's monitor 20ft away. It's the disconnect between the customer experience of that interaction and, and the people that are actually managing things that I think like leads to this. Like, I recommend for any service business owner to call your competitors and try to purchase. Yeah, you will. Like, you will find the flaws in the system so fast because you won't get a call back. If you do get a call back, they won't be informative. If they are informative and you ask for a quote, they won't follow up on it. And if they do follow up on it, they won't actually show up on time. And if they do show up on time, their price is three times higher. So it's like that was five steps in the process. So in my industry in SEO, we often look at these problems from the hospital perspective. We set up the site how it's easy to monitor. We listen to the CEOs when they say, oh, hey, I've got a site and we've got a demo form, we don't stop to ask and say, why do you have a demo form but not a pricing page like people you want, you're going to try to force them into a demo without knowing how much this product costs. You want them to take their valuable time to talk to you, to be convinced by you. Oh yeah, because our sales guy, he's got a tongue of gold and he can convince anybody when he's on the phone with. I'm like, well, but getting more people on the phone with them should be your goal. So why are you putting friction? Because you're going to have to tell them the price anyways. Like, so I'm right there with you of like, like hiding that pricing information. Especially with now we've got LLM Tools, Chat, GPT, Claude, people are putting in the query, how much is this type of software? And if your business doesn't list what it is, you're not in that, you're not in that quote, you're not in that, in that output. So yeah, you gotta find. [00:09:56] Speaker B: I agree, in fact Saturday, that hopefully new client of ours he had already reached out earlier in the week to, like, five companies, and he had scheduled this call, I guess, on Thursday with us for Saturday, which was good for him. And he said the first three immediately told him, oh, yeah, absolutely, we can fill this. Absolutely. There's not a problem. We've got it. We can do this. They went through their spiel and said, oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course, I get on the phone and I go, yeah, it's not going to be so simple. That's not the situation. Here's what you're doing, you know, looking for. Here's what it's going to take. Can we do it? Absolutely. Can I tell you we can do it in a week? No, there's just. It's not the way it works. What you're asking, what you're needing is a demand skill. It's also unusual. And by the time you interview, go through the process, it's going to take two to three weeks to get them onboarded and get going with you. But am I confident? Yeah, 100%. He said, no one said that to him. No one. No one was honest. And he said, why? Why are you telling me this? And I said, because we don't like to fail. We don't like to fail. It's so simple. Like, have an honest conversation with someone. When you're, especially a service business, if it's something that, you know is going to be a struggle or, you know, is going to be, you know, difficult and they're under the gun to have something because we sell people, it's not an easy sell. This isn't something easy to find, to get the people to show what you would think, to show up to do what they're supposed to do, because it just doesn't work that way. So instead of, you know, trying to just get the business, we don't get the business until we get paid. So if we're not going to be successful, don't take on the business. And if the person has unrealistic expectations, you need to explain to them what the marketplace is. And then he had one more phone call this week, tomorrow. And I said, you know, he told me who it was with, and I said, here's how it's going to go. And I told him, and he said, listen, if it goes exactly like you're saying, I'm calling you back and I'm doing it. And he said, it's funny because I think that's probably how it will be. And I said, it will, I promise you. And so Having that is so important for small business to have that communication. And you're right. The way that the LLMs are picking that question up, that's like one of the number one questions we all ask when we're gonna go buy something. What is it going to cost? Where are they located? What is it going to cost? And if you can't, I can't give you an exact number, this is true. But I can at least point you in the right direction to understand what you're looking at. People that come to us and have never used an agency, and we tell them, you know, you want to hire a CFO, it's going to run you about $100,000. And they're like, oh, I thought it was going to cost me 5,000. And you're like, no, you just told me that the salary for this person's like $600,000. You know, that that's what the normal is. It's not out of line. And they just. They're like, oh, we can't even afford that. I'm like, I understand. If you're paying somebody 600,000, you know, you should probably look at what you're paying them then. So. But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, at least giving them that information keeps them on your website, might entice them to look at other opportunities. And for us, we don't do just one area or one niche. It's so many that you know that when you're in a crowded space, how do you get them into your space and how do you keep them there? [00:13:31] Speaker A: I think it's. I was talking with my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency, and we were talking about the obsession in our industry and SEO of just getting the conversion of, like, oh, hey, I got somebody to my site and they submitted a contact form, and you're like, yeah, we're doing great. Isn't this great? And then you follow up, you know, with your, you know, your CPR class and, like, you sent us people that, you know, they want a CPR machine. You sent us leads for people that are not in our city. We're just, you know, we do CPR classes here and here, and you totally miss the mark. But if you don't follow through, if you just, you know, you don't line up those expectations, then you're going to miss, like, you can get traffic, traffic, you can get rankings. You can get people to your site, and you can even get them to fill out the form, but that doesn't mean that they're going to make it all the way down the pipeline, especially if you're not forward with the right information at the right time. And, you know, Mike Buckbee of NoETOA said, hey, ChatGPT is your most popular and least trained customer support representative. So you need to do more about filling out the bottom of the funnel part of what you do. Be more thorough and more explicit in how you do it. Have, you know, if you're delivering gravel driveways, like have a walkthrough on that morning, we're going to show up, it'll be a trailer, it's this long. He's going to try to pull it back into your driveway, and then he can leave in a pile or stretch it out and it's about this thick or he can go this thick. Those are things where if you go to a gravel driveway site, you can't find that information, but you need it to know, okay, can he even get into my driveway? [00:15:22] Speaker B: You know, but, you know, it's also interesting to look at the way that trends have changed over time. And so if I go back again to the online chat ability, that, just that ability to have that customer service interface and you think about how it's changed to. It went from, you know, that fill it in, somebody responds, now you're kind of connected. Then it went to the chatbot. And I'll tell you, when we had, when we launched the chatbot, the leads that we got from that were insane. I mean, it was just, they would put their information in, hit that button, we would get it. And our goal was within 10 minutes to make sure we were making that phone call back. And then we learned, like, if you, if it lasts longer than 30 minutes, they've already moved on anyway and they're already looking at another site. So then you start thinking how people were trained to do that. Well, then everybody jumped on the bandwagon to put a chatbot. And the moment you got on any website, you had a chatbot pop up. And really, I guess in between, in between, then we had target remarketing and things like that, right? Because they were doing it from the remarketing. So we had that in between. We all got sick of it. Then we went to the chatbot, we had the chatbot, you know, sending it back and forth immediately, whatever. I got tired of filling it out and so they quit doing them. And so now we're actually looking at taking our chatbot off of the website because we get almost zero traction from it because nobody wants to put their name and information in we have more success by having truly to book a meeting when it's convenient for them. You know, book an appointment, book a meeting for us to call on your schedule. That's more successful than anything. But the chatbot kind of movement I think has been, again, it's that tendency where people got so beat up every time they went to a website, they don't want to see it anymore. [00:17:12] Speaker A: I think it's, I think, I agree, but I think it's, it's more that the technology wasn't ready when it became popular. It became popular 10 years ago, but you couldn't find jack, you couldn't find anything in a chatbot. So it became an insanely fret. It really just became a way for companies to shunt less resources to customer support teams to take longer to answer those tickets. And it's basically like adding, you know, one of those phone dial entries to your freaking website. You know, like if nobody's answering the chatbot right away, it's giving bad answers. It's not connecting people to what they want. So by and large, most people have abandoned the on site chat because it sucks. And it's funny because now we have the rise of the same thing, but on another website. But it actually does mostly a kind of accurate job. I mean like ChatGPT. Claude, I'm using these tools constantly and horrifically surprised at how frequently Google's AI overviews are inaccurate. Wrong, unhelpful. I mean, I was trying to buy like a remote control or a controller for my particular, you know, NES emulator console. And it had like a special USB C Micro. And no matter how I typed it in, the AI overview just ignored the fact that there were different type of USB Cs. It took half an hour to finally track down the right controller. And it came from an actual forum, not any sort of chat or even search. So it's, it's. I think people are frustrated by companies jumping on tech that's not quite ready. [00:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well, plus it changes, right? That's the other thing. Right now we're changing every, you know, I used to always say technology change every 18 to 36 months. And if you just think a year ago where we were with chat, GBT and the LLMs and just the whole piece of it is not the same anymore. If I have one more person call me and tell me about an AI agent that they want to sell to me, I mean, I'll scream. It just, it's like we've tried it, we've tried it with the AI. We have an AI recruiter who does the phone calls. And she's like a version four. She's actually a lot better than version one. Version one was a mess. It was horrible, but it's still not there. But does it save time? Yeah. Does it engage quicker? Absolutely. But it's not something to be worried or scared about. I always think about my dad bringing home the first microwave to our family and it took four of us to carry it to the house. And he told us that the microwave was going to get rid of anybody being a chef or a cook anymore. And pretty happy to say, 45 years later, Denny's might have three or four of them in the back. They still got somebody cooking. So we just have to figure out how to live with it. But I'm with you. The biggest fear I have is the disinformation and the information that's wrong and companies embracing it like it's the Bible and it's 100% correct because it's not. It helps, but it's not 100%. [00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I had this convo with Matt Brooks of SEO Tarek about like the different types of hallucinations that can come out of LLMs. There's, there is just straight up factual inaccuracies, but there are also hallucinations of, based off of faulty data or a lack of information or context around it. So like, there are things that we can do in our marketing to, you know, to clarify. And it's really hard because every company's goal is to gain, you know, to have that market share. And you know, for a long time with Google it was, it was kind of predictable. And now the market's changing again and we have to adapt that. We, you know, we have a whole new layer to search, you know, both in Google itself with AI overviews being foisted on us when it's not market ready, as well as these, these nascent companies that are, you know, making a deal as quick as possible to get ChatGPT into Siri. I mean, the fact that we have these mobile assistants that haven't had these AI reasoning models for these past 10 years. We've just become accustomed to our phones being stupid and our phones not understanding what, you know, we were searching for, providing the most terrible interactive results possible in the worst scenario while we're driving and least capable, capable of refactoring our searches. Like we've been the victim of like, rollout. That's too soon. But we have to deal with it. Like, we have to come up with These solutions as companies to try to gain our piece of the market and kind of do our best. Right? [00:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, the other part of that, too, is that, you know, everybody's not allowing everybody to grab the data. And so when you have search engines blocking certain LLMs even to get into it, then now we're. Now we're segmenting in between. We've got, you know, we got Google over here, we got Amazon doing this stuff. Claude, you've got Perplexity over here. They're gonna create their own search engine. We've got this one not sharing with this one. We've got things like, you know, we don't even know yet where it's gonna come from, but when you start hearing, hey, Google's now pulling in Instagram. Okay, so let me make sure I understand this. Facebook owns Instagram, and now Google is showing Instagram results in search engine results. And then they're highly ranking Reddit. Reddit is the highly ranked one that this is gonna be where we're gonna get our information from. [00:23:45] Speaker A: I mean, yeah, 60% of queries basically are fueled by Reddit. [00:23:50] Speaker B: And then, you know, I read a couple months ago, this was the one that blew me away. It was like, the number two search engine is YouTube. And you're like, okay, now I will tell you. About a year ago, I was at a dinner, a family dinner, and I was talking about something. I know there were like 30 of us sitting there. We were talking, and I said, oh, yeah. I went. And I just. I googled it. And one of my nieces in her early 20s started laughing, and I said, what's so funny? This. This made me feel old. I said, what's so funny? She goes, oh, we don't Google. I go, oh, you don't Google? What do you do? She goes, we tick tock. I go, I'm sorry, what? She goes, yeah, we tick tock. And that's that. That's that thing that this is where, you know, the old guys, and we're going through this change is to understand that there's no longer, like one or two places when you're building a company, building a website that you need to be in. Google, Yahoo, Msn, right? I mean, those were pretty much your three. You had to make sure you were there to rank. Now it's like, you got to be in all of them, and you got to figure out, how do I get in all? How do I make sure across I can be in all of them, which one requires what and this and that. And then if you're not, why are you not there? And if you're not, good luck trying to figure out who to get to. One of our companies that we started a couple years ago, it's ranked in everything except Bing. That's it. For some reason we cannot get it indexed in Bing. Now normally I would say big deal. Bing's traffic is like nothing, right? [00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:25:36] Speaker B: Copilot is a big deal. That's the one I'm more worried about. I'm more worried about being in Copilot than I am the Bing part of it. And yet when you try to get customer service or anybody to help you out, there's no answer. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's almost like burn your site down, rebuild another one because we're not going to be able to tell you what it is. And I think that's the frustration on the human piece right now that that avenue of like you said about the customer service piece and people not doing that, it's been not only offshored, but it's almost like it's out of our orbit. Nobody wants to deal with it. It's just an expense. And so we'll just send you in the loop and never really come to an answer. And I hope we get answers because this is what we all wanted, right? We all wanted this and it does make us more efficient. But if we're not being successful with it, we're not being efficient. [00:26:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. And to reinforce your point, Bing's index is confirmed to be used in perplexity and ChatGPT and other LLM search engines as well as obviously Microsoft. Yes, there's a interesting, you know, subtests where they, they put some content that could only be indexed by Google and that managed to show up I think in GPT. So maybe there's a shadow index factor there too. But we have convert confirmed, you know, reports being indexing matters and so you know, adding that index now plug in if it's a WordPress site. If not using the index now, I think you could use it on other on WIX has an integration. Squarespace has an integration with IndexNow which pushes actively into, into Bing's index. So that's just as important now and that's even fueling things like mapped searches are now available in Bing for people that are saying hey what? What ice cream shops are near me. Well, that's being powered by being index, being listed in Bing local business and being a confirmed entity there, plus your traditional local SEO signals and being on Google and having Reviews. So it's like you got to do everything and. [00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah, and I thought it was interesting too a couple years ago when Bing integrated and took everything verified from like Google my business and brought them all in together and synced up with that, then it really made you look at it and go, okay, so now let me make sure you guys are kind of cross talking or how is that kind of working? Because you're taking them as the trusted authority. And so you know, then if you run into a snag, what's really interesting, if you run into snag over at Google, Bing, they don't change anything over here. So it's like, oh, well, that's too bad for them, but we'll keep you over here. So it's just, you know, how it ends up at the end of the day is gonna be interesting. And I think you had just said earlier, you know, about like Siri and when you think about the voice side of pieces, you know, it's, they still don't have it perfected. I mean, as a business owner, have you ever actually tried to do the business connect with Apple and get it correct? It's a nightmare to get that done. And yet you need it. If you're going to show up in Apple and Safari and especially with Siri, you're gonna have to be in there. Well, you can get in it, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna rank in a certain manner because have you ever tried to get ratings? I mean, try to go in there and find a way to get or promote reviews or ratings through Apple? Because it does count, but it's all through the map and it's only if somebody clicks on it. What they're really looking for are negatives. They're not looking for them. They want to know something's wrong. It's kind of like Waze. Waze is another one. In my opinion, Waze would be the ultimate search engine way to get your business in there and get some high rankings. The problem is there's no way for you to actually tell Waze about your business because Waze is owned by Google. So it takes the data from that and pulls it in. And if you're wrong, you're wrong. Or if you don't show up, there's no way to tell it, hey, I'm not there. So it's just, I go back to the Reddit thing. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to me. Like I'm still having a hard time understanding Reddit. Like it could be that I'M old, but I'm an IT guy and I'm having trouble comprehending how do I communicate correctly. And by the way, I can't have 28 things to communicate at the same time in one day. [00:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that is the diff. The difficulty of, of the position of a small business owner is, yeah, you got an open playing field. And yes, you can, you can publish the tick tock, you can publish the Instagram, you can make a site, you can send an email, you can create a podcast, you can be a guest on a podcast, you can post on subreddits, you can try to like there it's like, yes, and, but there's now, now you have 50 things that you're supposed to be doing that you could do. [00:31:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:03] Speaker A: How, how do you do all of those things? You, the answer is you can't. But you got to try to find a, a method to get as many as you can that are as most valuable as possible for your, for your small business. And even professionals like me will have a hard time quantifying or qualifying off the top of our head, well, which of those channels is going to be the most successful for you? [00:31:34] Speaker B: Right. Well, and then you have, as a business owner, you use a company like yourself and we want results immediately. And so then individuals who have never gone through that and understand SEO. I don't understand when you say, look, it could take a year to get you where you want to be easy. It could take three months to get you popping a little bit. But it just takes time, time, consistency and having a plan. You know, I read something last year talked about with the LLMs, backlinks weren't going to matter anymore. And I had this discussion with someone else and I said, backlinks will always matter. That's all there is to matter more. Exactly. And so, you know, blog content was another one like, oh, doing blogs won't make a difference. Blogs make a difference when it's relevant to your business. You know, if you're, there's a difference between a blog and selling all the time, like, that's not adding value. I mean, what makes you a trusted factor? What makes you someone who is an authority in whatever it is you're selling your business has to do with. It's all of those pieces that come together, it's the little things. And then you have to figure out the relevance. Just like you said, what's most important, what's going to have the biggest bang for the buck? Where is your flaw and within your flaw, what do you need to Fix is it you don't have videos. Is TikTok relevant or not? I thought TikTok, when we got on it was kind of a joke, to be honest. I thought, this is a joke. I don't even know why we're doing this. And what we found out was it wasn't about TikTok, it was about the reels and it was about the shorts and it was being picked up then not just on TikTok, but it was about Instagram, YouTube, it was about LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn from a business standpoint went through this, which again is owned by Microsoft. They went through this massive algorithm change this past year with the ability to post a video and have it out there immediately to now you post something on LinkedIn, there's a good chance it may not show up in people's feed for a week to two weeks. I mean, I've actually been reading a lot of stuff from my own employees who posted. I don't see it for like two weeks. And it's just, it's different. It's more about the people you're connected to, the relevancy and looking at what's the value and where are you on that ranking of authority and engagement with your customer, whether it's social media or your website. That's what they think about. It's more about the bounce rate on your website. How long are they on your website? The longer they're there, the better it's going to be. That's more relevant to Google than anything else today. [00:34:28] Speaker A: Change topic just slightly. I am curious what the impact of this tech change of LLMs of these tools has been on the job market, on job acquisition for something, you know, like a main staple job, like a legal position, like, you know, or you're trying to hire for your commercial real estate company. What's been the impact from your view of this technology, on the staffing and hiring perspective, skill sets that people are expected to have or not have? Like, how is that impacting from your perspective, both businesses and, you know, job seekers? [00:35:13] Speaker B: So we're, we're just in this, we're in a really. This is going to sound really bad when I say it like this. We're in a really weird time and that's the best way to explain it. I know that's like, I'm really using my big boy vocabulary here and here's why. First of all, we're not getting a requirement for a job opening from a client. And they say to us, I need a paralegal who is Fluent using Claude and Perplexity. Haven't seen that yet. Right. So what we're seeing from the different platforms out there is that they're being used more by HR departments than anything else. So that's the first part. Second part is that the individual looking for work is utilizing them to just a crazy amount of a number to either rewrite their resume to create. Because I mean it's pretty simple to do no coding basically coding is what it's called and create AI agents that will do outreach and are doing email outreach and email drip campaigns and marketing in different ways. But the scary part is that the number of fake individuals looking for work is. It's unbelievable. What we're at, we are fighting through to identify if these people are. If these. Yeah. If they're real people or not real people. And that's been the, the hardest part this year is to identify that the number of individuals doing video, video interviews and being able to have some type of a LLM chat thing program up on the screen that's listening and feeding the answers back in a. Like a teleprompt that's undetectable and then feeding it into a way that they can answer as if it's a human conversation is mind boggling. The number of people that take a resume and scam, or it's scam, I guess basically the fake resume background history creation of not just that, but then dripping over like a social media thing to create like a history is mind boggling. The ability to have a conversation, to do a reference call with someone and have that person on the other end be actually AI is mind boggling. I mean it's. So we had to implement things like when we do our reference checking, we have a special program that actually monitors the IP address. So we actually take the IP addresses, have them in a database. We can see how many times that same IP address has been used. We can question it, we can flag it, we can watch to then have to kick it into the next level of a phone call. I mean, obviously it happens if they're using it from a business or something. But it's pretty rare that all of a sudden you're like, this is interesting. This person has done 27 interview or 27 reference checks people in the last week. Now that's pretty. Something's up. This is, I mean they're getting creative. So that's the piece of the technology that's made it hard from our standpoint as far as what we do, that the technology is making us more efficient. We spent A lot of money over the last two years, really with the change, with what was technically the automation phase of things and the, the digital automation just making us more efficient in the screening, processing, the integration of bringing information in and the individuals that we work with more efficient. So the experience for them was better in doing so. We eliminated six positions in our company though. Now again, a lot of people would say, well, that's why this is bad. Okay, I was a paper boy when I grew up at 11, 12 years old. We don't have paper boys anymore, right? We don't have newspapers pretty much anymore. It's just part of evolution. It's part of us in technology growing that things are going to change. AI is disrupting everything there is. And that's what we wanted. And that's exactly what we have to do, is figure out how do we live with it AI to help somebody write a resume, a true resume, and create something and put it in a way that's easily read, that tells a good story, that's a plus. It's a negative that it did away with people that are. My daughter is a writer. She's a writer, she went to college and as a writer writes for major publication, she knows that her position will be gone and it already is going away. Now that's horrible. But we have to look back and understand that's just part of technology and that door that we've opened. But the difference is, and we said this earlier, it's changing so fast. It just, it is happening so fast that none of us realize and, or didn't realize how fast it was going to happen. I think back by the first time I ever got in chat GBT and thought, holy cow, this is, this is crazy. And now I go in, I use it every day now for something, even if it's just doing an email and then taking my email, putting it in there and asking it just to review it and clean it up a little bit. Yeah, looks a lot better. I'm not that great at that. I mean, spell check spellcheck did the same thing, right? Spell check spellcheck was a godsend to us when it first came out. Now today, the problem is that when I have to say to my wife, hey, how do I spell rhinoceros? Because I can't tell you, I don't know how to spell it right? And so that's what we ended up with, is that it makes us lazy. And that's what concerns me. It concerns me that we're not using our minds enough still. And I Hope that we figure out how to keep doing that. And I don't know that answer. [00:41:40] Speaker A: I've seen those studies where they've done group studies of enthusiasm problem solving with a cohort that's, that has access to an LLM and those that don't over time and there's genuine cognitive declines like it is, it is something tough to grapple with, with the nature of our industry, with the nature of our society, you know, we can't stop the progress. It's going to have its impact. White collared workers are not prepared for the earth shakes that are already happening. And I am genuinely afraid for some people. And we're going to face a nexus point as a society of some very large decisions that I don't think that we'll be able to truly handle that are going to require us to, to put on a, a totally different worldview. When, you know, if, if, if the, you know, not if we, when AI is able to do 3/4 of the jobs, what happens to the 3/4 of the humans? It's going to come. We'll have to deal with it. [00:43:01] Speaker B: And you brought up the legal industry. And so if you think about creating legal briefs and pulling data and what they would use like LexisNexis to pull case history, it's great if it's all correct. And so that's the thing. I mean even putting together together proposals that would take hours, maybe five, six hours sometimes now it takes a couple hours. But you still have to spend the time to go back through everything and re verify. It's like create and verify and then you got to verify it again. So there's pieces of that. But what you want to see is that as those jobs go away, we, we want to go into something else. And so, you know, political sides aside, bringing more jobs back, manufacturing, operating some of these plants, a lot of this will be done by robots, but you're still going to have to have people that run them. So maybe some of this is opening up the door to new opportunities. But there are always going to be a side of employment that over time with technology, as it improves, goes away. That's just gonna happen. And so we've got to figure out what the next thing is that comes after it. Because somebody does have to run the robots, right? [00:44:19] Speaker A: Yes. Otherwise the robots run the robots and then we get our T1000. [00:44:25] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. [00:44:29] Speaker A: So give a shout out to your business where people can find you some, anything new you guys are coming up with or that you think people should be aware of in the next couple months as we kind of wrap this up. [00:44:43] Speaker B: Yeah, so our company is just frontline source group and our website, we made it really difficult so it's just FrontlineSourceGroup.com to find us to visit the website. LinkedIn, our company page on LinkedIn is probably the best place that I really recommend people follow get connected to because it will give you information. Pretty much everything on there. It's on the website also. But we post everything on a regular basis on there. We do a lot of white papers, updates, information, try to guide, educate, you know, point people in the right direction of what's going on and what's taking place. We really right now are. It's funny because the technology piece with launching the last revival of our AI recruiter, there's a couple snafus that are still going on. We're not 100% comfortable with where that's at. So for us it's more about the automation piece. It's more about trying to educate people on some basics. And that really goes back to the communication, responding, emailing, understanding that, you know, this, this is a tough time right now in the country from hiring. You know, we heard just recently that numbers are fake, that that's nothing new. I mean, we've been saying that for 10 years, 20 years, but there's a lot to be said about what's taking place and there are companies still hiring. And what I like to point out is that unemployment is 4.5% and if true, unemployment is like six and a half. Call it. There's still 93% working in this country. And instead of us dwelling on this little negative, let's dwell on the fact that we still have a lot of people working and there's plenty of opportunity out there. There are a lot of positions and work. If you really want to go to work, you can do it. But I will tell you there are a lot of attitudes of people out there that companies don't want to hire. And if you really want to be hired, you need to get your head in the right space and understand that the companies and employers are in charge again. You know, a couple years ago we went through what was called the great Resignation where people jumped on the bandwagon and were able to get 10 to 25% pay increases. It's not happening. And so those days are gone. Hope you enjoyed it. They're not coming back for a while, but the employer is in charge and so understanding, working with them. You know, we're back into a work in office the remote thing is kind of old news. I do have an opinion it's going to be back, but don't expect to find it back next year. It's going to take a few years. They need to get out of their leases, and once they get out of the leases, you'll start seeing a change happen. I think it's five years out, but it's not going to be the way it was during COVID And by the way, we made it through Covid, and even at the worst time of COVID 85% were working. So we can get through this all together, but it's about networking, communicating, getting out there. Keep learning. Someone the other day told me they weren't on LinkedIn and I said, well, how do you learn things? And they said, well, you know, Reddit. And I went, okay. No, okay. We still have to network. You still have to be with your peers. You have to learn things. So don't be afraid to jump out there and try something new. Love it. [00:48:17] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time, Bill. I'll have the information in the show notes if anybody wants to connect and find more information and we'll see you around. [00:48:28] Speaker B: Thanks, Jeremy.