SmartRank: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Keith Hulen

Action's Antidotes

Many companies find themselves inundated with over 100 applicants for a single job vacancy, often resorting to traditional job interviews to make their hiring decisions. However, this process can be time-consuming and inefficient, leading to a significant investment of resources for just one hire. How can we address this challenge and ensure that we secure the best talent? Is there a solution that streamlines the hiring process and improves the quality of hires? In this episode, join us as we sit down with Keith Hulen, the Founder and CEO of SmartRank. Keith brings his extensive experience as a Hiring Manager spanning over two decades to the table, and he's here to discuss an exciting and groundbreaking solution for talent acquisition and optimizing employee-to-employer connections. SmartRank, the AI system Keith developed, revolutionizes the hiring process by not only saving valuable time and effort but also ensuring the hiring of the top talents for your business. Tune in to discover how SmartRank leverages and predicts top talent for your business success. --- Listen to the podcast here: SmartRank: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Keith Hulen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’m going to talk to you about something that’s near and dear to me because I think it causes a lot of suffering in this world, and that is this inefficient daunting process by which we go about finding jobs or finding employees, basically connecting an employer to an employee. This kind of really drawn-out process where people are submitting so many cover letters, so many resumes, reading so much, is what keeps a lot of people fearfully clinging to jobs that are making them miserable and a lot of business owners trying to hang on to employees that are just simply not working out and I personally think that we’d be in a much better state if we were to find a more effective way to connect these people so that if something isn’t working out, if someone is miserable or if someone’s not getting the job done, we can much more easily move on without this fear of what comes next and how much work am I going to have to put into what’s coming next. And that’s one of the core motivations for my guest today, Keith Hulen. Keith’s business is called SmartRank, more effective way in which to kind of sort through all the resumes, cover letters, or whatever employment materials that we get when we put out a job posting. --- Keith, welcome to the program. Yeah, thanks, Stephen. Glad to be here. Glad to have you here. S, Keith, first of all, let’s start by talking about your story. What motivated you to start SmartRank? What were you observing in your field that you had been in for a couple decades before that? Yeah, so I’ve been a hiring manager for over 20 years, and me along with all of my peers over the last 20 years have all felt the same way about the hiring process, which is that it was fairly dysfunctional and it needed some sort of improvement. The hiring process, as a hiring manager, from just my perspective, hadn’t changed in 20 years. It didn’t matter if I was at a global 500 company or a startup, it didn’t matter if I was dealing with an internal or an external recruiting team, the process, the tools, everything was almost identical. I mean, very small nuanced little changes between each one of those but, for the most part, everything was very, very similar and it was very frustrating. And so when I set off to want to start my own company, I knew that this was an area that I really wanted to explore further. What we ended up doing was not coming in with any preconceived ideas. I knew what our problems were from a hiring manager standpoint, I had spent a lot of time hearing from my friends and colleagues and peers about their experiences and I knew what mine were, but what I really wanted to do was understand more from th...