Renata (00:53)
When Garrett Rice left his job at Apple, where he had stayed for over 20 years, he realized that job search was hard work. And he also noticed that things that he knew from Apple, in terms of fixing up users’ experience and fixing up workflow issues, that he could apply those to job search and help job seekers like you.
So in this conversation with Garrett, we discuss how artificial intelligence and technology and machine learning are now a huge part of job search, job application, and recruitment and selection. And we also discuss what are the implications of that for your experience as a job seeker and also for your job in the future.
I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. I had a wonderful time talking to Garrett about this. It’s easy listening. He talks really fluently about an area where he’s an expert in, and I hope that you will enjoy listening to this episode. If you want to know more about…
the way that I work with my clients and the way that Garrett’s platform helps job seekers. There will be links for you in the episode show notes. So after listening, go to the episode show notes. If you’re interested in this sort of content, don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast, the Job Hunting Podcast, and also invest in it a little bit more and subscribe to the newsletter that I sent every week with subscribers only.
content. So there will be a link for you to subscribe in the show notes as well. Have fun!
Renata (02:40)
I saw that you worked for a long time at Apple and then you left. I was wondering if there was any hard lesson that you learned about job searching that made you want to help job seekers?
Garrett Rice (02:44)
That’s right.
Yes. So I left Apple during the pandemic. Actually, you know what? Hold on one second. My dog has his collar on and his rattling as he itches himself. I’m going to take that off so he can.
Renata (03:00)
That’s a very short answer. I want more.
That’s okay. It’s, don’t mind background noise. I don’t think the listeners are more interested in what you were about to say.
Garrett Rice (03:23)
Oh, okay. All right.
So the answer to your question is yes. So I left Apple in 2019 after many, many years there and doing a lot of different things. And I did it because I felt like I’d done what I could do there and wanted to move on. And I had the idea of taking a year off and going and making, I’d made a movie a long time ago. And so I took the time off because I was going to make a TV pilot that I’d been working on. And
Renata (03:29)
Okay.
Garrett Rice (03:54)
unfortunately the timing coincided with, this small little pandemic and just absolutely destroyed those plans. and so I went back to work and work for a couple of years as an executive at a midsize company. And, and then I left there cause it wasn’t a great match. wasn’t enjoying it. And, I started looking really for the first time in my career, seriously for a new job. And you know, the thing that.
that you learn as a product manager at Apple is focus on the user and the problems that they have and try and take those problems away. And there are so many problems in the job seeking market, you know, for a job seeker. It’s, it is a, you know, a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma surrounded by really crappy bureaucracies. And, um, and so I met my
partner, Philippe Caillou, we both signed up for the same career coach because I was like, don’t even know what a job search looks like. so actually that career coach turned out to be our third partner, Horst Govan. so Philippe, know, and Horst and I were just aghast at what was available to job seekers in terms of tools to help them. Because when we look at it, the job search, you know, is a workflow process.
You know, it’s more than that, but at the core of it, the work that you have to do on a daily basis to search for a job is a workflow process. And there’s, really was nothing out there to manage it. Even the big boys with all their advertisements for job seekers, they’re really focused on the hiring companies and recruiters. And, you know, most of what’s available for job seekers is upload your resume and, you know, get lost into an ATS system and we’ll never call you back. and so.
we started building a platform to manage all the different steps of the job hunt in one place. Cause when we talked to job seekers, the first thing we noticed is every one of them was building their own spreadsheets to track all the jobs they applied to. know, CRM is a, you know, that’s a solved problem in the tech business, right? You know, people track in Salesforce, they track, you know, leads and lead generation and there’s, you know, there’s
platforms to do all of that. And there wasn’t one for the job seeker, even on platforms like LinkedIn. So, you know, we started from that concept. Well, let’s, let’s build a tracker so that everything that they do is in one place. And, and as we started to explore this, of course we were, we were very excited about AI and the recognition that this was going to change everything. And it seemed like a natural technological fit for solving the problem that jock job seekers have because.
Well, many of the problems. so, you know, in addition to tracking the jobs that people are pursuing, you know, we, have a jobs database that we, that we search against and we use AI to do it. So, you know, another pain point that we noticed is that for most of the job seeking sites, you upload your resume. And then the next thing they ask you is to copy pieces of your resume into a profile, which is insane. They already have your resume. Why are you doing that?
And so, you with us, you upload your resume, we build you the profile automatically and you’re in and we take your resume. And the third thing that we noticed that was a pain point is most of the job seeking sites are keyword based. And so that’s a very inefficient way to look holistically for a job because different companies have different names for the same roles.
you may mistype or you don’t get it exactly right. And keyword searching, unfortunately is binary. If you don’t get it right, it’s not there. So we didn’t like that. And plus it gives you no sense of whether you’re a good match for the job. And so, you know, we built a platform where we use AI to read your resume and then compare it against millions of jobs to find the ones that you’re qualified for and you have a good shot at. And we give you a rating score and that’s the most popular part of our platform right now.
is our job match score. And so we look at a job and by the way, you can get the jobs from us, but you can also bring jobs in from other platforms like LinkedIn. We have a plugin to do that. So wherever you’re hunting to find opportunities, you can bring them to us for tracking and we’ll do the match score for you to show where you match, where you don’t match. And that report is very detailed. You know, for example, it might say, you know, you’re really great with the skills, but you know, they are phrasing this job that you’re pursuing.
as having a specific knowledge base around some topic and that’s not on your resume. And maybe you know it, but it’s not on your resume. Now you know to add it back, you know, and, know, and looking, looking at the article, you know, that you recently posted, you know, where, know, it’s about telling your story, right? And the first step of telling your story is getting that opportunity, which means, you know, you have to convey what they’re looking for. So they’ll talk to you and you know, the ATS system.
Renata (08:50)
Thanks, guys.
Garrett Rice (09:10)
You know, they, they, they reject, you know, really fast unless you have that match. so, so our job match system brings you jobs that you’re qualified for, tells you where you match and where you don’t match. Then we use AI to help you customize your resume so that it truly does match and our cover letter that, you know, is apropos to the opportunity. We do all of that. We provide research tools for the jobs you’re pursuing. What’s the company like? What’s the latest news?
Renata (09:32)
Mm-hmm.
Garrett Rice (09:38)
all of that as part of our platform. And then the next problem, you know, that we heard, well, by the way, you know, custom resumes is essential at this point. Right. And so we, we addressed that problem. That was another one. And then the biggest one. And you, know, you, you brought it up, you know, networking, you know, in your newsletters, networking, networking, networking, and people are like, great. Yes. And then they go home and cry because there’s, there’s no work process for networking. just like reach out to people, you know,
that are going to think that I’m mooching on them and try and ask them for something. And so we’ve tried to address that as well. And what we do is we take the job that you’re interested in and for every single job opportunity that you identify, we will try and identify the five to seven people in that organization that you’re pursuing that are the hiring manager, people on the team, the recruiter, the, you know, the person above or below.
Renata (10:14)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (10:35)
So you have a lot of context to reach out and we draft those messages and that may not be the message you go with, but AI is great for this. It solves the blank page problem. So you don’t have to sit there. Like I used to do this when I, when I was doing this, I started to apply for jobs and I would literally spend half a day staring at my word processor. Like, what should I say? What should I say in this cover letter? What should I say in this outreach message? You know, and, and when you have AI.
Renata (11:01)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (11:04)
prompt and assist you. know, our AI, we chat, could do this on chat GPT. What we’ve done is we’ve pre-built what are some fairly complicated prompts for our users around the job search so that, you know, they don’t even need to prompt. It’s just the, the, the, you know, the cover letter or the custom resume or the outreach message to networking contacts is all there for you in that first draft form. And you might tinker with it or change it, but
Renata (11:06)
Mm-hmm.
Garrett Rice (11:33)
that takes much less time than, you know, starting from scratch. And, and so that’s another problem that we solve. we also solve the problem of preparing for interviews. Now it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t practice interviewing any job seekers should, but we provide a very detailed two to three page report on everything that you should know in advance of your interview, the types of questions you’re probably going to get the type of questions you can ask them who’s likely to interview you.
Renata (11:37)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (12:02)
And, and so we, we provide that as well. And then on top of that notes and to do so that we can help them or, you know, the job seeker remember what’s next to take notes. If they did talk to somebody so that it’s all in one place, you don’t have to go anywhere else. And, know, and that’s because yet another problem in the job search, the average job seeker today uses 16 different tools for their job search. That’s not, that’s not sustainable. That’s not manageable. That’s not.
efficient or effective. so, you know, so it really came down and I rambled a lot, but it really came down in answering your question that, you know, Apple teaches you to dive in on the problem and really understand the true pain points of the user. And Apple tries to take those away, you know, not that help a little bit, but really try and take them away to really move you forward. And, and that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do with callings.ai.
Renata (12:38)
See you
Yeah.
I have so many questions for you, but coming back to that Apple philosophy and ethos, it’s really interesting. I will never forget the day I got my first iPhone. I have one here right now. I the needs updated. I was in Chicago and I was on a train from Northwestern down to Chicago’s, know, commercial district.
and I was looking at the Google Maps and I was moving, you know, and I felt like I was in like a science fiction movie. This was 2007, 2008. And I’m like, oh my God, this is the future. I didn’t know I needed this. And now I cannot live without Google Maps always, right? The thing that I am unsure about what you’re proposing,
Garrett Rice (13:33)
Yeah, yeah.
Renata (13:48)
is what I call the optimism bias in the job seeker is the fact that the job seeker never believes that they will have a problem finding a job. They think that they will have a job in two months and they might not be prepared to invest to do what you’re saying, which is sign up for this made basically like a CRM for job seekers platform. Have you encountered that people that think that they can.
get a job very quickly. I get that all the time. People sign up for my podcast. They may text me and say they love it. And I say, well, you if you need more support, have a look at my services. And then eight months later, they come back. I don’t have a job. Yeah.
Garrett Rice (14:32)
Well, I think that’s that’s that’s the key thing or nada they eventually understand Yeah,
and you know, it’s it’s so painful right I think we all fall into that trap Right when we face something daunting, you know, we we want to believe that it’ll be over quickly and by the way mean, you know doing a startup is the same way, you know, Philippe and I thought we’d be you know billionaires by now and you know, lo and behold There’s a lot of work to do to get
Renata (14:46)
Mm.
Garrett Rice (15:01)
So I think it’s understandable. We believe that they’ll eventually understand that. The hard truth is that, and these statistics are old, and I think that the market has changed dramatically in the last five years. I’m interested in your thoughts on that, but it seems to me that the job market is fundamentally different now after Zoom and COVID and the pandemic and remote and hybrid work.
And so with all of those changes, think…
the average job seeker back then would take five months to get a job.
And we’re seeing that that that probably is a low number now for any job seeker. And then for the job seekers that we attract most, which is white collar workers, that number is five months to a year with, with some people, you know, on year two. And, know, and I don’t want to be the bearer of that dark information. You know, I, I hope that everybody gets the job in the two months or even a month or immediately. But, but I think as a job seeker,
You eventually learn that, you know, that it’s a work process and you have to, it’s going to take time. And, especially the more senior you are, right? Because there’s less chairs in that musical chair game. If you’re senior and you’re pursuing a very rare commodity. and so, you know, we’ll, we’ll see, but you know, what we just try and do is lay out the availability of it. If you’re just looking quickly and you feel like you’re going to move quickly, you can just drop your resume and we’ll bring you job matches and you can go and apply to.
Renata (16:26)
Yeah.
Mm.
Garrett Rice (16:45)
and, know, and that part of our product is free. So, you know, as a job seeker who’s getting started and doesn’t feel like they need the full boat of stuff that we provide, they can use it for free as long as they want just to look at jobs and track jobs. if they want to use the AI stuff, then, then they can subscribe to our service. And, but I think I, I like how you articulated as a, you know, job seeker optimism and you have to have that because it’s, it’s one of the.
Renata (17:04)
Yeah.
Yes.
Garrett Rice (17:14)
Probably one of the top five or six most painful things that a person goes through in life.
Renata (17:19)
Yeah. And if you think about, you know, my analogy with the iPhone and what happens in my business, you know, as a career coach is that people come to me because they need a resume. People go to the shops because they need a phone. Right. What they don’t know, what they didn’t know back in 2008 is in addition to a phone, they have a camera, they have a map, they have social platforms. So I guess when they come to me and ask for a resume.
It’s so hard, it’s impossible for a career coach to create a resume. And I know that there are people out there that that’s all they do. They design resumes and they give it back to you. You are their client. They want you to be happy. Whereas the resume is not for you. The resume is for the employer. So in order for that to happen, there’s just so many other, you know,
variables that get to exist and to be accounted for in order for that resume to perform and get you a job. So a lot of people come to me with those beautiful resumes. That means absolutely nothing for an ATS system for the job that they’re applying for. So that educational. Yeah.
Garrett Rice (18:38)
It actually might even make it worse for an auto. mean,
one of the things we do when we import somebody’s resume is we remove the formatting and make it a straight text resume. And we do that for a very specific reason, which is ATS systems scrape your resume, the beautiful charts and tables and, you know, in purple with the script. All of that is, you know, this is important for you job seekers out there.
Renata (18:44)
yeah, it makes it worse.
Exactly. Yeah.
Garrett, I’m so happy you’re
Garrett Rice (19:06)
as pretty as your resume
is, the only thing that the hiring manager for most large companies see is your resume scraped into text and oftentimes not even formatted. so, so the, you know, we, we, we create custom resumes for each job that are just text-based for that reason. And we’ve, we’ve gotten complaints. People were like, I want it to be, you know, the picture of the airplane subtly in the background. And you’re like, you know,
Renata (19:33)
No? Garrett, I’m so glad you brought the purple, not me, because every time I mention purple, one of my clients will say, you were talking about my resume. And I’m like, no, there’s a lot of purple out there in resume making. I don’t know why. All right.
Garrett Rice (19:34)
That doesn’t make it through. So you bring up a great point.
To our customers out there, we’re not talking about you behind your back. There’s a lot of people with purple resumes.
Renata (19:56)
No, no, Well,
but I’m now going to talk about a conversation I had last night. So this is my coaching week. coach from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at night. People from all over the world. And I was with a client yesterday. And and this is the second thing that from what you explained about your platform, I wanted to raise with you is the fact that a lot of people come out of long term employment.
not at Apple where you are aware of all the trends in technologies, you know, they might be working in manufacturing or infrastructure or consulting and they have never used AI. And what I was explaining to this new client is this, is that by using Chat2BT to do your job search, you are going to be learning how AI works because you haven’t been exposed to that.
You know, I’m going to send you the prompts that I’ve been using and I want you to replicate them. I want you to learn. Is there a risk here of this platform being so good that you take away that agency and that professional development for them? Because I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to talk to AI.
Garrett Rice (21:19)
Yeah, I think your recommendation is brilliant. mean, people do need to. My my partner says it best. AI is just a new tool. It’s no different than the wheel or fire or the smartphone or the Internet. The impact is probably going to be as big as any of those, to be fair, over the next coming years. And the evidence suggests that there’s a ton of statistics that, you know,
are really scary in that regard. So I think your recommendation to your clients is really great, which is you’ve got to go and learn AI. I don’t know if we would take away from that because if you sign up for ChatGPT or any of these services, there’s a million things you’re going to use it for. I use it every day and I use it for everything. How do I take care of my dog or my…
be a better parent to my kids, to how do I solve this technical problem with my lawnmower, to what’s going on in politics. It’s so widespread and so good as an accelerant to looking into concepts and articulating concepts that I think there’s so many opportunities.
It isn’t that hard and it’s not scary once you start to use it, but I think you’re right. They have to start. And, you know, and the first step is just to type in questions and then eventually you start to understand what a prompt is, which is simply a more detailed question with a lot of parameters around it, you know? and, so I think everybody should do that. Currently we use AI for very specific, you know, ways to accelerate the job.
process. Certainly anybody could, for example, type, drop their resume in and, and a job post and say, you know, what, what should I change about it? Where, what we bring to the table is, you know, we’ve studied it a lot and we’ve really worked on those prompts so that, you know, we get a really great result. The downside of that is the person doesn’t learn how to do it for themselves. The way AI is going though, there’s
You know, increasingly AI is moving to things like agents and, sort of the next level on top of large language models. And I think there’s going be a lot of opportunities for people to, to dive into AI. And so I don’t know that we’re taking anything away from them learning that, but it’s an interesting, interesting question.
Renata (23:48)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So the other thing is the human connection in the recruitment process. I interviewed Dan Fantasia, who is a recruiter in the US working mostly with sales professionals. And I think also because of his expertise in working with sales, sales is still, you know, very much human based, I suppose, if it’s not e-commerce.
And he was adamant that we need human recruiters recruiting, especially because we’re talking about sales. In your platform, when does the human connection commences or if there is any or can they be hired without any human connection? I’ll give you an example. Before the pandemic in 2018, sorry, 17.
I, we were observing this major bank in Australia that was hiring up to 2000 people every year. To be fair, they were young graduates and entry level roles in banking. 2000 people without a single human interaction. It was all in, in the results were actually amazing. They, the retention was higher. they were happy. Yes.
Garrett Rice (25:25)
Really?
Renata (25:27)
And not only it was so transformative and I wonder what has happened because I left the university environment and I stopped following what was going on with this specific bank, but they weren’t even asking for a degree or where did you graduate? Because those were perceived as being buyers. Right? So if you graduate from an Ivy league university or the equivalent here in Australia, or if you
graduated from the same university as your manager, know, could that be a bias? So they remove that and then they went a step further and said, well, if they answer these questions and they record this video and the narrative and the language and the cognitive abilities or all the psychometric or the assessments that they did are fine, we don’t care if they’ve done their university degrees or not. So
We’re not even going to ask that. So I thought that that was really interesting and there were no interviews. It was just, that was just it.
Garrett Rice (26:31)
Yeah.
Well, if it works, it works. you know, we, it’s going to go that, I mean, it’s already going that way, you know? So, you know, there, there are companies that are, that are, like micro one, for example, that has built a platform for doing AI driven interviews and it’s pretty slick. You know, they did, they’ve done a great job.
Renata (26:36)
What do you think in terms of your platform?
Garrett Rice (26:55)
You know, certainly there’s, there’s a lot of technology on the recruiter hiring side around using AI to identify candidates, try and evaluate candidates.
I guess I’m mixed though because…
human beings are pretty good at reading human beings, not always, but, you know, and there’s certainly probably limits to analyzing data to evaluate a human being. You know, can’t pick up on their sense of humor or, you know, what they’re clever about or anything like that, just based on analyzing, you know, the data of their answers.
But I imagine it’s going to be a lot more of a team process with AI and technology and hiring and recruiting going together. And there are certain types of jobs, I think, where interviewing is probably not as essential. I think the higher up you move, think interviewing has to be essential because you’re not hiring those people to be able to turn a crank or to do something.
simple or repetitive or that can be measured, you’re hiring them for their wisdom and their decision-making. And I don’t think anybody’s done a great job of identifying in advance how to really rate somebody on that, because it’s contextual, right? It’s based on what problem you’re trying to work on and who you’re working with at the moment in time. you see famous, talented, successful people fail.
in similar roles when they switch. It’s really, it’s a fascinating thing. So, I don’t know, I hope that the human element remains. We believe it should. For example, in addition to all the tools, AI-driven tools and SaaS-based tools that we provide, we provide basic level, once a month coaching webinars with our co-founder Horst Govan.
just to basically give them a sense of what the job search entails and things to remember. And we save those and those are in a library. Now, we don’t think that that’s a replacement for hiring a real career coach or somebody to help, for example, with the resume if they don’t have one to begin with. We’ve not built a from scratch resume tool. For our customers, you have to start with the resume for us to really work well.
Renata (29:31)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (29:33)
I don’t know how AI would replace that capability. there’s a big part of that too that AI is going to really struggle with, which is we mentioned before that being on a job search could be one of the top five or six most stressful and painful things you go through in life. And you have to talk to another human being about that part of it. I think that plays a role as well. So I don’t know.
Renata (29:51)
yes, absolutely.
Mm.
Garrett Rice (30:02)
I’m not ready to
believe from what I’ve seen with AI that it’s gonna replace everything in our world. It’s just gonna change it.
Renata (30:09)
Yeah.
Tell me about video. In your platform, are you incorporating video? A few months ago, I interviewed a startup founder here in Australia and their platform is video based. And that’s very controversial. There are lots of different versions of video interviewing. Some of them, you may know this,
have incorporated reading people’s body language and facial features and analyzing that. And that’s quite controversial. And I don’t think it’s allowed here in Australia, but I don’t think that it’s also, it’s possible for it to be controlled. mean, people could be applying for jobs overseas from Australia, for example, and they would be using those types of video interviewing.
And what I think is really interesting is here in Melbourne, there is one executive search firm that’s quite well known. Many of my clients use this firm because they have so many good jobs. And the first thing you have to do is send them a three minute video. And that’s for C-level roles. And that just is amazing because my clients are not ready for that.
Young people are the Generation X clients applying for CEO roles. They do not want to do a three minute video to begin with. They might be willing to do it maybe later on, it’s that straight camera is very awkward at that senior level.
Garrett Rice (31:54)
get it. Yeah, and I mean, I have a big background in video.
Renata (31:55)
Mm.
Garrett Rice (32:02)
The part of the job search process that we currently manage with our platform, we don’t manage the interview process, right? We wanna get people to the point of an interview and there are other technology companies that are dealing with that. That being said, we have big plans to help people do a better job of telling their story and video will play a role in that. And I’ll have to come back on to tell you about that once we’re further along, but we…
Renata (32:16)
Got it.
No.
Okay.
Garrett Rice (32:32)
We’ve got some exciting stuff that we’re working on to help people do a better job of promoting themselves. And so I think you have to do it.
The way our current system is set up is hopefully that’s an opportunity you get to make by being considered for a job that we help you get in line for. Right now our platform is focused mostly on that, whatever the first 150 yards of the job search, is what is it that you want to do and be in your next role? We have tools to help people research and explore that.
helping them find opportunities, helping them apply to those opportunities successfully and helping them prepare for that interview opportunity. And then I think you’re going to see some of these other technology plays come in where they’re going to interview to an AI, they’re going to interview, be recorded by an AI. I think that’s going to happen. And eventually I think that’s going to be a central part of it. I mean, we’re all spending our lives on Zoom right now.
So it’s, it’s already, you it’s already happened, right? You know, most of the interviews that when I talk to people, they don’t go to downtown to an interview at an office building anymore. Almost all of the interviews people take if they are quote unquote live interviews are via zoom or teams or any of the other options out there. And so, you know, so you’re already on interview already on video and we’re all starting to, starting to learn how to do that.
You know, before you and I got started today, I had to spend five minutes figuring out this microphone. So, uh, I think you’re right. It’s coming. You know, it’s already, I mean, it’s already here at some level and it’s only going to get, it’s only going to get more. And it’ll be interesting to see if AI does a good job of reading people’s facial expressions. You know, it’s a little scary because I think there’s a lot of micro anxieties going on when somebody’s in middle of a job interview that might.
Renata (34:19)
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
Garrett Rice (34:43)
be misinterpreted by an AI, if they didn’t train it in the right situation. But it’s inevitable. I agree with you.
Renata (34:47)
Mm.
Yeah.
And by the way,
if you still have friends at Apple, please tell them to fix Teams because it’s very hard to do an interview with a Mac computer in Teams. And I can elaborate if you want to. Very hard.
Garrett Rice (35:04)
Okay.
I and it’s not Microsoft.
It’s it’s Apple you feel.
Renata (35:13)
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s something to do with the ability to do a presentation. if I have a client that’s more senior in the interview is a presentation. So you have slides and you have to do a slide deck that you need to showcase. Once you open the slide deck to share, you lose the faces of the people. I don’t know, that’s what my clients tell me. I don’t have a Mac.
You lose people’s images and you can’t see the notes. You have to opt for one thing or the other. mean, it’s important for them to see their notes. Anyway, and I’m like, just buy another monitor. I’m still, it doesn’t work. I had a couple. Yeah. Okay. All right.
Garrett Rice (35:54)
I haven’t run into that problem, but I believe you. I believe you. I mean, it’s really
interesting to me every meeting that we have right now on any of these platforms, the first five minutes, like in the old days, right? The first five minutes was waiting for people to cross campus to get into the meeting room so you could start your meeting or for people to finish talking about their weekend. Now the first five to 10 minutes of every
Renata (36:06)
No.
Yes.
Garrett Rice (36:23)
is people tinkering with their camera and their microphone and getting their background right. so I guess things change, but they don’t change.
Renata (36:30)
Absolutely. I feel so bad sometimes. Yeah, I feel so
bad as a coach. Sometimes I’m two minutes late because Zoom is doing something weird and I apologize. And I remember, you know, my coach in real life, 10 years ago being, I don’t know, 20 minutes late because of traffic. And that was just, we just lost our patience now. Everything has to be so timed.
Now let’s move forward. Talking about things changing fast, things are changing so fast. And I’d love to get your predictions for 2030. We’re in 2025. And I feel like we are millions of years ahead of where we were in 2020 when it comes to technology and AI and what’s going on. And if we fast forward another five years,
What is your prediction for white collar workers? Where will we be? And people are feeling really anxious about their jobs still existing. know, many professionals feel that if you’re working with process improvement or project management, or if you’re a dietician or you know what I mean? Those are things that AI can optimize. Can you…
identify where we’re going with work in the future.
Garrett Rice (38:01)
Yeah. And it’s always, it’s always tough to predict the future. I think to all the people who wrote books, you know, like in the 1980s and nineties about where the computer industry went, you know, like Bill Gates had just finished shipping his book about the future of computing in like 1994. And then the, and the internet came out and he had never even mentioned it. And, know, and obviously the internet was a
Renata (38:05)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (38:23)
gigantic change in the computer industry and he didn’t see it. know, nobody was closer to the front lines of the computer industry than Bill Gates. it’s a tough, predictions are a tough job, but I’ll throw a few statistics at you. Last year, 57 % of the internet content was generated by AI. So when you’re surfing around on the internet and reading stuff,
Renata (38:36)
Let’s say something really controversial.
Garrett Rice (38:52)
More than half of it was already AI generated or touched. This year in 2025, the prediction from Forbes, I believe is that it’ll be 90%. And so one prediction I’m very confident of making, and I’ve written articles about it, is that we are going to be deluged by a tsunami of AI driven content. And it will be printed content, video content, audio content.
Any type of media that we know will increasingly and almost entirely be touched by AI in the future. That’s job posts, that’s resumes, that’s anything, anybody in any of those industries. This is already happening. This is not, it’s barely even a prediction. It’s more like, this is happening right now and the conclusion of it will be that.
it’ll be increasingly difficult to hear human voices in the future. which is a little nerve wracking for me because one of the things that human beings do very well is they take in what’s happening and they create new concepts around where we should go to address that issue. AI is not very good at that. So, you know, when the car came out, you know, human beings being forward and looking, we’re able to predict and.
and build a world in which cars were at the center point of transportation. AI tends to be more backward looking and it doesn’t necessarily make those intuitive leaps for where we should go. so that worries me, right? Because if humans have a more difficult time being heard and at the same time, they’re the real solution to potentially upcoming problems, then
You know, that’s, that’s, that’s a, that’s a concern. so my optimistic side says that, that we’re going to increasingly value human beings who we know are wise and have, you know, who, who, who can articulate things in the right way. but they’re going to have to stick out against a, you know, a tsunami of, of AI generated content, which will all be perfectly, have perfect allocation and spelling and everything else. But.
so that’s one thing that the other prediction that I made, which is already coming true is that once AI takes over, we’ve got it. We’ve got a defiling challenge. AI is trained on data. And so if 90 % of all the content generated in our world is made by AI, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the AI companies to exclude AI data from AI training.
And if you train AI on AI data, it has a mad cow type of reaction in which, you know, gets AI referencing AI, it’s called the self-referential death spiral. And AI goes crazy when it starts to reference itself in the same way that if, you know, if cows eat cow brains, they get mad cow disease. And so that’s, you know, that’s a concern.
Renata (42:01)
Right.
Garrett Rice (42:15)
because it may mean that AI will be less reliable going forward unless the AI industry really addresses this issue. The third thing I think that I would predict is people cannot bond with an AI very much. They can’t look an AI in the eyes and get feedback or help or support.
Renata (42:15)
Mm.
Garrett Rice (42:43)
They can’t laugh or joke with AI interactively. I mean, you can ask it to tell you a joke, but you know, what it isn’t going to do, is, you know, is have that human connection and people crave that. In fact, even before AI came out, you know, everybody’s staring at their black screens, you know, everywhere they go, it’s already causing a loneliness epidemic and that type of thing. And so I believe as an optimist that
that increasingly people are going to start seeking out human interactions and finding more value in those things. Because I think increasingly as AI takes over the media, we’re gonna get increasingly bored of what’s being injected into our brains via multimedia. It makes us unhappy, it makes us angry, it doesn’t make us happy or loving or enjoy it.
Renata (43:19)
Hmm.
Garrett Rice (43:40)
You know, we’re already seeing the statistics on that. You know, people get too immersed in social media or on their platforms are definitively more unhappy than people that don’t, you know, and, you know, people that go out, plant a flower in their backyard, hang out with their, you know, their significant other there. They’re the people that have identified and found happiness and contentment. So, so those are, you know, sort of three broad things on the technology side, you know, to get more specific.
AI is going to pick up a lot of the things that people do. It’s just, it’s, it’s already happening, you know, and then people are already planning for it. The reason that we have the so-called white collar recession right now, I think is because most of the hiring people, and this is, this is, uh, this is born out by, uh, by, uh, surveys. Most of the hiring managers and people responsible for hiring are predicting that they’re going to need less people and they’re planning to not hire as many people. 54 % of hiring managers.
are assuming AI will take jobs and they’re either planning to not hire as many people or to let people go. And so that’s going to be tougher for a job seeker out there. Again, the optimistic upside is AI is a huge accelerant to human capability. We’re seeing that with our startup. It’s amazing the things that we can use internally with AI to do work that originally you had a team of three people to do.
Renata (44:52)
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (45:10)
And as a result, individuals are going to be more empowered than ever to make their dreams a reality, at least technically with AI. know, so if you want to write a screenplay and, you know, and you’ve got some good ideas, you can upload that screenplay into chat. GPT, ask for feedback, work collaboratively and iteratively with it to make your screenplay better. the third act isn’t right. What do you recommend by gosh, it does that.
And I’ve used it this way and it’s really, and so I view it that way as an accelerant. Steve Jobs once said the computer is a bicycle for the mind. An AI is a four wheel drive vehicle with a thousand horsepower for the mind. It really can help you move forward. If you want to, for example, build a technology platform, you could use AI at this point. you can prompt exactly what you’re looking for,
and you’re willing to spend enough time, it will even write the code for you. So, you know, that’s going to open up barriers that historically have been blocked. You know, you used to have to have an engineering team if you wanted to make an idea into reality and technology. Now you just need the idea in these AI tools and you can get there. And so, I rambled a lot there, but, know, I think those are the concerns and those are, you know, that’s, those are the opportunities I see. And by the way, we’re, you know, we’re living that.
Renata (46:31)
It’s great.
Yeah.
Garrett Rice (46:38)
You know, we’re much more productive as our little startup is using AI to be competitive.
Renata (46:39)
Yeah.
Absolutely. Now I really like all the ideas that you proposed and I think a lot of listeners who are still on the fence or maybe not using AIs to its full capability to help them with their lives and their job search. They might sort of get some ideas from what you just said. I will put a link below to your company’s website so that people can go check out the platform. Is it ready for use?
Garrett Rice (47:11)
Platform is ready for use today. callings.ai. And I’m going to look up a coupon here or a URL that they can use. think, let me just see if I
Renata (47:13)
Yeah
Okay.
Send it to
me and I’ll add it to the blog post so that people can use the coupon. That would be great. Okay.
Garrett Rice (47:33)
Okay. I believe it is callings.ai slash,
um, uh, slash, uh, job hunting, I believe for your podcast, but I will confirm that. And, uh, for those that come in, we’ll, we’ll give you, uh, you know, we’ll give you a coupon for, for extra time on the platform. And, uh, we’d love to, if you’re looking for a job, we can help you come try it out. It doesn’t cost anything.
Renata (47:45)
Okay. Okay. Well, good. Okay.
Garrett Rice (48:01)
We’ll help you find jobs and track jobs, all that for free. And then the more advanced features at a reasonable rate of about 30 bucks a month.
Renata (48:09)
And Garrett, do
you think it works well for people overseas or are we talking about our American listeners?
Garrett Rice (48:15)
We have users overseas. We’ve been focused on the U S market for the obvious reason that we’re here. And, know, we got to pick, we got to pick one to focus on to start, but, for, for major cities overseas, works quite well. where, where we need to do work is if you’re, if you’re not in a major city in a, you know, in Europe or, you know, Oceania, then, you know, we may not have the job coverage yet for you, but.
Renata (48:30)
Okay, good.
Garrett Rice (48:44)
You know, I think Melbourne and Sydney, we’re ready to go right now.
Renata (48:47)
should be fine.
Okay, good. Thank you so much, Garrett.
Garrett Rice (48:52)
Thank you so much, Renata. Really, really happy to be here.
