Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Thu, 20 Feb 2025
Hiring used to be about handshakes—now it’s about hacking the system. Mary Shea, GM of Hire Quotient and former co-CEO of Mediafly, spills the secrets of modern hiring, from decoding hidden talent pools to avoiding AI’s résumé black hole. Whether you’re job hunting, recruiting, or just trying to figure out why no one calls back anymore, this episode is for you. Key Highlights of Our Interview: AI as a Recruiter’s Right Hand “Offloading 75% of the recruiting workload, generative AI and automation work overtime, tackling bias and sourcing talent far beyond the usual platforms.” Beyond LinkedIn “Why limit your search to one platform? With integrations across tools like Crunchbase and Apollo, HireQuotient casts a wide net, uncovering passive and active candidates who often fly under the radar.” Championing Diversity “When male-dominated results dominated a recruiter’s search, HireQuotient adapted with a few new prompts, demonstrating how AI can open doors for underrepresented talent.” White Glove Experience, AI-Style “Automation doesn’t mean impersonal. By automating outreach and early-stage screening, recruiters had more time to build personal connections and keep candidates engaged.” Omnichannel Humanity “Use every channel, but never forget the power of face-to-face. It’s not just networking; it’s feeding your humanity.” The Human Advantage “AI might read resumes, but humans hire. Keep networking, stay visible, and remember that meaningful relationships can outlast any algorithm.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Mary Shea PhD --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Mary Shea and what is her career journey?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I've got a treat for you. We are welcoming back a familiar voice to the show, Mary Shea.
If you caught our first season back in March, you might remember her from episode three and four. If you missed those, don't worry. They're still there if you want to catch up. But we'll cover plenty of ground today. Now, let me tell you. Mary's career path is anything but ordinary.
We're talking a journey from classical musician to frontline salesperson, all the way to senior tech leader in sales and revenue enablement. Talk about range, huh? But here's what really makes Mary tick. She's all about using tech to shake things up in how we work. As she put it in her last conversation, she's not one for playing by the standard rule book.
Nope, Mary's is all about making waves and driving positive change. So it's no surprise she's now teamed up with a rising star in the HR tech world. Let's talk about why this matters. Our job market right now is like a roller coaster. We've got layoffs, downsizing, companies flipping their business models on their heads, and AI stepping into the ring.
Chapter 2: Why is the job market like a roller coaster now?
Throw in some political and economic curve balls, and you've got a recipe for a lot of people hunting for jobs. It's not just about finding work, isn't it? We are in this fascinating era where you might have four generations all working side by side. And AI is like this double-edged sword opening doors for some while others are wondering if it will show them the door.
So where does it all leave us? What's the future of work looking like? That's exactly what we are diving in today with Mary. She's going to give us the lowdown on what's happening in HR and recruitment. Ready? Let's jump in and hear what Mary's got to say. Mary, welcome back.
Chapter 3: What role does AI play in modern recruitment?
Thank you, Vince. It's wonderful to be here.
You've had a deep career journey from being an industry analyst at Forrester to now collaborating with a rising star in HR technology. What drew you to this HR tech space? And what makes you believe we are at a tipping point for accelerated growth in this sector?
Wow, that's a great question. And there's lots of questions within the question. You're so wonderful at what you do, but thank you for asking. So, yeah, I won't go too far back in time, but I was an industry analyst at Forrester for seven years or so. It's one of the most wonderful jobs that you could ever possibly have.
You are working with some of the most intelligent, creative, forward-looking people. colleagues and the clients are the same as well. At a certain point in life, I decided to go back into industry and I worked with a unicorn out in Seattle and was CEO of a RevTech company based in Chicago recently.
And I've absolutely fallen in love with not only the technology that HireQuotient has, but the leader of the company, who is Smart Sudhana. He's a founder entrepreneur based out of India. The company is based in Singapore and San Francisco. And I met Smarth at Sastr probably about two and a half or almost coming up on three years now. And I was a keynote speaker.
And he and Aishwarya, one of his colleagues, tracked me down pretty much the whole time that I was at Sastr. And they just wanted to talk tech and introduce me to the burgeoning company and build a relationship with me because I'm fairly well known in the industry and have a nice following. Grateful for that.
And we had so much to talk about that I invited him to come have breakfast with me at the hotel the next day. And you probably know me a little bit, Vince. I'm a bit of an introvert, even though I'm out there in the digital world and speaking, but I don't typically invite people I meet for breakfast. And so that was a strong indicator of my interest in Smarth and the company and his vision.
the company essentially is hr tech as you mentioned with a focus on recruiting and it's a software company it's not an agency i just want to be really clear and the software really takes some of the most sophisticated uses of generative ai and also automation the company has built rich ecosystem partnerships with a range of data providers that you would know
And it can essentially offload the first three quarters of the recruiting process for the recruiter. And why is this important? It's important because everyone's doing more with less these days. Many of the recruiters that I talk to, whether they're external or internal, are one human band, so to speak. There's not a lot of them. And so having...
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Chapter 4: How can technology uncover hidden talent pools?
I believe this is the, this is what you call a differentiation or differentiation factor in high quotient.
There's a couple of differentiating factors and many really. One is the level of sophistication and in quality of the AI and the ability to use very sophisticated prompts. The second is rich external relationships with database companies, whether that's Apollo, Zoom.
Navigator, Crunchbase, and so I won't list them all out, but there's a very rich ecosystem which allows clients to minimize their spend and focus on consolidating all of their tech providers. But what this does is allows us to, the recruiter will have a search and maybe it's, I'll give you, without revealing the name of the soon to be client, I'll give you an example.
we were doing a search on the technology for a database company that's soon to be unicorn closing a round of funding and they wanted to hire a principal engineer and that engineer had to have 10 years of experience in engineering they had to have the ability to understand java c plus a range of other different code they needed to work at a database company.
So they were looking for someone that had come from a competitor, understood the space. And there were several others as well. This is very detailed.
And so what we were able to do is enter in the prompts around where we wanted this person to be located, the amount of experience that they had to have in not only database company, but in their coding languages, because the experience was different in either. And we went on and on. It was pretty deep. The recruiter had been having lots of challenges.
We immediately entered in the prompts and the system went to work and identified in two to three minutes about 50 candidates. What was interesting was the response of the recruiter was blown away, who said, I've seen hundreds of tools like this over my last 12 years in business. I've seen nothing like this happen before. We looked through and we found the top candidates.
The system ranked the candidates based on the must-have and nice-to-have skills. We only looked at the five-star candidates. And oh, by the way, We found out they were only male candidates. I'm sure you're not terribly surprised. And so we said, maybe your hiring manager wants to bring a more diverse set of candidates to the tables.
Let's add in another prompt and let's look for some female candidates as well. And we did, we found someone and this person was not what we would call a five-star candidate, but a four-star candidate because she didn't have every single must have aspect. And we said to the hiring manager, okay, let's take a look at this, the skillset, the resume.
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Chapter 5: Can AI-driven HR tech be used for senior roles?
I had about 10 roles to fill. And I had one internal recruiter. That's a lot, Vince. That's a lot for one individual. And he wasn't just sourcing after my go-to-market roles. He was sourcing engineers and a range of other roles that I wasn't intimately involved in at the time. And I couldn't afford to hire an external recruiting firm, which could have cost me 80 to 100 grand a role. You know that.
I've done it many times, and it's great. But again, it's just not the reality, the business reality that many of us are in today. Yeah. So I didn't use higher quotient for every role. I hired them and I said, look, I can't, I don't know how I'm going to fill these roles in the time that I need to do it with the highest quality candidates.
And oh, by the way, I have a personal platform around elevating and amplifying the voices of underrepresented in business. So on every single role, I'm For my credibility within the organization and externally outside of the firm, I need to bring in a diverse set of finalists. That's no joke. I can't say one thing and then do another when the rubber meets the road.
And without HireCulture, I never would have been able to do it. So I didn't use them for every single search I had, but there were three that I used that I needed to. One was I needed a demand gen manager. And as your listeners know, demand gen is really hard right now. Now that's not a senior role, but we couldn't fill it.
And Hard Quotient did an amazing job of finding someone that had three different degrees, two masters, data science, phenomenal. The other role I had to fill was a sales rep based in Europe in the continent. And as you probably know, all my contacts are pretty much in the UK, but we needed someone in the continent because we had a deep partnership with SAP.
And we needed that person to speak German, English, and at least one other European language. We needed them to have worked at or understood or have relationships with SAP. And we needed them to have come from a revenue enablement company. And there was no way I could find that person. Hired Quotient found several candidates that met all of my criteria within, I don't know, two to three weeks.
And we had hired that role in four weeks, which blew my mind and exceeded all my expectations. Those are two, I think, pretty inspiring examples, but to directly answer your question about senior level talent or C-suite talent or talent where you need a white glove experience, This was the most eye-opening for me. I had to hire a chief customer officer.
This was the most important role that I needed to hire at the company for a range of reasons that SaaS companies have been struggling with churn over the last 18 to 24 months. It's been a very tough market. And so in order to grow your businesses, you need to first stop the leaky bucket. So I thought this was an incredibly important role. I had a board member refer a candidate to me.
I also found a candidate that I'd worked with in the past, someone who had grown a business to about 100 million and a very strong candidate. But to be frank, those were folks that they were both, one was a man, one was a woman. They weren't people of color. They didn't really feel my deep need for more diverse candidates.
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Chapter 6: Why is diversity important in hiring?
We found several candidates that had scaled customer success organizations to 100 million, that had been in SaaS businesses, that had experienced M&A because we were a highly acquisitive company. That was important. That had managed multiple SaaS products and so on and so forth. And we interviewed those folks and they were great. So what happened was we...
dramatically reduced the time that it would have taken me and other executives on the interview loops, because by the time HireQuotient had surfaced the candidates, they were really good. I was able to put four finalists together, which also included the internal referrals. And I'll tell you, personally, I fully expected to hire my former colleague.
And as we went through the interview process, I was becoming more and more taken with the two candidates that HireQuotient found. My final set finalists was two women, two men, two people of color. And honestly, I would have been happy to hire any one of them. They were all so strong. Everyone at the company thought it was an incredibly fair and well-run process.
And I hired an amazing person who is now doing a tremendous job in leading not only her organization, but is a strong number two for the current CEO of that company. I get it. I understand. Maybe I'm not going to change the hearts and minds of diehard recruiters who truly believe that the C-suite needs to be handheld every step of the way.
But I will say, because the AI can customize the external messaging so much, and because that's automated and omni-channel, it allows the person to stay in content, the recruiter to stay in content, constant contact with the candidate. This is a whole other topic, but how many times have you been ghosted and I've been ghosted by HR folks? It happens.
So it created a better brand experience, even for the candidates we didn't hire. And ultimately, once that three quarters of the recruiting process was handled by HireQuotient, we did white glove internally. I was involved in every interview. I was talking, as was our recruiter.
and i was texting talking with our finalists on a regular basis so just because you're augmenting a part of the process doesn't mean you walk away from a white glove or blue chip experience and so i really hope this these stories help come to life why i am debunking hopefully that theory and i know you have a different perspective so i really want to hear your thoughts
I can appreciate that if I were one of those candidates, by the way, in your process, I totally appreciate the fact that someone senior like you and your colleagues got really involved in the process. Because if I join, if you offer me a job, I will be working with you. How you treat me is indicative of how I will be treated as a colleague. Okay, so yes, I do have a story to share.
I don't usually share a lot of personal story, especially if I do interview because I want the focus to be on the guest. But this time for this topic, I do have a personal story. So if you could allow me. This recent experience of mine really got me thinking about the challenges and opportunities in the HR space today. So I was up for this senior position. and a big international brand.
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