Episode 3: Inside the Hiring Process (Before AI Ruins It)
Labor in the Loop
Episode 03 — Inside the Hiring Process (Before AI Ruins It)
Content note: This episode is rated NSFKM. Not safe for Karen's mom (or young ears).
About This Episode
This week Karen puts on her "unfortunately scared of technology" hat and asks Britt to walk her through the entire hiring process, start to finish — from what an ATS actually does to how candidates end up getting scheduled, screened, and (sometimes badly) rejected. Britt shares real talent-acquisition war stories, including candidates who won't stop texting her after a rejection, and the two dig into how to reduce bias in hiring decisions with scorecards and rubrics. The back half tackles something a lot of HR teams are quietly doing right now: feeding candidate resumes into ChatGPT — and what that means for candidate privacy that almost nobody is thinking about.
What We Cover
What We Learned This Week Basil plants gone to seed, and the taco seasoning packet Britt's been using wrong for decades (it's a concentrate — you're supposed to dilute it).
What an ATS Actually Is Britt breaks down the applicant tracking system — how job postings flow from a company's careers page to job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and how HRIS platforms like Workday, Paylocity, ADP, and Oracle bundle the whole candidate lifecycle (posting, screening, scheduling, offers, onboarding) into one system. Karen's takeaway: it's basically a CRM built specifically for hiring.
Interviews, Phone Screens, and Who Actually Does the Sifting How the number and structure of interviews varies wildly by company size and maturity — and Karen shares her own experience hiring for a small nine-person team, where she and her boss independently scored resumes before comparing notes, versus Britt's experience at a leaner startup relying more heavily on hiring managers and (increasingly) AI screening tools.
Texting Candidates: Etiquette and Horror Stories Britt's advice for candidates navigating text-based outreach (treat it like email — full sentences, an intro, a sign-off), plus a genuinely funny/painful string of stories: candidates replying "who is this," one who wouldn't stop texting after being told no, and the general chaos of rejection responses.
Hiring Manager Bias and the Case for Scorecards The two get into why hiring managers so often skip the upfront work of defining criteria — mostly time pressure, since open positions take about 30 days to fill on average and teams feel the strain of being short-staffed. Britt makes the case for scorecards and rubrics as the clearest way to reduce bias, and Karen raises a good counterpoint: rubrics can flatten nuance and end up as overlapping, vague categories (sound familiar, performance review people?).
Transition: Are Hiring Teams Using LLMs? Right as the conversation turns to how hiring managers and HR are actually using large language models day to day, the recording cuts out — technical difficulties (a dying mic, an aging PC) forced a stop and restart.
LLMs in Resume Screening — And a Privacy Blind Spot Picking back up, Britt gets candid about a practice she's uneasy about in hindsight: pasting candidate resumes directly into ChatGPT to help screen applicants during a period of especially high application volume — something she felt pressured into rather than fully chose. That opens into a genuinely useful conversation about what's actually happening to that data (names, emails, city/state) when it's dropped into a chat window without candidate consent.
About Your Hosts
Brittany (Britt) is a certified HR professional based in Boise, Idaho with four years of experience spanning HR generalist work, talent acquisition, and fractional HR consulting through her own practice, Lumi HR LLC. She got into HR the long way, through customer service, restaurants, sales, administration, and a lot of figuring it out as she went. That path is exactly why she cares so much about the people side of work.
Karen Boyd is a values and technology researcher and director of research at a think tank in Southern California. She holds an MBA from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD from the University of Maryland's School of Information, where she studied AI ethics and the future of work. She is, by her own admission, better at studying people than working with them.
Connect With Us
Britt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyhumphreys
Karen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drkarenboyd/
Lumi HR LLC:https://www.instagram.com/lumihrllc/
Karen’s author account: https://www.instagram.com/karenboydauthor/
Leave Us a Review
If this episode resonated with you, we'd love to hear from you. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We would love your feedback as we build the show! Please reach out with comments or questions at info@laborintheloop.com.
Labor in the Loop is part career strategy, part tech deep dive, part therapy session between two friends who study work for a living.
