Audrey Patenaude, CEO of RippleMatch, discusses the rapidly evolving landscape of early career recruiting in the age of AI and how the RippleMatch recruitment automation platform is transforming the hiring process for both employers and emerging talent. Drawing from her background scaling AI companies, Patenaude explores the challenging reality documented in recent research: fewer entry-level roles are available due to AI automation, while demand rises for "entry plus" candidates with verified AI fluency and strong power skills like critical thinking, adaptability, and communication. She explains how RippleMatch addresses the application overload problem—where candidates submit over 300 applications to land one role—by using skills-based matching to connect qualified candidates with employers, saving hiring teams 70% of resume review time while giving candidates a 20x better chance of getting interviews. The conversation delves into practical strategies for recent graduates to build portfolios of AI projects and document real-world experience, and for employers to create "AI centers of excellence" within their recruiting teams. Patenaude also discusses the shifting definition of entry-level work, the rising importance of interview readiness and communication skills, and why career preparation increasingly needs to begin in middle school to help students navigate this new paradigm where AI skills are becoming as fundamental as internet literacy.
Transcript
Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.
Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.
Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.
Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in the higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. At the intersection of work and learning right now, there's a confluence of challenges for employers and employees alike at all stages of the application and hiring process. In particular, we're seeing an increasing impact on early career professionals, as documented in the recent Burning Glass Institute report, "No Country for New Grads", and the "Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper, "Canaries in the Coal Mine: Six Facts About the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence". There are fewer jobs available for early career graduates due to the impact of generative AI, which can accomplish many of the job activities previously done by early career professionals.
Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin. And alongside this complexity, AI has also shifted how prospective employees look for and apply for new roles, and how companies go about recruiting and hiring talent. Just last season, we talked with Sean VanDerziel, President and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, about how employers are using AI for screening resumes, but also how the use of AI by job seekers to generate thousands of resumes is leading some employers to return to in-campus recruiting to find, you know, quote, legitimate candidates.
Kaitlin LeMoine: And then there's also the impact of AI on the very tech platforms and tools that HR talent development and career services teams use to support their own recruitment and hiring efforts. Needless to say, we're facing a complex set of circumstances, and it seems like just the right moment to speak with someone working on this set of challenges every day.
Julian Alssid: Which brings us to today's guest, Audrey Patenaude is the CEO of RippleMatch, a recruitment automation platform that seeks to transform how emerging talent connects with opportunity in the age of AI before joining RippleMatch, Audrey spent much of her career in the AI space and helped teams scale through rapid growth and innovation. At RippleMatch, she's focused on building a platform that levels the playing field for candidates while helping employers discover and hire the next generation of AI skilled leaders. Welcome to Work Forces. Audrey.
Audrey Patenaude: Yes, thank you. Julian Kaitlin, thank you for having me today. Excited to be here.
Kaitlin LeMoine: We're excited to have you with us, Audrey. So, as we kick off today, can you please tell us a bit more about your background and what led you to your role at RippleMatch?
Audrey Patenaude: I'll start with a little bit about my journey and why I really connected to RippleMatch's vision. I'm originally from Quebec City, a very charming but very cold part of Canada. And over there, I studied business and marketing in college, but when I got out of school, there were not a lot of marketing jobs in Quebec City, especially this was before remote work, and there were not a lot of tech companies with offices over there. So after college, I had to work some marketing jobs for small local companies for a while, until this one job opened at an AI company that had offices both in Canada and the US. And I remember at the time, all my friends whom I graduated from college with were all fighting for this one exciting job that we had in our, you know, in our backyard, and I got lucky enough to get it, and I think that this gave me some perspective on how the right opportunity can really change the course of your life, if you're lucky enough to, you know, be at the right place, at The right time and get noticed. So years later, I moved to New York, and that AI company grew a lot, and we went through an IPO, and I got very lucky along the way to be supported by amazing leaders and mentors and learn in that fast growing environment with a lot of innovation, and then got the chance to move to the city that I love and now consider home. So when came time for my next chapter, I met with the team at RippleMatch, and I immediately saw how, you know, to me, this platform felt like a way to push some of that luck forward, to help other candidates like me land jobs that could change their lives and open up so many doors for them, so it's really a motivating mission for me to work on every day and get to see the real life impact of it for candidates in the world and employers alike.
Julian Alssid: Audrey, speak to us a bit about what are the problems that RippleMatch is trying to solve for those employers and candidates and universities alike.
Audrey Patenaude: You touched on it a little bit earlier. But RippleMatch is the marketplace for AI, skilled emerging talent. What that means, or where that talent is, is folks early in their career that know how to leverage AI across all types of roles, and that can be really these amazing contributors that make a huge difference inside companies, and part of the reason why is because Gen Z is leading the use of AI, especially bringing their own tools to school and and work. So the problem that we are solving for employers right now we're seeing employers starting to think very differently about hiring and team design with AI, they are thinking a lot about how to design their teams in a way that will leverage AI intelligence with human intelligence working alongside each other, and what is the best way to build a team that's going to be efficient with the best tools and skills set up, and that's across, you know, go to market teams and technical teams. And in that design of the new, you know, modern team across different function, entry level is no longer seen as a training ground where employers on board a lot of super junior green talent and give them very easy but laborious tasks as they learn the ropes of the job, because, as you mentioned before, now, tasks like data entry, data enrichment and cleaning, or very basic support tickets can be or are being automated by AI. So we're seeing that instead of junior specialists, employers are looking for AI enabled generalists, for example, years ago or recently, if you were going to hire a junior marketer, you would very often look for a profile of a junior professional with very deep expertise or specialization in one part of marketing. So for example, you're looking for a HubSpot expert. Now that profile is changing to looking for someone that has amazing power skills, so someone who's really resourceful, has critical thinking, is going to be very adaptable and very collaborative and with AI and being able to leverage AI tools that deep specialization in one tool is not as critical or as valuable anymore, because you can use AI to figure things out, to build workflows amongst multiple tools, and you're going to innovate much faster and be able to contribute a lot more than that previous profile of a very kind of niche set of expertise. So yeah, employers are looking for these candidates with AI skills who can contribute and innovate quickly, and at the same time, power skills are becoming even more important because AI is automating some of these hard skills. So the net here for employers, and where the challenge comes is that the bar for entry level talent is rising, but at the same time, inbound volume and noise is up more than ever with AI, as you were saying, allowing candidates to send out a lot of resumes or to use ChatGPT to produce a cover letter or resume. The challenge that we help with is helping employers find top talent that's ready for today's workforce by connecting them with candidates that have verified AI skills, power skills, and technical skills. So basically getting them straight to the right talent with the right assessed skills, so that they can spend more time reviewing and interviewing and qualifying these top candidates.
Kaitlin LeMoine: So what does it look like to do that? Because, like you said, this is such a complex moment where employers are inundated with applications like, how does your platform work to help verify the skills that job seekers have?
Audrey Patenaude: The way it works is that we replace that application overload and traditional resumes that you would get on a traditional job board with skills-based matching so employers enter the criteria that they're looking for in terms of not just background in education, but also the skills that they want for this role, in terms of AI skills and AI fluency, but also power skills and technical skills, and they get matched with candidates who have verified these skills through courses and assessments. So we know that they know how to use these tools, that they are good communicators, because they've taken these assessments that they can showcase on their profile, and they apply to the jobs that they are qualified for through our platform, which is really for them, a guided experience to find their path in this market and to build and showcase the skills that will get them hired. So it's a little bit like the dating app that you need to find the job in this AI-disrupted market that just cuts out all of the noise on both sides.
Julian Alssid: Given that then, as we kind of move to this more skills focused marketplace, how, what are some of the successes, and then, what are some of the challenges that you're, you know, you're experiencing with both, again, both the employers and we're interested also in from the employee side as well.
Audrey Patenaude: Obviously, it's a tough market for students. AI is automating entry level work, as you touched on, and I think there's generally a more conservative and cautious ethos around hiring in most industries. So it's a bit of an overwhelming job market for them, where the major that you studied in may not perfectly translate into the kind of jobs that will be available to them today and tomorrow, and with all that uncertainty, the reflex is obviously to send out as many job applications as possible, and our latest survey data shows that candidates were submitting over 300 applications on traditional job platforms in order to land one role. So that's obviously a lot of work and overwhelming for candidates, but also for employers. So what we're doing is really helping them build that skills and personality profile, when they can really showcase what they can do and who they are, instead of being one more resume in a sea of thousands and thousands.
Kaitlin LeMoine: And how about on the employer side? What are some of the successes and challenges you're seeing there, as you know, build out this platform?
Audrey Patenaude: For employers, I think one of the challenges is on leveraging AI in their own internal workflow can sometimes be a bit of a challenge depending on the industry or the size of the company. You know, in our case, AI doesn't impact matching or decision making from employers on on candidates, so it's never an issue when teams actually look into but it's something where just the word AI can sometimes make some IT teams a little nervous, or it can make also recruiters or TA professional nervous in terms of how much is it going to change my work? Do I want it to change? And we really encourage recruiters to see AI as a co-pilot that helps them to do more of that busy work that can just be sped up and automated, but that they are in the driver's seat and they are making the decision it's just allowing them to spend more quality time with the best candidates. But in terms of successes, it's been really amazing to see how transformative this better way of connecting employers and candidates can be on both sides, because, as I was saying, our you know, matching connects only qualified matches on both sides together. We're able to save our employer partners around 70% of the time that we didn't normally spend on resume review, because there's none of the you know, unqualified noise coming in. It's only basically a pipeline of qualified candidates. So that's been pretty transformative, especially in today's market where ta teams are slimmer, there's less budget, there's less resources. So that time saving has been really, really huge, and for candidates, we're giving them a 20 times better chance of getting an interview than if they were to submit an application on traditional job boards, which is also really encouraging and much better for them. It's really great to hear from candidates who write to us after they got a job to thank us for how transformative this was for them in the job search, and how reassuring it was to finally hear back from companies instead of being ghosted.
Julian Alssid: Well, it's, it's so interesting though, Audrey, because you're, you're sort of helping then to cut down on the noise and improve efficiency in this process. And but if what you said earlier rings true and is an ongoing pattern this, and we've been seeing this for years, although with AI now, the acceleration is just massive. Is the rising skill demand for entry level? And I'm almost wondering, like, is there going to be an entry level anymore? Like, what is, you know? Is there really, you know? So you're making this more efficient. You're helping employers, in a way, hire fewer people, but with much more precision. Is this a blip, or is this, you know, where? Where do you see this coming? A little prognosticating.
Audrey Patenaude: To what I was saying earlier. I think that the profile of what it means to be entry level talent and the demand for it is going to change. We're calling this new type of entry level roles, entry plus, where you're not, you know, expected to come in, and, as I said, like, take a long time to ramp and contribute, because you have to learn very basic skills or do your junior work for a while. You're expected to come in, and, you know, be able to use AI to ramp up really fast, and to start innovating really fast, and to learn new tools really fast. So I think that we're looking at a profile where there may be a little less roles in some industries, but that these contributors make meaningful impact really quickly, and that with the folks that will be able to use AI the best, it's going to be pretty competitive for that talent. And we're already seeing some headlines about the salaries going up for this kind of young talent. That's really AI savvy. So I do think that there's going to be a revived demand for entry level with these right AI skills, and it's also going to be potentially pretty lucrative roles for these candidates too.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, yeah, it makes me wonder too. This is kind of transitioning a little bit to the higher ed side, but I'm just curious. Like, what do you see that meaning for, like, your higher ed partners right around like, what does this mean for we're talking about the skill needs going up. So what does it mean for career services professionals and those helping rising college graduates with this process of not only finding a job but also building that skill set that you're talking about to be entry plus.
Audrey Patenaude: Of course, universities and career services are, you know, working as best as they can to get their students to be job ready and market ready. I think the challenge is that what it means today is evolving very, very fast. It had already been transforming after COVID with the rise of remote work, the way that candidates would connect with opportunity was already a little bit different. It was already getting harder. I think now it is accelerating and getting even harder, because that skill bar is rising and is also changing really quickly. So we see a lot of university partners coming to us to help bridge that gap in the job search, whether for an internship or for a first job out of school, to help alleviate some of the stress and how overwhelming the job search process can be, and the guide directing them to a place where they can receive matches that they are qualified for, which gives them a higher level of confidence when they apply to these roles, that they are a right fit for them, and that they will have a higher odd of getting an interview, but then also identifying the skills that they might want to build, learn, and showcase in order to increase their odds of landing a job. So for example, it may be good for me to take a class in prompt engineering online and be able to showcase to employers that I've taken that but it's also some things as simple as interview readiness. Interview readiness is a big challenge that we hear from a lot of our partners, even before you know the rise of AI and even before the bar got higher on the skills, on the technical skill side, just knowing which candidates is ready for an interview and will have the right communication skill to succeed and to succeed in your interview process was already a big challenge. So that's both kinds of learning journeys that we want to help provide candidates to build these skills and then showcase them, and then, you know, be able to translate that into recruiter sourcing. So yeah, we have universities coming to us and just basically wanting to get us in front of their students to help ease that job search process right after they graduate.
Julian Alssid: Well, and we've had numerous discussions at this point about how this process is being pushed down to younger and younger and younger students. Just thinking back to last season, Jean Eddy from American Student Assistance, talked with us about middle school is where it really has to all begin. It's too late, if it's later than that, and I'm guess, I'm wondering is it, is it too early to say or from where you sit, are you seeing that this greater emphasis on building work experience, building those skills, building the interview and other communication skills earlier is paying dividends for candidates.
Audrey Patenaude: We're seeing increased investments from our employer partners in earlier and earlier programs in terms of early ID and early kind of enablement and education. So it is starting to go earlier and earlier in that education journey, in part, to help build these skills that now employers have to build with candidates when they start their first job. In terms of what does it mean to be a good employee? What does it mean to show up on time and use email properly. All of these skills are being now a little bit put on the burden of the teams that onboard that early career talent. So with that investment of getting early ID programs earlier and internships earlier, it just helps front load some of that learning and also groom these candidates to be, you know, ready and bigger contributors when they joined the company a few years later. So we're seeing that investment come in earlier. Of course, it's not fixing the entire problem, and that's where I think some of that digital learning and proactively recommending what's the best class for you to take, depending on where you are in your career journey or the career path that you want to take is where it can be pretty powerful. Because I think what we're hearing from candidates right now is that it's pretty overwhelming to even know where to go or what to do to make yourself better already, because there is a lot of digital content. There are a lot of digital classes, and you can ask ChatGPT what to do. But what advice do you actually take, and where do you actually go to to, you know, get yourself ready for the workplace is pretty overwhelming, because they definitely feel it shifting. They know it's changing, and they want to make sure that they find their way through this new chaos.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, I'm sure it shifts a bit by industry too, right? Depending on where these job seekers are looking, like what occupations and industries are looking to work, then the upskilling needs pre employment might be slightly different, right? I mean, I would assume some jobs, based on what we've been reading, some of the jobs are, there are fewer of some jobs than others, I guess, as related to which are being more impacted by automation and AI.
Audrey Patenaude: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're seeing the headlines about having less computer science roles available. I think that in some industries or in some segments, they're less available. So coding is an example, but also, if you're an amazing coder, and you know how to use AI really well, instead of being, you know, 10x the impact of a normal coder, then you're going to be maybe, like, 50x or 100x so your value is also rising on the market. So I think it's interesting dynamics. I think where we're seeing, where we're seeing it change the most recently, or I guess the fastest, is also in the other kind of go to market functions, where AI was not really thought of as a big plus until really recently. If you're a business development person or a salesperson, I don't think you were considered as an AI talent up until just a few months ago. But now we're looking at partners wanting to make sure that the PR that they hire, or the marketer or the salesperson will have the right proficiency in the right tools, or will just be, you know, able to leverage LLMs to figure things out and be a lot more efficient at their at their jobs. So I don't think that the impact in terms of like number of roles is even across industries, to your point, but I think the impact on the profile that folks are looking for is starting to spread across all industries and job functions.
Julian Alssid: That is so interesting, given all of that Audrey then, pulling on your own experience, what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in navigating or helping recent graduates navigate this complex job landscape?
Audrey Patenaude: For recent graduates or young professionals, I would say, as much as you can build real world experience with AI, regardless of what your major was, or the type of path that you may want to pursue. Build a portfolio of these projects or these outcomes and document them. You can use ChatGPT to recommend tools or experiments that you can do, or different projects that you can build based on the type of career you're targeting, but really make sure that you're documenting those, building a portfolio of those, because more and more employers will want to see tangible examples of the type of AI work that you've done and how you were able to innovate and get creative with it. Because some skills like I can use ChatGPT will become, you know, commoditized and a no brainer. And it's almost like, yes, I can use the internet, right? Very, very fast. So how will you be able to differentiate your work and you know, and really show that you can bring more value? But I would also say, focus on developing your power skills. That's something we're hearing more and more from employers that with AI skills like communication, both verbal but also how you interact with recruiters by email are becoming more critical than ever. They're really looking for these strong players that will make an impact on their team long term, not just because of their AI skill, but because of their critical thinking and because of their collaboration skills and how much they'll be able to move, you know, across their function and across the company. And then for employers, I think the practical recommendation here is really creating those AI centers of excellence within their own teams, to really empower, you know, their recruiting team, their TA team, to innovate in the ways that they find and connect with the right talent. So we have, for example, take the biggest AI adopters on your recruiting team and have them be evangelists and showcase to others how they are embedding AI in their workflows to demystify some of it, but also inspire others to also dive in and use AI and when you're looking to adopt new AI tools, or to ask your CFO or your procurement team for new AI tools, really set expectations in terms of, what are you going to use this tool for? What are going to be the practical implications of it? And then what ROI do you think you're going to get from that in a realistic way, both for the impact on the recruitment team in terms of this is going to help save my team 70% of the time that we're spending on reviewing resume, that is that many amount of hours, and that's what we're going to be able to do better with these other these hours instead. Or what's the amount of money that we're going to be able to save, but not just tactically on the impacts on the recruiting team, but also frame it in terms of the impact on the business. That means, for example, we'll be able to hire talent that will convert to better talent or interns that will be able to convert into full time hires at a higher rate, because we'll have identified the best talent, folks that will get promoted and contribute more into the company. So also some of the qualitative aspects of the outcome that will resonate with business needs on top of, you know, recruiting KPIs.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Great, well, so many practical steps to take away. Really appreciate that. And so as we wind down our conversation today, Audrey, How could our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work at RippleMatch?
Audrey Patenaude: Yeah, we publish a lot of content on how recruiting is evolving in this market, and practical tips to adapt for both candidates and employers. We love to interview our own customer partners regularly to hear about their real life stories about how their teams are innovating and driving change internally in their hiring process. So you can follow RippleMatch on LinkedIn and myself to continue to get these insights on your feed regularly.
Julian Alssid: Thank you so much, Audrey for taking the time to speak with us today, and we will certainly keep following you and look forward to watching this all unfold, you really are right in the center. Awesome. Thank you. Was a pleasure.
Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit Workforces dot info, forward slash podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces consulting, please visit workforces dot info, forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.
