Your Best Hire Already Left w/ Gustavo Serbia

Hire to Chair in 3 Days

In this episode of HR’s most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman sit down with Gustavo Serbia, the CHRO of Hair Cuttery Family of Brands, to pull back the curtain on recruiting and retention in the wildly competitive, hyper-fragmented beauty industry.  

Think corporate HR is tough? Try managing 6,000 creative stylists across 500+ locations where the barriers to entry are non-existent, your employees can walk across the street to a competitor on a whim, and "life happens" at Mach speed.

🎧 What You’ll Hear In This Episode:

• Hired to Chair in 3 Days

• The Power of Real-Time Data

• Empathy vs. Efficiency

• The Art of the Polite Poach

• The AI Wishlist

> "In this industry, you know to a tee when someone leaves. My CEO knows exactly what it's costing us right then and there. I don't have to wait weeks to calculate the loss." - Gustavo Serbia, CHRO

   

Whether you're looking to streamline your hiring tech stack or trying to figure out how to handle the "boomerang" employees who leave to be their own boss and immediately regret it—this episode is packed with unfiltered, practical advice from an HR leader looking way outside his own industry for innovation.  

Tune in now. We out!   

VIDEO - PART 2 - Why Trades Need AI

VIDEO - PART 3 - The Smartest Hire

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Joel Cheesman: All right. Let’s do this. We are the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I’m your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is here as we welcome Gustavo Serbia, CHRO at the Hair Cuttery. Yes. Is that a sick joke as a hair-follicly-challenged man?

Gustavo Serbia: Yes. When they called me, that was the first question.

Joel Cheesman: Yeah.

Gustavo Serbia: But I was so impressive that they still...

Joel Cheesman: When you’re employed at 22.

Gustavo Serbia: I know. My god. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: And before we get to anything, what happened to the Flowbee? Why did that not take off?

Gustavo Serbia: I was this close to actually buy it. It was that and the Euro Painter. You remember the Euro Painter?

Joel Cheesman: No. I don’t.

Gustavo Serbia: Oh my god. The Euro Painter. I actually ended up buying that one. It was...

Joel Cheesman: What was the Euro Painter? It wasn’t hair. No. You didn’t like spray on hair, did you? Which they’ve had that before, too.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. But the Flowbee is still around.

Joel Cheesman: Is it?

Gustavo Serbia: The guy that invented it made a killing with that.

Joel Cheesman: Oh. I bet.

Gustavo Serbia: It made a killing.

Joel Cheesman: All right. Let’s get down to business. Yeah. Jokes aside. A lot of people won’t know the Hair Cuttery. I guess a little bit about you and how we got here.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. So, Hair Cuttery Family of Brands, it’s a chain of private hair salons, primarily on the East Coast. We have about 525 salons, all privately owned. The brand, Hair Cuttery, has been around for about 45 years.

Joel Cheesman: Okay.

Gustavo Serbia: The company that used to own it went bankrupt during COVID, and a new company came in, bought it out of bankruptcy, and we relaunched ourselves as Hair Cuttery Family of Brands. And we own Bubbles, which is a private salon, too, but it’s a little bit more upscale. But there’s only 16 of those. And then—

Joel Cheesman: Bubbles sounds fun.

Gustavo Serbia: Yes. Let’s go to Bubbles. It’s fun. It’s fun.

Chad Sowash: I went to high school with her.

Gustavo Serbia: I was going to say something inappropriate. I’m so not saying it. And then we have Cibu, which is our own private label for hair products, and we’ve been expanding that.

Joel Cheesman: Okay.

Gustavo Serbia: And I’ve been with them for almost 6 years now.

Joel Cheesman: And so how many employees are we talking about? What kind of folks are you hiring? Straight out of cosmetology school? I mean, what’s sort of the profile?

Gustavo Serbia: All of that. So, we are about 6,000, primarily stylists. There’s about 75 people in the corporate staff, and there’s 37 district managers and regional managers. The rest are all stylists. And that’s what we focus. So we hire stylists. If you are a manager at a salon, you have to be licensed. If you’re an assistant manager, you have to be licensed. And then we hire students fresh out of high school, but then we hire, you know, anybody with any type of experience. As long as you have a license, we want to talk to you.

Chad Sowash: So do you do any types of programs to help get individuals into licensing if they want to get there, or?

Gustavo Serbia: No. We partner with the schools. Okay. So, you know, many companies partner with colleges for college recruitment. Well, we have the same, but it’s with beauty schools. So we partner with beauty schools and go and visit those schools and try to, obviously, present our company and bring them. Depending on the program, it is 24 to 36 months, the program that they go through. We help them come into our company before graduation, get them trained, and then once they get their license, then we make them a stylist.

Joel Cheesman: I can only imagine that’s incredibly competitive. I mean, you know where the candidates are. They’re in the cosmetology school. How do you set yourself apart? What is sort of the thing that’s going to get someone to look at you over all the others?

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. So, it is a very fragmented industry. So you have corporate salons like us. You have a lot of franchises, which are the bigger players. And then the rest are just individual mom-and-pops, private salons. So, we’re competing against all of them. I wish I could say I’m competing against this large chain, but I’m competing against everybody, because everybody is looking for those. So for us is the idea that we believe we have the best compensation package when it comes to the industry, but ultimately is being able to give them a path from the beginning to grow their career with us and stay with us over the long haul. It is very hard to do, because you have then booths. So people can go into a private booth on their own. Work independently.

Chad Sowash: Or contractor versus FTE.

Gustavo Serbia: Correct. For us, they’re all FTEs. Right? So if you want to be independent, kind of on your own, you go either to a private suite or you go to a booth. So now you’re competing against that also.

Joel Cheesman: Yeah.

Gustavo Serbia: So for us, the one thing is that we believe that out of any chain out of there, even though we’re called Hair Cuttery, we do all kinds of hair, styles, color. We do more color than any private company out there. So, we are able to offer you the beginning, the middle, and the end. So we can take your entire career with us.

Chad Sowash: My son is actually a hairstylist in La Jolla. Oh, yeah. In La Jolla, San Diego. And he like most, our queens. They’re drama queens. Right? How easy is it from a turnover standpoint to be able to keep them happy, to keep them there, because as you would said—

Gustavo Serbia: Yes. Yes.

Chad Sowash: —as you would said, this isn’t just fraught with competition.

Gustavo Serbia: Yep.

Chad Sowash: I mean, this is a little, let's say, for instance, cohort out there that is much different than many other employee types of cohorts. Right?

Gustavo Serbia: Yep. Yep.

Chad Sowash: Talk a little bit about that.

Gustavo Serbia: So there we’ve made a great shift in focusing on the empathy side. I have to admit it’s not my strength. You can ask my wife.

Chad Sowash: Join the club, yeah.

Gustavo Serbia: It’s just not my initial instinct. But as a company, we are in the business of retaining individuals. So within the HR framework, we partner with the DLs to ensure that any termination that is happening is happening under an appropriate framework. Do we terminate people? Yes. Unfortunately for us, the majority of people actually choose to leave, so it’s not that we are terminating them. But there’s so many cases every day, but I have not worked in an industry with so many people actually passing away, because we have drugs, a lot of drugs in the environment. I think it’s the circumstances that surround some of these individuals.

But I will tell you this, that after being there for 6 year, to me, the drama is not that different from what I used to find in hotels. Wow. Because at the end of the day, you’re dealing with people. Right? And it’s how you go about dealing with those individuals, and like anything, most of it, let’s say I have an hour conversation with you investigating an issue, 45 minutes is listening to your feelings about how you feel about what happened. Yes. 15 minutes is actually about the facts. All right? So, but you got to give space for that to happen, because if you cut them too short, which is my instinct, I know what is exactly happening here, there’s a lot of pushback. Oh, yeah. So we ensure that DLs understand we got to give people space to vent, to let it out. You should not be documenting people left and right, because it doesn’t send the right message. But sometimes it’s harder to do simply because you have 6,000 employees, everybody has a story.

My saying is life happens. So start with the premises that life happens and that what people are telling you is the truth until they give you the reason to not believe that it’s the truth. But with 6,000 people across the company, being able to manage that on a day-to-day basis, it’s very difficult.

Chad Sowash: You know what he just talked about, something that technology cannot do.

Joel Cheesman: Nuance, humanness.

Chad Sowash: Empathy, space, patience.

Joel Cheesman: Yep.

Chad Sowash: But what can technology do for you guys? And have you used it for a hiring process?

Gustavo Serbia: Well, I will tell you one of the best things that we have is we have our own stylist app that allows our employees to see exactly to the tee how much they’ve made on any given day. Wow. So they know how many clients they have had. Okay. Uh, how much they have produced on any given day, and then it projects them on what they need to do for the remainder of the week in order to make a greater level of commission. So, technology for us has been central. We’ve been working on the app for guest and customers to make it easier and better for them. We are now looking into AI and see what it can bring to the table. I, certainly, am a big user of AI. As a company, we’ve been using it, I think as individuals. Right? Everybody starts to explore. Now we’re looking to see how do we strategically organize ourselves behind a cohesive plan, in order to continue to enhance it. But you still need people to cut hair. And technology can help you with training, can help you with performance, monitoring how people are doing and communicating that, but at the end of the day, they need to be able to cut hair.

Joel Cheesman: Are you providing daily pay or a flex pay system if they are tracking what they’re earning? And how is that working?

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. We use a company called Rain. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s a competitor of DailyPay. Okay. And, we offer it, and they get the opportunity to use, because they earn commissions, that hourly rate fluctuate. Okay. So they also have an incentive in trying to drive that average hourly rate higher so they can borrow more money they need to. Yeah. We’ve been offering that now for about 3 to 4 years. Okay. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: Efficiency plays a role in the company. I know it plays a role in hiring as well. So on your website, you have, quote, "Hired to chair in 3 easy steps: video interview, decision, and offer, and start onboarding." Yeah. How has speed, whether it’s on that aspect or getting on an interview or getting pre-screened, how has speed with technology impacted the business?

Gustavo Serbia: Tremendously. I will tell you that if we didn’t have Paradox as a partner, it would have been the ability to get people behind the chair is crucial because the barriers of entries are very very low. So you talk about your son. He can switch from one salon to the next the same day and be behind the chair.

Chad Sowash: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Gustavo Serbia: No interview or a brief interview with an owner. Right? Right. Right. So we needed to figure out a way how do we get this moving quickly because they’re ready to be behind the chair. So we removed anything that we felt was absolutely unnecessary but it made us feel good. You know, typically, a lot of the applications make HR feel good, you know. Right. So I looked at it and said, okay. What can we eliminate? I know it will feel good if we have x, y, and z, but do we really need it? What value does it give us? And, ultimately, we’re able to streamline that entire process.

But efficiency is a tricky part because you can become very efficient at what you do yet not effective. Right? You can become very good at making a microphone but it takes you 3 years to create it, and it’s a masterpiece. Well, efficiency needs to go hand in hand with that effectiveness component. And for us, it’s measured, obviously, by the number of hires. So we needed to move quickly but, ultimately, we needed to get hires. So we look at the entire process to make sure that, yes, we don’t have crappy stuff in the process. Right. But we, ultimately, have to make sure that whatever we’re putting in is converting that lead into a hire.

Chad Sowash: So you talked about implementing Paradox. Yes. Where did you implement? You talked about interviewing, all these things to get you to a chair. What did you do? What for?

Gustavo Serbia: From beginning to end. Paradox is our conversational, but also is our ATS. Okay. Let me give you an example. When we were looking at implementing Paradox, immediately the thought was conversational AI, but I also needed the ATS. Yeah. And I started looking, and I come from big ATSs, so I was like, I need an ATS. Then I go, what do I really need? I just need to be able to post a job, have a requisition, and process onboarding. Mhmm. That eliminated pretty much the need for a true ATS, because everything else was a nice to have but we wouldn’t use it. So Paradox, actually, we were one of the first ones that were using that ATS component because they were not advertising it at the time. And it has worked perfectly for us because we put Paradox from the beginning all the way to onboarding, and then we, ultimately, send them to ADP, which is our system of record. Yeah.

Chad Sowash: So when you talk about that, what’s the time been? How long did it take to get somebody into a chair before? How long does it take to get somebody into the chair now?

Gustavo Serbia: So we were in the 17 plus days, and that includes the time that a person may give to resign. So some people resign and give 2 weeks or 1 week notice. We were able to bring it down to 12 days fully loaded, but we extend offers within 3 days. The time difference is driven by the individual saying, "I’ll start a week from now," or, you know, "2 weeks from now." We weren’t able to do that before because not only there was a burdensome process behind the scenes, but sorry to say this, but we were using ADP, which was an ATS, and it was working in the traditional manner. Right. And it just didn’t do it for us.

Chad Sowash: Slow and sluggish.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. So right now, when we advertise we can get you behind the chair in 3 days, if you’re ready to start in 3 days, we are able to do that. Most individuals say, "I got to give notice," or, "I have a trip that I already planned, so I’m going to take care of that, and then I’ll come back and start."

Joel Cheesman: How do you guys treat walk-in candidates? I mean, it seems like AI, certainly, and digital ways of applying have taken over, but it also seems to me like a real human—these are artists essentially, and they know all the players. Yes. Talk about the walk-ins and does that still happen? And how do you treat that in juxtaposition with the AI component?

Gustavo Serbia: It’s not happening as much, but we have to leave a lot of room for those walk-ins, but instead of those individuals walking to us, we’re walking to them. So, you know, boots on the ground networking for us is crucial. I think the industry has to do it because not everybody’s applying. So, you have a group of people that are going to apply. Technology helps us in identifying who those individuals are because now I can run a search of all the beauty salons in a particular market and know who the players are very quickly, and then figure out a way to how to target those individuals.

Chad Sowash: Poach. Yeah.

Gustavo Serbia: Poach. The industry also gives you access to state board lists, so you can go to the state board and, you know, get access to the list. Right.

Joel Cheesman: Does those have contact information like phone numbers? Does it have emails or anything like that? Does it?

Gustavo Serbia: All of it. The problem is they haven’t opted in. So you have to go through an opt-in process. You want to do it the right way, you have to go through an opt-in process. Right? So we do mailers from time to time, so you get a card at home that says Hair Cuttery. Those are hit or miss depending on the market.

Joel Cheesman: Do those have a QR code on them?

Gustavo Serbia: They do.

Joel Cheesman: Awesome. So high tech. Go on. Go on. Thank you.

Gustavo Serbia: I guess we’re going to have to have a sidebar.

Joel Cheesman: It’s a little inside conversation. Mailers.

Gustavo Serbia: Mailers. Yes.

Joel Cheesman: Mailers. Yes.

Gustavo Serbia: With a QR code. Yes.

Joel Cheesman: Keep going.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. So, we have to rely on technology to get us who those potential individuals are, find them, but then we have to go out there and meet them, because not all of them are applying. So if I rely solely on people that are applying, I cannot stay...

Joel Cheesman: How does this work? Do you sit down for a haircut and go, "Hey. You’re looking for a new job? Take a little bit off the top." I mean, how do you poach in this industry?

Gustavo Serbia: Very politely. That’s all I can tell you. My CEO would not be happy if I gave you our secrets.

Joel Cheesman: No secrets. No secrets, please.

Chad Sowash: Well, and the CEO, I’m sure, the only way that you make money is to make sure that the chairs are full.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. They have to be full.

Chad Sowash: Right? So it is imperative that you don’t have empty chairs.

Gustavo Serbia: Yep.

Chad Sowash: So, I mean, you are the lifeblood of the organization. So I would assume that you are tying all of this to revenues. Is that correct?

Gustavo Serbia: Yep. Well, I’ve worked in HR now for 25 years, and people talk about, you know, turnover and the cost of turnover. Every industry is very hard to prove that, you know, me leaving is actually costing you x amount of dollars. In this industry, you know to a tee when you leave. So when I came in and I found that out, I was in heaven because now I can truly show the value of recruiting, of retention, of coaching, right, where in other industries it’s harder to put it. My CEO knows exactly that when we lose anybody, there’s a cost attached to that individual, and we know that right then and there. I don’t have to wait 2 weeks, 3 weeks to figure out what is the loss. If I lose you as a stylist, I know right away if you were a top performer or not. Yeah. And how much it’s costing us to try to replace you.

Chad Sowash: Well, you’re the CHRO and also the CPO. You’re the chief product officer because you are putting products. I mean, they are the product that drives the revenue other than the great shampoos and things of that nature and Bubbles, my favorite.

Gustavo Serbia: And Bubbles. Bubbles. Bubbles.

Joel Cheesman: It also feels like a very localized, hyper local almost opportunity. Talk about how AI has impacted that or can it, or do you have a vision for the future of how that would work?

Gustavo Serbia: We’re still trying to figure out that piece. I think in the broad scheme, we’re looking at Stylists are the same. They may bring a slightly different cultural background. Right? For example, we know that in northern, we have our best retention. So when you talk about Pennsylvania, New Jersey is the best retention. The worst retention, Florida. There’s more transient people. Right? So we need to understand that and then try to tailor the processes for those things. So we know we can move very quickly in Florida. Northern is going to take a little bit longer for people to make a decision because they’re not moving as quickly as they would do, for example, Florida. So for us to localize it, it’s really primarily around knowing to know knowing where the players are. Not necessarily how the local game is played, but it’s really knowing where the players are, because you’re trying to poach, you’re trying to steal, borrow, what is the saying? There’s a saying about Beg, borrow, and steal. You’re doing all of that. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: When we talk about AI and the fears of taking jobs, particularly entry-level jobs, you said you pull people right out of high school. Yep. Do you are you finding that more high school students are open to opportunities like yours because they’re being told college is expensive, a lot of those jobs are being eliminated? Have you used that to your advantage? And what like, what are you seeing on the front lines of that debate?

Gustavo Serbia: And in the front lines, there’s students in beauty schools are no different than students in any college. They’re confused. They’re trying to figure out who they are and where they’re going.

Chad Sowash: They’re kids.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. They’re kids just figuring it out. Yeah. We certainly can and should take advantage of the fact that even recession, even during COVID, people still want to get a haircut, right? They were not getting it at the same level. Right. Might be getting a Flowbee. At least he will. You and I can’t. There’s no hair to cut. But, ultimately, we have to find a path where we can use some of that message to give them the comfort that you can come, make money with us. They can make great tips. They can build a career. And we emphasize that in our we promote a lot of people from within. I mean, a lot. Mhmm. But every stylist for us can get a promotion based on how much they produce in commission. So we talk about the fact that you are in control of how much you can promote yourself on any given week. But we also promote the fact that you can buy a car, you can buy a house, because the money that you’re making, you’re able to increase it on a week to week basis if you want to, if you’re committed to what you’re doing.

So, ultimately, AI is going to help us, I think it’s going to help us on the reporting front, on the processes front, but at the end of the day, it’s still a people business for us. People are behind the chair, they still want to be able to talk to the stylist, build a relationship. We talk a lot about the fact that when you are on when the client is on that chair, you’re the master of the domain, right? You own that chair and that client for the 30 minutes or the 4 hours because they are taking 4 hours sometimes to do certain styles.

Chad Sowash: When Joel’s getting his tips done.

Joel Cheesman: I guess the appeal of doing your own thing lures a lot of people into that world, and the software makes it easier and taking payments. But my guess is a lot of them sour on being their own boss after a time. Is there a strategy that you guys utilize to sort of keep in touch with them and say, "Hey, if and when you’re ready to join the dark side..." Boomerang. Boomerang, baby. Well, they’re not leaving and coming back. They’re leaving cosmetology starting their own thing, but realizing, oh, maybe the self-employed thing isn’t for me.

Chad Sowash: But they’re still coming back. Back to what? Not the cosmetology. Hopefully. Hopefully. No. Not the cot- That’s what I’m talking about. Oh. I’m sorry. Okay.

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. No. The I don’t know the exact numbers within the industry of the amount of people that drop out, but to your point about the boomerangs, when I came into the industry, because I had not worked in the industry, they told me, "Get ready because you’re going to get people that are going to come back 4, 5, 6 times." And they do. And it’s because, particularly earlier in their career, they’re figuring out where they want to be. Ah. Uh-huh. Right? Do I want to be in a private salon? Do I want to be in a chain? Do I want to be on my own? Yeah. Yeah. So we remain in touch with all of them because we know that at some point, they’re going to come back, and we want to be ready. But we have to also have a story, and often I got I got to let them go for them to discover this was a great place. Mhmm. So our rehires is a point of focus for us. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big rehire font for us.

Chad Sowash: So when we were back in high school, back in the day, the comprehensive, the vocational part of high school was big. It was pretty much inbred into every school system that was out there. And I remember Chad had a glorious head of hair. Back in high school. We did. We did. Don’t leave me out. We did. I’ll show you pictures of that moolit. That moolit, anyway. Google search. Anyway, so there was, I mean, that was a breeding ground for people to go directly into the into into, you know, your salons. Yep. But that has gone away. That’s gone. But we also need plumbers, and we also need, you know, people to build homes, and, you know, carpenters and what-not. Do you think that there might be a revival of the vocational sector in our high schools? Yep. To be able to, and are you guys actually pushing, or are there lobby groups or anything like that pushing toward actually making that happen?

Joel Cheesman: Remember remember Grease, the Beauty School Dropout. We used to sing that to Tristan all the time. Yeah. I used to be a thing. Right in high school.

Gustavo Serbia: I didn’t know what it was, by the way, when I watched the movie. I had no clue until later in life what that Oh, that’s what it means. Might be 6 when it came out. Yes. We’re working with government. We’re working with the schools because there has been a huge drop, particularly after COVID, a lot of schools closed. So we are no different than the electricians and the plumbers. We’re in the same boat, yeah, when it comes to that. We were not actively involved as a company, and then we said, okay, we going to have to get involved because the reality is that if we’re not partnering with those schools, then we don’t have stylists. Right. So we’ve upcharged our approach a little bit more in partnering with government. For example, licenses. If you have a license in Ohio and you move to Florida, you have to go through the entire process to get the license. Yeah. Yeah.

Chad Sowash: It’s like nursing, which is it’s all ridiculous.

Gustavo Serbia: It does not make sense. So we are pushing heavily to try to allow for licenses to just you transfer. Transfer. Drivers license. You transfer, you present the old one, get the new one, and you can move on. Right. You have people that have to sit on the sidelines for 3, 6 months waiting, and if there’s a backlog, yeah, depending on the state, there’s a backlog. Now you have lost productivity for 6 months. That individual is not making money, and that individual has to make a living and says, "Hmm, where do I go?" So, by the way, because the barriers of entries are low in the industry, although you need to have a license, we’re competing not only against the beauty industry, but any retailer out there. Oh, yeah. So so we lose people that go to other industries because they realize I need to make money, and some people are not comfortable making commissions, so they prefer that hourly rate. Even though that hourly rate may be lower, feeling wise, it makes me feel secure that I have that hourly rate. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re we’re figuring out ways to continue to build the pipeline, and it’s going to have to be in partnership with the schools. The schools have are picking up again, certainly we’re not in the COVID era. But I don’t see necessarily bigger players coming and saying, "We’re going to open a chain of beauty schools." It is slowly being rebuilt. Is it at the pace that we would like? No. But it takes money for people to actually do that. It’s expensive to go to beauty school. It’s not as cheap as it used to be. And the vocationals are I just went to one in Florida. Mhmm. Amazing amazing vocational school. Uh-huh. And they have barbers, and they have stylists. Barbers is a new front that we’re exploring as a company. But those don’t happen all the time. I mean, there’s the amount of schools out there has decreased tremendously. Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: Talked about the funnel from high school into this opportunity. Curious about your thoughts on the importance of immigration to this profession, whether the border is less porous or more. Talk about immigration, how important it is to filling these roles.

Gustavo Serbia: Because we need a light you need a license to operate with us, coming from another country is only beneficial if you are getting a license. We have a lot of people, depending on market, Florida. Right? If you go South Florida, you have a lot of Latinos down there. But we have multiple languages within the company, when I came in, the first thing that I saw, "Oh, H2B visas," because I worked in hotels, yeah, where you bring a lot of those. Mhmm. It doesn’t exist within the industry. Yeah. So I thought about it. Hmm, maybe we could do something around that, but in reality, our path is probably better off through the vocational schools and ensuring that the schools grow, because, ultimately, I can bring somebody from another country to work as a housekeeper in a hotel or in the front desk.

Chad Sowash: They don’t need a certification for it.

Gustavo Serbia: They don’t need a certification. It’s expensive to get that certification, more than likely, they don’t have a lot of money coming here in the first place. In the first place. Yeah. Yeah. So it has not been a path, but we will always explore if there’s a possibility there. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what’s on your tech wish list? What do you hope is created in the future, or what are you looking to buy, some other products or services to add to the arsenal?

Gustavo Serbia: Yeah. Certainly an AI recruiter, something that can allow us to interview a lot more people quicker. Okay. That can serve questions and answer, better, than a chatbot, because the chatbot does it. Right? But it’s still more something more like an agent, an interviewer. More like an agent. Yeah. Yeah. And so that would be probably number 1. And number 2 is quicker reporting. We still use Tableau. Oh, yeah. Databases. We get the information that we need, Right. but with AI, I mean, I just started 3 weeks ago basically with a data dump. Yeah. And used AI to pretty much produce an entire analysis of the entire funnel. Uh-huh. And it took me it took me a week because I was looking at what I wanted to build. Yeah. But I don’t have to build pivot tables. Yeah. And I can now feed it the raw data of the new week and say, "Here’s the raw data for the new week. Update the analysis," and in 30 seconds, I have an updated piece of information. So using that technology to facilitate, for example, who are the people that we should be sourcing or going after? You have a lot of people in the database. Let’s say I have 6,000 people. Yeah. And I have 10 recruiters. Yeah. How am I going to go after 6,000 people? Yeah. Well, I’m trying to build right now a type of ranking mechanism that would allow us to say, "Okay. Who are the better people to go after?" and then go after those. So, rather than sourcing or going after everybody on the database, Right. use the technology to try to figure out this group tends to be better at completing interviews, completing the hiring process, right, staying longer. Yeah. Go after those. These ones you can go after, but you may not spend as much time and energy. Yeah. And technology can do that.

Chad Sowash: And you’re at an event over the next few days, yeah, where there might have been some of your peers who have already whiteboarded that and they’re in the process of actually building it. So how much time are you actually taking in being able to have those discussions with peers inside and outside of your industry to look for those shortcuts?

Gustavo Serbia: Inside the industry, not a lot to be transparent. The I coming from—

Chad Sowash: Too much competition?

Gustavo Serbia: Number 1. Yeah. Nobody wants to talk with each other. Yeah. I come from hotels, and in hotels, everybody talks. Yeah. There’s groups, HR groups that will get together and everybody will share data, information, and you will learn from each other. Right. This is not the industry for that. So you have to figure out by watching and then looking at other industries that might be doing it well. Marriott is a company that I think regardless of the industry, you should pay attention to, so I pay attention to what their workflows look like.

Chad Sowash: You can tell he’s from the hotel world because he said Marriott instead of Marriott. Yes, he said Marriott. Yes. Good for you. Yeah.

Gustavo Serbia: Well, at least I say one word correctly because my accent sometimes it gets in the way.

Joel Cheesman: You say QR code and that’s all that is really really made me here. The QR code. All Joel cares about. The QR code. I got to learn about what’s going on. All right. You don’t want to know. But, ultimately, it would be nice to be able to do it within the industry, but it’s so defragmented. It’s very hard. It’s very hard to do it. So I just look at other industries and go who’s doing it well. Yeah. Yeah. You can always learn.

Chad Sowash: Well, I would say, and not to say that your industry’s backwards, but it is slower to adopt and it’s not sharing. Correct. So more than likely, what you’re going to find that’s more innovative is going to happen outside.

Gustavo Serbia: Correct. And that’s where I want to capitalize within the industry and say, "Okay. I’m not finding it within the industry." Mhmm. That’s okay. I can always find it somewhere else. It’s a matter of staying ahead of the curve.

Chad Sowash: Well, needless to say, Marriott is going to be here this week. Yes. You can hang out with them and. Yes. It’s been fun hanging out with you, Gustavo. Thank you. Appreciate it. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast hanging out with Gustavo Serbia, CHRO at the Hair Cuttery.

J

oel Cheesman: I’m Joel Cheesman. He’s Chad Sowash. This is the AI series and we out.