How Private Equity Can Win With AI-Driven Hiring | Greg Nieuwenhuys

Guest: Greg Nieuwenhuys – PE Operator & Founder, Generative AI Strategy
Host: Alex Rawlings – CEO, Raw Selection

🔍 Episode Summary:

Greg Nieuwenhuys returns to share a practical, step-by-step AI Playbook for hiring. From writing job descriptions to automating follow-ups, Greg breaks down how PE firms and portfolio companies can integrate generative AI into recruitment. Packed with tools, tactics, and workflow tips, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to hire faster, smarter, and with less bias.

🕒 Key Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro & Why AI in Hiring Matters
Speed, accuracy, and competitive advantage in recruitment.

01:25 – Greg’s Background
CEO in multiple PE-backed firms; now leads Generative AI Strategy.

05:17 – Where AI Improves Hiring
From job specs to onboarding, AI supports every stage.

06:43 – Quick Wins

• Write job descriptions in minutes using ChatGPT
• Use AI note-takers for transcripts & summaries (e.g. Fireflies)
• Screen CVs faster & more objectively

09:58 – Tools Greg Uses
ChatGPT, Fireflies, Perplexity, Zapier, N8n

12:43 – Building Automation Without a People Team
Use Zapier or N8n to connect email, CRM, and AI tools.

14:35 – Custom GPTs & Human Oversight
Create consistent outputs and reduce manual work—always review.

18:25 – Using AI for Better Decision-Making
Compile notes, CVs, and feedback to spot gaps & flag concerns.

19:21 – Interview Coaching & Advanced Tools

• Assessio: Team chemistry prediction
• FinalRound AI: Candidate coaching tool
• Ovida: Feedback on communication style

23:06 – Better Candidate Outreach
Use AI to create relevant, personalized messages.

25:02 – Improve Candidate Experience with Automation
AI-written follow-ups, regular updates, CRM reminders.

27:55 – Greg’s AI Stack
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Zapier/N8n, Fireflies, Perplexity

29:24 – AI Makes You a Better Human
Use tools like Ovida to improve interviewing skills & self-awareness.

💡 Takeaways:

• Start simple: job specs, summaries, feedback emails
• Don’t over-engineer—focus on solving real bottlenecks
• Train hiring managers with AI-generated insights
• Improve candidate experience with speed & clarity

📲 Connect with Greg:
LinkedIn – Greg Nieuwenhuys
🌐 www.thegregstar.com

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
🌐 Visit Raw Selection www.raw-selection.com

Looking to grow your team? Check out our Hiring Guides

for proven strategies, templates, and best practices to make smarter hires. 

Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Royal Selection Private Equity Podcast. A familiar name,  Greg Neuenhuis is back again. The AI expert, Private XU BAT PE Operator  is coming back to give us a playbook series.  If you are listening to this and you are driving,  stop driving or stop listening to this. Get a pen, get some paper. We're going to dive into the playbook of how you can adopt

00:29
artificial intelligence  into your hiring process.  So again, if you have not got pen and paper, you're going to need this. We're going to give you, or Greg's going to give you the playbook around hiring process and how you can improve things.  Let's dive in.  Greg, for those that haven't listened to your prior podcast on  AI, us a bit about yourself, Yeah. Thank you for having me again, Alex.  It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed the last conversation.

00:57
Kind of for those who have not heard the first episode around Gen.ai in private equity, my background is I've been,  over the last 15 years, CEO and chair of lots of consumer PE-backed businesses,  like the Kotlod Outdoor group, like Mammut, like Wodbike, and now NoDoor, which is sitting right behind me. It's the leading brand of darts and dartboards in the world. And two years ago, I became very passionate about Gen.ai.

01:25
and realized that kind of most business leaders and companies don't really understand how Genitive AI works and don't really understand how they can leverage the power of the technology to make their business proposition better, faster and cheaper. So I also kind of run a business called Genitive AI Strategy and we help people understand and implement Genitive AI into their business. So  we're going to focus today around  hiring, one of my obviously favorite topics, but talk to us about hiring in private equity.

01:55
Yeah, I mean,  obviously this is the biggest cliche you can make, but kind of it all comes down to the people.  Right. And I think what's specific around private equity is that there is, you know, time is money. There's a sense of urgency. And I'd say, especially when you're doing primary deals, the ability to attract talent and put them in quickly is going to make a huge difference in terms of being able to hit the value creation plan  and get early momentum.

02:24
And my sense is even over the last five years as kind of hitting the returns has become more challenging because of higher interest rates  and higher expectations. um There's been more emphasis on value creation through EBITDA improvements.  And that just puts, I think, a very big strain  on hiring talents.  And kind of my observation is that as the world has become more uncertain,

02:52
you know, because of inflation, because of geopolitics, but also because of AI. My sense is that the ability to hire, you know, experience is critical, right? You need to understand what's the value creation plan and therefore what are the key sets of experiences that you need to have in a business. But I think probably now even more important than that is the mindset and the attitude um and leaders who  can manage change.

03:20
who understand the DNA of the business and a fund or a team that understands what type of people will be successful in this type of organization has become even more important because there's just so much uncertainty in the world. I've been at NoDo since the beginning of the year and we're backed by Inflection and they've been incredibly helpful in helping me hire an executive team. going through it again, just realized it's the most important part of the Variation Journey.

03:50
often the most complex. And so I think leaders can use a bit of help and Genitive AI definitely can be your best friend there. You're just looking at that. You said inflection has helped you with the process so far. What has inflection done for you and what do you learn from working with them with regards to the build out of the team, the assessment of TALO? Yeah. So inflection is kind of a leading mid-market PE fund and kind of...

04:20
All the large and giga cap funds will have six significant value creation teams or, know, inflation caused the value acceleration team, but it's less common in the mid cap funds. And I think, know, Inflection has made a big investment here and they've supported us across many different areas, digital, but definitely also human capital.  And they have two people in their team who have just helped me connect with head hunters, screen candidates, get job descriptions over the line  and move much faster.

04:48
in recruitment and  I was the first hire. Basically I was on my own. There was no people team within the business. um And now I have an exec team in place, a CEO joining in October. There's no way I could have done these things without the support of Inflection. I think it's their experience. It's being connected to the right head-onters for the right  specific roles. And it's also their judgment and just having processes that are ready to  help decide and move fast.

05:17
It's made a big difference. So we're going to dive into leveraging AI and the hiring process. So we'll start in the beginning. Obviously you understand what you want to a degree. How can we use AI to start attracting, sourcing talent? Yeah. In my work, I still come across the majority of companies who started to have a few piloting in there.

05:44
They might have a child's LGBT license or Gemini or co-pilot, which inevitably people are very disappointed about. And I understand why, because it's not grace. um But  yeah, it's  most businesses still really don't understand what generative AI is and therefore how they leverage it. And I think it's the same in recruitment. kind of the way I look at it is, you if you kind of look at recruiting people, you kind of think of first, what type of candidate do we need? How are we going to source and find them? Then what is the screening?

06:14
in the interviewing and then how do we assess and compare them and then kind of what does the offer and the onboarding look like. And across all of those phases, Genitive AI can be extremely helpful. And I'd say probably the easiest way to think about it is to kind of divide up  the AI use cases and things that are really easy to do tomorrow.  And then things that are a bit more complicated  that require workflow automation and connecting to your CRM that are very valuable.

06:43
but maybe not the place to start. And I think, you know, some of the easy wins, for example, is, you know, talk about creating a good job description. I've even had search firms that I've worked with, you know, that'll take a week or two to turn around a job description. I mean, if I'm on a call and I have an AI note taker and I have an IM of a business, I can turn around a job description, which is 90 % good in five minutes. And I'll take 10 more minutes and it'll be 98 % good.

07:11
Right.  And especially if you have a database of lots of good job descriptions in your business, that job can be done much faster and obviously much cheaper. But I think here, the essence is much faster. It'll just help you go to market much faster.  think another one,  I mean, on all my calls, I have an AI note taker, which now more and more people have. But I think even for me, when I've interviewed candidates, I'll then go back and upload the transcript of each meeting.

07:39
And I'll have AI taking the job description and help it turn into kind of what are the top five criteria for this role. um And I'll use it in the screening process to look at the CVs and say, okay, how do they compare and how would you rate them across those five things? You know, the search firm will typically do this, but I like to do it myself as well. But then I'll also put the transcript of the interviews through. um And there is so much information there uh that is very, you know, I can't memorize all of it.

08:09
Um,  and it kind of helps me take a bias out of the conversation. Sometimes you just have a very strong click. And, here you can kind of really put all the elements back and compare. Um, and you can focus to be honest, much better on the candidate because you know, someone else is taking notes. Um, there's also simple stuff like scheduling, you know, sometimes, you know, the calendar is challenging and AI can help very, very effectively as scheduling interviews and you know, candidate summaries and reports also.

08:38
is very easy and these use cases are typically you have access to Chai GPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever it is.  That's enough  to get these unlocked if your people understand and know how to use AI. And that's the big if is in most companies that still  people use it as a search engine. They don't really know  how to prompt, how to inject context. And that's not very difficult, but you just need to learn it.  But once you can do that, it's very easy.

09:07
you a few lines is it licensed at 25 quid an hour  per month, sorry.  Um, not per hour. And, and you can do these things and they will help you get better job descriptions, less bias in the interviews, you know, much more depth after the interviews in reviewing and kind of also when you're going to case study, looking back and saying, you know, what does Canada exactly say and what are the, the

09:31
the differences between what the candidates  made  with different people in interview process. mean, there's so much more depth you can go into that is basically a human mind cannot do. So those are kind of the really easy to unlock use cases, which I think  most search firms are using now. um But my sense is that in portfolio companies,  most of the HR teams are still not doing this.

09:58
I can only say, you know, it's there, it's not difficult. Get your talent team on board, get your, and get them to start doing this. So just to kind of pull some tools out, because there's lots of different AI note takers. Which one are you using and do you recommend to save everybody having to go through and trial them all? Yeah. I mean, I mean, there's loads. mean, there's the one that you're using on Zoom, you know, which is pretty good. But I wouldn't call it kind of, you know, best in class. Microsoft Teams, so the co-pilot is pretty good.

10:27
That's actually one of the few things that Copilot is kind of decent at. I use Firefly's AI and it's very good, but I think the important is to get a transcript of the meeting. Then you have the data. And then I often end up using ChaiGBT to summarize. And the next step after these easy use cases is building workflows. And I have workflows where...

10:57
After a conversation, there's automatically an AI going to update the CRM and say who I've spoken to. It'll put the key insights of the conversation and it'll automatically write a follow-up email to thank someone for the conversation and say, know, this and this was really exciting and these are the next steps, blah, blah, blah. And those workflow automations are not difficult to build.

11:20
But obviously, you know, on repetitive tasks, and especially if you're a recruiter and you have all these interviews, they can save you so much time. And candidates often feel unloved.  and like things are, you know, communication is slow. That's an easy way.  So how are you, um so we've got, you know, when we talk about AI as well, of like the blend between AI and not AI, but  we have a lot of, so if we speak to a candidate on the system, there's then

11:48
loads of automation that goes to the background. So what we'll do is we'll click something like submit to the client and then this will say, hey, you're going to this company, share new profiles, this role's on hold, this role has been canceled, this is proceeding to this or whatever. but I appreciate not every firm's going to have like that kind of level of sophistication through CRM because their whole business model isn't built on it, albeit short-corner every business is a recruiting business.

12:13
and a media company, if you want to agree,  in today's world, in my opinion.  So what are you specifically doing there, being the fact that you're not, as an executive search firm and you're running a portfolio company, to kind of build some of these things that then these triggers happen to make things simple? And what do you use to build these things? Yes. Yeah, it's a very good question. mean, Node.org is a good example because there was no people function in Node.org. Basically all the hiring was done by the hiring managers.

12:43
And therefore no real processes. Everyone just did it as they thought it was and okay, they've hired lots of great people.  But as you ramp up, look up to ramp up the growth, you need to professionalize this and centralize it and put systems in place and processes in place. And as you say, I think the generative AI bit  of just having a note taker and having child GPT write double descriptions is really easy. That's the first step. People should kind of walk before they run. The next step is to kind of look at automations and you know, every business will have

13:12
some type of CRM system, they might have a talent acquisition system.  And it is nowadays very easy to connect workflows where there's basically automation that talks that kind of links the different tools together. And tools like Zapier or N8n are very powerful doing this. And if you understand your process as well, there's so much value you can get by combining generative AI with automation. m But it's not the place to start. Right. And I think that's often...

13:40
The challenge we see is people look at kind of complicated software solutions to try and solve a problem. Whereas actually there is so much value to be unlocked by Genitivi across, you know, basically any task in recruitment or  any task in marketing and sales or whatever. And do that first before you start to invest in automation and that kind of thing. think reading into it now is kind of not going...

14:06
Hey, I've just downloaded ChatGBT and then I'm going to go straight in, never use it and start building my own custom GPTs  and things like that. know custom GPTs aren't too far away  from  using it, but it's kind  of edging your way through and beginning to build that competence level rather than try that.  the world immediately. Yeah, think actually,  custom GPTs is probably a good example. think that would probably still fall in my first category of easy quick wins because  all it takes is you need to understand a little bit about prompting.

14:35
And you can create a custom GPT in five minutes.  And if you're in the talent team, you you definitely need a GPT to create job descriptions, right? It'll just look at, you know, what are the last 10 job descriptions we have? You upload those and give specific instructions. And then you also give instructions to ask whoever's feeding it in to ask questions that have not come out of the brief, just like any human would do is say, look, I understand this, but what about all these things? And then  build a job description, right? Those things are easy.

15:04
I think the next step for me is when you kind of need to start spending money and start spending time from the IT team to make connectors. And that's the mistake is then people actually push this off to INC and say, this is a technology challenge. Whereas in reality, it's a people challenge where recruiters and investors and anyone just needs to start using AI to write emails, to transcribe meetings, to write reports, to translate, to do whatever. Yeah. I'll just let you make an error there because we've got

15:34
like custom GPTs for all of our searches that come into the business.  it,  and it all gets laid out exactly the same presented to the client builds out that.  and, uh, not just thinking actually, we should probably release this as information of how here's all the template is out here. So if you are listening to this,  um, that there will be, if you go to raw selection website, go onto the resources on there, there will be an example of, of what we have internally and you'll be able to download the exact prompt that we use.

16:02
And equally the template that we use on there as well.  So we'll get that uh added in. So I appreciate custom GPTs. I've played around with it a lot.  But as Greg will tell you, LLMs are a nightmare for just deciding one day just to do something slightly different.  So human input and stringent  is incredibly important because it will start doing the wrong thing. And we find that one in 10, it'll just make a slight mistake. So you've always just got to keep going back and changing it.

16:31
Exactly. mean, that's the part is kind of there needs to be human in the loop. Always. It's, it's kind of always an interaction between the human and the AI. The human has to be in control. The human gives the instruction. The human provides feedback. This is good. Change this. And the human validates, right? Because the human is accountable. And that's because the LLMs are a bit of a black box and they can do amazing things. People think to like, whatever, this thing is so much smarter than I am. I'm sure it's fine. And that's not the way the world works.

17:00
So they'll kind of think about it as an intern and you also, you don't send the work to an intern straight to the CEO. You always check it first.  And I think people would be very surprised if you do this simple thing is, you know, you're a private equity investor. You upload the IN of the business. You have a 30 minute call about what the CEO role is. You have a note taker on it. You upload that into the GPT that creates um job descriptions, which has two or three jobs that have been created before. The job description will be nearly there.

17:30
And you'll have it five minutes after your call. It'll be very good. All right. That's how simple it is. Yeah. Yeah. The, uh, certainly is.  the, another way that we've been, uh, using it, just talking about your like transcript pulls and things like that. What we've been doing is we've been pulling and seeing if you'll, you can add to this, but,  uh, so what, post the conversation, what we'll do is recently we've got an individual we're exploring for coming into the business. And I was just kind of formulating thoughts and thinking about it.

17:58
Doing what we all do, which is second guessing ourselves, worrying about the hire. Are they right? I'm going to make a mistake. Have I missed a flag? Have I covered everything? Do I know if they're strong enough here? So I'm like prolific note taker during kind of phone interviews and person interviews. I actually don't, I used to write everything down. I don't do that anymore in interviews. I will literally just take my laptop in because I can copy and paste everything in nice and simply. And I will actually pull that all together.

18:25
I'll put their resume, I'll put all of my notes, I'll put all of any colleagues notes that have been created, and I'll put that into just a simple chat in GPT. And I would just ask it, based on, and we've got some custom GPTs in there that kind of have flags both for our clients and internally. And that will say, you're missing this, have you explored this? There's been no discussion around X. This is in your scorecard and it's not been reviewed. So do you guys use things, you mentioned the transcripts and things.

18:53
Is there anything you would add on top of  that with regards to the use of the notes that have been taken from interviews, the discussion points that have been had, et cetera? Yeah.  I mean, I think in general, think a trick that I think many businesses miss and probably especially in a private equity context where there's significant growth and there's lots of hiring required is to actually train the hiring managers to interview. So many people don't really, really don't know how to interview. um

19:21
Right. And so you can get a lot of feedback by these transcripts, by just looking at people interview  and you give people an hour training on how to interview and what mistakes not to make and how to do it. It'll, it'll have a huge difference. And then you can just provide easy feedback using those transcripts, for example. But there's also some kind of more complicated, well, I say complicated, more advanced use cases. There's a tool called a assessio, which basically what they do  is they'll have candidates take

19:50
25 minute questionnaire.  Um, and, it's kind of very diverse and based on that, and then all, all the data that you just required, the interview transcripts from all the different conversations. And it'll basically kind of give you a prediction of how that individual will perform in the team chemistry of the business. And, you know, fit is always something that people think a lot about and you try to feel that it's quite difficult to make it very tangible. Um, and I'm not saying.

20:21
The outcome of that process gives you the exact answer, but I think it gives you a lot of extra color and depth that either you're not getting today or you have to pay a huge amount of money to an external assessment company to get. um that's one. mean, and another one, another tool I'd mentioned, which is just for the awareness of people on this call. You may have heard of this Alex is called final round AI. Have you heard of that? It's called what? Final round AI.

20:51
Final round day, I've not heard This is basically for candidates. And what it does is  I'm interviewing for  a role as a consultant at  Role Selection.  I have the job description, I have my CV,  and it's going to help me prepare all the questions you're going to ask me. But then it's also going to sit there live during the interview. And every time you ask a question, based on all that context that it has, it's going to provide me a verbatim of the answer I should be giving. um

21:21
And clearly that's not always going to be right, but in  quite technical rules, um it  provides some kind of, it's a huge advance. So I think for me, the takeaway here, think in general, in general of Genitiv AI is there is a premium to human face-to-face interaction. Sometimes, you know, deep fakes, all of that is increasing. I could be sitting here, this could be an avatar version of myself. uh So I think there is value definitely in kind of face-to-face interviews.

21:50
em Anything else with regards to either the interview process, the assessment of talent that you would recommend for AI usage?

22:02
I think the em

22:06
I mean,  I think the kind of  the phase of scanning candidates, I think that's always, it can take companies  and search firms quite a long time. And I think it depends whether you have good data. If you have good data and a good database, like I'm sure you do Alex,  AI can  hugely accelerate that process and kind of shifting through thousands of CVEs based on key criteria in the brief.

22:36
and bringing those CVs immediately to life. You can also then do personalized outreach. you know, outreach is kind of a very labor intensive task.  And LinkedIn, and, I get approached every week by search firms and I don't often respond to them, but the quality of the outreach I get is often very poor. And if I get a short,  but relevant outreach that kind of sparks my interest, I much more like to click through and think, okay, you know, I might take the call. um So I think those are also kind of in that phase of just kind of

23:06
Not only shifting through, through lots of data to screen, but also personalised outreach. Um, and by responding faster, which typically kind of really helps the candidate experience or some, some other use cases that are not very difficult to implement, but, can have quite a lot of value. What do you, um, so we've again, of course, we've got our own outreach process and different bits, but thinking about if you've got a, you may not have a talent person in, uh, in, I, as I'm talking to our listeners here.

23:34
Yeah, they're in your private equity firm or in your portfolio companies  that's doing outreach. What do you use for kind of cold outreach and for bringing some automation around some of that or  is that predominantly manual? No, I mean, so again, I would probably  use the combination of different workflow automation tools like N8n or Zapier  with Chars GPT. you  know, there's a loop which we use. I mean, there's lots of different tools.

24:04
that are available. Some are pretty good. Some are not as good.  think  that does require a bit of due diligence to kind of figure out which tools are best. Again, you know, the easy thing is, know, uh ask Chagy P.T., go and do deep research, get an overview of the tools, dive a bit deeper. You know, all these tasks should be done AI first, The AI is going to be so much faster doing that research for you and together with you, right? Not instead of you.

24:34
And talking about the kind of nicely lances into kind of candidate experience side of things. Trying to bring AI into it bring that. I've got to, which eventually I will actually release something talking about for too long. need to get, I finished a book. just need to sort out this. Getting it distributed and everything else, but I told them about the lack of communication, the lack of updates. know, just even just that keeping that flow. What's...

25:02
What else can we use from an AI perspective to increase and improve that candidate experience, that candidate nurture, you know, and hoping to increase the level that they choose our platform, our private equity firm, rather than somebody else's. Yeah, I think, I think it's a, it's a very good question. And I speak from a personal experience and a lot of the processes I've been involved in, um, but also kind of a lot of feedback that I hear from other people is that as a candidate, often it can be quite slow.

25:31
level of feedback that you get and also  the quality of the feedback you get around, know, what are they like about me and what are the points of interest? Often it's quite shallow and I think there's a lot to be learned. So I think both in terms of speed and quality of feedback,  AI can be very powerful and it can be as simple as, you know, there's a small automation, which basically you and I on the call, Alex, my note taker is then going to send  a message to ITPT.

26:01
It's going to write a summary of the meeting and straight after the call is going to thank you Alex. It was a really good call. You know, these are the key things that we discussed and we're excited about the rule. are the next steps and I'll be back in touch with you 10 days from now. Then there's a message that goes to the CRM and says, okay, 10 days from now, we need to send Alex a message. And either I'm going to then input by voice, by speaking to the AI for one minute saying, okay.

26:26
You know, the update to Alex says, know, we're still meeting candidates. We're not quite ready yet, but you know, let's schedule a call for the end of next week. Right. These things can be pretty easily automated. And if you think around kind of how easy that is and how much of that doesn't happen currently, think it's a bit, it's an opportunity. Well, I know you actually have that. I this is the last time we did our podcast and I got an email pretty much immediately. And I think you actually, well, you act fat. You actually wrote the email as we were, we were on the, on the session as in churners.

26:56
how it's been and whatever else live. So if you haven't listened to that, go back and take action because that was more tactical across the business, across kind of inbox clearing and all sorts of different bits. but we didn't dive into too much on the how. So you've obviously got, you mentioned ChatGBT, we've got the AI note taker. What are you doing using Zapier to communicate between all three and then obviously into the inbox or how are you playing that? Yeah. I think kind of step one is really is use ChatGBT

27:25
or Gemini or cloud. think those are kind of the top three, you know, those who have co-pilots better than nothing, but it's not very good.  Sorry, Microsoft. m And then an AI note taker, that's critical.  Perplexity is awesome for search and research. m And then I think the next step is when you're looking at automation, where basically you want to connect your AI note taker to your Outlook and your CRM, for example, that's the example I just gave you, then

27:55
A tool like Zapier is really easy to use or N8n. It's a bit more advanced, a little bit more technical,  but very robust. Those are good. And typically in every business, we have a few people who are quite technical, very curious and happy to experiment with these things. It's not that difficult. How else can we use AI, Greg, for hiring a process? Any other tips and tricks you haven't shared with us? Well, I think the general message is, know, talent is...

28:24
The most important part of the value creation plan, speed is of essence. And I think if GenAI does anything, it's speed. And basically you can get an answer within three minutes. So rather than giving all the answers here, would be kind of think around in your hiring process, in your business, what are the things that are currently taking you a lot of time? What are the current bottlenecks in your process, whether it's  in the people team or the hiring managers?  And  think of easy ways that Gentilver is going to take that away and just do it much faster.

28:53
And simple things like, know, GPTs, note takers will make a big difference. that'd be my main takeaway is don't try to invest loads of money in workflows.  initially, know, very welcome to that, but start with the easy things first and think around what are the current bottlenecks in your process? And I hear this is people, but also the hiring managers, you know, and I said, quality of interviewing is one of them. know, AI can help you there. And maybe I just as another example, there's...

29:24
There's a tool called Ovida,  O-V-I-D-A.  I mean, that's a fantastic tool. Basically what it does  is  when you are in a conversation  on VC, it observes your body language. It observes your use of vocabulary.  It observes your tonality and it observes whether you're asking open or closed questions and it gives you feedback. So actually what it does is the AI  makes you a better human.

29:54
because it gives you very powerful feedback around how you are performing in a conversation and whether you're listening and who's speaking more than the other and how many times you interrupted the person. You asked  10 questions, but seven of them were closed questions rather than open questions. When the theme of change came up,  you crossed your arms twice. It's like,  oh, wow.  If we had  this coach that was always sitting next to us when we interviewed and said,

30:22
Hey, that was great, but you could do this better. I that's, that's, you know, I don't know how to quantify that, but obviously it's, it's quite fascinating that we can also create better humans thanks to AI and it's not doing the opposite. Absolutely. And that was O-Z-I-D-A. I've not heard of that  one. Yeah. Um, I'll check it out. even, even Fireflies will, will tell me like  between, between us, how many words per minute do I speak? It's quite high. I'm a fast speaker.

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How much percent of the time have I been speaking? What was the kind of, when was the tone of the conversation positive, neutral or negative? And I can tickle a negative. It'll show which parts of the conversation. So there's even that there's a lot of information that I think many humans will not be aware of when they have a conversation. So it can also help kind of uncover the unknown.  that. Kind of Jahari's window, getting that, this piece, what you don't know about yourself, how you communicate and how you portray and bringing that into a...

31:21
into that self-awareness piece. think that's that. I've got a whole page of notes here of stuff that I'm going to be actioning myself. So a selfish podcast as well as  sharing with you guys, but I'm hoping everybody listening's literally dived into that as well.  So Greg, if anybody  hasn't heard the first podcast, back, listen to that in addition as well. Anybody that hasn't  got your details or reach out, how best do they get in touch with you? Yeah. I mean, I'm active on LinkedIn, so find me there, Greg Newenhouse.

31:50
Um,  and you can also visit my website. It's the Greg star.com.  Um, those are probably the easiest ways and feel free to send me an email.  You'll find the details on my website. I look forward to hearing from you. Perfect. Well, thank you very much for coming back for, for round two. Um, what I love about this podcast, Greg, that we've had together as you've given us actionable insights, we've been able to come in, go away and actually improve things.  Um, and if you, if nobody listening has improved anything I have.

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significantly, even just with the notes I've taken and the actions we're going to get from this. So thank you very much, Greg, for coming on again and spending your time  and really appreciate it  for you coming onto  the podcast. My pleasure, Alex. I enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing what you do with it. Absolutely. And  as always, guys, thank you very much for tuning in yet again to the Private Ethnography podcast. We are doing a bit of a revamp and a bit of  reinvigoration of this. So there's going to be different questions. We're going to be focused on tips, tricks.

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information that you can take away in more detail from the Private Equity Podcast to make this industry better, to make you and your firm and your portfolio companies continue on the  value creation journey. But Greg, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Till the next time, keep smashing it and thank you very much for listening.