00:00 Ashley
A moment ago, Handshake, which touts itself as the career network for the AI economy, announced the roll out of a new app to help job seekers reach the finish line. Joining me now is John Stoll, chief operating officer and president of Handshake. John, welcome to NYC Live and congratulations.
00:24 John Stoll
Hi, Ashley. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
00:27 Ashley
So, what are you launching and who does it involve?
00:30 John Stoll
Yeah, great. Uh, thanks. AI Skill Studio is a place where anyone anywhere can build the practical AI skills they need to move their career forward. We’ve partnered with some of the most innovative uh AI companies from Open AI, Google, Vercel, Figma, Notion, Clay, Lovable, Replit, Slack, uh by Salesforce and beyond to build projects, 10 to 45 minute projects where you can actually use the real tools to build real projects you can share. Could be a website, could be a an app, could be a spreadsheet, could be a series of uh outreach sequences if you’re a salesperson, for AI for sales, AI for marketing, AI for education, really AI skills for any career going forward. and we’re excited to launch it now to the 30 million students, young professionals on handshake and also open it up to anybody around the world uh to log on and join handshake.com.
01:07 Ashley
And why now? And why is this such an important initiative?
01:13 John Stoll
Well, I think, you know, the why now is is pretty much in every headline or every conversation certainly that I have with whether you’re talking to young people, whether you’re talking to young professionals, to parents, uh, to educators, to employers, is there’s, you know, massive change in the market. AI is an incredible technology that’s bringing, uh, you know, massive new gains in productivity. Uh I think all of us are using it uh pretty much every day for a wide range whether it’s a personal agent or a chatbot or agents that can, uh, you know, take over a number of tools at your at your company, your job.
01:50 John Stoll
At the same time, that amount of change and the speed of change creates a lot of anxiety and creates a lot of fear and it does create a lot of need for transition. You know, as new jobs evolve and as the jobs yourself are working change, people need new skills. And particularly given the speed of change, we want to make sure that the people at handshake and beyond are able to access really easy tools and projects they can do to move their job forward. Uh and to make it easy to make it uh valuable, to make it something you can share and build with so that um it’s fun and engaging and also makes it really practical and useful for you going forward.
02:08 Ashley
So, how does it work?
02:11 John Stoll
Yeah, so basically, when you log on a handshake and whether you’re a student today, a professional, an alumni, you yourself actually could could log on to join handshake.com and use it right now. Um, you open up and you have uh uh the tools, the access, the tokens you need, either all of our partners have uh have brought forward and made it free for people to use uh to build these projects. And you’re either getting uh instructions right now to an AI skill instructor who’s walking you through the steps you need to build something real. So this could be something like if you’re doing AI for sales, a real practical skill is having the ability to build a CRM to have all of your contacts and your lead lists. People don’t know how to do that, but you can actually do that through notion. And so we have a very specific guide and and that gives you feedback. As you’re building that, you’ll get feedback on what’s working, what’s not. Uh you’ll be asked questions about how to interpret AI and making sure you have the right answers and not just following blindly uh the outputs you’re getting, and then you build something.
03:22 John Stoll
You share it on handshake.com in our AI showcase. It attaches to your profile, so a million employers can have access to it and use it. You can share it out to anybody uh and put it on LinkedIn, put it on uh email, put it on your personal website and beyond. So it’s really the ability to sort of build something, to share it, to use that sharing to get a job or to move you forward in your career, and then to keep growing uh as you go forward.
03:52 Ashley
And in terms of AI skills, what are employers most interested in knowing about job seekers?
04:03 John Stoll
Good question. and to be honest, a lot of employers ask us the same question. They say, look, we know we need to have a more AI skilled uh uh, you know, employer base, employee base, but what do we need to do? What are the specific skills we need? We hear the same thing from universities often and say, look, I want to train my students to be more AI ready and what do we need to do there? So we really partnered with close with employers, with uh our partners on content partners and universities. And then we built what’s called our AI capabilities framework. We’re actually rolling that out even more in depth next week, but the fundamentals are that you really want to progress along the ability to use AI, to then use AI to build things for yourself and for your team, and then to automate that so it can be used consistently across yourself or your team going forward. And then fundamentally on the bottom of that, you really want a foundation of skills that anybody needs.
04:55 John Stoll
That’s connection and relationship building. That’s critical thinking. uh and that’s the ability to really make sense of all this and and have human agency going forward. So, uh when we think about that, we then apply that framework to every career track from sales to engineering, product management. So it really depends on the function you have and that’s why it’s really important. It’s not just AI for AI’s sake, it’s about applying AI to do real work, to do um, you know, actual tasks in your job that can make you a more productive employee, that can make you a better entrepreneur, that can be make you a better leader. So there’s some consistency in skills about using, building and automating, and then there’s a lot of depth around what that means, you know, per job and per role from being a journalist to being a teacher, to being a salesperson.
05:46 Ashley
All right, thank you. John Stoll, Chief operating Officer and President of Handshake for joining us.
05:54 John Stoll
Thank you, Ashley. Appreciate it.