Episode #291:
Paul Sial, Chief Marketing Officer at AbroadWorks Inc., discusses how AI is fundamentally reshaping workforce strategy, hiring, and organizational growth. He explains why companies must rethink talent acquisition, global hiring, adaptability, and productivity in a rapidly evolving market. Paul also explores the growing importance of AI proficiency, human creativity, and resilient leadership in building competitive advantages. His insights reveal how organizations can scale faster by combining technology with highly engaged global talent.
“You still need great people to be successful, and they really need to be passionate about what they’re doing because success does not come without those two things.” – Paul Sial
In this episode, Paul highlights why AI is changing far more than productivity alone. He explains how organizations must rethink hiring, adaptability, and global talent strategies while still prioritizing passionate, highly engaged people. This conversation offers valuable insights for C-suite leaders looking to build resilient teams, scale smarter, and create lasting competitive advantages in an AI-driven business environment.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspective Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today we’ve got a super interesting conversation, and one that I would say you would not quite expect. We are talking here with Paul Sial. And Paul, you are the Chief Marketing Officer at AbroadWorks, and you play in the global talent industry.
[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: And I’m going to let you explain a little bit more about that. But what we’re going to be talking about today is something that all of us, as CMOs, CEOs, CROs, everybody, need to be thinking about, which is how we are rethinking human capital, especially in the AI world, right? Because AI is going to disrupt everything.
[00:00:42] Steve MacDonald: And it is, and it has a massive impact. And we talked about this just a few minutes ago. PE companies and VCs invest in the team first, right? And the idea second. I think that is the importance, that is the level of importance, of the conversation we are going to have here.
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: I would love to just sprinkle a couple of things in about your background and let you take it from there. You’ve been inside multiple, like three different unicorns. That is phenomenal. It is like making it to the Super Bowl three different times and winning. You are also a former IBMer.
[00:01:15] Steve MacDonald: You are a cancer survivor, and you and your wife have a toddler running around the house, and that was difficult to get to. So you are somebody who is going to persevere as well. I would love to hear your version of your background before we dig in here.
[00:01:31] Paul Sial: Well, sure. Thank you for having me, Steve.
[00:01:33] Paul Sial: It is a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, you are absolutely right. I have been fortunate enough to be part of three unicorns here in North America, fast-growing SaaS organizations. I am a former IBM-er. You know, I grew up kind of thinking, “If I ever make it to IBM, I will just stick it out.
[00:01:50] Paul Sial: I will be there for 20 years and get a pension.” But life had a different story for me. And you are right, my wife and I, you know, we went through six IVF cycles to have this little toddler because I am a former cancer survivor. I had lymphoma in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. So yeah, I know a little bit about persevering through obstacles. And yeah, I think every organization needs to be resilient, especially in the times we’re in. And so I look forward to talking more about that.
[00:02:21] Steve MacDonald: So I want to kind of start where I teased in the beginning here, you know, like how the teams are so important. I think of it this way, right? You hear on the news all the time, what are the prediction markets saying?
[00:02:33] Steve MacDonald: It is because of where people are putting their money, right? When you vote with your money, it has a different level of significance, right? Yeah. And so these PE and VC firms are voting with their money on how to create those unicorns. And you mentioned a conversation that you had one time with a big-time investor, you know, a very experienced investor.
[00:02:54] Steve MacDonald: And I would love to just start with the advice he gave you.
[00:03:00] Paul Sial: Yeah. Steve, let me start off by saying, yeah, I really love helping organizations grow and, you know, getting involved and seeing them scale because I think once you do that, you really want to do it again. It is exciting. It is such an accomplishment.
[00:03:13] Paul Sial: And I vividly recall, you know, we were at a company event, and I had the opportunity to stand beside this lawyer and investor that was very successful. He had invested in several unicorns, some well-known companies that everyone here would probably know. And anecdotally, he was just telling me, you know, the secret to success with these organizations is getting a small group of people to start off with that are very smart, but that are highly engaged with the business.
[00:03:44] Paul Sial: And when he said that, I thought back to our company at the time and realized, yeah, that was in fact the case, right? People that are smart and thinking twenty-four seven about the business, how they can help, how they can make improvements. And so human capital is still important despite, you know, some of the things we talk about today.
[00:04:06] Paul Sial: At the end of the day, you need great people to be successful, and they really need to be passionate about what they are doing. And so I do not think success comes without those two things, really.
[00:04:18] Steve MacDonald: So that just puts a major spotlight right on hiring, right, and forming these teams. And, you know, we know high-performance teams create high-performance companies.
[00:04:28] Steve MacDonald: But the shifts in the workforce and what AI is doing, and the need to rethink assumptions about workforce management and hiring that we had before, that we should be rethinking now. Take us through your thoughts on the rethinking we now need to do.
[00:04:49] Paul Sial: Yeah. It is really an interesting time. And, you know, in my current role at AbroadWorks, where we help primarily North American companies find, manage, and bring on board talent in other parts of the world, we are really at the forefront of seeing some of these changes.
[00:05:05] Paul Sial: And notably, you can see even with what is happening with some of the layoffs in the market, I think a lot of organizations are reluctant or frozen on hiring because they are trying to really figure out what they can do with their existing team, flanked with AI, right? And we do not really know that, right?
[00:05:27] Paul Sial: Every day, there is something new coming out, and some new functionality that we are trying to incorporate. The world is moving very quickly. So, as a leader, you are, I think, in a position, because human capital is your biggest expense in most cases, to really try to wait and understand, “Hey, what is it going to look like in six months?
[00:05:50] Paul Sial: What is it going to look like, and what is my team going to look like? What are they going to be able to achieve with the tools that are emerging so quickly?” This is a good time to discuss this, and we’re seeing some of those changes in the hires we make.
[00:06:06] Paul Sial: And, you know, the roles that we look at, the types of people that we are hiring, they are different than what they were just even a few months ago. And so that change is accelerating very, very fast, and we kind of have to account for much different things than we did even just a year ago, right?
[00:06:21] Paul Sial: And so, yeah, I think there is a lot to talk about there.
[00:06:26] Steve MacDonald: So, tell me how that makes you think differently, not necessarily as the CMO at a company that is a global workforce management company, but as a CMO, CMO of a SaaS company.
[00:06:41] Paul Sial: I go back maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I saw a commercial, and it was great. It was animated. It looked, you know, think of Nike, you know, the type of ads that they put out, right? Like emotion. I spoke with our team and asked video agencies, “How much would this video cost to make?”
[00:07:05] Paul Sial: Now, we were lean, you know, we were about 20 people. We did not have a lot of money. And every production company I went to told me that video cost eighty to one hundred thousand dollars to make. And I said, “There is no way, you know, we could afford that.” It always sat with me.
[00:07:22] Paul Sial: And so today I have someone who is in another part of the world, where the cost of living is much lower, and no formal education, but he is a tinkerer, right? He works with AI. He is always messaging me about the latest AI models and avatars coming out.
[00:07:42] Paul Sial: And I showed him the video last week, or a couple of weeks ago, and I mean, he can do that video in a week for four hundred dollars, right? So just think about that, right? That is a major change. Last year, as a CMO, you were always thinking about how do you get more videos.
[00:08:01] Paul Sial: You know, people love consuming videos, as we all know, and then just move much more to that format. So that is one example. But I was looking at how do I get more videos out, lots of videos. And, you know, I was interviewing agencies, and they were going to say, “The traditional agencies.” Even last year, it was just traditional agencies.
[00:08:18] Paul Sial: And, you know, they wanted to put me on a retainer, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars a month, fifty thousand on occasion. And, you know, I found this guy now, and he makes 25,000 dollars a year and can produce 2 videos a week.
[00:08:34] Paul Sial: So what a change, right? And even getting a case study done, right? It used to take a team. It used to involve a writer. We were interviewing someone, and we would have to talk to the customer success team. Can we get an interview with this CEO? We wait two months out, send them a list of questions, get the recording back, plug it into an AI model, add my branding, and I have a case study in ten minutes.
[00:09:00] Paul Sial: Now, I have got to tinker with it and massage it a little bit, but wow, what a difference, right? So now I think the expectation is, at least from that lens, that of a CMO. But I think every department, you have got to do more, right? Now, the expectation, the bar has just gotten higher. And so the expectation is we are probably going to see a flurry of content that’s being released all the time, even more than we see right now.
[00:09:26] Paul Sial: And how do you then account for that? Now, even with the individual that I’ve hired, and I just go back to him as an example, he’s still a great storyteller at his core. He is a great storyteller. So he’s able to take that tool and tell stories with it. But that’s still irreplaceable. Like when I asked him about this last week, “Can you use one of the AI solutions to give you the story?” And he’s like, “It still gives you a generic story. I still need to massage it or change it or give my interpretation of it because it can’t go out of the bounds of what’s already been created.”
[00:10:04] Paul Sial: And so there’s still something there about human beings in that process, but the way that you go to market with those types of content, or everything that you’re doing, is different, right? And the productivity that you’re able to achieve is changing in a really meaningful way. So yeah, I thought that was an interesting example of what we’re experiencing.
[00:10:29] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. So if you apply it broadly to the CMO role. The CMO role can, in many companies, be seen as running one of the largest cost centers in the business, right? And cost matters.
[00:10:47] Steve MacDonald: Cost matters a lot. We don’t want to be seen as just the lead generation guys, right? Throwing MQLs over the wall and seeing if anything sticks. So we have to do more with less. We have to make the paid media that we put out into the marketplace work harder, so the content we create has to be better and better and better.
[00:11:15] Steve MacDonald: And short-form interactive video content is where it’s all at today. So I understand the direction you’re going. That, to me, changes the dynamic, right? At the end of the day, we sit in, and I was a CMO for a long time, we’re short for tenure in the C-suite as an industry, right?
[00:11:36] Steve MacDonald: You know, we’re the bottom of the barrel, right? And we also need to use AI not just to be more efficient, but how does it make us smarter? How does it help us accomplish the challenges, the pain points that we have as an organization, but we have running our departments? Now, the same thing, the same lens, right?
[00:11:58] Steve MacDonald: When we’re looking at the CRO or the CFO, it’s all about doing our roles better, right? Engaging better, right? Spending more time, like you talked about at the very beginning. So I’d just love to take that for a moment and kind of put it on the side, because finding the right people to put into that environment that are going to be able to take advantage of AI in the way that you’ve just been talking about, that’s a whole new skill set, right?
[00:12:33] Steve MacDonald: I want you to talk, but I interviewed the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, and he had just outsourced the majority of his marketing department to Accenture. And the big reason why is he said, “Well, I need developers and I need prompt engineers. I need things that I’ve never overseen before,” right?
[00:12:49] Steve MacDonald: “I need skill sets that I haven’t traditionally had in order to do what I need to be able to do.” So how does this never-ending change in requirements and skill sets seem like an upheaval that it’s hard for us, like I know for me, it was hard to then decide, well, how do I even know what skill sets do I really need?
[00:13:13] Paul Sial: Yeah, it’s incredibly challenging. I think they used to say, even a few years ago, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners are part of the Revenue Pavilion, Revenue Collective, which was a peer-to-peer network where you could share, because they would say that by the time the textbook is printed, it’s already out of date.
[00:13:32] Paul Sial: So now there is no textbook. There’s no schooling. I mean, I think I did a program at MIT a few years ago on digital marketing analytics. That was 2023, and what I learned in that program is obsolete now. So how do you find it, right?
[00:13:52] Paul Sial: Because you look at someone’s resume, there’s no program that says AI. And even if it did, by the time they graduated, whatever they learned would already be outdated. I can speak for us as an organization. We are getting a lot more requests around roles that we’ve never had to source before, one of which is AI prompt engineer, and that comes up really often, right? As you can imagine, lots of companies are moving in that direction.
[00:14:04] Paul Sial: Now, we struggle to find those folks, right? And even though that’s our business, finding these individuals, we’ve had some success in other parts of the world. There’s certainly a shortage of that in North America. And if you are doing that in North America, then you’re highly sought after. So your rates are outlandish, and you can’t get that. So we’ll have to look at these other parts of the world and think about someone in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who has a business, or in Ohio.
[00:14:49] Paul Sial: And how many prompt engineers are in the area that can come into your office, right? It’s probably a very short list. They’re all fighting for the same group. So now we go international, and what we’ve seen is, yeah, there are some hotbeds, Latin America, India, and some parts of Europe. But even people traditionally considered tech resources are not necessarily a fit for what this is.
[00:15:09] Paul Sial: And if you’ve ever tried doing some prompting, it’s a little different. So we find some of these individuals, but you have to kind of go back and peel the onion a little bit, right? It’s not just a look at the resume. We have to give them exercises where we say, “Here, let me see.” And then we test their logic. “Okay, show me how you got to that prompt that worked, that delivered this output.” And that’s a big change from the way that HR teams used to hire, right?
[00:15:48] Paul Sial: It’s like they’re screening. And what you have now is AI that’s screening the resume. You have AI that’s writing the resume. So, filtering out your HR team, a small percentage of the resumes are usually based on keyword density. They’re looking at how many times. But these people, they’re not that traditional. They’re just people who like technology or are fascinated with AI, and they may not have any traditional schooling. How do you unearth that? It’s a challenge.
[00:16:26] Paul Sial: Now we post for AI prompt engineers. We sometimes see someone change their resume to just say “AI prompt engineer” all over the place. But then you look at their background. So yeah, for us, the testing of what I’ve noticed right now is like, “Let me see your portfolio. Let me give you a task that requires prompting, and let me see the logic that you used to get there,” right?
[00:16:44] Paul Sial: And even then, I look at it, and I’m like, “Did they use AI to…” And then I put that through AI, and I say, “Was AI used to generate this?” And then sometimes they’ll tell me, “Yes, a little bit of that,” right? So yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s an emerging field. There’s a lot of interest in these types of individuals, and we’ll all have to learn to find them better.
[00:17:04] Paul Sial: I think it’s things that, if you’re at the front lines like our organization, you get a little bit of familiarity with it. But yeah, it’s a different landscape for hiring folks now than it was.
[00:17:14] Steve MacDonald: You know, I’m going to date myself a little bit, but over 20 years ago, I was doing work with Nike, and one of their key executives said, “We’ve got a philosophy at Nike.”
[00:17:25] Steve MacDonald: I don’t know if they still do, but he said, “We hire for the right corporate athlete. The person that maybe doesn’t have the exact role, or they were in this part of the organization, but they were a rock star and they want to move over here,” right? “Or we move them over there to get different roles and experiences, but we look for the people that can adapt.”
[00:17:47] Steve MacDonald: The ones that you talked about at the beginning that are really engaged in the business. They’re smart people, and you put them in the right roles, and now with AI, anything you don’t know how to do, you just go, “How the hell do I do this?” Right? And so it’s really the people that are rising, that are shining, are the ones that maybe don’t have prompt engineering as a background.
[00:18:06] Steve MacDonald: But if they want to get into prompt engineering, if they’re dedicated to it, they’ve got a PhD tutor consultant in the AI tool itself to help them do whatever they want to do. So it’s more along the lines of, are they a self-starter? Are they engaged? Are they smart? Are they going to put two and two together and just make it happen, right?
[00:18:32] Steve MacDonald: That’s an intangible. But AI is giving us the tools. I’ll put you and I in that category, right? Why not? It’s my podcast. If you have that kind of engagement, you can do tremendous things, right? So are you now asking candidates different questions to try to screen for some of those intangibles?
[00:18:59] Steve MacDonald: Or how do you even think about that with your audience here being your peers, and CROs and CEOs that know they have to hire right to be successful? That’s how important it is.
[00:19:14] Paul Sial: Yeah, no, I love that anecdote about Nike and the corporate athlete. I could not agree with you more. Adaptability is, and curiosity, right?
[00:19:21] Paul Sial: Like, those are all, think about HubSpot and some of the tenants of the hires. Curiosity is one of the characteristics that most leads to success within an organization. But Steve, to go back to what you are saying, I think, and what I am seeing, you know, and being kind of in this space, is testing, like outside of the resume and outside of the interview. There is a lot of testing emerging, especially when you think about human capital as a global marketplace now, right?
[00:19:53] Paul Sial: And so, because when you are looking at resumes from different countries, which you kind of have to do because you are not going to find, as I said, 100 prompt engineers in your locale anymore, you kind of have to look at these other areas. And then you won’t recognize any of the schools.
[00:20:12] Paul Sial: You are not going to know how this company, you know, for example, out of India or out of Mexico, and I do not know that company. It is not like, you know, something that is in your backyard, like Sherwin-Williams or that you would know, KeyBank or Bank of America. So I am seeing a lot of emerging tools to hire people offshore and facilitate communication.
[00:20:35] Paul Sial: You just look at some of the fastest-growing companies, Deel, Remote, EOR companies. But over and above that, a lot of solutions around testing, and there are all kinds of testing, right? Behavioral testing is emerging. There is aptitude testing. We now administer a lot of testing for every candidate. That squeezes your candidate pool down considerably because people are used to just sending in their resumes and then waiting by the phone for someone to call.
[00:21:04] Paul Sial: And so, by then throwing in the wrinkle of, “Hey, we want you to do this assessment,” or we want, first of all, lots of people do not do that, do not want to do it. And then only a small percentage actually pass or, you know, and if you are giving three or four of these and you are really unearthing, you know, then you are really dwindling that number down.
[00:21:23] Paul Sial: But I do believe that, from what I am seeing, there is a lot of testing that is emerging and solutions around testing, and a lot of the HR platforms are incorporating testing in. And like I said, that falls into a multitude of categories, and some are like, “How well will they fit into our corporate culture?”
[00:21:43] Paul Sial: Sometimes you want someone who does fit. Sometimes you want someone that does not fit, that is counter, that is going to push the envelope, which is interesting because we see some of our clients say to us, like, “We do not want someone that is like-minded to the rest of our team. We want someone who is off thinking of things a little differently.”
[00:21:59] Paul Sial: So yeah, I do think that one of the ways is you are going to have a lot more assessments, a lot more of those kinds of testing solutions emerge to really understand who you are hiring and what their personality is. The challenge becomes, again, with AI. Now, we have a lot of testing, but we are noticing that a lot of our candidates, because we hire a lot in bulk, we are hiring hundreds of people a month, and they are gaming the testing with AI.
[00:22:28] Paul Sial: And now we have to, like, we have got to stay one step ahead of them, you know. Now there are tools that will track their eyes. Are they moving off the screen? Are they looking at something else? And try to understand if they are using AI to beat the AI test that we generated. So again, yeah, they escape that, right?
[00:22:44] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, the fact that they are using AI to game it, they are probably going to use AI on the job too, and you know. I mean, so…
[00:22:51] Paul Sial: Interesting, you say that. Yeah. So, you know, we have an internal debate with our executive team because I like to believe that if they are using AI so well to game our test, then maybe we should be okay with that.
[00:23:06] Paul Sial: Maybe that is a quality that we want because they will come in and they will use AI to flag them and, you know, that is what we want too, right? So, you know, we are still thinking through that, how we feel about that. But yeah, I think that should be okay too.
[00:23:22] Paul Sial: And eventually, you know, it will be about how proficient you are using AI, and maybe that is the quality that we should be hiring for rather than the base aptitude, right? Like ingenuity around using AI, deeply integrated with what we want, also.
[00:23:39] Steve MacDonald: What I love about this conversation is that, you know, as C-suite executives, we have got so much on our plate.
[00:23:46] Steve MacDonald: There is, you know, we have got a proactive list this long that we never seem to get to, right? Well, let us put another thing on it, right? Talent. And we all know how important talent is, but we really need to think through talent as a strategic growth initiative within our organizations, along with the culture we are creating, right?
[00:24:08] Steve MacDonald: The receptivity. Do they want to be here? Do they want to stay? All of these things are so important. We have talked about so much here. I just kind of want to boil it down, right? And if there was a single takeaway that you wanted the audience here of your peer C-suite executives and B2B companies, to take away from our conversation, what would be the one thing you would want to have them remember?
[00:24:33] Paul Sial: There is a Buddhist philosophy about living in the present moment, right? We tend to worry about the future and dwell on the past. And I think, you know, what we are talking about right now is a lot of things in the future where there are unknowns, and we are reluctant to make decisions because of that unknown with human capital and with people.
[00:24:57] Paul Sial: But what I will say is there is a tremendous arbitrage opportunity that still exists right now, in the present moment, with great talent in all different parts of the world, and we are just scratching the surface on that, right? And now this used to be something Fortune 500 companies knew for decades, right?
[00:25:17] Paul Sial: Like, they have been setting up offices in different parts of the world for many, many years. But what has changed now is that access to talent is now available to small and medium-sized businesses, right? And yes, the AI will be great, and there will be many use cases.
[00:25:35] Paul Sial: But you still, as we said at the top of this call, need great people, and there are lots of great people out in the world. You should not limit yourself to just, you know, a 25-mile radius to your office. There is a world of possibilities. There are people who are very smart in a number of different countries where the cost of living is a little lower, right?
[00:25:52] Paul Sial: So if you are not doing that, then I do believe some of your competitors are, and that is a real advantage that they will have. And so yeah, if that was the one thing I would leave you with, you know, that is something I believe in. Whether you choose to work with a company like ours or do it on your own, I believe in the model of thinking about the world now as a global pool of talent.
[00:26:14] Steve MacDonald: And how that is a competitive advantage.
[00:26:16] Steve MacDonald: I love that you threw that in there, right? You know, we need to be thinking about, like, we are not overabundant with competitive advantages these days, right? We are in a highly competitive marketplace. We need to create competitive advantages everywhere we can, right? So I have got to tell you, Paul, you know, the goal of this podcast is to bring together different perspectives, ideas, and experiences from across the C-suite and around the world.
[00:26:42] Steve MacDonald: And if we can listen and we can share amongst what we are all doing to become successful, then if we glean one thing, one thing from every conversation that we have here, what an amazing, like, I call it the rising tide that lifts all boats. And this was a conversation we have never had on the podcast before, but it is so, so important.
[00:27:04] Steve MacDonald: I just wanted to say thank you for coming on today.
[00:27:06] Paul Sial: Thank you for having me. It has been a pleasure. I think you make these conversations very easy. I hope that it had an impact on someone. As I said, I believe in this. You know, over and above just what I just said about the goal and how it is a competitive advantage, I will say that, you know, in some parts of the world, you are really changing people’s lives also, right?
[00:27:26] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely.
[00:27:26] Paul Sial: You are giving them amenities that they never had before and making a material impact on the way that they live. So thank you again, and it was certainly a pleasure talking to you today.