Why Zapier Requires 100% AI Fluency (And How They Measure It)
episode
“HR Heretics” | How CPOs, CHROs, Founders, and Boards Build High Performing Companies
29 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
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Why does Zapier require 100% AI fluency for every new hire?
One of our biggest episodes this year was with Zapier's CPO, Brandon Samut. For today's Essential Heretics 101 feature, he demonstrates AI agents automating bar raiser interviews and performance reviews while explaining Zapier's four-level AI fluency framework.
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of HR Heretics. Brandon Samu. What's up, man? It's good to see you. Where I want to start with you is talk about like AI fluency. And you had said on LinkedIn that AI fluency is a requirement for a hundred percent of new hires at Zapier. Why is that the case and how do you guys go about measuring that?
AI fluency is a requirement for everyone we're hiring into the company for a couple of reasons. The first is it's essential for fulfilling our mission, right? Zapier's mission is to make automation work for everyone. And AI is a meaningful new way for us to make that mission real for so many more people. A second reason why that matters to me is more about like Zapier's. tacit commitment to people we hire. You know, you think about if you're in the job market right now and you're thinking about whether to go to this company or that company, you know, a lot of us have a leading sense that wherever we spend the next few years of our career is going to have a lot to do with the kind of opportunities we have for many years after that.
And gosh, I would really encourage all of us, like make sure we go somewhere where That's actively investing in making sure that we know how to use AI to supercharge the thing that we do best in the world, or at least at work.
Branded, I was listening to a podcast on the way up to the city today and similar thing that a company was saying it's a requirement for folks to come in with some sort of AI, you know, I'll use fluidity 'cause we're using it here. But their bar was curiosity. And I'm wondering if yours is something different.
You have to be a little bit more than curious to get a job at Zapier, but I appreciate that as a starting condition. So I would call a curiosity like necessary but not sufficient, if that makes sense. At Zapier, we have kind of like four levels on our AI fluency rubric. And the first is unacceptable. It just means you just you're not both from a skill and from a will perspective. The second is capable. And what we mean capable, that means like you have some of the skills and some of the know-how of like how to apply AI in your daily work. The third and next level in the rubric comes up. That's called adoptive. Adopted is, oh no, you're applying it, but you're applying it primarily to the work as it's conventionally done.
So it's like, you know, the work is traditionally done a certain way. I'm using AI to practically improve my productivity or the quality of my output. And by the way, like that's pretty impactful. But it gets even better because the top tier in the AI fluency rubric is called transformational. And that's for folks that are showing us that not only do they know how to use AI to impact the work they do as it's traditionally done, they are also able to completely rethink how the work gets done in the first place. So it's almost like a like a clean safe. But you're starting more from, you know, like a you're kind of zero basing the whole thing of being like, gosh, if we were to start from scratch with the tools and know how we now have.
How would we do this work?
Thank you for breaking that down. A lot of the issues I see out there right now is just literally like an inability to simply break things down so we can touch it to feel it. And that's really helpful.
All right. Well, let's get into the meat of this. So how are you guys deploying AI and what do you think are like the most interesting use cases you want to show?
What we're looking at is Zapier agents, right? And just to define agents really quickly, Agent has the kind of underlying LLM capability that we all know and love, but with the ability to automate tasks on your behalf.
What are the four levels of Zapier’s AI fluency rubric and how are they defined?
So at Zapier, like many organizations, we do a bar raiser interview.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Zapier require 100% AI fluency for every new hire?
0:03–4:03
2
What are the four levels of Zapier’s AI fluency rubric and how are they defined?
4:03–7:04
3
How does the Bar Raiser interview agent automate interview preparation and question selection?
7:04–10:09
4
In what ways can AI agents automate performance‑review evidence collection?
10:09–12:59
5
What is the vision for an AI coach idling in Slack and how might it work?
12:59–16:53
6
How does the one‑on‑one meeting coach capture, analyze, and give feedback on manager conversations?
16:53–20:58
7
What transparency and data‑privacy questions should companies ask when deploying AI HR agents?
20:58–24:38
8
How can organizations choose between on‑demand vs. required AI workflows and scale them effectively?
24:38–29:37
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from “HR Heretics” | How CPOs, CHROs, Founders, and Boards Build High Performing Companies
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