Meet Ilya Talman

The head of Roy Talman & Associates has seen a variety of changes in financial technology recruiting since 1982.

Blog

ChatGPT Brings Excitement But Thin On Safety Guarantees

Discover the potential risks and safeguards surrounding ChatGPT and AI in general. Elon Musk warns of the absence of fail-safe measures and protection against malicious use. As unregulated advancements continue, the fear of intentional manipulation and harm arises. To mitigate this, a system must be developed to detect harmful activities ...
Read More

Guiding ChatGPT Becoming A Rare Talent All Its Own

Discover the power of ChatGPT as it goes beyond simple queries, requiring comprehensive information and follow-up questions for insightful responses. Learn how ChatGPT's answers can be refined through rephrasing and leveraging specific expertise, unlocking accurate and detailed insights. Explore how ChatGPT can provide assistance in various domains, offering improvement suggestions ...
Read More

Why Big-Time Programmers are Being Influenced by ChatGPT and More

Discover how AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot are revolutionizing the programming industry. Top programmers, including Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's Senior Director of AI for 5 years, are finding these tools highly useful, with it being said Copilot now influences up to 80% of Karpathy's code. Learn how incorporating these ...
Read More

Will Machine Learning Change How You Hire Going Forward?

This article delves into the latest advancements in AI technology, from image-based platforms such as DALL-E to the birth of ChatGPT and its impact on the industry. Explore the potential uses of ChatGPT in recruitment and hiring processes, and learn about the competition among big players like Google and Amazon ...
Read More

Battle Between AI Platforms For Your Loyalty About To Heat Up

"Discover the latest trends and advancements in AI platforms in our expert analysis at Roy Talman & Associates. Learn about the battle between AI platforms and their competition for your loyalty, and how this will impact the future of AI technology. Stay ahead of the curve with our insights on ...
Read More

Python Vs. R: The Battle Influenced By Machine Learning

"Discover the key differences between Python and R in the context of machine learning. Explore the strengths and weaknesses of each language and make an informed decision on which one to use. Read our expert analysis at Roy Talman & Associates." ...
Read More

The Truth Behind The U.S. Building New Chip Factories

This year may be remembered as the one when chipmakers decided to truly commit to manufacturing in the U.S., with companies like Intel, Samsung and TSMC announcing their intent to build factories here for the purpose of producing semiconductors. ...However, there is always a danger between potential and reality that ...
Read More

DALL-E, Copilot And The Deep Learning Models You Need To Know Now

One of the new deep learning models I’ve been fascinated by is called DALL-E, developed by OpenAI. This technology with roots in GPT-3 can generate digital images from your voice commands. For example, if I have a picture of myself on vacation and I’d like to add a funny hat ...
Read More

What To Do When Caught Between Legacy Systems And AI

At times, some companies can feel as though they are caught between the present day of preserving the legacy systems they have now – and the future when a transition into AI and machine learning will be fully realized. This state of limbo provides further pressure when employees who only ...
Read More

Luring Tech Talent Back Home Takes Sophistication, Not Sentiment.

As remote work shows no signs of slowing down in the technology space, several cities and states continue to explore all kinds of creative ways to lure more technical talent. One of the more unique approaches companies have taken is an outreach campaign to appeal to supremely talented technical workers ...
Read More

Companies Push Their Machine Learning Capabilities to the Max

Many of us remember early on in our careers when all files were flat files from a computer. Those, in time, gave way to databases and the idea of knowing how to use databases was paramount – ultimately, you couldn’t have a system without a database. Once again, we’re now ...
Read More

When On-Site Policy Causes Increased “Looking Around”

A friend of mine’s wife is a lawyer who works at a major university reviewing contracts. She figured she would likely finish her career working in that job. In the meantime, she and her husband got a house in Arizona. It wasn’t a problem with her job because she hadn’t ...
Read More

On-Site Policy Causes One Executive To Move. Domino To An Exodus?

We’ve used the phrase “The Great Reshuffling” in the past as we don’t feel it’s merely The Great Resignation we’re experiencing. The “deck” of what we’ve always known for traditional work and the way it’s done is being reshuffled. We’ve talked a lot about remote work and the impact that ...
Read More

Don’t Minimize The Pull For Getting Back Together

In the last couple of years, we’ve all heard a familiar refrain: “I miss being around people.” It’s grown louder as conditions for masking relax. This poses an interesting question for those who assume everyone wants to work remotely or even engage in a hybrid arrangement. Do they? Picture a ...
Read More

When More On-Site Work Strengthens Your Recruitment

As much as we’ve seen significant movement over the last couple of years from companies on whether or not to let workers go fully remote, an interesting shift is occurring. Some of those very same companies are changing their expectations, requiring employees to be in the office at least two ...
Read More

The Great Reshuffling to Florida and Texas

If there’s a giant sucking sound you hear coming from the Rust Belt in the northeast, it’s no coincidence. Key people are being drawn from this area if working remotely isn’t an option. As a result, many are exploring their options in a warmer climate to the south: Namely, Florida.  ...
Read More

Where Is Machine Learning and AI Headed In 2022?

AI and machine learning evolved significantly in the past year, which begs the question: What’s next? Where are these technologies going and how will they further impact our way of life in a time that has been anything but predictable? ...
Read More

Where The Chips Fall: How Changes In Chip Making Can Impact So Many Of Us

When you think about it, the number of computer chips surrounding us is absolutely mind-boggling. We simply don’t realize how many things have chips in them or how many chips are in our devices. If you are staring at a giant computer screen, how many chips are in it? You ...
Read More

The Tug-Of-War Between Tomorrow’s AI and Yesterday’s Legacy Systems

For as long as people in any technology field can remember, there’s always been a sort of push and pull, back and forth between the latest technological innovation that may change the world as we know it and the legacy systems we have to preserve for a while longer. Is ...
Read More

Chicago Implores Top Tech Talent To Come Home. But Will Enough Of Them Return?

We’ve often focused on the movement of tech talent back and forth, including migration from Silicon Valley to new cities for remote work (just don’t expect to be paid precisely the same in your new town if you do make that move). Interestingly, there’s been a campaign taking the angle ...
Read More

Fresh Tech Talent Ready to Catch the Machine Learning Wave

In many Talman Tidbits, we speak of systems and trends as they pertain to machine learning and AI. Still, any momentum these areas might have requires an influx of people to embrace machine learning to the fullest. Fortunately, the signs there are increasingly positive too ...
Read More

Forget “Someday”: Machine Learning’s Growth is Serious Business NOW

It appears now, more than ever across many industries, companies are incorporating machine learning tools into their process of doing business ...
Read More

How To Evaluate Employee Performance When More Want To Work From Home

Here’s a question that won’t be easy for some companies, even though I’m confident they will figure it out eventually. If an employee can’t be seen, how do you know they’re working hard, focused on the highest priorities and well on their way to producing positive results for you? ...
Read More

Is the Great Talent Reshuffle Upon Us?

In early May, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Diamond said he wanted people back at work because working from home “doesn’t work for young people.” In the same breath, however, he also spoke of some employees working under a hybrid model and even a tiny percentage of employees with specific roles working ...
Read More

Where’s the Puck Going Next? Virtual Reality, Coding Nomads and More…

We've frequently used hockey icon Wayne Gretzky's phrase, "Skate to where the puck is going next" to describe where technology and trends are headed, so as we face a return to work, school and life as we know it, let's do a roundup of where we see some vital "nexts" ...
Read More

Training Remote Employees: Can It Work As Well As In-Person?

Amid the talk of increased remote work post-pandemic and its potential impact on culture, teams, hiring and more, it’s smart for companies to consider how they can effectively elevate the skill sets of their teams. Particularly when those teams could be a lot more dispersed....With this in mind, how can ...
Read More

What Remote Work Means For Redefining Your Culture

As we’ve been talking a great deal about remote work and how we expect it is here to stay post-pandemic, the first impression would seem that company culture is the loser of this evolution. At Roy Talman & Associates, we’ve always gone beyond viewing people through the lens of a ...
Read More

6 Factors To Deliver A New World Of Remote Work Immigration

In our previous post, we talked about the dawn of “remote work immigration,” in which work reaches a level of mobility we’ve never seen before. It doesn’t mean you may say goodbye to the traditional office space tomorrow, but there’s little doubt that new and genuine possibilities for working remotely ...
Read More

Remote Work Immigration: Are We Prepared for the Shift?

As I was speaking earlier today to a gentleman who works in Japan, I had to reflect on how many people outside of the U.S. our firm has been talking to over the last eight months. We’re finding a significant difference in many ways. For instance, if I were to ...
Read More

Why Machine Learning Needs So Many More Humans

A while back, I read a book that proclaimed a very simple formula of how to succeed in business. Imagine you’re in the year 1910 and you’ve found a way to add electricity to a new product you’ve invented. Electricity is still relatively new at this time as it hasn’t ...
Read More

Pace of Change: Zooming Along Kurzweil’s Timeline

“We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at ...
Read More

Big Tech Breakup? No, But 230 Questions Remain

In the dawn of a new administration trying to grapple with a pandemic and rebuilding an economy, it's only a matter of time before Washington returns to the question of what its relationship to Silicon Valley. Namely, will and should Big Tech companies such as Google or Facebook be broken ...
Read More

Machine Learning’s Challenge for Talent

There may be a boom in the technical application of machine learning coming, but there’s also a problem that’s already here: One that has centered around the lack of people who know how to work with machine learning applications ...
Read More

From Working from Home to Working From Anywhere

Obviously, a pandemic has done its part to push us out of the office and keep us out for the majority of a year. COVID-19 made us stuck in our houses. But it’s not too optimistic or unrealistic to be thinking about the day and age when COVID, thankfully and ...
Read More

Permanently Virtual: Is Your Firm Ready For This?

Remember when this forced working from home was going to last a few days? Then a few weeks? Then maybe just a month or two? All those markers have been left far behind, haven't they? If someone were to tell you, in February of 2020, that a large percentage of ...
Read More

2021: The Future of Recruitment is Quality, Not Quantity

We’ll let you in on some industry insight: When someone asks a recruiter how their business is doing, the answer is often a more complicated one than you might expect. You see, if you ask about one’s recruitment business, you’re really asking, “How many people have you placed?” ...
Read More

Who is Winning the Battle of The Bandwidth

Amid a terrible and tragic pandemic, we have to look for good news anywhere we can get it as that’s a sign that we will return to normal and learn how to do things more wisely from this experience. One of those signs? There’s strong evidence that certain companies are ...
Read More

What is GPT-3? Is It A True Game Changer For Technology?

What if you’re a programmer who has been writing code in Python and one day, you don’t need the program anymore? That’s right. All you need to do now is deliver sample data into a machine, get the output type you want and analyze it. In essence, you become a ...
Read More

What if Working from Home Becomes the Rule and Not the Exception?

What both of these books have in common is a very optimistic view of where we are – a very rare thing, indeed. It may feel hard to relate to such optimism at this moment. Nonetheless, these authors believe that overall trends will be very positive and on a large ...
Read More

2020’s Silver Lining: How We Work May Be Evolving For The Better

If we talk about how the world is changing in relation to the way we work and communicate, it’s vital that we consider the convergence of three significant developments: 1) For many of our jobs, there is a true ability to do that job remotely. People can be much more ...
Read More

The State Of Hiring: 4 Insights To Plan Ahead In Unpredictable Times

We’re obviously in a tumultuous time with a lot of different changes. Still, even if your company isn’t in a rush at present to fill the next significant potential role, you can take advantage of the time to think about smart strategies for planning. Here are four insights we’re seeing ...
Read More

4 Ways To Find Your Stability In A Redefined World

The reality of the world we’re currently living in is that our industry is continuing to be redefined. It’s true for recruitment. It’s also certainly true for the industries our firm serves, such as technology, financial trading and management consulting ...
Read More

What Does the Resume of the Future Look Like

We always hear debates about whether or not resumes will even matter in the future but I prefer to look at The Resume of the Future differently: Resumes as we know them may drastically change and if we’re going to operate in a world relevant to machine learning, then candidates, ...
Read More

Might Coding Academies Level The Candidate Playing Field?

The machine learning space represents a fast-moving market in light of a number of companies trying to upgrade their technology. New technologies are moving at a much quicker pace than the educational system training people in those new technologies.The perfect example of this is a platform called React, which was ...
Read More

The Software Developer Evolution Is Upon Us

Starting this year and beyond, one trend we will see more of is that companies will need to make membership on their platform more valuable over time. Case in point: How many more people can join Facebook? It has very likely hit its peak in the growth department. So now, ...
Read More

AI As Hiring Manager: Can It Tell You Which Candidate Will Thrive?

There was a big story recently in the Wall Street Journal talking about a company that has interviewed over a million candidates via video on behalf of companies interested in hiring, such as Hyatt Hotel and Goldman Sachs. The company raised $95 million in one round of funding alone. The ...
Read More

Are You Truly “Fully Prepared” To Win The Job Race?

You’re about to go into a big interview with a prestigious firm and you feel like you’ve fully prepared for this moment. But…do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are as prepared as you could be? What does “fully prepared” truly mean to you? Consider this: ...
Read More

Are We Really In The “Golden Age” Of Artificial Intelligence?

Last month, I was reading an article in Forbes in which the author claimed that the golden age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was upon us, confirmed by a survey of more than 1,000 executives. Adoption of AI is up 72% this year compared to 48% last year! 93% of executives ...
Read More

Bigger Waves Of Data, Bigger Platform For Tech Talent To Shine

There’s plenty of talk about how “smart” machine learning systems are. The problem with these systems is that they're really narrow – and let me explain what I mean by that term. Let’s take a healthcare environment. With today’s machine learning systems applied in healthcare, if you have just the ...
Read More

Is Tech Company Compliance Hurting Small Firms More Than Large Firms?

A certain company you’ve probably heard of called Facebook was fined $5 billion recently and it’s understandably causing a great amount of chatter across the country. Is the hammer going to drop on big companies in the tech space now that it came down on Facebook? The answer may surprise ...
Read More

With New Technologies, What Makes A True Expert?

The word “expert,” is one that’s used by many but it’s hard to say that any of us can definitively agree on what does and does not make an expert. The closest I’ve heard is the definition from Malcolm Gladwell: It takes 10,000 hours of learning to become an expert ...
Read More

Two Underrated And Big Opportunities For Interview Success

At our firm, we have a real process called “The Talman Way” that’s fairly extensive but nonetheless vital to the ideal fit between candidate and client we’re striving to achieve. When a technical candidate has reached a certain point later in that process, they’ve often taken a series of tests ...
Read More

The Real Key To Getting A Job Working With AI

Without question, one of the most popular topics in our business right now is how to get a job working with artificial intelligence / machine learning. At one level, we have clients that want cutting-edge, top-of-the-line researchers. Fair enough. However, there is one issue we’ve seen arise in lot of ...
Read More

AI Graduating Beyond “Side Project’ And Moving Up The Priority List

While there has been an issue with how expensive it is to build machine learning systems and “feed” them, there’s good news to be had in that we foresee the cost of building these systems and feeding them continually going down. And as that happens, their usefulness and applicability is ...
Read More

Small H1B Visa Change May Mean Big Help For Those With Advanced Degrees

As we’ve written a few times on the challenging, ever-evolving H1B Visa process for employers and international candidates, a minor but interesting change to the H1B Visa program has occurred that’s worthy of you to be aware of if you hire people from that program. There are two types of ...
Read More

Non-Compete? No Problem. Maximize Your Time Between Jobs.

As we’re frequently dealing with senior people in high-frequency trading shops and hedge funds, it’s not uncommon to see many of them face a non-compete situation that can last as long as 18 months. This person may be privy to a process that is material to generating revenue, so a ...
Read More

Readying Your Company For A Machine Learning Talent Pipeline

For a very long time, we've heard about shortages of people with specific skills but most of those skills in question tend to be on the newer side of the spectrum. For example, if you listen to people at Google and Amazon, they're in dire need for machine learning talent ...
Read More

How Candidates Can Keep Their Learning Curve Ahead Of Accelerating Technology

In the last 18 months, with a variety of tech companies facing a solid amount of turnover – as in people leaving after only a year or two – you’d imagine that many candidates don’t need to put a whole lot of work into the entire interviewing process. They’d just ...
Read More

Prepping Your Skills For The Machine Learning Revolution

In one of our recent posts, we wrote about the coming revolution in machine learning that candidates have to prepare themselves for. In truth, we’ve heard a lot of talk about it for several years now, but we still haven’t seen a lot of activity utilizing machine learning in many ...
Read More

“Home Grown” Talent Versus Importing It

Many times, we’re preconditioned to think of hiring for talent that’s right in our own backyard. It’s convenient and let’s face it – there’s less to consider in the way of relocation expenses if it’s local and “home grown.” However, if we’re going to always be looking not only for ...
Read More

Building Stronger Tech Worker Relationships In A New Era Of Activism

Recently, Google had a massive walk-out – about 20,000 employees – over its handling of cases of sexual harassment and misconduct. It’s part of a shift we’re seeing in tech environments in what some are branding, “tech worker activism.” Employees in the tech space seem louder than ever, essentially saying, ...
Read More

Talman Talks Tech Predictions For 2019

Before I get started about what I foresee in the tech space for the coming year, let me share my favorite line about predictions, from Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” So while you may take some of these predictions with a grain of ...
Read More

Why Did Amazon Really Pass Over Chicago For HQ2?

When Amazon chose the markets of New York and northern Virginia for its HQ2 company headquarters, a number of cities on the short list asked the same question: “Why not us?” Based on the chatter around town, Chicago was no different in asking this, especially since it appeared at one ...
Read More

Women In Technology: The Deeper Problem Beyond Screening Too Many Candidates Out

Until recently, Amazon had an AI-based tool to screen candidates that probably sounded really good at first on paper. In fact, it seemed like the Holy Grail: You give the tool 100 resumes, it helps screen for the top candidates and, wow, look at all the time we’ve saved! Right? ...
Read More

Lessons From Sears: The Peril Of Maintaining Status Quo Technology

Someone recently came into my office with a background in database management for the financial industry over many years. He asked, “I’m not seeing a lot of needs that entail the use of Oracle products…why is that?” My answer, basically, was that a heavy background in Oracle didn’t matter because ...
Read More

From Amazon To Google: West Coast Outposts May Shift Chicago’s Hiring Strategies

A few months ago, Facebook signed a new lease in the Loop comprising a whopping 263,000 square feet – a space that many speculate can hold 2,000 employees or more. Around the same time, we learned that Google was planning on adding 100,000 square feet of office space. Pinterest leased ...
Read More

Winning “The Lottery” On Your Own Terms

In our last post, we talked about how some people are drawn to the idea of making it big in an expensive area like New York or San Francisco while working for one of the top companies in the tech space. We often refer to this idea as “winning the ...
Read More

Picturing The Movie Version Of Your Career

I’ve written before about the concept of “The Lottery” as it pertains to certain people who want to have it all in their careers. What’s winning the lottery to them? Living in a big house in a highly desirable location like San Francisco or New York with a wide range ...
Read More

Why Silicon Valley Is Looking Hard At Chicago For Expansion

I was reading a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal focusing on a very large software-specific private equity firm that has a unique strategy – when they buy a company that happens to be based in a high cost area, they subsequently try to diversify the geographic location of ...
Read More

Average Job Tenure Is Shrinking But There’s A Hiring Strategy For That

If there’s one observation that can be made in regard to the average job tenure at a company, it’s that these days, people generally don’t stay in one place for very long. By now, the assumption is made by many hiring managers at tech companies that within two or three ...
Read More

Picking Winners In Tech’s Next Stage And Building A Career Around One

There’s a school of thought among some in the technological space that as advanced as we humans have become at coding, code generated by machines is getting better all the time. Still, the future lies with people who can leverage the code that machines are generating for us. We still have such ...
Read More