The Recruitment Hackers Podcast

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Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, James Ellis from Employer Brand Labs.

Ellis: He got it. He got it.

Max: Yes.James is an expert in helping employer brands stand out from the crowd. And today we decided we'd have a conversation for you, our audience on this topic on employer branding and specifically how you can gently indicate to some people that this is not the right place for them. And how many employers sometimes fall into this trap of trying to welcome everybody? And so they end up standing out for nobody and James, thanks for joining. And how did you end up in this very specific field of employer branding? Did you come in through marketing or from recruiting?

Ellis: I did Max. And first off, thanks for letting me join this. I'm looking forward to this conversation. But yes, most people in Employer Brand come from two routes. They come from either the recruiting side where they realize that they have a different kind of point of view from most recruiters, some successful recruiters. And that means they don't really succeed as greatly as recruiters and they find that there's a space called Employer Brand where their skills do make sense. The rest of us come from marketing where we realize that marketing has been done and it's a machine.

You go to school; you learn your four or five Ps. You apply them every day. It's all the fun stuff in the tactics or in the insight and that's great. And try not going to downplay marketers because I think they're amazing and they do amazing work, but this is the tiniest slice of marketing in which marketing isn't about more. It's the only kind of marketing and branding in which more is actually worse, right? If you're selling an ice cream cone and you sell a million ice cream cones, your employer of the month, they're going to put your name on a face, on a poster. It's going to be great.

You're a recruiter and you get a thousand applicants. You should think about another line of work. You have made a poor choice; you've done something wrong. And so that to me is the fine crux of what employer brand is and why it's interesting and fascinating and still has so much to uncover, to really understand what it's all about. Right now, even like seasoned, respected Employer Brand professionals argue all the time over just basic ideas because we still haven't figured it all out. And that's what makes me so excited about the field. Even though it's only a couple of thousands of us.

Max: Well I guess jumping on the question, the number that you just mentioned that employer branding would be, you have to right-size it and if you have a thousand applicants per position, you've wasted some resources.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Perhaps, I could challenge that a little bit by saying that well, if you haven't paid too much for the thousand candidates, then that's all right.

Ellis: Well here's the deal. The problem is often that there is a gap between hiring managers and recruiters. The hiring manager says I need a, whatever it is. It's a nurse, it's an electrician, it's a data scientist. It's a litter of people, whatever that thing is and they think that's enough information as if all nurses and data scientists and electricians are the same and they are absolutely not. Anybody who's met three nurses goes, oh wow, they are all different. And they have very different skill sets, but they also have very different approaches to how they do that work.

The hiring manager doesn't want to get into that. So they just throw the requisition over to the recruiter who says, okay, so who are you looking for? They want someone great. And then they walk away to do their day job because they're busy, right? They've got stuff to do. And the recruiter says, I don't know what the hiring manager wants. So I'm going to write a job ad, add a job description, and a job posting and those things are all slightly different. And we don't have to get into that today, but they write it to be so generic and that opens the door so wide. Is that anybody who can pretty much spell their last name is encouraged to apply? It just gets crazy.

You've opened the doors and the metaphor of course is always, you're trying to find a needle in a haystack. And you're trying to say, well look, if I get a thousand or a hundred people to apply, I'll find that needle. But now we're in a world where we need more needles and the answer to creating more needles isn't to make bigger haystacks. It's not how needles work. That's not how needles are created. That's not how needles are found. The goal of good recruiting is when you have enough information, and that means about what the team's all about, what the company rewards, what they want to be motivated for and rewarded by, and what the tasks are, what the future of that job might be.

The ultimate situation, the platonic ideal of recruiting is you really only get two candidates to apply. The person you hire, who is amazing, and the person you don't hire who is almost equally as amazing and you put them in your back pocket because you know, one day you're going to want them. And you only have that second person. So the hiring manager feels like they made a choice, right? That's all it is. Everything after that is time the recruiter now has to spend burning up, filtering through resumes and filtering through CVs saying, nope, nope, nope, nope. Or worse yet, it's time the interview loop has to spend on the sixth candidate to say, yeah, no, not quite because they haven't communicated what they're actually looking for.

Max: Yeah, well, James, I mean, there are tools available to--

Ellis: There are.

Max: -- do a lot of selection, but I guess you're right in the sense that the hiring manager ideally would in a dream situation, would just have two or three to choose from.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: I think it's also the recruiter's job to expand a little bit and we're in contradictions here. You're saying, narrow it down, get it down to this one. Now, two perfect profiles, but I would say, maybe the recruiter can expand a little bit on the definition and say--

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: -- well, you're looking for a nurse, to take your healthcare example with all the professional credentials, certification, that lives 20 minutes away from the hospital, et cetera, et cetera. This perfect candidate when probably doesn't exist.

Ellis: Probably not.

Max: And so then oftentimes they have to stretch and therefore, I guess play the numbers game. Now let's go a little bit broader.

Ellis: Yeah. And I think my position is very extreme simply because I think the pendulum swung too far on we've made it so easy for anybody to apply. Like I could use my elbow and just hit an apply button and click, connect to LinkedIn. Yes, I accept. Okay, I've applied for this job. You don't want to hire me. I don't do that job, but you've made it so easy that I might as well. And so I want to swing the pendulum back to say, look, it's not about making things easy. It's really about how do you speak to this job. How do you speak to this opportunity in such a way that the person who isn't just going to be okay at this or even good at this, but the person who is that magical unicorn, we all know purple squirrels will have you? Doesn't just say yes, I'll apply, but says, wow.

That sounds like the exact job I was looking to do next. That's where I need to take my career. And it's because we've put enough information in the job, the brand, the company that we're not hiding behind platitudes and cookie cutter and fortune cookie kind of BS junk and the verbiage on most career websites which is garbage because it says the same thing. You might as well copy and paste from every other career site. And that means the candidate can't choose. And I think there's this interesting kind of spin where if you look at modern hiring, it's a Kabuki theater.

The candidate has decided I'm going to put all my info and quotes, all my information in two or three pages. But it's never the negative stuff. It's never, I got fired. It's never, I got accused of something. Yeah, I showed up late 14 times in a row when they were forced to ask me to leave. It's never anything like that. If I look at your resume or my resume or your CV or your CV, it sounds like you’re mother Teresa, you're amazing. You've never done anything wrong. It's perfect. It's polished. And on the other side, you have this job posting or job ad, which says nothing. It says, yes, must be an excellent written or a communicator.

So I got to write novels or do I got to write haiku? What are you saying? You're just saying garbage because you think you have to, so you don't push anybody away, God forbid. And consequently, there's this huge gap. Both sides are lying in different ways, trying to suss the other out and come to find a match. What I think of as employer branding is a function of every hire should be a perfect match between the company, which is what's their culture? What do they have to offer? What do they reward? The role? So the team, the manager, the mission of that job, the job itself, and the person. And if those three things match, you have an amazing opportunity not just to hire, but to hire someone who's incredibly successful long term. If one of those things is an out of line, it's not going to be a great hire.

Max: I think anybody would agree with your wish and is like the purple squirrel perfect match, but the way to get there, the risk of sounding a bit cynical is—

Ellis: No, no, go.

Max: -- to play the game--

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: -- the rules of the game that we're all in.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: And if indeed, we live in a world where 70% of candidates are going to come from Indeed and everybody has the quick apply button with the elbow.

Ellis: Yep.

Max: Well, are you going to just gonna count yourself out and just move out of Indeed and then just do hyper-targeted marketing using social media or will you perhaps do a second layer of selection post apply so that, the application and the job description and the ad is as inclusive as possible, kind of like cast a wide net and then do all the selection automatically afterward?

Ellis: Yeah, that's a setup and I love that setup. It's fantastic because no one's going to out cynical me. You can try it, but I am the most bitter black-hearted human being you've ever met. It's the coffee. It's amazing. I think there's something there's an option. I'm not saying throw away job boards.

In my last job I got as a cold applicant, I got the absolute wrong way. I'm a pretty experienced and skilled professional. I should be in that hey, he's in my network. Let's talk to him. I am that candidate, but my last job was a cold LinkedIn job post and that I went “sure apply” it was a great role, but that's the rarity. Yes, you should use job boards. Yes, you should use social media.

Yes, you should have all the tools at your disposal. But instead of saying, hey, we're hiring an MBA graduate, come join our wonderful company. We're a great place to work. We have great rewards and we'll have lots of opportunities, which by the way, is a pretty standard, slim-down job posting, right? What if instead, you say, what we're really looking for is an MBA grad who maybe was at the top or near the top of their class, but more importantly, they were the shark who stabbed everyone in the back to get what they needed to get? We want the person who is so cutthroat, they would sell their grandmother down the river for 14 cents. That is the MBA grad we want. And in return, we will offer you this track towards growth. Yes, it's rewards. Yes, it's benefits. But what we're really looking at is we're looking forward to growing a team of sharks and cutthroat and ninjas and assassins who are going to do this, this, this, this.

Max: This is to work on the death star, right?

Ellis: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or write it the other way. Hey, we're looking for an MBA grad, but we're not looking for necessarily the person who stabbed me in the back. We're looking for the person who others looked up to, who was a leader without any authority or any power. It doesn't matter where you graduated from the class. It doesn't matter if you nailed that accounting class or not. It's really about, are you someone people look to when there's a challenge? Now, have you ever seen either of those like paragraphs in a job posting? No. Why? But they are writing--

Max: No. I mean, sometimes you see some great efforts.

Ellis: You see, you do. But when you are that specific about an MBA grad, you can apply that to any role.

Max: Yeah.

Ellis: Suddenly, you're not going to get a thousand people to apply because effectively what happens is by being honest about the role, you force the candidate to be honest about what they want.

So if you say, are you a cutthroat? By applying you're saying I'm a cutthroat bastard. Well, that's great, you know yourself and that's fantastic. And now what do you think the interview process is like? Who is more cutthroat bastardly than I? I mean, what do you do there? What's the process? I don't know. Or you go the other way, you say, look, this isn't about the head of the class. This wasn't about the valedictorian; this wasn't the do anything to win person.

This is the person with that really interesting leadership quality. We don't find them everywhere. That person has to say, this sounds like me and because I'm not that cutthroat and I'm not that diligent and I'm not this, I have this particular flavor of myself and they say, I want that. You're going to get less applicants. And the pendulum starts to swing the other way. Sure, post it on Indeed and LinkedIn and every other job board under the sun, it's not about channels. It's about the message you put on that channel so that you're no longer focused on it because we all know those metrics.

I posted on Indeed, I got X number of applicants. I got posted on LinkedIn, I got Y number of applicants, which is better. No, where'd the hire come from? That's the most important thing. And let's be fair our metrics don't always make it that easy to find and figure out and have confidence in. But, the more you change your message to be specific and attractive and real and different, the more the person who is, I want that job, who falls in love with that job. And that's a phrase we don't use enough.

You want someone who desires that job, not someone who deigns to apply, not someone who is willing to go through the interview process. Someone who goes that sounds perfect. It serves my needs. It sounds like me. It sounds like what I want. Let's have a conversation. That's where you want to bring the recruiting conversation, not to bend in people's arms and twist people's arms and hustling them and selling them. That's not where recruiters want to be, is it?

Max: We started out talking about the volume and the numbers that recruiters naturally gravitate to in an understandable feeling towards safety.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Safety in the numbers.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: And so your approach, which would significantly reduce the size of candidates?

Ellis: Yes.

Max: Could we think of ways to balance that out with ways that we could increase the size?

Ellis: Absolutely.

Max: That you don't end up with a goose egg or with just one candidate?

Ellis: Yeah. Like I said, I'm only kind of taking this very polarizing opposite to swing the pendulum back towards the middle, to a better middle. And then that's a place where, the recruiter gets to be the expert in the marketplace of talent, which is where recruiters should want to be. It's where they have their most value. It's what they do their best work. The hiring manager gets to actually say, look it's a nurse, but we want this kind of nurse and someone who sounds like this and feels like this--

Max: Cutthroat killer nurse.

Ellis: Yeah. That's got to be a thing somewhere. Look, here's the deal. There's only two of those jobs, but those two nurses are like, yes, that's what I want. And that's where you want to be. You don't want to be a choice among many. You want to be the choice for the few.

Max: I think that would be very effective in social media if it was shared because like then, let's say you're that MBA student and as soon as you see the ad, you know who this makes you think about.

Ellis: Yes.

Max: This is perfect.

Ellis: Oh, that's Bob. Yeah, Steve and Bob.

Max: And actually Steve will love it.

Ellis: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's the game of marketing. Is that there's so much about, we say the same things over and over again? We have to remember. Literally, depending on the time of day we roll this, there could be 8 billion people on this planet and that's a number that is so big. It's hard to get our heads around. There's 50 million businesses in this world. So you're talking about a game where you're trying to figure out how you sort these people and where do you put them? And we've made the game about putting all the power in the hands of the hiring manager and letting them pick.

And I don't want to be picked, I don't want someone to say, wow, what he has, or if I'm talking to somebody, else's what she has. It's not about that. What she has is exactly what we want and we want to find a match. It's not a game of, I'm going to accuse you of lying on your resume, or I'm going to accuse you, or let's negotiate and squeeze each other to death and then decide at the end of it we're all best friends. It's about saying it doesn't have to be confrontational in that way. It can be, I'm going to open up and be more transparent about what this job is about. Here's another way, let me put this different spin on. It's a rare, rare, rare day that you see a job posting with a section that functionally says, here's why you won't love this job. Everything about this job is great.

There's puppy dogs, and daisies. It's lots of great, it's free food, it's all these wonderful things, but there needs to be a part that says, and by the way, this job has a lot of paperwork. No, it's not to say, the funny thing is that if I were to talk about a friend or a car, or I was trying to sell you something, I said, here are the 10 things that are all positive about this friend or this car and I list them. They're great. They're funny. They're wonderful. They're always there for you. Like after I get like number seven, you start wondering what's the catch. What's with this guy? What's wrong with them? And if I never list a negative, I've put the seed of the negative in your head and now your brain says, oh, they're probably racist.

Max: You have to go--

Ellis: Oh, they're probably horrible, right? There's something. No, it's not even that you look, it's that your brain does all the work and projects stuff. But if I say here's my friend, funny, wonderful, but by the way, chews with her mouth open. Okay, suddenly that negative proves, makes all the positive things more believable.

Max: I know I don't want to have lunch with her and that's fine. And--

Ellis: There you go.

Max: -- just eat meals. No problem.

Ellis: There you go.

Max: Yeah. I think if you say the reasons why people will not join you, you control the narrative. And if you don't say it--

Ellis: Yes

Max: -- people are going to either subconsciously create those stories like you said--

Ellis: A hundred percent.

Max: -- they have to fill those gaps or they'll go look on a glassdoor. And then they'll get it straight from the angriest of the angry crowd.

Ellis: But the nice thing about that, if you control the narrative hearing from the angriest of the angry crowd, doesn't dissuade, it proves. So if I say, let's go work at Goldman Sachs, you're going to get paid really well. You have a huge opportunity, it's a great logo on your resume. There's a status call. There's a productivity call. There's an opportunity call. By the way, you're going to work a hundred hours a week. And you go on Glassdoor and they say, you won't believe this place.

They make you work a hundred hours a week. It's slave labor. It’s insane. Yeah, it's nuts. And you go, well, if that negative is proved by Glassdoor, I guess all the positives must be true too. It's an amazing kind of process where suddenly the negative proves positive. And now, when I choose to apply to Goldman Sachs, I don't go in with my eyes closed about how hard the work is. I know exactly what I'm getting into, but I also know the trade. I know the value proposition. I'm going to give you my twenties and thirties, and you're going to make me a millionaire.

Max: And at Goldman Sachs, everybody knows about it, but--

Ellis: Exactly.

Max: If you're a company with a hundred to 10,000 employees, most people have never heard about you. You have to get out there and let them know. So--

Ellis: And you have to control that narrative. Like you said.

Max: You think that when you're dealing with experienced professionals, people have a little bit more self-knowledge and they know what they want, but then if you go a little bit younger--

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: -- then you have to be more cautious because they may, I don't know.

Ellis: Yeah

Max: They may be more sensitive.

Ellis: I think, and that's a nice way to dance around that and I don't disagree with any of that. So I've got two things I could say. First off, I spent a little time at Universum and they do amazing research in the US because it's where I am. I know it's not where you are. In the US, most of their research is around graduating student cohort, right?

Max: Universum does a lot of research in Asia as well.

Ellis: Oh, they do it everywhere. It's fantastic work. But I just know that when you look at just the junior-level talent, they all say the same thing. I want to work at Google, SpaceX, and Tesla. Why? Because Elon Musk is on Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a cohort of people who say he's the best, even though, no thanks. They talk him up and if you have no frame of reference, you think, oh, that must be a great place to work. However, I did some research when I was with TMP now Radancy where we looked at the impact of content on job postings. Now, this was about six years ago, but I think the idea still holds. And that is if you're showing content if you're able to say, here’s 10 senior jobs and here's 10 junior jobs, and you look at the people who apply and who looked at those jobs and they did, they look at content.

Even in a senior role, if they looked at content, they were far more likely to apply because they understood what the job was. They said, ah, yes, I understand what these companies are about. I understand what they reward. I want to be a part of them. Interestingly, if you push content to junior audiences, instead of saying, well, I'm just fresh out of school. I don't know what I want. I'm just going to hit apply as many times as I can, right? We've all been there. I've been there. I know for sure. And I know my sister who's 25. I know she's going through that too. But if you start to see stories and content about this, this is what the job is like, it suddenly becomes less abstract. You suddenly go, oh, the jobs like that. I don't want to do that and they walk away. So content--

Max: I think it also equips you for the interview. It makes you a little bit more prepared. Like--

Ellis: Yes, absolutely.

Max: Likethe counterpoint to your recommendation if we want to be very direct and incisive in our messaging is that no, no, no. What I want to do is make people feel at ease, tell them that everybody here is super nice--

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: -- rainbows and puppies--

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: -- so that they can relax. And when they're relaxed, then I'll grill them and then I'll slam them and then I'll screen them. But actually, if you do deliver sharp content at the front, I guess, a person comes into the interview, they can be prepared. They know what's coming a little bit.

Ellis: Yeah. And I think it's an interesting kind of, I personally believe that the candid experience and the work experience should be mirrored. They should be very much similar. You shouldn’t have, no one goes to apply for the army by taking a written test. What you do is you go out, you run for four miles with 60-pound packing because that's the actual job, is to run and try not to get shot at and jump over things and right. That's the job. That's the interview, but it's also the job.

Max: That sounds like a pretty cool job description. I've never wanted to join the army until this very moment.

Ellis: Yeah, there you go. There you go. I mean that they literally do that. If you're trying to join the Rangers, they call it hell week. They run with packs and they shoot over your head and they go, if you can't handle this, this is not the job for you. So--

Max: [Inaudible] gun.

Ellis: Yeah. let's hope so. But at the same time, if you're applying for an accounting job and it's a grueling kind of job, but you make the candidate experience happy fuzzy bunny, they're going to say, great. I love this job. And they're going to walk in and say, whoa, this isn't the job I thought I was getting into. And they're gone three weeks later because they're valuable. So there needs to be some mirror. So to me, Employer Brand isn't the thing that attracts them. Employer Brand is a strategy all through the entire candidate journey. Frankly, all the way from the top to the bottom to say, this is why people work here.

This is what we reward, proving it through the candidate's journey, supporting it in the job and when knowing that, by telling them all those things, when they tell their friends or people at a bar, what it's like to work there, they're telling similar stories to bring them back to the top of the funnel. Employer Brand is not just attraction, it's the whole thing. Now I might focus on attraction because that's what gets me the most bang for my buck early on. But I know, here's a good example. If I say, hey, I'm going to put this message out. We want just cutthroats I'm going back to this because it's funny. We just want these cutthroat nurses, these two cutthroat nurses and we're not drunk. Ladies and gentlemen, listening to this, we are very, very stone sober I promise you.

So you get these cutthroat nurses and the cutthroat nurse goes, oh, that sounds like a cool job and they apply. You don't ignore the cutthroatness of the job. And in fact, when you get-- you touch on it, the recruiter should be touching on it through the journey. And then when they get to the offer stage, the offer stage should literally start with, you applied because you saw this cutthroat job and it sounded like something you wanted to do. All you have to do is touch on it. All you have to do is just tap it to remind them.

This is what got you excited in the first place. Just doing stuff like that increases your offer acceptance rate. Because you're reminding them why, you're not saying, hey, let's switch the conversation is nothing but salary and benefits and negotiation, which is sadly where most offer conversations go. If you say, look, here's an offer, it's fair. But I want to remind you what you get is the subjective value you wanted. You said you want at the beginning, reminding them, squeeze and re-anchor it at the offer level, they're more likely to say yes. So Employer Brand impacts even things like offer acceptance.

Max: Yeah that's a solid takeaway here. Remind them at the offer stage why this offer is unique?

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Also I love the tip about telling them a list of reasons why you will not like this job. One of my favorite interview questions is you’re not working here six months from now. Well, tell me what happened.

Ellis: Yeah. Oh, wow, that's a good one.

Max: I got, that one from a friend at Google and the answer usually help you yeah understand what candidates considered to be the main risk factors, which is a little bit more self-centered rather than company centered usually. But still very insightful.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Great. Well, James' final question. And because we're up on time.

Ellis: You make it sound like there's a trap door, right under me. Like the final question, sir. Are you ready for this?

Max: Well this one is a bit tricky. It's walking back to a dark place, which is a mistake that you have made in recruitment because anyone who's done recruitment has made a recruitment mistake at some point.

Ellis: Yes.

Max: And if you could illustrate that. Think back to someone that you hired and you made a mistake and then what can the audience learn from that?

Ellis: Way back when I was a hiring manager, I had a team of -- well, Max there were 19 people helping us build social media and content for clients and whatnot. And so we were hiring our a regular basis. We were hiring very junior people and we didn't-- it wasn't the top-of-the-scale pay. So we were hiring people who were 21, 22, 23, fresh out of school, maybe one job before that. And my mistake I made and it's a rookie mistake, but I think everybody has to learn the hard way, is to just listen to me. And so I found someone, I thought they were great. I kind of said, yep. I think we should hire them. Did it. Hired them. And three months later, they hated their job.

You know, making people around them miserable and they eventually left. Thank goodness. And the little lesson I learned was that look, I have to have other people's weigh in and kind of balance me out. Like I get into folks, like many people. I kind of get fixated and say, oh, this is the right person. And then the blinders come up and I say, this is what I want. I needed to kind of build my own little, you might call it an interview loop, but I really thought of it more as a board, a personal board to say, look, you know me and you know what I'm looking for because you do the job.

But I also know, you know my blind spots. So check my blind spots and I've had almost screaming fights with people who said, James, you don't understand, do not hire this person. And I'm like, I love them. I think they're amazing. And then I had to listen to them and I did. I think I was all the better for it, but that's the lesson I learned is that you do need to kind of understand your own blind spots and you have to build systems that balance against them otherwise you're just going to keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Max: That's very hard to do because if you don't hire someone, then you don't really know, let's say you fall in love with a candidate.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: And then somebody tells you not to, and then you don't hire them. You follow their advice, but you never know what could have been, you could live in regret.

Ellis: The FOMO.

Max: Yeah, the FOMO is strong and real.

Ellis: It's real. It's real.

Max: Yeah. It's a real problem.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Well, I don't think we'll solve that one today, but--

Ellis: No, no.

Max: For everything else t thanks a lot, James. Where can people get a hold of you and read your content perhaps?

Ellis: Sure. I do a free newsletter. It's called Employer Brand headlines. If you go to employerbrandheadlines.substack.com, or if you go to employerbrandlab.com, it's right there. It's free and I think right now it's the biggest newsletter in employer branding. I don't know. I don't have metrics for that stuff, but let's say it is. Let's pretend it is. Why not? What the heck, it's a podcast. Just say anything.

Max: This is branding. If you say it is. And so--

Ellis: Yeah, exactly. If Joe Rogan can say whatever he wants to say on his podcast, why can't we say whatever you want? What's up with that? Anyway, employerbrandlab.com.

Max: To subscribe, spell it out again for the substack.

Ellis: Sure. It's employer brandheadlines.substack.com. It's free. It's really designed to help you get kind of sharp at employer branding and how to think about it. It's not tactics, it's not tricks and hacks. It's really about look, employer branding is a way of looking at the world. Here's a way to kind of help shift your perspective.

Max: Great. Well, I'm going to go online right now and subscribe to it. Thanks a lot, James. Thanks for having you.

Ellis: No, it's been a blast. Thanks for having me on.

Max: And that was James Ellis from Employer Brand Labs. Hope you enjoyed the discussion we had particularly around volume, James arguing for less is more to get the perfect candidate in and I always arguing for more volume and then let the machines do the sorting for you. Both approaches of course are not incompatible. And James and I had a great little discussion afterward discussing how people, employers could expand the front of the funnel and then use their branding too as well, make sure that every candidate is a good culture fit with your company. So I think both are very compatible in fact, and that we live in a world where we can get very targeted candidates, but still insufficient volume. Hope you enjoyed it and that you'll subscribe for more and share with your friends.

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Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, dialing in from Johannesburg, South Africa, I'd like to welcome now to the show Vanessa Raath, who is a global talent sourcing trainer and our paths almost crossed in London a couple of weeks ago. She's a world traveler. And we're going to talk about the difficult art of planting doubts in the minds of unsuspecting candidates and talents. And how do you turn a passive job seeker into an active one? How do you mess up their world?

Vanessa: How do you play with their minds?

Max: That's it. How do you play with their minds? So Vanessa, thanks for joining me for this, hopefully, entertaining discussion.

Vanessa: Sure.

Max: And before we get going, could you tell the audience a little bit about your background? How did you end up in this recruitment function? And as a global talent sourcing trainer? What was the journey to get you there?

Vanessa: Awesome. Well, first of all, Max, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Always nice to be a guest on a different podcast. So my journey was an interesting one. I've done quite a few things in my career. I'm actually a qualified teacher, which leads into me working now as a trainer and helps immensely. I've also worked as a scuba diving instructor in Thailand. So you pick it up and pretty much done it.

I've taught unruly school kids in the UK, taught unruly holidaymakers how to scuba dive in Southeast Asia and in East Africa, came back to South Africa and kind of fell into recruitment like everyone does. Went for an interview at a recruitment agency, and they said, why don't you think about recruitment, and I was like, I'm not sure whether I've got the wardrobe, but I'll give it a bash and see how I go.

Vanessa: And the rest is history. I did 13 years working in both the recruitment agency space as well as finishing off doing internal head of talent acquisition for a tech company, and that is where I pretty much taught myself how to source because I realized I couldn't find tech talent, just relying on job boards and LinkedIn anymore. And it was time to actually branch out, look for passive talents in different places where they were spending their time.

And yeah, getting into the psyche of your reach out and persuading people to leave jobs that they were probably really happy in in order to come and join your organization. So three and a half years ago, I launched my own business, and that's what I've been doing ever since. So yeah. Good times. I'm very happy.

Max: It sounds like your background as a teacher would be perfect training--

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Max: -- to go into training. And then, of course, your natural curiosity. And what I heard is like you were driven by the needs of the business like we need to go--

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Max: --go beyond Indeed and LinkedIn, which is a lot of what your training is focused on, I gather. So if people want to find out how to source talent outside of the beaten track, they should come to you right

Vanessa: Yes.

Max: --for new ideas. Now, let's talk a little bit about those passive job seekers, people who are maybe never heard about you before, and didn't even know that they were looking for a job.

Vanessa: Until I found them and told them that they were looking for a new job.

Max: You are like, hey, I've got news for you buddy. So the transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, which is one that I guess, if it happens smoothly, in a perfect world, you would just send a job description, and they would fall in love with it. And then they'd be like, well, great. Yes, I love the package. I love the job description.

Vanessa: Now you see that sounds like recruiting was 10 years ago, and it was super easy, and we all should have worked harder, and we all should have made more commission and retired sooner. Now the game has changed. The goalposts are different because sending a candidate a job description isn't good enough anymore, because you first got to persuade the candidates that they need to leave the job that they're in.

So you're now selling to both candidates and clients. Because before, it was easy enough to go and find these people on job boards, they were on the market, they were putting themselves out there, but now the landscape of recruitment has changed, and now everyone's kind of passive talents, which has made our jobs so much more difficult.

Max: Yeah. The fact that they were maybe less actively looking, is that observation based on data? Because it seems like everybody's on, in my world, everybody's on LinkedIn all the time. But I guess it depends on the kind of talent pools you're going after. Because I'm dealing with HR professionals. So of course, they're on LinkedIn.

Vanessa: Beautiful. So you and I are both so lucky because our target database is HR and recruiters and those people are on LinkedIn all day, every day, right? So when I'm trying to sell my training to recruiters, that's where I'm posting. But if you've got someone who's a Java developer, why would they go to LinkedIn? The only thing that's going to happen is that they're going to be harassed by recruiters trying to recruit them.

That’s not going to enhance their career. If a Java developer was to spend some time on GitHub, and they could look at other people's code, they could learn from other developers, that would be much more beneficial to them and their careers. So that's what we've got to think about, who's on which platforms more than others.

Max: So, maybe walk us through the journey of engaging with somebody on GitHub. For example, somebody who's not looking for a job, because it sounds extremely creepy to me that I'm an engineer trying to inspire my work. And randomly someone is contacting me a little bit out of the blue. So how do you make it less out of the blue?

Vanessa: This happens all day on LinkedIn too remember, it's not a platform thing. So my training is all kind of like, try and find someone's email address, because I prefer to send someone an email than in-mail. So on GitHub, for example, you can't actually even connect with developers, they've taken away that functionality, you cannot message someone through the platform. So you have to find an email address.

So for me, when I reach out to a candidate, I'm never going to say, I just saw you on GitHub. I'd maybe say, I saw you on GitHub, I had looked at your Twitter feed, well done on something you'd achieved, and also watched your training video on YouTube around how to build a new repository using Java, something along those lines. So it's more of a holistic view of, I've really done my homework about you, I've looked at you on all of these platforms, let's start chatting. And that kind of gets a lot of attention and a lot of response from candidates because I've gone the extra mile.

Max: Personal.

Vanessa: Yeah, and I've personalized my outreach message. So first of all, we've got to work on getting a better response rate from passive talent, which is something that most of the teams that I'm training at the moment are struggling with. So for me, it doesn't matter which platform you find people on, always have a look at them across multiple platforms, because that will help you to personalize that outreach for them.

Max: Are there tools that you use for that, or you're just basically researching them on these platforms to see if their names come up?

Vanessa: So what I generally do is I use an X-ray technique, where I go to Google or one of the search engines. And I will write a Boolean search string and our X-ray into one of these platforms, in order to find people who potentially have the right tech stack that I'm looking for, for one of my clients. I predominantly source in the tech space. But you can do this on several platforms using the X-ray technique. And then what I normally do is activate some chrome extensions in order to be able to find people's contact details, like email addresses. Because emails, let's face it have a far higher response rate than in-mail.

Max: In-mail?

Vanessa: So I'd rather choose that route, yeah.

Max: Okay. And what if you were able to get their phone number, does that happen?

Vanessa: You know what? When people sign up for these platforms, they're generally signing up with an email address, not a phone number. So it's actually easier to find an email address, and you can find people's phone numbers, it's possible. It's not impossible, but it's just not as easy as finding an email address. And let's face it, you're going to find an email address with more regularity than you will a phone number.

Max: Right. So it's more scalable and I also suspect that sending a cold email will be more, well, it's a bit intrusive to make a cold call these days, because most of them are telemarketers--

Vanessa: Or financial advisors.

Max: Right. So but I suppose you could also do that. And then the reason I asked about phone numbers is because the phone numbers also open some new windows such as WhatsApp, so you could also use WhatsApp for engagement.

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Max: Yes, you use that.

Vanessa: Yeah, yeah. I do. I mean, WhatsApp, it's really popular through Africa and Europe, but I actually found Facebook Messenger a lot more effective in the US. So it's just understanding which platform works better for people. A lot of my friends in the US also prefer signal or telegram to WhatsApp, because they're not supporters of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta who owns WhatsApp. So yeah, it's just understanding the psyche of where you're going to find people.

Max: Yeah, I'm on all of them just in case.

Vanessa: Me too. That's what we do as recruiters.

Max: No secrets for Mr. Zuckerberg--

Vanessa: Yeah, he's welcome to listen in on my conversations really.

Max: You too?

Vanessa: Yeah, I don't really give a shit.

Max: Great. Well, so that initial email, where you show that you've done your research, you personalize the outreach, then when do you get off email into a phone call? How far can you use the written form in bringing them into consideration for a job? Like how long are these correspondences? How long would you be recommending that a recruiter goes into these correspondences considering that well, we all have limited time and, I guess it's like, in sales, you have to know when you've lost the deal. So you can move on to the next one.

Vanessa: Yeah, exactly.

Max: The same thing. So of course, you can always advocate for more engagement, more personalization, more emails, more everything. But we've got a finite amount of time and resources. So how do you know when to stop? What's the right amount of correspondence? And how do you know when to stop?

Vanessa: So basically, my best should I say tip around this is to automate this process because we all don't have enough time for this. So what I do is I advocate putting candidates into a five or six email reach out a campaign, where a lot of recruiters, I've been training on this, this morning, and we'll send a very long email upfront, and then a second or third email saying, hey, did you read my email with that kind of passive recruitment that's going on.

Where if you break up the information that you would put in that very long first email across five emails, or six emails, of breaking it up into bite-sized pieces, thinking like a marketer, you actually get a better response rate. So I normally use my tool for automating emails is something called SourceWhale. I use that really all the time whenever I'm trying to get hold and source new talent. And I usually run it over 10 days.

So I send people five emails over 10 days, at varying times of the day, varying days in between each message. So it's something that I don't really need to think about. Because as soon as I get the new role, I've set up the campaign, I don't know the personalization that needs to be added in. And then the campaign runs in the background. So I literally can be delivering like four hours’ worth of training and finish the training and I come back to a whole lot of responses. And there are people who've answered the automatic email that's gone out from my outlook with my signature looks like me to them. It's brilliant.

Max: You can go scuba diving, in the meantime, come back--

Vanessa: Absolutely.

Max: -- inbox full of candidates.

Vanessa: Yeah, there we go job done. So for me, the trick is to automate because you're never going to remember who you've messaged, and who you need to message again. Those kinds of things.

Max: And these, you talked about personalization, and then automation. And sometimes these are in conflict. If you're automating everything, then there's no personalization.

Vanessa: It depends which tool you use

Max: But there is some customization you can do on those email templates where you have certain fields that you can fill with tokens.

Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: So that is automated. I mean, it feels personalized, even if it’s somewhat automated. So to illustrate that, it sounds like that's what you're doing, right?

Vanessa: Absolutely, yeah.

Max: So what are some of those fields you might be using?

Vanessa: So for me, like one of the fields would be that maybe where the person's currently working? What is their current job title? What is the qualification? Their certification? Maybe something I could find out about what hobbies they do? I could relate it to maybe it's something similar that I do, they could go and verify that by looking at my social presence online, and definitely the person's name, I think we tend to forget about that one.

That's also a good custom field that you can fill in, and maybe a link to like a GitHub repository, if it's someone who's in the tech space, YouTube channel, whatever I can find on the person, I'm going to tell them that, hey, I took the time, I did my research, I really want you. So one thing I'm definitely not going to do in my reach-out message is say, if you know anyone else that you can send my way, please let me know because--

Max: Oh, really? I do that all the time. It's not a good idea?

Vanessa: Not a good idea because the feeling coming back from candidates is, why do recruiters always ask me to do their jobs for them? So if you know the candidates, and you've placed them and you've got a good relationship, by all means, pick up the phone, phone them, who do they know? But if it's in your first reach out to them, or in your reach out campaign, I normally will end with that in my last email. So if I haven't elicited a response, at least, it doesn't harm in asking, but I wouldn't ask for anyone else, because I want that person to feel special, I want them to think I want them.

00:15:27

Max: And sending these hundreds or maybe 1000s of emails every month, you must be getting a lot of responses?

Vanessa: So first of all, I'm not sending 100 or 1000s of emails a month, because I recruit in a very specialized tech industry, and they aren't that number of people that are around. I don't agree with that kind of just bulk spamming people with templates. So yes, I'm getting loads of responses, but it's manageable.

Max: Okay. Yeah, it's not in the 1000s. And I was going to ask you, how do you capture that on the way back because I think that we're actually at the infancy of what the technology will be able to do where you'll be able to read the email, read the response, organize the data semantically.

Vanessa: Well, basically SourceWhale does that. So SourceWhale reads the email, and it tells me whether it's a positive response or a negative response. And then I can respond directly from my email accordingly. So I could say, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I could say, well, let's meet, here's my Calendly link, let's make an appointment. So I think these things are far more intuitive than we give them credit for. And they keep on pushing out improvements out there. So it's one of those things that always amazes me, it's very intuitive, it's using a lot of AI, and makes me think that maybe one day robots will roam the Earth, I'm not sure.

Max: No doubt.

Vanessa: -- maybe not in my lifetime, but--

Max: I'm working on that with my colleagues.

Vanessa: Yes, please keep me posted.

Max: We've talked about the technology, the automation, which is so important. But now let's get into a little bit of psychology. So an answer you should be getting for most of your candidates is thank you very much. I'm not looking, I'm happy where I am. And that's human nature, we get comfortable with the familiar and we want to stay where we are. So where do we go from there?

Vanessa: So for me that response is good because any response is good. Let's face it. Someone's going to respond, you've elicited that response by what you've said and that's amazing. So if they say they're quite happy a lot of the time, it's because in the tech space, people are working on a project, and they've still got a couple of months left on their project.

So what I would go back to with them and say, how much longer do you have on this project? Is this a long-term thing? Please shout as soon as you hit into the support and maintenance phase, which everyone in the tech space hates, because they know that their skills are stagnating, and they not learning anything new. So you kind of play to the doesn't get stuck kind of people. But if it was--

Max: The innovation pace, how fast are you innovating right now? What are your big milestones? Are things moving fast?

Vanessa: Exactly, exactly. For someone who wasn't in the tech space, just to give you an example would be, when is your next round of bonuses or grades, let me know when you can chat, and then I’ll tell them something that they couldn't refuse. So I'd know something from the hiring manager, that would be a potential hook.

So something that would be unique to that company. If you ever want to learn this new skill, or you ever want to work internationally, or you want to get asked to sponsor you for this international qualification or certification and like, global techs, whatever, whatever, then you just let me know. So as long as you've got the response first, you can go back with any of those kinds of hooks that would entice people to want to come and work with you.

Max: Yeah. Sometimes we'll engage engineers who are working in a service environment where they're doing project-based work and say, wouldn't you be interested in moving to the product side where you're working on a product for a long time? So actually, it's kind of like the opposite of what you were describing. It's like saying, don't you want to do service and maintenance on the same product for a long time, because it's not necessarily boring for everybody. It could be fun.

Vanessa: Exactly, exactly.

Max: Great. Great, great, great. What about some dirty tactics? Like would you plant a seed in someone's mind on the quality of the company they're working in?

Vanessa: Like, I think that's a bit of a low blow, to be honest. I don't know whether I'd be brave enough to go there. But what I would probably do is play on the fact that surveys at the moment are showing that people want to work for companies that are making a difference. So they don't want to just sit in a bank where they're going to make the bank loads of money.

I'd rather say, this is a startup, we focused on solving global world famine, and we would love you to be a part of that because that really is going to be a role where there's going to be a good purpose behind it. And I think I would maybe use the reverse psychology to say, not just to say, actually, you just making a bank more money, but come and work somewhere where you're going to add value and actually have an impact on the world.

Max: Yeah, because everybody's got a moment of doubt, where even if they're comfortable in their job, and the money and the people, they'd be like, oh, what should I do with my life?

Vanessa: That's a big picture exactly. And you want to like kind of tap into that.

Max: Okay. Well, all great stuff, gold, I hope the listeners are paying attention and taking notes. I end my interviews, usually with the same question for everyone, which is one of the mistakes that we have made in the past on the hiring front. And ideally, in order to illustrate that with one specific case of someone you hired, which didn't work out, for whatever reason, and as painful as that was to walk back on the origin of that mistake, and then what we can learn from it?

Vanessa: Sure, okay interesting. So I mean, it does happen. I'd actually rather have someone not start, then someone starts, and then be appalling. So there was a situation when I was working for an agency, and I was tasked to go and find someone who was going to be a housekeeper. And I interviewed this lady, and she seemed great and she was battling. She hadn't had the most, should I say, stable medical history. She'd been in and out of the hospital but assured me that everything was fine.

She was in remission, she had actually suffered from cancer. And she'd got the all-clear. And my gut kind of was like, I don't know about this lady. I don't know whether I'm giving my client a forward pass here. And she actually started with the company. And within two months, the cancer was back and she was back in the hospital. So I probably shouldn't have put her forward for the role, but she was desperate for work, she had medical bills to pay off.

But there was always that niggle that something else was going on wrong. And what actually transpired was that she didn't actually have cancer, she had a drug dependency issue on prescription medication. So for me, the niggle that I didn't follow through on was my gut feeling of there's more to the story than what I'm seeing. So it was early on in my career when I was still working in an agency. One thing that I kind of carried through for the rest of my career was, if there is a niggle, if there's a gut feeling, go and dig deeper, maybe do that extra reference check on the candidates.

And, maybe don't be so generous and give candidates the benefit of the doubt. And if you do something that I have done, and what I learned from it is that one's guts are actually never really wrong. And that's probably why we work in the industry that we do because we have a good gut feeling of our people and we know who we're going to connect with and who's going to do a good job. And we sometimes kind of push that to the side because we've got deadlines, and we need to put a bomb in the seats and things like that.

Max: Oh, the innocence of people who have never worked in recruitment, we we'll never have that again.

Vanessa: No, of course not that I'm sure everyone's got a similar story. They were all duped by someone, given a story, but this is something to remember, I think.

Max: I mean, and that does happen very often. Candidates, they're not stupid. Often some are smarter than the recruiters, and they know what not to say and what truth to hide. And got to pay very close attention to those details.

Vanessa: Yeah.

Max: Thanks, Vanessa.

Vanessa: My pleasure. Thank you.

Max: Well, where can people get a hold of you?

Sure. Guys I'm not difficult to find on the Internet. So I'm on any other social platforms. My website is vanessaraath.com--

Max: Double-A.

Vanessa: -- And yeah hit me up. If you want to talk about talent sourcing training. I would love to work with you and your teams.

Max: Thank you very much.

Max: That was Vanessa Raath who was reminding us of some of the beautiful technology that is available at our fingertips to create email sequences and treat the passive candidates like something that should activate you rather than you being passive in front of it as well. I hope you got something out of this interview. I certainly did. And that you'll be back for more to listen to some of the hackers of the recruitment industry.

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Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I am your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome someone who is a veteran of the industry. Sorry, Steven, it has to be said. The Founder, Chief Visionary Officer for College Recruiter. We'll give Steven a chance to introduce College Recruiter and what they do, but I'm excited to have a conversation with Steven about what is happening in the world of campus recruitment and university hiring and all of those activities that kind of used to require a travel budget.

And so what, what happened over the last couple of years, what's gonna come to us in the future, and how do we keep hiring young talent without breaking the bank without it costing what it used to cost, basically. That's what we'll be talking about. So, Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven: Well, thank you very much, Max. I think the word veteran is code for extreme age. Okay but that's cool. With age comes wisdom, and at some point, I'm hoping to have both, not just the former.

Max: Age is just surviving, surviving everything that could have happened and all those buses that could have hit you
Steven: All those I’ve tried have to dodge.
Max: So yeah, it's a compliment of course. You’ve been running college recruiters since, your LinkedIn says since November, 1991. Pre-internet so well, how did you end up in that space? Cause I saw from your background that you come from the legal, from being a law clerk and studying law and being a law graduate. Right? So you're a lawyer.

Steven: Yes. I like to say I'm fully recovered. Family members would definitely disagree and that's fine. I'll Sue them.

So in 1991, I had graduated from law school and was clerking for a couple of judges. And it's a pretty common thing recent grads from law school do. It's, kind of almost the equivalence of like a residency program for positions. You know, you go, you get that formal education and it kind of gives you like an internship kind of a year, but you're paid for it.

You're paid pretty decently for it. The work is really interesting but during that year, a friend of mine reached out to me and tried to get me to join his small business, which I had actually started the small business when I was in college, when I was in undergraduate school, he took it over, tried to get me back in and that kind of got my entrepreneurial bug going again. And so in 91, while I was working full time as a law clerk, I got the business that college recruiter grew out of started part-time and what it was for a few years, it was publishing maps of college and university campuses and selling the advertising around the borders to restaurants, retailers, et cetera.

That then led into publishing employment magazines, where the magazines I gave them away for free to career service offices. They gave them away free to students and grads. And the revenues came from employers paying to advertise their jobs. And then in 96, this thing called the internet came along. And over the next few years, we gradually got rid of all of our print publications. And so since 2000, it has been the job board, collegerecruiter.com.
Max: Right. I'm gonna show my age by telling you that in 2000 I was working for a company called Zip Davis and I was working for a computer shopper magazine. So I was there for the slaying, the final days of computer list, people buying computers on listings and you know every month we would lose advertisers. But I'm sure the CNET networks was able to recuperate some advertising on the other end, but yeah it was a time of just destruction, all over the place. And I guess there must have been one year when you went from 80- 20 to 20-80.
Steven: Yeah, 1999 was the year that we shut down the maps, which were ridiculously profitable. You know, I think in 98, the maps provided something like 80% of our revenue. Sorry. I think it was 80% of our profit with only 20% of the revenue and about 5% of my time. It was painful to give that up, but the writing was on the wall. It's like, you know, you give this up now and work from a position of strength and cannibalize your own sales.

Or somebody's gonna do that to you.
Max: And fortunately, you were young too.
Steven: Yeah. I was young and, and I mean, my wife and I had a couple of kids at that point. We ended up with three, but, it is a different situation at that point than, you know, when you're still fairly early in your career, you're, you're better able to take on risks. Uh, everything else being equal.
Max: Yeah. So, college recruiter has been, is it, can I call it a job board? A market?

Steven: Yeah,

Max: I know it's not a sexy term, but like a marketplace for young talents?

Steven: yeah. You know, it's not sexy, but one thing about job boards, is that they work. Yeah. They, really deliver, the good ones, they deliver really great value. They've been around for a long time. Without a doubt, the industry has its haters. The haters, the most vocal ones tend to be those, with skin in the game, the ones that are competing against the job boards for the same budget. And so you see third party recruiters talking about how awful job boards are and how nobody uses job boards and blah, blah, blah.

It's like, well, okay. If your whole focus is on recruiting C-suite executives, then yeah, job boards are not the place for you, but if you're recruiting a lot of relatively early career talent at scale, there aren't too many more efficient ways of getting that opportunity in front of the candidate. There are loads of ways, including Talkpush of then taking that candidate who has discovered the opportunity, who's discovered your organization and converting them into an applicant or converting that applicant into a hire. There are loads of ways out there that do that better than a job board would. But that initial, “I don't know who I wanna work for”, “I may not even know what kind of position I'm looking for”, I don't just don't think there's anything better out there than job boards for that.
Max: mm-hmm yeah, I've been a promoter of social media for sourcing at high volume for a long time. And, I think it's effective, if done right. And, you know, depending on the geographies, but if you're in a college town and you're targeting a specific age bracket, I think it can be very effective for jobs that are suitable for a large trench of the population.

But instead of taking it from the employer's perspective and we take it from the job seeker perspective, then yeah, the benefits of this sort of virtual career fair that you get in a job board is it's unmatched. The only thing that was close to it maybe was Facebook jobs, but they shut down in March that I think that was, that could have been a good, uh, Yeah, maybe another job board killer.

I know there’s been a lot through the, over the years who have come and gone.

Steven: yeah, I was a fan of the concept, and I think if they had more focus on it, I think they could have made it into a real success. It'll be interesting to see five years from now when the truth comes out, why it was really killed, what the reality was. I suspect it had to do with privacy laws that they were gathering or needing to gather a whole lot of information about job seekers that just doesn't play well with laws like GDPR.

Max: Yeah.
Steven: And, better for them to focus on their core. You know, serving basically display ads than job postings, resume searching. It's different. It's really different.
Max: It was poorly monetized. Um, it was driving traffic out to sort of clunky and ugly career websites and ATSs. And, it was opening Facebook to a world of pain, which is the regulatory employment laws. So. Yeah, sad to see it go myself. But, anyway, there's plenty of other venues.

So for people who want to find out more about College Recruiter, they, I suppose, where should they go and read more or find out about your services?
Steven: Yeah, so they can go to collegerecruiter.com. We're very transparent about who we are, what we do, if they wanna reach out to me directly, they can do so on LinkedIn is a good way. linkedin.com/in/Steven with a V uh, Steven Rothberg, or just email me Steven@collegerecruiter.com.
Max: And then, there's your podcast, that you co-host with? I forget his name.
Steven: Yeah, Jeff, Jeff Dickey Chasins, that’s the job board doctor, he and I last September launched a podcast called the job board geek podcast, and it's about the business of connecting candidates and employers. One way of doing that is through job boards. There are loads of other great, technical tools out there too that do the same or similar thing, usually just kind of in a different way and reaching different kinds of candidates, different points of engagement, requires different kinds of tools.
Max: Would you consider that your number one customer is the employer or the student?
Steven: So we are, my answer to you is neither. Okay. Neither and both, if that makes sense. So neither in the sense that we don't look at either the employer or the student or the candidate as being the customer, we're in a double-sided marketplace. That means that we have two different customer groups. We have the employer and their intermediaries, advertising agencies, job distribution companies, et cetera, that act on behalf of the employer. And then we have the candidate for us. That's going to be a, somebody who's currently enrolled or graduated within the last three years.

So shorthand, zero to three years of experience. If we serve one far more than the other, the whole thing crumbles. You have to serve both. You have to balance the interests of both. For example, if we were to say the candidate is all that matters and we need to do what is in the best interest of the candidate, where that would lead us would be to provide the home phone numbers of our employer customers to the candidates. That's not a sustainable business model. I don't think we're gonna have too many employers that are thrilled if we were to do something like that. On the flip side,
Max: Total transparency is not gonna please the ones who are paying for the service. Yeah.
Steven: Right. And then they'll stop, and when they stop, then how are you helping anybody? Cuz now there aren't any employers that are using your platform to hire. So then the candidates who are using your platform, then can't get hired that way. So, and then the same is true in reverse, you know, if we were to be completely loyal to the employer and sort of disregard the interests of the candidate, then we start treating candidates like inventory.

And again, we start providing the employers with a bunch of information that maybe we know or find out about the candidates that the candidates don't want us to be providing. You know, why did your boss really hire you last week? You know, that's something that should be between the candidate and the prospective employer.

That's not something that an intermediary like a job board should be revealing. Now, again, it's different if it's an executive recruiter, because the executive recruiter is then acting on behalf of typically the employer. Not always, but typically, and they're essentially the agent, but we're not the agent of the employer. We're not the agent of the candidate. We have to balance both interests.
Max: Yeah. Yeah. Well that makes sense. So let's talk about the interests the students, the college students. Yeah. how did the college students fare from 2020 to 2022 on, on the plus side?

We still have very low unemployment, so there's high demand, plenty of jobs available, checks coming in the mail, getting a lot of bad press for what it's doing to the hunger and drive of the new generation. But, so overall it seems like they're doing all right, you know, but of course we know mental health issues, blah, blah, blah.

You know, all of the hardship that comes with the pandemic and being locked at home, not being able to socialize. Let's put all of that aside. Just focus on the college stuff yeah. On the hiring, on the hiring problem. How did college students get hired in the last couple of years?

Did they switch entirely to video and zoom calls and was that the primary channel for college hiring?
Steven: Yeah. So just for a little bit of context, you know, COVID really hit hard, the us, you know, March of 2020. By March in any year, the vast majority of the hiring of students in recent grads is complete.

By basically February, the very, very beginning of March, employers, just aren't on campus interviewing. They're not reaching out to students as part of their college recruiting programs, which are increasingly being called things like early talent, or early careers or something along those lines. Employers are kind of broadening it. We can get into that later if you wish. But so. The graduating class or those who were looking for internships that first year of COVID were not greatly impacted in terms of finding jobs, applying to them, getting hired. Fortunately, that first summer, the summer of 2020, most large employers did a really fantastic job of transitioning their workforce from being in-person in offices, to being fully remote, working at home. And so, although the students who were interning or those who were new grads lost that in-person experience, along with it mentorships. You know, good management, et cetera, only a small percentage of them lost out on their jobs.

Most employers did not rescind their offers, but the programs were definitely highly adapted. We saw a lot of things like employers taking a 12-week internship program and making it four, rather than in person, it was virtual and they would do a lot of zoom-based training, and they would create projects.

So that rather than that student working side by side with her manager instead, she would get a project and kind of report back to me in four hours or 12 hours or 20 hours, or, you know, however long that project might take. Okay. Most students, a large percentage of students worked for large employers and it was the large employers that had the resources and the know-how to do that adaptation, small employers were the ones that really didn't. So, the students that kind of got their offers rescinded or showed up and the door was locked, I literally heard that one time, they tended to work for small employers, loads of exceptions though. The next year's graduating class and the students who were looking for internships in the summer of 2021, by then vaccines were already coming out. And you had a lot of employers who were starting to hire back really quickly. It's kind of hard to remember. It was only a little over a year ago, but it was like, wow, vaccines are coming out. Life is returning to normal; people are starting to travel again. Isn't this great.

We made it through and then Delta hit, but Delta didn't really hit until July, August, you know, in most areas of the country. So again, it was kind of fortuitous a difference of a few months would've made a big difference. But the students by and large, already were interning, most of it was remote. The new grads were already working, most of it was still remote, but you were starting to see some hybrid. So, it didn't have as much of an impact on the labor market as it would have if the change had come in, say September, October, when, when the bulk of on-campus hiring's done. Um, and by this year, things were pretty much back to, I guess back to the new normal, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So one of the big differences between say 2019 and 2022 is that we've all learned how awful on-campus career fairs are. Any employer that still thinks that that's a great way to hire is an employer that probably has a brain injury. It is excruciating for the employer and for the student, the only real reason that they exist is because they always have existed. And because the career service offices use them as a primary way of generating revenue. So career service offices will say to employers, quite literally, if you want access to, “my students”, they own them. Yeah. Then you have to spend a thousand dollars and come out to our career fair, even though it's gonna be a complete waste of your time.
Max: I remember
Steven: That's ridiculous.
Max: I remember being asked for money to advertise on campus, but it's yeah. I mean, the argument is just to weed out the employees who are not serious. Yeah.
Steven: Yeah. And those without money to give to the career services, but who might have great job opportunities for the students. Right. At the end of the day, the career service offices are there to serve the students. Not To use that relationship in order to balance their budget, they should be getting their budget from student services or somewhere else in the university. I mean, not from employers, you, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go to an employer and say, Hey, if you wanna park in our parking lot, you gotta pay a thousand dollars. And if you don't pay a thousand dollars, you're not gonna recruit students. You know, the parking lot has to be paid for, but they're gonna pay a nominal fee to park there they're gonna pay 10 bucks or whatever that money out of
Max: That's a conflict of interest
Steven: Yeah. it really is. It does a massive disservice to the students. So what a lot of schools did during the height of COVID was that they shifted that whole business model online. If you thought in-person career fairs were bad. Wait till you see virtual career fairs. And some organizations did them well, but most didn't. Most of the virtual career fairs, and again, there were definitely some that I looked at and I said, Hey, this is done well, but most of them were basically glorified zoom calls with 60 people in a waiting room.

And so you want your 30-second chance to talk to that employer. You're gonna, you were sitting there and you were waiting often for an hour or two to have a 30-second conversation. And then the employer would say, well, for this reason, or that reason, we're not interested and moving on or thank you very much, go to our website and apply online. And the student is sitting there, like, why did I just spend an hour here? I could have just gone to their website and applied.
Max: So with, or without the pandemic and the fact that people, it was harder to meet in person, harder to travel and so on, would you agree with the statement that campus hiring is a very imperfect way of connecting employers and students and kind of keeping, you know, actually closing off a number of opportunities for students who are at a stage when they should be opening their mind to all kinds of possibility. Perhaps, it could be argued that it has a detrimental effect because they end up thinking that you know, the workplace is represented by these, know, 10 employers that is Accenture and, BCG and, a couple of other, you know, management, you know, PWC and that's it. That's, that's my landscape.

I imagine that most students have more imagination than this, but still, it should be enabled rather than limited by these physical barriers. So, care to comment on this?
Steven: No, I totally agree until campus recruiting in 2019. So before COVID.

Basically looked the same as it did in 1952, you had mostly large employers flying recruiters and hiring managers around the country, staying in nice hotels going on campus, and interviewing wining and dining professors. And. Not so coincidentally very often arriving on campus right in time for the homecoming game and getting tickets on the 50-yard line. So there was a lot of I don't know, feather betting or quasi-graft, kind of going on in that world where those who were in charge of the budgets often greatly favored the school that they went to or a school that had a really fun party kind of an atmosphere that they could take advantage of when they went there.

Then often, the employers would often make excuses about not being inclusive. So there are about 7,400 post-secondary schools in the U.S. There are about 3000 4-year colleges, universities in the U.S. And basically, other than the U.S army, no employer goes to all of them. Right. So how do they pick and choose? Well, they, you know, it comes down to budgets and need and you're gonna favor a school that's close to you rather than a school that's far away from you that all on the surface makes sense. The problem with all of that is that it's anything but inclusive. So, you know, one of the other things that happened in 2020 was the murder of George Floyd.

And all of a sudden, all of us were really forced to come to grips with what are we doing to improve diversity, equity, inclusion. And saying to students that the only way that you're gonna be hired here is if you happen to go to one of these 12 schools is not inclusive and because it's not inclusive, it's also not equitable. And it's, you're also not enhancing your diversity and employers started to understand, some already had. But I think a much larger percentage really grasped it, that the more diverse their workforce was, the more productive their workforce was. So I think for the first time, employers really, really started to invest in DEI, not just for compliance purposes, but to enhance their productivity.

And that meant they had to go to a lot more schools. So in one sense, having to use virtual career events and zoom and other tools like that, job boards to advertise your roles in one sense, felt like a step back for employers because they got, they lost out on the fun football games and they lost out on staying in, you know, a nice suite at a Marriot hotel in their favorite city, and going drinking with their friends on the weekend when they got to stay over and they lost out on all the miles that they would use to take their families to Europe during the summer. And there was a lot of that.
Max: Doesn't sound too bad, you're right.

Steven: Yeah. But on the other hand, they no longer had to literally plan 14 months ahead. For how many people are we gonna hire into what kinds of roles and where are they gonna be located throughout our organization? Now hiring manager calls up and says, Hey, we just landed a new contract. I need 20 electrical engineers, and I need them in three months. Right now you can do that. You can't do that when you're doing on-campus recruiting because it just takes too long. So employers very quickly were forced to, and then saw the value in shifting their resources from flying a bunch of people around the country to doing it what a lot of them call virtually. Which is just, you know, using this thing that basically was invented in the mid-nineties, that's the internet. So the ROI on recruiting somebody online is way better. The studies are showing that the productivity's actually higher than recruiting people on campus and the cost of hiring somebody is way lower.

This isn't about college recruiter. This is probably the same with just about any sourcing tool. But when we talk to our customers, their cost per hire are usually measured in the hundreds of dollars, right. NACE, which is the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the association for basically campus recruitment just before COVID. They said that the average cost of recruiting a student through on-campus recruiting was $4,600. It's like $4,600. It's like, but we only spent $200 at a career fair. It's the travel. It's the staff time. When you start flying a team of recruiters around the country. And they can go to a campus maybe once a day, probably every other day, cuz of travel time, and they meet with couple, a dozen students and maybe they hire one of them maybe they don't, it's frightfully expensive and it's not at all diverse. And so I think that one of the few positive things that have come out of COVID. is that employers of students have started to take a better picture. They're looking better at their ROI, not just their cost of hire, but also the productivity.
Max: I love the positive spin on the last two years. And I do think it is a more inclusive world, in that sense that you, you no longer are bound by geographical, material boundaries on how you're gonna pick your talent. And that's an enormous boom for mankind because it means we're gonna make better hires. Productivity's gonna go up it's good across the board. But in a more literal and direct sense; was it good for business for you? Like do you, did the travel budgets that got canceled, did they convert into ad spend on college recruiter.com?
Steven: Yeah. Our revenues have been up 30 to 50% a year, year over year, the last few years.

Max: Nice.
Steven: And we're growing and we're doing it profitably. Our headcount has basically doubled in the last six months.

Max: Cool.
Steven: And it was very overdue. We basically had to make sure that this was real before we started hiring a bunch of people and then we didn't wanna start, like laying them off three months after we hired them, but it was overdue. We put way too much stress on our staff by not hiring quickly enough. And we still have a couple of open roles. So, you know, max, if you're looking

Max: Quite inspiring, 20 you're 20 years, how many years? It's 25 years into this business. 30 years?.
Steven: Yeah.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. And then you have this two years with 25, 30% year over year growth. So, it is never too late to have a record year.
Steven: Yeah. And, you know, like, I think a lot of businesses in our space where it's primarily technology-based, you sort of, it's not the same business it was three years ago. So we made a huge shift towards pay for performance, like pay per click and programmatic before COVID. We started to really shift in like 2014, 2015, 2016. So it's not like we saw a pandemic coming. It's like, oh, well we better do programmatic and pay per click because there's gonna be COVID. No, it was, we were fortunate. We had the right products in place. Our entire platform has really evolved since the mid-2000s, since like 2015-ish to be really good at high volume hiring. Employers that are hiring dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands. That's basically what college and university hiring is. The vast majority of students and recent grads go to work for large employers, that's the way they hired

Max: When I was coming out of college, my master's degree, and it was in 2000. So you know, it was not a great year to be looking for work. So I spent a lot of time on monster.com and I, you know, I'd applied to like 10 to 20 jobs a day like steady for a month. Is that quite characteristic? I mean, in terms of the volume of jobs that the average student would apply to, do you have a way of quantifying that?

Steven: Fortunately, they're smarter than you were.

So what students are counseled to do now is to do a lot more research upfront about the kinds of jobs that they're looking for, really much better understand what kind of a job am I looking for? What kind of organization offers that? And then to really zero in and apply to five to 10 jobs. And when you apply to a far smaller number of jobs, you're able to do a much better job up front, making sure that they're the right jobs to apply to. And that, you know, there are still loads of job seekers out there who will apply to any job that moves and, and employers complain about them all the time.

And I think for good reason, you know, if somebody applies to hundreds of jobs, the likelihood of you hiring that person is really low. The likelihood of that person really not having any kind of qualifications for your job is pretty low, but that's also where technology can play a role. So yeah. You know, any employer that says, oh, well, you know, I have to sift through hundreds of resumes in order to find a good one, that's an employer that's investing too much in manpower and not enough in technology because technology should be preventing those people from applying to begin with to dissuade them, to basically say, Hey, you know what? No, you're not well suited for this role. Maybe there's another role over here, or we just can't hire you at all.

You have to be a U.S citizen to work for us because we require a security clearance and you are a citizen of, you know, God forbid Canada, or you know, where I grew up. You know, you definitely don't want to hire Canadians, can't trust any of them. They all smell like maple syrup. Yeah.

Max: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think you're on the side of the market where the marketplace could become intelligent and advise your students to apply to a different, better-suited job. I'm on the receiving end. My company, we process applications coming in from all kinds of places. And then we can go on and ask some qualifying questions to the candidates. Are you sure this is right? Are you sure you've got U.S citizens so you can do it on both. Can you tell us about some of the employers that are inspiring you in 2022 that really have nailed it when it comes to hiring students this year, that have done something nice because it's really hard to do a, virtual career fair, it's very hard to do a good candidate experience when you're doing high volume. So maybe you've got, a case study for us to think about?
Steven: Yeah. So, you know the shiny examples year after year after year, and it really COVID didn't change this would be, you were talking earlier about someone like the big management consulting firms, you know, the Deloittes, the PWCs, the Ernst & Youngs all over the world. So they have a ton of money, they hire 10,000 plus students in recent grads a year. They're very, very sophisticated about what they do. One of the things that those organizations do along with lots of others that a few years ago, hardly any were doing it at all is pre-application assessments. And you know, when I was a recent grad, if somebody had said assessments to me, they were probably talking about some BS thing, like Myers's briggs, or if you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

And somehow that was supposed to show them that I was gonna be a productive employee. And now there are loads of assessments out there off the shelf or companies as little as ours we built our own because we couldn't find one to assess developers, if they had the right skill set, if they had the right experience with the tech stack that we use, it's not that hard and not that expensive any more to have every candidate go through this assessment
Max: There's a lot of solutions online, so much stuff. So if you don't have you know, budget to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on assessments, you can go and build your own these days. Right. You don't need to be an engineer.

Steven: Yeah, exactly. And, and so I'm seeing more and more and more employers doing that. Now, partly what excites me about that is from the employer's perspective, It does a really nice job of greatly reducing, not eliminating, but greatly reducing the number of unqualified applications, which means then that they can spend more time on the qualified applicants, which means they're gonna hire more of them. That's best. That's good for everybody. It's also good for the candidate because wouldn't, you rather know 30 seconds into a process that this is not a job that you're ever gonna get than 30 days and five interviews later?
Max: It weeds out candidates like me in 2000, then I wouldn't have had time to do 20 assessments a day, half an hour assessment each. I mean, it would've been
Steven: you probably would've modified your behavior. You would've applied to fewer jobs. Yes. And that also would've then led you to do probably better research to which jobs to apply to.
Max: Yeah, my life would've been better. I would've had a way better life than the one I had.

Steven: Yeah. It's, you are a cliche that people talk about is hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun, you know, you know, you're, you're going and it just tends to lead to better results. The other thing that I think it does, that I know it does is that it helps to diversify your workforce because under the old system where a recruiter would look at your resume and they would see, it's like, oh, Max went to X, Y, Z school and that's a really impressive school. So I want to interview him, you know, and Cindy went to some school I've never heard of, so she can't possibly be well qualified, so we're not gonna interview her. Now it's based upon your actual skills. Yeah. Maybe you did go to an elite school, but you probably spent all your time playing Frisbee. Where Cindy went to a third-rate school, but had three amazing internships. Who would you rather hire? The person with work experience?
Max: No Frisbee. The Frisbee guy, Frisbee guy. A hundred percent.

Steven: Well, yeah. I mean, it depends. I guess it depends. If you're the Frisbee corporation, then yes, you'd rather hire the Frisbee. If it's like a Frisbee golf tournament then, yeah, the Frisbee guy. But, otherwise, you're just going to, you're just gonna end up being like a podcaster and an owner of like a workplace tech company. And that's not a good living.
Max: No, no,that's rough. Okay. Well that I agree with a hundred percent that, you know, skill-based, assessment-based hiring is gonna be more meritocratic and more fair and more, I don't know if it necessarily falls into diversity.But it can help certainly. It's more diverse than just hiring at the University of Wisconsin. That's for sure.
Steven: Right. And as a graduate of the university of Minnesota, I can definitely say that you do not want to hire people from the university of Wisconsin. Actually, my wife who's, our CEO went there and despite that,t I love her.

Max: Okay. Okay. Give faith my regards. I wanted to, uh, end on the question I ask all my guests which is - we all make hiring, and with that, we all make hiring mistakes. Thinking back about your long journey as an entrepreneur and all the people you hired, can you walk me back through one particular hire you made, where you missed the mark and did the service to yourself, to the hire, to the organization and then without giving names, of course, but just giving us the moral of the story, what can we learn from it?

Steven: Yeah. I'll just give you their social security number. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You know, there was a common thread. So, Faith became our CEO in 2008 and so I have not led hiring since then. And, probably about five or so years ago, I really haven't been involved in interviewing or whatever. It's not something I'm good at. That said, in my role, I will talk with candidates before they're hired, if they want to, to sort of get a better picture of the company, but I'm not evaluating them, it's helping them evaluate us. But to answer your question, Max, about sort of people we've hired that have not been a good fit.

I think a really common thread. Would be two things, two real common threads. One would be, I used to hire people that I felt that I liked and I could trust. And liking somebody and maybe trusting them, that kind of thing leads you to hiring people yoou know, people who are friends of yours, people who are family members of yours, and you're hiring them for the relationship and not what their skillset is, not what their career aspirations are. We've had a couple of people that we hired that way that were, that were great, but they were the exception. Repeatedly, we ended up hiring sort of good people who just were not a good fit for the work and, you know, right person, wrong seat kind of, kind of thing. The other real common thread that we found is that, and this is a little bit unusual for us.

We've been fully remote since 1997. So before it was cool before it was often legally required, we were fully remote. There's a huge difference between hiring somebody who's gonna work shoulder to shoulder with their manager versus hiring somebody who's gonna work halfway across the country or even halfway across the world. So we've gotten really good at hiring people who are gonna be working remotely. And we've tried to share a lot of that knowledge on the college recruiter’s YouTube channel. But basically, you've gotta manage that the burden falls on the manager. It's not actually so much on the employee.

The manager has to be really good at managing by outcomes. Yeah. So if we've got a manager of that department, who's really good at managing by outcomes, it makes hiring a lot easier. If the manager struggles with that, then we have to pay particular attention to the employee's ability to manage up, to communicate with their manager, hey, when do you want this done? What resources am I gonna have? What's the priority of this versus the other 18 things you've already given me? And a lot of people, they can't do that. They just won't or can't manage up. And so that's been an important factor for us

Max: Great. Well, I won't add anything to it. We're over time, but I agree with all that Steven said on the managing by outcome, and how important it is and that the onus is on the managers. So thanks a lot, Steven, for joining and for sharing your unique insights into the world of campus hiring, college hiring, early careers hiring.

We'll talk about labels next time we get to do a podcast interview together, maybe on yours, if you'll have me.

Steven: Absolutely. Well, we're gonna get some dates on the calendar. Max has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Max: Thank you.

Max: That was Steven Rothberg from College Recruiter. Hope you enjoyed the interview. He really made me think it doesn't always happen overnight. You can be running a business for 30 years as he has and a technology which is 20 years old, which is the job board market, and still have your best year. In fact two of his best years back to back are 2021 and 2022 because the market is shifting and because the old way things are done, they take a while to break down and the old way of hiring on campus where you have to send an army of recruiters and post a stand and pay the university for an entrance fee, well that's on the way out.

So, never underestimate the power of technology to change behaviors over time. If you enjoyed this and would like to come for more, please subscribe and please share with friends.

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Max: Hello. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And, today I'm delighted to welcome Peter Weddle, who is the CEO for the Association for Talent Acquisition Solution, also known as TAtech, which you can find on TAtech.org. Peter has been leading this association which gathers vendors, practitioners, and who is a real futurist as well. He has written some books on what the future holds for humanity and how to prepare our future generations for the impending rise of the machines. So, I'm excited to talk to him about some of the trends that are shaping this year and perhaps how to prepare not for the next year, but for our next generation of recruiter, how our recruiters are gonna look like, and what they’re gonna do 20 years from now? We'll have a bit of a discussion on that. Peter, thank you so much for joining.

Peter: It's great to be here, Max. Thanks for having me.

Max: It's a pleasure. And, always love your newsletter. I love your content. So, maybe we'll start with that. What is TAtech? And, how can people get plugged in?

Peter: TAtech is the trade association for the global talent technology industry. So, that means that our members span the spectrum from job boards and aggregators and job distribution companies to conversational AI solutions, programmatic ad buying platforms, recruitment advertising agencies, marketing companies. Basically, any company that uses technology to design, develop and deliver a talent acquisition product or service for employers.

Max: Okay! So, there's a lot to unfold there. But we're talking about basically the cutting edge of talent acquisition. And, I… you're based in Chicago right?

Peter: Actually, we're based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Max: In Connecticut. All right. Great. And the…but with a membership that is global. But, I think a lot of the investment is coming out of the U.S. right? That's really the hub of the TAtech industry.

Peter: Well, we do a number of things as a trade association but we're probably best known for our conferences. We certainly do one in called TAtech North America, but we also do one in Europe called TAtech Europe. And, that's for the whole EMEA region. And, I think it's safe to say that, yeah, there's a lot of investment, probably more money flowing into talent acquisition technologies and products than H.R. products largely. But, that's not only true in the U.S. now, it's increasingly true across Europe, particularly in the U.K. There's a lot of really fascinating developments of new companies springing up in Europe and in U.K.

Max: Yeah! Absolutely. I think actually that when it comes to recruitment, recruitment has more domestic localized elements. And so, you know, a lot of the leaders have come from Europe or from different parts of the world and then from India, and then they eventually make it to the U.S., which is the biggest market. So, it's quite an international community, I would say. But the capital certainly seems to be coming out of the U.S. in majority.

Peter: Well, we're very fortunate that we, as you mentioned earlier, we do have a global member base. So, we have the advantage of being able to look at not only new developments, but also where the current trendsetters in the industry are going into the future. And, we can look across all of those trends globally because, you know, the fact of the matter is that increasingly we have a global workforce. So, companies may be based in the U.S., but they're hiring all over the world and vice versa. Companies in India are hiring in North America and so forth. So I think it's important to recognize that, you know, geography is still important, but geographical barriers are not.

Max: They're coming down. Yeah. And, increasingly now there are some behaviors that are… I mean, whether you're in India or in the US or in France, you are witnessing how fast the world is moving,how fast things are becoming, the consumerization of just about everything. And so, that's going to affect, of course, the recruitment because the way consumers behave globally is pushing recruitment in the same direction, you know, in all corners of the world. So, yeah, it's a good fine balance between these local and global trends. But before we talk about the future and those…or about those trends, Peter, how did you…how does someone end up being the CEO of the TAtech? How did you end up in recruitment to begin with in talent acquisition?

Peter: Well, I was a partner in the Hay Group, so I… my roots are in the H.R. field. But, I got the entrepreneurial bug and bought a company called Job Bank USA in the early 90’s. This was pre-internet but we were arguably one of the largest companies to use computers to match people in jobs. And, about five years later, I sold that firm and fell into a gig writing a bi-weekly column for the Wall Street Journal about this new thing called the Internet and in particular the employment space online. And, I bought that basically until Murdoch bought or I did that until Murdoch bought Dow Jones. So, I got to go over the shoulders, meet and interact with all of the early players in online talent acquisition. And, by 2007, it just seemed to me that the industry had matured to the point where it needed a trade association and an organization to help set standards, to help identify best practices, to make sure that customers, employers were getting what they paid for those kinds of things. So, we launched TAtech in 2007, and the first thing we did was create a code of ethics because we believe, you know, that technology needs to serve the individuals that are using it, not the other way around. So, we really focused on that first. Since then, we've developed a whole range of products to help our members do something that is very simple, make more money at the bottom line.

Max: I admit to you and to our audience, I have not read the code of ethics yet but I'm going to do that as soon as our conversation is over. And, I am on board because I have read all of Asimov's work and I know that we have to set the rules early in the game before the machines take over. So, I am on board and yeah, it's amazing how far we've gone in those 20 years where…Well, 15 years you've been running the association, and to think where we were in 2007, right? Where it was basically the first SaaS companies like Taleo going IPO and success factors and early days of ATS. Do you…are you as excited today as you were back then about where this industry is going after all these years?

Peter: I think it's fair to say I'm more excited. You know, Kurzweil, the head of engineering at Google, has said that we will see 10,000 years of progress in the next 100 years because the pace of technology, technological invention, and innovation is accelerating. And I think, you know, it's hard to wake up on any given day, walk into the office and not find something new. So, our challenge as a species is to learn how to leverage the advantages of this technology, this development, and also preserve some space for our species so that we, you know, lead fulfilling lives.

Max: Mm hmm. Then, there are some concerns with the pace of technology being such that people can't keep up, that the jobs that are more menial and that do not require, you know, too much thinking. The non-thinking jobs are gonna disappear and be replaced by mechanical robots and yeah, I mean, there's perhaps a concern about whether there'll be jobs for all of humanity. And, I think you addressed that in the past in some of your book. I forgot the title. Perhaps you could reminded me what the title of that book was?

Peter: It's Circa 2118. So, it was written in 2018. And, what I was trying to do was to forecast the impact of technology in general but especially artificial intelligence 100 years later. So, 2118, Circa 2118 is the title of the book.

Max: And, to predict 100 years ahead is an impossible task, I think. But, you show, I mean, in 2018, we felt pretty confident there'd be no more truck drivers by now. They're still around. But certainly by 2100 that jobs should be replaced or automated, right? You would think… Can you make some predictions on what the job of a recruiter might be, you know, 10-20 years from now? You know, how that might be chopped off or changed and morphed into something else?
Peter: Well, if you don't mind, I'd like to begin with where we are now, because I think you said earlier and it's exactly true. We humans, all professions, including the recruiting profession, may well have surpassed our gulp rate in terms of taking all this new technology on board and using it effectively. And, I think one of the reasons that we are struggling is because we only address half the issue. You know, we are increasingly good consumers when it comes to buying tech products. We do our homework, we talk to our peers and experts in the field. We get a sense of, you know, what are the top two or three options similar to what we do when we buy a car and then we go out and we make a purchase. But unfortunately, that's where things end.

And with technology, particularly today's state of the art, that's when the challenge actually begins, because integration or implementation is the single most important and difficult part of buying a new tech product. And most recruiting teams today don't have the priority. They don't have the leadership attention, they don't have the budget, and they don't have the staff to really implement these tools effectively. And when that doesn't happen, you know, you get first of all, you get the recruiters who are upset because the product doesn't work as advertised. Sometimes it destabilizes the other products in the tech stack, and that makes their job even harder. You upset the IT department because you're complicating their lives. I mean, it just kind of cascades into this really unpleasant and oftentimes disappointing situation.

So, you know, I think that one of the priorities for the recruiting profession in the near term has to be how to get better at, how to acquire the skills and knowledge of technology implementation. Yeah! You want to be a good consumer about buying the stuff, but you also want to be a good implementer as well.

Max: Mm hmm. Yeah. I obviously completely understand the pain you're describing I mean, basically, the harder it is at the beginning, the better I sleep at night because it means that they understand the magnitude of the challenge, because there's a lot of change management that comes with it. And, it just changes people the way people work.

So, right now, we're in the middle of eliminating a lot of the first human interaction, which is the phone interview where you call a candidate and you do a first phone screen. My company is focused on eliminating that piece for the majority of the volume, and we're making progress. So, I feel like it's certainly…we're moving the needle. What are some of the other tasks besides that first phone screen that do you think are gonna disappear, you know, in the next 20 years? If you agree with my premise that phone screening will disappear.

Peter: Well, I think that we will, for the next 20 years, so for all four generations that are in the workforce currently, and maybe even Gen Z coming on board because we still have some baby boomers in the workforce for all of the extant generations in the workforce, we will continue to see hybrid kinds of interactions.

But for the kids and grandkids of the generations in the workforce today, I think they face a very, very different future. And, I think that recruiting is one of the fields where it's likely to be completely automated. It's not to say that what the humans are…human recruiters do isn't important. In fact, sometimes the most important tasks get automated. But, I think the fact of the matter is that technology, you know, I mean, right now, the way the paradigm is set up, you have…it's a bipolar distribution.

You either believe that technology, we stick our heads in the sand, technology is going to go away. There are just some things that humans do that machines cannot be taught to do. And, then there's the other extreme, which is terminators. And my God, they're going to destroy the human race.

There is a third way or a third path, and that is that we want to apply technology everywhere we can. And, at the same time, think about what kind of world that's gonna create. What are we going to do for the humans who will find themselves not only unemployed, but unable to be reemployed because there just aren't enough jobs to go around? And we need to begin thinking about that now, because it's going to cause a huge structural shift in society, in education, in the way that you and I spend our days. Well, not you and I, but certainly kids and grandkids can spend their days. Yeah!

Max: Yeah! The people who are the superstars now and who are driving, you know, the content and the media industry are gamers and, you know, sort of virtual characters with avatars rather than 3D faces. And so, you know, will we need to…Will recruitment still be human-led? You’re saying machines will do a better job at selecting who is right for the job.

Peter: Well, what I'm saying is two things. First of all, as more and more jobs in the enterprise, let's just talk about recruiting. As more and more of the jobs in the enterprise, not just blue-collar jobs, you know, robots on assembly lines, but increasingly we're seeing machines take over huge swaths of the professional workforce. As that happens, there will be less need for recruiters because there will be no human showing those jobs. So, demand will go down. And, you know, we already have examples of machines being evaluated by humans as being more empathetic, more understanding than their human counterparts.

There's a machine at a retired living community in France that goes around and attends to the people who live there. And that machine gets higher marks than the human attendance because it's there 24 hours a day. It always responds. It's been taught how to be empathetic in a way that the people appreciate, and that's a very rudimentary example of where we are going.

So I think, you know, I don't know about you, but I think the prospect of losing employment, not work, that's different. Losing the requirement for paid employment to have a meaningful life is a good prospect. But it means we need to think about, you know, a basic income for all people. I mean, these are the kinds of things that we kind of shovel under the rug and we don't talk about very much. But ultimately, if we really care about the future, we're going to bequeath to our kids and grandkids. We should be thinking about that stuff now because it is virtually inevitable that we're going to get to that point.

Max: I think you’ve taken us a little bit further than 20 years ahead, that we still have a couple of decades of, you know, filling jobs with actual humans but…

Peter: Well, and that's why I begin with, you know, let's worry about using the technology where we have today effectively. Let's implement it well, let's buy it well. Let's implement it well. Absolutely. And today's recruiters have nothing to worry about. They are not going to be replaced by a machine. So, yes, that's why I called my book Circa 2118. We are that's way down the road.

But today, you know, I think the other challenge that we have for people in recruiting is just being aware of what's out there. You know, it's very hard. If you'd go to an H.R. conference, the vast majority of the exhibitors are going to be H.R. Technology companies. They're much bigger, the much better funded. And frankly, H.R. pays much more attention to them. And talent technology is sort of relegated to second class status. It's sort of shoved off in the corners. And in my view, that puts the cart before the horse because, you know, you can't manage the human resources you don't have.

So, the number one priority should be to buy talent technology and getting those people in the door, the talent that you need for the jobs that you have, and then worry about having the H.R. technology to manage them and develop them effectively.

Max: Amen. More money for the industry. I have to get behind that. But, I would say that I imagine a world, you know, many years from now maybe there won't be companies employing humans to drive trucks or to, you know, to build machines or even to provide health care services. But, they'll be a new breed of services that will arise that will require the inventiveness and creativity and the ability to multitask and the human sensitivity and almost, you know, sort of the soul, the soulfulness of a human to do to create and deliver them. And, they'll be a perhaps recruitment software to help those tribes build themselves. But I cannot …for the life of me imagine what kind of services they will be providing. I hope we'll still be busy. That’s all I'm saying.

Peter: Oh, I think we'll be very busy. But you know, I've written a book since Circa 2118 called The Neonaissance. It's a play on the term renaissance. Renaissance was a look backward. It was returning to the glory days of Rome and Greece. The Neonaissance looks forward. And, what it's all about is in a world where we've done two things. We've solved what humans need to do or can do or should do in a world where technology does almost everything for them. And we solve the climate crisis.

If we can address those two issues, then we are in a period called a new birth of humankind, which is how do we create fulfillment for humans, which is the one attribute that no machine and no animal can aspire to. How do we create fulfillment for humans in a world where you don't have to work for a living? Excuse me, you don't have to be employed for a living. And, you know, I think that's the future we have. I mean, I think it's gonna be a tough road getting there, but it's going to be a very exciting and fulfilling future. And, I believe in it so strongly that I'm giving that book away.

So, if people want…if you listeners want to get that book, again it's called The Neonaissance. It's on a website called onestoryforall.com. You can download the book for free. It's probably more than you've ever read several hundred pages, but at the end of the day, it says, yeah, we've got a tough road ahead of us for the next period of time with getting agreement about how we're going to solve global warming, how we're going to solve the impact of technology on the workplace and workforce. But, once we get through those challenges and that's the good thing, that's the thing one thing that humans are really good at, solving challenges. Then, we have this new period the Neonaissance to look forward to.

Max: I think humans are also pretty good at competing with each other And so, hopefully that does not end up in a nuclear war or in destroying all of our available resources and that we can compete on with paintbrushes or with other ends and create an artistic future.

But, I want to come back to Earth for 2 seconds and to our listeners who are in the recruitment space. And, I always ask this question, Peter. Think back to a time when you hired somebody and you made a hiring mistake. And walk us back through this mistake without giving names necessarily, but telling the audience, telling me what we can learn from that mistake and how can we avoid a similar one being made in the future?

Peter: Well, I'm living, breathing proof of the findings from a University of Michigan research study done a number of years ago. But it found that hiring managers are only 4% better than flipping a coin when it comes to picking the best person for a job opening. They get it right 54% of the time. And the reason they have such a miserable track record, it's because they don't hire the person who will perform best in the job. They tend to hire the people they like the best, the person who interviews the best and so forth.

And that's the mistake I made. I hired a person that I really connected with during the interview process. I had almost a visceral reaction at this person and I were really of two identical minds, and I was really swayed by the fact that I had this strong reaction to, you know, his outlook, his vision, his way of looking at the world. And, what I didn't do is pay enough attention to his skill set and to the kinds of talent he would bring to the job. He was great, you know, was a great guy and a great, you know, individual in the workforce. He just wasn't the right guy for the job I was trying to fill. And, I should have paid closer attention to what the job actually required because what I ended up doing was putting him in a position where he could not succeed and that was unfair to him, as well as unfair to the organization that I was representing.

Max: And it makes you wonder almost whether if you'd like someone, if you could answer in the affirmative the question: Would you hang out with this person outside of work? Maybe that's a red flag, you know, like, maybe you shouldn't be the one making that decision, that hiring decision. Because if this person is likable enough to you that you would want to see them outside of work, and how could you be unbiased?

Peter: Well, I know I'm going to get some pushback from the people who say, hey, you know, you want to have…you want to hire people who have sort of the same cultural mindset. And that's true. But in my opinion, that has to come second. First is, can the person do the job and perform at his or her peak? And then are there cultural fit with the organization? And, I reverse those.

Max: So, you're saying the right order would be… First, can you do the job and then maybe afterwards? Yeah, the cultural fit. Somebody just gave me on this show told me that it should be going the other way. You should first establish culture fit because if you have technical fit first, you're gonna completely ignore…If for some jobs where it's very difficult to get technical fit, job fit, then you'll be too skewed to ignore the cultural misalignment. So, I guess it depends on the ratio. Like if it's very, very hard to get an engineer and they fill the job, you know, they fill the job description perfectly, then you'll, you'll look past the cultural misfit.

Peter: Well, there's plenty of research that shows that would be a fatal mistake, because that person is ultimately going to end up either underperforming or leave, you know, within the first 90 days of being in the organization because they don't like it there for a whole host of reasons. But at the end of the day, I think no matter how tough it is to fill a job, you know, cultural fit is important. And, I think when somebody says, well, just focus on skills and because that's a hard job to fill, you know, kind of let the candidate slide on culture. I think what they're really saying is our recruiting process and practices are substandard and we are not adequately sourcing for this particular opening. So, I don't… I mean, look, there are plenty of… no matter how difficult the job is, there are plenty of applicants out there. Are they tough to find? In some cases, absolutely. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Max: Yeah! You can expand the search, especially these days, is when you don't have to hire in your vicinity for a lot of these specialized jobs.

Peter: Exactly.

Max: Now, I would end our discussion now, but since I'm talking to a technologist and we are talking about cultural fit, which is very hard one to nail down. What are some of the technologies that you've come across that you think are gonna change the way we establish culture fit? You know, what do you think works these days for matching a talent with a particular company culture?

Peter: I don't know that I have a good answer for that…

Max: …Maybe that's a question for ten years from now.

Peter: Well, yeah, I'm sure there are some technology products out there that help recruiters assess cultural fit, and I suspect that they are very helpful. I have found that cultural fit is a challenge in two respects, no matter what the products are. The first is, in some cases, not many cases, but at least in some cases, organizations don't have a good handle on what their culture really is. They have a culture. They have a good fit or a good fix on what they aspire to be in terms of culture. You know what the CEO says they're all about. But in terms of the genuine, authentic culture of the organization, they are too often clueless. And, that comes to the fore when you look at the distance between an employer brand and an employer's reputation based on review sites and so forth. That's where you see that play out.

The other is that when you introduce technology, not all technologies, but at least some technologies, you're going to change culture or you're going to at least disrupt culture. And, you need to think through how to deal with the change in things as simple as practices and procedures, but also, you know, in sort of the role of the recruiter. I mean, we've been talking about that a whole lot. And, as technology gets introduced, recruiter roles will change and adapt over time. And, you need to think about that in advance rather than after the fact.

Max: Mm hmm. Now, what is the culture you want to prepare for five years from now when your industry will be completely different? And how do you know what kind of… what's the composition of your team then? Of course, everybody who went fully remote has probably gone towards hiring more introverts, for example. And, I don't know if they did that precisely or it kind of happened organically, but probably a common trend.

Peter: Really? I had not heard that. And I would have thought exactly the opposite. You know, I'm an introvert and getting in front of a camera and talking to someone that I'm having a hard time reading their body language with, it just makes it that much more intimidating. An extrovert, I think, would flourish on Zoom. We introverts kind of cringe into the background.

Max: Well, I don't ask my engineers to switch on their cameras.

Peter: There we go.

Max: All right. Well, thanks a lot, Peter. And again, TAtech.org and the website again, the URL for downloading your latest piece of fiction.

Peter: Well, fiction, in fact, it's got 180 footnotes. So, it's not as if it's not well researched. But the name of the book is The Neonaissance and it's at onestoryforall.com.

Max: All right, onestoryforall.com. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for coming on.

Peter: Thanks for having me, Max. Appreciate it.

Max: And that was Peter Weddle from TAtech.org, reminding us that technology doesn't deliver on all of its promises in the short run unless we're very tight on implementation. But it usually goes way beyond our imagination over longer periods of time. And it's time to prepare for new generations and to think about the role of technology in an ethical context and in the future of mankind context. So, obviously I really enjoyed this chat. I hope you did too, and that you'll go check out his books and TAtech.org to become members of the association. Thanks for listening.

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00:00:01.860

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I’m your host, Max Ambruster and on today's show, I'm delighted to welcome Tim Freestone, who is the founder of Alooba, a tech startup based in…well Tim is based in Australia, but I gathered your team is spread out all over the world, which is specialized in helping companies, hire data scientists, engineers, architects and analysts, and so all the people that deal with data. And if you live in the same world that I do, that share of the employment workforce is always growing, and every company needs them. So, I'll be asking Tim about how to attract and how to interview this talent, and welcome to the show Tim.

00:00:56.220

Tim: Thanks for having me, Max. It's great to be here from a very sunny afternoon in Sydney.

00:01:01.890

Max: Great! Great to be connected. So Tim, tell us a little bit about yourself to begin with. How does…how did you end up in the…or maybe we'll start with your company, Alooba. Did I describe it okay? Is it an attraction methodology? It's more of a screening methodology or tool, right?

00:01:26.820

Tim: Yeah! So we basically assess people skills in analytics data science and two main use cases for that. One is definitely that hiring use case which you mentioned and so companies would use our product typically either as a very short initial screening quiz that they would send to every applicant who applies for one of their data roles. And there'll be a customized assessment on our platform assessing things like ,I don't know, statistics machine learning visualizations, really depends on the role. And that's kind of one half of the company. The other half is really around assessing people skills internally within a business trying to find the strengths and weaknesses. And that's most often being used in conjunction with the data literacy strategy. So it's becoming bigger and bigger these days that you know, you might be a data scientist and have really advanced skills, but what about the 99% of the company, who aren't data scientist? What kind of data skills do they need? And so a lot of businesses realize that everyone needs some basic data literacy. And so we often get involved at the starting points of putting in place that learning and development plan. We really come in as that measurement tool to understand okay what's our current benchmark, and then keep measuring through time to see hopefully that they've had some improvement in their data literacy.

00:02:44.100

Max: Hmm! Yeah, makes sense. I was advised for my business to put a portion of our account management team on things like learning how to use SQL and I'm getting training like that, so I guess I've put it out to my employees as a good recommendation but I haven't enforced it, but you know in bigger companies you're seeing data literacy being enforced at the corporate level and pushed across departments. Is that an example? Like an SQL training?

00:03:18.660

Tim: I'd say SQL would probably fit into the relatively advanced part of data literacy. So they'd be things that are even more basic or simple than that would normally form part of that program. It could be things like, hey, you know what metrics should I be looking at to answer these types of problems. Understanding basic ideas around like sample size. So, you know if you're reading a report and you see that I don't know the number of bookings in England went from… went up by 50% but you know, to look at that and actually they went from two to three so that doesn't really mean much if the book has gone from two to three right? And just having that kind of understanding of the basics of data, really.

00:03:58.800

Max: Yeah! I suppose there is such a wide gap between, you know, the experts and the beginners that you gotta lift people so that they don't say anything stupid to begin with, like use two decimal points on a percentage when your basic…like you said on a sample size of two or three, stuff like that. Great! Well, how did you end up, you know, launching Alooba. I suppose this is a problem that you…it sounds like this is something personal, apparently, that you want to do for yourself.

00:04:34.950

Tim: It definitely is a selective confluence of the last 10 years of my life, really is this business. So, the last role I was in was at a tech company, I was leading an analytics team. And so, I noticed two big themes, while I was at this business, so one was anytime I went to hire any kind of data professional, so, data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, I found it personally a massive pain in the ass trying to hire. So, the process was you know you put up a job ad on LinkedIn or in Australia. We have seek like the big job platforms. You get all these applications through and you basically get a CV. And then from that CV trying to pick through quickly and figure out, who are the best candidates to interview.

What I found consistently was that it was very hard to predict, based on a CV alone, who the best candidate was to speak to. So, that meant that I have to do a lot of interviews to hire one person. I'd often get five minutes into an interview and realize the candidate who said they had X, Y said advanced skills, obviously didn't have those. And so, I really wanted a more efficient, simple, a more objective way to screen candidates that was one origin. And the other piece was looking around at my colleagues and realizing that in a company of 150 people, we had maybe I think six or seven data professionals. But then, there are at least another 30 or 40 people, all the product managers, all the online marketers, the senior managers of the business where I looked, what they actually did day to day, it was basic analytics, even if they didn't think of themselves as analysts. And it was very clear to me that this data literacy thing was becoming more and more important.

00:06:10.230

Max: Yeah, yeah! So, it's like…it should be like a mandatory step in the journey for a good portion of the job be…well, can you handle data? Do you know how to extract it? How to use it? How to interpret it? That makes sense and the other point you made, which is you know the resumes are lying, right? That if you look at a hot space like the one you're in where it…we know that salaries are inflated and that there is not enough talents, and so it's going to potentially attract people who are trying to find a shortcut to a better life, you know and good. But I will guess there are some resumes that are kind of like packed with keywords that don't belong there.

00:06:54.600

Tim: Yeah! There's definitely some keyword stuffing. There's some inflation there's also just… you know, we're not the best judges of ourselves, and a really interesting data point that we collect directly on Alooba to kind of master this is that, before a candidate starts a test, they rate themselves on a scale of one to ten for each skill that we are about to assess them in, and then we compared their self-rating to their actual performance to come up with what we call the self-awareness index, and to cut a long story short, all our data shows that people consistently overestimate their skills, and that's true for any gender. It's like more or less for men or women, like everyone does it so.

We're not generally the best judges of ourselves, that's part of it, but then it's not actually just the person writing the CV. It's also the person reviewing the CV and what we've done in a really interesting experiment actually was we contract that whole bunch of recruiters, gave them all the same set of 500 CV, it’s the same job description, and basically asked them, okay, shortlist who you think we should interview. And, it was amazing. They all came back with different suggestions, like almost like complete randomness. And, behind the scenes, we also had these candidates test performances, which we didn't expose. And, so what we found was the CV screening often missed the best performing candidates anyway so actually, if you would almost flip a coin that might have been a more accurate predictor than having someone look through the CV. And it could be any number of reasons for that. You can think of bias like there's been some interesting studies around. You know, callback rates and application depending on your surname and ethnicity but most all those kinds of things, but in general I think a CV is like a really, really weak data set to figure out who to interview.

00:08:40.170

Max: Yeah! Of course, and this experiment I think would prove the randomness will be even higher if you go towards younger people, I mean if somebody's got 20 years of experience. You know, and the track record to show for it and professional references, and I think the resumes a little bit of a stronger indicator right? But you know if you're looking for people in their 20’s, and assessments is the way to go. So what's the… you know, for those who are not experts and who heard the word, you know data science and data analysts and all that, but they don't know how to categorize this domain, could you give us a quick kind of summary of what are the different profiles within the data world so that people can organize their thoughts around that around that talent?

00:09:40.620

Tim: Yeah for sure, and it has changed a lot, even in the last few years, so it was only I'd say a few years ago where they were almost all one person look…everyone's looking for sort of the Holy Grail unicorn person that do everything, but now it's been split out so, yeah, definitely. A data engineer, I would say, it's basically the person responsible for the data pipelines, so responsible for getting data from A to B, and getting it in a state that's easily analyzable so they've cleaned it up. They've aggregated, they've rambled it, that’s kind of ready to go.

To data analysts will then be responsible normally for visualizing the data, putting together reports, digging into like negative trends that they find in the data, and being probably the closest person to the business. So, they'll be the ones, actually, you know, working with I don't know let's say the tech company, the product managers, the marketers, and helping them understand the data and defining all those metrics.

And then data scientists often work on more complicated problems. There's an expectation they'll have what I'd call like proper data science knowledge, so machine learning, you know, maybe some more deep learning natural language processing. And, they're basically using more complicated statistics often to do more like forecasting and predictions. Sometimes, as part of a product, sometimes as part of marketing, doesn't really matter. And, there's let's say often a little bit further away from the business, maybe slightly less expectations of business acumen, doing less of the day to day stuff and working more on projects. That's the way I split them up.

00:11:12.990

Max: One, two, three, and that sounds almost also like a chronological line you need to have your data pipeline in order before you can analyze it. And then only after you've got a large enough data set, can you bring in machine learning, NLP, and that data science.

00:11:28.440

Tim: Yes, and you would think that and I think a lot of the businesses only discovered that over the last few years where they initially built out advanced data science teams only to realize the things you just pointed out, which is you're going to have the data pipelines and the data is not clean, then, it doesn't matter how good your algorithms are if the data is not correct and you know…

00:11:46.290

Max: … I made that mistake.

00:11:51.600

Tim: Speaking from bitter experience, then.

00:11:53.430

Max: Absolutely, yeah! We're loaded on data engineering now, and I'm still actually still have to sort out through a lot of data, because you know, at Talkpush we process like millions of data points every day, and it's just a tremendous cleanup job. And, you can extract anything meaningful out of it. And, so, well let's imagine somebody is not a customer of Alooba, but still wants to interview a data engineer, a data analyst, and figure out who's right for the job. What are some good interview tips and methodologies that you can offer our audience?

00:12:35.220

Tim: Yeah! Yes, I think interviews are a really interesting space and we're going to start working on some products in that area soon. From our research, what we tend to think is that interviews tend to be done in quite an unstructured way on average which makes them potentially very, very subjective, and our vision for interviews is to try to help companies do them in a structured and therefore as an objective way as possible. Just as a quick anecdote, like I've had I've done many interviews and last year myself, sometimes with someone else in our business. It's really fascinating that you get to the end of the interview, and if you sit there and do your own evaluations of the candidate independently, you'll straightaway see the problem. And that is, that you'll often have very divergent opinions over how the candidate performs on any particular thing. So you might say, oh, I thought they were great on this field, and your colleague might said, oh terrible. So trying to find a way to make it as objective as possible is really what we're going for. I think that starts with just defining very clearly before you even start hiring, like what exactly you're looking for in the candidate. What are the requirements of the role? And then, setting up each stage the hiring process, be that an interview, the tests, some other process to just match exactly that and nothing else.

So, I think where companies often fall down is they just add extraneous steps that are you know, this is gone really well, but you know speak to Joe first. I'll have a quick chat with this person. There's so much moving the goalposts we call it in Australia. So, I think you know just trying to have as clearly a structured process as possible, down to the question level I'd say. If you're saying we're going to interview this candidate, define ahead of time what are the ten questions you're going to ask him and why. You know these three questions related this skill which we've identified as essential. These three questions relate to this trait which you've identified as essential. Then, within that try to have a scoring methodology, so you might have let's say for a particular question, you're going to ask like what would be a good answer, what would be an okay answer, what would be a bad answer, and try to think of that ahead of time, if possible, so, you can more objectively categorize the candidates and assign to each of those buckets. And then hopefully…

00:14:43.920

Max: …It's all those things on the fly right because you're trying to have empathy towards your audience and to read their answers and listen. So, you can think of your questions during the interview. You really have to prepare for it.

00:15:02.100

Tim: Yeah, exactly.

00:15:03.840

Max: So, let's get into a little bit more granular then. What are some interview questions that we can ask? For data engineers or data analyst, I think…Am I right in saying that data analyst is perhaps the more junior role of the three or the one where there's the most number of talents? And then data engineers, a little bit harder to find, data scientists is the hardest?

00:15:34.590

Tim: Possibly, yeah I'd say there are more entry level data analyst roles, and I'd say the skill set is a bit less technical than a group of data scientist or engineer. I think that's a fair comment , yup.

00:15:44.880

Max: Okay, so let's hone in on these guys on the data analysts that are a little bit more junior, because those are the hardest interviews, the ones with people who don't have a lot of experience.

00:15:55.770

Tim: Yes.

00:15:56.280

Max: Yeah! What… I mean, I know you’re go to move would be… well let's move them to an assessment as fast as possible, and if somebody doesn't again that is not a customer of yours, what kind of assessments can they build at home?

00:16:12.930

Tim: Yeah, for sure so, I'd say any good hiring process probably has a combination of things in it, I think, absolutely you should interview candidates. I just think there's also some value add to testing this skill somehow, whether that's through a take-home assignment, whether it's through something like a platform either way. And, I think it's a case of thinking about what things you're trying to evaluate and whether or not they're better to evaluate an interview or a test. So, for example, anything that's more of a soft skill I'd say you're better off trying to evaluate in an interview. It's a lot easier to test someone's communication skills, that decision making, those type things in an interview. Anything is a bit more technical and a bit more black and white, for example, like writing sequel or Python coding or those types of you know, basic statistical and machine learning knowledge, I'd say put that into a test for a couple of reasons. One is you'll be able to assess a lot more things in the same period of time as what you could interview. Like in an interview, it's going to take at least a few minutes to go through each question, or in a test, you could ask three or four questions in a couple of minutes and gather more data points. And, do that in a completely apples for apples way, where every candidate has identical amount of time, they've been asked the questions in the same way like everything's held the same.

So, I'd say yeah, figure out what you're trying to assess and split it into a test or an interview. For the interview part of things, yeah, so for those kind of softer skills and what not, again I try to think ahead of time of like how you're going to categorize like what good communication skills are as an example. Something like that is actually quite vague in terms of what good communication skills are, like are you looking for they easily understood you and answer your questions? Are you looking for them being really articulate? Are they meant to be charismatic? And you know when we talk to companies and who we have worked with, and they said, oh, their communication skills weren't good enough. Like you dig in a couple of layers and you realize that that made so many things that turned different to many different people. Same for the cultural fit thing, like those types of things I'd be really careful with anything that's like very, very subjective and I just try to find a way to define it.

00:18:24.240

Max: Yeah, and back to your earlier point about people not being able to assess themselves, even if you ask somebody how your communication skills, there's a certain set of people who will rate themselves poorly even though they have impeccable vocabulary grammar fluency, understanding comprehension, but because they're not the popular kids in high school, they just think my communication skills aren’t good. So that makes sense, yeah. So, the assessment part where you're asking them to write sequel or do some Python coding, and so on. Is that something that is easy to… for a small company to put in place without you know, a professional tool which is time-bound, controlled, password-protected, or you know, does that open the gates to some cheating? How do you feel about like sort of like homegrown testing on these things?

00:19:31.590

Tim: Yeah! I think it depends on the scale of the company and who's already there. So, you’ve already had an analytics team built out with the skills to create those assessments and evaluate them, I think, potentially, it makes sense to do that. The other upside is you can use your own data sets and craft exactly what you need. And, if you're willing to wait, you know, for the candidate to be able to complete this, often don't take like a week, to go through and to evaluate it, if you're willing to do that, then you can get some quite deep insights because you can basically give them effectively real work to do. I don't think anything will ever be as stronger predictors as that. Like just giving them literally what they would work on and seeing how they go. Downside is really the time it takes the candidate and yourself to evaluate it, especially in this current market that is going to probably deter some candidates from completing it. The other thing is that you'll be struck down with scale, like you probably can't assess more than five candidates in a week, you know you probably want your data analysts doing data analysis, not grading assessments. So, there's probably some upside to using a platform because it's all kind of set up there waiting for you, the questions are created, the tests are ready, and all platform works, etc.

00:20:46.950

Max: Okay, well, I normally give this question to the end but I ask you now, so if somebody wants to work with wants to find out how the Alooba can help with the selection of data professionals, how do they get in touch with you? Who's your ideal customer and how do they get in touch with you?

00:21:09.030

Tim: Yes, so we normally work with a large enterprises or high-growth tech companies, and that's probably because they're the ones who hire the most in analytics and data science, so it makes sense, that they have the biggest problem to solve. And they can get in touch with us at our website alooba.com that's a-l-o-o-b-a.com and there's just a form that you can fill in to book a discovery call. Just start with a quick chat, understand basically your hiring process, your pain points, and then potentially to just tell how we could help.

00:21:34.680

Max: Great, great! And now what is…actually my last question, which is the one I asked all my guests is… to walk us back through a hiring mistake that you personally made, and without giving out names, recall a time when you hired somebody, made a hiring mistake, and walk us through the steps of that mistake so that we can learn from your mistake, and try to avoid making one ourselves.

00:22:09.120

Tim: Yeah! That's a great question. Let me contemplate on like…

00:22:13.710

Max: Are you seeing some ghosts flash before your eyes?

00:22:17.850

Tim: Some very recent ghost as well. Yeah, I mean, I think we…to be honest getting people right for our businesses probably been one of our biggest challenges, so this is really hard and I… everyone has my full empathy is on how hard it is to find the right people. I can think of a few people. So they fit into quite different categories, and some would fit into the category of us maybe over-indexing on skills, maybe drinking a bit of our own cool-aid right, like saying okay, maybe skill is all that matters and neglecting called…what I call values alignment let's say. So, after we went through that stage, this is about 18 months ago we got really, we sat down and talk really quickly about like what our values are in the company, like what we want our people to be like from a value perspective. We've got them incredibly concrete. And after that point we then embed them into our hiring process, so we now ask hiring questions at various stages of the process to cover up those values, so we weren't just focused on… Could they technically do the job? So, that was I guess one big trend. Another one was probably over-indexing on people that I’d known already and I was comfortable with and assuming that they can transition into quite a different role in a different type of business environment, and maybe also underappreciating how different is to sell different types of products. Yeah, and you know learning that new domain of software, sales and software marketing, and how much of a transition that can be if you've been in other environment.

00:24:02.760

Max: Okay, yeah. I'll latch on to the first one, you said, and this reminds me of a chat I recently had with the time Dr. CEO who said that… he mandates the culture fit assessment before the technical assessment because otherwise, in a market where technical skills are in such high demand, it excuses the rest of the hiring process. You have somebody who aces you know the assessment and it was like super great on a technical level, then you're going to kind of ignore all the red flags that come afterwards.

00:24:43.200

Tim: Yeah, absolutely and it's such a capital bouncing up, I think, because you know some companies can use cultural fit to mean anything, like you can exclude anyone in any hiring process for cultural fit, and yet we know that it matters like, you know, having certain types of people to work in a certain way is really important. I think it's just about can we more objectively concretely define what cultural fit is... to then make sure we evaluate candidates as fairly as possibly.

00:25:13.980

Max: You almost name like a Chinese wall between the person who evaluates values and technical skills so that you know they don't influence each other. They can both come up with their own independent scores regardless of you know, in which order you do it well. Tim it's been really educational, and thank you for sharing your knowledge on how to hire data professionals, and all the best to Alooba.

00:25:43.770

Tim: Awesome! Thanks for having me Max. It's been a great afternoon.

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Max:

Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Ambruster and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show, Cynthia Owyoung, who is the author of a new book “All are welcome - how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results.” And we're going to be speaking about, well, the results, mainly, and how talent acquisition can drive that. And how the field has changed over the last 20 years. Because Cindy has been in the space for a long time and has seen the world change. So, Cindy, welcome to the show.
Cynthia:

Thank you so much, Max, for having me. I'm excited to have the conversation with you.
Max:

Yeah, thanks for coming. And congrats on the new book. Before we get into the book and the lessons, could you share with me and with my audience, our audience, your curriculum and how you ended up in the beautiful world of inclusion?
Cynthia:

It's a great question, I did not have a very straight path to it, it was a little bit roundabout and curvy. I started my career actually in marketing, I worked for ad agencies doing consumer research and strategic branding. But after a decade of that, I decided it wasn't that fulfilling. And I wanted to do something that would feed my soul a little bit more than just selling products to people, that sometimes they didn't actually need. So, I went to grad school intending to start my own nonprofit, because I have a brother who is developmentally disabled. And, you know, being Asian, and having a disability in the Asian community, culturally, that can be very taboo. And so, you know, my brother being an adult, he had aged out of a lot of services that are given to children under the age of 18. And I…still on my life plan, I'm still going to do a nonprofit that supports adults in the Asian community with developmental disability.

But I decided to put it off because I met some folks who did diversity and inclusion work inside companies. And once I heard what they did, which was you know, I mean, they work to create access and inclusion for everyone and equal opportunities. I thought to myself, well, that's what I want to do, right? That's something where I can make a positive difference in the world, employ people like my brother, and really open doors, instead of being the one that knocks on them all the time. So, I made the switch. I got my first job in diversity management at a company called Intuit, which does financial tax software, and have been lucky enough since then, for almost 20 years now to work in several types of tech-companies, media, global, startup, gone into financial services. And now, written the book.

Max:

Yeah. And because we haven't dropped all the names after into it, but I will mention them, Cindy worked at Yahoo, GitHub, Charles Schwab. And most recently Ability Path and in Robin Hood, so quite a resume. And many beautiful companies, I think that have had, you know, leaders in their field. Of course, not everybody can afford to have a Head of Diversity and inclusion, can have an officer like small company like myself, 50 employees, I think, I have to be the Head of Diversity myself. So, yeah, is there a way for companies that are on the smaller range, side of the range to, to think about, okay, what do I do about diversity and inclusion? And who should be in charge? Should somebody be in charge? And I what point do I hire? Can I afford to hire someone?
Cynthia:

Really good question. So yes, absolutely. And you know, it's funny that you mentioned that you should be the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at your company, because yes, you should. And you actually find a lot more leaders these days are taking up that mantle from…in a very official status, right? The CEO of Nielsen, which is a marketing measurement company, here in the US, that I think operates globally as well. Their CEO announced a few years ago that he was the chief diversity officer for the company. And that's definitely a growing trend, others CEOs have made very similar kinds of statements. And it's important because it's important to have the senior most leaders of any company, whether you're small, 15 people or 100,000 people, really committed to supporting diversity and inclusion, because your employees take their signal from that, right? If they hear that you care about the space, then they're going to be more accountable to supporting the space.

And you know, any company like you don't actually have to have a dedicated person, you don't have to necessarily have a huge budget for this, like, there's lots of low cost ways to incorporate this into your company, whether that is taking advantage of free training and online seminars that are out there, or even just like buying things like my book, right, and having a book club to have a conversation about different concepts around diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, thinking about who you're hiring, and where you're hiring from. Any hiring manager has decision making power over that, right? And I can really think about how to incorporate that diverse lens into how they're sourcing for candidates and how they're considering competencies in the space and who they want, to what perspective they want to add to their team. So, all of these ways are ways in which the, you know, no cost, no real like, you know, effort to do other than being intentional about it.
Max:

Great, well, let's get into recruitment since that's our focus on the show. And so the intention of you set on sourcing, as well as on the selection front, you know, being more opening the door to other groups. The sourcing question is difficult, it's a little technical, because on one hand, you could say, well, I'm going to open the door by basically communicating jobs to as many people as possible using popular channels like social media to just get the word out, and so that we're not really restricted to word of mouth referral networks. Another approach would be intentionally to say, okay, I'm going to go look for people who are hearing impaired and neurodivergent and, you know, work at home moms, and all kinds of categories, and that, then that becomes like, a very difficult endeavor, because you don't necessarily find these pockets. I don't know, I perhaps…Pardon my ignorance, but I don't know if there was even such marketplaces available to recruiters where they can go and pick by category by category if they wanted to do so.
Cynthia:

Not quite like that. But there are definitely ways to, I think you can actually do both, right. I think it's important to like get the word out to as wide an audience as possible, right, so that you can find the best talent from the available pool, right? I mean, that's everyone's goal, right? They want to hire the best person, the most qualified person for their jobs. The question is always like, have you actually put out a wide enough net to capture the interest of the most qualified best person for your job? And do you define, you know, an effective sourcing process, as you know, looking for diversity within that? I do, I think most companies should, right. And what you can do in terms of like, sourcing, specifically for people of very, you know, specific and different backgrounds, is you can look for organizations that produce pipeline around that.

There's lots of technology platforms these days that actually provide matching algorithms for people from diverse backgrounds to different jobs. Some of them are targeted by gender, some of them are targeted by race, others are targeted by disability, and others for you know, even, you know, people with military backgrounds, right. So, there's a wide variety of those types of companies. You know, depending on the events that you might, you know, want to recruit from, if you're looking for something is very specialized, right, lots of tech companies, as an example, go to tech conferences. And there are conferences that are very dedicated to like, you know, Afro-tech is for the black community, Grace Hopper, which is a worldwide recruiting event for women technologists, right, like there are definitely if you do your research, there are different places that you can go to, to really find and target the diverse set of backgrounds who might, you know, be sources of talent for your roles.
Max:

Yeah, that's that, you know, those resources, of course, there's a lot more of them in North America and other places. So, again, I think maybe those marketplaces and those talent pools aren't so and technologies are a lot of them have been designed with the North American market in mind. But as we were saying before we started recording, every country has its own battles to fight, and they're different from market to market. And so, you might not have as many resources available in other parts of the world, but you can still fight your local battles. Can you share some of the battles that you've had on the global scene and how that's different than the ones you fight back home?
Cynthia:

Yeah, you know, it's a, you know, mind you, like, over the course of my 20-year career, I've seen a lot, right in different places, and a lot of positive progressive change as well, that has come, for instance, I remember, you know, back in 2008, right, like in India, as an example, LGBTQ being LGBTQ was against the law. Right. And so, people didn't feel safe to be out. And so, one of the things that we tried to do, our company that had offices in India, was to make the office a safe space for people who were LGBTQ, and where they could be out and be their authentic selves. Yeah, at least within our community, even if they couldn't be that outside of it, right. And, you know, there's lots of places around the world where it's still against the law to be identified as LGBTQ.

And so that's like, one very tangible way that people can define that and then look for, you know, those networks of folks that you can have as your support communities, but also as your hiring pipelines, right. Because we all know that, you know, one major source of referrals for jobs are people who are in our networks, people we know, people that we can refer in. So, the more that you can get connected to different communities, no matter where you are in the world, the more likely you are to be able to find the talent from diverse backgrounds that you need.
Max:

It's got like, you can kill two birds with one stone. By getting connected with these communities, you make the new hire, feel welcome and included, but then you're also perhaps reach their friends and increase the referral. Yeah. The referral pipeline.
Cynthia:

Absolutely.

Max:

Yeah. And would you, would you agree that there's been a lot of progress made over the last 20 years and that the champions of inclusion have achieved great results already? I mean, the results, that's in the name of your title. So, I suppose that's what I want to shine the light on the fact that while a lot of the talk is about, oh, we should do better, we should do better. But also, to celebrate some of the progress that's been made so far. Would you mind sharing a few examples in the, you know, for I don't know of company specific examples, but maybe numbers that illustrate the progress that's been made?
Cynthia:

Yeah, you know, I think progress can be defined differently, you know, in different segments and in different industries. Right. So, I think that when I look back over the course of the last 20 years, and I see progress, even though it's been slow, it's probably not as much progress as most people want to see. But there has definitely been progress in terms of like, the raise level of conversation dialogue around diversity issues in this space. You look at what happened in the wake of George Floyd's murder here in the US in 2020. And how that sparked global worldwide protests in different countries and cities around the world, which was amazing to see. You talk about like the stop Asian hate movement, right that started early last year and really started kind of when the pandemic started to you know, blame people of Chinese descent for the virus because it or you know, seem to originate from China. And so, you started to see like anti-Asian racism, not just spread in the US, but in other parts of the world. And so, you know, a lot of this is no longer a within border conversation, it has to be a much broader international conversation and set of issues.

And so, you know, companies are more dedicated to it, they've committed hundreds of millions more dollars to it in recent years. So that's one result. You see companies adding more women and people of color to their board of directors, which is another amazing result. I mean, if you look at State Street, which, you know, made a very intentional commitment, asking companies that they invested in to diversify their boards, over 862 more boards now have at least one woman on their board as a result of their singular initiative. Right. So that's a huge result. And then you take it down to the company levels, right companies that have been focusing on this, there's lots of studies out there, McKinsey puts out a great one called why diversity matters, that has examined companies across industries globally around the world. The ones that have more diversity from a race and gender standpoint on their leadership teams perform better financially, right, up to 35% better financial metrics in their results, so there's lots of good evidence out there that shows people that we are making progress, right, companies that do focus on this are making a difference. And I think it's important to, for people to keep that in mind, even though…
Max:

It makes sense. On the results of the top, you know, higher performance, if you have a more diverse workforce, it just makes sense. Because it's kind of correlated with, okay, you're hiring on a broader pool, probably more merit-based than, you know, the network. So, you're a little bit more, you know, you're smarter about it, really, if you're opening up your talent pool, and considering more people for the role than your competitors, then over the long run, that will impact your performance, that will make you better and stronger. So, you know, without doubt, I would imagine that would be positively correlated. But it doesn't necessarily need to stem from an inclusion initiative, it can just come from just good business sense, right?
Cynthia:

You know, you have hit the nail on the head with that, absolutely. Because it really is, like I talked about diversity, equity, inclusion belonging work, as really, it's just good, like good business practice, it's about creating an effective as effective an organization as you can have, because I truly believe like, effective organizations have more diversity in them, right? And so, when we talk about modifying hiring processes, to be more inclusive of people, everything that we're doing is actually to help mitigate bias in that process. So that you can hire what you want to what you're setting out to do, like the best, most qualified people, right, and not just like going out and getting your neighbor to apply to this role. Or having your best friend right, it's about…
Max:

Oh, I don't talk to my neighbors, don't worry. Not happening. But there's been a lot of work in your field around making sure that people use the right language on job descriptions and you know, as you said, make your workplace more welcoming. I want to focus, you know, one level above or a few levels above the job description, which is the company values and the mission statements and those big guidelines that companies set, have some of these guidelines and visions and values been a little too masculine in the past, where they would, if you kind of trickle them down to individual job description, and then interview questions, it would encourage companies to hire basically, dudes hypercompetitive dudes. And they've had to be recrafted in order to create a more inclusive workplace for women?
Cynthia:

Definitely, I think, you know, anytime you see companies that put out statements like, you know, we're an incredibly dynamic and fast-paced workplace… that that can be perceived as, you know, kind of this code for not women or family-friendly. Right. And so that would discourage or could potentially discourage more women from actually considering your workplace. It's similar like when people say things like, you know, we value rockstars we're looking for the best of the best in the field, right? And because that's typically, you know, been define, like rock stars is a very brings to mind a very male masculine image.
Max:

You don't imagine Atlantis Morrissette first thing?

Cynthia:

That's right. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, when we talk about like…

Max:

Toriyama’s Rockstar.

Cynthia:

And they are both rocking it. Right, you know, even like the best of the best of the cream of the crop, like if you look at that, traditionally how that's been defined, it's always been like, majority male and white. Right? So, those are definitely ways that you start to kind of limit how people perceive whether or not this is a workplace that I can see myself applying to let alone like actually working.

Max:

But we are fast-paced, we are dynamic, and we do want the best people. So how do I frame it in a more welcoming way?

Cynthia:

You know, I think, first off, go look for some of those inclusive language tools online that are available and start to type in some of these words, because it will tell you if they are more gender defined or gender-neutral. And usually, they will also suggest for you, you know, more effective terms that won't necessarily prop up some of these connotations that are very genderized. And they're free, even better. Like anybody can find them and use them. And I think specifically, like if you think about how do you describe your workplace, as you can always balance it like, yes, if you are a fast-paced, I get it. Right. It's better to be open about that than not, right. But then how do you balance that with? And, you know, we value balance, right? We want people who, you know, like, we're very community-minded, or, you know, I don't know what the quality might be that aptly describes you, but like, how do you make sure that you also signal things that are more family-friendly, right? And I think that that's a really good sort of principle to follow in terms of just having people on your team just like, even review what your communications are, and get that perspective, like, does this…

Max:

Can I say it helps a lot that I became a father? And you know, that kind of forces me to be a little bit more family-friendly. Because it does change your perspective on life and things. So, you know, I don't know if my people have noticed, I hope they haven't. They don't think I've become too soft. But change your perspective, in a good way. Of course.

Cynthia:

That's right. That's right. And, you know, I mean, soft is not bad, necessarily. And also, I wouldn't frame it as soft because like, being a parent is one of the hardest things in the world to do.
Max:

Sure. Sure. No, I mean, you know what I mean.

Cynthia: I do. I do.

Max: Yeah, I like to ask you, where can people get a copy of this book? And yeah, who is the perfect audience to buy “How to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results?” I suppose, you know, that could attract a wide audience of HR professionals. Who do you want reading your book? And where can they find it?
Cynthia:

Definitely any HR professional will benefit from this. Any business leader will benefit from this. Any employee who wants to support more diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplaces, but doesn't know how would benefit from this. And so, I encourage people like it's available on across all major online platforms. So, if you go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, indie bound bookstore, bookshop.org, right? They all, you can order through any of those platforms. And all of that can be found on my website, cynthiaowyoung.com.
Max:

Okay, great. And one question I asked all my guests is, is a question about a hiring mistake that they've made in the past, and then usually I find this to be more insightful if you have a specific person in mind that you hired, and it was the wrong person. And walking through kind of the mistake that was made so that our listeners can benefit from the lesson learned with that, because we all make hiring mistakes all the time.
Cynthia:

Yeah, you know, I thankfully, haven't made very many hiring mistakes. The one that stands out to me is I was making a decision between somebody that I had already worked with, right, an internal candidate who was a known entity and who I thought, you know, absolutely could do the job, and was great, but was comparing to this external candidate who had had like, incredible bells and whistles in their experience, right? Things that, you know, I mean, and I don't want to describe specifically, but like, you know, Olympian level type of stuff.
Max:

Big numbers, all the right keywords.
Cynthia:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, literally, you know, there are people out there who have like, Olympic athletes on their resume, like, this is one of those like kinds of people. And I …
Max:

We all want them on our sales team.
Cynthia:

That's right. And I decided to go with the Olympic athlete type of person, and…
Max:

Good for you. Good for you. I would have made the same mistake.
Cynthia:

You know, it turned out to be a mistake, because what I discovered was that, even though the person had like incredible drive and ambition, that the way that she approached the work that we were doing together, like we were just never on the same page. And so, we could never agree. And it was a really difficult working relationship that ended up you know, with her leaving the company, but you know, that's a good example of like, not being, not letting sort of the bells and whistles of a resume kind of overshadow like the actual, like skills and competencies that you really need to be able to work smoothly together.
Max:

You know, I couldn't misinterpret the story as one where you know, you should have listened to your gut, but I know that is the wrong language to use when talking with an inclusion specialist as yourself. You should be like, no, don't listen to your gut. Listen to the interview, listen to the candidates, and don't follow your instincts compulsively either. Yeah, but yeah, maybe more broadly here we're seeing, you know, the resume was better. But the other candidate, the internal candidates, you would have had better results with because you know what you were dealing with.

Cynthia:

That's right. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Max:

Great. Great. Well, lovely chat. Thanks for coming on. And if people want to connect with you, should they jump on LinkedIn or?

Cynthia:

Absolutely, they can find me on LinkedIn. You can follow me on Twitter at Cindy Owyoung is my handle and or connect with me on Facebook.

Max:

Great. Thanks, Cindy.
Cynthia:

Max: Thank you so much.

And that was Cindy oh young author of all our welcome how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results. If you enjoy the interview. Get ahold of the book. For me, it was a reminder that inclusion and diversity initiatives do not have to be experienced as a new set of rules. I'm quotas to abide by, but can be defined at each country and each company's level as a journey to find a new competitive.

the search for talent. Some segments of the population are not currently considering a job at your company because of the language that you use or the message you portray, rethink about rethink that communication in order to attract more and better talent, because that's, what's going to help your company perform the best.

I hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe it.

View Details

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast and the host, your host, Max Ambruster. And today, I'm pleased to welcome on the show the winners of the 2021 Global BPO Awards for The Best Advertising Campaign in Recruitment. Reed Elsevier. I have two ladies joining us from the Philippines. AJ Silva, who is Head of Branding and Corporate Communication, and Kath Lisay who is an HR Supervisor for the branding and communications team as well. AJ, Kath, welcome to the show.

AJ: Hi, Max.

Kath: Hello. Thanks for having us.

AJ: Very excited to converse with you.

Max: Thank you. Thank you, it's good to have you. And we were chatting a little bit beforehand that the corporate communication and branding team sits under HR. So, for your team, HR and recruitment, it's not a second thought. It's very front and centre, it’s what you do every day. So perhaps that doesn't surprise me so much considering that Reed Elsevier’s business is so dependent on attracting talent. But for those who don't know what Reed Elsevier does, perhaps we could start with an introduction on what the business does.

AJ: Alright, okay for Reed Elsevier Philippines we are the shared services arm of RELX. So, RELX is an information solutions provider for different sophisticated businesses, we have for Legal, Science and Medical, Exhibitions and Risk solutions as well. So, Reed Elsevier Philippines, what we do is that we support our RELX business, we have four main market segments that's for LexisNexis, Elsevier, Reed exhibitions, and Risk Solutions group. So, as you can see, we have a very diverse and sophisticated market. And given that for Reed Elsevier Philippines, the talent that we are looking for, are people who are dynamic, who are really focused on or are experts in these different fields, but at the same time, we also invest in their career development.

Max: There’s a lot to cover, it's impossible to squeeze it all that in a 10-seconds sound bite, but where there's sort of a broad spectrum of products that are information-related, research-related and events. And so, it's probably hard for job seekers and candidates to understand all of that, right, just from an ad. So how do you, from the conceptual standpoint, when you're putting together this campaign, when you have a very complex business such as yours, how do you simplify it and connect with an audience, a wide audience, so that, you know, you can grab their attention even in a place like social media, where attention spans are fleeting?
Kath: Right, so, with regard to crafting the advertisement campaign in our social media channels, we have to make sure that it is automatically understood by our target audience. So, as AJ mentioned earlier, that Reed Elsevier Philippines offers a lot of career opportunities to different professionals such as Marketing, Accountancy, Finance, technology, so to speak. So, these a wide array of opportunities, we have to make sure that Reed Elsevier Philippines steps up so that we can be known as the organizations that have these opportunities and we are one of the organizations that they have to look forward to in terms of getting hired. So, when it comes to promoting or crafting the recruitment advertisement, we want to make it as simple as possible. And then we also want it to remain detailed as well in terms of providing information in about our job, about the job description itself and as well as what are the opportunities and the business that they will be supporting to in the event that they get hired.

Max: And to put the job listings, of course, you have to put the job listing at some point. But tell me or tell us about the concept of this campaign. First of all, was it on social media mainly or did you use other media?

Kath: Yeah, yeah. So, regarding the different marketing channels that we use to broaden and amplify our recruitment, ads, we have utilized various channels like social media, we have also used on job portals, such as Job Street, Philippines, and then we have also advertised it in our website. And then we have also targeted different organizations that we think are our target markets here in the Philippines.

Max: So, targeted my profession? … IT, finance. Okay. And you can do that on social media?

AJ: Yes. What we actually notice is that there are different personas for demographics. It's like let's say for legal, or lawyers, we do hire legal editors, legal professionals for most of our businesses, and what we know what this is, that's what really works for them aside from social media, they call it referral. So, what we did also, is that we amplified our brand through the employee referral program, there are a lot of lawyers, legal professionals who would refer their friends, etc. And how can we actually back on that strength, we've used, you know, the digital platforms to further our brand. And then our employees, since we have a very big one, employee referrals, our legal professionals, our employees, they are the ones sharing our content as well. So, that helps in spreading the word and therefore inviting their network, their colleagues to join the organization. And although some of that may translate during the interview as an employer referral, but behind the scenes, actually, they knew about the company because their network share this through, let's say, Facebook or through LinkedIn. So that's another, you know, Domino effect of the social media campaigns that we're doing. Aside from legal also, we do hire, let's say, marketing, sales professionals, even for customer support, we have seen great success for customer support roles, and even for finance roles, for some of the entry level roles that we have in you know, different social media. On the other hand, though, for LinkedIn, we still target as you know, a very strong digital platform. And we have a lot of niche hires, from that platform, specifically for sales, marketing, technology, and even for a lot of leadership positions. So how can we actually make use of these platforms. It's a good thing that we are part of HR, we have that visibility in terms of, you know, the different profiles of the people that our colleagues within HR looking for. So that's how we curate the messaging, but we always go back to the core. We always go back to our value proposition that what we provide to our employees. At the end of the day, we want to let them know you know, what's in it for me by joining the organization, what are the different opportunities that I can explore?

Max: I want to ask you more about the employer value proposition. But first, you said something that I thought was very insightful was the fact that the employer referral program, it needs to be supported with a certain amount of branding to make sure that the people who get contacted already have an idea of who you are, and what Reed Elsevier does. And you said that you do that by encouraging the employees to share content. Could you expand on that? How does that work?

Kath: Well, we have two different strategies in our employee referral program. So definitely, we send our employee referral program ads through corporate communications. And then as well as we post it on our social media channels. So, what our employees do is that we thrive on organic engagement. So, they tend to share our employment ads, the tag their friends, and the invite everyone almost every one of their connections to apply here in Reed Elsevier, Philippines. And then, as well as we have to make sure that we post our culture and what's in it for them in our social media channels so that when they get to invite their friends, they would prove it, they would prove that Reed Elsevier Philippines can be their Employer of Choice due to these various reasons, such as the benefits that they offer, and the culture as well the Reed Elsevier Philippines has.

AJ: And to add to that Max, maybe I'll share something a bit more personal for both of us. We're actually, the company or Reed Elsevier Philippines has been the country for 10 years. So, I just celebrated my 10th year with a company…

Max: Happy anniversary.

AJ: Yeah…soon to be 11 years, actually. So, I'm looking, you know, reflecting on that aspect on how far we have gone with, you know, we've stayed with the organization, it's because we believe in the company, we've been given opportunities at the same time, it has extended to our families. So then what employee value proposition that we're talking about, it's not just a mere messaging, this is something that we want our employees to feel.

So, for our internal audience, for our team members, as part of HR, we make sure that, you know, there's a positive experience in exactly of their employee lifecycle on their journey with a company. So that can state to them being an ambassador without us actually forcing them to share you know, the content, or I'll be honest, I think the employee referral program, there's an incentive, but it might not be as big financially, as compared to the other organization. But it's still something very, you know, very important to us, because our employees are referring their friends, their network, because they want to, you know, be a link to the world make their friends and family also experienced the good things that they're experiencing with the company because…

Max: And it's free advertisement.

Max: Oh, yeah, I saw that slogan “Valuing what matters”, which does not actually tell me what you value, because I don't know what matters for you. But maybe this is a good transition to for me to ask about this employer value proposition, that was the foundation for your campaign. So, what is it for keeping in mind that if you're advertising on social media, you probably have like two and a half seconds to grab someone's attention, how do you do that with an EVP? Because you can't put your mission and value statements up there. That's going to be hard for them to absorb.
AJ: Yeah. So, I think going back to our employee value proposition, I know “Valuing what matters” can…it may mean different things to different individuals. But the bottom line there, the root word is actually value. So, we value what matters to our stakeholders, our customers and to our employees. So how do we actually brand that through our different external branding campaigns we highlight on the audience like you empathize and put yourself in their shoes. What's in it for me? If I see this organization, if I see this ad, so what would make me actually click on the link and explore these things that they're saying about, what we're doing, we always go back to the authentic messaging, we make use of employee testimonials.

At the same time, we also, you know, go straight to the point, we're not very flowery on words, we don't do much in terms of, what else you know, different marketing strategies that we know would be too complicated. We just want to make it very straightforward. I recall also, when you mentioned or introduced us from the last event, this company, they have a very straightforward hiring ad; We are hiring. So that's a very straightforward, clean slate, monthly hiring add that we post, which I think was very much appreciated by our audience, because during the pandemic, as we all know, it hasn't been easy for everyone. But for our organization, we continued on giving opportunities to our fellow Filipinos, and one of our highest-engagement actually was an ad back in 2020.

I think during that enhanced community quarantine, we are all navigating through the challenges. And then we you know, it's a regular ad that we're doing. When you posted that ‘we are hiring’ ad, we were surprised at how many inquiries we had. It only reflects that, of course, there are a lot of Filipinos, a lot of people who would like to get employment, because of the hard unprecedented times, it also reflects that we are valuing what matters to our business because we continue the business. We also value what matters to our employees, because we have the job security. And we are very lucky to be part of that organization that, yeah, we continue to be strong, growing and expanding despite the pandemic. So, I think that's, you know, we're very in terms of our approach on how we articulate our EVP, we are very straightforward. We always go back to what really matters to our audience, what would make them appreciate that it's not just a very stoic and cold ad, we always go back to the heart, we touch the heart of our audience.

Kath: Exactly. Yeah. And just to add with what AJ mentioned earlier that valuing what matters to our business, and stakeholders, of course, we want to make sure that we make our business successful, because in the end, it will actually give us more opportunities to provide better opportunities to our employees. And of course, we always go back to our roots, and the heart of the company, which is valuing our employees. And I believe that within the 4500-employee population itself, everyone knows what ‘valuing what matters’ meant, because not only that, they know it through what they see in our communications, but they feel it as well, in terms of how we provide their employee experience and in return, be provide this authentic messaging and testimonial with Reed Elsevier Philippines, hence, the employee referral program numbers are steadily going up through the years.

AJ: And also to add to that, again, Max, I'm sorry. For the employee value proposition, what's in it for me, so for our employees, you know, we have different career development opportunities. Right now, we're also offering continuous improvement programs, six sigma, automation and analytics and all that. Aside from that, as mentioned earlier, on how you can actually extend the good things that you're experiencing with a company with your family, we have a very comprehensive HMO, that extends up to let's say, four of your dependents or beneficiaries as far as on day one, don't have to. They’re 100% subsidized by the company. So that's a big thing, especially now that you know, we all experience the pandemic. Apart from that we also highlight the culture, the very positive work culture that we have. And I think what you've been mentioning before is that people out there, they won't know what's inside.

Kath: Yeah, unless we show it to them. So, we always want to make sure that we get as much coverage as we do in social media organically, because our employees has a lot to say with their positive employee experience back that up with the posts that we have in social media in our website, and then in return, they will be able to prove that Reed Elsevier Philippines definitely serves as their employer of choice.

Max: I think I'm starting to get it. I'm going to try to summarize what I learned today from talking about, and tell me if I'm on the right track. The advertisement itself has to be direct. It talks about jobs, it talks about benefits, it talks about what matters to putting food on the table and knowing exactly what you're applying for. It's direct, and it's honest. And when it comes to things that are more subjective, like, how do you embody those values, and what life is like inside the company, you fully rely on turning your employees into ambassadors, rather than try to control the message with as you said AJ, flowery language, you let the honest people who are working at your company do the talking for you.

Kath: Yeah, yeah. And, and it actually works. Like, most of the time, whenever we post an ad in social media, our employees are the first ones to share it. Like most of the time, instead of our recruiters sharing it to various social media groups in Facebook, our employees get to share that; hey, we are hiring, we have all these benefits, come and join us, I have been with a company for 10 years, seven years. So, those are the actual messaging that an applicant is looking for. So instead of them researching the company, on its own website, or on Facebook, sometimes they have this notion that maybe all that I see is not real. So, when in fact that they talk to an employee, and they know for a fact that this employee, you have been with a company for four or five years, or eight years, ten years or so. So, they will get this feeling that this employee won't last for eight years or ten years, if the employer itself has not treated employee with, you know, a write positive or a positive employee experience. And that in turn is a great, you know, piece of marketing, instead of us putting ourselves out there, which we also do but if that has been backed up by the authentic messaging of our employees, then that in return makes a good use of or a perfect random ambassador, technically speaking, yeah.

Max: Of course. But I'll let you speak AJ, but I got a question on this. Like, it sounds too good to be true. If I'm an employer, of course, I want all my employees to go out and sing my praises and give me candidates but they have their have their daytime job, you know, they're busy, right? What can I do to make it easier for them to grab the mic and, you know, sing and talk it up? Is there anything any sort of tricks or incentives or programs you put in place to encourage this kind of behavior, or it's just purely organic, just because you've got a good vibe going on?

Kath: Well, in terms of the organizational culture that we have here in the Philippines, or in Reed Elsevier Philippines, it's very tight knit. So, we operate as a family, technically speaking. We’re proud to be here in Reed Elsevier Philippines that's why we always advertise it to our friends, to our family, and we want to make sure that they get hired as well so that they can also enjoy the benefits that I am currently enjoying. So, like what AJ mentioned earlier that our HMO or the health insurance that we provide, we provide up to four dependents starting day one of their employment. And that's actually rare, like most of the companies, they offer it sometimes after regularization, but for us, we offer it for free, not only to you, but to your family as well. And that's starting day one of your employment, and that in return, goes to show that not only we value you, but not only you, but your family as well.

Max: That's interesting, because you could have put that money into an advertising campaign or billboard, but, you know, I mean, maybe I don't know how much more it costs to actually have the four dependents covered by the insurance, but, you know, there's probably a good cost benefit analysis where you would see, okay, I spent X amount of money, but now I've turned half of my employees into ambassadors, and that lowers my cost per hire by X amount. So, you know, it'd be a difficult calculation to make, but it sounds like it's working for you guys.

AJ: Yeah. And also Max. I think, you know, all of these, it's not an overnight success. Well, for us, we are pretty much, you know, not really a newly built team. But before, you know, we are more into the traditional type of hiring or advertising. I think, in the past 10 years, the organization has really evolved. But on that past 10 years that we are operating in the Philippines, as mentioned, it's not an overnight success, we have focused on building a positive work culture, we have an open-door policy, there are regular surveys, employee opinion surveys, where we get the feedback of our people, and then we respond to that. Also, we develop our leaders to be servant leaders. And we really invest in them, because they're the front liners that would build the team and continue to sustain a fun and engaging and professional work culture.
So, it's not overnight, something has been worked on for the past decade.

And then I think what really sets us apart, or the differentiator that we want to highlight is aside from the culture that we have built over the years, we also want to highlight how, you know, if you're part of this organization, it's not just because you're getting something out of it, right, like you're giving an opportunity to give back to the organization, and you also have a very strong corporate social responsibility program.

So, that's something that you can also, if you want to give back to the community, so there are a lot of other a lot of other items that that really, you know, long term programs, not short-term programs that would build the ambassadors from within. So yeah, it's really about, it's a joint effort from everyone, and investing in our people and even on our leaders.`

Kath: And just to add with how AJ mentioned about investing in our people and you mentioning about, you know, cost benefit analysis, instead of, you know, putting out a billboard out there and, you know, focusing on the employees instead is that we back on our people, that's because he marketing itself or the fruit of the marketing from our people has not been with, I mean, has been with us since day one, but the reach is not as overwhelming as what we have right now. But we continue to build and back in our people in terms of their career development, their learning, we also bank on their health and safety and that's because we know that they will become more productive, they will feel more valued. And at the same time, you know, we will get this offensive messaging if they're positive employee experience. So, yeah, I mean, the purpose is not turning them into the brand ambassadors, but just to definitely, you know, making sure that they are being treated right, that we make them feel valued. And then the byproduct of it is that they turn to our brand ambassadors.

AJ: #companygoals. That’s one of our campaigns also.

Kath: Yeah.

Max: All right, wonderful. Well, I think I could see how you do turn them into ambassadors with that mindset, and thank you for coming to share some of the secrets behind this campaign that was celebrated by your peers in the BPO Industry. Congratulations for winning the award once again. And well, if people want to sort of get familiar with Reed Elsevier, Philippines and the company you've been in for over 10 years, AJ, where would you send them to, you send them to, you know, where can they go and see some of this employee culture on display?

Kath: Yeah, we do. They can find us on Facebook. So, it's Reed Elsevier Philippines. They can also find us in LinkedIn. We also have an Instagram and a Twitter page and YouTube. So, our YouTube is filled with our fun employee engagement activities that actually promotes employee resource groups, passion, and of course, work-life balance. And yeah, for our recruitment advertisement, yes, we also post it in Facebook, LinkedIn, and JobStreet.

AJ: And we also have our official website, of course. That's www.ReedElsevier.com.ph. And if anyone is interested for like career opportunities, we have the ManilaCareers@ReedElsevier.com. And another site, iloilocarees@reedelsevier.com.

Kath: Yeah.

Max: Real multi-channel strategy. I think I'll start with the YouTube channel.

Kath: Right.

Max: Thank you. Thank you, ladies. Pleasure to have you and congrats again.

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Max Armbruster: Hello, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Ambruster, and today on the show we're going to talk about hiring remotely and

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Max Armbruster: how do you do that

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Max Armbruster: at scale. I'm delighted to welcome to the show Liam Martin. Liam is the Co-founder of Staff.com, Time Doctor which… which helps employers hire employees from anywhere in the world, and and and help manage their time the or the organizer of the run running remotes.

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Max Armbruster: conference, which has been going around for a few years and great timing on that Liam and then and, recently, you took that running remote title and you slapped it on a book.

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Liam Martin: That is true.

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Max Armbruster: And so, yes, well we'll we'll talk about that book. Thanks for coming on Liam, and looking forward to… to picking your brain on how to hire remotely.

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Liam Martin: Yeah thanks for having me.

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Liam Martin: I think that hiring remotely is actually one of those issues that hasn't really been addressed all that much during what I like to call the

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Liam Martin: pandemic panic period of remote work, the last two and a half years, because no one really had to learn how to play because they were literally just transitioning their teams to a remote work model, and now I think we're actually going to see a lot of work being done in this space.

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Max Armbruster: Yeah yeah then then last year, the big theme was the great resignation.

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Max Armbruster: And I don't know if the numbers have come in, yet on whether people have been able to retain their remote workers, but certainly i'm hearing a lot of people saying

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Max Armbruster: it's harder to hire now because people refuse non remote work so there's all segments of the population that refuses to come back in.

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Liam Martin: Yeah there's a statistic that I heard actually when I was speaking at a conference a couple months ago and I'm going to

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Liam Martin: pair it it here may or may not be true, but supposedly more people quit in the month of June last year in the United States than history of the United States,

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Liam Martin: which is pretty scary statistic when you think about it, so many people quitting their jobs, and when you look at the actual reasons as to why people are doing it,

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Liam Martin: it all ties back to remote work, undoubtedly, it is fundamentally easier

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Liam Martin: to enter and leave a job now with remote work than it was in the past, so it's even more important to be able to retain that talent and I think there's a bunch of strategies that people can implement to be able to do that, but before you even do that need to actually hire them.

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Liam Martin: A little bit more of a complicated process. Yeah hiring the right people you know I got some counterintuitive perspectives towards that.

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Max Armbruster: Okay, great well before we dive into those perhaps for for those who don't know Time Doctor and Running Remote, could you give us like the the one minute overview of what you do.

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Liam Martin: Sure, so time doctors, a time tracking tool for remote teams that company's been in operation for 10, 11

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Liam Martin: years.

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Liam Martin: We effectively lovingly call it fitbit for work, and it really came out of the problem that I was having which was, I actually had a business before Time Doctor, which was a Tutoring business.

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Liam Martin: And I couldn't actually measure how long a tutor work with a student, it was creating a big problem instead of that business. So Time Doctor scratch that itch. The second business,

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Liam Martin: which was born out of basically our core mission statement which is trying to help

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Liam Martin: the world transition towards remote work was running remote, and we did one of our team retreats in Baraka, which is a very small island, it's the party island in the Philippines and we we get to like oh it's a great spot, isn't it?

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Max Armbruster: yeah yeah.

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Max Armbruster: Great great fun.

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Liam Martin: Lots of lots of red horse that we drink there, I think I got very, very drunk at the end of that actual team retreat and.

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Liam Martin: The issue that we had was there was so much information on how to hire a virtual assistant.

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Liam Martin: Or how to be a digital nomad but we didn't want to know those things. We wanted to know how do we get to 250 people, 500 people, 1000 people, 10,000 people.

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Liam Martin: As a remote first organization, a lot of remote companies and since you've been remote from the inception, you probably know this.

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Liam Martin: They have a bit of a chip on their shoulder where they're kind of seen is like lifestyle businesses right like oh,

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Liam Martin: that's a cute little half a million dollar a year business that you have, I hope that it goes well, as opposed to really.

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Liam Martin: The incredibly fast growing segment of the market that I think it is today, I actually think promote first organizations

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Liam Martin: are going to be the majority of hyper growth tech companies within the next five years, and so we're really frustrated on this. There was no information and I just said okay, let's do a ready shoot aim philosophy. Let's just get on you.

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Liam Martin: And then i'll talk to a couple of my friends that are in there about workspace and see if we can put something together and that was the beginning of running remote, which

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Liam Martin: we are finally going

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Liam Martin: back to in person conferences, May 17 and 18th in Montreal, Canada, and we've got a great you know grabbing speakers that are really coming from.

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Liam Martin: It's it's an interesting time for us actually. This is the first physical conference we've had since we've… since we basically come back from COVID

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Liam Martin: and remote work has changed so much. I think it's a complete kind of reimagining of what remote work is, and I'm excited to be able to do the conference.

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Max Armbruster: I hope you I hope you have a good sales team for for this event, because I, it seems like every tech company has got its got a story to tell now on

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Max Armbruster: on how to run remote.

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Liam Martin: So I completely agree on that.

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Liam Martin: I actually have a bit of an insider joke here is there's so many remote companies coming out of the woodwork that said that they were remote pioneers.

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Liam Martin: You know before it like basically if someone is legit to me it was did I know about them pre-COVID?

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Liam Martin: If I knew about them pre-COVID, they're automatically legit because I've gotten pitched by so… I mean I've got a does this week gotta speak at the conference, and so critical for me to speak at the conference, and I know everything about remote work.

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Max Armbruster: And then I talked to the county data and they're like three months old.

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Max Armbruster: Right, and it's gonna you're gonna miss.

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Max Armbruster: You miss the early adopters. Well, alright let's let's let's talk about you know the good thing about the early adopters they they make all the mistakes and they learn all the lessons, and they clear the space so so let's talk about the mistakes that we've made as employers hiring remotely.

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Max Armbruster: And we were speaking beforehand about the Steve Jobs philosophy that you should know who your who are not your customers better than who are your customers.

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Max Armbruster: Could you expand on that and see how and discuss how that applies to candidates as customers.

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Liam Martin: Sure um I loved there's this talk, and it's… I don't know if it's… I mean it's on the Internet somewhere. I've watched it a couple times, where this this interviewer asked Steve Jobs will you ever have a sub $1,000 notebook and that's when $1,000 was you know,

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Liam Martin: a lot of money, not in the hyperinflation days of today.

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Liam Martin: And he said no, I'll never build a $1,000 notebook because none of our customers

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Liam Martin: are selling $1,000 notebook people, like we only target people that can afford a $1,000 plus notebook.

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Liam Martin: And when you think about that, it's actually a really good measure to be able to identify who your customers are. We talked about running remote.

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Liam Martin: Digital nomads, not our customer. A business that has you know, one to two employees, not our customer. People that don't want to go remote, are not interested in it at all,

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Liam Martin: not our customer. What are we interested in?

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Liam Martin: We're interested in people that are

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Liam Martin: interested in building and scaling remote in hybrid teams and are really excited about building a business, not necessarily building, you know, a lifestyle business on the side that makes 10 grand a year, or something like that.

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Max Armbruster: As that applies to people.

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Liam Martin: I think you still have to have the same philosophy, so we have a culture test internally, where we really focus on what… and I love

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Liam Martin: the term culture, because it's used so often in the tech startup world, but no one really knows what the hell that means.

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Liam Martin: You have to have a really important culture. What does that mean? Like what… Does that mean you know aeron chairs and like free lunch? Is that culture? No, it's not culture.

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Liam Martin: The sociological definition of culture is, what are the unique activities that you do, that other groups do not.

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Liam Martin: So we really try to identify what makes us unique as a culture, and then we try to get rid of people that don't necessarily want to apply to that particular model of working, so we have you know before the pandemic,

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Liam Martin: a big one was we work remotely. We’ll never have an office. We have people and team members in 43 different countries all over the world.

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Liam Martin: Everyone will work remotely. We will never have an office ever. If you're interested in having an office, don't come work here.

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Liam Martin: That's an example of those types of cultural touch points that I think are really important before making those long term purchases, which are basically, the most important purchases in your business, which is your people.

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Max Armbruster: But that's a good practice for people who are doing first interviews is to really outline who should not be applying for a job and in a way to let… so that the

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Max Armbruster: candidates are the future… the potential future higher screen you out as an employer and say well this this is going to do it for me because they're they're very adamant about the fact that they don't want this, and they don't want that.

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Max Armbruster: That could be done, you know as a first interview, and in your case, you said it’s a test that you've built in.

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Liam Martin: So.

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Liam Martin: We generally uhm… and I took this leadership from Shopify actually, where they don't… so the candidates that are brought in,

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Liam Martin: they figure out there's a first pass of do they meet the base requirements for the position? They do not do any technical. Their first test that they do was a culture test.

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Liam Martin: Because they recognize. If you're perfectly you know positioned for this job, from a technical perspective, but you don't have the right culture fit,

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Liam Martin: we're going to hire you and then you're going to quit in six months, which is the worst. I mean that's the absolute worst place to be.

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Liam Martin: You've gone through onboarding. You've integrated them into your culture. You spent all that managerial overhead to be able to get them into your organization, and then they quit, right? That's the absolute worst place to be.

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Liam Martin: So they're realizing well let's not be tempted by technical fit. Let's actually just focus on cultural fit first and then, if they meet the cultural fit, then we talk about technical fit.

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Max Armbruster: Right. And and so in Running Remote, you you you you've written about the best practices to put in place for

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Max Armbruster: for hiring remotely.

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Max Armbruster: Is uhm… is that is that part of your… the toolkit? Is the standard toolkit that you recommend is a culture test at the front? Or there's some other some some other methodologies that you, you advocate for?

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Liam Martin: Well, so even from a psychosomatic or psychometrics perspective, there's there's some interesting data as well. Remote work really is

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Liam Martin: is very friendly towards introverted people.

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Liam Martin: So this is a, this is one of the strongest signals that we've had and the way that we're measuring that is basically retention. So does someone quit, right?

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Liam Martin: Remote first organizations, if you're extroverted, your chance of quitting goes up, and we think it's simply because people get lonely.

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Liam Martin: So the way that you solve for that, you can’t hire extra pretty people. You just need to be able to keep entertained in some other way,

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Liam Martin: which is going to a coworking space. You know sending them to coffee shops.

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Liam Martin: Getting them a social circle that's not necessarily their work circle is a way to be able to hedge against that, but fundamentally introversion counter-intuitively is by far the most important variable that we found that is going to make for a successful long term higher.

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Max Armbruster: When…when I'm going through the people in my company in

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Max Armbruster: my head and thinking.

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Max Armbruster: Yeah, that… the the extroverts would be the exception. So do you think that by that token it's going to be difficult for certain organizations that are

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Max Armbruster: more maybe sales reliance and that need to to offer a service approach? I mean, in fact, we know that a lot of the…the BPO world,

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Max Armbruster: The call center world has has managed to move to hybrid or some some even fully remote and… and they need to hire extroverts, I would imagine, so… so it can be done, but

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Max Armbruster: maybe…maybe you're saying the easier… easier for companies that are hiring remote teams of engineers, for example, which tend to be more introverts.

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Liam Martin: To a degree, I mean, I think there are introverted sales people there are people that are able to build that deep intimate connection with just one person.

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Liam Martin: And it can work, but I agree with you, the vast majority of sales people just are… you know they're attracted towards extroverted perspectives as it applies to sales, but I would say, I mean it's um.

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Liam Martin: I actually think remote and where we are right now, like January, 4% of the US workforce was working remotely. March, 45% of the US workforce was working remotely like

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Liam Martin: wham, exponential jump and that's the biggest transition, since the industrial revolution in work, but the industrial revolution took eight years, and we did it in March.

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Liam Martin: So we've completely transformed the way that work is being done and long term, we're projecting 30% of the US workforce will be working remotely literally like 2022 and on post-pandemic so,

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Liam Martin: there's got to be a place for these people to go, and whether you're introverted or extroverted you really have to actually learn a couple key variables to succeed

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Liam Martin: from a hiring perspective, from a working perspective which, and I think the actual, the most important one is

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Liam Martin: the ability to be able to focus on information and ideas, as opposed to individuals, so I think that the future of remote work will be the future of the introverted leader.

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Liam Martin: I think that the vast majority of not that…when I interview people for the book, I interviewed two dozen billion dollar plus remote first organizations.

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Liam Martin: And the biggest signal that I got from all of that group was number one, their managerial layer was about 50% smaller than the average company of the same size, which is an interesting…

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Max Armbruster: Like an organization, you have more people reporting to you.

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Liam Martin: Well, there are more people doing work and there are less people telling people what to do.

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Liam Martin: Yeah so any organization, in which you can optimize towards deep work, which is basically solving very difficult problems quickly, you're going to have a faster moving organization, so if you can remove, you can

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Liam Martin: you can tighten up at managerial layer.

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Liam Martin: That's a big one, and that's actually due to my second biggest assumption, which I was pretty surprised about, which is why I actually made the entire book about it,

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Liam Martin: which is asynchronous management, the ability to be able to say listen, I don't need

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Liam Martin: to tell Max what my targets are or what my numbers are, even though Max is my manager because I'm just going to put it inside of a Google Doc or somewhere. It's going to be automatically reported.

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Liam Martin: And then Max doesn't have to tell his manager, and his manager doesn't have to tell the boss, the boss can basically know everything and

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Liam Martin: not only that, Liam and Max can know everyone's numbers everywhere. You can have the same kind of radically transparent view of the business as the CEO. If you have the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company,

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Liam Martin: you automatically make better decisions up and down the org chart but, more importantly, when the difficult decisions need to be made,

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Liam Martin: a lot of people actually understand what the heck is going on. They’re like Oh, I understand why we actually have to cut 10% of the workforce.

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Liam Martin: Because if we don't right now, we're going to be screwed in six months, because we don't have the cash to be able to keep going, and that's the part that all of these asynchronous remote first companies have in common.

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Max Armbruster: And uhm… the percentage of of those big companies that are you know going for hundreds or thousands of employees

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Max Armbruster: That are truly, you know, like truly remote where you can hire anybody in the globe is quite small right? Because usually they would they would pick one, two or you know, a handful of countries to run remote.

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Liam Martin: for…Absolutely. That's something that I think is changing. Companies like ourselves. Get Lab,

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Liam Martin: you know, Get Lab hires everywhere on Planet Earth. Companies like Todoist, they have…they hire everywhere on Planet Earth.

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Liam Martin: Buffer hires everywhere on Planet Earth but,

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Liam Martin: They’re actually very small companies. Zapier as well, but they actually have a lot of their employees located in North America.

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Liam Martin: They've just realized that there are some asynchronous versus synchronous challenges, so they've realized that they actually need to silo at least some some overhang hours. But the companies that are incredibly successful

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Liam Martin: have basically just built their businesses with this one core assumption, which is

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Liam Martin: what if we could never talk to anyone in person? What if there were no… What if we could not communicate synchronously? What if there was no way for us to be able to do it? There's some… Zoom, you know, explodes tomorrow. There's no more Google Meet. There's no more Skype.

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Liam Martin: What the heck do we do?

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Liam Martin: How do we build a business that way? And then, when you put your mind into that perspective, you actually build a business that is incredibly resistant towards

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Liam Martin: problems. I'm currently seeing a huge conflict between Russia and Ukraine right now. Conflict…a war between Russia and Ukraine right now.

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Liam Martin: You can sidestep a lot of those problems but, more importantly, this actually makes your business much more effective to scale. So if you have the process, be the manager, as opposed to the manager, you can train a 1000 sales reps, not just one or two at a time.

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Max Armbruster: Uhm…one question that I, I always go back to is

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Max Armbruster: is hiring mistakes.

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Max Armbruster: And in the context of remote hiring,

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Max Armbruster: as you, as you pointed out, some people will be at a psychological disadvantage in a remote organization, extroverts notably, and they… they are there's you've given some tools to work on that.

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Max Armbruster: But when you know, when you when you think back on your your personal journey as an employer, as a recruiter,

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Max Armbruster: and you think about some of the mistakes that you made. Is there… can you point to one example where you hired somebody, it didn't work out, and and what lessons the audience can take from that unfortunate experience, I mean.

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Max Armbruster: You gotta pick one, because I know you I know you've got an end you got dozens that flying through your mind. Now now that's um.

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Liam Martin: So we always assess, every quarter actually, we… we assess regrettable and unregrettable terminations. So um there are some people that quit and we think to ourselves, oh man thank God, he quit.

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Liam Martin: Because otherwise we would have had to fire him right? And you've all been… I mean everyone that's managing a company right now, you've been in that that headspace. Um so we try to basically identify, is more than 25% of our termination events

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Liam Martin: regrettable? If that is then we're in a deep… we’re in…we're basically in pretty serious trouble and we need to be able to make a shift pretty quickly.

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Liam Martin: In terms of the reasons.

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Liam Martin: I would probably say it's almost entirely connected back to culture, and I hate to use that term because I actually hate that like it's such an all encompassing term but.

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Liam Martin: I can remember, I did an interview for a sales person and this person was incredibly well positioned for a job with our company.

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Liam Martin: Had the right experience, work with the right type of technology, understood our technology stack, understood our CRM systems, and throughout this interview he said, Oh well, you know I don't really believe in remote work.

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Liam Martin: As I go, what do you mean? What do you mean you don't believe in remote work?

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Liam Martin: And he gave me a long answer. He basically said that remote work doesn't work and it's not going to be successful long term.

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Liam Martin: And I said so, you know that our mission statement is that we're trying to empower the world's transition towards remote work right? And he said yeah, but I can sell this software. I'm just telling you straight up I don't necessarily believe in, you know, remote work. And I was like, awesome.

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Max Armbruster: I mean in hindsight, is, I need to get out of here right now, like you need to get off the bus

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Liam Martin: immediately. So really for me it's just identifying… I mean the vast majority of people that we hire right now, with the great resignation, they can find another job instantly and they can probably find a better job actually

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Liam Martin: long term. We're very… I mean we're relatively competitive,

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Liam Martin: but Facebook and Google and Apple and all of these big corporations are all spinning up remote hiring on at scale, so I actually think the real pioneers like us, are going to be significantly left behind

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Liam Martin: in comparison to what hiring was like, you know, two or three years ago. But it's just literally saying, listen, do you actually connect to what we really care about? Would you do this job for free? If you had like… if you had 10 million in the bank,

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Liam Martin: would you…what part of the job would you do for free? Would you do any of this job for free?

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Max Armbruster: That’s a good question.

Liam Martin: And if the answer is yes,

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Liam Martin: and that's someone who I would keep for an extended amount of time.

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Max Armbruster: Did you hire the salesperson, Liam? Did you hire the salesperson you were

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Max Armbruster: talking about in your example?

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Liam Martin: No, we got rid of him immediately, like that was…

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Max Armbruster: That was out of the process. Okay. Okay.

Liam Martin: That was immediately out of the… out of the game, yeah. Because to me…

Max Ambruster: But you…I gotta hold you accountable

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Max Armbruster: because you dodged my question. The question was: a hiring mistake that you made.

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and

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Liam Martin: I know. But it was such a… like there's a ton of people and they're all kind of, and I also want to be respectful of…

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Liam Martin: If I tell a personal story, it might… I might

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Liam Martin: identify something…

Max Armbruster: I think you might get caught

Liam Martin: Well we just don't want to do that, we want to make sure that everyone…

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Liam Martin: Like when people leave the company, they may disagree or agree with our decision, but at least we want them to feel like it was a fair decision

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Liam Martin: that was made, and that they've left on good terms.

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Liam Martin: If I had to really look at a core part again, it would it would come back to that cultural part it would come back to the… did they actually really identify

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Liam Martin: with what we were as a company?

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Liam Martin: I can tell you actually right now, one of the conflicts that we've had just recently was

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Liam Martin: COVID really grew everything in remote work, so we had extraordinary growth during COVID, and

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Liam Martin: our DNA as a company is a bootstrapped company. We are bootstrapped, we've never raised any money, and so we were hiring a lot of people that were

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Liam Martin: really really experienced people that could scale venture backed companies, and we came up against some of that resistance and we basically discovered,

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Liam Martin: By we, I mean, like me and my Co-founder, discovered that that's actually part of our culture is being bootstrapped and being a little bit I mean some people would call us cheap probably a lot of people would call us cheap but just being more thrifty with where we put our dollar.

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Liam Martin: And thinking a little bit.

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Liam Martin: Maybe too much before making some… some tactical or strategic decisions in terms of spend.

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Liam Martin: So that's something that we thought this was the direction that we wanted to go as a business, and we realized it had… it took us quite a bit of money and time to be able to recognize that that wasn't the direction that you take it.

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Max Armbruster: So.

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Liam Martin: It's constantly evolving and the thing was is that when we actually came back to the team members that were having that type of tension with us and we explained it to them, they were like: You know what? I agree.

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Liam Martin: You guys it's just not… you're absolutely right, this is probably not the way that we want to go and it's much better if

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Liam Martin: these people move on to something else, as opposed to continue on in the business and they moved on and they all got salaries double. What what we had because they were really, really good people and they were incredibly passionate about the subject but

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Liam Martin: it's just again, with hiring people, especially those A players, don't be concerned about letting them go. It may actually be the best thing that you could possibly do for them.

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Max Armbruster: If… if you're building…

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Max Armbruster: A key takeaway here is, if you built a unique culture around in bootstrapping but it's a form of hustle and and

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Max Armbruster: you know, can do attitude with with limited need sometimes, you don't… you don't want to dilute that culture, even if

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Max Armbruster: if it looks great on the resume, and it's an important element to preserve. So thanks for those lessons and for sharing Liam, and if people want to get a hold of you, and they want to buy your book, what's the… what's the best way for them to do so?

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Liam Martin: If you go to runningremote.com/book, you'll be able to go and check out the book there. We are launching August 16th and while you're there, if you're interested in going to the reading about conference, it's may 17th and 18th in Ontario Canada, which is a beautiful place to live.

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Max Armbruster: It’s not in the metaverse?

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Liam Martin: So…you know what?

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Liam Martin: You actually have to come to the conference to get the answer to that one.

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Liam Martin: That's all I'll say.

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Max Armbruster: It’s the portal, it’s the portal inside Montreal that takes you to the next dimension.

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Liam Martin: I'm pretty excited about it, but you have to come to the conference. I'm not gonna

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Liam Martin: get any more than that, and then Time Doctor, just go to timedoctor.com and then, if you want to kind of talk with me, best spot is YouTube.

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Liam Martin: We put up all our talks for free, because, again, helping the road transition towards remote work means can't afford a ticket for 1000 bucks or even a book for 30 bucks you can afford for YouTube and you go to youtube.com/runningremote and you can check out all of our talks there.

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Max Armbruster: Thanks, Liam.

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Liam Martin: Thank you.

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Max Armbruster: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Ambruster and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show Julia DeBari who is

Max Armbruster: a designer turned into a recruiter of designers, and we’ll get to her story in a minute, and I hope to ask Julia about how to hire designers and how to hire them in a way which opens your talent pool and opens the door to as many qualified talents as possible.

Max Armbruster: So Julia well, welcome to… welcome to the show.

Julia DeBari: Thank you very much Max, I appreciate you having me.

Max Armbruster: It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. We… we got connected because I saw some of Julia's work online where she… she explained some of for UX and design work. And… and Julia like many, many recruiters kind of stumbled into recruitment and talent acquisition. I suppose bit late in your career.

Max Armbruster: So it's only been… you've only been a full time recruiter for less than a year, right?

Julia DeBari: Five months.

Max Armbruster: Five months. So well,

Max Armbruster: that's the hardest part probably.

Max Armbruster: Hope… hope you're hanging in there and but yeah how did you end up… Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and… and then perhaps how you ended up in talent acquisition.

Julia DeBari: Sure. Sure. Yeah, so as Mike said then in UX design actually 22 years, primarily in the San Francisco Silicon Valley area. Most of my life, I recently moved up to the Pacific Northwest.

Julia DeBari: And I had the normal career, you know, go up the career ladder and then I decided that wasn't for me, and so I switched to teaching UX design for five years.

Julia DeBari: And I got a little burnt out, and switched to design program management for a year and felt like I just wasn't having the same impact that I was able to in the past.

Julia DeBari: So yes, I decided to try recruiting to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.

Julia DeBari: As I was doing education, I saw so many students struggling to find that first job after graduating. And I just really wanted to understand the hiring process and more detail, so I took the plans and jumped right in and been doing it for five months.

Max Armbruster: All right, all right. And you're… you're helping… are you able to help those young people today find jobs? Or is it like every other field? Nobody wants to hire them straight out of school. We want them to have like three, four years to basically to have their…

Max Armbruster: To… to have all their training, the initial training, paid for by someone else.

Julia DeBari: Yes, now it's just like that.

Julia DeBari: In my recruiting role, I got one junior graphic design position and I've gotten 500 applicants in 24 hours.

Julia DeBari: That I get to go through.

Julia DeBari: So yeah it's really tough, just like many other industries, design mostly wants senior people.

Julia DeBari: Frustrating. And many people out of school do a lot of contract or freelance work for a few years before a company is willing to take a chance on them.

Max Armbruster: Yeah, it's a great way to at least get something started, go build a portfolio, you go on Upwork, you take the odd gig, and then adds up right? I mean,

Max Armbruster: Yeah, people put Upwork on their resume all the time now.

Max Armbruster: Good enough for me, actually. As an employer who works with a remote distributed team, I'd be happy if somebody spends five years on Upwork, as long as they got good credentials.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's sort of your only option to waive the processes right now.

Max Armbruster: Well Julia, I'm thinking about these…

Max Armbruster: these young people who don't have a long portfolio and these 500 candidates. Did you know… did you come up with a process that works and that… that you could recommend for others who are hiring designers?

Julia DeBari: Um, I don't think I've quite finalized the process. I think I've made some improvements.

Julia DeBari: But the thing is the improvements are mostly just me. I'm still trying to scale those improvements out to other people.

Julia DeBari: And I think one thing, so when I was in UX design, I was a manager and hiring.

Julia DeBari: And I was much more open to mentoring, whoever the new person on the team was. And I know there’s a lot of hiring managers who are just too busy and don't have the time, which is why they're looking for seniors.

Julia DeBari: So I think what's positive in the industry is there are a lot of design apprenticeship programs

Julia DeBari: popping up where people can join and get the ongoing mentorship well working, if they can get someone to take a chance on them. And I think that's really important to be like, I have a regular steady mentor who I talk with and reviews my work.

Julia DeBari: And I think that helps when you can bring that to the table when you're interviewing.

Max Armbruster: And that does sound…Oh, you mean the candidates would…Oh, no, you mean the recruiter of the candidate should…

Julia DeBari: Oh, the candidate. So, something I like advocate

Julia DeBari: for when I get junior candidates is to tell them like step by step, how to like get a regular mentor, and like how to get by.

Max Armbruster: Get a mentor and bring that to the discussion. Bring out to…to the interview.

Julia DeBari: Yeah.

Max Armbruster: Oh yeah, brilliant! I could use a mentor from…from my designers. That's…that's not a dig. It’s just to say we know we're a small business and we don't…we don't necessarily have the layer of senior mentorship available in house.

Julia DeBari: We need to take that conversation offline and give me some

Julia DeBari: free consulting advice.

Max Armbruster: Thank you. I will…I will take you up on that. And so thinking about the…the mistakes we want to avoid when…when hiring designers.

Max Armbruster: What are…what are some…I mean you must have…you must have hired a few in your days when…when you were on the other side, when you're managing your design.

Max Armbruster: Can…can you run…you know, kind of walk…walk me back through some of the hiring mistakes that you may have made. And what you…what you've learned from that, and how employers can avoid hiring the wrong designer.

Julia DeBari: Yeah, um.

Julia DeBari: One mistake I made it was not

Julia DeBari: special. So anyway,

Julia DeBari: I was a manager and I inherited a team. And then we wanted to bring some new people on, and I went on vacation and the hiring process started without me.

Julia DeBari: And when I got back from vacation, I had a new…two new people on my team that I did not interview. So I definitely do not recommend doing that.

Julia DeBari: And I think I strongly suggest when you are having a designer, that they meet at least a couple people on the team. Not just the hiring manager and their boss, or the cross-functional partners, but they need to talk to some people that they're going to work with on a day-to-day basis.

Julia DeBari: What I used to back when it was in person, obviously, things are a lot different with remote, that I think is helpful is showing them like the creative area, or where they will be doing their work. So if you do have people in person.

Julia DeBari: You know it's a lot different some places, still have the whole cubicle setup or you know, is it a total office setup or ballpen setup or whatever. So that was useful but I don't think it matters now with remote work.

Julia DeBari: But do letting people know, like the cadence of meetings. I think that's one thing, depending on the company.

Julia DeBari: You know, some companies are really meeting heavy, and some people really don't like that. And so, those are some important things as a hiring manager. You can let candidates know, so they're not surprised when they set the offer and start.

Max Armbruster: Yeah, that's…that's tricky right to

Max Armbruster: be able to figure out if somebody is meeting friendly or not meeting friendly. I know the…I have my ideas on who likes meetings and who doesn't in my company. I would say, most of the engineers are quite…are pushing back heavily on it.

Max Armbruster: And I suppose generally if you could map out who's an interest back introvert versus an extrovert, then you can figure out how much they enjoy meetings, but that could be simplifying things. How do you…Yeah, how do you determine that's on…with their…with their candidates?

Julia DeBari: Um, yeah. I usually just ask and say like we usually have…depending on like what client I'm hiring for, like there's usually X number of meetings a day. And another thing I think is important

Julia DeBari: is like are those meetings planned? And like they're on your calendar like a week or two in advance? Or is it like

Julia DeBari: fire? You know emergency. Okay, we throw like an hour long meeting on the calendar and five minutes, so that you know we can

Julia DeBari: rush to do a crisis. I've certainly worked at places where they just like proliferating like mushrooms, but nothing was hardly ever planned out as far as needed. So that was a little bit of a pain. So I'm just asking those questions straight up.

Max Armbruster: Yeah, like what is your average week look like? How could it be better?

Max Armbruster: And you know what you…And maybe some designers will say: Oh I…I wish I had more me. I wish I had more interaction. I was more involved with other sides of the business and possibly you'll get that kind of candidate to.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Armbruster: And then, and so, so that’s…that's kind of a culture fit question. And then in terms of technical assessment, what do you do?

Julia DeBari: That sounds really interesting. There's quite a debate in the industry around say like technical assessments in the sense. And I'm sure it's not just design, where there are so many tools and it's like a job description, a list you know you must know these five tools or something.

Julia DeBari: But honestly, almost every job I've had, there's been a new tool or something. So I would say for hiring managers, I would look more for someone who can pick up a new program really quickly, and not use that as criteria to cross someone off the list.

Julia DeBari: I use so many different software's and…Oh my God, I said software is a complete mess with that. So many different software programs and

Julia DeBari: you know, it usually just takes me like a few hours or a day or so, to pick them up. And so I think a lot of people are like that, and so I see hiring managers like: Oh, they must know this program,

Julia DeBari: or like we work only in…like I just got a design, like a UX design job and they only work in Illustrator and I'm like

Julia DeBari: Well, most…

Max Armbruster: It is like,

Max Armbruster: if you don't know my software, then what kind of person are you? It’s that sort

Max Armbruster: of tribal instinct that

Max Armbruster: kicks in where we think: Oh you're an outlook person? Gross.

Max Armbruster: You know.

Julia DeBari: Exactly. So I see

Julia DeBari: things like that getting in the way of hiring great candidates a lot.

Max Armbruster: Yeah. So okay, try to shake off all your…So we have…we have all these biases, right?

Julia DeBari: Yes.

Max Armbruster: We imagine a candidate to be a certain physical type gender, age group, etc, and…and software package to come with it, or if it's not an Adobe Indesign person, I don't want to touch it.

Julia DeBari: Yeah.

Max Armbruster: So we got to get rid of those biases, and then we got to get to the core. So the the core of…of a great designer.

Max Armbruster: I don't know how do you measure that. Like is it artistic sensibility? You see their portfolio, and you ask them to walk you…walk them through the artistic…you know the creative process.

Julia DeBari: Um, well you caught on a keyword there. Process. So the great thing about UX design specifically is that it's using an old fashioned term. It's both right brained and left brained. So you want someone who can think critically, and ask a lot of questions and

Julia DeBari: not just take things for granted or take things at face value. But then you also, as you said, you want someone with that aesthetic sense and that creative ability.

Julia DeBari: So yeah. So I really feel like your portfolio is really where you can stand out as a candidate, and as a hiring manager that should be your like single

Julia DeBari: point of reference versus someone's like resume or like where they went to school or whatever. And in that portfolio, you want to see

Julia DeBari: you know, attention to detail in the design artifacts that are on the portfolio, as well as an explanation of like how they went through that project's process.

Julia DeBari: You know of

Julia DeBari: like…so things…

Julia DeBari: Oh sorry, go ahead.

Max Armbruster: I'm sorry. Yeah, I was gonna say that portfolio is a little bit like a resume. You can…you can put a lot of stuff in there. It doesn't

Max Armbruster: always have to be true, right?

Julia DeBari: Oh, that's a good question. I never thought about that. But I’ve heard…

Julia DeBari: many story.

Max Armbruster: But you know, a lot of people cheat on their resume a little bit, or bend…bend the truth a little bit. And I imagine, they do the same on portfolios and…

Max Armbruster: You know I would look at a portfolio and say: Well, did you really design that?

Julia DeBari: Yeah. No, actually you totally reminded me it was last year. The year before I was talking to a friend and

Julia DeBari: they'd hired someone based on their…this person's portfolio. Like she wasn't the hiring manager, but this person was going to be her co-worker. And it turns out they totally copied someone else's portfolio, like ripped it off like letter to letter.

Julia DeBari: So that is one reason why we see so many design challenges. Like unfortunately, it's awful to do it as a candidate, but

Julia DeBari: I've done a lot of interviewing with other hiring managers, and the amount of responses where people are scarred by hiring the wrong person, is like

Julia DeBari: fear. Like they're afraid hiring the wrong person. And just to your point like, person has a great portfolio, but did they really do the work? How can I test for that? It's not like programming, where you write test cases or something like that, or your code works or it doesn't work.

Max Armbruster: You…you I was gonna ask you design challenges and tests. I'm sure people have come up with those hundred different ways by

Max Armbruster: now.

Max Armbruster: There's no one exercise that you…you think works for you or for hiring somebody, let's say you know one or two years out of school?

Julia DeBari: Yeah, I actually really like…It's totally free online. It's been up for years, like you can totally just go use it. Google's

Julia DeBari: Innovation lab, so it's called. It's the guy who wrote that book Sprint Jake Nap whatever. I don't remember. It’s called Google GV Labs. Google Venture Labs. That's what it is.

Julia DeBari: He put a great design challenge of online. You can download it. Use it. I think it's almost perfect, like it…you know, those what you needed to do.

Max Armbruster: The design’s print is a five day process for answering critical business questions through design prototyping and testing ideas with customers.

Julia DeBari: Yep.

Max Armbruster: That one? Okay.

Max Armbruster: All right, something to check out. So that's…that's something you…we you… you can dictate the outcome a little bit? Or it's…it's an open challenge?

Julia DeBari: It’s an open challenge. Yeah. And it's just the challenges online like you don't need to buy the book or anything.

Max Armbruster: And it's time…it looks like it's time bound.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Armbruster: Because the other thing with portfolios is maybe you have a beautiful piece of work, but it took you three years to do that one thing.

Julia DeBari: Yeah, very good point.

Julia DeBari: Yeah.

Max Armbruster: Okay, and

Max Armbruster: what…what other…any other advice on how to find…you know, how to give young designers a chance,

Max Armbruster: and how to avoid mistakes on hiring UX designers?

Julia DeBari: Um. Well, I could go on and on about gibbering junior UX a chance, but I guess just more on the hiring, a little bit like really looking into like diversity and inclusion.

Julia DeBari: There are lots of great places like don't just use LinkedIn or Indeed to find candidates,

Julia DeBari: especially like junior candidates. They might not you know fully be aware of these platforms, or at least LinkedIn.

Julia DeBari: So you can go to like Behance or Dribble, which are like sort of portfolio websites. And you know there's also…I don't know if clubs is the right word, but there's like blacks who design, and let team knows who design, and

Julia DeBari: whole bunch of like specific groups around that kind of thing that are a good place to find people.

Julia DeBari: So, I definitely recommend reaching out to those groups. And then one thing I do and it's worked for me, both as a candidate and a hiring manager, is using things like Slack groups or design communities.

Julia DeBari: Instead of just using like a job board to like go find people and just reach out to them on these like Slack communities, or whatever you know Discord, TikTok. There's design communities and reaching out to people.

Max Armbruster: And it sounds like at the

Max Armbruster: at the junior end of the…the talent pool, then there’s this too much talents, though there's…there's an oversupply. And what's…what's the other side of that equation? What are the…what are the…the type of profiles that are in such high demand that nobody can find them?

Julia DeBari: Yeah. So it's usually seniorly like UX designer.

Julia DeBari: And I have tons of friends with those titles, and yeah they're…

Max Armbruster: They don’t have to sweat for work.

Julia DeBari: No, they really do not. They can pretty much just walk up and get almost whatever they want.

Max Armbruster: It's still a good career choice for people who want to move into it. It’s a good career prospect.

Julia DeBari: Yeah yeah definitely and

Julia DeBari: One thing I would say…Oh sorry.

Max Armbruster: No, no, go ahead.

Julia DeBari: I would say to companies, it is a hiring frenzy out there, and

Julia DeBari: being a recruiter with like some jobs are like: Yeah we want to hire right away. And yet you still take like weeks to like give feedback or schedule interviews, where I have other candidates like

Julia DeBari: the client went through in just a couple days, and they got an offer at the end of the week. So you really, really need to move fast right now. Like you can't take weeks or months to decide on a candidate.

Max Armbruster: That…that is music to my ear, I think.

Max Armbruster: For most jobs, it should be like that actually. But but we…we all fall asleep at the wheel sometimes, unfortunately.

Max Armbruster: And what's the…

Max Armbruster: You…you're now in…in recruitment and interviewing designers. Do you think that having…having been a UX designer, a lead designer for a long time decades, you said that…

Max Armbruster: Do you think that that gives you an edge as a recruiter? And you know the follow on question to that is…if somebody does is a recruiter for…for designers,

Max Armbruster: you know, should they…what kind of…what kind of education do they need to access in order to speak the right language? I mean I don't know if it's given you an edge or not, or if you feel like you're more catching up to the recruiters

Max Armbruster: on how recruitment is done. I've seen a lot of people come into recruitment and kind of get the hang of it quickly, and use their…their past experience as…as a way to build trust with candidates.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. No, I think it's definitely helped me build trust and like quick rapport really quickly like I was screening someone earlier,

Julia DeBari: and they're like: Oh, you're a fellow like part of the creative community. And they're like really happy to talk to me. And so it's definitely actually been a positive thing. And to your point, I feel like picking up the general process of recruiting was very quick.

Julia DeBari: There's some little nuances that I think just might be like company specific that I'm still trying to understand.

Julia DeBari: Yeah, but I think that’s good.

Max Armbruster: I'm taking a fresh look at things. I mean the recruitment process is changing very fast. It's different now than it was two years ago,

Max Armbruster: pre-pandemic. And so people are still catching up all the time. So I think

Max Armbruster: they are bringing in external…you know people external from talent acquisition is…is generally positive. I've seen a lot of companies succeed well bringing somebody from outside.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. I agree.

Max Armbruster: And hopefully you'll stick around in talent acquisition, and help a lot of people, and make a lot of money,

Max Armbruster: or whatever…whatever you're in it for.

Julia DeBari: Thank you.

Max Armbruster: It was a pleasure to meet you, Julia, and to…to get it a little bit into this…this unique world of hiring UX designers. How can people get a hold of you? And…and yeah, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Julia DeBari: Definitely LinkedIn.

Julia DeBari: I just saw LinkedIn is called a social media network, which

Julia DeBari: I was unaware of.

Julia DeBari: But I'm stuck to LinkedIn the way other people are to like instagram or Twitter or…

Max Armbruster: I was…

Max Armbruster: I wanted to ask you actually. Are most UX designers, do they have a preferred social media?

Julia DeBari: Um, actually Twitter seems to be more popular.

Max Armbruster: Oh, that's…

Max Armbruster: that's ironic. It's a text based social media

Max Armbruster: that wins the people doing design.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. There…there are people on…I mean there's definitely a good group of people on LinkedIn, but

Julia DeBari: I find a lot of people on Twitter too.

Max Armbruster: Okay.

Max Armbruster: Good. And there, I asked instagram, TikTok.

Julia DeBari: Um. Not this…Well,

Julia DeBari: I haven't seen on TikTok, or not TikTok, Instagram very many like people searching for jobs.

Julia DeBari: And like I thought like: Oh that'd be a good way to like

Julia DeBari: maybe also branch out your portfolio to like show pieces and stuff like, you know, on your bio or something. But I haven't really seen it that much which actually surprised me.

Julia DeBari: And then I have seen some people do some interesting things on TikTok but definitely the more junior people you know.

Max Armbruster: 18 to 25 year old.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Armbruster: Yeah.

Max Armbruster: All right, excellent! Thanks, Julia.

Max Armbruster: And…

Julia DeBari: Thank you, Max.

Max Armbruster: All the best with your career and recruitment.

Julia DeBari: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Have a great day.

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Max: Hello, welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. And I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, I'm delighted to welcome to the show, Fahad Subzwari, who is Director of Shared Services for ibex. in Pakistan. If you don't know ibex., you're not in the BPO industry, because it's a global player with operations, and I think in Africa and Europe, in Latin America, in the Philippines, and Pakistan, all over the world, and they've got thousands of people, and they hire about 8000 people a year in Pakistan. And the reason Fahad is on today's show is because he was recently awarded an award at the Global BPO TA Awards for the Most Inspiring TA Leader. It was the popular vote on LinkedIn, with hundreds of people voting from all over the world and some fierce competition pegging Fahad against, I think, some people, some stiff competition coming from the Philippines. But yeah, I guess Pakistan can be proud, they pushed you over the edge and got you the award. And well, good to meet you again, Fahad. Welcome to the podcast.

Fahad: Thank you, Max, thank you for the introduction. It was a great event, by the way, I enjoyed a lot. And yeah, hopefully not blushing right now.

Max: Oh, wow. That was a few weeks ago already. So, I'm sure the blush has gone by now. But it was great to see. My marketing team, you know, this could be a tip that could be applied for recruiters, my marketing team talked to me about doing a competition on LinkedIn. And I thought, oh, it's gonna make too much noise. I don't want all this attention. And then we saw in a matter of two weeks, the number of followers on our LinkedIn page, which is really hard to get, it went up by 50% in like two weeks, considering we’re a 7-year-old or 8-year-old company is quite a rise. So, yeah, basically, marketing was right and I was wrong on this one.

Fahad: That was a great idea. Brilliant idea. What I've noticed is that these kinds of events now even on digital medium, you have now ATL and BTL activities at the market here. So, this is kind of a big deal activity you do and it does pay off and it's great. Whoever came up with the idea, kudos.

Max: Yeah, and then it got to the award, too. So, double bonus and an opportunity to talk a little bit about ibex. And before we go there, perhaps tell us how did you end up in the beautiful world of talent acquisition?

Fahad: Okay, so I've been associated with the BPO industry for almost 20 years now, 19 plus. I started with the operations side of it. And before that, I was in hospitality industry. So, in about nine years ago, I was given an opportunity to run the Shared Services, which started with different control functions, then the recruitment and training was also added to it. So, it was a turning point in 2014. And that's when we decided that with the global BPO focus increasing towards Pakistan, we need to have changes in our different support functions. One of them was recruitment and marketing side of it. So, we started from there. And it's been an innovative year, year after year. The changes are definitely, I mean, division was right, for [unintelligible] a year that changes are happening very fast. And we actually still are learning and, you know, change is a constant factor every year for us. So, that's how I got into TA.

Max: How big was recruiting volume in 2014 when you got started in Pakistan?

Fahad: So, if I just speak about international, it was probably around a couple of hundred people in a quarter, you know. Now we're taking about 4000 a year in just international demand. 8000 overall in BK, you know, so it's a big chunk.

Max: You kind of came into recruitments not the traditional way. You came from operations and kind of running a good shop and making sure you have a high productivity organization. And you didn't have to sit through thousands of job interviews, recruiting and interviewing candidates. You were able to skip that step and kind of go straight into the orchestrator role.

Fahad: Yeah, well, so I did have some experience on this in terms of when has been decided to always involved in the recruitment process. So, the interview and mechanics of interview and the profiling aspect was already there as a requirement aspect, right. But yes, from the TO workshop itself, it was not there, right. So, the business experience did help me, the operational experience still help me run an efficient workshop, develop the processes. I'm a process guy. So, it helped me build the processes that were missing. The framework, required overhaul, the past experience helped me build that. So, it is not a typical [unintelligible] that's for sure. I mean, that's the disconnect that, I guess, comes when we look at the BPO industry recruitment process, and the ATSes available in the market, right. And that's where I think the normal recruitment process doesn't hang up the BPO industry recruitment process, in my opinion, just because of the sheer volume that is there.

Max: I agree. And I think, for having met a number of professionals who came to talent acquisition, for the BPO industry in a high-volume world that did not come from HR, I have found that they can be very effective. And because they're not tied to certain practices, and they don't have preconceived notion on how the information will flow. I know that ibex is one of those companies and there's, actually you're in the minority, but one of the few big companies that have decided to build their own ATS, applicant tracking software, as opposed to purchasing a solution from one of the big vendors like Workday, or SuccessFactors or iCIMS. That's a decision that as a technologist myself, I've often challenged and said, No, that's, that's crazy. Why don't you use what the leaders have already built? I'm sure that that's been a consideration for you guys. So, I really like to dig into that topic a little bit. Because I think we're gonna find some common ground on why the ATS is not great for what you're doing, and why you felt the need to build something in house.

Fahad: Okay, so two major reasons. One, was the disconnect that I feel is there in terms of support for the industry, I'll explain that aspect more in detail. The other is obviously the cost factor. And that was there. We had the leverage of having in house development team and utilizing them. So, it was an initially into [unintelligible], it was a no brainer that we should build our own. The main aspect that I spoke to you about earlier, the disconnect, was that the solutions that were available, they were only evaluating one aspect of the whole framework, right, which was the when the candidate is either assessed at any of the point of the process, right?

Max: And that’s the stage of the process where they're already at the assessment stage.

Fahad: Exactly, right. There's a communication aspect of it too. Whether people are talking to them, or engaging them or, you know, monitoring the… in the digital age, it's more on the social media now than anywhere else. Right. So, that communication aspect and it's monitoring is missing in most of the ATS and, for me, it is hand in hand, you can escape a lot of processes of physical on all the assessments by having more of a communication side improved or integrated, whether it's, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom, Skype, chat bots, etc. But all this combined can meet to show the flow of the candidate, right, the lifecycle of the candidate, whether it starts from the inquiry and converts into an employee, that whole journey needs to be monitored and mapped. And I think there's a break, that happens, right, so even right now, the top of the line ATS have the assessment, but the communication is happening separately on the Zoom, or somewhere. So, from the efficiency perspective, being an operation guy, yeah, I think that that is a critical factor, because I need to make sure that there's efficiency in the processing too, right. So, that because that all, just like in customer service, is linked to the experience, candidate experience, customer experience, right? It's like sales, you have to take our guy and convert it into a sale.

Max: In ibex., you obviously know a lot about customer care. And you said you're coming from operations. So, it's the same kind of approach of managing the customer through its entire lifecycle. And you said you had some technology resources in house. So, were you able to pull some of the technology practices and know-how that applies to Customer Care, and reapply it to talent acquisition? I imagine that you said also that ibex. had some internal resources to build its own tech. So, did you use the same kind of software technology and methodology and best practices from Customer Care, building CRMs to handle Customer Care, and reapplied to recruitments? Is that how this project came about?

Fahad: In a nutshell, yes, that's correct. So, the main idea was to move from all manual work, or ad hoc automated system to a system that could track all the customer journey, right. And I call them customer [unintelligible], we need to make them our customers, internal customers. So, that's what the idea came from, we will know where they're coming from, which channels they're coming from, what they were talking about, what was said during each phase of the interview, how to do them the assessment, etc. All that has to be recorded, right, including the conversation that happens with our talent acquisition people. So, just like a call center, right?

Max: I think it's right. It's a very obvious observation. I mean, it seems obvious once you make the observation. Maybe it's not obvious to people who are buying ATSes today, but how come it doesn't record the phone call? How come it doesn't know when I'm on Zoom with somebody? How come I don't get a transcript for every one of those calls? Yeah, I suppose those companies are going to build it if they listened to us, and I'm sure they thought about it themselves. But yeah, it is surprising that they're not built as communication platforms. That's one shortcoming of the ATS.

Fahad: Agreed. And I think everything links to that, because your candidate experience is prime, right? And with the technology age, you need to make it easier for them to be accessible to you. Whether you're on or not, right, and that's how it should be. We're not there yet. I'm not saying as an organization, we're there yet. That is something we're working on. And it's a long journey, a constant evolving journey. You have to stay ahead of the technology and that's a tough task.

Max: So, as you adapt to new behaviors from candidates, what were some surprising trends that you notice in 2021? Is the candidate in 2021 a little bit different than 2020 or 2019? Are you seeing that their behavior is changing, conversion rates are changing, some channels are picking up, any new trends you can point us to?

Fahad: Yeah, well, I wouldn't say from 2020, but from 2019, definitely. The COVID era has given everyone a new horizon, where they're open to working from remote locations, they were open to having better internet, they're open to, you know, this becomes more of a necessity than a luxury, especially for developing countries, right? So, people are now not apprehensive of saying, Oh, they're not calling me an interview, and they want me on, you know, remotely on the Zoom, etc. It’s more preferred now. And over the last one or two years, they have now more focused towards WhatsApp, and other communication channels that are instant, right, they want instant gratification, they want instant update of what's happened to their applications. When they can come in, when they can have interview. So, that's a change that has come up during the last two years.

Max: In fact, when I hear some BPO companies who say they've got a recruitment process that, you know, takes like, a month or six weeks, how can you can be competitive with these kinds of timelines?

Fahad: Even beyond one day is someone you might lose. I mean, our process is not very efficient in that matter itself right now, that is something a work in progress, right? We want to make sure that candidate experience, the wait time is less, the interview time is less, the number of steps are less. So, that's what we're working on. That's our 2022 goal.

Max: So, the joy of hiring 8000 people a year is a feeling of a job well done. The recognition of your peer is the feeling of a job well done. And your team apparently voted you as a somebody they like working with. Talking to Fahad the manager and the people manager, what are some of the philosophies or best practices that you abide to as a manager that helps you to manage a team of talent acquisition professionals, and keep them on their toes, engaged, excited? Can you point us to, you know, some of your philosophy on this topic? And maybe if you need to refer back to references, there's some books or, you know, literature that has guided your management philosophy?

Fahad: Yeah, well, more than books, I think it's something you have to, one thing for sure, that you have to understand your own self, you have to understand what's your own shortcomings, right, first and foremost, before you can help anyone else, right. So, that's a constant activity, it never stops, regardless of the age. People say you cannot learn people's management. I say you can. It's up to you as long as you can decide to it that you want to, right. So, obviously, I don't remember the book that I read a long time ago. There are three types of you know, management style, there was autocratic, there was democratic, and there was networking type. So, I always want it to be a blend of situational one, right? It all depends what the situation is. And it's stressful, you have to back off, let them be a bit approachable at any time. And during the technology era that has helped a lot. Being available remotely, anywhere at any time of the day is the key. My phone is always available to them at any time, and to anyone, it's not just my team, you know. Since I worked in operations, people have my alumni that has gone out and develop themselves in different organizations, I’m approachable to them too. So, I think being approachable at any time is the key factor. And for that it's not just communication part, it's your reaction to the situations too, right, how you react? So is your response time. I'm sure seven habit is, I once have gone through that. So, one of the key factors, the response aspect. And the third is the how you come up. Because in a stressful situation with 8100 people, you know, odd hiring, there's multiple conflicts that come up, right. And talent acquisition is kind of a role that always has the gray area, and a lot of arguments happen. And it's the nature of the game, right?

Max: And it is, it's time sensitive. So, it's gonna create, yeah, some territorial disputes.

Fahad: Yeah, and a lot of stress, right. And that's where I say anyone who has done BPO industry hiring can fit into any of the organizations, talent acquisition, because the sheer volume makes you ready within a quarter for any kind of height, right. And that's where you have to have the conflict, you need to be able to provide that third solution, the [unintelligible] cannot just be on, you need to be neutral. And think about the business, think about how it, you know, impacts the overall ecosystem, right? Not just individual or one side, the solution needs to be a blended one. So, it's a tough thing and I'm not always right. But that's where the first part of it comes in, where you realize that what you did wrong, and not to repeat it, right?

Max: That's a good toolkit. I actually wasn't familiar with it. But as you were speaking, I was Googling it. Maybe this is what you're referring to. Kurt Levin, the father of social psychology, with three types of leaders, laissez faire, authoritarian and democratic. And Laissez Faire is like, yeah, let the situation resolve itself, authoritarian, and democratic is more you get everybody's consensus. So, when faced with a management decision, decide which hat you're going to wear and have…

Fahad: It’s a situational one, yeah, you cannot be on one. You cannot just be one side; it has to be situational. The people have changed them. Generations have changed, you have to adapt.

Max: Alright, great. And one thing that our audience can learn from is hiring mistakes. It's a question I ask everybody who comes to the podcast, is to think back on a particular individual hire that was a mistake, and where did it go wrong and what can we learn from it so that we don't make that mistake again?

Fahad: Now, regardless of your experience, you will make that mistake, let us be honest with that, right?

Max: Forget about it, you're screwed. Whatever happens, you’re gonna make that mistake.

Fahad: You cannot judge what the person is going to do in the next one year or two year in a half an hour interview. And there's no assessment, regardless. You can find someone with a high EQ or IQ, they will still mess up on the real time, right? So, the idea is that whoever you hire are for the attitude, the energy they bring in, during that half an hour, right? And then you can, I mean, it's not rocket science, regardless of the job other than very technical ones, you have time to groom them, you need to give that time, right, you need to be ready to groom and develop them. You need to give your 100% before you decide, okay, now this was a bad decision. You cannot decide in that half an hour, you cannot decide three months after that, that's why the probation period is there, right? I think that's the right thing. Even after that, if you feel that you haven't given enough from your end to develop that resource, then you're equally at fault, not just in the decision, but also getting them ready for the floor. So, just own that decision and obviously, you'll have some biases when you go into the next hiring. But again, the key is that your objective and your approach and keep the basic that you're hiring this guy to develop a person, to develop into your backup for that matter or your, you know, main cheer or main resources, someone who can be in a future leadership role, right? And that doesn't happen…

Max: That’s very Zen, very Zen philosophy, Fahad. Whatever happens, you're going to make some mistakes, accept it’s coming in, coming into the hiring profession, and do whatever you can to make their experience as positive as possible to give them something good to remember you by.

Fahad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Max: Well, I can see why you're so popular online.

Fahad: Appreciate that. Thank you.

Max: It was great catching up and thanks for sharing some of your tips and thoughts. I think you've got a great website coming up, and so if you want, if our listeners want to go and check out the work of ibex. and on the career website and the candidate experience, where do they go and apply?

Fahad: Okay, it says talentibex.com and it's a new launch. We are also going for an app development right now. So, they will have multiple channels available for them. You can also search us on our Facebook page, and we are there for you. Come join us.

Max: There you go. And don't copy the website or if you do, send a thank you note to Fahad and his team. Alright, thanks again.

Max: That was Fahad Subzwari head of shared services at IBEX, Pakistan, and winner of the 2021 BPO talent acquisition awards for most inspiring TA. And you can see how he is thoughtful about everything he does from the way he interacts with people on a daily basis, whether he wants to be less airfare or more authoritarian or more democratic and thoughtful about the systems that he used and the eventually choosing for IBEX Pakistan to build their own ATS hope that was good food for thoughts.

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Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, delighted to introduce to you, who don't know, Mr. Alex Murphy, CEO and Founder of JobSync. JobSync is a technology partner that can help to speed up the application process and improve the candidate experience, notably with marketplaces and job boards, and its very cool technology, which is trying to connect two worlds, marketplaces and ATSes. I'll let Alex explain it a lot better than me. But we'll talk about job board and about Facebook and how the sourcing world is changing. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex: Max, thanks for having me. Much appreciated.

Max: So, did I represent what JobSync does decently or you want to take another stab at it?

Alex: No, I think you did. I mean, we are, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to help companies, specifically employers, create more efficient recruiting processes, right. So, it sounds fairly generic, most of us are trying to do that. The way we go about trying to do that is we are connecting the various systems that they use in the recruitment and talent acquisition process. So, as you said, between job boards and applicant tracking systems, this means enabling the candidates to apply while they're on the job site. So, whether that's on Indeed, and Indeed Apply, ZipRecruiter, Zip Apply, or anywhere where they may be, to use the applications natively on those job board platforms or job board marketplaces, and to not have to leave, but for the employer to still get all the questions that they need to have answered in that application, and then delivered directly into the applicant tracking system, just within a few seconds. And then the recruiter can start the recruitment process immediately, as opposed to waiting for some period of time or recognizing and seeing a huge fall off. So, the end of the day, we're helping companies get more out of the recruitment advertising spend than they were previously.

Max: And to put a visual on it, I mean, I'm thinking back to the days when I was a jobseeker, I was unemployed, a long time ago, and I would go to job boards like Monster, and I would have applied to 10, 20 jobs a day because, you know, I needed a job. And in that context, I would, of course, be more likely to complete an application if I didn't have to bounce around from website to website. And so, I think job boards have now recognized that and this is what you're describing with the Indeed Apply, Zip Apply, and others. That's the candidate experience improvement in a nutshell, right?

Alex: Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's a lot of talk about candidate experience, there's actually an award, right, the Candidate Experience Awards, the candies. And what that's really gets that side of the world kind of gets hyper focused on is what is the experience like after I apply? And unfortunately, for a long period of time, there hasn't been enough focus on the applicant experience. Right? What is the experience before I apply? Or will I even apply? An interesting kind of side note, a recruiting benefit that we have is we talk about in our job ads for when we're recruiting new people that come work with us, we talk about fixing this application experience. And we're speaking to the people that are literally going through this really bad application experience, at which point, they get really excited about being part of the solution to this problem, because pretty much every job seeker has had this experience where they are on a job site, they leave the job site to go to apply to a job. They're viewing the job for a second time because they already viewed it on the job site. They view it on the company's career site. They're then redirected to the applicant tracking system, they probably been presented with two different places where they had to sign up for some newsletter, join a talent community, they finally get to the applicant tracking system. They click Apply for the third time. And now they're presented with a login form. And they're kind of like, what is this? A login form? I haven't created an account. And that's an immediate path for that candidate to leave and go to TikTok and start watching videos, right? Like nobody wants to go through that experience at all. And so, when we communicate to prospective candidates ourselves about fixing that, it resonates pretty highly because everybody is having that same really terrible experience as an applicant.

Max: Talent acquisition is always running behind on a smooth experience, but yeah. Of course, in 2022, where everything goes so fast, and you can get everything done and delivered to your home in just a couple of clicks, you would want that application to be just the same, if not better. And well, before we talk about the market, Alex, how did you end up creating JobSync to begin with? It’s an insider's trick to activate JobSync in a booming marketplace, kind of working at the frontier of different tech giants. So, you need to be an insider to do what you're doing. So, I gotta ask you how you ended up in that area.

Alex: So, I have a co-founder, John Bell, he was the founder and CEO of a company called Boxwood Technology that he sold in 2014. Boxwood, was a job board software platform primarily for associations, they had over a thousand associations and he had started that back in the 90s. And I actually credit John, I think, with the real observation about what happened between I'll say 2002 and 2012, which was the experience for applying to jobs changed fundamentally. In 2002, virtually all applications online took place on job boards, and the application was delivered by email to a recruiter, and in the early 2000s, and then kind of really taking hold by about 2006 and 2007 in the US market, in particular, with respect to the EEOC questions, companies started to require the application process to take place on their ATS. And what John observed was this massive decline in conversion rates, and what used to be 40% conversion rates or better, meaning, if 100 people viewed my job posting 40 People would apply, had tanked to sub 10%. And in a lot of cases, with really arduous applicant tracking systems, that conversion rate might be 1%. So, one out of 100 people would apply. And so, he observed that. In parallel, I had been job.com as a co-founder there in the early 2000s, was at Beyond for eight years, as part of the traffic and business development teams, was observing the same thing happening as from the operator side, that the product that we're selling is deteriorating, right, like we are not able to generate the applicants that we once were. So, fast forward, and I left Beyond John started a company, and we brought a bunch of different ideas together in 2019 around creating this integration platform that was focused on connecting the job boards and applicant tracking systems to make it so that we could emulate the application on the job board that was taking place on the ATS, so as to improve conversion rates, and on Indeed, their data shows that you get a 4X increase, meaning 400% improvement in applications. That's like a 400% improvement in your recruitment when you return on ad spend. That has massive implications in terms of not just your ROI, which is great, but really, at the end of the day, the thing that you're really getting more of is you're getting access to candidates that would otherwise drop out, which typically are going to be the most sought-after candidates. And so not only…

Max: Candidates like me, 20 years ago, they need a job. So, they're going to apply to a number of positions, right? I mean, those are not bad candidates, they're hungry candidates.

Alex: They are in what I would say though, is that, you know, there's a lot of things that are odd in the world, right, and you could say that they're bad, right. So, like, people that have been out of work and kind of, you know, you can call it like a gap shaming or what have you. What I will say is this, though, is that if you are looking for somebody in a position that requires some level of experience and expertise, then those candidates, those people are the ones that are generally the most difficult to get at, most difficult to find, and the most difficult to actually get to follow through, right? Like, they're not as motivated to go apply right now. Right? Like, the thing that pushes them over the edge is they had a bad interaction with their boss. I like to say, like, the moment when somebody is most likely to apply is when they walk out the door of their boss, and the boss just gave them a lot of grief, right? [overlap]

Max: …around, indeed, and they'd be like, screw this place. And they'll go look for a couple of options. But they don't feel like spending 20 minutes going through application forms, creating a username, profile, password, all that.

Alex: That's exactly right. I call it the subway application, you need to be able to complete the application in the time that it takes for the train to come into the station, Wi-Fi turns on, I get a job, I see it, click Apply, and before the train leaves the station, I need to be able to finish it. Right? So, that means that…

Max: I thought we're talking about Subway sandwiches, but that takes about the same amount of time, I guess.

Alex: Yeah, no doubt. I imagine they probably does, so.

Max: Okay. I love that native applied concept, and I've been promoting it to my customers for years on social media saying, if, in your case, we're talking about a disgruntled employee who is spending a little bit of time on Indeed, exploring what could be. That’s not a very captive audience. But even less captive audience would be somebody who's just browsing TikTok or browsing Facebook, they see an ad, they click on it. I mean, those guys, they certainly don't have, you know, they don't have the mindset, they're not in the right frame of mind to start applying for a job for 25 minutes, because they were just kind of like having fun, killing time. So, it makes sense to keep the experience as native as possible for those even more. And so, as a historian of the space, Alex, you're saying that the space kind of moved in the late 90s, right, and 2008 or so when everybody moved everything to the ATS and completion rates dropped considerably, are you saying that we're shifting back now, that the share of applications that are completed without the ATS is increasing?

Alex: It is. So, you know, I think that what's happening is you're seeing, like, course corrections, so to speak, right? And there's a little bit of maybe call it something like the Goldilocks zone, right? So, we write about this where, you know, there's this concept of a quick apply, which might be like the name, email and CV of a person. And when a recruiter calls that person, if they can even call them, because often it doesn't have a phone number. So, they email them and they say, Hey, would you like to set up an interview? They get nothing, right? Or maybe they get an interview scheduled, but the person doesn't show up, right? So why is ghosting up? Why? I don't understand why did ghosting go up? Well, the person doesn't even know what they apply to. Because they had to just check a box, they may have checked 20 boxes and hit submit. Right? So, is there enough interest? I like to think back. Like, let's not just go back to 2002, let's go back to 1986. The level of effort to apply to a job: you open the newspaper, you had to find the fax number, you had to send that, you had to write out your cover letter, and you had to make that resume perfect and you had to print it and then you had to get to a fax machine, as most people didn't have fax machines. You had to sneak into the office and get it through the fax machine before somebody else saw you putting a fax through to somebody else, right? Like the level of effort was really, really high. And that meant that when you got a phone call, you reply. And today you can send out 4000 applications with a click of a button, remarkably different. On the other end of the spectrum in 2008, the recruiter said, Okay, now we have the power. And what that meant to them was I'm just going to ask you every question that I would ever need to ask and force you to spend 35 minutes going through this application. And people have just gotten fed up with it, right? They're not willing to go through it. The answer is that there's something proper in between. Five questions, seven questions, on a drop-down, simple screening questions actually can decipher, is this something that you should be interested in? We want to talk to people to come work for us that are interested in being part of a startup, being part of building a company, which means that there isn't a lot of structure yet defined, because we are defining it as we go along, right, that proverbial build the airplane in flight. So, if somebody wants lots of structure, and we can discern that in a screening question, then we can we can help save everybody time and pain and anguish, right? And every company in every job has a set of screening questions that should be asked to ascertain is this a good position for you or not? And that type of experience, I think, will go a long, long way to helping everybody get at what it is ultimately that they want, which is to have, you know, really worthwhile conversations for both candidate and recruiter.

Max: It's crazy sometimes that it feels like the different partners in the space are fighting for eyeballs and for the time of the candidates, you know, and like job boards, or protecting their candidates from spending time in other platforms, and vice versa, when it's to no one's advantage to hold the candidate up. We just kind of want to get through those applications as fast as possible and give people quick answers. And I think what you're doing is going to help a lot of time save, a lot of savings for the candidates when they needed most, which is when they're looking for a job. We spoke a little bit before recording about the recent announcement of Facebook jobs and your read on this situation. For our listeners who don't know, Facebook Jobs has invested for the last few years in a marketplace where millions of people have logged in and applied for jobs all over the world. And I know they generated a lot of traffic for us in different parts of the world, from Brazil to the Philippines and to the US. But that marketplaces are getting shut down, unfortunately, for all that free traffic that it was generating. But perhaps there's a silver lining with that announcement. Alex, you were saying that this initiatives maybe solidified Facebook as a great place to source?

Alex: Yeah, well, I mean, I think so. First and foremost, I'll just say for the record, I think it's unfortunate that they've made the decision that they made. They introduced the Facebook jobs marketplace as a response to what their users were doing, which was they were searching for jobs in the search bar within Facebook. And they were having a really bad experience. And so, the idea that the jobs marketplace would go away means, you know, without seeing what it's going to look like on the other side, I would imagine that it's going to go back to being a bad experience. So, that's too bad. The silver lining sort to speak, as you put it, in my opinion, is there now are hundreds of thousands of companies out there that recognize that Facebook has people that go look for work, and that should be a no brainer to most people, right? Like recruitment advertising should go wherever the people are, right? We are trying to reach people where people are. And people are on Facebook, they're on Tik Tok, they're on Snapchat, they're on Reddit, they're on YouTube, just like they're on job boards as well. But they're on these social platforms at a much greater investment of time, if you will, than they are on the others. The question is, can you do something to pull them in to engage with your recruitment ad, right, and this is where you were talking earlier about having that kind of more native experience. The person has to leave Facebook, right, and a tremendous amount of the activity on Facebook is happening on the mobile app, right? If they're supposed to leave Facebook in order to engage with your brand and to become, I'll say, a lead or an applicant, then the likelihood that they do so is really, really low. And so perhaps there are companies that recognize, okay, I should take my brand and go to where the candidate is, and then engage with them where they are, rather than trying to force them to come back to me. And if they do that, then there's a lot winning strategies. And you guys are one of the leaders, if not the leader, in recruitment at reaching people through Facebook ads, and really activating that audience and getting them to turn into applicants and employees, right, because at the end of the day, 9 out of 10, people are active on Facebook in some way, shape or form, Simply as a matter of reaching them with the right message at the right time in the right place, which is often that timing thing for…

Max: I love about the Facebook job was the fact that the timing was there, right, because somebody will not go into the marketplace, if they're not looking for a job. And advertisers on Facebook don't have the option of targeting specifically job seekers, like, there's no tag for that. And I was, you know, I think advertisers would really benefit from getting that data points. But it's a sensitive data that I suppose Facebook couldn't extract or couldn't share with its advertisers. But it's still, you know, the most rich advertising platform of all in terms of targeting. I mean, you can target any job title in any location, and all kinds of other psychographics that can correlate well with your talent pool. But, when people hire there, they say, Well, I’m only hiring one or 2% of, you know, the clicks, the leads that I generate. So, it's really a bad quality, I can't, I can't manage, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it, right? If it's 1%, but the cost is, you know, is 1% of what a cost for a lead is in Indeed, then that's fine, as long as you've automated the front of the funnel. I think the cost per lead needs to be broken down into what a lead means. And I suppose what you do is you're going to take those job board leads, and then they maybe have two or three different stages of how qualified they are. Right?

Alex: Yeah, so I think, you know, just for one other thing that's really important in there is, you're reaching people that you otherwise wouldn't reach. Right? I mean, if you're, you know, think about like somebody like a nurse, right? How many nurses are there on Indeed, right now, eight, like, worldwide, like, it's not, there aren't a lot, nurses don't really need to work very hard to go get a new job. Most of them are leaving their jobs. And you know, that's like its own tragedy all on its own at the moment. But I can tell you that a lot of them are on Facebook, looking at what people say, thinking a lot of different things about what that conversation looks like. And if you have an ad talking about, you know, we pay you full time, but you work 30 hours, I'm making something up. Right? We have mental health facilities, we limit you to six-hour shifts, we have, you know, half an hour breaks every two hours or whatever, like, I'm just totally making stuff up.

Max: We have a cocktail room in the back.

Alex: Exactly, right, exactly. We do shots at the start of the shift. You know, whatever your benefits are. Those things are speaking to that person where they are when they're just trying to kind of unwind. And that's a way to pull them in, invite them in, to engage in a dialogue. And if you try to get them to go answer 42 questions on your, your 25-minute application, that's going to fail, right. But if you say, you know, we'd love to just chat for 10 minutes, when you've got time, if you're interested in looking for a new opportunity, that's the kind of thing that pulls that, you know, pulls up on that thread, if you will, and gets them to come engage. And all of a sudden, they start to engage, now you're in a dialogue, that's a discussion, that's how you convert. And that's the kind of thing I think that the presence of Facebook jobs for the last five years, for better or worse, and it leaving, at least hopefully, some people saw that Facebook brings value. I always love this story, our first customer, their first hire was a data scientist off of Facebook. Right? It's like, you'll say who's on Facebook. I'm like everybody, every person type, every personality type, every job type everywhere in the world, there is representation on Facebook. It doesn't mean every person's on Facebook, but every type of person, every type of role can be filled with the right ad presented the right person right time on there. And that's true across all social platforms.

Max: Tw billion monthly active users, two billion plus. So, if you can't find your candidate there, then might as well forget about it.

Alex: Right? Well, in all likelihood, the candidate probably doesn't exist, right? Like you have to go train and hire right? And so always love those stories, right, where it's like looking for somebody that has more experience than the technology has been around, right? We had a joke about iOS developer job in 2012, that the minimum requirements were 10 years’ experience of iOS development. iOS have been around for five and a half years. So, it's like, that's probably not a realistic expectation.

Max: Open your talent pools to people with less experience and more desire. And you'll see small miracles happen.

Alex: That's right.

Max: I'd like to ask Alex to drive some of the listeners to check out JobSync. What are the quantifiable problems that you are solving for them? I believe it's the conversion rate from job board to application? That'd be one of the, if you have a low conversion rates, and single digit, like you were saying, that that would be one area where they should reach out to you. Are there other, yeah, does that describe it well and how do they get ahold of you?

Alex: Yeah, so first off, if you go to jobsync.io, you know, come and see us, I'm active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is amurphy59. I think, you know, at the end of the day, the thing that we're solving for is when your recruiting team is doing a lot of manual effort, or conducting a lot of manual effort in order to run your recruitment programs. And that's not just limited by the way to job boards and ATSes, right, it could be with any of the other systems up and down inside the stack. So, we connect to your text messaging platform or your career events platform or your assessment platform, and automate the messaging in between, so that your recruit recruitment teams are not having to manually do that work. I'd say that the number one metric that we kind of think about the most is really around reducing time to hire. So, you know, the consistent metric across all of our customers, when they start with us, they're really struggling to get applicants into their job postings at enough scale to take that job posting to an extended offer and into an actual start. And by putting our program in place, you get a lot more efficiency across the spectrum, you get more efficiency out of your ads, and your recruitment team, you get exposure to better candidates. And those three things combined means that you're going to reach you know, a slate of candidates or your kind of final five that you might want to take to final interview and offer much more quickly than you would otherwise.

Max: I think that that will connect with a lot of people. Non-job-related question, but one that I asked everyone on the show is a personal hiring mistake that you have made, so that our listeners can draw from that experience and avoid making the same mistake. Can you think back to somebody you hired and it didn't work out and you messed up somehow and you're able to kind of, you know, mea culpa on your mistakes, so that we don't commit the same one again? Your eyes are glazing over, you're seeing ghosts.

Alex: I am actually, it's like a roomful of them, right. I mean, we all make a gazillion mistakes over time. I would have to say that my number one mistake that I've made in the past, and I can say that we actually had the opposite experience recently, was set up a process to screen people out because there are minimum thresholds, right, saying this is our standard and that needs to be our standard and I want to believe in what the person on the other side of the conversation is saying to me and they didn't pass a check in the assessment process, and I let the person pass, and then that came back to bite me pretty hard. So, I would say, adhering to a process that you predefined is really the way I counter that. And I would say the mistake was not sticking to the process that I had predefined.

Max: You were bending the rules that you were setting yourself, for yourself?

Alex: That's exactly right. Yeah. So, we just recently went through this where we set what the standard was, and the person came through and had all sorts of good reasons why things didn't work out, and why he was underneath of the bar. And we said, look, this is just the way it's going to be, it's a really high profile, really important position, and we stuck to our guns. And so, I feel really good about it having made that mistake in the past.

Max: I sense that there's something about job hopping that may upset you was that related? You're looking for people, job hoppers.

Alex: I'm perfectly fine with job hopping. I mean, I think that, you know, a lot of the things that are memes today around, you know, call it Twitter conversations. You know, if a person left three jobs in the last nine months, you know, I want to understand what is it that's making you make a bad decision about whether or not you should go work someplace, we should spend an extra couple of weeks making sure that you get to know everything about us, right, set your expectations on what life's like here before you come. Because the last thing in the world that I want you to do is to come and leave. But, you know, I think it's really important that we all look at that the people that join our teams, they’re here, like, a) to make a paycheck, b) they want to make an impact and make a difference. But the impact-difference piece is about growing themselves in their career to set themselves up for their next gig. I’m not ignorant to that, that’s been my background, my life, right, that should be everybody’s life. I want them to get the best of what they’re gonna do next, and if they’ve been hopping jobs, something happened there, I wanna understand it. But it certainly isn’t a glaring red flag, in fact, it means that they’re gonna stand up for themselves and that they’re gonna leave. I’d rather have that person than somebody who’s gonna stick around and kind of create chaos in the background for 8 years.

Max: It’s more of a red flag if somebody stayed in the same job for 10 years without changing them.

Alex: Yeah, if somebody’s been in the same exact role for 8 years, are you really ambitious? For our company, you probably’ wouldn’t be a good fit because our world is gonna change 16 times in the next four years. So, it’s about finding that right fit. At the end of the day, that’s tough, and we all make mistakes in the process. I like to look at it as just one big gigantic conversation, certainly in our stage.

Max: Great. Well, amurphy59 is the LinkedIn handle, if you wanna continue that gigantic conversation with Alex. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you about the industry. Thanks, Alex.

Alex: Thanks, Max, appreciate it.

Max: That was Alex Murphy ofJobsync and some interesting perspective on how the pendulum is swinging from marketplace and job boards to the ATS's is where should the candidates spend the most time and how do we adapt to the changing candidate behavior? And the changing ecosystem that they live in.

Hope you got something from this interview I certainly did. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe.

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Max: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to meet again somebody I met a few years back in Cape Town, South Africa, Rudé Alley who is the Managing Director and Founder of the Surgo Group, which is a BPO business or contact center business. Feel free to requalify that, Rudé. Based in Cape Town. Welcome to the show.

Rudé: Thank you so much, Max. Thank you for the introduction. You had it spot-on. Surgo is a business process outsourcer based in South Africa.

Max: We recently reconnected because Surgo was in competition for the Global BPO Talent Acquisition Awards on the category of the Most Inclusive BPO and voted by a panel of esteemed judges from the BPO industry. Surgo won the votes of the judges in competition with many global BPO brands. I think in part of recognition that Surgo may not be a globally recognizable brand just yet, but you don't need to wait until you're a giant corporation to start investing in inclusion. I think that's what won their hearts. We were one of the sponsors for this event, I've congratulated you and your team before, but tell us, me and our audience, what diversity means for Surgo in the context of your company's history and the community in which you work.

Rudé: Thank you for the introduction and also winning the award with Talkpush and BPESA was really an incredible thing for us. We were very excited. The whole group just got together, and we were watching this online, and we were very happy to bring the award home with us because I know that we are not necessarily a very big recognized name internationally, but it means a lot to us, especially locally because we have been on the outsourcing industry for about 12 years. Surgo has been in operation for about 8 and winning an award like this is really good for us in terms of scratching more visibility in terms of what diversity really means in the workplace. So for Surgo… [overlap]. Sorry, Max

Max: It's so common for people to talk about diversity and inclusion that it almost feels like it's in everyone’s mission statement by now, especially in the BPO industry which is traditionally very inclusive. And so I suppose it's hard to differentiate that factor as an employer brand because everybody says they're very inclusive. My subjective opinion is that actually most BPOs are very inclusive generally.

Rudé: That's very true. I think that the key was in ensuring that you're creating a work environment that is such inclusive for a diverse workforce. It's one thing to say that you're a diversified company and that the employment equity or affirmation or transformation is one of your key areas of development, that you focus there on that. But does it really boil it down to the race of your business? Do you have the buy-ins in your senior executive teams, your manager to frontline managers? I think that the idea behind diversity in the workplace is all about inclusion, and that's probably the key that we'’re looking for when we're talking about diversity. South Africa is such a diverse country already that if you don't have a diverse workforce, I'm always asking the question is why don't you have? You have to look so hard and to not have a diverse workforce than to just really accept and embrace the diversity that's already in the country.

Max: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember my trips there, it's people from all over the world and all the neighboring countries working there. Yeah, it'll be a melting pot. I'm thinking of my first trips in the Philippines in the BPO sector, I also saw the LGBT community heavily represented. It was an eye-opener for a country which is a traditional, Catholic country to have an industry so prominent and where inclusion is so strong. How is the South Africa brand helping your business on the international scene when you're promoting Surgo and the talents that you have access to?

Rudé: You know when it comes to diversity and having a diverse workforce, I go to employers for our client’s competitors as established in inclusive workclass [unintelligible] employees. So we're looking at some stats, according to the Lloyd's, diverse companies enjoy 2.3 times higher a cash flow per employee. Gartner found that inclusive teams improved their performance by up to 30% in higher diversity environment, and in a BGC study, companies with a diverse management team has had a 19% increase in revenue compared to the list of its counterparts. And I think that any investor would probably be very interested to look at companies that have this because if you're looking at the stats, the numbers speak for itself.

So, you're looking at increased productivity, improved creativity, profits reduced attrition, which we spoke about earlier before we started the podcast, and then improved company reputation, a wider range of skills, and an improved cultural insight. So it really just makes sense to focus on having a diversified workforce. But, the thing is it's not necessarily a strategy for us, it's really just about lives. It's part of what a company and a country is about. It's about the diversity. The key is really to just embrace that and then to ensure that you can have workspaces that is conducive for a diversified group. For example, if you have people from very poor areas that don't usually have access to certain skills and education coming into your workforce, what are you doing as a company to ensure that that person is successful in your workplace. You can't just necessarily exclude those marginalized groups either. People from very poor, very far, essentially from very rural areas, what are we doing for those type of people?

Max: You were talking about Impostor Syndrome as something that you can feel as a business owner. Of course, you can feel as an impostor even if you're not a business owner, if you're an entry-level, new in the workplace, particularly if you come from a family that never had a white-collar job for instance. Perhaps that's the strongest way in which you can be inclusive, as an encouragement to people that nothing is gonna hold them back. Why don't you try to be the boss, take the manager's job, and promote from within people who themselves couldn't articulate the ambition if left to their anxiety of their cultural background.

Rudé: Absolutely. I'm actually getting goosebumps as we're talking about this because it's something that I'm very passionate about and it's something that is such a prevalent thing in our country. We're a third-world country, even though South Africa has been voted as the number one outsourcing destination in the world, but when we have people who were going into the workplace, we have people coming from very poor areas. I think that as part of your talent management strategy, it is also important to establish a sense of belonging for everybody. I've been in call centers working as a group agent management before where people come to work, they don't have food to eat, they're all wearing the same clothes three days in row. They're poor. And that money that they're making they are taking it right back to their homes and they're feeding their grandmothers and grandfathers and their uncles and their aunts and their children. So, that is a very very important point that you have raised because of course, I even suffer from Impostor Syndrome, and I have no need to suffer from Impostor Syndrome, but when you have people from those backgrounds coming in and mixing with also a diverse group of people, there is that inherent fear. And again, fear is something that pulls away from each other. So, it's important to have also empathetic leadership is very important. So, if your managers, again, aren't buying into the idea of diversification or diversity, then it's gonna be a recipe for disaster. You're gonna have high staff churn, you're gonna have employee unhappiness, and the people are not gonna feel like that they belong in the company.

Max: You've talked about fear and concepts like equity, affirmation, and transformation. I think some of this vocabulary is perhaps particular to South Africa, but I think the concept of fear obviously is, unfortunately, universal. Can you teach me a little bit what you mean by fear and about killing fear or addressing fear?

Rudé: Basically to answer this, the one side of it is obviously marginalized groups feeling fearful that they're going to, the LGBTQ+, for example…

Max: Suffer violence.

Rudé: Suffer violence, yes. The Stand Against Violence Against Women in our country is also a very big thing, also a part of the marginalized groups. And then, so the fear of retribution, I guess. The second part of fear is that people are wired to react with fear and distrust when their beliefs are challenged, that is the other part of fear. So, you'll have people in the workplace that don't initially have Impostor Syndrome, they're living in great areas that don't have issues, but when you challenge them based on their beliefs, that's where they react with fear and distress. So, there's two parts of that equation that you have to be cognizant of when you have a diverse workforce. One is a rehabilitative way of looking at it, so you'll have to have a sensitivity training with your employees, or you're going to have to have very courageous conversations about various sensitive topics and then manage how those people react and respond. Because if you're preaching about diversity in the workplace, it also means that you cannot discriminate against religion, political beliefs, age. So, you have to also be cognizant and very careful how you approach that. So it's a very tricky journey, I think it's something that is always a work in progress, but it's two aspects of fear.

Max: I get the feeling that you talk about it with passion and with a sense of purpose where you feel it's ingrained with your mission, it's a serious matter. Whereas I try to take the other approach with my team where I'm like, we don't take ourselves too seriously, we make fun of each other but not in hurtful ways. I try to take a lighter approach. I don't know if it's gonna work. Do you have any thoughts on that whether some things can be laughed about?

Rudé: Of course. I think that's the premise of it, it's that, I know that there was the Black Lives Matter movement recently in America, for example, and that also challenged my outlook on life a little bit because I always said, I don't see color. And i realized that saying I don't see color, I don't really recognize the person as their culture or their color or whatever they may be. So, it's always to see the differences in people, and once that you have gone into that step where you are now rehabilitated, then it is okay to make light and talk and have fun. Because then the other person knows that you're seeing them as a person. It sounds very heavy; I mean we're not sitting in our business talking about diversity and inclusion all day. It's all about creating that culture. It is a safe environment for us to jest and to joke and to celebrate each other's differences or joke about our own cultures. So that sense of belonging, that sense of safety, then culture. It synchronizes that sense of… it's okay, maybe you’re getting it right Max, I mean that's why you guys can jest and joke and it's just an easy environment.

Max: That's a good outcome but of course, a joke can always be misinterpreted in the wrong context. So, these are tricky, dangerous ground. I was thinking about it because you're talking about inclusivity for religious belief and the political element and the social media element have defined the camps of the debates so clearly that it seems impossible to have on one hand, a progressive, and on the other hand, a conservative person, sharing the floor and having a nice chat about it these days. So, I always try to make the two sides feel welcome, but it's a hard one.

Rudé: Yeah, you have an integral role in creating that culture in your business or that safe environment in your business. People take or your employees take, they take from the leader and the leadership teams. So, if you're creating an environment where it is easy and it's okay, then people are going to feel that it's easy and okay. I've always said in our country, specifically, we've got a leadership problem. I'm not talking specifically about our government because it's easy to say that's the top leadership in our country, I’m talking about anybody in the leadership position should be able to create and be ethical about diversity, especially if you're living and working in third world country. For example, if you are a housewife and you have a domestic cleaner working for you, it is your ethical responsibility and duty to treat her the same that a CEO of a large company would treat their employees. That's what I mean when I said we got leadership problem. Any leadership position where you are in a position of interest, it is your responsibility to ensure the safety and the diversity or have those courageous conversations with your people.

Max: Amen.

Rudé: I wasn't preaching.

Max: I’m an atheist.

Rudé: Me too, but it's okay.

Max: Well, I can go on all day, talking to you about this topic, but I wanna keep to the format. So. I'll move to what is my penultimate question which I ask everybody on the show. Walk me back through a hiring mistake that you've made. Particular individual that you hired and wasn't the right hire and you had to think back about, walk back the steps, and figure out where did I go wrong. And from that then we're trying to say is try to avoid for some of our listeners in making that same mistake. Because they are all hiring right now, and if you can avoid one hiring mistake through your example, that will be saving a lot of pain for some.

Rudé: That's an interesting question because hiring for my business or hiring for my clients?

Max: I know you don't make mistakes because you got 3% attrition rate.

Rudé: It's not that. We make mistakes, but I've made a few hiring mistakes in my career, but I have always turned that hiring mistake into something else. So, it's difficult for me to pinpoint and say I hired this person, they were so horrible, and so they can go. But in terms of when it comes to hiring for a very specific position, I've made mistakes before where I would hire a person that would perhaps not have the necessary skills, or they would initially buy into the position, or they would say they’d perform. But then what I would do with that person, I would take penultimate accountability for that hiring mistake because I believe there's no such thing as a bad employee, only bad managers. So, if that person was hired by me, I would make sure that I replace that person in a position is more suited for them. But obviously, when it comes to hiring for clients, there are always opportunity for mistakes, but the only way that you can curb those mistakes is to make sure that you ask the questions before you start hiring and that you checks-and-balances their employers before you place that person. I remember very early on in my career; I placed a medical aid institution and we had lost reference pending for her. We couldn't do the reference because she had to restart it with the client. And once we did the reference, it turned out that she had been lying and that she stole money from that company and it was a whole thing, we lost a client. And so, they are very early on learned that you need to ask those questions and close those gaps and make sure that you've got all your checks and files before you place someone in a high-stake client.

Max: It's a numbers game. Eventually, somebody is gonna try and con you past a certain number. You might get away with ten, twenty, even a hundred hires, but hundred and one was gonna con you.

Rudé: [overlap]

Max:I don't know if I wanna leave it on this note because it'll be hard for people to sleep at night. My other question was for those who want to know more about Surgo, what are your areas of strength and how can they get in touch with you. What kind of business would you like to welcome to Surgo.

Rudé: Oh, nice. that's a great question. Thank you for the opportunity. So, we're obviously a business process outsourcer, so we, specialize in the call center industry, specifically customer support and tech support, but we also have a few other areas in our business. So, we do recruitment selection as well, pre-employment services too. We've got an HR department, so we do HR outsourcing, payroll outsourcing. We do learning and development. We’ve got an LMS that we recently bought, and then a management system. We're basically finalizing our language assessment tool, so if you wanna send your foreign language through our assessment tool, please do. So that's basically what we specialize in. And then obviously, we're looking for clients that align with our values. So, if there's anybody out there who wants to contact me, you can reach out through our website, www.surgo.co.za and that's about from our side.

Max: Well, Rudé, thanks. Congrats again to Surgo and for the rapid growth that your team has experienced over the last couple of years and continued success.

Rudé: Thank you so much for the opportunity, Max. It's really great to see you again and good to see that Talkpush is really crossing borders and stretching boundaries. I'm happy to reconnect with you again.

Max: You're too kind.

Rudé: Thank you.

Max: That was Rudé Alley from Sergo reminding us that diversity is not about beautiful websites and aspirational statements. It's really about building a management team that wants to get people to rise to their full potential, regardless of where they came from. And for that, you need to create an environment which is inclusive, where fear is diminished or where trust is built and it's not easy, but as the best that we can all do, hope you enjoyed it. And then we'll be back for more, remember to subscribe.

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Max : Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Alison Kaizer who is head of talent at Lunchbox, and Lunchbox is a company that helps restaurants get better engagement and more sales. Alison will tell us about a little bit about that exciting startup or technology company. And we'll talk as well about the transition to remote hiring and how to reinforce how to establish strong connections remotely during the recruitment process and how to communicate employee culture in the recruitment process so that people are not walking into a company that feels strange and foreign and disconnected to them, which is the game that I guess most of the world is trying to figure out right now. So a hot topic. Alison, welcome to the show.

Alison: Thank you for having me.

Max: Thanks. Thanks for joining. So tell us a little bit about yourself to begin with. How did you end up in the beautiful world of recruitment?

Alison: It's a funny story, actually. I feel like no one decides that they want to go into recruitment, everyone falls into it.

Max: It's an accident

Alison: …by accident. But I have a background in business. I worked in management consulting for a little bit. I worked in advertising. And then I ran my own business for some time. And when I decided I wanted to go back into a more formalized kind of office environment, I sent my resume to a recruiter. And she basically said, I think you would be an awesome recruiter, based on your background, you have experience in the industry from multiple facets. So I went through an interview process with this agency, and it was fantastic and ended up deciding to kind of take the plunge. And I really haven't looked back for the last seven or eight years that I've been recruiting.

Max: And what she liked about your background is the fact that you were working in marketing. Correct? And I think I keep telling people that, you know, recruiting and sales, and actually recruiting is marketing because it's more and more about managing big digital media spend, and large funnels. And it's, you know, I think it's even more of a valuable skill right now to be able to buy media than it is to study psychology, which has been traditionally where a lot of recruiters come from.

Alison: Yes, definitely. And also really understanding the subject matter expertise that you're talking to candidates about adds so much value. You can be strategic, and you have a lot of empathy for their position as a candidate. So it's a great entry point if you're interested in becoming a recruiter to, you know, enter an era and a function that you know a lot about.

Max: Well, I'm glad that you're part of this industry. I also fell into it by accident. And well, let's say what about Lunchbox. What is Lunchbox? And why? What makes it an exciting challenge from a talent acquisition standpoint?

Alison: Yeah. So Lunchbox is a really incredible company to work for. It's incredibly disruptive in the restaurant space. And basically, the premise is allowing restaurants to compete with third-party platforms. So the door dashes and the Uber Eats of the world are charging significant fees to restaurants where they end up breaking even or losing money on their orders. And they also don't really have access to their data, in order to make strategic decisions that impact the business moving forward. And so what Lunchbox does is it facilitates that digital experience for restaurants completely holistically, but allows them to maintain all of the control as a first-party platform. So we help with web orders. We can do mobile. We help with loyalty programs. We even have an in-house studio that helps with all of the marketing that restaurants need to drive the customers directly to that first-party platform that we're facilitating. And then they also have access to all of their data, which is incredibly empowering. So it's almost like a Shopify, for restaurants. And from a talent acquisition perspective, I think the challenges are very similar to what so many other tech companies are dealing with, currently, especially at an early stage. It's so competitive from a talent standpoint, particularly around engineering, sales, and marketing. We're growing incredibly quickly as well. So just the sheer volume of our recruiting efforts. When I joined in early March, we were about 60 people and now we're about 250 people, we've hired almost one and a half people a day on average. And so building a scalable process where there's a lot of alignment and allowing us to be competitive, but also very measured in our evaluation of candidates is a significant challenge for any talent leader.

Max: Sounds incredibly expensive to be growing at that pace. In this from March 2021, onwards, when the cost of… Yeah, the cost of hiring has gone up, basically, across the board and in marketing in particular. So well, maybe could you share a word about what your marketing mix looks like from, you know, recommend marketing spend?

Alison: I'm sorry. I don't totally understand the question like, “What are…[overlap]

Max: Where would you spend most of your ad money? Is it the traditional channels like Indeed and LinkedIn, or are there other new ways to connect with people? I mean, I don't want to spill the beans if you have a secret sauce you don't want to send to the competition. But just to get a feel for where you operate.

Alison: Now that I can definitely answer. So from a recruitment marketing perspective, I think we're really lucky because one thing Lunchbox does unbelievably well is branding and marketing. In general, if you take a look at our careers page, it's very advanced, the brand is excellent. The career page is extremely robust. There's a very clear tone of voice. And so we've invested a lot in our marketing in general, as well as our employer brand, which allows us to cut through a lot of the noise. And so we actually spend very little money on marketing from a traditional kind of sense. We do have some LinkedIn job slots that we leverage, and we use Greenhouse so it allows us to post all of our jobs on LinkedIn in general. But a lot of the traction that we get is just, you know, us all being very active on LinkedIn, and having very strong recruiter networks, making sure that we have really strong outreach. And that's really speaking to our employer brands and our culture. So a lot of our active outreach, gets positive response, and just focusing on having a great culture and brand. So when people hear about us, they're excited as opposed to using a lot of the more traditional marketing tactics.

Max: Alot of word of mouth and yeah, positive feelings that generate enough talent and enough applicants. I believe that-- obviously, it's working for you so I'm not gonna tell you it's a good strategy. If it's working, that's all you need to know. You don't need to hear it from me. But I do believe that when you get to a certain size, maybe like five, 600 people, you kind of hit the wall in terms of how much referral, with the share of hires that you can do through referrals at some point. Those, I think, numbers go down a little bit when you get to a bigger company. But…

Alison: Alot of our hires are candidates that we actively sourced. I mean, more than 50% are people that we actually go out and prospect-- that don't find us we go out and we had on them. Alot of our roles are very niche, and we're looking for a very competitive talent. So just having kind of a strong recruitment team that's able to really leverage a powerful employer brand. And that outreach drives conversion. We do get a lot of referrals as well and a lot of inbounds but it's mostly active headhunting.

Max: Okay, well, let's talk about those. Those people that are actively being headhunted. They don't know. They don't know you. They go to your website. I've just been to it after what you said. And it's true, it really is a visual experience. It's a very unique employer brand. So I'd recommend people to go and check it out there listening. And it looks reads a little bit like a comic book for me. And I love comic books. So it works for me. But, you know, beyond that those first impressions, which are critical, of course, what are some of the other things that you've built into your recruiting process that helps a complete stranger feel less so?

Alison: Yeah, it's a great question. And so I think, from the get-go, our outreach is very much written in our tone of voice. And it's very colloquial, and it's very light. And it's funny, and it's very clear that this is not going to be a boring conversation and Lunchbox is a brand worth engaging with. And then as a talent team, I think we've been very intentional about the recruiters that we've brought on board, making sure that they're all strong representations of our brand. We're all very startup-y. We're very casual. We all you know, really kind of represent the lifestyle and the culture of what you will find when you join a company like ours, and we're all very open and ready to answer any questions that the can candidates have. Create a very kind of dynamic and partnership-based experience. This isn't a place where if you interview, it feels dictatorial. And we're kind of grilling you, but always very much focused on matchmaking and ensuring that there's alignment and, you know, looking for collaborative folks. So really fostering that dynamic throughout the interview process is important. And I think the other piece is having a heavy focus on culture throughout the entire interview process. So even in our very first initial screens, telling people about what it's like to work here, and making sure that we really dig in on what they're looking for, from a cultural perspective, is a key part of our interview process. And something that continues to be top of mind in every stage that someone goes through. So that focus on culture, and being human-centric is something that's very prominent from the first conversation that you have with someone on our team.

Max: Let's get into it. Because culture is such a general term to describe so many things. So perhaps, to illustrate this with some examples, can you tell me about some of those key elements of your culture and how you would assess a fit for those? Specifically, if you have interview questions that can show us how you work around that, because when you hire people in sales and marketing, for instance, and you said that such a chunk of your hires, they're always so adaptative, you never know, you never know if they're selling or not.

Alison: 100%. And so I think our culture is very much a startup culture, we're not a nine to five. First of all, we're incredibly flexible. We're quite casual and laid back but very, very collaborative. We look for extreme ownership. We look for people that run toward fires. We look for people that can move very, very quickly. And so we're actually incredibly transparent with people and we allow them to opt-in or opt-out, and some people opt-out. And that's absolutely fine. I can give you a few examples. Like we're looking for talent folks. Generally, I'll talk to them about the number of wrecks that we have at any given time, and the time to hire that we generally tried to maintain. And with every person on my team, if you reached out and had a conversation with them, they tell you that I showed them my calendar, which at that time was from 8am to about 7pm. And we were incredibly busy. And I spoke to them about the number of calls I was doing a day and the kinds of conversion metrics I was looking at. And I would explain, you know, if you're looking for a nine to five, if you're looking for something that's incredibly structured, that's absolutely fine. And there's nothing wrong with that. But this isn't the place. If you're looking for somewhere where you're going to learn and you're going to be very challenged, and you'll be able to look back at the work that you've done and say, “No, that wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for me. I really built something there. And I had an incredible amount of impact.” It's a wonderful place. But it's incredibly rigorous. And this is what you can expect things to look like. And some people opt out of that and the right people opt-in. But just you know, being very honest, are at the process, I think is important. And so another example is on sales. We look for folks that aren't actually just focused on sales targets. It's really important to bring people into this team that are builders, and if something doesn't exist yet, or it's not working, they raise their hand to fix it. And so we’ll often dig in and ask people about projects they've worked on above and beyond their sales goals or times that things were broken, or they weren't working and that individual raise their hand to fix them. Because if someone wants to come in and just sell all day and wait for things around them to be fixed or built, they're definitely not going to be the right person for this team. And so we over-index on those kinds of questions.

Max: Almost like you're answering the question, my question, but taking it from the other angle that I would have expected. Where I would have expected you to talk about, you know, all the great, how wonderful it is because of XYZ. But actually, you're kind of putting the spotlight on here are all the reasons why you should not join. Yeah, right. It's not going to be so wonderful. Are you still up for it so that you could get some people to eliminate themselves from the process?

Alison: Totally. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, recruitment is about matchmaking, and solving those problems is going to be very exciting for the right people and it won't be for everyone. But the last thing I would ever want is for someone to join and say that the experience is not aligned with what they were expecting, and it wasn't what they were looking for. That's, I think, a big waste of everyone's time and a huge failure from a cultural perspective. And so the best thing that we can do is communicate the truth and the benefits and the fun, the opportunity to work with incredibly smart people, the opportunity to really learn, and to have fun, to have impact, to work for a company that's incredibly mission-driven and a product that's really having an impact on an industry and, you know, folks that are really interested to join.

Max: The way you portray start-up culture, because I think that there was there was a for a little while in San Francisco, the feeling that it had become very entitled and that, yes, we would have, we would have the no shoe environments and the casualness and the great benefits. There was, yeah, all of those were granted, but nothing was expected really in return, when the origin there is a higher pace, and higher expectations, working in high tech.

Alison: I will say… I have to tell you that one of the things that drew me here is I met this CEO. I actually wasn't looking to leave my previous role. And the CEO, his name is Nikhil Unger. He's a Top 30 under 30. He built his way up to CMO of Bareburger before starting Lunchbox at a young age. And he said to me on our initial call, that nothing mattered to him more than people, which I don't think it's a very common thing for a CEO to say. And it's proven to be absolutely true. I've never met a more people-centric person in my entire career. We invested in a director of culture. So we brought someone on and her entire role was fostering incredible remote culture as a Series A, which is a very early stage investment. We encourage people to take time off when they need it, and build teams that are focused on supporting those that are out when they're out. Our benefits are fantastic. We have weekly team meetings around culture and a weekly update, where we explain the state of the business in full transparency. Our Slack is so active. Everyone spends so much time together. So it really is a nurturing and familial environment. I would say Lunchbox is like the antithesis of an entitled environment and really focused on retaining amazing people.

Max: No wonder you're growing so fast with this kind of leadership and investment so there's no surprise there, I would say. You know, some leaders are made to build large teams more than others. So well, thanks for sharing all that, Alison. I like to ask a question to all my guests, which is around hiring mistakes, and particularly if someone if you can go back into your history, your long history or seven years as a recruiter and find or maybe even before that, and think back to a specific hire that you made, that was the wrong hire. And when you've reflected on what mistakes were made at that time, so that our audience can learn from those mistakes and avoid them in the future.

Alison: It's a tough question to answer because there are so many examples. Obviously, I've made a million mistakes. But when I think back on one hire that I made, that was the wrong person. There's someone that I had a long-standing relationship with, and we developed a very close friendship. And so I was operating under the assumption that that would translate well into work. And because we were close, and we had great rapport, and this is someone that I'd worked with as a vendor, that that would translate very well to an internal relationship. But ultimately, as I just mentioned, Lunchbox is very rigorous. It's not for everyone. And so when that person joins, although they you know, were extremely hardworking and very bright, they didn't have that kind of startup experience, nor do I think they were really seeking that kind of rigor. And it ended up being misaligned, even though our relationship was so strong. And so recognizing the difference between someone that you may really like on a personal and even a professional level and fit for the larger organization was a key takeaway from that experience.

Max: Thank you, Alison. Yeah. So those ties can take years to build relationships that take years to build that could be destroyed in a matter of weeks if you put them in the wrong wrong job. Yeah, so not a risk worth taking.

Alison: Luckily, we still have a great have a great relationship dynamic. He went back to his previous employer and just went right back to where he was and we've maintained a friendship but yeah, learning experience

Max: Great. Well, I've already been on the Lunchbox career site. lunchbox.io/careers I'd recommend all the listeners to go and check it out. And if they want to get in touch with you, Alison, what's the best way?

Alison: Yeah, definitely you can shoot me an email. My email address is alison@lunchbox.io. Or you can definitely connect with me on LinkedIn if you want. My name is Alison Kaizer and I will definitely get back to you.

Max: Go. Thank you, Alison.

Alison: Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.

Max: That was Alison Kaiser from Lunchbox reminding us that when it comes to communicating culture, you should start by sharing what turns people off about your company rather than what turns them on that will make sure that the candidates can self select themselves. They can opt out of the process if they're not a good fit.

And we'll ensure that you can preserve a strong culture where people are okay with all your flaws, hope you enjoyed it. And you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe.

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Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Thad Price, CEO of Talroo.

Talroo is one of the leading platforms for programmatic advertising, and please, Thad, correct me afterwards if I'm mischaracterizing what Talroo does. But the point of this conversation is to go over some of the trends in how advertising is being spent in the recruitment space, particularly within the North American market, and how that's affecting the work of recruiters listening to this podcast. Thad, welcome to the show.

Thad: Max, great to be here. Thank you for your time and happy holidays.

Max: Thank you. Happy holidays. For those who are not familiar with Talroo, could you start with that? Tell us a little bit about how the business came to be, its evolution, and its current state.

Thad: Yeah, absolutely. So, a little bit about our brand. As we think about the Talroo brand itself, it really is the intersection of recruiters and talent in helping companies find the right hires and the right talent to drive a business. When we think about the evolution of the industry over the last few years, we've seen a lot of similarities to traditional marketing, and where marketing, where ad tech and marketing have moved. And you know our thought processes is about the audiences that you're attracting to your job. It's about attracting the right talent to your jobs. So, really if you think about how we provide a lot of value to our recruiters and employers who leverage Talroo, it's about finding the right audiences wherever they are. Right time, right place, right candidates, and how we can leverage data to ensure that we're actually doing that. We were incubated in Silicon Valley a number of years ago, over ten years ago, and we moved to Austin, and we call Austin home for a little over 8 years. So, we moved in the first wave of folks moving from California to Austin, Texas, a great town for us.

Max: Elon followed you a few years later.

Thad: That's right. That's right. But it really has been a great opportunity for us, specifically because Austin is such a great town for entrepreneurship. And if you think about what makes a great town, and there are two things that I constantly hear in research. The first is the idea of creativity and the second is entrepreneurship. And I think we're seeing that in Austin. It's been terrific for us to attract the right talent and to take our business to the next level.

Max: All these universities which are producing tens of thousands of graduates in the engineering space but also in business functions. I work a lot in the call center space, and I know that these student towns are a wonderful place to locate a call center as well. So, you don't have to be a Python and LP developer to find a job in these areas. They just attract a lot of productive capital

Thad: Yeah, great point. When you think about UT here in Austin, a lot of students don't wanna leave. They call it home. They've moved from other areas in Texas, and Austin is just a terrific town. They get a lot of entrepreneurships, a lot of opportunity, and it's been great to just experience growth over the last 8 years.

Max: So, I admit, Thad, that I'm not very fluent on the topic of programmatic and I described Talroo as a platform that does that. Am I on the right track? For those like me who need an education, could you go over what programmatic does?

Thad: Absolutely. So, there's been a movement in job advertising, probably the last 5 years, where there's this idea of more efficiency in job advertising investment. From what we can tell, the total addressable market on job advertising is anywhere between 10 and 12 billion dollars worldwide. And so, there's a lot of inefficient investment that typically is in this [unintelligible]. So, the idea of programmatic is to be more efficient and to attract the right audiences so you can drive hires. The Talroo kind of definition of programmatic is this idea of profile-driven programmatic, which is beyond the ideas of the site in which you advertise, but based on the audiences and the people that you're attracting to jobs. So, I think that's a big differentiator when you think of the idea of programmatic in the job advertising world. Again, today, it's more about job distribution and how can I get on a lot of different sites. The key with profile-driven programmatic is this idea of reaching the right audiences at time of search, and how can we ensure we're reaching the right audiences to drive hires. And that feedback loop is what's so important. So, in traditional… I'll give you a little information about how this works in consumer advertising. So, if you take a large advertising marketplace like Google, for example. Google has data on what people are searching, and based on data on what people are searching, they're able to allow consumer advertising companies to attract consumers based on audiences and based on buying behavior. So, an example is, I'm in the market for buying a car. I'm in the market for buying a Ford truck. How can Ford advertise to people based on their data searching for folks looking for a truck? So, it's about the audience and about attracting the audiences that will show this behavior. And so, that's the consumer advertising world in a very basic terms.

And I think about it in job advertising. So, in this idea of Ford Motor company who's looking to attract people looking to buy a truck. 20 years ago, it would be that you would need to be on cars.com because people on cars.com were looking to buy a car or a truck. And so, people would advertise on cars.com with the hopes of attracting people who are looking to buy a car or a truck. And so, that's what's been happening in the job search industry for the past 20 or 30 years where people advertise on many different job sites, and the idea is well, if someone is on a job site, then they're looking for a job. The next stage of this is how do you then leverage that data to go beyond a single destination and leverage data to ensure that you're reaching the right audiences at the time in which that audience is looking for a job.

So, that's what we do here in Talroo, we power over a billion searches per month and we allow companies to attract audiences and match companies to audiences based on job advertising and job ads and based on profile, specifically. So, early on in our company history, we were a job site. Our technology powers one of the top job sites in the US, and that's Jobs2Careers. And so, we opened up our technology a number of years ago, so we could go beyond a single job search and really think about how we can access audiences outside of a single job site, which of course at that time is Jobs2Careers. Jobs2Careers is still a terrific destination, it's one of the top places that people look for jobs online in the US. So, the extension of that was how do we open up our technology to access additional audiences and provide scale for high volume hiring needs for employers looking for essential workers.

Max: I remember, this is from many years ago, but I remember that the number one place where people go to look for jobs is Google. They go and type in a job title and then hope something pops up. Obviously, in the last couple of years, that search is a lot better than it was before because now Google is scraping all of this content. Do you access these insights to redistribute ads to the people who are looking for these job titles? How does that work?

Thad: Great question. So, when we opened up our technology we power a lot of different sites. We power job alerts. We power notifications. We power a lot of different opportunities where people look to find jobs. And so, from Google's perspective early on when we were investing in our domain Jobs2Careers in that particular career site, job site. One of the things we did was we thought of, “Okay, how can we connect to Google and how we can ensure that we can make essentially searching through marketing more efficient for employers and for, of course, more efficient for jobseekers?” And so, early on a lot of the investment and a lot of the R&D went to, okay, how can we leverage Google from a search engine marketing perspective. So, absolutely, that's when [unintelligible] from a Google, for job's perspective, that's kind of its own marketplace and it has its own characteristics.

Max: That's the free traffic and then there's the paid traffic.

Thad: Exactly. And one of the things that we're very good at is we're very good in investing in search engine marketing to ensure that we're driving top of funnel candidates for employers.

Max: So, it's free inbound separate from Google Jobs. So, there's resources with Google. Google Jobs, inbound, and then maybe paid advertising.

Thad: That's right, that's right. And early on we're very good at paid advertising on Google because the thought process is we should be more effective at connecting our employers, connecting our job sites that we may be working with jobseekers. So, if we can connect with search engine marketing, we can be more effective at that. So that was kind of the idea of Job2Careers early on in our history before moving to Talroo, where Talroo is more of an advertising platform. So, when you access the Talroo ad platform, you have access to essentially profile-driven programmatic job advertising events which you can create, and of course our Insights product which essentially what you can do is you can look at the labor supply in a certain area in a certain location and, of course, a certain category.

Max: To create searches that will then pull out data from different places, including maybe LinkedIn and places like that?

Thad: Good question. Almost. From an Insights' perspective, it's only our data. So, it's data in which we're powering, and we have access to from a job search perspective. So, it isn't third-party data that may be coming from places like LinkedIn. But the good news is, with all of that data, we can help companies be more effective at recruitment marketing by helping them learn the top competitors in their location, the top titles that may be driving clicks, and job views. All of this is important in ensuring that we're creating more of our recruitment advertising practice, if you will, recruitment marketing practice for businesses.

Max: And those insights can then be used in LinkedIn or other places.

Thad: Exactly, exactly.

Max: So, we've been through a rocky ride the last two years with maybe a third of recruiters losing their job in 2020 and then everybody being worked to the bone in 2021. If you listen to what's going on in social media, it's a bit of a story of extremes, but I do believe it to a certain degree. I have seen it on my side of business, some loud swings. What's been your experience from the advertising standpoints.? Who are the big winners in terms of employers? Who are the employers who performed really well during this period? You can categorize them by industry or perhaps by best practice. Who are the ones who won the talent award last year?

Thad: Good question. I think that as an industry, there's been a huge shift. It's been transformational in so many different ways. Like you, a lot of our customers advertisers hit the pause button as the country was shut down. Pause button. You don't need to recruit. Now as the country was opening, it was, “I need a staff.” Demands up. “I need a staff, I need a staff.” It's been an interesting dynamic in the last probably 8-9 months as more companies are looking to hire and to ensure that they're meeting consumer demands. Winners and losers, I would say that there are couple things that I observed.

The first is that for years, we've been talking about this idea of the baby boomers' impact in the US to the labor market. From what we can tell, everything shows that in the first quarter of, and this is a Pew report. In the first quarter of 2021, almost 3 million baby boomers retired more than the first quarter of 2020. That's a lot of folks, not because participating in the labor market, and there have been further studies on this as well. What we can basically say is, if we think about the Great Recession that we experienced a number of years ago, roughly 2000 and 2009. There was a sense of lack of financial security because of a lot of pressure on 401Ks given the turmoil in the markets.

We didn't really experience that in the last year or so, and so there's this idea of feeling this financial, I guess, relief of, “Hey, my 401K is still plentiful.” Also, we've had housing prices, which in many cases from a family perspective, a lot of wealth is tied up in home prices. And so, I think there's a sense of security, and that was the word I was looking for earlier, there's a sense of security that a lot of families are seeing and so they retired. And so, now we have this situation where folks are retiring and let's not also, you know, we can't discount the sense of health and time. We were saying earlier before we jumped into the conversation that time is so important, it's the one thing in life we can never get back. So, I think people are actually looking at this and making that decision. So, that was the first shift that I think is kind of where we are in this tight labor market today.

The second is the idea of flexibility. You know, winners, we talk about winners. I think a lot of the winners, a lot of the, what we refer to as the gig marketplace, have been winners. And the idea of InstaCard and DoorDash and other providers in which you can work when you wanna work and have that ability to turn on the ability to deliver or to drive. And we've been seeing this for years as an industry, talking about this idea of flexibility being so important to the labor market, but I think that the pandemic accelerated all of this. And you've been seeing moves, even companies like Target, buying and investing in companies like Shipt, where you could turn on this idea of labor when you need it. We saw this with, a number of years ago, IKEA purchasing TaskRabbit. And so, my feeling is that companies are having to leverage these marketplaces more than ever because they need to adapt to what jobseekers really want and you're gonna see this transformation continue to unfold, I believe.

Max: There's this one trend of capturing the marketplace and putting your foot inside these closed ecosystems where everybody is logging into to get an hourly gig or to speak to like-minded people in their profession. I get that that's popular and attractive, but I also feel like these closed ecosystems, they never last. Eventually, they die a quiet death, or they become very specialized and never hear from them. But what always last is an influx of new talents, coming into the marketplace, and sometimes that talent spends its time on Instagram and two years later they spend time on Snapchat and two years later they're spending time on TikTok. Those are the places to be if you wanna attract 20, 25-year-olds, which as you're getting rid of the boomers, maybe you should hire a bunch of those guys. So, do you think that social media has, you know these big platforms, they deliver on their potential for employers in 2021 or still underutilized?

Thad: I think they're probably still underutilized. I think it's changing, but at the end of the day I think it's about what a company is advertising, and how they're treating their employees, honestly, and pay. When we surveyed users, jobseekers before, we found a couple things that are important. The first is pay, of course, how much they're making, how much an individual is making, and the second is flexibility, and the third usually benefits. And the flexibility piece is huge which is one of the reasons why I think these marketplaces are providing a lot of value to workers because they create flexibility. Now, what I think happens is as employers look at this and say, well, how do I provide flexibility within my ecosystem and within my company, then I think that there's a big question mark of making that choice. Am I using a marketplace to find work or am I working for Target, and I have flexibility as an example, or UPS or FedEx or others? So, I do think there's this huge shift that's happening and it's all about what jobseekers really want and you have to ensure that you're aligned with what jobseekers want because there’s more opportunity than ever in the labor market.

Max: And now is different than last year, right, because last year was about everybody wants security and so, the gig took a hit in a way because the companies refocused their attention and their resources on full-time permanent staff.

Thad: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: Now is the freedom years.

Thad: The other piece of this is kind of the no-contact experience as well that's essentially happening with some of the marketplaces. Now, I'm not saying that there's no contact, but if you think of someone that is delivering for one of the marketplaces, for an example, there's definitely less contact delivering for marketplaces on your doorstep than a cashier in a grocery store. And I think that's another piece of this as well, we have to think about rational behavior. And a lot of these is taking a step back and looking at your company and putting yourself in the jobseekers’ shoes and saying, what is rational behavior? And I think if we do that as an industry, we can see a lot of insights into, you know, as people make this choice, this calculated choice, what's really happening.

Max: Yeah, it's always a good wake-up call to apply for a few jobs yourself and kind of walk in the shoes of the candidates, for sure. Well, thanks for these great market insights and reminding us that this year is very different than last, and we need to move faster and adapt in order to remain attractive. One question that I love to ask everybody who comes on the show is to talk about recruitment and people that you've hired yourself. Everybody makes hiring mistakes once in a while because of various cognitive biases or bad luck or God knows what. I'd like you to walk us through one of those painful experiences, if you can remember a wrongful hire you've made, some time in your past, it can be a buried memory. But share with me and our audience, what was the mistake that you've made?

Thad: Great question. So, I would say that when you're thinking about hiring, the number one key is culture alignment, and when I say culture alignment, you know we spend a lot of time as leaders ensuring that we have the right culture, and we have the right way in which we lead the company in so many different directions. Really, it's the alignment piece that's really important, in one direction. And when I've made a bad hiring decisions in the past, it's usually been because from a cultural perspective. We weren't aligned, whatever that may be. And one of things that we did as a team to ensure culture alignment is we basically created a list of situational experiences that all of us have had, and we went through this situational experience and had our team just talk through how would you handle this situation. And these aren't recruiting experiences, these are actual life experiences.

Max: I get that, I get that. Somebody on the show recently said, you found a wallet in the shopping mall, what do you do with it? That kind of stuff. That was for security guards.

Thad: One of the ones that we have is, and this actually happened to me, I was at a dinner. I just moved to Austin, probably about 7 years ago. I was out at dinner, and I walked into the restaurant and there was a sign that said, please lock up your valuables, right. And I didn't pay any attention to it because it's a sign on a restaurant that says, please lock up your valuables. So, I had a great dinner, get back to the car, and that my car and my window is smashed, and my laptop bag is stolen in the back of the, it was in my back seat. It wasn't in my trunk, but it was in the back seat. So, one of things that happened to me was I said, “Well this was my stupid mistake because I should've hid my laptop bag.” And so, that's an example of one of this experiences that we talk to our candidates about and say, you know, what do you think about this situation? What's the impact to the restaurant, what's the impact to you, what's the impact to the person that smashed the window? And it's a great conversation to ensure to, you know, not that there's a right answer, but it's a great conversation to ensure how people [overlap]

Max: There must be a right answer but maybe you don't wanna share on the show.

Thad: All right, my right answer is, I shouldn't have left the laptop bag in the back seat. I'm taking responsibility for it. So, responsibility is important. Those are the types of experiences that we've used to ensure that we're aligned culturally with our team. And we look at all these things to gather and develop what needs to be a part of Talroo and what's important and ensure we're moving the ball forward.

Max: Great example, thank you. No matter how great your technology becomes in Talroo, and how advanced our technology with conversational AI gets. They will never replace a good interview question like this with situational discussion about how would you react if this happens. So, the job of recruiters is safe for as long as we live.

Thad: I always say to our team, you can't take the human out of human resources, and I think that's a great line to think about.

Max: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. That will be your closing statement, Thad. Thanks for coming to the show.

Thad: Thank you very much, Max. Thanks for having me. Take care.

Max: That was Todd price, CEO of Talroo reminding us that flexibility is a very popular thing these days. In fact, a top three demand from candidates at the moment.

So if your company can offer flexibility, make sure to put it front and center in your ads and your marketing, it will give you an edge on the war for talent.
Hope you enjoyed it and that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'd like to introduce you to the CEO and co-founder of Truss, Mr. Everett Harper. Welcome to the show, Everett.

Everett: Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it and thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it and hope the listeners get a lot out of this one.

Max: I'm sure they will because from what I’ve heard, you've implemented some very innovative strategies in order to attract and retain talent, notably around the sharing the transparency around salary information, an information that is typically kept very very secret and that nobody wants to have leaked. And you found that it could be used by some organizations willing to make that leap as a competitive advantage in the world of talent. So, that's the conversation we're gonna have, if that's okay with you Everett, but first for our listeners who are not familiar with Truss, what do you guys do? Who do you hire?

Everett: Sure. So, we are a human-centered, purpose-driven software development company. What we do is solve really complex problems for large government agencies, such as Department of Defense, Center for Medicaid Services. We're one of the groups of folks who helped repair and helped save healthcare back in 2013, for example, for those of you who are familiar with that. On the private sector side, we have several Fortune 200 companies, and we will address issues such as supply chain software issues or how to enable military service members to move without many of the hassles that they normally experience by developing software that's really about being human-centered and human-focused. At this point, we're about 132 people and we are a remote-first company, so we are in, people in about 30 different states across the United States and have been that way since 2011. So, we have a lot of different things that we do with our company, and we'll get a lot more into that as well, but that's just the summary.

Max: Thank you. Thank you. So, you hire engineers, mainly.

Everett: Yeah, so good. Thank you for bringing that up. So, the people that we mostly hire are actually across a range of disciplines. From research and design to application engineering, infrastructure engineering, product delivery, because you can build a thing but you gotta be able to stand it up and make sure it delivers to the customer, as well as a lot of the support and operational disciplines as well.

Max: Okay, and the remote culture since 2011, well, great for you for having that foresight, but now that great competitive edge is gone, everybody is doing remote so you can't use that as your main selling pitch anymore. Although of course, there are different levels of remote, and if you've been at it for 10 years, you're gonna be Level 3+. What are some new tricks or hacks that you have worked on recently to give you a new competitive edge, considering that remote isn't enough to stand out anymore?

Everett: Yeah, so I think the main one is that there is a difference between somebody who’s just doing remote, who's had a very strong in-office culture. It takes a while to figure that out and we have built this up to solve various problems for a decade now and so, the communications structures, the documentation structures, how we hire, who we hire from, the networks that we can hire from. All those have been a decade established. So, there's still a lot of built-in knowledge and mistakes that we've made that we can deploy as far as a competitive advantage. It's things that people will feel in some ways with regard to other companies. In terms of things that we do that might be, I wouldn't call them hacks, but as solutions to challenges, we have a really strong documentation culture and it sounds real boring until you think about how many things were in your office that you sort of just picked up because it was on a whiteboard somewhere or you could lean over someone and get a synopsis of the last meeting, or you could overhear it if there was an open office. If a documentation culture isn't established, who is gonna take notes, how is that being done, where are those published, are they done in a way that everybody can understand, are action items really clear, and are deadlines really clear? You can all of a sudden have a meeting, yeah it was all great, and then nothing happens. And it's probably because there's some missing pieces with documentation, so I can't emphasize how important that is for anybody, for any company, but that's something that we're practiced at. So, I think that's just one off the top of my head.

Max: Yeah, yeah. When hiring remote first, you would think you need people who are warm and great in front of the camera and fun to hang out with, but as it turns out you need people who are good with pen and paper and a keyboard and who are very meticulous about notetaking. I've found the same thing, my company is also fully remote and yeah, it's absolutely essential because it's asynchronous communication as well, you're working on three different time zones, so you might save a lot of time this way.

Everett: And even to go further, whne you say you broaden it to talk about asynchronous communication, that's visual communication as well, can you draw diagrams and so forth that are easily shareable to show process steps. So, for folks who are in talent acquisition, clearly, it's a pipeline. How is that visually represented so that different groups can understand and plug in at the right time? We go through a lot of iterations of that.

Max: So, the transparency theme, before we get into the touchy subject of salary, you talked about documentation. So, I assume you also sharing with candidates everything from the leave policy to benefits to how you guys run meetings. You just dump it all on the internet and let them kind of sift through it?

Everett: Um, well.

Max: Maybe dump is not the right word.

Everett: No, no. It's available to them. What I would say though is, we do have, you know we have GitHub repo where we have a lot of our policies people can read through and so forth. But I think one of the things that we do explicitly is we put our values and we put our operating principles on our website. My co-founders and I spent six weeks every Wednesday after work for three hours a time, honing those values really early in our history. The reason is because we knew the benefit of having strong cultures. And a good, clear, actionable value statement or operating principle statement is such a foundation of a great culture, in my opinion, and in particular, it repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones, before they ever get into the pipeline. And I mean repel the wrong people is people who aren't a good match, they may be brilliant at another company but not for us. Everybody needs to know that as early as possible. So, we have the benefit of people seeing and say hey this is a place that I want to be.

Max: Who are you trying to repel? It's a hard one. Because I know you're coming from a point of view of inclusivity as well, and so, who you wanna repel sounds like a gotcha question.

Everett: Yeah, no no not at all. I'm happy to answer that. People who aren't interested in communicating. In a remote space, great communication written and verbal, and now visual, but written and verbal, is really important because it's highly collaborative team environment. We work with clients, so if someone can't communicate very well or doesn't want to communicate very well, they probably aren't gonna be very successful. So that's one type of person who might be successful in a different environment that's less dependent on…

Max: So, if we're talking about, let's say, an engineer, it's somebody who says things I value that most is being left alone and not having to have too many meetings and something like that, would that be an indicator that this is somebody who is not a strong communicator, those kinds of signals?

Everett: Yes, very much so. And again, they might be successful in a different place, but the ability to persuade, to engage, to take feedback, et cetera is critical for us. And so...

Max: The engineers, they'll get a job. We don't have to worry about them, they'll find work. So, sharing everything on GitHub, policies and so on, sharing who you don't wanna hire, of course, sharing your values. Those Wednesday evenings discussing values with your co-founders sounds like they were probably a lot of fun to go through anyway, right? It was a happy-hour Wednesday?

Everett: Yeah, no, actually it was after that. We were the facilitator and we worked really really hard.

Max: Oh, it wasn't beers at the pub?

Everett: No, sure wasn't actually. That's a less sexy story but it was in a breather room that didn't have any windows, and us just slugging through.

Max: Oh boy.

Everett: It’s the things like that.

Max: This goes to be an insight into your company culture that I'm a little uncomfortable with, sounds like a lot of work, lot of whiteboards. Cool. So, let's get into the thick of it. The sharing, the transparency on salaries, which I believe is what you're doing, right, and I've heard other companies experiment with that with mixed results. Is that what you're doing, or your salaries are open for the public to share or open internally to share?

Everett: Good question because it's important to clarify that. So, the first thing is our salaries are transparent internally. Buffer did it externally, we wanted to make it transparent internally. So, that's a clear distinction. And maybe this is an opportunity to say why we even embarked on this in the first place.

Max: Yes please

Everett: We, as a black CEO with my co-founders being a white male CTO and a white female COO who is also, both of whom are highly technical, we had a diverse founding team to begin with, and so we were very committed to having a diverse company as well. And we knew there were great people, engineering, design, product, etcetera, across the spectrum of all different kinds of backgrounds. So, we committed to that early. One of the things we noticed and one of the things that's well-documented is that there's still pay disparities with the same job between men and women, between black and white, or Latina, Latino, Latinx, and white, et cetera. All those are out there. And I heard stories as we're thinking about this, that even well-intentioned companies, if someone negotiated 5% higher than the next person for the same job, happens all the time, if those two people performed at exactly the same level and got bumps proportionately from their salary, in five years, you'll have a very big disparity and what would happen is people would find out, people would inquire. There were lots of stories in Google and other places where people looked around and realized that they're being paid a lot less. That's bad for everybody. And the notion of being at a company where you're working really hard shoulder-to-shoulder with your colleagues, but you're not sure whether they're being paid the same, more, or less, that creates some energy that we wanted to avoid. We've been part of those situation before.

Max: It's also perfect in the remote environment where trust-building is harder to do.

Everett: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that but that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. So, we really started to do a lot of investigation, we started to do a lot of research and tried to figure out well how would we address this equity issue. Is it about making sure people can negotiate differently, is it about trying to attract different types of people? We found that the thing that we wanted to land on was just make the pay equitable to begin with and if we made a mistake, how do you make sure that it's transparent enough that you can correct it. So, we did a lot of research, and I can tell you about the process, but that is really the origin story of salary transparency. It's about trying to create an equitable working environment for everyone.

Max: I remember the guys at Buffer who had experimented with it, I think they had applied a ratio based on location, because cost of living is smaller in Oklahoma than it is in San Francisco, and people wanted to be, yeah. And I find the argument to be a little bit flawed in the sense that for a lot of work, like who cares if you're in Oklahoma or in California. But from the employees' standpoint, of course they do care. The taxes are different, cost of living is different. I guess there's a debate to be had there internally. How have you resolved it at Truss?

Everett: We pay various salaries, mostly because we originated here. But the same argument is true, if you're contributing and you are at the same level and you're creating the same value, why would I pay you less because you live in a lesser cost of living. It's not about where you live it's about what you can contribute. And we have some marginal hire cost basis as a result, and I think one of the things they'd consider is whether folks living in areas where it's a lower cost of living, that's pretty attractive. And being able to retain those folks, and if they have a network of people that are in that area, and say hey I'm being treated really well, my salary is transparent, I'm being paid in San Francisco rates, and it's a good company I work for and we have really interesting work, you all gotta come and check them out. That starts to develop these local networks and we found, in fact, over the last couple years that that has been an embedded strength of ours in certain areas.

Max: You paint a rosy picture, has there been some push back internally when this was released and if somebody wants to embark on this transparency journey, what kind of obstacles that they need to prepare for?

Everett: Sure. So, I'll deviate slightly and say that I write a lot about this. I have a book coming out, called Moved to the Edge, Declare it Center, coming out on Wiley in February or March 2022, and I go through the process in detail about how we came to this decision, what process we used, and what the outcomes were, and what we did to make it systemic. So, Moving to the Edge is about moving to the edge of knowledge and uncertainty and unknowns in complex situations and Declare it Center is about how you create systems around those learnings so it then becomes a part of your normal operations. It just becomes a fish describing water, it's just normal. So briefly, the whole thing took about 10 months, and the first thing we did was to figure out what is the area of highest risk. And the area of highest risk is everybody's gonna leave, so let's just ask that question. If we made salaries transparent, would you leave or how did you feel about it? Basically, all but one person was very curious and very up for that journey, and the other person who wasn't was like, I have some questions but let's keep going. So, what we did was basically start to look at what is the next area of risk. Okay, are we figuring out the right problem? Is this the right problem? And so that's where a lot of the research happen. Then we went to, okay we are solving the right problem. What's the next step? Well, we have to have good ways of making things equitable across different positions. Oh, we need a performance rubric. That took the most time, months. Because ours was junk, it was just not good enough. And that's hard if you're doing that for the first time. And we have to map salaries to that. Mapping salaries to rubrics, I'm sure everybody knows, is not cheap and not easy. The key thing we did during this stage is we involved employees. So, it wasn't just the leaders, it was people from all different groups across practices at different levels. So we had committees going out and researching certain pieces of this. One the advantage is they have different perspectives, and they can bring different questions. Second, they get engaged in the solution. So, if you participated and you know that you've had a voice, raised your concerns, or raised advantages, you're more likely to be able to be down with whatever...

Max: Be onboard.

Everett: That's right.

Max: I imagine this becomes a selling point for your company amongst the people who are seeking fairness, who are particularly have fairness as a high value for them. Any other ways in which this has affected your recruitment. This transparency value, how do you quantify its effectiveness?

Everett: Not sure if quantify is something that we've attempted to do, although we're fairly data-driven about things, but I do think that we, there's sort of, people talk about being transparent in their culture, we do transparency, and salary transparency is one way you can clearly demonstrate there's a commitment to this. Reflects in a bunch of places, but we're putting our money where our mouth is. I think the second aspect that is quantifiable is, so towards the end when we were trying to map salaries and then we had to say, well where are people relative to where their bands are, what salary are we paying them now, and what types of salary should we be paying them? In some cases, we were under, awesome we get to pay them more, that's always great news, right. Everybody celebrates when that happens. There's some we were overpaying and so the choice becomes well should we move the down or not. We said, look if we overpay them that's on us, as the leadership team, and that's not their fault, that's our fault. So, we're gonna hold their band, we're gonna make sure that their performance catches up to where their band is, but we're not gonna penalize anybody for being overpaid because of our mistake.

Max: This had a financial impact, obviously, initially. But you're getting that money back in a way, that investment that you've made you're getting it into differentiation, as an employer I imagine.

Everett: And I think in retention as well. I mean obviously we all know that people leaving for any reason as a particular cause, so they extend to which people are participating in a solution that is benefitting them and benefitting others with a lens towards fairness tends to have people be willing to stay at the company.

Max: Everett, how do you set your salary?

Everett: Same, and actually this year has been us really thinking about the leadership rubric because as we've grown the definition and the expansion of leadership roles has been something we were a little bit behind on. So, we did the same thing, we set up from market standards and figure out where we are on assessment. We do a self-assessment and then we have managers or peers do assessments and then map it like that.

Max: There was one thing I was thinking of maybe implementing in my company which is what the Singapore government does is it sets the salary of the prime minister based on the average salary of the top five CEOs.

Everett: Oh, no kidding, I didn't know.

Max: Yeah, because they wanna equalize between the private and the public sector and that way it's transparent and they're very well-paid. I wouldn't do that obviously, I'd be like, the average of some of the top salaries in my company, maybe, would be one way to do it. But anyway, that's for another discussion. I'll get to my final question which I ask everyone on the show which is everybody makes hiring mistakes, and I won’t believe you if you tell me you haven't, but if you could focus on one example in particular that broke your heart at the time, and help some of our listeners avoid such heartbreaking mistake by recounting the steps.

Everett: Yeah, I would agree with your assessment, if you can't think of one, then hmm. So, the one that's coming to mind is more recent, and as I said we expanded the company, we had some new exec hires coming and we did not, well, they left before we thought they would otherwise, in one case couple months, another case a little under a year. And given the investment and given the time to get them onboard and to find them in the hopes of really being a different part of the company, that was incredibly disappointing, and to me personally, embarrassing. What we started to realize was, and this was the core of the mistake, we under-invested in onboarding, we under-invested in the type of onboarding. So, one across all of our positions, we weren't as consistent about saying, here's what the company's about, here's where you fit in, et cetera, but doing it on repeat because people come from different places and different cultures. And it takes a while to kind of un-school the previous assumptions about the way the world works and get people addressing and reacting to the way this world works. That's multiplied by a hundred with a leader. And we were measuring onboarding with a few meetings, a couple weeks of training, etcetera etcetera, and then basically you're good, right. And that's big, big mistake. As I've talked to other CEOs and other folks, they're saying, you know, you're measuring onboarding in quarters not in weeks, you're measuring onboarding relationship team to gel in a year or 18 months, not in quarters. That changed our focus to make it longer, changed our focus to being much more embedded and much more personal time to really understand where people are, what they're challenged by, et cetera. The other thing that we have learned is we have to make sure that the rest of the organization is also onboarded to the presence of a new leader. You're getting a new leader to take you to the next level, they're gonna bring and do different things than we had done in the past. What you got here, doesn't get you there, right. That means there's some change that has to happen, so there's some change that has to happen. So, there's a change management component that we completely underestimated for the culture and for the rest of the organization. So those are the things that I learned very much the hard way. One onboarding much longer and much deeper with your leadership team and then the change management process with the rest of your company, both are critical and do it over a long period of time.

Max: No shortcuts there. Just because you're talking to an experienced leader who's done it a hundred times before doesn't mean this time's gonna be the same. So, very good lesson. Thanks for sharing, Everett. Thanks for coming on the show.

Everett: You are very welcome, and thanks for your questions. And again, I'm learning how to do this, give a plug to a) Truss, we are absolutely hiring, if you like what you hear, and then second, the book is coming out, it's called Move to the Edge, Declare it Center, if you wanna hear more in detail about how we went remote and how we did salary transparency, I laid that all out in the context of making decisions in uncertainty and unknowns.

Max: Right. I'll put the book in the links when it comes out or for pre-orders if it's available with the show. Thanks, Everett.

Everett: Thank you.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I've got a world traveler, a man who I first interacted with in Malaysia a few years ago and who has since moved industries and has worked in entertainment, in games today, and a few other, and oiling gas before, and is today the Director of People and Legal for Big Viking Games. Welcome to the show, Bob. Mr. Bob St-Jacques, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Welcome to the show, Bob.

Bob: All right, well thank you, Max, happy to be here.

Max: Pleasure to have you. And of course, we interacted with Bob when he was leading the people function at a company called 7Geese which got acquired by Paycor which is a leader in OKR methodologies. So, for the HR performance enthusiasts that are listening, they'll be familiar with OKR methodology and it's a great foundation for start-ups. So, anyway, that's a little bit about your background but perhaps, Bob, I'd like to ask you to walk us back to the early days of how you ended up working in talent acquisition and dealing with people. Was it by design or by accident?

Bob: It was by design because I had a very good mentor and it was, going back a few years, 1992 and I was going to get a master’s in industrial relations with Cornell and my mentor suggested, he said, what do you want to do? I said, I wanna do HR. He said, no no no that's not gonna work. He said what you need to do is pick a problem. Pick something that you wanna pour your heart and soul into and I said, well HR is basically broken, right? 91, 92, there was a recession going on in North America. I was working in Parliament at the time, so we were holding hearings, and nobody was happy. Employees, employers, communities would lay off. Nobody was happy. So, I said, hey look this is one of those problems that, like climate change, it's big and I can't fix all of it, but maybe I can fix something. So, he said, look if you wanna do that, go to law school and practice employment law then go into HR because you will spend the first five years learning from other people's mistakes. So that's exactly what I did. I went to law school, practiced employment law for five years and then got hired by my client. And basically, what I've done since 2000 is work on transformation efforts. So, in the beginning, they were turned around. So, I worked for a client who's called the Lens Crafters and they were in pretty rough shape, but if anybody wonders why I'm an optimist two and a half years later they're number 58 on the Fortune 100 best companies to work for list. Then I worked at Delta Airlines after 9/11, so I turned them around, right. So, this is why my optimism comes in. Moved to Dubai, things got a little bit more difficult because I had to help transform companies that were in scale-up and that were already growing about a hundred percent every year and how do you tell those folks, you're leaving money on the table you need to do more. So that was a further challenge and so I helped a lot of high growth organizations in Dubai, all over the Middle East, South Asia and Africa as well, worked in oil and gas in Nigeria for example. And then I went to the Far East and started focusing on tech, tech high-growth companies, tech scale-ups in that area and I've done the same thing here in Vancouver. So, the central theme is I've kept to my mission which is I want to help HR. And that's what I've done throughout my whole career. Sometimes, as you mentioned, being an OKR expert, spreading the love and the gospel of it, of OKRs, and sometimes there's goals more specific toward the company.

Max: I think it's good advice for the young people to walk towards the problem, not away from the problem. You see an industry that's broken and a company that has issues and, you know, don't run away from it. That's an opportunity to make an impact and to work on a whole career duration on fixing something. I can empathize with that on my end. I saw a lot of broken things that I'm still trying to fix on high volume recruitment. So, maybe a word about Big Viking Games, your current company, which I understand has gone through some transformation over the last few months since you've been there for six months now. And we're gonna talk about how the talent acquisition strategy has been transformed to expand the talent pool. But can you set the scene for us, what does this company do?

Bob: Yeah, so, Big Viking Games was started at, well I could tell you, it was 10 years ago in about a month. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary which is a pretty big deal. Only 4% of companies make it to 10 years so we had a fun event for everybody, and we managed to bring a bunch of people together. Now the challenge was six months ago is that the company had been making games but had been kinda flat-lined and just kinda been bumbling along for the past three four years. And so, they were looking to revive and expand. And the interesting piece is that in the gaming industry it's usually boom and bust all the time, right. Hire a bunch of people to make a new game, I'll make some money, oh you sold it off and then you drop the right number of employees and the revenue goes like this, it's big yoyo. So, what they decided was that's not sustainable and that's not great for employees. Employees in the gaming industry will tell you, yeah, I've been laid off and hired, right. You look at gaming LinkedIn profiles and they've all had 14 jobs in 10 years and it's not because they're job-hoppers, it's been most of the time because they've been laid off. So, the company decided to move towards a live operations model. What does that mean? It means they don't create their own games, they either expand things that they have, and they typically buy intellectual property and then expand it and run it. So that's a big switch from making games boom-and-bust to just kind of like very linear growth. And so, it's a challenge because you need different types of people, different types of mindset in that area.

Max: Basically, in the oil and gas, it's like moving from being a builder to an operator.

Bob: Correct. And so, there was the challenge. We need different types of individuals, different types of talents. and we needed to grow, and we were looking at acquisitions and so on. So fast forward, six months, what we have found ourselves is before we were in one vertical where we had a Facebook/Web games there which you know was alot so we had really high MPS scores. 70% of our players play our game 27 out of 28 days which is pretty impressive for games right. So, we got this loyal fan base. But now, we've attached, we've done an acquisition, we've expanded on a couple areas and so as folks will see throughout December, we will be putting out press releases in these areas. So, where we were in one verticals, we will not be in four verticals starting in January as we close these deals. So that's created some challenges and opportunity areas as well because we got new places we're expanding into and we're also expanding our current offerings. So, another piece of good news and we just got it less than 24 hours ago, again talk about the power transformation. When I joined, the Glassdoor score for the company was 2.2, when I said things are bumbling along, it was a bit in rough shape. Yesterday we were just notified by the Great Place To Work Institute that we are certified by them as a great place to work. So, when people talk about transformation is too hard, and I love the phrase that you used, running towards the problem. So, if you look at things as an opportunity in terms of aligning people behind the business strategy, OKRs and things like that, once you get alignment and you clarified the strategy for everybody, employees tend to follow along, right, to support you in that area, and that's what we found.

Max: Congrats on the Great Place To Work and the transformation, I mean it's not a turn-around, but it's kind of a pivot for Big Viking Games and of course it does sound like a nicer environment for people who want a bit of stability after they changed 14 different jobs in 10 years. That could work your nerves out a little bit. Let's turn to the topic of talent acquisition and you changed the process there as well which you were telling me before we started recording. The testing has started to effect, the use of automated assessments, has changed the composition of your talent people and allowed you to expand to new talent pools.

Bob: Correct. So, what we did was, again, because of the challenges that we face in terms of going into new areas we needed new and different talent, is that we decided to turn the whole selection testing paradigm on its head. Usually, people use these tools as deselection tools. So how do we get folks to get them out of the process. We test them and then that's it, they're out and so on. We turned that around. What we wanted to do was opt people in. Let me give you an example. Here's like, we were down to the basics. If we look at a situation where we're looking for a developer, an artist, and so on. Nowhere in the job description does it require these individuals to be excellent at creating resumes. And not to pick on developers, they're not, they're really really bad at writing resumes, right, and showing their skills set and so on and so forth. So, what we said was, you know, we get hundreds of applications, some case thousands of applications per position, you try to read through them the best you can, right. Most people they do a good job of communicating their skills, they tend to get interviews and so on. But what we did was like we're missing people; we're missing some diamonds in the rough. So, what we did was when we saw, we went beyond, right, when somebody was working at a grocery store, but like went down the resume and saw that they had worked as a developer before, right, and for whatever reason they're working at a grocery store now. But like fine. So, what we do is we tested these people in the beginning. And the quid pro quo is we said, look we'll test your own skills, resilience, and general ability, and you know what, we will give you the test, we will give you the feedback, we will give you your scores, the test, the report, everything, just work with us on this. Now here's what happened, if we would have taken one of those CVs which is in pretty rough shape and give it to the VP of Engineering, you would have said, are you kidding me, I can't. Now what happens is if this person's score is very high, intelligence, problem solving, resilience, and skills set, we can say, look this is a CV it's not so great, but look here we have documented proof that this person should be interviewed and move on to the next level.

Max: So, the first time the candidate is speaking to somebody, a recruiter or somebody from your team, they've already done the assessments, how long does that assessment typically take. Half an hour, an hour?

Bob: Yeah, no more than an hour, right, cause there's four components to it and then they're about 10-15 minutes each.

Max: So, then the big question for a lot of employers is, you know this is a very high demand market. I'm sure for hiring artists and developers is very hard as well. How is that not shrinking your talent pool to a very miniscule amount. Sounds great, you know, of course, you get an assessment done before an interview, but that's not how recruitment used to be done. You used to, like, hit the phone and hunt these people. So how you filling the top of the funnel.

Bob: In terms of the top of the funnel, those are coming through via ads and so on. So top of the funnel is fine for us. The important piece here is that when we were talking to the folks at various testing regimes, a lot of them said, when we said, hey we wanna offer the test back to the candidate, and they're like why? And I said, well that's the quid pro quo, that's the magic there. Because people will do things if there's something in it for them. Now there are, we use, for example, I don't know if I can say it maybe you could cut it out later if I'm not allowed to, but we use Test Gorilla. Test Gorilla has a certain amount of cache and individuals who take their test are allowed to use their results and give it to other employers.

Max: I tried them out. I think they're great. Test Gorilla very easy to use and they have a very wide selection. They're a Netherlands-based company, all self-service, easy to use with APIs to integrate. So, love it.

Bob: So that's what we do, right. So, we give people something and that's how we keep the testing level quite high. Now here's the interesting piece because we look at data, so I'm also a fellow in the Center for Evidence-based Management so I am really big on data, right. I wear a watch, I keep track, I can tell you what my macros were last Tuesday at 3pm. I am a fanatic about measuring everything. So, what we did was we said, okay what happened to people who went through the process. So applied or head-hunted, interview, tech test, our very difficult tech test versus applied, Test Gorilla, interview, tech test. What we found was that the uptake on our tech test during our traditional process was 50% five zero. When they took the quick test, got something for it, did the interview and had to do a very in-depth tech test, we're looking at about 85-90%. So, we nearly doubled the people. So even though we've added an extra level, again it's the counter-intuitive piece and this is why you need to look at data. Because if you were to ask me, I would have said, yeah, I don't think this will work. But it's important to measure what you do and put your scientist hat on and say, this is an experiment, it can blow up in my face or it can produce the most wonderful thing every. What we found is because we start by giving something, yes, they're investing their time but they're getting something back for it. People feel like, okay, you know, they continue with the process

Max: How do you communicate to them that they're getting something? How do you let them know that they're gonna get something back?

Bob: So, when we let them know that they've been selected for the initial test, we tell them, hey look, here's the advantages, you get to keep your test, here's the feedback, here's sample reports, and with some of the skills in tech testing, they're transferable and other employers accept.

Max: Yeah, they can get like an act of accreditation that they can put on their profile or something.

Bob: Correct, yeah, and it'll be verified by Test Gorilla.

Max: Cool. Well, I certainly think you're not alone in making this happen right now. There's a change in candidate behaviors worldwide where they're getting used to it basically. There was an intuition from the TA community that this is too much, but that intuition is being tested and minds are changing on this topic, including mine. I can't believe the completion rates that I hear about for test that take 45 minutes to an hour and I'm shocked myself. Because I always assume that with the shrinking attention span of the young generations that we know about that this is something that they would not do. But well, that's why you gotta test your assumption.

Bob: Yeah, and part, this came from one of my recruiters who tends to skew towards the younger generation, and he said, look people are taking these Buzzfeed and other quizzes all the time. There are millions of people, right. And they get a report back. You're a part of this house in Harry Potter and you're this type of potato, and you're this type of vegetable. You know, these people take those quizzes all the time. He said, look it's a higher level and it's something that's verified from a real company, like Test Gorilla. They got something that can help the in their job search and/or career and/or professional life. One other thing that I wish I could say, oh yeah yeah you know we totally planned this, again, because I look at the numbers and what we found by focusing on skills rather than ability to write a resume or CV is that for the past six months, 43% of our new hires are women and 52% are what we call here in Canada BIPOCs, so black, indigenous or people of color. So, again compared that to the rest of the gaming and tech industry, especially here in North America, we're doing quite well, we're on the right track. And I wish I could have said, oh we planned this, you know we did reach to certain group, you know, in those areas, but what we found again by focusing more on skills and abilities and less on the resume, we ended up with a much more diverse workforce.

Max: Congratulations. That's the right way to go about it. Focus on competency, give everybody a chance. Glad to see it's paying off and helping you increase your DI metrics. There's maybe another element which is the fact that you're breaking down some of the borders and some of the geographical boundaries of your search and you were telling me how you're leveraging Canada as part of your employer brand. Can you share that story?

Bob: Yeah, when the pandemic hit, the decision was made early on, and we basically cancelled our leases with our offices. We had two studios, one in London, Ontario which is about two hours west of Toronto and one is downtown Toronto, and so gone, studios gone. So, they went all in on transitioning to 100% remote. Again, sounds very good in theory but everybody was learning on the go, so to speak, and you know you've seen all the stories from everywhere from LinkedIn to all kinds of magazines.

Max: I've seen my own rental bills go down and I'm very happy about it.

Bob: Yeah. So, the thing is then it's taking a lot of that and investing in different pieces. So, in terms of talent acquisition, what is 100% in what we call Remote Awesome. It's a campaign that we started where you're free to move about the world. So, it's telling our Canadian employees, look you're not stuck in Canada. If you wanna go work in Barbados or Mexico for the winter, you could do that too. In terms of recruitment, though, what's happened is we've done two fronts. We said, look, you can come work for us, we work on a concept of core hours, and we do asynchronous work, and you can stay where you are. You could then stay where you are for six months and come to Canada if you want. Or if you want to come to Canada, we will help facilitate your move to Canada. So we tend to take a wide open approach and say, it's up to you. People are at different points of their lives, so some folks come to work for us and boom, either we start the process fairly quickly and other folks will say, yeah next summer, you know, basically July 2022 is when I'd like to apply, it'll take x amount of time, that'll be perfect. So, we, by focusing on, hey either we’re able to work based on your interest. Staying where you are, including asynchronous work so you're not working from 11PM to 7AM, some sort of horrible shift. You know maybe like for example, I start work at 5AM because east coast time and we have exec meetings in the morning. Why do we have that? Because some of our executive team is in India and they've been working the large part of the day, right. So, it's that kind of flexibility that we can offer people and say, no everybody in the world has to work eastern standard time hours. That's not the case. And so, we offer flexibility, stay where you are, move later or move now. And so, with that approach, we've managed to get some amazing talents. So, we've grown from employees in two countries when I've joined, we're now up to 14 countries.

Max: And their contracts are, some of them are local contracts and some of them are Canadian contracts and some of them are consultant contracts?

Bob: Exactly. So, it depends on how long they're gonna spend. So, if you're on your way here, it's a consultant contract, right. So, it helps with integration so we could show immigration, we know who they are, they've worked with us for a little while, bring them in. If they wanna stay there permanently, then we use a local vendor that we pay people through and so that makes sure that all the right deductions are made, and they get access to all the social benefits. For example, France, Netherlands, and the UK. I think in France I think there was like 27 deductions from an individual's salary. So that was interesting to see. But again ---

Max: Now you know why I left the country.

Bob: Yeah. But that's managed for us. So, we just pay one entity an amount for an employee, and they handle all the deductions and payments.

Max: There are a lot of vendors helping with this domain now and I suppose people can reach out to you if they need some recommendations on how to source the right vendor here. Have you had a discussion internally about having local payrates? I mean, you said people can work from anywhere. So, I guess everybody is paid, there's no differences based on where you live and their cost of living. Usually, people have different pay scales for different, let's say, geographies.

Bob: No, we run on CTC, which is concept called cost-to-company. So, we look at it, right, so some have higher social legislation requirements, we'll call it that, some have lesser, right. But at the end of the day, what we look at is what the company pays out overall. So that people are paid about the same no matter where they are in the world. Again, we focus on skills, competencies, and so where you are doesn't matter because we do have a fairly tough and rigorous hiring system. So, if you do get through it, we know you're qualified, we know you're able to produce a certain amount of work which has a certain amount of value and we will pay you, just like we pay everybody else that's in a similar position to you no matter where you are.

Max: Great, that's great. We in my company also universal pay scales and I'm trying to ring them up to San Francisco standards, but some people on LinkedIn were saying we're not as generous as we should be, but we're working up to it. If the whole world could be paid like San Francisco that'd be awesome. We're working towards that. We're reaching the end of our conversation and there's one question I'd like to ask everybody that comes on the show which is to go back to a hiring mistake that you've made in the past that has stayed with you a little bit and that you had time to reflect on so that you can share with the listeners the lesson that they can take from bad hiring mistake. Of course, I'm not asking for individual name but rather how you took a misstep that one time.

Bob: Yes, and so I'm gonna go a little bit against the grain, because I know I've highlighted that I tend to focus on data and information. So, one time I went through a process I was hiring a fairly senior member of my team, Global Recruitment Director, and you know we're getting close, and it was very exciting. When I was doing that, I was asking for references, and when I talked to these references, it was very, something was off. And I'm a lawyer and I could just ask people all kinds of questions, usually you could get them to admit the most horrific thing they did when they were thirteen years old. And I thought I was very good, but something was eating at me, like, I'm missing something, like something's wrong here in this area. And it turned out that I was not as prepared as I could be for those reference checks. Three months later, that individual turned into a nightmare on many fronts, internal, external. It did a lot of reputational damage to the company from that individual. And it's one of those pieces where I've learned where I was a little bit cocky, and I didn't listen to my gut. So rather than be the experimenter, you know what I mean, something came up, I should've asked more questions and I didn't because I was in a hurry and i wanted to find this person, and this individual seemed great, right. And I cut corners, didn't listen to my gut and ended up coming back to be quite embarrassing for me.

Max: That's a tough one right because you said you're the data guy and the guts got nothing to do with it, we're trying to silence that thing. But in this case, something was wrong with the reference check. Can you expand on that a bit? What were maybe some signals?

Bob: It was the guarded nature, right. I talked at high levels, we tend to be quite positive, right. So, when you talk to people and say, okay you know hey I'm going to be managing this individual what kind of development do you think that they need? And it was two references where there was a pause and I thought that was fascinating. On that pause, I should've jumped on that more. But it was ---

Max: This person needs therapy. Okay. All right. So, listen to the pause when you're doing your reference checks because obviously nobody likes to say bad things about their former employees. It can be a treacherous territory so you gotta be very attentive. Good lesson for everyone to remember. Thanks, Bob, for coming on the show and sharing your experience in expanding your talent pool and transforming the recruitment process of Viking Games. It's been a pleasure.

Bob: All right. Well, thank you for having me on.

Max: Pleasure.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm excited to welcome Bas van de Haterd, and not the way he was referred to by the great podcaster Chad Sowash as, well, I don't know, you tell us Bas, how he butchered your name, but Bas, hopefully I get it right. Bas is a professional snoop, is his title on LinkedIn and how he introduces himself. He's a consultant for the talent acquisition professionals who are looking to revisit and improve their process, and today, we agreed we were gonna have a conversation on the world of assessments. And notably, assessments, everybody's been looking into assessments in 2021 and deciding, is this the right time to revisit? So, we wanna dig into Bas's brain to find out when is the right time to change your assessment strategy and what are some case studies that we can learn from. So, welcome to the show Bas.

Bas: Awesome to be here, awesome to be here, Max.

Max: And sorry to hear about your American friend Chad butchering your name. You were telling me, Bas, for those who don't know your work, you're very present on social media, so, maybe, where can they meet you on the internet? Where's the good place to interact with Bas?

Bas: On personal interaction, it's usually LinkedIn. If you just wanna listen to my views, The Talent Savvy Podcast is a great one to subscribe to as well. And of course, I am avid member of [unintelligible] Recruiting Brainfood Group by Hung Lee which we've also digitally met before, Max. I tried to keep it down a little because I was too active there according to some people, but it's a great source of inspiration for me and I try to add a lot of information on assessments and strategies.

Max: In valuable resource, I've made it a mandatory reading for anybody in my company as well. The Recruiting Brainfood by Hung, great source, and also an active community on Facebook. So, great place to interact with Bas, and what was the name of the podcast again?

Bas: Talent Savvy

Max: The Talent Savvy Podcast, so you can find Bas more for more insights there. So, let's jump into the topic and let's talk about assessments. That's a hot topic in 2021, as I was saying, because it seems like a lot of companies have decided to deal with numbers, finally. The balance has changed a little bit, we have more candidates and less recruiters during a part of last year at least. And so, naturally, assessments came to the fore and people, a lot of vendors have also appeared in the last couple of years that are credible vendors that can do all kinds of assessment. I've had a few of them on the show. So, what's been your, you are like, from a consulting standpoint, are companies revisiting the way they do assessments and are they coming in and asking you for help, of that sort, or do you have to really shape those discussions good that you're just happier with? What works, don't break what works and we have an assessment based on it and we need to change. Are you pulling or are they pushing?

Bas: No, I'm usually being asked, you know, can you help us? The downside is usually in the budget there is no room for an external consultant, so, I'm most often get asked for free advice and as soon as I'm like, well, how am I gonna make any money off this, and they're like yeah, we never thought of that. But you do see a lot of companies now revisiting their assessment strategies. I actually do see a lot of difference in there. So, in my home country of The Netherlands, a lot of governments are looking at it, both national as well as in the local level because they've now read so many stories in part published by me and a lot of other people, how assessments done well can actually help your diversity and inclusion and be more fair in your selection process, and for governments that's of course very important. So, there's a lot of governments who have actually done amazing cases which is really interesting to see. You know, the most traditional organizations you'll probably think of being the most innovative and piloting cool, proven, and new technologies in a really smart way. And actually, now also, and I love that about them, they feel the need to also go externally with their data with their knowledge, and just share what they did and share what the results are. So that's how case studies are coming out. A lot of them government related. I see, interestingly enough, Scallops don't see a mis-hire as being part of the process, they see a mis-hire as something they need to improve. A lot of Scallops are ditching the resume as their first point of entry very quickly because they have one or two mis-hires, and they're like, yeah this cost us a lot of money and we have a culture in this company that if something fails, that's not a problem, but we should learn from it. So, they don't consider mis-hires as something that is part of the process, that's unavoidable, like a lot of recruiters do. They see it as, okay how do we prevent it from happening again? And you really see an awesome development there and so small companies are implementing all kinds of assessments. Sometimes good, sometimes not, because as you said there's a lot of new vendors on there. A lot of them are awesome, some of them are complete and total crap, to be honest.

Max: I'm totally fascinated by what you just said on governments jumping into the foreign, like, innovating, initiated by a consciousness and an awareness on fairness and inclusivity. So, some strong innovation has been driven by this sort of alleviated political discussion which has therefore push the buyer to say, okay well we're gonna remove some of the human error.

Bas: Yes, and a lot of them, most of them, let's be very honest, try to do it the traditional way. Oh, we'll do a gender-bias training, and that will at least check the box. But in some cases, for example one of my major clients is the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they now have a Head of Recruitment who isn't originally from HR, he just got in there, he worked in an embassy for 25 years. And he was just looking at the selection process and said to me at an event, listen I think it's really strange how we do it, and I'm like, yeah, I totally agree with you. Okay, cool, we're gonna redo this. And he was looking at it with fresh eyes, and of course, there was some push back from the recruiters at first, but we've always done it like this. He's like, does that mean that it's good, the fact that we've always done it? So, he asked all the questions which you should ask. History doesn't mean it's good, it doesn't mean it's bad either, but we need to revisit our original thoughts and they were basically sending the last candidate to an assessment, because they said, listen we need to have an assessment in there et cetera et cetera.

Max: Like a QA check at the end of the production line.

Bas: Exactly. And he literally said like, listen about, almost nobody gets rejected by the assessment, so we're basically spending a lot of money. I'm getting an external company to sign off on what we've already decided.

Max: That sounds like governments, sounds just right.

Bas: Yeah, and this guy, although he's been in government forever, he said, now you're telling me, because he saw one of my lectures when we, it was pre-covid when we were still able to go to events and stuff like that, and he said, and now you're telling me boss that by moving it to a different part of the process, basically putting it all the way up front, for the same amount of money, or maybe even less, I can have two or three or four times quality? I'm like, yeah pretty much. He's like, let's do this. Let's do this. He says, I have no idea what it's about. People in my team, if they had an idea, they should have spoken up a long time ago, so obviously they don't have an idea. Please help us.

Max: You raised something very important here. You said, for the same price or maybe less. I think that's one of the reasons why people have been quitting the assessments at the end of the line is they say, well I pay on a per assessment basis, so I don't wanna spend that kind of money. I don't wanna spend 10, 20 dollars for a candidate. Is that changed? From your experience, is that a good way to save money?

Bas: It depends, which is a very [unintelligible], but we've got a lot of suppliers who now say, listen we're gonna charge you depending on the number of hires you make in a year, and we don't care about the number of applicants, or we're gonna charge you a fixed price anyway, or we're gonna charge you based on a number of candidates which you are never ever gonna be reaching, so who the hell cares? You've got those, and you still got more the traditional suppliers who moved online and they're like, still --

Max: Like Berlitz and things like that.

Bas: Yeah, and interestingly enough every country has their own set of suppliers because there's a lot of, there's actually interestingly also a lot of bias in a lot of assessments, which the suppliers will deny, but I know which assessments have which risk for bias. And those are also nationally.

Max: You know their [unintelligible] once.

Bas: I'll give you a simple example. If you do a Likert scale that's like 1-5, a Dutch person will always answer a 2 or 4. We are never on the extremes, we are never extremely bad, we are never extremely good. If you make us choose between two things, we will never say we are not able to do one. If you ask an American, it's always a 1 and a 5. They're either great or terrible at something. But, if you start using this data to match with applicants, you've got a cultural problem in there. And the interesting thing is people with a bicultural breakarm from countries like Turkey and Morocco where we, and The Netherlands have a lot of them, have the tendency also to go to the 1 and the 5. So, despite the fact that that test itself isn't biased, the way people read the test or used the test could be biased or is biased, and because by law it's not allowed to ask somebody for his ethnicity in Europe, you can't correct for that. And funny thing is, every major supplier corrects based on national levels, yet never tells that in public against their clients, to the clients. And they can't do it internally. We know that an Italian will fill out, with the same characteristics, will fill out a test differently from a Swede. That's just, that's been registered a million times. Yet, what about the Italian living in Sweden, that means you get a wrong test. So, those are --

Max:: Sounds like an impossible conundrum, I don't think we'll have time to fix it on today's discussion. But give us, can you share, I know you've prepared some examples of people who did a before and after and who had an assessment system that they thought worked, and then they revisited it. So, let's jump into those if you don't mind, Bas, and you had an example from, what was the one that you want to start with? Help me out.

Bas: I think the one which I really like because it's the most simplest of assessments is from the Dutch Post and they did it for, basically, for package delivery people. You know just the people driving around in a van all day. And they simply changed from asking a lot of data in a resume to sort of a structured questionnaire, interview-like assessment, application process. First of all, they looked at the questions they were asking, and it turned out that some of the locations were asking, how long do you have your driver's license, and others were asking, how many kilometers a year on average do you drive. Turned out the last one was a lot of more predictive, so they were simply looking, and a lot of applicants actually feedback, because they interviewed recent applicants as well, and they said, listen we get the same question two or three times in the process, which we're annoyed about. Sometimes, in the first interview, the phone screen, they would be asked, how long do you have your driver's license. And then in the interview they'll be asked, how much have you driven this year. For them it's the same question. And they we're like, well if the first one isn't relevant, why is it still in there? So, they made a basic set of questions, both on applications as well as in the phone screen, and they were able to, they piloted it which I loved about their case and that's why I'm sharing it. They started saying, okay, we've got 15 locations in The Netherlands, 5 of them are going to use the new system, 10 of them will continue as is for now. So, they had the perfect quality control of is this really better or is it --

Max: Like AB Test?

Bas: Yeah, perfect AB Test. And the pilot locations saw the early attrition. So, people leaving within six months of signing up the contract, which is really expensive, dropped from 17% to 12% in a quarter, while the other one saw it increased from 14% to 23%. Because the market was tightening, early attrition was increasing everywhere except for the ones where they did the new selection assessment strategy.

Max: So, in this case, they really just changed one question and --

Bas: No, no, no, they changed a whole lot. I'm just giving one example, they changed --

Max: That was the one question that made a big impact.

Bas: They changed the entire process from basically letting the recruiter decide what questions to ask to having a structured interview for everything and looking at the relation between the questions and being able to tweak it.

Max: They centralized the screening process and standardized it rather than leting the recruiter set their own questions, that makes sense. [overlap] It's the same question, like how long you've been driving and how many kilometers you do every year. But one is obviously better because it's gonna, you know, it's closer you to what the job actually is. Nobody cares about --

Bas: Exactly and especially if you notice that one reason for early attrition was apparently that people didn't like being in a car all day, which is something you are if you are a package delivery guy. So, another really cool case study comes from completely different market, a stock market trader, and the reason I love this case is that they actually, the good thing about financial institutions is they have a lot of money, so they were able to simply run two assessments side-by-side for two years. And seeing you know, what's the predictive value of [unintelligible] they already had a process. The thing about the stock market trader, you gotta understand Max, you can't really have a bad hire because it's potentially can cause you millions of dollars. They're trading on their own accounts so you really can't make any mistakes. And what they did was they had a more traditional assessment with questionnaires, with cognitive tests, et cetera et cetera. That was pretty good, but it also had a price per assessment. So they're only recruiting from the top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, INSEAD, and if you hadn't been there, you shouldn't be applying. They had to do a CV check which they knew had no predictive value whatsoever. They literally said like, we're hiring students, except the school you went to, what could possibly be on there? Absolutely nothing. But we need to do something because too many people wanna be a stock market trader because it's still a job which inspires a lot of people because you can make a lot of money in a short time. And they, basically, they went parallel in their test for two years and because of all the feedback they had from, okay, this person was hired, we didn't let him go really quickly, this person was hired we let him go. And I'm especially saying “him” because they actually never hired a female stock broker until this year. If you're talking about diversity, they just hired their very first female stockbroker because now what they're doing is they're making brain profiles, as they call them, which is basically a next generation cognitive test by a company called Brains First. They're able to, they've gotten an insane amount of really interesting game-based cognitive tests. I always call it like four different shooting games, I actually love playing them. Yes, they're long, they’re 45 minutes, but when I finished, I was like, what finished already? While if I'm doing a 20-minute questionnaire, in 10 minutes I'm like, oh god I'm only halfway there. That might be my gaming background. I know I listen to your podcast with the guy from Activision Blizzard, you have a gaming background too, I know you'll love this game, Max.

Max: Okay, I’ll check it out. I'm on their website right now, Brains First. Forty-five minutes for an assessment seems like an awfully long time but if you have the kind of career that attracts a lot of candidates that they just want to work for you, then why not? You know, you have that luxury, it doesn't work for every employer.

Bas: It doesn't work for every employer but in their case, it worked really well, and they were now able to, first of all, screen everybody so they're seeing diversity, especially in their case, the diversity of all the universities they're recruiting from increased. They now actually, and I love this about it, they say, listen on our career site, there's a button, check if you have the brain of a trader, so you can actually check if you're going to go to the second stage of the process before you actually apply. I mean, isn't that cool? You can take away the anxiety of an applicant like, okay you're good enough or not. And like I said they, for the very first time, were able to hire a female trader this year.

Max: I think going back to the, you know, great example and people should check out Brains First if they're hiring for people who are quick, you know, they need a quick mind, right, there are quick reaction time and resilience, so that could be a good solution for them. We started chatting about what's a good time to rethink your assessments. I was thinking some of the symptoms of maybe this is the right time, is when you see examples like HR treating the assessments as a necessary step to get through and like when they're, sometimes you can even see recruiters who are coaching and preparing the candidate before the assessment because they really wanna get through it. They want them to pass, right? So, they say, oh yeah this is how you're gonna pass and then that way we can get over this thing. You know that’s a pretty clear sign. Are there other kind of signals people gotta look out for that now is the time to revisit or what's the cadence at which one should revisit his assessment strategy?

Bas: Well, I actually think that by definition you should revisit your process every couple of years at least. But right now, what I've been hearing a lot is we can't find anybody. You know there's just not enough good people out there. I've seen a lot of case studies also with these assessments where you're not lowering the bar but you're opening it up to an entire audience which you never would have thought of. I'll give you an example, air traffic control, which by the way, also uses Brains First, and I'm not at any way affiliated with them, but they just have awesome case studies and they publish them, so I love them for that. In the air traffic control, it used to be that you needed an academic degree, then they said college degree is good enough, and now they're actually saying if just finished high school you can apply because with our test, we're able to actually assess if you're good enough. And for example, one of the things which is really important for being an air traffic controller is stress resilience, that's something which isn't tested in college or in a university. And they opened up this entire pool for people with much lesser or no education while, and this is the beauty of it, while increasing the quality of hire by 120%.

Max: It's a beautiful time to be in HR and to be in [unintelligible] in recruitment. To have access to these kinds of insights. To say, I'm now hiring an air traffic controller because that person stays cool under pressure, and I can measure that scientifically. These things didn't exist ten years ago. So, for probably the majority of the jobs, if you haven't revisited your assessment strategy in a while, you should do so regularly because it's moving so fast.

Bas: I'm not saying that the resume or experience have no value because for some jobs, I love the fact that if I'm flying, my pilot has a pilot license, and I love the fact that if I'm in the ER that the nurse is a registered nurse. I'm not saying it works for every job, but I've seen awesome cases also on hiring recruiters who never got a chance and who are awesome at the job with assessments. I recently saw one where, at one of those cities, one of the local governments, and they said, okay, for this job basically 95% of everybody doing it is gonna retire within the next five, ten years. It's really an old man's job. So, they were like, well we can't hire anybody with experience because then we're gonna be hiring somebody again in a few years. We're only postponing the inevitable, but we have all these experienced in our company, in our organization now. People who are retiring who don't mind sharing their knowledge, who would actually love to share the knowledge, but there's no official education for this job. They call it the digital archive person, basically. It sounds like the most boring job in the world, but a lot of people love it. You're basically the digital librarian of a city, knowing where I can find all the information on who owns what plot of land, what was there historically, could it be contaminated ground. All those kinds of stuff.

Max: Sure, some people are like that. That's a job for someone.

Bas: Exactly, but, and what they're now doing is also assessing. They're just telling people like, okay, I don't even want your resume because we know you will have no experience which is relevant for this whatsoever because it's such a unique job. These are the qualities we expect from you, here's the test, show us you've got the quality, and the best five from the test will get invited for an interview. They recently did this one and they hired a 24-year-old woman, which was the first woman in that organization doing this job ever and it was the first person under 50 in a long time.

Max: Oh, wow.

Bas: And everybody is now saying, which is interesting, because of course just hiring at diversity doesn't mean hiring quality, but the feedback from within the organization is, wow this is such a fresh of breath air [sic]. And she learns so quickly because she was screened on having the ability to be able to do the job. Now she's not able to do this job yet but that's why there are like five old folks training her to do the job.

Max: It's a lot of optimism I think I get from your stories, and we can avoid a lot of heartaches and hiring mistakes as well. Going back into your personal career, if you think back, somebody you hired or recommended for hire that was a mistake, I don't know if any kind of person comes to mind if I asked you that question. Would you, could you recount us the mistake and what you learned from it and maybe whether an assessment could have prevented it.

Bas: Actually, an assessment is now preventing it. Yeah, I actually made the same mistake twice. Basically, hiring somebody I knew, a friend, who was first of all, apparently, not really fit for the job and it took me a while to figure out what qualities were necessary for this job. It’s basically a researcher position, but a very simple researcher position. Twice I hired a friend on there. One was really, he just didn't have the cognitive capabilities and the other one was really hard to motivate, and if it's a friend, it's even harder to kick somebody's ass, basically. And they're still friends, but as employees I would never rehire them.

Max: You're still friends but 10% less.

Bas: No, no, no, no.

Max: 100% [unintelligible]

Bas: No, no, no. We're still friends but I would never rehire them, and they know that. And they --

Max: And the assessment that could have prevented it?

Bas: Well, I've actually developed a few tests now that are preventing it. So, for this research, I used to have, I would hire four or five people every summer to do a certain research for me, students. And now, I’ve got a few tests which is basically measuring your information processing speed, your scanning speed because you're researching websites, you're looking at --

Max: And it's a test you built yourself, a home-built?

Bas: Well, I took the academics which I knew measures the cognitive traits I needed to have and yeah, I had it built in by a [unintelligible] developer in Russia, because that was so much cheaper than actually buying one. But that's because I actually knew, the moment I realized the qualities I needed in my employees, because I'm an assessment expert, I immediately knew this test, this test and this test would work, and I was able to really --

Max: And you're able to put it together very quickly.

Bas: Yeah and I mean it's just three really simple academic tests. To give you an example, if you wanna know if somebody can scan a website really fast, you just give them a 20x20 grid of letters, you say there's one x in it, find the x.

Max: Two seconds, boom, yeah.

Bas: Well, yeah, and you’ve got two minutes to find these many x's as fast as you possibly can in different situations.

Max: That correlates well.

Bas: And that correlates really well, and of course, I checked if it correlated, and it did. And since that moment, I introduced and I've got three tests and I've hired better and acceptable people, but I have not had a single one completely misfire and before then I had at least one mis-hire every year.

Max: There you go. Great. Thanks for sharing. I'm sure you’ve given us, our listeners, reasons to rethink their assessments strategy, maybe build their own home tests, because it's not that complicated to build your own tests or go out into the market to find what's available, or reach out to a consultant like yourself, Bas, to guide them to that decision and remember to pay you not all free advice. So, again, the best place for them to get ahold of you is on LinkedIn, Bas van de Haterd, and maybe you wanna share an email?

Bas: It's my first name @ my last name dot N L. So bas@vandehaterd.nl you can reach out there, you can reach out on LinkedIn. If you wanna know more about assessments, do a vendor selection, output implementation, or if you wanna build one yourself, I usually don't recommend it because there's just so many awesome tools out there which are usually scientifically much more validated and you really need to know what you're doing in order to make it scientifically sound and there's a lot of law, especially in Europe coming up where you will be held accountable if you are using an unvalidated or not perfectly correct assessment, an AI system.

Max: Proceed with caution. Don't try this at home. Okay.

Bas: Well, yeah.

Max: Okay, great. Thanks a lot, Bas. Thanks for coming in on the show.

Bas: All right.

Max: Hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bas. There is a lot more of Bas's conversations on Facebook and on LinkedIn, if you joined the white groups and and I think if you don't revise your assessment strategy and you don't take another look at what's available in the market every couple of years, you're definitely going to be missing out.

So feel free to turn to Bas for advice or to turn into this show, we also feature a lot of assessments on the show and please subscribe to receive more.

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Max: Hello! Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today all the way from Plano, Texas, I'm delighted to welcome on the show. Tim Meehan who's VP and Global Head for Talent Acquisition Innovation Lab at Pontoon which is part of the Adecco Group. Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you, Max.

Max: Thank you. Thanks, Tim. We met years ago in the real world and we were just saying how a business is now keeping us at home, which is lovely. And it's mostly lovely. How else is Pontoon Solutions affected? You know, changed its business over the last couple of years? Can you maybe start off by telling us how Pontoon Innovation had to adapt to the new normal, which is not new at all anymore?

Tim: What do I have? Two hours, right?

Well, first on the Pontoon levels. Thanks for asking. I would say our business has been very strong even through the pandemic. We're fortunate to have a portfolio of customers in the technology area so that business remains strong for us. But you know, as we were talking a little bit earlier, Max, I think there's a couple of trends that increasingly occupy my time, my mind, my thought focus in terms of how to bring, not just Pontoon for it, but our entire industry.

Because I think we're at an inflection point, an important point in time where the way talent is acquired in our industry is changing radically. And we all understand digitization and the automation that's occurring in homeport experiences, but there are some trends that I increasingly look at and say, you know, I think there, if we're all aware of them then perhaps each of us in our own individual spaces can be thinking about how we work within the

Max: And the Talent Acquisition Lab at Pontoon is, correct me if I'm misdescribing it, is like a consultancy practice focused on helping companies crack the case of how to bring in new tech in their talent acquisition tech stack, and how to work within their existing IT architecture. So yeah. Does that sum it up?

Tim: Yeah, it does. And it's important to explain it. So for us, at Pontoon Talent Acquisition encompasses all the workforce categories.

So certainly RPO, or we call it RXO, the full-time talent acquisitions is a big part of what we do. MSP or contingent labor talent acquisition is another part of our portfolio offering that my team supports, but increasingly statement of work or service procurement. So people coming in on fixed deliverable basis, those are all different ways for companies to access a growing and very powerful talent pool.

Then my team, which is a team of technologists, product marketers and, solution designers are responsible for figuring out how to simplify it to our customers because this stuff is really hard. Steve Jobs once said simplicity is the answer, make it easy. And so that's what my team is trying to do. Make a little less confusing for our customers to understand and decide what to do.

Max: Yeah, it's so complex for companies, especially when they have a broad variety of job types from blue-collar, white-collar, graduates and, and so on. And almost for every job category, you need a different partner on the sourcing side, on assessments, on the process and, and a strong case could be made for a company to buy 30 different technologies just for talent acquisition, right?

I mean, you must have these kinds of, I wouldn't call them horror stories, but customers that are heavily loaded right? Or overloaded?

Tim: Yeah. I think one of the trends I see is some of the tech companies in our space are trying to simplify it by bringing the entire tech stack to the customer.

So I look at like Phenom people or an eight folder, and I sense a little bit more ATS, but certainly the capabilities of Symphony Talent. So their pitch to our customers is I bring the stack to, you know, one buy and I can plug you into a whole architecture and ecosystem of capability. And we are seeing companies look at that.

The key issue is a lot of times the applicant tracking system is owned by eight. IT, the career site may be run by the marketing department internally developed, and then you've got HR with the room budget as well. So you've got kind of a challenging cross-functional challenge to break those, take those pieces, and have them all into one buy.

But I am seeing that trend. I call it the field of dreams, where these big tech companies are going out and they're building it and hoping companies come and we are seeing some interest in that. And certainly, as an outsourcer, we work with those vendors when that's the case.

Max: And maybe five, ten years ago, IT had a little, relatively to today, a little bit more power, and it's shifting a little bit to the marketing function.

Tim: Well, the other one is my other joke is Love Actually, where Hugh Grant says to uh... where Billy Bob Thornton says to Hugh grant, “I'll give you anything you want as long as that's not something I don't want to give you.”

And in some ways, that's sort of the IT group. HR, go out there and look at everything you want. But only if it's within the framework of what I'm willing to let you do, which is to say data, privacy, data, security, data governance, the vendors have to pay a certain threshold.

So IT is increasingly empowered, ITN, data privacy, certainly with the data privacy regulations that are coming out, not without good reason. So you have to be able to operate increasingly. HR has to be able to operate both. Understanding the language and needs of an IT organization in their company, as well as the technology needs of the many vendors out there that can help them supercharge their recruiters.

Max: Okay. I thought it was going in the other way, because I thought, well, it's so easy to buy software now that nobody needs to know IT or be an engineer to be able to buy it. And you know, the cloud story of everybody can be a buyer now. But you're seeing it, the counter-trend to that movement.

Tim: Absolutely, I am. I think about my career and my early career recruitment. My expertise we're building source two plans with which job boards, how many recruiters in which job boards in a couple of ratios. And today I'm doing data mapping, integration design, architectural reviews, and granted, this is all I do. But any program we want to do, that's what we have to do. And so, you know, I think we're going to have a… no, I think the language of HR in the future, certainly talent acquisition is increasingly require a digital mindset, a digital skillset.

But you know, if it's something like, you know, I don't want to do that, that's not my area then I would probably say, make a decision, either build the competency so your TA person listening to me right now, and you're not familiar with Talkpush and all the Talkpush’s competitors in the HR tech landscape, and you don't want to be then I would suggest you're going to struggle. And what you should either do is say, I'm going to ramp up and build the competency early or myself, or call me. Honestly, or call one of my competitors. This is what we're doing. We're building out an entire ecosystem of capability to help you through that gap.

Max: If you walked into HR on talent acquisition, because you wanted to get inside the psychology and the human and touchy part of recruitment and, and stay away from flow charts and Excel sheets. It's going to be tough, right? You know, you'll have to ask for help some way.

Tim: And you know, so my team, we’re involved in some of these very big bloggers complex deals. Our HR sponsors will bring us into dialogue with their IT org, and these get extremely technical. But that's what we can bring to the table. Now we've got other clients that they have that competency within their organization. So you know, and if you don't outsource it, you don't have the competency, then you're going to struggle a little bit.

Max: And that's when, I guess, that's when companies or TA teams, they call their IT team and say, “Please come and help me out”. And when IT comes in, they come in with a whole new set of requirements, which will change the scope and perhaps tilt the conversation towards having a one standalone system that can do it all. They'd be more likely to consolidate all under one architecture, perhaps. Yeah. And so now let's give some advice to the TA listeners who are dealing with maybe one system to rule them all. And they wanna create some flexibility for their local team, maybe for their local sourcing team. How do you navigate these necessary IT architectures and convince some of your customers to open up?

Tim: Well, I would say, first, self-assess. Where you're at and what your competency is. And if you're in a company where maybe you have an IT organization that's very helpful and wants to be supportive, that's different than maybe you have a discussion with IT, and you don't understand what they're saying.

So I would suggest rely on your vendors. So certainly there are in Asia, you know, mature organizations, a big company well-respected, well thought-out. You've got the resources that can command and have the discussion with your HR contacts, technology people to help them get them through these gaps. And we can have that discussion and certainly, Pontoon can have that discussion.

So I'd say rely on your vendors. For certainly our HR tech trade shows, hopefully, it will be coming back on their virtual ones. I think just self-assess would be my biggest recommendation. How big is your, if you're having talent, acquisition pains, can you perceive or believe your technology may be a challenge. If you don't have the ability internally to do this, then I would start talking to either outsourcers or significant point solution providers that can help you.

And then the only other thing I'll say specific to Asia is, you know, what do you have for the world? Two thirds of the world. It's Asia, right? How many languages? How many countries are there?

So even in Asia, the trends for Asia are different. So you'll have the ability to do maybe some work. You can be a little more creative in parts of Asia than you can in some of the Western continents.

Max: You were saying in Brazil, for example. A whole different... You typically end up with a completely different architecture than you would for global brands, right? They make exceptions market by market. Those exceptions are would you say they dictated by language barriers or behavior? Yeah. What’s your take on those differences? Is it well...

Tim: If the case in Brazil specifically. If you're trying to do it… If it's a Brazilian company that is looking for TA innovation, you cannot lay her in a San Francisco technology solution. The cost structure is hysterical. So, you know, you have to find a Brazilian technology companies that can support you in Brazil because their cost structure is lower. In fact, we're talking to them and bring them outside Brazil and come to the rest of the world because they've been developed in a low cost country and they're successful.

But certainly the same with India. I mean, you just cannot lay her in an extremely expensive tech stack. If it's only in India or only in Brazil. Now the big multinationals, they're going to spread that cost across their entire organization. And so the cost impact to say Brazil or in India isn't significant.

Max: But we are going to make some adjustments for internal accounting and they'll say, “Well, yeah”. They use more seats in India and Brazil, but we'll adjust the cost, the cost per seat.

Tim: Yeah, you can. Or you know, the allocation model could be not even specific to that tech, right? So the corporate IT may allocate its cost over all of the businesses in a different way. So I just say certainly when you're talking about multinational and certainly Western countries, IT technology, IT barriers become a big issue.

If you're talking to emerging economies, there, I think, there's still a lot of opportunity for point standalone solutions, country-specific technology solutions.

Max: Yeah. We've noticed very different candidate behaviors from one place to the next, which communication channels they use. Obviously, the language is a barrier but also almost every country has a different leading job board.

With, of course, Indeed being maybe at the top of the mountain and, you know, number two, a number three in a lot of other markets, but companies... Job boards that otherwise nobody would have heard of outside of the US. And they have different levels of openness. So when you have a global customer come to Pontoon and do you... First, put a map of the world? You try to figure out, yeah, where they could... Do you work mostly on global contracts and then you have to map out the whole world and figure out so, you know, how to help them at every pit stop?

Tim: No, I would say... boy, I don't know the statistic off the top of my head, but certainly a chunk of them are multicountry. But I wouldn't call them multi-region. Multi-region which to me, it starts to talk global. Those are harder to do. That's a big change management, but to get an Americas deal or a MIA deal, part, you know, parts of Asia, maybe three or four countries in Asia, that's pretty typical whole all or one, not quite as common.

Though I will say, we’re, maybe part of my self promotion here, part of our answer to what we've talked about today is within my team, we have built out a product portfolio that's very scalable, and it starts with a top of funnel sourcing, highly automated sourcing capability. And then we can layer in various texts using our backbone technology and the cost model is extremely attractive. So it's, it's going to work for us in Brazil. It'll work for us in India. But you know, for me, for us, we need a lot of bullets in our holster. And so the client is you know, they're wanting to just start with a couple of steps. We've got an offering and then as they evolve, we can expand that offering.

Max: Okay. So it sounds like you're saying it's more cost-effective even though it's more work and that's where you guys come in, but it's more cost-effective to find point solutions that are, you know, best in class for each stage of the recruitment funnel and then assemble them. And thenthat will outperform, cost-wise, having a, you know, a single platform that offers to do everything.

Tim: Well, I wouldn't quite go that far, but I wouldn't disagree that, you know, it's a messy world. And so if you're a… If you're going to be a regional or a global talent acquisition company, and you want a single experience for your customers, then you're going to have to layer in a pretty complex technology solution, not point. But if you're a single country, standalone, then it gives you more flexibility to pick tools that are specific to that country or your use case.

And then you got to layer in. Maybe I only want to outsource blue-collar. Or I've got a new ability I’m building. And I only want to... I only want these roles in this location, but this amount of time. So there's besides the technology, there's, you know, customer use case scenarios that you're going to be almost solved for too.

Max: Yeah. It's for the RXL business that you cover. You come into our company saying, which part of the talent acquisition defines your brand and you want to own a hundred percent of it, versus something which is something you have to do, but it doesn't necessarily define you. And then it's a little bit easier to outsource, right?

Tim: Yeah. Yeah.

Max: Great. Well, one question that I love to ask my guests is to share with our practitioner listeners a mistake that you've made--a hiring mistake that you've made and to kind of try to dig it out forgotten raised a memory of yours. Somebody you hired and it just didn’t go right. And, you know, we know in a long career such as the one you have, it must've been more than one instance. I mean, you can't hire without making a few mistakes. So is there one that comes to mind without giving names that you can draw an experience from on a lesson for our audience?

Tim: Well, I will just say for me personally, hiring somebody is a sacred responsibility and I personally have been hired into a role that I wasn't successful at. I, at the time, did not know I couldn't do the job. I thought I could. And I believe the person who put me in that role made a bad hiring decision and it had a pretty bad impact on me personally.

So that was a learning for me. And yes, I have hired people that didn't work out. And I view that as my failure. I absolutely hold myself accountable. I'm with the team I manage, I view their success as a reflection of my leadership and management competency. So…

Max: I applaud your humility in answering the question. I've asked this question to 50 plus people, and nobody's said that they were the wrong hire. So you've given everybody something to think about there. And I think I might have been the wrong hire once or twice to myself.

Tim: Oh, how do you know? I mean, the enthusiasm, you know, so I'm pretty good now about thinking through a couple of things to help me make sure that the person is making this good decision and cyclic. I am.

Max: Yeah. And to go back to that time when you were the wrong hire, what was the mistake that the manager did or that your employer did then? Was it they were trying to paint too rosy a picture, or they had written the wrong description?

Tim: Well, it was when I moved into the temporary staffing industry many, many, many years ago. I had a career before this industry. I was in recruitment. I did...

Max: Good thing you got out there

Tim: It's gone. It's, in fact, every company I've ever worked for is bankrupt. So it wasn't my fault, but the industry collapsed. And so when I moved into this industry, they put me in a very important role and the staffing company, and I had to learn the industry. I had to learn the people and I was remote and it was just a lot. And the environment itself was challenging. So I think anybody who would have struggled and I didn't kind of walk through it though.

I was asking like really stupid questions. You know, I got an order from a hundred people and I didn't ask what the pay rate was like and you're the leader. So you know, it was a humbling experience, but fortunately, here I am. I'm not going to tell you, but it's decades.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, today remote hiring is a lot easier than it was back then. It was a lot more people are better at it. So maybe if the same scenario played over today, you know, it would have worked better, but certainly industry experience and, you know, never underestimate, I think, the importance of training. Your talent acquisition team and your recruiters on the industry, on the lingo. So they don't sound stupid. I mean, that's pretty essential again.

Tim: I would say don't put your need to fill the job ahead of that person, that human you're trying to hire. Always think about that first.

And that comes back to pays dividends. I have amazing people. I'm very proud of the many senior leaders in this industry that I hired and developed and I played a role in their career. And so I, again, it's hiring somebody as a sacred responsibility and if you hire people that don't work out, you gotta own it.

It's like Colin Palisson. You break it, you bought it. So just take... Don't think about your mistake. Take it as a personal reflection of your leadership and hiring competency.

Max: Strong words. I think we'll wrap it up on that. Thanks so much, Tim, for sharing. Where can people get ahold of you? I guess LinkedIn?

Tim: LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn.

Max: Tim Meehan. M-E-E-H-A-N from Pontoon Solutions. And thanks. Thanks very much, Tim. It was a pleasure.

Tim: Thank you very much for having me on your show.

Max: That was Tim Meehan from Pontoon Solutions, reminding us that if you got into Talent Acquisition and recruitment, to stay away from doing too much technical work and, you know, building technology stack if it’s not your cup of tea. There is help out there. There are providers such as Pontoon Solutions and others that can be your partner and help you put together a best of breed solution.

Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more and remember to subscribe and to share with friends.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show Alison Daley. Alison is the founder and CEO of Recruiting Innovation, a business focused on helping recruiters who don't know how to speak to engineers and don't know how to confidently assess them. And if you know in 2021, I think just about every company out there is promoting themselves as a tech company and mentioning that hiring engineers is their number one bottleneck. So, there's a huge demand for people trying to figure out how to interview engineers intelligently, and this is where Alison is gonna be able to help us, I hope. During our conversation we'll cover methodologies and techniques that can be applied to technical recruiting. Welcome to the show, Alison.

Alison: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, I'm glad to be here.

Max: Delightful to have you. And I think you didn't grow up wanting to be a technical recruiting trainer. So, what happened? How did you end up doing what you're doing today?

Alison: That's my favorite question to ask recruiters or people in talent space is like what's your origin story of how you got here because most of us didn't have dreams of working in recruitment, let alone study for it. I actually call myself the accidental recruiter. I've fallen into recruitment four times, and I've kicked it three times and I think it's just that at this point now I'm all in on recruitment and being an extrovert, as extrovert, this is definitely my industry. And at this point, I've recruited for Fortune 500s, boutique [unintelligible] firms, hydro start-ups, and you know I cut my teeth on the top 5 staffing firm in the world. So, I've seen it all at this point and part of where I got, how I am where I am today is that I actually chose to come back into recruitment after I've left it where I thought was gonna be the last time, for real this time. And the story behind that was that my last recruiting role at a hydro start-up here in Colorado, I kind of was burning out. As an industry, it can be a tough industry to stay, you know, fulfilled in, and especially if you don't feel like you're growing professionally or growing up the ranks, and that was kind of my situation. And so, I had decided I was gonna take my people skills and pivot into user-experience research. I used to be a dedicated UX, user-experience recruiter, and so I used to live vicariously from my UX candidates that's such a great blend of analytical and creative skill set and I did a UX boot camp. I actually landed a role very quickly as a Junior UX Researcher because my network was so big, so strong after being a UX recruiter and got on a software development team and became the person tasked with figuring out who are our end-users, where are they, get them to talk to me, follow the UX methodology of sort of assessing, you know, what were their goals related to the product, their experiences, their frustrations, and synthesizing those stories back to the team to make informed product decisions. And I had this aha moment, maybe 9 months into the role, where I realized that this methodology that exists in software development within a user-experience umbrella, to systematize talking to these end-users, getting their stories, and then sharing them back to the team, I thought, oh my gosh, what if we could take this methodology and we'll bring it to the recruiting space, especially in tech recruiting where it often feels like we're navigating in a foreign language. Having a methodology to follow to have these conversations would not only give recruiters a leg to stand on with technical talent and learn to speak their language, but it actually would make us more effective at our role. And looking at the market, no one was really out here solving for the very known issue that recruiters don't understand what software development process is, who those different roles are, and how do I engage with them effectively. And so, one year in to my UX role, after having left recruitment in the dust, of course, I actually quit the role in UX and then came back to save tech recruiting.

Max: To tackle a bigger problem.

Alison: That's right.

Max: Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, your traits include being an extrovert and communicator and high-energy person. I suppose you meant by that that recruiting typically attracts these types of psychological profiles as opposed to perhaps engineering which would be more likely to attract introverts. Just to set the scene a bit, would you say that the majority of tech recruiters are not engineers? I think that's a fair statement.

Alison: That is totally a fair statement, yes.

Max: So, I've done a lot of tech recruiting myself and sure, I never had a single one of them where I felt smart. You know you're looking for a certain set of keywords and the interview is over in like 30 seconds when you've gone through them.

Alison: Yeah, I call it keyword-jousting, when you're just trying to match the keywords from their resume to the keywords in the job description, yeah. That's sort of what we're rendered down to doing if we don't understand the background of what these folks are doing and how to get a story out of them.

Max: Yeah, yeah. So, I'm your target audience, right? People like me who dread coming into an interview with the sense that they're gonna feel stupid.

Alison: Yup, been there done that. I mean that's the thing too about our industry in general. As an industry, we really believe in a sink or swim ethos to new hire onboarding, and honestly, I think that that's an old era. We gotta think about what is recruiting look like in the 21st century and that means that we need to be prepared to train and enable our recruiters to meet the insane moment that we're in right now. And so, it requires cohesive training and onboarding. And so, that’s the goal of what I've built is to help recruiters sort of, and teams, circumvent the unnecessary need of just throwing people in the deep end and hoping that if they talk to a few candidates and a few hiring managers, they'll suddenly know that Java's not short for Java Script and, you know, basics like that. But I think having a cohesive training is the way of the future, that's for sure.

Max: C++ isn’t the latest version of C, and stuff like that, yeah.

Alison: Right.

Max: But those are very superficial examples. There's never, I mean an engineer is gonna be proud of what they know and proud of the knowledge that they've accumulated, and quick to judge somebody who doesn't ask the right questions as well, so it is a tricky audience. Is your methodology going to go deep into teaching, you know for example all those different languages and those frameworks that developers use so that you can kind of jump from one tech to another while you're doing interviews, or is it more of a general approach that you can apply for any field of software development?

Alison: What we're gonna cover today is the latter. So, what I'm gonna be able to fit in to 10 or 15 minutes today will be specifically around how to have conversations that's sort of an agnostic general foundational level with any type of technologies on a software development team. But my company, Recruiting Innovation, we offer an online tech recruiter certification program where the course includes the framework that I'm gonna kind of highlight today, the alignment framework that I developed. That's what I call the tool kit I developed from the UX tools. But then within the tech recruiter certification, we take that same methodology and then we work with technical experts to become our instructors. And so then, you have a UX designer downloading their workflow and their tool kit and their things, you know, everything that you need to know to recruit someone like them within our model. And so, we combine both the general agnostic, how to have a conversations and do your job. Element of alignment framework that we're gonna cover today, and then we partner with technologists so then you learn specifically about front-end back-end dev ops, UX design and product management, from technologist themselves. And so, it's like a two-prong superpower at that point.

Max: That is, that's actually very appetizing, I must say. For me, like I'm thinking I need to sign up myself because, you know, I don't like sounding stupid and I have so many times. So, for today, the framework, the foundation, how do you speak engineer and how can you ask questions just on the back of a resume or a LinkedIn profile that can carry a conversation where both sides are talking for 40 minutes to an hour.

Alison: Yes, yes. and that's what's cool about this framework is that it's role agnostic. So, what I'm gonna go through here in a moment is the workflow of people on a software engineering team, and I'll transition to that in a moment, but you can have comfort in knowing that everyone on a software development team, regardless of whether they're a data scientist, a front-end engineer, a UX designer, a product manager, everyone follows the same five-step workflow of software development. And so, once you understand that key workflow approach and then how to ask questions to touch on each of those stages of the workflow, you're off the races, and now you can have engaging conversations and ask good questions and get things back in a story form that a) not only establishes your credibility and actually starts to establish a connection with that technical candidate and get them excited to work with you, but part of our job is always presenting and positioning these candidates to our hiring manager and so this model actually gets a really rich story from the candidate and then it actually, 70% of our write-up on the candidate is done just by facilitating the interview in this way.

Max: Okay, great. Well, yeah, feel free to take it away.

Alison: Should we do it? Okay.

Max: Yeah, let's go for it.

Alison: Cool. The way I like to position this is with the alignment framework, so our proprietary training model, the alignment framework teaches recruiters the language of technology and how to talk tech. And so, knowing your audience, you know, you have Europeans, you have Asians, you got people in the US, probably, Africans. You have a global audience, okay? So, most of the people that listen to your podcast speak at least one and a half languages, if not more...

Max: For sure.

Alison: more fluently. And so, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask everyone to put on their learning a new language hat. So, we're gonna learn the language of tech today. And when we're learning a new language, there's two parts, right? There's grammar, so how to have conversations, how to structure our sentences. And then there's vocabulary, so once you've got the grammar down, it's all about learning as much vocabulary as you can, start populating the sentences, right? So, what I would like to do is first we're gonna talk about the grammar of technology and then we're gonna get into some vocabulary. So, when we're thinking about grammar and the structure of conversations within technology, I really wanna anchor this thought process into a workflow approach. So, everyone on a software development team has this a similar structure of workflow, same with anyone on a recruiting team has the same structure of workflow. So, bring at home recruitment. Our workflow kicks off when we get a new rec, right? So, that's when our process starts. And then we follow either five or six steps depending on your opinion about it, but I say it's six steps. Now, six-step workflow of a recruiter is you have your new role onboarding kick-off strategy meeting with your hiring manager, also known as the intake, sometimes. So, you have your intake with the hiring manager, then you go out and source, looking for candidates. In tech, you have to do outreach messages, that's not true for every industry, but outreach messages is definitely a step in the workflow. And you've got your phone screen as a recruiter, and you got your team interview, and you then you have your offer and higher stage. And then, once they accept, the role is closed, and your workflow is complete. [unintelligible] right? And so, as I'm going across those stages, I am doing and thinking certain things to solve for each problem of the process, right? So it's in, yes please?

Max: Okay, great.

Alison: Okay. So, taking this workflow approach, right? We have our discrete set of steps to complete our goals and we're doing and thinking certain things to solve for each of those stages, and in recruitment, that's our same process whether it's a marketing role, an engineering role, or ops role, you name it, that's our workflow. Now, in technology and on software development, it's the same thing. It's a very discrete workflow process. A lot of recruiters, if you don't know any better you think that there's some black box where magic happens, and software comes out. Not the case, I'm gonna take the mystic out now. It's a five-step process that everyone follows when developing software. So, yes.

Max: In recruitments, sometimes you do have specialization where there's like one team that does the [unintelligible] to job description and does the job posting and another team does the interviewing and the screening. And so, when you're hiring engineers, are you finding that they're also just focused on one part or they do the whole project than to end, or is it mixed?

Alison: They have their own flavor of what they do and how they do it, and depending on sort of the methodology of the team. Some things are emphasized over others, but if anyone, you know, any of your listeners have ever seen that sort of famous image of waterfall methodology compared to agile methodology, that's where we're gonna anchor our thought process around today, and I'll elaborate a little bit on that, answering your question on that part, Max. So when you're thinking about waterfall versus agile, so thinking of the waterfall image, right? So, waterfall methodology has its anchor in manufacturing where you start at the beginning, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end to produce an end-result, right? And back in the day, when they're building software, you know, it would be 18 months projects. Well, with the onset of agile methodology, things sped up and projects got smaller and faster and innovative development happened. But, looking at those images, both waterfall and agile have a five-step process. Those five steps are: research, design, build, test, and deploy. And so, technologist on a software development team, regardless of their role, when they get a new rec for, let's say, a new feature, they are going to follow that process: research, design, build, test, and deploy. And as they're going through that process, they're doing and thinking things, like I said, to solve for each of those stages. So, what I would like to do today is kind of talk a little bit about what are each of those stages and then how do we go back through and ask questions against each of those stages to really get a full technical story from a candidate in a very confident, structured way. How does that sound?

Max: Yeah, that's perfect. And then, to make the interview fit within a normal timeframe for a job interview, you wouldn't have time to cover every project. So, first before you start going into describing the work on a specific project, you gotta pick the right project, I suppose. So, how do you get there in the course of the interview? Because you know if they're working like 20 different projects in the course of a year.

Alison: We like to lean on within the alignment framework we use a tool called the contextual interview. So obviously behavioral interviews are the gold standard in recruiting. Past behaviors predict future behaviors and has a value to know but it doesn't help us dig deep on the technical skills. Contextual interviews are designed to get us into the context of the story that the candidate or end-user is sharing with us and that teaches us how to ask 360, who, what, where, why, when questions to get a good big picture view of what, how they moved through their process as they solve for the goals that they had. And so, when we train recruiters to do tech interviews, we train them to launch with the contextual interview, anchor question. So, our anchor question is, "Walk me through a project that you're most proud of or that was particularly challenging. What was the goal of the project and how did you go about solving it?" So, we're helping, we're asking them to just highlight something. Take one project, we're gonna go deep on one project. And so, that's how we start the conversation.

Max: It's much better than a leading question like, "Tell me what you did on this or tell me what you did on that." Yeah, go.

Alison: Right.

Max: Pick something that you really really sunk your teeth in.

Alison: Yeah, and then they'll light up, right? Because developers, they love what they do. And through all the research I've done, they genuinely wanna have really good relationships with recruiters. They wanna get connected to awesome jobs. But half the time they feel like they have to like throw out the baby with the bath water, right, because it's just they have such a bad experience. But what we're doing with the alignment framework is we're just putting the interview on its head, and so, you know understanding that there's a workflow, there's a research, design, build, test, deploy process for everybody, right? So, I ask that question, “Walk me through a project you're most proud. What was the goal and how did you go about solving it?" 9 times out of 10, our candidates, our technical candidates are gonna talk about that build stage right in the middle, right, they're developers, build build build. And if you don't know there's a discrete process, your wheels are already starting to spin off and you start fumbling for follow-up question and the next thing you know, you're asking how long have you Java’d, right? Java’s not a verb. So, what we do is we teach recruiters to say nothing. If you ask nothing else, after their first response and to say, “Interesting, walk me through your research process. How did you know React JS was the right framework to use?” You will feel the candidate shift in their chair because you’ve now established credibility as someone who understands their workflow. And so, what we do is we teach recruiters so that the model is, you know, and I can actually probably tell you what each of the stages are as I share follow-up questions through each of the stages we’ll kind of put it together. So, you know, you ask that question, they talk about build. You say, “Interesting, walk me through your research process.” Right? “What was the requirement that you had to design for?” Okay, so, if we’re gonna think about this, research as it sounds, we’re trying to figure out what is needed from this new feature, who’s gonna use it, what’s the code requirement, does it need to fit within the code that we already have? right? Start trying to figure out everything that they need to know before they can move on to that next stage which is design. And so, within the research phase, some of the questions we can also ask is “Who did you reach out to when you were researching? The requirements of the project. What research went into your design decisions? Where did you start and then what was the process of finding out what you needed to know?” Next question, all around designing, right?

Max: I love those because I can imagine myself asking those questions and already being back in the driver’s seat. Like, okay, now he’s thinking and I’m sitting back and listening.

Alison: Right.

Max: He or she. Yeah

Alison: That’s right. It allows us, what I like to do is I say it gives us a roadmap to have these conversations and so we don’t need to feel like a deer in headlights like we’re trying to think of something on our feet because every step is laid out for us. We know there’s five steps to their process. We’re armed with questions to ask for each of those stages. And let’s say, you know, they start talking about a distributed build system, right, their dev ops candidate. I might not know what a distributed build system is and actually I would even argue, you know, we don’t need to know everything, but because I have roadmap to follow, I can ask these questions, get a full picture of it. I might only know about 70% of what that candidate ends up sharing with me, but because it’s in a story form, who they interacted with, how they problem-solved, the technology they used, when I go and position the candidate to my hiring team, we know that they’ll understand a hundred percent of what they said. And so, it really allows us to get, you know, a full picture from that candidate through the process. So, in this case, so the candidate talks about the research phase, who they interacted with, what was the use case that they were designing for, what are the requirements it had to meet? And then they move on to designing a solution so then these are some of the questions we’ll ask to get a feel for how they designed. It’s like, “What dependencies did you have to consider when designing for the solution? What was the primary use case? Right, is it a check-out flow? What was the secondary use case? Like, what were these users trying to use this feature for? And then also importantly, who did you collaborate with when you’re designing the solution?” ‘Cause the days of solo genius in the basement building everything are over. You have to collaborate, and a lot of collaboration happens at design. So, now we’re starting to get a good feel for who they’re interacting with, how they problem-solve, what they’re thinking about. And then linearly then we move on to the build process, right? So, you can even say, “Walk me through your coding process. Were you solo-coding? Were you pair-programming? Were you building from scratch or were you able to reuse existing code? And what was the time frame that you had to build this new feature?” Right? And you can hear how these questions are pretty agnostic, you can ask anyone these questions and they will have answers for you.

Max: Excellent, okay. So, we’re done with the build and then moving onto, if my memory serves me right, is the test to deploy.

Alison: Yes. Yup, gold star, you’re listening Max. Thank you. So then during the testing phase, as it sounds, this is a period when they’re testing what they built to make sure there are no bugs, that it’s not gonna take the system down, that it actually solves the problem that were identified in the research, right? It solves for the requirements; it solves for the use cases. And this is a really good question because every dev team is a little bit different, right? So you can ask about, “What was your build and test cycle like for this project?” Because in agile which is the modern methodology for development, design, build, and test can kind of happen concurrently, so it speeds it up. So, asking, “What was the build and test cycle like for this project?” also establishes that you know that there are different methodologies. You can ask how “How involved were you at testing or was there a separate QA team?” And then there’s also a thing, there’s to, you know, to learn add in some acronyms, there’s also a thing call TDD which stands for test-driven development. TDD means that once you have established the requirements in the research and design stage, you actually build the test first and then you go and code it. So, it’s sort of like we already wanna sort of define what good looks like and then we’ll build against that, that’s called TDDs. You can say, “Were you using a TDD environment?” Or there’s a thing called continuous integration, continuous deployment. And that’s like dev ops, you know, 5000, right? CICD, which means like you’re, as you’re building code you don’t have some big deployment hoorah. It just it passes its test, it automatically gets deployed. So testing is often an overlooked part of the process, but it’s so critical. And so, during the testing you wanna understand how involved to testing they were, what kind of testing environment they were operating in. And then, once we understand those things, we move on to the deploy, the last stage before, you know, as the code goes live into the world. And again, some teams, depending on the teams, there’s a different team that does actually the deployment. So, you can ask, “What was your involvement in the deployment stage?” Right? These are all agnostic; it shows that you know what you’re talking about without speaking too much. ‘Cause I think sometimes we get nervous and we say some things and then we actually don’t make sense. So, just asking, “What was your involvement at the deployment process, or what sort of release cycle were you working within?” And then, last question we like to ask is, “Who was responsible for the code once it was live in production?” The end, yes.

Max: I imagine that especially when you get to the test and deploying phases, a lot of engineers will express frustration with an imperfect environment because it’s, as you said, there’s different levels of excellence for testing and deploying code, and I think it’s a shared responsibility for most engineering department, so they’ll be like, “Well, we don’t have this, we don’t have that. It’s not ideal.” And then this could be an opportunity for the recruiter to put on their sales hats and say, “Well those frustrations you have in your current environment, you know, we know them as well, but we’ve addressed them already and so you would join a more mature organization where you can spend more time building less time testing.”

Alison: Right, and I will say on that note, this model that I’m sharing with you on the alignment framework for the technical interviews, we do the same model but then flipped side with the hiring manager and how to ask questions to get a real rich understanding of the open role that you’re being asked to fill. And what is the testing environment here, how is deployment facilitated, what is the build process here, are people pair-programming or is it solo-coding, how involved with research will they be, do they get to help design a solution? And so, you can see it just allows us to understand the components of the software development process and ask intelligent questions both of the hiring manager about the open role as well as of the candidate about their experience. And because it’s the same model, you can see how it really starts to blend and just gives us a floor to stand on, basically. And what are the roles I’m open at recruiting for, and then who are these candidates that I’m talking to.

Max: Okay, enough methodology talk. Let’s talk money. Let’s talk business.

Alison: Get it.

Max: I’m a 25-year-old. I wanna move out of my parents’ basement. I wanna make some money. Can you help me?

Alison: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Max: How fast can you turn me into a credible, technical recruiter?

Alison: Well, it depends on how hungry you are, that’s for sure. But I would say, you know, if you’re asking me with my business hat on, the way we work at Recruiting Innovation is with the tech recruiter certification. It is an all-encompassing, one-stop shop for fundamentals of recruiting. We have a Recruiting 101 class, and we have our alignment framework course, which is this, you know the communication bridge I like to talk about, I call it. And then we partner with the technologists to then download their specialties. So, then we, and the UX class, you hear the UX designer say this is what I’m doing across research, design, build, test, deploy. So, we would say that if you have, you know, 5-10 hours of training, right now it’s $695USD for the tech recruiter certification and, you know, recruiting is such an approachable industry. I wish we have more of a PR globally. I mean, demand for recruitment right now is as high as it is for software engineers, it’s blowing my mind. But, as an industry, we’re not really equipped to the onboard of ton of new recruiters because everything is sort of like one-for-one, you know, take time off the senior to show you, you know, what a tech staff is, if they even know, kind of scenario. And so, what we do is we, Recruiting Innovation becomes that digital onboarding partner for scaling recruiting teams. And I will say, while we’re speaking of it, we are almost going to, we’re soon to launch the 2.0 of our tech recruiter certification program, it’s due in mid-November. Inshallah, that everything, you know, comes through correctly. I’m doing my own product [unintelligible] development, so I’m experiencing it myself. But, with that, we’re gonna have front-end back-end dev ops UX design and product management courses in addition to the alignment framework course. And then the prices go up, from then it becomes 849USD per person. But anyone that wants to get on a 1.0 price, we’re doing a promo through November to lock in the $695 price to get the old 2.0. And actually, I also wanna share with your audience, you wanna get to see this in real life, I have some handouts for you. So, if you want to take down this URL, go to the URL, download the handouts, you’ll get not only the template for the technical interview, but then you’ll get the handout that has all the follow-up questions to help you get up to speed. So, if you’re interested in getting your alignment framework handout, it’s a bitly link. So it’s B I T dot L Y so bitly, forward slash talk technical. T A L K T E C H N I C A L. (bit.ly/talktechnical) And so it will take you to a landing page where you can download our handouts and you can learn more about our certification if that’s up your alley and then otherwise, you know, I would love to hear from folks how they’re getting on with trying out the handouts. You can always find me Alison Daley D A L E Y on LinkedIn.

Max: Fantastic. bit.ly/talktechnical.

Alison: That’s right, that’s right. That’s all we do is we help recruiters confidently talk tech. We like to say, “Stop the awkward, start the conversation.”

Max: Perfect. And I do think that there’s a world of opportunity there and people who can have control over their schedule and build a very profitable careers, helping companies hire engineers. and you’re right, it’s very accessible once you shake off the awkwardness. So, wonderful work that you’re doing to help shake off the awkward. And one question I ask a lot of my guests is to take us back to a recruiting mistake that they’ve done in the past, where they hired the wrong person and try to visualize, you know, a specific person that you hired that wasn’t a good fit and share with the audience what you learned from that experience so that they can learn from that mistake. ‘Cause we’ve all made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past.

Alison: Yes, yes.

Max: Is there someone that comes to mind?

Alison: Well, yeah. I mean if I, just thinking on my feet. It was actually for our own team, we were hiring an HR Generalist and we ended up hiring a former schoolteacher who was a really lovely person, super kind and friendly, gregarious. I expressed a little bit of concern, but I didn’t make it very big, but I thought that he was a little bit more creative and extroverted which would suit him more toward a recruiting role than an HR Generalist role, ‘cause they are very different positions and they tend to, you know, attract and require different personality types. Obviously, broad strokes, not true for everyone. I know some amazing introvert recruiters who just get the work done. But he didn’t do that well. He wanted more quickly from that position, and I had a feeling that he would. He really wanted to work at the company, which I couldn’t blame him. But you could just see overtime that he felt like he was bumping into walls and then it’s kind of like by-the-rules HR Manager didn’t really like his kind of creativity-slash-free spirit. So [unintelligible] there is a lot of dissatisfaction on both sides that, I mean, a lot of times it’s like it’s a really awesome person and you could see them in the company but then you kind of shoehorn them into the position that’s available and that’s just not a good fit for everybody in the long term.

Max: Yeah. Don’t try to force a hyper-creative person into a very structured environment where they’re just gonna make enemies all day long. So, that’s a great anecdote. Thanks, Alison. And of course, we’re not saying it’s anyone’s fault there, of course.

Alison: It happens. It really happens.

Max: Well, you’ve shared a lot of insights so thanks for coming on. And again, bit.ly/talktechnical for people to sign up and check out Recruiting Innovation and launch their and get rid of the awkward when you’re interviewing engineers. Thanks, Alison, for coming on the show.

Alison: My pleasure. I hope you all found us useful, and I look forward to connecting in the future. Thank you so much for having me, Max.

Max: Yes.

Max: This was Alison Daley from Recruiting Innovation, teaching us how to get rid of the awkward when interviewing an engineer and how a non-technical recruiter can get out of these interviews not sounding like an idiot. Hope you enjoyed it and if you want more tips on how to get better at recruitment from people like Alison and from technologists, please subscribe and share with friends.

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Max: Hello. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Lindsay Witcher, who is VP of Global Practice Strategy and Solutions at RiseSmart, which is part of the Randstad group and an expert on internal mobility, which is maybe the hidden engine a company needs to activate in order to really power up their hiring for graduate hiring That’s what I'm hoping for this, that with a good internal mobility engine, then that means you can train, you can grow people for many years, and then you can build a more diverse workforce, which is built from people from within coming straight out of school. So that'll be my pitch. And maybe Lindsay, if you want to poke holes in it, you're most welcome to do so and to expand our mind on how to build a good internal mobility program. So welcome to the show.

LINDSAY: Thanks Max. I'm so excited to be here. And definitely looking forward to that topic. I don't know that I'm going to poke holes necessarily in, but I'm excited for an interesting conversation.

Max: Thank you. And to kick things off how did you end up in such a, you know narrow, I would say specialized area of mobility I'd ran stats. Walk us through your career on how you ended up in the beautiful field that were of people strategy.

Lindsay: Yeah, sure. No happy to. So I've been here at Bronstein RiseSmart for a little over 10 years. I started when we were just RiseSmart very early days as a small Silicon Valley-based startup looking to disrupt the outplacement industry. So the industry of supporting people who are impacted by layoffs, find a new role, that was really the roots of our company.

And since that time you know, the company has really grown and expanded in terms of what we do and how we support our customers to really encompass the entire employee life cycle. So internal mobility redeployment all the way through to outplacement. And so obviously internal mobility today is such a hot topic for companies.

The war for talent is such that you can't find people on the outside. It's an important time to start looking within. And so we do a lot of that. We offer services and technology to help with that. And looking forward to, you know, diving into that topic as far as on a personal note I got here, I started my career.

I actually got a master's degree in career development. I was really passionate about psychology and careers and HR. So that's the path my education took me and then stumbled upon you know, a number of different roles, managing businesses, managing HR and some small businesses, coaching executives, writing resumes, all sorts of interesting things. As I went through graduate school, and then ultimately came more into this space, specifically that outplacement space and now the talent mobility space. And I'm part of Randstad RiseSmart’s global leadership team. So excited to have...

Max: Well of psychology is one of those departments that always produces great talent for the HR teams because you know, you have to have that sort of twisted mindset.

Sorry, just poking fun. But then you kind of have to have that curiosity to try to create these good environments and deal with the stresses of people. Maybe people from in talent acquisition these days I see more and more who are coming from an analytics background and maybe more, you know, left-brain thinkers.

But there's these two elements rises psychology elements and the analytics, which are both rising in demand and perhaps a in town tech position, what's becoming less, less frequency is the, you know, the more aggressive salesy kind of profile. The last two years must have been a very busy time for RiseSmart.

I'll play it. You know, if we're talking about outplacement and how is the market changing in the field of outplacement, which is. I think unknown to most people outside of that, up in the air movie with George Clooney.

Lindsay: Ah, you thought, oh man, I have to be honest. It's very much not like that movie. I can assure everybody. So just know that I mean, you know, we've really. Well, first of all, to answer your first question, what it's been like. I mean, obviously last year, 2020 was an incredibly difficult year for many companies, right? So many organizations were really negatively impacted by COVID their business models were turned upside down and they really struggled to find their way through the economic downturn that we experienced.

So we definitely had a lot of our customers needing to have layoffs last year, unfortunately. Which of course, you know, we much rather our customers retaining talent and move talent and train talent and do all those things. But of course, last year we saw a lot of companies needing to let people go.

But at the same time, you know, there's always that other side of it, there were a lot of organizations that we work with that were in a good position as a result of COVID they were in industries that were, you know, boom. On the flip side of that scenario. So in that case, we were able to really work hard with those customers who were having to let people go.

And those customers who were hiring to try to connect those dots and create as good of an outcome as possible for those employees who were impacted by layoffs. Because, you know, for us, we're really focused on experience. We want the individuals to have who we work with to have as good of an experience as possible, have all the support they need.

They get partnered with a coach, they get a brand new resume from a resume writer. We do a number of things to help them. And so for us, you know, we were really honored to be able to help a lot of people through a difficult time and found a lot of success, helping them find new roles in the industries that we're hiring over that time.

Max: I've never received this Rolls-Royce service, but I've actually never suffered a layoff personally you know on a personal level. But the career coach service the outplacement service, is that something that is offered at scale or it's more for, you know, leaders, senior leadership and you know what are some of the best practices in this space for maybe the more high volume space?

Lindsay: Yeah it's a good question. And I think that it's a nuanced answer because I think I remember, I don't think I know every company handles it differently. So on the one end of the spectrum, we have customers who truly are committed to equity and inclusion, and they believe that everyone should have equal access to services such as ours, as part of their exit process from the organization.

And so those organizations whether you're at the, you know, most entry-level of the company, or you're the most senior executive you're going to get outplacement services. And I do think that is the most fair and equitable approach because really we that when people have our services, not only do they handle the transition better, land into their new role much, much more quickly.

So that's good for the company, right? You save on severance, you save on unemployment insurance, depending on what country you're in and what those rules might be. But ultimately I think that we, of course, always advocate for that approach. There are companies, however, Based on budgets or past, you know, past processes or whatever the case might be.

They only offer our services to, you know, a certain level of employee up through, you know, their executive team. So it really depends on the company and what they're trying to achieve and their sort of point of view around. Who gets what and how much and that kind of thing. And then as far as the best practices, I think that for us, it's really about tech and touch.

We have a technology that we built that helps match people to jobs, helps them prepare for the job search, helps them be effective. But at the same time, like you might, like you mentioned, we have coaches, people who work with us get unlimited coaching. They get that brand new resume to have a job concierge career concierge who is really supporting them and finding opportunities, all of which sort of surround that person during this difficult time to help them be more successful because when you're out on your own, you know, it's challenging and you don't do a job search normally. So you don't know what to do to your point. Some people have never had to kind of go through that. So all of our services really help people be successful.

Max: Yeah you anticipated next question, which was around technology and automation. And of course they're dealing with an emotional time when you need ideally a high touch approach with a human touch. Do you think that this domain still has room for automation and you know, what is the crystal ball say on this one?

Lindsay: Yeah, I think that, you know, like I mentioned earlier, we were born as it's really a technology company. We've always had services, but really where we focused. How can we deliver a great experience through technology with the human touch to supplement it and really power the human touch through that technology? So I think when we think about automation, we think less about reducing the human touch and more about optimizing the human touch.

So when we build backend systems, when we build tools in our portal that individuals use, we're really focused on how can we optimize a person's experience so that when they are leveraging our services, they in the coach are really focused on strategy, focused on the most important things.

Not doing things like trading emails on what time someone's available. Right. We have self-scheduling for example, or, you know, job matching. We don't want a person having to go out and spend hours and hours and hours looking online for jobs, our technology. We have a patented matching technology that does the work for them.

A curated list of all of the opportunities out there, just down to the ones that are best fit for them, their profile they're still, so there's always room for additional efficiencies and creating greater experiences through technology, certainly. But I think for us, our DNA and our commitment to creating just what we would call a wow experience for people, it's never to replace the human element, but just to optimize it and make it either.

Max: Amen. Amen. There's so much that can still be done around yeah. Productivity of individual contributors and. I personally feel like my job has changed a little bit in the last two years with an increase in zoom meetings and obviously a decrease in traveling. So I feel like you know, the day-to-day job has changed a lot. Even though my remnant and job title is remained intact. Wondering about moving on to internal mobility and the, the way we market our jobs to our employees. Generally, that's not something that's handled by the same team as the one that does recruiting. Right? Or do you find that there's a dedicated team just in large companies that say if many thousands of employees do they separate those two teams because we're dealing with different audiences with different expectation?

Lindsay: Yeah, it depends. And again, I hate to keep saying it depends, but it really, each customer handles this a little bit differently. And I think that the reality is most professionals would say or would agree to, it's easier to find a job outside the company than it is to find a job inside the company. Right.

And that's why so many people leave. I mean, there's a lot of stats being thrown around right now. You know, 95% of professionals are considering leaving their jobs or 75% of professionals are considering leaving their jobs right now. Right? I mean, I'm sure the actual number is somewhere in the middle of all that, but ultimately when you have a situation where it's easier for someone to find a job externally than it is for them to find a job internally, then, of course, they're going to go externally, right.

Because it's the path of least resistance. And so from my perspective, And what I am seeing, some companies move towards is treating internal talent acquisition with the same thought investment teams as external talent acquisition. Because really at the end of the day, from my perspective, it's all about talent pools.

Your internal employees are just yet another talent pool for you to tap into and you should be leveraging and optimizing that just as much as you. university hiring or your early professional hiring or, you know, whatever other types of hiring you're trying to do. And so from my perspective, at least you should be making the same types of investments in that but there's a big change management culture curve that has to happen in many organizations because what we find is a number of things. First and foremost, a lot of companies don't have a culture that's accepting of internal mobility. So managers core talent, or they penalize people who raise their hands and say, Hey, you know what? I actually might want to try something new. Right. And all of a sudden, you're not getting projects, your manager won't talk to you.

And you know, you're worried you're going to get that pink slip, you know, the next time you talk. Right? So there's a culture problem first and foremost, in a lot of companies. Whereas they say they want to do better internal mobility, but they haven't created an environment where that's accepted and encouraged and rewarded, frankly.

So I think first and foremost companies have to focus on the culture. And then from there, once you have the culture in place and managers and leaders on board, then you have to create the systems by which people can actually be mobile. Part of that comes down to, do you have a profile of all of your employees, right?

You would be surprised. How many companies don't have something as basic as just an inventory of employee skills, for example? Right? So in order to enact into our internal mobility and do it well, you need to know what skills your people have and you need to know what skills your organization needs to be successful, and you need to bring those two together.

Right? So, that's not happening in a lot of cases. And then furthermore, I think if you can think about it from a top-down or a bottom-up perspective. So top-down perspective is the culture change, the leadership, the, workforce planning, activities, all of that sort of thing. But then at the end of the day, you can workforce plan, you know, you can implement LMS systems, you can put, you know, training videos in place, but at the end of the day, if the individual employee doesn't understand.

What's in it for me? How does my making the effort to take control of my career? Take that class, gain that skill, you know, apply for that job if they don't understand why that's important and how that fits in for them and their future. They're not going to take action. They're not going to be motivated to do the things that are needed to make internal ability successful.

So our point of view, of course, somewhat selfishly, is that everyone deserves a coach. Everyone deserves that one-on-one career support, right. And in a perfect world, everyone who wants it would have access to. But you know, of course not everyone is ready for something such as that, but we know that people are more successful when they have one-on-one support around their career.

And most managers let's be honest, are terrible at supporting their employees from a career perspective. So, you know, you kind of have…

Max: You've said a couple of you've had a couple of digs at managers for protecting their teams and yeah, because

Lindsay: I'm a manager, I have a seat. Right. But I also have… I'm also a, self-aware enough to realize that in a lot of cases, a manager has so much impact and control over the career of an employee that, you know, you have to really create a culture where part of the manager's job is getting great talent up and going into other roles within the current along way towards that internal mobility. Yeah.

Max: Yeah. It's that switch? When the manager starts to see themselves, as, you know, a pat, you know, a stop along the way of a great career sees themselves as a mentor who will help them get to the next step. It's yeah, it takes a level of. Detachment from the day-to-day, which is a level of maturity, which it takes a while to get there.

Lindsay: Right. And just a commitment to the bigger picture putting the good of the company over the good of me as a manager. Right. And just my team. And I think that's part of it too. And again, it comes down to culture, right? It comes down to an example that your leadership is setting for, you know your directors for your managers and, and kind of everyone in.

Max: Do you think that you know, there's a stat to say that new generations have a shorter attention, span, more opportunities than ever, and everything is available at the click of a button these days. So that they're a little bit more high-paced and so do you think that the pace of internal mobility has changed to reflect that and that companies now are okay with people changing roles faster than they did five, 10 years.

Lindsay: I think they have to be. Cause if they're not okay with it, it's not going to change that that's the new reality. Right. So they need to figure out a way to be okay with it and create a scenario where people have the opportunity to do it because I think that people do have choices. And I also think there's a lot of trend towards people not willing to put up with what they have in the past, from, from companies from work. That sort of thing. I do want to acknowledge that not everyone is in a privileged position to have that level of autonomy over their career. Right? It's not available across the workforce. So I think it's important to recognize and acknowledge that. But I think for, you know, a lot of professionals today you look at a lot of the studies and surveys and things that are going out there, but work-life balance doing work that has purpose and meaning.

You know, all of those things are so important and then people are not willing to accept anything less. So they'll come to you they'll work for you, but if they don't find that they have the opportunity for growth, that they're learning, that they're engaged with. They're connected to something bigger than themselves, they will go somewhere else. And personally, I think companies should be more okay with that and recognize that while this great person may be leaving to go to another company, I'm probably gaining a great person from some other company, right? So it really almost creates an ecosystem where everyone is benefiting, where if I think all companies can get comfortable with the idea of mobility, get comfortable and committed to skilling their workforce and keeping people employed. Where everyone will then benefit from each other's investments versus this very narrow-minded view that we hear a lot is, well, I'm not going to invest in skilling my people, because then they're just going to leave. So why am I going to do that? Right. Which is very prevalent, you'd be surprised.

And that, to me, that's a very short-sighted view and it's a very short-sighted approach because at the end of the day, There's a bigger societal commitment. I think that companies should have to do their people, right?

Max: Yeah. Yeah. I agree that as a psychologist, you know, you can probably dig into the reasons why. I mean, it just comes from a certain level of insecurity. Somebody leaves you and you fail. You take it personally.

Lindsay: Yeah, but it's not about you. Right? We have to leave our egos at the door in some cases with some of these things, right. If someone goes on to take a new opportunity, it's not about me. It's not about my company. It's, that's what was right for them and that's okay. And I need to be okay with that as a leader and even support them in a lot of cases.

Max: Hey I think you're so damn right. And it's so damn hard.

Lindsay: Can you please cut that out of the podcast and just give it to me in a little a drive so I can share that?

Max: Yeah, I wonder on the recruitment marketing side do you think the right approach is, to go and promote and hunt these jobs out, or that would create too much disruption like to have a head of a department go speak to another department and say, you know, come and work for my team. Have you seen these companies where there's enough maturity and trust where that,

Lindsay: Yeah, I absolutely have not a lot are there. Right. But there are absolutely organizations that one comes to mind that we work with. It's a large technology company. They have about 70,000 employees globally and they have a very robust, very mature kind of internal mobility mindset where they kind of buy into a lot of what I've said so far on this call, which is, you know, we are stewards of a person's career during the time they choose to be here. And so we're going to invest in them. We're going to make opportunities available and we hope they stay. But if they choose to go, that's okay too, because that's what's right for them. And kind of going back to your question. They actively encourage cross-functional networking leaders, getting exposed to people across the business, individual contributors, you know, professionals at all levels being exposed to leaders, considering making career changes, considering joining different teams.

You know, I think at the end of the day, a lot of the companies are moving away from this concept construct of, you know, you have a manager and then you have a team who work for that manager and that sort of what they do. To more of a dynamic, you know, skills-based there's work that needs to get done within the company. Here's the people who happen to have the skills required to get that work done, put those individuals together on a dynamic team, get the work done. And then they move on to the next dynamic team for the next body of work that needs to get done based on their skills. So I'm not suggesting that we're anywhere close to eliminating the idea of a manager. I think even in that sort of more dynamic team environment, you're always going to need someone who is that touchpoint for the individual to help direct and monitor and support and all of that. But I do think that you're going to find the borders for lack of a better word around the groups of talent, which today we kind of call teams being broken down a little bit and being more fluid, focused more on skills and work that needs to be done and less on well, you know, that thing isn't part of the charter that I have, therefore I'm not going to commit any resources to it. Right. Which is what you see in a lot of companies today.

Max: Just for the sake of debating, what if there was a counterpoint to internal mobility? What would it be? Is there, can you imagine a scenario where a company goes too far into this internal mobility business and just creates a havoc for them? Can you imagine such a scenario? You know, I'm trying to imagine it and I think, well, no way, like, of course, it's good for every department to know what the others are doing. But maybe at some point, there's like an overload. I don't know.

Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen that happen yet, but you know, and I very much believe in the idea of the less rules, the less overly processed things can be the better. Right. I think that when you start to apply too many processes, too many rules, too many regulations, you inhibit growth, you inhibit innovation, you know, things like that, but, you know, of course, you don't want to create a scenario where people are hopping jobs every 30, 60 days or something like that. So I guess if there was a scenario where that was happening within a company. I could see that as being viewed as, maybe not ideal necessarily, but short of that, I,

Max: With the graduate management training program where we made them hop department to department, but it was hard to get people to accept in our company. It's just, yeah.

Lindsay: Well, that's also during a discreet time, too, right? It was a special kind of insulated program, if you will, versus like the entire company is working. And I've every 60 days I'm moving onto a new role type of thing. That could be good.

Max: Yeah, that would be hard.

Lindsay: Okay. That initiative that you've just mentioned.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's because you know, you feel like the people coming out of the program have you know, more maturity than if they had just done one thing. So I think it's just the way to go and if you can afford to do it, it's great. And you can't really afford to do it you know, you can't hire up some top executives and say, all right, just bounce around for a year or two. And tell me what you like.

Lindsay: That would be tough.

Max: So you're going to do that with the young talent, but I think it works of course. And well I normally asked two more questions to all my guests, which are a little bit outside of our topic.

But you know, the first one is technology that you use in your field that you think could lift an operations effectiveness and alluded to that a little bit saying simply well productivity tools like scheduling and calendaring. Is that the first thing that comes to mind?

Lindsay: I mean, yeah, it's sort of basic, but yeah, I think for me, as far as making the work, we do more efficient. That's part of it. I mean, I do think another technology that we have is called Bright Fit that we've just recently released, which is really focused around helping an individual, understand their skills, understand what opportunities in the broader job market have the best outlook and then matching those two things together.

It's sort of like a GPS for your career. To help you really navigate things. And so, you know, to me to get to that conclusion for an average person would take hours upon hours upon hours of research and interviews and digging, and Googling and all sorts of things. So I think anytime you can consolidate the effort of something to help a person make a career decision and give them insights that really get them closer to being comfortable, making a decision to me, that's a great efficiency.

Well, of course I think what we've built is amazing. I'd love to see more companies focusing on that. It's really an employee experience consideration just across career decision-making and career path thing and all of that kind of thing.

Max: Yeah. Well, salaries are going up and you know, many people are. Oh, can I get a raise? And then you need to be able to come up with an answer for that. So using the tool, like you mentioned to say, well, you can get a raise if you move a little bit towards that direction, because that's where the market is becoming, where there's the most demand. So it's a market-based approach to dealing with that situation. I think it works well. And then my last question, which is you know, a bittersweet one while more bitter, really it's about hiring mistakes that people make. And so as a manager I know you've made hiring mistakes before probably. And so just if you could walk down memory lane and even if it's a suppressed memory to, to, remember for our listeners, what mistake that was and you know, what they can learn from it.

Lindsay: Yeah. I think for me, especially in our earlier days working, you know as a startup and whatnot, you know, you work very quickly. You're moving at a million miles an hour and not always taking the time to really stop and think about what you need. So I certainly can think of times in my career. I've made a hire based on, you know, available information, but not given myself the time and space to think it through longer-term and more strategically.

And as a result, you know, might've been able to hire someone who was a slightly better skill fit for the long-term versus just the immediate need, if that makes sense. So I think that I would call that kind of a hiring mistake is really mostly about just being very intentional. Thinking it through and not making a gut decision, but a really well-informed database, longer view type of decision around hiring now.

Max: What is this person going to be doing a year, two years, three years from now.

Lindsay: Right. And is this person I'm looking at hiring right now, capable to get there, even if they're not here right now, do they have the capabilities to grow into that? And if not, then I need to really question if that's the right hire.

Max: Yeah. And it's a delicate balance, right? Because if you're interviewing somebody as if they were coming in for a VP role, and then you put them at a desk to handle a customer support. Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a gap between the experience of the recruitments and then the reality of the job.

Lindsay: Yeah, somewhere in, but even just things like growth mindset, curiosity. Right. I think that there's some kind of baseline traits that can tell you that a person can be poised for greater things down the road, even if they're not ready for them today, maybe not quite that leap customer service to VP, but at a minimum, you know, customer service to maybe eventually being a manager of a customer service team, for example, I think thinking that through is really helpful.

Max: Yeah. I had an assessment vendor on the show that was saying that for positions that are indeed high volume, very repetitive that they would ask questions to make sure they would for people who were highly creative thinkers, they would downgrade their...

Lindsay: And that's where it's interesting.

Max: They'd be afraid that it would burn out through boredom.

Lindsay: I think that there's a right job for each person. Right. And no matter what someone's skill set is, what someone's sort of a superpower is if you will, that there's a place for everybody somewhere.

Max: Well, beautiful words to finish our conversation. Thank you, Lindsay, for coming on the shelf. Of course. Thanks for having me max. I appreciate it.

That was Lindsay Witcher from Randstad reminding us that someone coming to work for you as only there for a little part of time. For a few years, if you're lucky. And that recruitment is a small step within a big step, which is joining your company but in a very multi-step and many sometimes many staircases experience, which is a career.

So as Lindsay works on outplacement services, you reminds us as recruiters to always keep the long-term perspective of what a candidate has to do to progress in their career. And it's important as to keep that top of mind so that we don't solve short-term problems to create problems down the line where candidates that don't have a path for growth.

Hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll be back for more on the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. Remember to share with friends.

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Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today, on the show, I'm super happy to welcome Adam Chambers who is the founder, CEO of Applichat Healthcare. Applichat is a company I've first found about on another podcast The Chad and Cheese and was one of the first companies, along with mine, to move into the chatbot space and applying chatbot specifically to the challenges of sourcing and sourcing on social media. Since then, Adam has focused his company on the healthcare, on the booming healthcare sector, which has gone through so much changes in the last year and we're here to talk to him about sourcing and how to source for nurses and healthcare professionals and anything else that where the conversation might take us. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam: Thank you so much. To everyone listening, I just wanna say Max is amazing. Really helped me with my career. So, you should keep listening to the show and buy his stuff.

Max: Thanks, buy my stuff, yes, and I'm not selling on this show. I'm just using it to remind ourselves that recruitment never stops, that never stops changing and that to stay abreast of what people are doing and maybe get a couple of ideas for my own business, as I hope some of the listeners will. So for the people who are new to Applichat and Applichat Healthcare as newly-rebranded, can you say in your own words what you guys do?

Adam: Yeah, so, we really specialize in connecting nurses, employers in under 48 hours. So sort of means you guys pay, because whenever it comes to job search as a nurse you have four or five different options and the one that's gonna give you an offer quickest is usually the one that you're gonna take. Like they don't have a time to mess about. So what we do is we make tough application process, like you do with your chatbots, simple as possible, 60 seconds, five to ten questions. And then we immediately get them in front of a recruiter, at one of our clients. So, it's an instantaneous process.

Max: Front of the panel, before it hits the ATS?

Adam: Yeah pretty much, like before even they send their resume. We try and call them within one hour, get them booked in. And one we sent one on Friday, so today's Monday, we sent one on Friday and she just got made a job offer today plus two working days, we can say to the nurses that we're the best cause we have these relationships with our clients where we can move you quickly and then to the clients we say, nurses want to be moved quickly so when can I do that for them?

Max: Mhm. The time element with nurses, is it more acute than you know I guess other jobs? I guess the time elements become more pressing the lower the salaries are, it seems like you know. The people who are less paid on the great you know pyramid of things, are the ones who need the money the most, and the highest time pressure, I suppose, to act on things. But generally speaking, I would imagine that healthcare workers, presently, are very well-paid, that they would be in their comfortable category.

Adam: Yeah, I think a nurse could expect to get 70 thousand dollars a year, depending where they are, it's an average. The speed thing is not so much that they need the money, it's more so that the employers need them. So, they'll make four, five applications and then it's a matter of sort of who can get to them first. So, I think there is like—where like the first employee you speak to, the first one you interview to, the first facility you visit, it has an improved impression compared to the other ones. So, that's why it's so important to be the first one to get an active job-seeking nurse because here she already has four or five applications and there'll be a couple offers by the time you speak to them.

Max: Absolutely. So, I think that's true for most jobs and certainly in a hot market like this, it's a race. So, the diss on social media and social media sourcing is that, yeah, you can get leads but they’re not good quality leads. These people don’t even pick up the phone, they're not qualified candidates. How do you work around that objection and what are your thoughts on social media versus job boards?

Adam: I think, if you could get a hundred applicants from Indeed, more would get hired than the hundred that you get from Facebook. So I don't think it's a black and white diss of saying that social media doesn't work for recruiting, it's a spectrum. Social media works for recruiting, you just need to get more candidates and that's actually a good match because 70, 75 percent of nurses, at least, will go on Facebook or Instagram every single month compared to five, ten percent go on Indeed. So, you've got a bigger market of candidates, but less competition when it comes to employers. So, I love the spectrum ranges, from just looking to ready-to-apply on social media. The fact that there is that portion of ready-to-apply, means you can still make placements and just as many placements as from job board seem to get more people. And at the same time, that perception of rubbish leads who don’t pick up the phone. I think it is ingrained in the people because they're so used to getting their candidates from Indeed or through this career site. Like people who take loose steps to find a job and they don't know how to treat a lead, like they don't even call a lead, in our space at least, they just say, as a nurse, he isn’t interested. Whereas, we know, like you have to market to those people and you have to send them emails and a text every so often and like build the candidate pool and then you can use those. So...

Max: So you're building the talent pool by getting their attention, but once you’ve got them looking, it may take a few ads, a few messages before you can activate them into a job-seeker.

Adam: Yeah. It's more like a few months, and sometimes none of them will, but you have to do something.

Max: You know. That's how to make the economics work is to have that re-engagement strategy. So, maybe from practically speaking, what are the initial steps if somebody says you know, well, I don't wanna create competitors for Applichat, but if somebody says, I'm a healthcare provider, I wanna hire some nurses and I haven't tried, I don't know, Facebook or Instagram, is that where you're advertising?

Adam: So, we don't really talk about so much like in those presentations whenever we're selling to someone because if we say the word Facebook, like, that has so many connotations to them that it sort of distracts them away from the point, yeah. But if we are advertising there, like, we use the traffic that go onto that site, advertise to them. That's how you utilize it.

Max: Okay, yeah. I think most marketplaces are the same way. Everybody goes to the same places to get traffic, which is you know you go where the people are, which is TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, and then you drive people to a website. And so, you've stopped maybe doing the whole native lead capturing where you do everything on Facebook, and now you drive them to a more, let's say, traditional website?

Adam: So yeah, well it depends what channel we're advertising on. So, if for example, if we're doing it on Instagram like then, it get real easy for someone to input their information, like natively. But if it's on Youtube, it's better if you send them off Youtube, on the website. So it really depends, I think, on how people are used to using the channel and then what technology the channel provides to enable you to take advantage of the people who are using it. Not on a bad way, that sounded bad. Take advantage of their behaviors.

Max: For example, with the retargeting or being able to, you know, to organize the profiles and categories?

Adam: Yeah, exactly.

Max: So, um.

Adam: Retargeting, it comes back to, like, the spectrum I was talking about. If someone isn't ready to apply, then it would be a good idea to retarget them with an ad which acknowledges that. So, if for example, you have Talkpush as a CRM, for example, and a candidate's been stuck on a stage for a couple of weeks, then I like them to start a campaign which has a message directed to people who are still thinking about it. It's a much smarter way to advertise and just like pushing jobs to like people who aren’t listening.

Max: Mhm. And for example, that kind of content would be a video about, you know, career reconversion. Would you advertise directly some employer branding materials and videos about this is why it's so great to work here. How do you do it in a more subtle way than just push job description?

Adam: Yeah. There's two useful ways. So, the first is what you mentioned, employer branding stuff. Stories of real people really resonate well with nurses because a lot of them have a calling to care for people, so they really value personal connection, and also they value the opinions of other nurses, more than anything. So, personal stories like that, people speaking to the camera. Or, you can just, sort of, call, what's the saying, call a spade a spade, and say like, hey we saw you clicked in our ad recently, still thinking about it, and just sort of call that out and then revisit some of the reasons why they might have clicked the ad in the first place.

Max: Right, reminders and retargeting that way. I agree with you that these personal stories would be great, sort of, bait. And for Applichat, are you bringing stories during marketing, you bring stories from your different customers in the healthcare space, and you go straight to the candidates to share their stories or you have more targeted campaigns that are customer-specific? Is it branded Applichat or is it branded for your customers?

Adam: Yeah, I think of like, you're gonna tell the story of the place of work and the people that they will work with. They don't really care so much about our process and how we help them. They care about what their life will be like in this new job. So, you wanna, like, show them what it could be like, show them that beautiful reflection could be them, if they do it.

Max: That initial lead that you engage with, so if somebody wants to get started on sourcing on social media, they wanna make their own mistakes, and they wanna figure it out without going through your company, how would you advise them to get started? You know, to get more familiar with social media sourcing. What would be step one?

Adam: So, step one, get a hundred dollars from someone.

Max: Their parents?

Adam: Just get, say, cause you always have to think like, of the practicalities first I think. So in the past I've done webinars on using Facebook for jobs, but no one ever does it. You just think about the practicalities and the settings. So, you need to get approval from someone and a hundred dollars, a small budget, from someone who has decision-making authority and say, I wanna try this new thing. And then it's just a case of starting going on Google and Youtube and looking up how to create ads on Instagram or Facebook or Youtube. Follow that through, create an ad, and I think the most important thing is your ad shouldn't be a job description, it should be an offer. Because on these sites, you're not competing with the retirement home next door or the hospital next door, you're competing with Coca-Cola, McDonalds. Everyone trying to sell everyone else’s stuff. So, it's so important that you are able to catch people's eye, awaken something inside them, make them feel a bit of emotion, and you can't do that with a job description which says the working hours and the responsibilities. You have to come in with the PN points and the potential solutions. So for example, one of our ads is for relocation to North Carolina and we're targeting travel nurses. So, we will go wide with a message to those travel nurse that talks about how they might be tired of moving about so much, that talks about how they might be frustrated with the inconsistency of their lives, and then comes in with the opportunity that get like consistency, stop moving about, and still live somewhere which is beautiful.

Max: Put your life in order and go watch the beautiful trees as autumn comes to North Carolina.

Adam: Yeah.

Max: Like a travel ad.

Adam: Yeah, we need to like, recruiters need to go away from like the science of like number, well numbers are important but like, don't just say the facts, you know, tell the story as well. We need to move towards being like poets and artists and writers. I think we need to think of ourselves as higher than recruiters cause we're all doing so far more than just creating jobs and filling jobs. At least that's how I think about it.

Max: Everything that you just said is quite opposite to some of the advice I've been delivering myself, which is

Adam: Oh yeah?

Max: You know in some market, you have very direct advertising, just don't forget to put the salary, you know, don't forget to be very specific because you don't wanna mislead candidates into not knowing what they're looking for. But, I suppose, I'm thinking more about active job-seekers. Even before that you're opening their mind to the possibility of a different career or relocation and still today, I think, Facebook and Instagram, or Youtube, they don't allow you to target specifically job-seekers, right? It's not like you have a cookie on their browser and you know that they were on Indeed and Zip last week.

Adam: Yeah, you need to target them with what you say in the ad. So

Max: Yeah.

Adam: That's what you need, something that's gonna make them click on it.

Max: Yeah. Right. Well, I think we've got some great bits of information and advice here for our audience. So, thanks a lot Adam for sharing, and how can people get ahold of you and Applichat if they're in the healthcare space and looking for help in hiring more nurses?

Adam: Yeah, just add me on LinkedIn. Adam Chambers. C H A M B E R S.

Max: Great.

Adam: That's it.

Max: Thanks a lot. Thanks for joining.

Adam: All right, thank you for inviting me. Cheers.

Max: If you're sourcing on social media, the best thing to do is to tell a story more so than in other medium, a job description won't do it alone. You need to tell the story of the people whose life you're going to effect. Adam Chambers has been doing that for nurses, but the same holds true for other professions. Hope you found this interview inspiring that you got something out of it, and that you'll be back for more, remember to subscribe and share.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I’m your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, somebody south of where I am, all the way down in Perthestow in Sydney, Miss Mrs. Kelly Van Nelson, Managing Director at Adecco Australia. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

Kelly: Thank you, Max. It’s great to be here today.

Max: Pleasure to have you, and Kelly how do you end up as a Managing Director? I’m not gonna ask you to introduce Adecco because if you don’t know Adecco, you’re on the wrong podcast. because you should as number one brand in the world and well I’m sure it’s got a different strength in different markets. It’s pretty well-known worldwide. I couldn’t think of a geography where it isn’t. So, I assume that the business in Australia is also quite wide-ranging from tech to you know more office temporary staff and everything in between?

Kelly: Yes, it is. We have the Adecco group and all of the brands represented in Australia which Adecco is workforce solutions, but we do have all-tech solutions and we do have talent solutions which is our placements and upscaling and rescaling too. So yeah, the full complements of the Adecco group is here on the ground, in and around Australia.

Max: And Australia is in the news right now for all kinds of reasons, mainly because it’s impossible to come in and out of it. Has that been we’ll talk later about how that’s affected your team, but from the business standpoint, is it been good or bad for business?

Kelly: I would say it’s been good for business, challenging absolutely, and we have to very rapidly pivot our operations and elements of the business to leverage the opportunities, but nevertheless, it’s actually been good for our business for a number of reasons. We can dive into them if you like but I would say definitely positive impacts.

Max: That’s great to hear. I’ve recently had on the show someone who’s taught me about having to repurpose. Half of her team to do something other than recruitment in 2020 and I hope I wasn’t too traumatic for the team down under. And sounds like things are good so we’ll find out what well what you can share with us there. But before we go there if you could share with me and the audience were how you ended up where you are today because you don’t sound Australian so I think it must have been a long road.

Kelly: It’s been a long road. Twenty-seven years in the recruitment and workforce solutions based on the technology in the street. Started out in Northern England as you can probably guess from the accent. But yeah, I moved around the world in the industry, lived in South Africa, Edinburgh, London, and many years in Perth and Western Australia in my early years of my career with the Adecco Group in the technology brand which is Modis. And two and a half years I go I moved to Sydney with the family and moved into the Managing Director role of Adecco. So yeah, been around a little while and seen a hugely changing industry that we work in which is actually exciting, no two days are ever the same.

Max: Yeah, it attracts a good bunch of people who end up in recruitment. People who are empathetic and hardworking generally, but empathetic and hardworking may not be enough anymore. There’s there are new skills required to survive in this dog fight. Can you elaborate on how you know those new changes have affected the composition of your team and you know what are people that have done well and those who have lagged behind?

Kelly: Yeah, we definitely see it man, not just in our own business but with our own customer base for different sets of core skill sets. Resilience is the one we’re always seeking and with that comes the ability to adapt and change and embrace change. And the resilience is not just from COVID but from the changing sort of industry that we work in and the rapid scaling of technology and the different demands of you know the global economy. So for me, resilience is the number one thing I look for when I when we are interviewing for new personnel to build a high-performing team. And when we have people in the business, the most successful recruiters and broader team members that I see who really have a good long career and good long tenure and great success would be the ones who have this aptitude for lifelong learning. Always looking to gain new skills, always looking at what’s next not what’s happening today, and being very very open to self-investment in their own skillset and you know personal capability in achieving personal best. So yeah, I would say having a huge aptitude for upscaling, rescaling, and lifelong learning is really critical right now.

Max: And now to be able to assess resiliency in the course of a couple of interviews is sounds like mission impossible. I can’t even think of a psychometric or competent assessment task that would get you there either. Intuition, career history, what are some of the good data points you can base those decisions on?

Kelly: Yeah, definitely I probe a lot and run scenarios even with people that we’re interviewing who don’t come from the industry or don’t bring a huge amount of experience, or they might be a graduate friend or for instance in early career. I tend to put some scenarios on the table around what has been a challenging circumstance that you’ve faced and how have you overcome an obstacle. And you know just different types of people like to self-manage and yeah just really probe around those examples and you can tend to you know to find what you’re looking for in individuals who have risen above obstacles and removed roadblocks. So yeah, it’s definitely something I’ve spent a lot of time on during an interview process probing on that one.

Max: Yeah.

Kelly: Yeah. I think I think the recruitment industry as a whole now is asking for this whole broad range of soft skills. You know if you look before what would be the core skills of recruiters, it would be probing on ability to meet targets and ability to sell, and you know customer skills on the telephone and all of the things that go with sort of a sale skill set or you know maybe a call center skill set. Whereas now it’s really about these inner skills that you know can really set you apart when the going gets tough.

Max: Yeah, it’s about this lifelong learning, reinventing yourself a few times, and I think I wouldn’t do very well in an interview. I’ve had my first of of of you know conflicts and difficulties, but you know the human brain I just kind of erased it all. I don’t even, once it’s once the when the challenge has been overcome I kinda tend to forget about it and pretend it never happened. That’s maybe why I wouldn’t do such a..I wouldn’t be such a good recruiter. Maybe that’s unique skill set for an entrepreneur.

Kelly: You’d be surprised. We could make a recruiter of you yet I think. We could make good recruiters of most people. Yeah

Max: Thank you. That is a fine compliment. Great so so one change that recruiters and white-collar workers all over the world have had to take in is this hybrid work environment.

Kelly: Yeah.

Max: And and so I don’t know how many people you managed in Australia and how big the team is but I’m sure you’ve had to some turnover with people who are either fed up with working from home or fed up with going to the office, one way or the other. It’s very hard to please everybody. How is how do you know work around these challenges?

Kelly: I think for us it’s just again about being adaptable. We were very lucky in that when the first wave of the pandemic really took foothold in Australia, we were very well-positioned to rapidly move to work from home. We ran an overnight test done pretty much within 24 hours. We had moved our entire operations to virtual working and that was right across the country, which was quite extraordinary and that really enabled us to push on and do what was needed to be done with redeploying workers and helping the workforce to cope with the pandemic. It has been many workers coming out of employment or being stood down or having their hours cut back and needing to be handheld into new industries or new positions. And many candidates also needed assistance to use virtual tools, virtual interview tools, virtual application tools, onboarding tools. But our own recruiters inside Adecco were very very able to adapt literally within 24 hours. We had already been pretty good at allowing and supporting flexible working policies and embracing work from anywhere and mobility and things took quite a long time, which really bode us well in you know in what happened with the first wave of COVID. And as we progressed through some of the last you know more than a year now of the pandemic, what we’ve found is we’ve got this interesting trend where about half the workforce wants to be in the office half of the time. So, you’ve got this hybrid scenario emerging and the next normal continues to be this hybrid environment. Workers want to have a balance of time in the office where they can interact, they can upscale, they can learn from one another, they can you know find this team camaraderie face-to-face and have human interaction and social interaction in the workplace. Versus being highly productive if not more productive from home and you know being able to balance their home lives and you know to being able to balance the safety and the environment which we have to work in if we’re going through different lockdowns. So, we see this globally, on average, globally 53 percent of workers want to spend at least you know some of their time working remotely. So, it’s not really a trend anymore, it’s actually a new norm this hybrid working. So, so organizations are having to adapt to this in different ways depending on the industry and the type of industry you run. But for Adecco, we’re very much in a comfortable place now with being able to operate work from office work from home in varying levels of that and giving people flexibility.

Max: That’s that’s to be expected progressive employers such as Adecco would be who’d have already spent a lot of time doing hybrid workplace. Maybe you have some customers who are less more traditional let’s say, more resistant. The customer is king to a certain degree so have you kind of helped customers attract you know to change their recruitment marketing to attract workers that are more inclined towards the office? And then of course we know a lot there’s plenty of offers for jobs that are fully remote. I think that the labor market is plentiful. But are you working with some employers that are you know that are still committed to having a purely office environment?

Kelly: We definitely see that. We see some businesses still struggling to find their feet a little bit with what their business landscape looks like. And we also have a very large proportion of our workforce, especially in the contingent labor space that are essential work and doesn’t necessarily always allow work from home for various reasons. If there is you know customer at face-to-face engagement or services needed, what we tend to do is typically treat each business with you know good listening and good understanding of what their business objectives are. And also have a good conversation around the skills shortages that we do face, and you know with no migration you know more than 70000 people only migrate into the country and unfilled a lot of the positions that we you know that we look for. And that workforce is not readily available anymore. Unemployment’s at an all-time low and the talent pool list to a certain extent shrinking. So, accessibility to talent and the best talent in the market is key for any business, whether it’s about small business right up to you know a large global Fortune 500. Giving your organization the chance to hire the best talent wherever they’re located and bring them into your business, it really allows for diversity of your workforce into you know to really attract routine right now at a time that that’s critical. If you don’t, you would be, to a certain extent, left behind. So so sometimes it’s a conversation around you know talent shortages and getting the best talent. You know there’s a financial link to that and financial benefit to that. There are productivity gains that are proven to be really good if you can get this. And yeah, workers and our employees are commanding it right now.

Max: Yeah, and in this market, I’m surprised anybody can hit their targets. What are some of their creative workarounds for you know industries where you have low unemployment, rising wages, more constraints about who can come in and who cannot. Can you illustrate some creative thinking that’s going on or maybe you’ve reconverted people from one industry to the next in order to keep the wheels spinning?

Kelly: Yeah, we definitely had exactly this scenario. So, if I can go back a year, we had whole industries that were downsizing and substantially so, for example, aviation and hospitality and retail to a certain extent, and you know sports and recreation. But entire industry is pretty much you know grounded and in parallel with that, you had many other industries experiencing extraordinary surges. So, for example, online trading of services, whether it be online buying and retail, consumer services at on the phone, or online. You know for example call centers, contact centers. You know the demand for skills second to none during the COVID coupled with healthcare changes in certain industries, you have this two-stream scenario of industries downsizing their workforce substantially and industries commanding extraordinary numbers of new jobs in different industries. So, we did a lot of work very very quickly. I’m talking in a matter of you know one to two weeks. Putting workers through very rapid upscaling and rescaling practical courses that were going to give them the tips and the techniques and the basic skills to be able to transition from one industry into another with some level of seamless you know ease. And that was enormously successful. We transitioned and redeployed a couple of thousand workers in a fortnight in the early stages of COVID by upscaling and rescaling any short-job programs and ways of working. So that was highly successful and a lot of them has remained. So, we are, still today is an organization in Adecco investing in upscaling and rescaling through our different brands, really working with candidates to best identify how we can use candidate pools smartly and sensibly to fill with skills gap even if their skills are not the perfect fit because, in the large part, they’re not a perfect fit. The skills of the future and the jobs of the future are different and they’re changing every day quite rapidly so. So, with that means skills of jobseekers also have to change and evolve. And our job as a recruitment firm needs to embrace that and help bridge those gaps and provide the transition from you know from one job into another or from one industry into another. That will remain and we have a big part to play as a recruitment industry to enable job seekers to find comfort and not be afraid of the future.

Max: Yeah. Your inspiring story about how Adecco responded quickly to these changes makes me think. You know. You’re a little bit like a financial trading company where some hedge funds really benefit from market instability. You know they’re like when things are moving quickly, that’s when they make money. You can think that I mean of course you it be very I don’t wanna lay this in nick of Adecco as a profiteer of change you know traumatic situation but rather as an agent of change where the market will continue to change, most people will continue to look for jobs. Good year or bad year you know traumatic year. These changes needs you know need guidance. And so, you could imagine that Adecco would have I don’t know I haven’t looked at your I don’t know if your results are publicly posted but it sounds like Adecco may have had a great year when you you put it that way.

Kelly: We definitely did have a good year I think and ultimately, we have shareholders and we’re publicly listed, and you have a business to run. But the reality of it is if we have last year have faced the wave of the first lockdown and sort of sat back to certain extent and accepted where we are you know good proportion of our workforce was being stood down or have you know we’re having their hours reduced to absolutely no fault of our clients. You know we supply a huge number of small and medium enterprises, not just large organizations and many sectors that were impacted, we would have been in serious trouble, we would have in serious financial trouble, we would have had our own workforce impacted with not enough work to do, and it’s not in our nature to sort of accept that. So, we were very very quick to look up the strategy and to pivot and to understand where the market was going short term and where the market was gonna go long term and that was incredibly difficult during COVID. But our workforce inside Adecco absolutely adapted and we moved people around internally from you know one team to another team internally. And people responded very well to that and got on with the necessary task of trying to help as many people as possible remain in work or come out of work in one job and get into the job work in another and that helped us to remain sustainable as a business, helped our workforce and our candidates, and ultimately helped our clients, even the ones that were downsizing. That helped them because they knew their workers were going to another home. And it was easier on everyone to do that, so it was actually really quite rewarding despite the pressure and the challenges of the economy and the market and you know the health crisis that everybody was facing. So yeah, we’re a pretty resilient bunch in the large part in Adecco, but yeah there’s business travis for sure that go without. We didn’t our own workforce to have to be impacted but we didn’t want our candidates and casual workforce to be impacted either and I think we did a really good job of leading the charge there.

Max: Well, well done. Well done to the team and I hope of course that not every year has full of changes as last one and that we could have some more quiet time for people can settle into their industry and I’m getting some sense of stability. I have two more questions for you. One of them is about productivity and tech tools that are used by the team or that you use personally, that you would recommend. What are some productivity tips you can offer to our listeners?

Kelly: I love this question and I am a big I mean I come from a technology background so I’m always keen to try and look at what tools are out in the market and technology in the market that would give us efficiency and give us advantage as well, differentiate us for our clients. If I look at some of the tools we’ve embraced and scaled, we are right now today we’re you know embracing AI, we’re embracing analytics and the data that we have is you know the power that’s within that data. We’re also embracing chatbots and finding ways to automate elements of the recruitment process that for many years have been manual load, very labor-intense, very cumbersome, and is often at lower on investment tasks. So, finding good ways to automate the recruitment process has been a real journey for Adecco and we are yes still advancing every day with what we’re doing with our technology and tools. And that’s exciting it’s exciting because it doesn’t displace our recruiters if we automate an element of their task and their business process. It actually enables them to focus on new work on you know where the market’s going, what their customers really need, and their relationship-building, and focusing on different maturity of our solutions and what we’re actually offering. So, what we find is as we brought in more tools to automate the process, the capability levels of our recruiters have improved, and we’ve got you know much higher-grade recruiters. I always say we have a high-performing team and that’s absolutely true and we are enabling them to be that by taking away the low-hanging fruit from them through use of tools and technology. So, they embrace it. Our recruiters are not afraid of the tech. They actually will off my hands off of my bringing something new to the table which is a product that’s going to help them in their day to be faster you know quicker speed to market, offering better service to their clients, helping their candidate supply and remain on our workforce you know on our workforce you know for a longer period of time. So, it’s exciting. We’re using many many tools in a really great way and they’re here to stay. Technology has been enabling us the workplace, isn’t it? It’s here to stay.

Max: They’re lucky to have a leader that can embrace it so vividly because you know I started my company after doing a lot of recruitment myself, interviewing thousands of people over the phone, and feeling the dehumanization. You know I’m feeling my soul slipping away to know that that you know these days are for the most part gone that than now. It’s much more value-added work. It’s a redefinition of the role of recruiters that’s happened over the last you know fifteen years which is yeah absolutely wonderful. Now my last question is about one of my favorite questions which is we all make hiring mistakes, and we try as I said we try to bury those memories. But sometimes it’s good to wait a minute and remember and remember so we can draw the lessons from them. Can you walk us back through a specific hiring mistake you’ve made and what you know why you made that mistake and what we can learn from it?

Kelly: This is a good question. I’ve never had this question before in my many interviews, so it’s a nice first one. Maybe what I would say on this one is that if I go back, you know I’ve been around nearly three decades now twenty-seven years in recruitment, and one of the things we often used to do as leaders is hire multiple recruiters into the business and potentially at an average level. You know in the hope that a good proportion would step up and a good proportion would remain average, and you might have one or two strugglers that would not necessarily be the right fit and you would make that call and you would mass hire, especially in the large recruitment firms. And that works to a certain extent but it’s not really great for the individuals and it’s not the most rewarding way to you know build a high-performing culture in workforce. So, we definitely don’t do that now. What we do now is just hold the line and very carefully wait for the right fit, the right cultural fit, never compromising cultural values or ethics. Waiting for the right fit even if it means we have an open vacancy for quite a long time and well losing productivity as a result of that because it pays off more. We’ve been hiring that way for the last two-three years and our everything has improved as a result. I would say our culture is better, our productivity per recruiter is better, the camaraderie has improved, and you know the level of business that we’re selling is far far better. And it’s because we make much more cautious hires, we just yeah, I’d rather sit with an open role than to fail you know to fail with more people and one of them might not make it. I’m not a lover of that model. I don’t think it’s good leadership practice and it doesn’t really yeah it just doesn’t serve you well in the long term. So yeah, I hold the line now while I draw the higher well and take time and be cautious about it and know that we are really getting that good fit than you know mass hire and hope.

Max: Very good advice. Hold the line. Don’t lower your standards.

Kelly: Yeah.

Max: You can always look back and say oh well I did this because of that mistake. But in your heart of hearts, you know when you’re making a hiring mistake. When you’re dropping the bar. So it’s important to just accept the fact that your business is gonna be stretched and, like you said Kelly, sometimes at the risk of hurting productivity, but it’s a small price to pay for a long-term gain. So thanks a lot Kelly for that advice and for your time and well I hope we’ll get some of your followers to listen to our podcast.

Kelly: Thank you, it’s good to talk to you today.

Max: That was Kelly Van Nelson, Managing Director at Adecco Australia, which tells us resilience whether at the company level or the individual level is one of the most valuable skills you can have in recruitment because things change fast and recruiters are change agents.

They help whole economies reinvent themselves. I hope you enjoyed this interview and that you'll be back for more. Please remember to like follow and share.

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Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today I'm delighted to welcome to the show, Dorothy Dalton. Hello, Dorothy. Welcome to the show.

Dorothy: Hi!

Max: So Dorothy is a talent management strategist who focuses on diversity inclusion and gender balance, and it's very visible on LinkedIn and has a practice over more than a decade, I believe in talent management strategies. How did you end up in this space?

Dorothy: Well, it was fortuitous in the sense that I'd like to say it was a strategy, but it wasn't that I have a background in corporate HR. I then did a stint in sales and marketing completely divided from HR.

And then I came to Brussels in the mid-nineties and set up an executive search consultancy. I was approached to do that and over the years, it's just sort of like topsy, it's just grown. So I'm a certified coach and trainer from my earlier corporate career and I've just expanded my range.

So I do more career coaching and the next active coaching. I do two corporate training, but I very much support organizations who want to make a cultural transformation, especially around, as you said gender balance, diversity, and inclusion.

Max: Right. And is Brussels a good place for you to be based in it's world, famous as the think tank or Europe for policies. Are you finding that there is an AP center too? you know, the HR world in Europe, or really, it's more of every country fighting for their own piece of land.

Dorothy: I love being in Belgium, so I'm now half of, because of Brexit. I now have dual nationality. And it's what I love about it.

It's very international. There are lots of different cultures, people from all over the world. In terms of HR, there were a lot of Amir headquarters located here, but it's also a hub in sense of its geographical location. So between Paris, Amsterdam at one time, London that's fast important now, but all the other major cities in Europe and internationally, so absolutely love it.

Max: Now I love visiting as well. I have family there and I know it's very welcoming very, as you said, the international city, but you know, in your answer was also the other answer, which is no, there's no real capital of Europe when it comes to HR best practices. And we were saying before we started recording, you were sharing how this puts Europe at a disadvantage sometimes against the loud voices and HR practitioners from North America, which is the biggest market and headcount and budgets and access to media. And it can drown out some of the voices in Europe. Did I summarize your position well?

Dorothy: Well, It's sort of, I mean think, cause you say is that particularly terms of HR practices and access to social media that the US is a world leader. But that is kind of changing a lot now over time. And one of the things that I'm perpetually chipping away at is that I would like to see some diversity included in the type of advice we see coming from the US and I gave you before the show, that one example of some career advice that one of my clients heard on pub house and they went away and did it, and it was about integrating straight to the hiring manager. And so bypassing HR goes straight to the hiring manager and trying to double your salary from the figure you first started and the person got past, I mean, so in an organization, which does not respect and value individualism, the way the US does instead not fly at all.

So what I would like to see is just some nuance and recognition that not everyone does the same thing everywhere. And in Europe, 99% of businesses, the resumes. So they're not all these big global us Anglo-American types of realization. So just let's factor in and say, this applies where we are and you have to be cautious about testing it in other locations, it's not rocket science, right?

Max: No but particularly for younger audiences who, some of them, they haven't even seen an office. And so they get most of their content from thought leaders like Gary V and other loud you know, go-getters. Of course, they're going to think coming into the workplace that this is how it's going to be.

It's not going to play out that way in a lot of cultures dialing in from Asia where I think hierarchy are even more rigid than in Europe than many companies, you know? So applying to the field of well gender equality would you say that there's different sensibilities between the European continents and North America is there one geography that's more advanced than the other?

Dorothy: Well, I mean you're probably aware of what's been going on in the states recently. And Europe is streets ahead of the states in terms of protection of women's rights, women in the workplace. I think the US in terms of access to parental leave, I think it's right. I mean, of the developed countries, it's the lowest, I think in the world, there are only a few like Pacific islands that worse than US.

And with the recent changes that are coming about, about abortion rights. And I think that we're seeing quite a dramatic shift and obviously, even in Europe there are differences with the Nordics are very advanced in terms of gender balance and inclusion and parental leave that sort of.

Max: Yeah. I guess if an American company in North America came out and said, we're giving away three weeks maternity leave, and maybe it'd be kind of a nice perk by local standards, but actually don't know what the baseline is, but it wouldn't look too good on the international scene

Dorothy: No, and you know I think this is a cultural thing but that commitment to what I call the sacrifice culture you probably saw for example, that Goldman Sachs were exhorting their employees, that analyst work hundred-hour weeks. And there are just certain things around time off and vacation time. You know, I have American colleagues to just say, well, you know this because, you know, France.

You know, the whole of France closed down in August, you know, how is that possible? But it does. And mainly, you know, but I suppose it's just things that we've got used to. We have a different approach to well-being and work-life balance, I think.

Max: Yeah. I know culturally there's, there's a big gap and for some of the Europeans who don't feel at home with their native culture and who do want to put in super long hours and hustle harder. I see a lot of them on the international scene, right? There's a lot of Europeans who go abroad go to London and go to the US go to, you know, to Asia seeking for that extra work rush. Because it's just to chill at home.

Dorothy: Yeah. And I think don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that people in Europe are less committed to their jobs or anything like that, they're not, but I think there's a sense of roundedness. And I work a lot with executives, particularly in a pre-retirement situation.

And honestly, they never say, I wish I spent more time in the office. Never not once. So I think everybody has to find the balance that works for them. And there are some people, and there are international companies that appreciate that work ethic and that commitment. But I don't think that those who want a more balanced life should be penalized.

And we're seeing this particularly in the hybrid situation and what happened in confinement where people find themselves working much longer hours than they did before and suffering psychologically because of that, in terms of wellbeing and health.

Max: And actually thinking about the fact that more people are spending time at home, would you say that the recent crisis has to some degree benefited the female workforce by allowing them to spend more time at home?

Dorothy: No! Quite reverse. I mean I think cool that all the research suggests that women left the workplace. I mean they call it the shecession that women because they work in frontline jobs and jobs that are impacted by the pandemic, they were laid off.

Max: Yes, I've read that. So they work in healthcare and retail hospitality. There's more women there.

Dorothy: So there was more, yeah. Yeah. So that was massively impacted when they were working at home, they were assuming a greater load of homeschooling and domestic responsibilities that the number of hours increased to over 30 a week. And. So, what we need to see is in it, man sharing the load.

I mean, it's quite often couched in these passive terms in the media that women assumed greater responsibility. In fact much more proactive in that they assumed it because the partners were not doing it. I mean, it's that simple. And so it's about getting them back into the workplace and then not getting back into the workplace at the same pace as their male colleagues

Max: Okay. Okay. I'm glad I was able to elicit a strong reaction from you

Dorothy: There's a stereotype on my head because, you know, and I think there are all sorts of things about women being encouraged to work from home so they can spend more time with their kids.

Max: And, yeah. Sounds like a great idea.

Dorothy: That just sounds like more deeply embedded sexism and stereotyping. I think what we need to do is to open it up so that people can be flexible because women don't want to be removed from the decision-making process.

Max: Well, look, I'm with your Dorothy. My wife is at the office right now and I'm at home you know chilling with the dogs. So I encourage her to spend more time at home because I miss her. So my intentions are absolutely not what's it called? Patronizing or paternalistic

Dorothy: Sexist! Sexist.

Max: That's the word you use? That's great. So let's get a little practical for our listeners or, you know, a lot of talent acquisition professionals and what are some of the common pitfalls that company should avoid when it comes to. accidentally excluding half of the workforce and making your work environment less attractive, less welcoming to the female workforce.

Dorothy: Well I think we need to just overhaul a whole approach to work and particularly to recruitment to the way we measure success. I've heard a lot of chat and noise on social media about four day week, but no one ever specifies how many hours are in that four-day week. I think we really need to start shifting to a presence not a presence culture, but a result culture.

And that needs to be reflected in our recruitment processes. And this is obviously going to be important to you. And I think we need to stop penalizing people for taking a career gap. Particularly if it's parental leave, we need to encourage people to work flexibly, but to work optimally, you know, to produce the best results.

I think that we need to make sure that we deep bias our recruitment processes. So we manage them correctly. I think we just have to overhaul our approach to talent acquisition

Max: So offering more flexible work arrangements so that people can balance multiple responsibilities and more family-related work. One strategy.

Another strategy I hear is two. Yeah, you said there was a bias against people who've taken a break, and yeah, I mean from the perspective of the employer, of course, you can see how that might be but of course what you gain in return is if a more inclusive workplace and probably a very, very focused workforce, because I have found that nobody is more productive with their time at the office than a working mother. Sorry for falling into stereotypes again, but that's been my experience.

Dorothy: Well I just want to dial back that you talked about employment gap is a problem for the organization. So I would just go back to the basic premise because that is a bias. Why? And I think what I'm hearing about is the people being penalized because they had a break during COVID.

I mean, seriously, I mean, that is absolutely bad. And particularly in the US like there was a report that came out from Accenture and HBO. I think it was last week about what they're now calling the hidden worker. And that is because the skill sets that are being demanded by employers and the skill set of the individuals are just not jiving.

So then missing masses of talent. And one of the reasons is that they are cutting people who had career breaks. We just got to get over that because if we do competency-based recruitment, then that should not happen.

Max: Arguably somebody who's been away from the action for a couple of years may not have seen the latest technology in so many professions are changing so fast.

Yes. For maybe 80% of the jobs is the same, but that other 20% can change very rapidly some times. And, you know you could argue, you could make an argument that for some positions that are more technical, two years is a huge amount of time. You could argue.

Dorothy: I think there are a number of factors.

That almost, I mean, if you take, for example, an engineering graduate, that qualification will be almost out of date by the time they qualify. So it's about also integrating talent development into the recruitment process. That is something we don't do. And it's also about testing.

So does that person have the test, the potential to absorb those development, that those new innovations or they might've already have done it on their own. You can't make an assumption that because someone had a year off because of COVID that they aren't necessarily up to date, you have to test them to find out.

And then if they're ticking 90% of the box boxes and they're missing one little thing, train them.

Max: Yeah. Way is easier. And there's enough assessment tools available on the market today, where you can create tests that are not jargon-y where you don't need to know exactly the latest version of software to demonstrate your ability to get the work done. So I agree. Those are bad excuses.

Dorothy: And if I can just jump in, if you have a couple we'll do economic forum says about the 10 skills that you needed for 2025, 8 of them are soft skills.

Max: Yeah, for sure. The gender gaps should the page and their gaps should be the other way around. All those soft skills are the ones that are in high demand and are skills where often women outperform men. So yeah I think as a free-market guy, myself, I believe that the market will adjust and you know, a hundred years from now, it will be men asking for equal pay.

Dorothy: Well I think the projections are horrible. I mean I've seen the women will have to wait for equal pay and basically there's too long. And I mean, I thought very naively that I would see that in my day, but I don't even think I'll say it from my grandkids, you know, and that makes me want to cry with rage and frustration because it's so unfair.

Max: Okay. I will not let you cry on this show

Dorothy: I won't cry on the show.

Max: And thinking about the people who've been locked up for the last year and a half. And the type of support that they need coming back into the workplace today, you were telling me you're advising some companies on how to create an inclusive environment for people with different new concerns have come up in the workplace or amongst job seekers. Could you share more?

Dorothy: Well, I think what we're seeing is that there's a discrepancy to the way employees perceive situations and the way executives see situations. And Gardner did a study on that. And I think that a lot of organizations are just hoping to dial the clock back and just carry on a business as usual.

But I mean, I think things are profoundly changed. People have been profoundly changed by lockdown, not lock up. So even if the people have been isolated, we have to practice what's called radical empathy. So understand what's going on for every individual and trying to accommodate them and wellness and psychological safety and physical safety are going to have to be top priorities for most businesses radical.

Max: Radical, no. Radical empathy applied in the recruitment process. I'm going to imagine what that means. Is it making room inside the recruitment process to ask what someone's emotionally been through for a year and a half, or an open your own frailties and difficulties and kind of create that trust environment by talking about the shared pain that people have been through.

Dorothy: Well, I think it's about trying to understand what's going on for people. I mean, you know, I think in the early days and somebody posted a tweet that basically that if you haven't learned a second language or got an MBA, you're a complete loser. And I think it's about finding out what's been going on for people they've had homeschooling they've had childcare.

They may have had been sick with COVID, but they might have had long COVID. Maybe they haven't seen their parents or they've lost a parent or said goodbye to a parent on the night pack. Can you imagine? So it's about understanding what's going on for them and making provision for that. So rather than taking what you know, you could have learned a second language, but you didn't.

So that's really not good enough. It's finding out because people will judge organizations, but how they respond. And you probably read about the great resignation. And I can see that is that people are much more open to talk to opportunities than they were pre-COVID. So basically if organizations don't get up to speed on this they will lose talent and they will not be able to track the best talent

Max: Yeah, I'm going to try to summarize that advice to all the employers out there to soften their hard armor their businessmen suit. And accept to share their weakness, their softer side because it will allow for the candidates to open up, to share and allow you to make better hires because we've created a good environment of trust so that they can talk about the job.

Dorothy: Yeah. And what's called psychological safety. It's now a prime driver for candidates. They want to feel secure in the organization and recognized and valued, and they want to feel physically safe as well.

Max: Well, I think a lot for us to digest and I probably have to rethink about our process, our internal process after this conversation. I mean we just haven't thought about making time to talk about, you know, safety and personal history that much, because it wasn't part of our DNA.

I'm sure other listeners we'll have something to think about and if they want to ask you more about how to prepare a more inclusive workplace and talent acquisition practice. Where can they get a hold of you? Where can they reach you, Dorothy? Should they do like me and connect with you on LinkedIn

Dorothy: Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn.

So just say that you've listened to this, but that would be great. I'm a bit of a Twitter. So you can follow me @DorothyDalton on Twitter, where you can email me and that's dorothy.Dalton@threeplusinternational.com.

Max: Thank you, Dorothy, three plus com. Yeah, that's the number three. And then plus spelled out.

Dorothy: Yeah. And three plus international.com is quite long ago. Hey, Dalton, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Great. Thanks a lot, Dorothy.

Dorothy: Thank you, everyone. Bye.

Max: That was Dorothy Dalton. Then reminding us that people have been through a lot in the last year and a half. And if you exercise radical empathy to use her words, you could allow the candidates to open up and to trust you better. That's mission number one for a recruiter to create a trusting environment where the candidates will open up so that you can have a rich conversation.

So a good reminder, and. I hope you enjoyed it that you'll sign up to listen to more of our interviews, which will alternate between debates on best practices and practical advice.

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MAX: Hello. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today we have a special episode where we are going to talk about how the recruitment experience and the candidate experience differs for Latin America and Latin America in the high volume space in particular but Latin America in general, which is a big market for us, where we have spent the last four or five years, preparing and adapting to it. And I thought there would be no better person to come and discuss this market than our very own Carolina Vargas, who is the Head of Customer Success for Talkpush, based in Costa Rica. Welcome to the show, Carolina.

CAROLINA: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

MAX: Thanks for coming. The first time we are having an internal discussion on the show. But, you know, I don't think that there are too many TA practitioners in Latin America who have experience necessarily at the regional level. I mean I couldn't think of a few, of course, some of whom we serve, but a lot of them is country by country, right. Recruitment is a domestic game for most companies.

CAROLINA: Yeah, exactly. And we still have the chance to make the comparison with Latin America and North America. And that groups to be very different. Honestly, in terms of their behavior and the way we see they adapt their sourcing strategies. So I think that has proven to be very effective in terms of analyzing how these companies are doing what they are doing today.

MAX: Yeah, it's like the big brother of the biggest market in the world is right North of the border, if you are in Mexico, but if you look in terms of headcount Latin America has a much bigger talent pool than any. I don't know if you can measure the sort of diversity and complexity of a market but would you say that North America is more uniform than Latin America? I would assume Latin America is much more diverse in terms of candidate behavior.

CAROLINA: It is absolutely. Yeah, I mean, North America itself has a lot of diversity but I suppose Latin America as a whole, you have to consider the difference between the northern part of South America for most people, the Caribbean, behaves in a completely separate way. We have countries in Latin America that speak only English, then that speak French, Portuguese and Spanish for the most. So of course we have diversity in terms of ethnicity, in terms of how these countries interact with one another. I mean, as we were saying, without a doubt, Latin America has a skilled workforce with relatively low cost compared to other regions, even our own neighbors, like the US and Europe, Brazil and Mexico are pretty powerful economies on their own. But I think the rest of Latin America or the smaller countries, rely a lot on our neighbors to export our services, and I think something that happened especially during the pandemic is that we managed to remove all the remaining carriers that made outsourcing for services, so attractive.

MAX: Okay. Okay, so the Latin American, the smaller countries are booming, finding ways to sell their services to the region.

CAROLINA: Pretty much, yeah.

MAX: Cool. What about those who aren't aware, you said some countries speak English and French but I guess the majority of the space is in Spanish. Is it fair to consider this whole region is generally Spanish speaking and to apply the same language settings for all candidates?

CAROLINA: Well, I suppose you could potentially discuss something about Latin American Spanish and it's something that you for example using Word. There is an understanding of what Latin American Spanish is, but on its own, it's very different, we use different ways to treat people. So for example, just something that we've considered in our bots. It's not the same, to create a bot for a Mexican audience and of Costa Rica, or an Argentinian audience. They use completely different ways to speak to their candidates. One can be considered extremely formal in the country and extremely informal in another, so these are things that we have to be cautious about. Of course, you're going to get your messages across, we all understand Spanish even if it comes from Spain or Argentina we'll understand it, but it's not the way you want to present your brand. You want to take care of these minor things when you're creating or conversing with these candidates.

MAX: Okay, so could you illustrate that. You said the formal versus more colloquial style. Would it be rude to address someone in Mexico, in a way that is more formal in Costa Rica, or vice versa?

CAROLINA: Yeah, for example in Costa Rica it is very common to speak to people in usted. That is the way we speak to everybody I would speak to my parents like that, and this is considered extremely formal in Mexico, it would create a barrier or a distance between candidates and recruiters that would be considered a little harsh rather cold, they would put you in a defensive position. So this is something that you have to be mindful of. They can absolutely understand that but it does change the way you are interacting with people.

MAX: So as an employer brand, if you said usted to candidates in high volume recruitment in Mexico, you would come off as distant and too formal.

CAROLINA: Absolutely. We consider this in the way we shape, or for the conversational designing team is preparing these bots, right. They want to make sure they adapt to the way people are expecting to connect with these brands.

MAX: So for our listeners who don't know Talkpush, we design and provide chatbots/conversational AIs, which have to speak the local language and adapt to local behaviors. So that's an extra layer of work and complexity for us. But I guess beyond the conversation and the language components, we can look into a little bit more of the differences in behavior. Maybe starting from the corporate side. Is there a good division of labor between recruitment Marketing and Recruitment operations as you may have, in Asia, or sometimes in the US, they use a lot of agencies to manage their ad-by and employer branding work? What is the lay of the land for Latin America?

CAROLINA: I suppose it's pretty diverse as well. We do find that it's more common that these companies do it in-house, so most of their marketing purposes and marketing are managed in-house. There is a difference though. The stronger companies that we see are the ones that are being able to chase the top talents while other ones that have a stronger connection between their recruitment or their talent acquisition department, and their marketing departments and of course, the way that they generate their employer brand can, of course, create a huge impact in the way that they're addressing these candidates. The candidates sometimes reach on their own. We have clients that do no advertising and have massive amounts of volume because of what they have done and the services they provide. People want to work for them. Maybe they don't have the best benefits of the region but the power of their brand is so visible that candidates are looking for them. So yeah, I suppose, to answer your question, we do see all kinds of behavior in terms of interaction and marketing, interacting with recruiters and talent acquisition teams, but yeah, they take care of their employer brands and that's what creates the difference.

MAX: And is there a big use of agencies to build a brand or is it mostly done in-house?

CAROLINA: Mostly in-house, even for bigger companies.

MAX: All right. The other aspect of recruitment which is so key is buying direct mail. I heard your example saying that a strong employer brand can suffice to fill your talent pool for some of the bigger brands, but that is not going to work for everybody, some direct advertising as well, is going to be necessary. In the US, you have Indeed, zip recruiter, and LinkedIn which dominate a lot of the market. And then, you often have like the dominant player in some of the markets in Asia. In Latin America for those who don't know how it breaks down. How is there one job board or marketplace where people can go to support them regionally?

CAROLINA: No we, wish. No, not really. Job boards are very important, definitely, but they are so different from one country to the other that the same formula will not be sufficient for one country and then the other. So we see indeed working in Mexico for example, but not to the extent that it works in the US at all. And then job boards like the Tecoloco that work very well in Central America, nobody knows who they are outside of it, or Computrabajo work for certain roles, even but it's not the same for the rest of the region. So, South America, Uruguay, Brazil, all have different local job boards that worked very well. In LinkedIn definitely in terms of a regional strategy but this is for certain industries and more senior positions, but yeah, as you were saying, there is much diversity, people really browse a lot. And definitely, you're gonna have to find the right job board not only for the country but also for the types of positions you are advertising.

MAX: So for this purchasing, you have to have a domestic expert, a country by a country expert to decide where you buy your ads where you buy your traffic.

CAROLINA: Yeah, I mean you can always rely on social media. Social media is big. But if you want to tap into all the most effective sources as your competition is probably already doing then definitely you are going to have to do a little research on what is the right combination for you and the type of roles you are advertising.

MAX: Okay, all right. Well, let's say somebody figures that part out. The next part is then how do I communicate with candidates. Are you seeing similar behavior, let's say with the other market that you operate in North America because you manage both regions. Do you see significant differences in candidate behavior and the way they communicate or how recruiters engage with them?

CAROLINA: Yeah, yeah. I mean the difference is extreme. I suppose in the US, I think WhatsApp is not really a thing probably only less than 20% of people are using the application, and this 20%, we're talking about, probably, Latin American people even so as opposed to the rest of the region that WhatsApp is king really. There is no other way to say it and we are seeing a lot of people, not connecting their job applications to Facebook anymore or to their personal emails, especially recently, and then people prefer a lot to gravitate towards WhatsApp, which is very easy to use. And then pandemic did create this very extremely, in terms of candidates that are more rural, that are part of regions in Latin America, that was not our average candidate interacting with bots. And right now we can see that there has been a dramatic switch, people are communicating through WhatsApp to order pizza to get their taxis for everything. So there used to be that, now in all parts of Latin America, of course, there are still accessibility issues everywhere, but we see the adoption and 96% for most of these countries even countries that are only English speakers like Trinidad and Tobago, they have like 98% adoption on WhatsApp, and they use these as formal channels of communication that will allow them to use rich media, that will allow them to send big text, sometimes it's necessary as opposed to SMS which is what they use in the US but it's far more limited you cannot brand it in any way, and it's costly. It is really far more expensive.

MAX: Yeah, it's one of those areas in the US where they are actually a little bit behind. In China, everything goes on WeChat. All transactions, all payments, and seems like WhatsApp is supporting all kinds of E-commerce now, and activity and behavior. It is a bit surprising what you said about the lockdown being a driver for this mobile messaging app adoption. You would think that with people being stuck at home, maybe they wouldn't use their phone so much, but, it makes sense, I guess to be ordering, yeah to access the world from your phone instead of in the streets.

CAROLINA: Yeah, and especially younger people. We see this definitely tracked on our candidates' behavior. We see numbers that reflect that we have now, income in a lot of candidates, blue-collar workers in rural areas in Latin America. They are perfectly able to communicate using smartphones for everything now. All of a sudden scanning a QR code became almost mandatory if you wanted to receive information from their government or health information about COVID or ordering in a restaurant. You no longer were allowed to touch people or to pay using your hands so one day to another we did make a big turn. I suppose there's still some stuff that has to be adapted for a younger audience and we've seen that with our clients. Some of our clients have made tremendous efforts in reaching the people that are not yet ready to go from offline to online. But yeah, there's been definitely a change.

MAX: The story of the QR code will have to be written down in tech history as the greatest comeback ever because it was such a big push for it 10 years ago, nobody wanted to touch it, and then what you needed as a pandemic, to now make it the way government communications and everybody else. So, you are seeing that in recruitment as well?

CAROLINA: Yeah, definitely. At least in the sample of clients that we have. We for a moment experienced a period of time when QR codes were interesting or attractive for them anymore. And then the pandemic came to bring that back, absolutely. So, this is the way that they are now using their referral programs, now they're using QR codes. So they are putting these QR codes on their coffee mugs and on their boards and physical spaces but also they are using it on their email signatures for example, and all these things are things that were not used anymore a couple of years ago. So I think now you see people in all sorts of restaurants, scanning the menu and everything. Yeah, so now QR codes are back. But I guess this is also connected to the region making a 10 years technology. Seeing my parents and my grandma using Zoom now and that was something that I don't know how long it would have taken for the government, employers, and workers to adapt to that where we are today. Thanks to the pandemic with all the horrible things that brought it also brought a huge technology lead in the region.

MAX: Okay. Other ways COVID affected the candidate behaviors or new trends that you saw pick up and rise in Latin America over the last year and a half?

CAROLINA: Yeah, I suppose I could think of two big things, making remote work mandatory for anyone who could. So, a huge percentage of the industries one day to the next day pretty much put mandatory experiments on a global scale, and now a year and a half down the line we are seeing the tremendous success of companies that managed to adapt. And then there's also like all over our cultural space you see these memes or sketches of people refusing to go back to the office, they just won't do it, and that's very interesting because it's causing in the US a big resignation. People are just not willing to go back to their former conditions, but in Latin America, it is a little different because, well the region struggles a little more, and the unemployment rate after COVID skyrocketed. It's now at 11% I suppose in some countries, Costa Rica has 20% unemployment at this point, and that's drastic and very dramatic. So you see these people that are not willing to go back to their former jobs but at the same time, there is still a lot of unemployment. So it's difficult for them.

MAX: For sure.

CAROLINA: Exactly.

MAX: So, they don't want to come back but maybe they will be a little bit faster than the North Americans.

CAROLINA: Definitely.

MAX: We are not supposed to say the Americans because that's a bit.

CAROLINA: That is a continent.

MAX: Yeah, that is a whole continent so we are not supposed to do that.

CAROLINA: Yeah.

MAX: Well, thank you for coming to share and, of course, there is very little we can cover in this format, but we can talk about a country by country, and if people would like to reach out to you we will put your contacts in the links, but I guess Carolina Vargus on LinkedIn or hello@talkpush.com. Carol can you talk to help you optimize your recruiting marketing strategy for the countries you are looking to accelerate in. Thanks, Carol for joining us.

CAROLINA: Thank you very much, Max. It was a pleasure.

MAX: Plus if you're a global brand well-renowned or just a regional player localization and getting closer to your candidates is key to achieving success in recruitment. I hope you learn some interesting insights from Carolina, who shared the experience of South America and how within one region often seen as uniform, you have a great diversity in languages, culture, expectations, and marketing and behaviors.

If you'd like to know more, of course you can reach out to her at talkpush and hope that you'll follow us and share with friends. To help us promote this podcast.

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MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show I've got Ashleigh Anderson, who is the VP of global talent acquisition for Credit Karma. Ashleigh, welcome to the show.

ASHLEIGH: So happy to be here.

MAX: Thank you. Thanks, Ashley, and well to get started, perhaps, could you give us a quick intro to Credit Karma.

ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. So Credit Karma is going to be a full-scale financial platform to help our more than 110 million members, improve their credit, pay off debt, and plan for the future. We want to democratize financial information. So everyday terms that mean we're gonna help you find a credit card when your credit score goes up, that has a better interest rate, help you refinance your mortgage, and even help you find better car insurance. So, save 1000s of dollars a year.

MAX: Nice, and this is focused on North America, the US, and Canada?

ASHLEIGH: We also have an office in London so we do have a product in the UK.

MAX: Okay. So before we jump into the talent acquisition space. Can you give us some of your industry perspective on how debt is evolving in America, because I believe everybody got checks in the mail and that they don't need to borrow anymore?

ASHLEIGH: I don't know that that's necessarily the case. I know that you know a large percentage of Americans still don't even have more than $400 in savings for an emergency, which is a quite scary fact and that's why we're here to help champion financial progress for everybody.

MAX: Yeah, of course, it's a big cultural thing, credit. It does change from place to place. I'm calling in from Hong Kong, China where there's a strong savings culture here. Everybody's got a few years of income, tucked under their mattress somewhere. So it's different cultures. Great so you've been in Credit Karma for three years now, and what a busy time. Maybe we'll talk about what's happened over the last year and a half with the changes that your team has been through, we talked a little bit before the show about the fact that you had to move some of your team internally while recruitment was on hold. So that's where we are going. But before we go there, I'd love actually for you to tell our audience a little bit about your background. I think you've been in recruitment for a long time, and particularly in tech recruitment for a long time. How did you end up, early days, how did you end up in talent acquisition?

ASHLEIGH: Well, so as we know nobody goes to college to be able to recruit, and there is no degree in recruiting. I applied for my first job at Microsoft in 1998 for a marketing job, and they call me, had that first interview, they're like, Hey, do you want to fly in Seattle, I'm like okay great, that's awesome. And the recruiter was like hey this is a recruiting job, and at that moment, I had no idea that there was a career in recruiting. I thought hiring was done by hiring managers. So I went out had that interview, loved everything that I heard and my first job was as a college recruiting team at Microsoft. And it was an incredible place to start. So, tech recruiting became what I loved and I stayed in that, after Microsoft I went to A.com during the .com boom. Of course, that blew up for most of us. After that, I went to a Microsoft partner company then started my own business, then went back to Microsoft in their response team. I ended up working in games for 10 years, was early at Jenga. Helped grow Jenga from 300 people to 4000 people in about four years that was an incredible experience. And then recently decided to get into mission-driven work, and went to a company called the Planet Corporation as head of recruiting. And worked there for four years and then got the call for the role at Credit Karma. My first interview was with Ken, our founder and that was what solved me.

MAX: That's a lot, a lot to unfold. I think the fact that Microsoft interviewed you coming out of college, and asking you to go into recruitment. I think recruitment is a great place to learn for people who are entering their career. But you would think that Microsoft would be more geared towards hiring experienced recruiters rather than people straight out of college. Going back to those days, what do you think of the program back then. Could the program that you were you were part of back then, still exist today, or was it a completely different world?

ASHLEIGH: I think it could. I think that it should, especially right now is it's hard to hire recruiters. I think that if you find driven passionate people who have high potential, mold them into the recruiter you want them to be, hire them right out of college, give them the tools that they need to be successful. It's really hard to hire a senior recruiter right now. I think Microsoft had the ability to make great recruiters, and I think recruiting leaders need to focus on that right now.

MAX: I believe you. I'm thinking about my early days as a recruiter and how much you learned. Like the first time, I was asked by my manager to pick up the phone and call a candidate, believe it or not, was a very scary moment for me. But, now I wouldn't think about it twice with bat an eyelid. And, you said you were working in the gaming space for a while, that's with Jenga?

ASHLEIGH: So Xbox teams and Jenga.

MAX: And were you hiring some of the creatives on the gaming side?

ASHLEIGH: I was, game designers, artists, publishing folks, you name it, also engineers, product managers, really whatever it takes to build a game we were working on them.

MAX: And do you find that it's a very different approach hiring these creatives and these designers than hiring engineers or quality assurance people and more, let's say, you know, I am thinking of it from a sort of right side versus left side brain people. Was there a separate recruitment team depending on the hemisphere of the brain that they were targeting?

ASHLEIGH: Definitely, I think the approach obviously was very different, the way that you frame an opportunity has to be different for those types of posts. I think when you don't work in games you're still dealing with creative people, UX designers, for instance, those folks are interested in talking about different things, about product design and development than an engineer would be. So I think you're always having to wear a lot of different hats talking to different people.

MAX: Yeah, we had somebody from the gaming industry before and said that it was a small world, that everybody at the executive level, it was very much network-based. But, made a career out of it. Let's jump into Credit Karma, if you don't mind, I'd love to see how things have evolved over the last year and a half, which has been turbulent for most. And you were telling me before we got started that you were able to retain that everybody on your team and all the Credit Karma employees. There were no layoff plans, and to ride the storm. How did you do that?

ASHLEIGH: Well, I think, Ken, the leadership team, Coleen, the head of people, decided to prioritize people over profit. And they said, Hey, we have really great people whose jobs are going to be affected, but we know they are smart, they're driven and they have transferable skills, and we're going to find whatever roles and other teams and other departments where they can be contributing to Credit Karma still. So, some of us spent many weeks kind of being the internal matchmaker so a new flavor of internal mobility, taking a look at what was needed in the business and who was on the bench and the recruiting team and some of the marketing teams as well. And it was an incredible experience and I'm sure like you a lot of us watched LinkedIn were companies, whether they were 100 people or 10,000 people were laying off full recruiting teams, and we didn't do that. It felt really good to actually live values. I think some companies talk this talk and they're talking about the values that they live by and people first, and then when things get tough, that gets thrown out the window, and money really is a motivator. And it just meant a lot to me and the rest of us, that Ken calling in the leadership team really decided to put people first.

MAX: Right. Yay, Ken! I am glad you could keep everybody. So was it bitter-sweet selling your recruiters to other departments, and have you lost some of them permanently?

ASHLEIGH: So I'll say this, I laughed as I'm old, obviously. I just told you that I've been doing this for 25 years. A lot of the people in my team were early in career and mid-career and I said to them, Hey, this moment is why my dad has tried to get me out of recruiting since day one. There's not a better job than I have than a recruiter when the economy is great but this moment is why. And so I said I want you to take this opportunity to see what role I put you next could really be a career change for you. And I'll celebrate that right. I love everyone on my team, maybe, finding a new role was actually a better fit for you. And we did have some of those success stories and I was super happy that I felt like, Hey, I still really have my recruiter jobs right. I did a good match I found this person a great role. A lot of folks didn't come back and we tapped them on the shoulder, but I was happy for that handful of people that stayed in engineering, marketing, product management.

MAX: You manage to put them in engineering and product roles, though that's not a natural fit. I would think they're doing sales and marketing.

ASHLEIGH: No, test engineering, product management, like a true PM role. We have technical project managers, we have people who recruit marketing managers. It was across all functions.

MAX: Fantastic. Snd those are positions in product management are very hard to fill so killed two birds with one stone.

ASHLEIGH: Yeah, exactly.

MAX: And so what happened in talent acquisition now is we went from nobody. Now there are no jobs for recruiters, there were no recruiters in a matter of six to eight months. I think it was an opportunity for a lot of companies, to ask themselves, are we right staffed on talent acquisition. What can we automate? Were you able to automate a few things during this period to operate leaner?

ASHLEIGH: Well, I would say that we definitely implemented quite a few new technologies into our systems. I'd say tech is every step of our process from the job description generation, all the way down to the offer acceptance. So yeah, we were able to really look at how we were operating in every step of our process. We say, how can we do this better, how can we make this faster, how can we take the people hours out of this. So I was really happy with the tools that we decided to implement and how that has been going.

MAX: Yeah. I don't know you went to this level of automation but we've seen some of our customers go basically all the way to an offer letter without an interview.

ASHLEIGH: Wow!

MAX: Yeah, scary a little bit I'd say, but it would have been a joke three-four years ago, as a gimmick. But they've rolled it out effectively with language or communication screening automated, and plugging in a few different solutions as part of the process. And basically, the human touch is only at the very end just to say congrats.

ASHLEIGH: Wow! We are nowhere close to that not going in that direction but that is impressive that they could do that.

MAX: No, no, it's scary but it's for a different kind of industry. It's for really high speed, high churn kind of positions. Okay and then you created a new role at Credit Karma, the head of the talent enablement. So we're always looking for new ways to name all things to reinvent ourselves. And so, what are you reinventing with talent enablement, or is this brand new?

ASHLEIGH: I mean I would say that it is the operations function on steroids. I would really make an analogy of let's say you're a traffic controller of talent. It's building the connectivity between all of the pieces and functions that are involved in hiring and onboarding someone, and it's really important to us right like we have such an incredible culture at Credit Karma. We want to ensure that we can run faster than we have and scale quicker than we have in terms of hiring but not lose any of the connectivity between the experience and the teams that contribute to that experience. So that is kind of the core of what the enablement will handle.

MAX: And could you illustrate that for me, you're talking about speeding up onboarding. Are we talking about basically workflow automation with certain tasks that get assigned automatically? These kinds of tools?

ASHLEIGH: Yeah, so right now, this team has built over 50 dashboards that are self-service dashboards for different partners in the business to understand all of what is happening in recruiting and model out what we're doing what the future state will look like in terms of hires. Everything from top-of-the-funnel metrics down to dashboards that enable IT to ensure they are curating the right amount of equipment for people. So it's really like taking all of the data from all of our systems and putting it in one spot so that we are making sure we'll have the information they need in order to do their job faster.

MAX: Okay. Is there one tool, it sounds like, that's a big project with 50 dashboards connecting the different parts of the operation. Is there a recommendation you can share on a tool that is a central part of this strategy? Are you using Taleo or Power BI, for instance, or is there some tech recommendation?

ASHLEIGH: Yeah, so we are using the data tool and G-Suite. We are a G-Suite company. And so that is essentially pulling out a greenhouse, out of the workday, serving into that. It's been a game-changer. I think for us, and the head of the talent enablement, he is kind of a wizard with building the data dashboards. We talk about what would be best to serve out in terms of insights, and he's able to kind of magically create all of these things quickly.

MAX: So another name for this head of talent enablement could be talent analytics.

ASHLEIGH: Part of that yes, talent analytics also runs operations, as I said tools, coordination team. We actually will be building a research team underneath them to do a lot of insights and building so we can go to our managers with really clear expectations on what talent pools look like, what they can expect in Geography, and in terms of seniority of talent. So really anything that can help us do things better and make things go faster, head of the enablement will deal with all that. And it doesn't stop there right so it's training and development really build and deliver not just team-based training, but personal training. We have an entire professional development plan where we get $5,000 a year to help you learn and invest back in your career, so tap into that. Align programs and projects across all of the talents, all the way from a brand, referral, mobility, DEI, you name it. And then, of course, he and his team are HRVP whispers, this is what I call them right. So you're making sure that we know how to interpret organizational needs into work design and then how do we go find those people to fill the work design.

MAX: It sounds like a very cerebral role that maybe is not what somebody had in mind when they came into recruitment in their early days.

ASHLEIGH: No, for sure no.

MAX: That is where it's going for sure. Keeping recruiters on their toes and then adapting to really becoming tech masters in different domains, connecting all these dashboards as you said, is very challenging, but the core of recruitments is still dealing with people and sometimes following our instincts, instead of our cerebral/instead of the grey matter. And those instincts can lead us astray. I like to ask, most of the guests on my show, if they can tell us about a recruitment mistake that they've made in the past, without naming anyone, so that we can learn from that mistake and try to avoid making the same one again.

ASHLEIGH: Okay, I'll have to think about this.

MAX: Doesn't have to be at Credit Karma.

ASHLEIGH: I mean, so many I'm just trying to choose the right one right it's not that I haven't made any mistakes. I've made so many mistakes but I want to make sure that the one I choose is good. I think I pride myself now on being very detail-oriented. And that is because of a few snafus in the past, right. And I don't know if it was this one moment but I do remember, pacing, on the phone in my daughter's bedroom, for whatever reason, and was talking through an offer with the candidate listening obviously about kind of what was still one of their objections or whatnot and giving them the numbers, and looking at my computer wells or pacing is not a good idea. And I looked at the wrong offer and gave incorrect compensation information.

MAX: Received too much.

ASHLEIGH: And it would have been fine if that number had been lower than the real number, but it was not of course because the universe would never let that happen. But I think my snafu with my learning is to tell everyone, just pay attention, don't pace, don't walk around, like make sure you've got the right numbers in front of you, be detail-oriented. Guess we are in the people business, we talk a lot it's a lot of conversations, a lot of relationship building, but at the end of the day, the details do count.

MAX: So important, yeah. You get a little confidence when you hire 10 people in a month, and then you think you can do that in your sleep between two meetings. No, that's when mistakes happen. That's a very good reminder that overconfidence can read complacency and that could drive terrible mistakes. Stay on your toes, folks. Thank you very much Ashleigh for coming to share, and I'd like to ask if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way, or if they want to look at jobs at Credit Karma, I suppose.

ASHLEIGH: Yeah ping me up on LinkedIn. Send me a message and I am happy to answer any questions and creditkarma.com/careers, we're hiring anything and everything that has to do with product development in the tech sector, all the way from member support to machine learning engineers. What I can say about Credit Karma is we do as I alluded to have this incredible culture when we do put people first. We are on a mission to help our 110 plus million members enable them to find financial progress. So it's a great mission and we're a very good company.

MAX: Awesome. Thank you, Ashley.

MAX: That was Ashley Anderson from credit karma, reminding us if need be that recruiters are a great talent pool for other departments. That's what credit karma did when they had a hiring freeze. She helped to repurpose and redirect some of the people in her team to other departments and they're still working there, it was a success.

So maybe inspiration when the next recession comes along, hopefully in a few years. Not too soon. Hope you enjoyed it and then you'll be back for more, remember to subscribe if you did.

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MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'd like to welcome Jared Hummel, who is president at Parqa Digital Marketing Agency in Minneapolis, and Parqa is an agency that's focused on recruitment marketing for the staffing and recruiting firms. So we'll get a chance to ask Jared about this world and how it's evolving and how it's adapting to new technologies. Jared, welcome to the show.

JARED: Hey thanks, Max. Appreciate you having me.

MAX: My pleasure. And would you mind giving us a quick overview, how you ended up in the ungrateful cutthroat world of recruitment?

JARED: Death in recruiting, right. Yeah, I got lost along the way. We have a sister company in Versique Searching and Consulting which is a recruiting agency in the Minnesota, Twin Cities market, and I applied for a job with one of their recruiters, of which she then asked me if I wanted to be the CFO oversee, which I thought would be a good idea. Learned a little bit there for a few months and then got asked to run Parqa, which is the sister company of the digital marketing agency that was kind of floundering around at the time I came around and we saw a pretty good market opportunity. And so the last three to three and a half years I've been focused on growing that with our client base in North America.

MAX: And so you could say that you came into this recruiting world a little bit later in your career right. It was not like coming out of school or anything like that, which is where most of the industry comes from is, this is a great way to make money at the start of a career if you're good on the phone. But I've noticed others have come into the industry later in their career and their experience is quite different. It's more like, wow, this is how you do things here.

JARED: Yeah, well, like you said I have come from outside the industry I guess ignorance is bliss sometimes right. And so, I think for being probably early to mid-career versus straight out of college I'm still naive enough to steam my opinion to the owners, right out of the gate and tell what I think from a different industry perspective. But to your point, like I've got to be on the other side of it. I've even worked in manufacturing and then in the home service business. We would have the big companies calling on us all the time, trying to push labor into us and so now seeing it, not only from our sister company Versique from the industry as a whole in Parqa, to be having clients throughout North America from IT to hospitals to finance and like seeing kind of the whole picture has been a pretty interesting experience.

MAX: The questions that you come into your customers at Parqa when you enter a new working relationship. What are some of the probing questions that you may ask to validate if some company needs your help, so we can situate your range of services?

JARED: Yeah, so, Parqa itself is a full-service digital marketing agency so we can solve any critical pain point in the marketing arena for staffing and recruiting firms. As we were talking before Max, especially in the United States, I can't speak, necessarily worldwide but recruiting firms are generally, five to ten years behind from a marketing perspective and so as we go into them, even if they have a CMO or a couple of marketers, technology is moving so fast in today's world that it's really hard to have an internal marketing team unless you're a very large company that specializes in SEO, pain management automation, martech stats, website development, job board integrations programmatic advertising. And so that's one of the ways that we enter in with new clients is either they have a CMO that presents a good strategy but doesn't have the labor to necessarily execute at a high level, or vice versa they might have one or two entry-level marketers, but they're just kind of flailing with organic social media or something that is not driving results. And they would come to us to put something more holistic together to try to drive an ROI.

MAX: You were giving me earlier a range of clients in terms of revenue, but I'd like to, for listeners who haven't run an agency wouldn't know what those revenue numbers represent. Could you frame that in headcounts, what's your typical staffing firm customer size?

JARED: Yeah, so, we're constantly trying to push the envelope so we're constantly trying to provide new services that are for bigger and bigger firms but, kind of our wheelhouse at this very second is probably a headcount of 50 to like five to 10,000 so, in US dollars that would be 20, million to close to a billion. So, our agency at this point, maybe necessarily hasn't worked with the top five to 10 global staffing firms but some of our bigger clients are multinational corporations.

MAX: You said, some of them were 1000s of headcount so I would assume that at that stage that they would have a dedicated digital team, but I would assume wrong, it sounds like they still come for help. They're a little bit late for the dance.

JARED: Yeah, yeah. The thing I learned coming from outside the agency is staffing or recruiting is kind of the consummate sales profession and so probably, I don't know what the number is, but probably 80-90% of staffing firms are run by a leadership team of sales executives and so what I've learned coming from outside the industry is that the solution to every staffing firm owners problem is hiring five or 10 more recruiters or sales representatives to solve a revenue growth problem and that is something we're trying to fix. Because I can promise you that there are more efficient ways to go about it and ultimately, that's why we're talking today. We're trying to make you do things to make it a more automated and efficient process for organizations.

MAX: Well, you're trying to find some similarities between our businesses, but in fact what I'm hearing is that I resemble perhaps more closely the typical profile of a staffing firm company because I come from sales and I've often made the mistake of let's just hire more headcount, in my case more sales guys, but if it's staffing or more recruiters to push revenue up. And, of course, you get a short-term lift but long term, you're not creating differentiation. So, the investments that people have to make in databases and websites, and SEO. These are things that take a while to yield results. These are long-term investments. Can you give us an idea of how patient a staffing firm would need to be before seeing some returns?

JARED: Yeah, well, as you said, I guess, to me, it's almost a no-brainer because if you look at a fully loaded compensation for a recruiter and say you have to hire 10. I mean you're talking, close to a million dollars. And then you have to deal with turnover, you have to deal with them not meeting their quota, all of that stuff and from a marketing perspective you can see results fairly quickly. I mean, with the way the world works today whether that's programmatic job board advertising, whether that's Facebook integrations to their job feeds, marketing automation as a whole is making a recruiters process more efficient so that they can do more business with less headcount. And so a million dollars would get you a long way as even as a $500 million company. We could employ our whole set of services for a good couple of years and strive for some pretty good results for replacing that headcount.

MAX: I 100% agree. I've seen that with our more successful customers that they change their spending, and sometimes they don't even have to increase their advertising spend that much they just have to spend a little bit wiser in high volume recruitment, there's social media is very cost-effective, provided you can qualify the incoming traffic, automatically. You don't have to have an army of recruiters to qualify all the incoming traffic. So that's, in my world like Facebook, Instagram is one, very performing. What are some of the channels, digital or otherwise that you see are trending well in your market?

JARED: Yeah, definitely the Facebook, Instagram world is a big play, especially in the industrial staffing world, and as we partner with clients that aren't necessarily in massive metropolitan areas that might have been kind of the Midwest manufacturing environments. I think the Facebook's of the world are advantageous as you get into some of the more, like, finance, IT, engineering. Obviously, a lot of that spend shifts to LinkedIn. But, the new craze, which I'm not an expert on so I won't go into detail but like TikTok obviously is the new thing going on in America anyways at this point and they're working to launch kind of their team TikTok resumes, I think it's called a Tik-Tok jobs. And I think we talked about this a little before but I mean you're starting to see the digitalization, as a whole of the staffing recruiting industry with more of the candidate user experience when it comes to like the e-verification of staffing. You're starting to see private equity money flow into companies like that are just, I don't know if you call it, marketing, but it is like. It's using technology to create a better candidate experience so that they want to use your platform right. So, that would be another one. At the end of the day, Google is still Google right. I mean, when you're in a pinch, generally in the United States, you go to Google and type in jobs near me or head under near me or recruiter near me. And so, there's always still, at least for the foreseeable future, a substantial investment into paid advertising, and just search engine optimization on the Google platform.

MAX: When traveling was more popular I used to do a lot of conferences, TA and staffing firm conferences in North America, and I was always amazed by the volume of job board and marketplace vendors, and it was usually Google representative in the room, which now looks like a wolf in a hens house. Everybody was polite but a little bit worried. Do you think that in a market where there's so much consolidation around the platforms that we just mentioned, LinkedIn and Google and maybe Facebook and Tik Tok, the days of programmatic are numbered because, well, if there are only three or four big channels where you advertise, you don't need an algorithm to help you place your ads?

JARED: Yeah, no I think that's a valid question. I think you're starting to see more sophisticated technologies coming out from the Googles and the Facebook's or just, suppliers or vendors, building things to make those experiences that much better but yeah I definitely can't argue with you like we do have a lot of clients that are still using programmatic but the efficiency of that is definitely a question, moving forward with the big players.

MAX: Right there is an existential threat but then we didn't even mention Indeed and Zip and those guys, so if you started to add those up, you could see why a recruiter's head would explode having to manage these four or five different budgets on top of their daily work.

JARED: Yeah, and just know, what Parqa is good at more than that we're like an expert at Indeed or expert at Monster whatever it is, like, providing a strategic solution for our clients that is numerically justified right like, I think a lot of times you get a recruiting manager that says, like, their CFO gives them a $20,000 budget or whatever the number is $200,000 budget and says like, well, we have to have an Indeed contract, we have to have a LinkedIn contract and all of a sudden like they're not even doing like they're just paying those people money to you know to be a partner with them but they're not actually coming up with a strategic solution is quantifiably driving business results for them, well we should be a part of Indeed, well, a LinkedIn sales rep came to us and said we have to pay X dollars for the company LinkedIn recruiter seeds. And there's just no like thought process, it's just like they go from supplier to supplier saying like yes here's my 100 grand, here's my 200 grand. And that's what Parqa tries to bring all that together to say, like let's look at your buyer persona, your ideal clients, your ideal candidates like where are they living what are they doing, how do we get to them in a way that's efficient like, the database like you have an accounting and finance firm that has been around for 15 years, how many of those candidates that you talked to 10 years ago are now managing directors in their role and now they're hiring managers and that could be more clients, it could be, getting candidates out. There are just so many ways to be efficient at it, and not to go all the way back to where we started, but the answer always is like, hire more recruiters, make more outbound calls, do more intakes and it's not about the future right.

MAX: No, no. The future sounds like it would be, start by measuring everything that you do, find out what your cost per hire per channel is, and then move your money there, and then get good at one or two channels, better than your competitors.

JARED: Well that's, yeah, like we talked about early on we started, I guess you'd call them like Mom-and-Pop shops but, more of that like 10 to 30 million reigns and I guess at that point you don't necessarily expect crazy sophistication, but what's really been surprising to me is, as we move into the 500 million-plus accounts is, they are really not any better at marketing attribution. It's really a freed for all, they don't know where their money is going, they buy tools and pay for the tools but quit using the tools. And so that's one of the things Parqa is really not mastered quite yet, but that's one of our big focuses heading into 2022 is, I want to create a full attribution product, essentially, a dashboard that is customizable but scalable, that we can go into these staffing firms and just quantifiably, say what you just said it's like you're spraying money everywhere, why don't we just hone in on two things that are working really well for you and then make your internal process more efficient. Because at the end of the day, if a recruiter can have 100 people out versus 50, they're commissioned salespeople and that's a pretty easy sell the internal recruiters just like if I can make your job this much easier. So you're focused on value-added items, and you can make $100,000 more while we do that for you, would you be interested in hearing more. I think any rifle recruiter would probably raise their hand, with some interest.

MAX: Yeah, I would listen to you, and if I was a business owner of a staffing firm, amid small or mid-size. I would find it helpful, that even if you get to companies with a few 1000 headcounts, there's not a methodology about channel marketing and there's not that higher level of expertise, and that there they still fall into these old patterns of hiring their way out of revenue plateaus and I would, of course, go back to the basics, which is every year, your market is different. The way your candidates behave changes, it's very dynamic. And so what worked two or three years ago may not work anymore. I don't know if the cycle is right but it feels to me like two-three years would be like a good time to like reboot and rethink. Do you think that's about right? Is that the frequency in which your contracts are being re-evaluated?

JARED: Yeah, I mean I would probably say two to three years, a couple of years ago, was probably accurate. I would say that post-COVID at least, and again in the United States, I can't speak worldwide but, I mean there's definitely been a shock in the system and, I mean there's more technology, more options, more things changing more rapidly than any time before in staffing history. So that might have been redefined to like six to eight months or something at this point.

MAX: Yeah, it's been a bit traumatic, it has been quick. What are some of the tools or technologies that you've seen pick up over the last year that you think were trending well that have high impact, high ROI for your customers?

JARED: Yeah, I would say, sometimes I feel silly saying this because I feel like we're not on the cutting edge but for staffing and recruiting we are. It's really like home-based marketing and marketing automation. I don't know if you're familiar with Bullhorn, they are one of the largest ATS providers like they just purchased Herefish, it's probably a year ago now. And Herefish is someone we worked with prior to Bullhorn and acquiring them. I don't know what Bullhorn's revenue is off the top of my head but when you're a company that large, and Herefish like a low seven person startup is like your golden ticket like you know that something's changing in the industry, senses another product. I believe there Google-backed. They are not a Google company but again as a candidate enablement software to automate the candidate experience. The job board integration thing is something that we do, I wouldn't say it's revolutionary technology per se but building custom job board integrations to make sure that all, you know, we talked about the many job boards that exist today, making sure that they're able to scrape and do all that, from a technology perspective. And then, I know it's not necessarily technology but you know database management is one of the things that we're really trying to work with our customers on because as these martech tools come into play, you run into a stone wall pretty quickly when the database is a disaster. And so, really trying to educate the market on database, cleanliness, and operational best practices.

MAX: No, just this week, SAP SuccessFactors, which is more TA than staffing, they made a small acquisition which they almost never buy small tech companies they wait for them to be big but they just bought a company called SwoopTalent specialized in improving the databases. You were mentioning Bullhorn acquiring Herefish, which is a company, I think Herefish specializes in re-engaging and helping you get more out of your database. So those are big trends, clearly. I know this isn't cutting edge either, but what about messaging and SMS and texting, is that still got some growth ahead, or is that getting old, is that established.

JARED: I think it's a little bit dependent on what vertical your firm is in or the TA company that you'd be working with. Honestly, our value-added and if you're talking before the consulting world and like the high volume staffing world, I would say that text message is still very prevalent. I think that's how we're finding a lot of people prefer to communicate over email. I guess I can only speak for myself, but I get 1000 emails a day to my personal email, but I only get 50 text messages. So, when it is a value-added service, I think, text messaging still plays a pretty important role. Yeah.

MAX: Yeah, depends on your industry, but yeah, it's performing well. Okay, well, one question I always ask my guests, is to walk us back to a day when you made a hiring mistake. And so that our listeners can draw some lessons from the pain that you experienced back then. And you don't have to name individuals but it would help the exercise if you had one person in mind, and you could walk us through why you made that mistake.

JARED: There's one that's just like glaring in my head and I wish like I still to this day, of course, I made the mistake.

MAX: Let's talk through it, please lay down and open up. I am your therapist. We're gonna walk through it.

JARED: That's great. So yeah, it was a few years ago and I believe this person just applied through like a LinkedIn ad. So our agency as a whole, probably 70% of our employees are referral base, and that ultimate automatically gives you like a little sense of security, so this one did come through LinkedIn. Not that we have like a crazy big process because we're not huge but generally like I interview people first, because if they're not a culture fit that I don't even care what their skill set is. Then they meet with the hiring manager to really assess the skill set and what's needed. And then the third is we kind of bring them into meeting a couple of the other directors or a couple of the other teammates so that they get a feel of the overall culture. This person actually ended up meeting with our CEO, I don't remember why exactly but usually our CEO's interviews are about seven minutes long, and he is on to the next thing. He talked to this person for almost an hour and a half. And so my interview from a cultural perspective is like this guy's there this person is great, he's gonna be a good fit. And then we brought in the subject matter expert who has worked at large agencies throughout the Twin Cities, she thought this person was a great fit. The team met him, they thought he was a great fit. Then I watched our owner talk to him for an hour and a half and I'm like, there's no way in hell I can't hire this guy I've never seen Tony talk to someone so long it's his entire life. And so we hired the person, within about two weeks, we realize that he knew literally nothing about digital marketing whatsoever. He had held a job at a large fortune 500 company in a role that we were hiring for six years, or according to his resume, for six years, and didn't even know the basics so, you know, fundamental digital marketing. It was probably about three weeks in when we knew like this was a train wreck and like we had to take care of it. And this person actually came to me and said, Hey, like I'm getting recruited by another agency, and I have like, literally sprinted into a closed office and was like, Dude, you got to take this role like this is a perfect role for you to like, don't feel bad about it, no pain on our side I think this is the right decision for you.

MAX: What a gift. You don't get gifts like that too often.

JARED: I think actually I met this person in a parking lot, that very weekend, to like exchange stuff to make sure that he didn't like remain wanting to stay with us. I was like, let's get the key and had everything taken care of. It comes up in meetings, probably on a monthly if not quarterly, or weekly basis of like what the heck happened here.

MAX: Will you change your recruitment process? What have you learned from that experience? I mean what I'm hearing is, there's no way to be 100% sure until day one, maybe, but perhaps as well, even if somebody sounds really good on paper, still ask them how they do things, how do you run this campaign, how did you accomplish those things and don't skip that step. It sounds so obvious, but would you think that that might have been skipped?

JARED: Might have been a misunderstanding. No, I think that having been an industry-agnostic my whole career, like I have placed a lot of value on culture, and a lot of value on like my gut feeling which we all know, will fail you from time to time. And so I think, as we continue to scale like you said, having each director in our organization really put together like a "test", to really quantify and measure aptitude, because, when you're in startup board and when you're growing rapidly, it's easy to take shortcuts. And, yeah, we'll I learned from that one.

MAX: Our listeners, we'll learn from your pain so thanks for sharing and opening up. Where can they connect with you, Jared? What's the best way to connect with you or with Parqa, if we have a staffing firm or recruiting firm listening, who is looking for marketing help.

JARED: Yeah, so it's, I mean simply www.parqamarketing.com. For the listeners out there, Jared Hummel, on LinkedIn is definitely an easy way to track me down. But yeah, I think, you find me on a podcast, doing videos with supplier partners. Our industry is still pretty large on like the trade shows and the state associations and whatnot. So it's kind of exciting, I was in Chicago last weekend, I think we have Denver coming up in September and Florida in November. So I'm kind of getting jammed up to go out and see people and shake hands and have some fun so.

MAX: Awesome. Great, well thanks for coming on and maybe see you on the road somewhere, if I'm allowed to travel again.

JARED: Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me on Max. Obviously, you have a pretty crazy awesome background and are doing some pretty cool things with TalkPush. So yeah, when we make that move from staffing to talent acquisition, maybe we'll find some synergies together.

MAX: That's good.

MAX: That was Jared Hummel from parka digital marketing agency, reminding us that recruiting should never get stale. And yes, traditionally staffing firms will hire people who are salespeople, who are hyperactive and they would want to focus on what they're good at, which is hitting the phone. But. I'm really an effective recruiting marketing can carry so much more impact that a busy day on the phone. Every recruiting marketing strategy needs to be revisited on a regular basis, perhaps every couple of years. And you can do that internally, of course, but you can also reach out to agencies to come and help you through the process. Hope you enjoyed this interview and that she'll be back for more.
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MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I'm delighted to welcome you to the show Robin Linn, who is the senior director for creative recruiting. What is creative recruiting, you're going to find out, for a company called Activision Blizzard, one of the leaders of the leading publishers of games, and Robin, welcome to the show.

ROBIN: Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

MAX: Pleasure. I was raised on video games and cartoons, and as an adult, I would love to find out what you guys are up to, in the adult world, because I am a big consumer of the output, and you are the factory, you are the input. So, well, first of all, I need to ask you, Robin, for the audience, maybe not all of them know what Activision Blizzard does. Could you tell us a few words about what your company does, to get an idea of the size and the kind of people you hire?

ROBIN: We're about a 9000 seat company right so it's a fairly large video game company we've been around for many years, our game titles that might be most widely known are World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty, Overwatch. And we're also associated with King, so if you've played Candy Crush or Crash Bandicoot, those are also titles that we produce.

MAX: Wow, if you add those up, I think it's like half of mankind has played one of your things.

ROBIN: We think so, right.

MAX: Especially the candy crush one. I remember that it was like half the planet on that thing. It was like a drug.

ROBIN: Right casual gaming, right, that is just, it's addictive.

MAX: Oh! I'm trying to shake away my old addiction, thinking about it, and what an unusual world to be in. We've all left the cartoons behind us, and the games behind us, many of us have, unfortunately. But you managed to stay involved and we want to know the secret. How did you end up in this industry? Could you walk us back?

ROBIN: Sure, we'll start back with where I grew up in Orange County, California, which was right next door to Disneyland. Right next door the ashes from the fireworks would fall upon our roof every summer night. And I think you grow up next to a place that's based on animation and based on escapism, it can't help infect you a little bit, and I fell in love with animation, early on, because it's the most liberating medium out there. Anything can be turned into an animated character. There's been a brave little toaster that took a vacuum cleaner and a toaster and an electric blanket and sent them on a journey. And any number of anthropomorphic-sized animals and other characters have populated animation since its earliest days, and that freedom intrigued me. I was raised in a very traditional home so the fact that characters were rebellious, and they were rewarded for being rebellious. You think about the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. He's not the polite little corporate spokesman that he is now he was, you know, he was quite a little rough and tumble character. And I think that appealed to me early on, and then I was exposed through Saturday morning movies right after the cartoons, you'd have the movies come on that were those that had Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation. The Sinbad movies, Jason and the Argonauts, where you could see what you knew were animated characters, right. I knew that those skeletons weren't real but they felt real. And to see them interact with live-action actors was just so fascinating for me, that I got drawn into it. I was lucky enough in school to have a teacher who gave me a box of clay and said well you're not very good at drawing, maybe you can sculpt. And it turns out it could, and I spun that up into a career and I joined Hanna Barbera cartoons in the late 80s as a meerkat sculptor, someone who was sculpting animated characters. This was pre CG. This is back before CG was even thought of. We'd sculpt the statues that the animators could then hold up and see the character from various perspectives to help them draw their drawings. And I did that for a couple of years and then CG came along, Jurassic Park and Toy Story, and that kind of spun the industry on its head a little bit. And I left traditional sculpting and went over to a studio called Sony Pictures Imageworks, which was one of the founders of computer-generated imagery, and worked on Anaconda and contact and then Stuart Little. And while I was there as an artist I had a manager come to me and said, you have a background in management, because I had been a bank manager, million years ago, and he said you're an artist, so we'd like you to be the artist manager. Okay. And part of being an artist manager was recruiting talent.

MAX: That's the hardest part.

ROBIN: Yeah. And when I started the group was about 25 people and I left here about 320, and loved every minute of it and went to work for a couple of smaller studios to get experience there, and then gaming came along, and I thought well I'm not done gaming. And, it's the interactive version of what I love so much in animation, let's give that a try. So I went to Riot for a bit. I left Riot and went to Netflix because when Netflix comes calling, you've got to see what that circus is about, you've got to go figure out what that is. And then, this past fall, the boss I had at Riot, he had left there and gone to Activision and he called me up and said we have a position here of recruiting creatives, what do you think? and so I made the jump back.

MAX: Awesome. So, from that childhood flame, you skip the part where you ended up working in a bank for a couple of years. I guess that was less memorable.

ROBIN: I graduated high school, unfortunately, economic situations were such that I couldn't go to college.

MAX: You had to take a real job, it happens.

Robin: I had to take a real job and I thought banking is a real job where you wear a tie. I remember I was given a gift of a briefcase, right, because I'm going to carry my, I don't know what I was supposed to carry. I carried my lunch in it primarily. Yeah, and that was it. But yeah I did a number of years in banking and I was pretty good at it. I was about to be promoted to be an assistant vice president of operations at a small bank. And at that same time that was coming together, I got that offer to be a sculptor and Hanna Barbera cartoons and I'm sorry. You know when that lands in your lap, the banking just kind of fades away. I ran from finance.

MAX: It faded away, but you mentioned in your story that they looked at your resume and said, Well, you've worked at a bank, therefore you can manage people, it's funny how that association works because why would somebody who is coming from a bank, know how to manage creators, it doesn't make much sense. But I suppose management for some people who are so in love with their craft is considered a chore. And something that I don't want to deal with is the admin type, I don't want to have to deal with people, I just want to be at my desk making beautiful work. And, and so, you know that created a gap in that team. I imagined that's how it played out.

ROBIN: Yeah, well I think it was more than the fact that I'd written performance evaluations in the past and nobody likes doing those so at least Robin knows how to do them. Although, reviewing a bank teller, and reviewing an artist are very different animals. Just the way you speak with artists is very different than you would with an engineer or with you know another type of candidate.

MAX: Yeah, well, let's get into that. We're here to talk about recruitment, not cartoons. So I would love to get some tips from you on when you're at Activision, or Netflix, or even Riot Games, you have a huge brand behind you, anybody in the industry would know who you are and your reputation would somewhat proceed you. But if you remove the brand and we can talk about the brand later, just focus on the art of recruiting, which is the mano a mano battle between recruiter and candidate. Yeah, how do you appeal to that creative audience, and how do you put together a team with creative people who just want to jump on board. Is it all about getting them excited about the vision of a project or, is it more about creating the right environment? How does it differ from let's say hiring for a bank?

ROBIN: Well I think we have to go back to the foundation, the fact that I came up as an artist before I moved into the recruiting space I think gives me a little bit of calling it street cred for lack of a better. We're sitting down you're talking with an animator about what it's like to work on a deadline. Most films are budgeted on a 50 hour week, so there's overtime going into it, there's crunch time coming out at the end of it where you might be working 60-70 hour weeks. If you can sit down and talk with the candidate and through your language and your sharing of whatever they understand that you sat in that chair, that it's not abstract, you're selling a product that you're familiar with, that you have already have used you. You've been on a production that's gone haywire, you've been through working on weekends to have your shot canceled. I think that that lends a little bit of again credibility to you as a recruiter, as opposed to someone who may have come up through an agency, who has been a professional recruiter all of their time in the industry may not have that understanding. At least that's been my experience. And it also gives you a vocabulary that you can talk to a candidate in such a way that they know you know their role, right. I'm probably cursed or it's unfortunate to me that I can't sell an opportunity that I don't have a complete in-depth understanding of. Like if you were to put me in front of an engineering role I would struggle at being able to sell that because I just don't have the in-depth understanding of it, but even coming in front of art and animation and visual effects and gaming, and the creative spaces in there, and I'll have either the experience myself or I'll have worked closely with people who have, and be able to have that same vocabulary resume.

MAX: I think whether you're in your industry or others, it's something that we can all get better at. I do hire engineers and I'm not an engineer myself and I've often felt that I could get a little bit deeper into it so I could describe the environment better. If you're a recruiter, you're not necessarily going to maintain that relationship, post the point of hire. But you are that first impression and so, should sound familiar enough.

ROBIN: It's interesting you say that because I still keep in contact with people that I recruited 25 years ago. Social media has made it so much easier now. But it's rare that a week goes by that I don't exchange an email or a text or something with people that I have hired early in my career and early in their career and we both kind of advanced up. You'll reach back and share more stories or whatever. I think because you're recruiting for lack of a better term is an intimate process. You get to know somebody very well over the weeks you may spend with them because you're talking about where their challenges are. If you're a good recruiter, you don't go in saying, this is the great stuff about the candidate, you have to go into your hiring manager and say these are the challenges, this is where this person is going to need to support. And the only way you can find that is by having really in-depth conversations with that candidate in developing trust. On top of that, the financials are right, you're going into that knowing what that person makes her living which is, in many cases their significant other may not even know that. So you develop a friendship is probably too strong of a word. We should develop a relationship with these candidates that certainly is kind of the bedding for a friendship, it's bedding for a relationship that will spawn up out of that.

MAX: You need to bleed a little bit and worry a little bit about if this is gonna fit, otherwise, this is gonna hurt my relationship, and we will suffer from it. Whereas, in the high volume recruitment space, it is a one-time interaction so it's a very different world.

ROBIN: Yeah. So we were talking before we started recording. The talent pools that I'm working within are very finite. If we're talking about Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisors, there are 60, maybe 70 of those on the planet. I cannot letter bomb all 50 of them with a templated email and expecting a response back from any of them because they'll delete it before they even get-go. So you have to have the ability to understand what these people have done, what their background is, what the connective tissue is, who do you know who knows them that can introduce you. It becomes much more of a social game at some level than just reaching out with a cold email.

MAX: The Netflix culture made a lot of noise emphasizing accountability and performance in the early days. I haven't heard that much about it since. I suppose that would resonate relatively well with creatives because there are also very autonomous people who want to get things done, and who have a strong drive for personal accomplishments. Would you say that's a fair statement or that people kind of rejected corporatism?

ROBIN: Well I think we can't paint with too broad of a brush, this is appropriate for everyone. My experience with the Netflix culture was that it was a great kind of litmus test, right. Every call that I had when I was working there for the three years I did, started with, have you read the Netflix culture memo, what are your thoughts on it? And also sharing that with there were things that were written on that document that was like, Oh, I don't know if I agree with that. I don't think anyone can lock step in with all 52 points that are made on that document. It was a great opportunity, like a conversation icebreaker to talk about where they didn't align. It's one thing and I'm sure you've experienced that in recruiting as well. At some point, with certain levels of candidates, you stop talking about the benefits of the job and you start talking about the challenges, right. You don't say oh this is the best place in the world to work, you start saying, this place has got some challenges we're broken because that's why we need you to come in. That's why we need you to help fix us. That's for a certain type of candidate, the fact that everything is running smoothly is like red meat to a tiger, like, I want that. I want to come in, I want to leave a mark, I want to make a stand, I will make a difference. I want to feel like I've contributed. And if the workplace is seamless, there's no opportunity to do that. So the more challenging an environment is, the more intriguing and interesting that will be to the right level of a candidate.

MAX: Yeah, well let's talk about the recent challenges of your industry where, my mental image of the creatives and the developers, everybody's living in basements, drinking Mountain Dew under green neon lights, and having sleepless nights of coding and gaming. I'm sure it's not exactly like that, but that doesn't sound very COVID-friendly.

ROBIN: No, and I think what this situation has taught us, especially in animation, and in gaming as well, is that the artists no longer have to be in-house, right. They can operate from home, and produce work safely and without there being too big of a hit on our production cycles. For recruiting this means that our talent pools are no longer geographically locked, right. I'm no longer looking for people who are necessarily in Los Angeles based in or in proximity to our studios, and the campuses. It opens the world up, right, especially if you're looking for people to come in and do contract work where we might need seven or eight paintings done or we might need character designer or prop design. All of a sudden we can start looking on a global scale as to where those people are located and track them down and this is when it becomes all-important to candidates to brand themselves. When we started this conversation talking about branding, candidates have to be forward-facing. They have to put themselves out there and they can do that. It's so much easier now than it was in the older days before to the web where you had to send around a portfolio just so you can get work. Now you can create a website, you can utilize social media channels like Tik-Tok, and Instagram to put your artwork out there. You can follow recruiters, and recruiters have Instagram accounts. You can find them, you can follow them, you can interact with them, you can share your work with them, ask for feedback and they won't necessarily give it but it's always good to ask.

MAX: Is there unemployment in your space? Are there animation artists and game developers that are sitting on the bench?

ROBIN: Always, right. A part of that is because we're a finite industry but schools keep graduating students. And that's just, I don't know, in the best of yours we could absorb everybody who's looking to get into the industry. It just doesn't happen. There was a stat, years ago and it was probably still the same, that there were more professional football players in the NFL than there were professional working animators. And that's a fairly accurate parallel because the desire to do something, the desire to be an animator, the desire to be an artist, the desire to be a game developer does not guarantee you employment in that space.

MAX: That's right. Not enough to want it, I don't know what you need, what do you need?

ROBIN: Talent. You don't have the talent to.You can want to be an actor, and you can study all the lines, and you can memorize everything and you can know where to stand, and where the lighting is, but if the performance isn't there, you're never going to be an actor.

MAX: So how do you measure that? Are there some exercises you can submit, for the younger crowd? When you seem to get older you can see their professional outputs but for the younger crowd, are there ways for you to evaluate that talent that can be applied by others?

ROBIN: Certainly. The web has made all this so much easier because you could find, you can type into Google, animators reels, or if you're a prop designer, professional prop designers worksheets, whatever it is, you can type it in there and find examples online of what good looks like. And odds are you can find somebody who's willing to teach, right. Or you can find tutorials that someone's already completed for you, then it's up to you to do the legwork. We're not necessarily concerned about where you go to school or where you have a degree or if you have an advanced degree. We're more concerned if you have talent and you can do the job. And there are a million different pathways to get to that result, you don't have to just go through formal education.

MAX: But those reels, that are online, that's going to be the basis for your evaluation, there's going to be the first interview, get to know each other and then afterward, somebody is going to evaluate your work on its creative merits?

ROBIN: Yeah, normally what we do when we're looking for an artist is we'll go on to Instagram or go on to YouTube or any of these media channels. And we'll just start vetting art, we'll start looking, we'll put in a search engine, right. So we're going to search for you so if you create a profile, you're going to want to use keywords that we can find. That's how we're going to find you. So you can put in animation, you can put in character design, you can put in prop design. Build those out so you're easily searchable. And we're going to gather those up into a database. We're going to then go through that database and that candidates, and it's one of the sad realities that just the mechanics of the process of vetting candidates means we only look at your artwork, for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Right, so you have to make a fantastic first impression because you won't get a second opportunity to make that work. If we like your work well we'll watch it longer, we'll look at it longer if we don't like your work if your work is really bad, we'll also look at it a bit longer but for a different reason. But that's it, 10 To 15 seconds is all you get. We'll boil those lists down. I think the ratios that I'm comfortable speaking about, for every 50 websites or 50 reels or 50 portfolios we look at, we may find one that we advance.

MAX: Okay, so 2.5% conversion rate.

ROBIN: Right.

MAX: I've seen worse.

ROBIN: Yeah.

MAX: And you get to browse Instagram all day, that sounds like a Millennials dream job.

ROBIN: Yeah, but I'm not looking at cat videos necessarily.

MAX: Or other robots or other monsters.

ROBIN: We'll gather those up and we'll take those to the supervisor in that particular discipline and ask them what do you think, and out of that list of 10 or 15, we may get one or two that they like. And then we'll do a phone screen, we'll go grab a phone call with the candidate and just talk to them and try and get a feel for who they are. We've already assessed craft we know you can do the work, then it's about who they are as a candidate. Are they brave, are they timid, just all those things you started looking for because we're casting. Right, that's what we're doing at that point. We're trying to see what's the deficit on the team that I'm looking to fill and how does this person fit into that. Candidates need to understand that, especially first-time emerging talent. But we often hear from emerging talent or when we talk to them is oh I want to be a sponge I just want to come in there and I just want to learn and I just want to be like, I just want to take everything and just take it all in. And that's great, but what are you bringing right. What do you bring to it? If I'm making this meal over here. Right, what's your addition to the menu. How are you going to make us better by your presence, and that can be in your talent, that can be in your feedback, that can be in your personnel. It's a number of factors that they bring, or they can bring to the team to improve that, it's not just their ability to create, especially with emerging talent, we hire primarily. We've seen that you can do it, we don't know if you can necessarily do it again but we hope you can.

MAX: In engineering, there are some fields that are extremely hot, and if you get in early, you will find jobs, you will find work. If you're one of the first developers to build on AWS, and it took off, I'm sure you would find a job in that field if you're one of the first developers building chatbots, your salary would go up by 50% the first year, etc. That there must be still some pockets of grade gaps where somebody has done that and then they get picked up.

ROBIN: It's the less glamorous job like everybody wants to be an animator because animators are actors. And it's performance-based very sexily to see your character come to life on the screen, but there are a number of disciplines. I won't even say support. I almost did it and caught myself. They partner with animators to make that performance possible, right, character riggers that actually take a static model and input the controls that allow it to move, that allows the animator to drive that performance. That's a great career path for somebody who may not have the acting chops, they may not have made the best acting decisions, but they're more technically minded and they have a sculptural mind, they understand that when you bend a finger this is what happens to the skin, and they can duplicate that using technology. People who are proficient in software called Houdini, which builds visual effects, right, now all the visual effects you see out there. All the new kinds of AR and VR technology. So if you can animate or you can work and build visual effects in that new space.

MAX: Does that Houdini software cost an arm and a leg?

ROBIN: Yeah, pretty much. Like real-time, we can't find real-time visual effects artists, that's always an area that just drives us crazy. So further if you can find joy in doing something that someone else doesn't want to, you will never be unemployed. And I think that holds true in our industry as well.

MAX: Yeah, those are good last words. But before we part ways. Robin, I have a question I always ask, and it's kind of shitty of me to end on a sad note but I always like to ask about hiring mistakes made in the past and what we can learn from them. And so I'd ask you to think about one person, without giving a name. One person in particular, where you made a mistake and blew up in your face and in then their face, and what that mistake was? Could you walk us back? One coming to mind?

ROBIN: Sure. Oh immediately. I think every recruiter got like a handful of these like Oh yeah, that one. I'll start with this. If you love chocolate it doesn't necessarily mean you want to work in a factory that makes chocolate. Right. You have to be able to distance yourself from the process of making the product, what the actual product is. And I remember sitting down with a candidate, and his significant other who came into the interview with us, and that's fine. This is a business where the animator is going to be away from home quite a bit working on these projects. And I remember her saying in the course of the interview, to me, Oh, I'm so happy he's done with animation school because the hours were so long and now he'll just have a regular nine to five job. I was young in my recruiting career, and I should have just gone, wait, let's talk about that because that's not the case. And I didn't and we hired him anyway. And I think the first time he went on a 60-70 hour week, it may have put some strain on their relationship that I felt in some way responsible.

MAX: Okay, yeah. We all put our heads in the sand sometimes when we hear something and we just brush it over, that'll be fine.

ROBIN: Yeah, that's a ghost that haunts me. That's one of those 3 am thoughts like god why.

MAX: Well, if their relationship survived it, then it'll be stronger for it.

ROBIN: So the good news is I hired him subsequently a couple of other times and they're together and have kids everyone's been great. Man, you do learn from those experiences, never to just skip over something lightly in an effort to make a hire.

MAX: It was very kind of you to come and share with us the wonderful world of gaming, and studios, and animation, and on the off chance that Houdini developer. Here's our conversation, where can you be reached? Can people connect with you on Instagram or what's the best way to connect?

ROBIN: LinkedIn, I'm old school, right. My Instagram is filled with gardening pics and videos with my grandchildren. But, LinkedIn is the best way to get hold of me and I try to respond to everybody on there. This was my New Year's resolution this year to be very active on LinkedIn so I try to post something every couple of weeks that's related to recruiting and getting a job in animation and sharing whatever I picked up over my 30 years.

MAX: Thanks for sharing with our audience, Robin.

ROBIN: My pleasure.

MAX: Good luck with hiring people from all over the world and making the dreams of these young animators come true.

ROBIN: It's the most fun I've ever had. It's just been the most rewarding career to do that, right. I feel very very fortunate to have had the years I've had.

MAX: That was Robin Lynn, who is in charge of creative recruiting for Activision Blizzard. And who reminded us of how important it is and how useful it can be for a recruiter to know to have sat in the shoes of the candidate and to know their industry jargon and so on. It does make everything go better and the trust builds faster.

So a good reminder for all of us recruiters out there to really know our industry deeply. Hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. And you'll be back for more, please follow us on the recruitment hackers podcast and share with friends.

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Welcome to the think like marketeer: marketing strategies for recruiters webinar.Talkpush created these webinars that we do believe that with a couple of gifts from marketing, we can definitely level up the game of each recruiter in the recruiting industry.

I'm going to stad eating the welcome to Max. We're very lucky to have you. He's our CEO at Talkpush. So max, the word is yours. Hello everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. And good night wherever you're logging in from. I'm the CEO of Talkpush. We are a recruitment software company, which deals with really high volume and we've built a bunch of technology that helps us manage wide recruitment funnels, which requires.Very wide advertising and marketing funnels. So naturally we've had the opportunity to work with cutting edge recruitment marketing teams who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and investing in their content strategy. And so on. And in our years in the space, we've come across some really like I said, cutting edge professionals and people who are deep experts in the field of recruitment advertising and so I'm really excited to see what we're going to hear from our two speakers today. Adam Chambers and David Lim who represent Applichat and ThinkCrumbs and who are two experts in the field of digital advertising particularly on Facebook and other high volume channels.

I thought I would kick it off by saying, well, first of all, we live in a world where it's never been easier to have a lot of data and so the problem has in a way shifted from where can I get candidates to, how can I get, how can I manage all those candidates, which is a very different problem and this is not simply a trend which dates back from, I mean, this trend staded a long time ago, 20 years ago. But it's actually still accelerating, meaning. In 2020, you can get way more leads than we can get in 2019, strangely, even though in 2019. And it was already probably an age of plenty full in terms of generating leads and candidates in 2020, it's even more so we were just commenting on the fact that the cost per questions, cost per leads has dropped considerably over the course of this crisis and and on top of that, the trends that had already staded with some of the aggregators that are providing free traffic to employers, such as Facebook jobs and Google jobs are further accelerating during this time.

People have more time at home, more time to browse, more time to search, more time to apply for jobs. And so the volumes are going up and I Talkpush. We were lucky enough to work with some of the largest employers in the world, and we can see their candidate traffic has increased considerably in a while.Companies were still feeling a little bit, and shy about hiring. We have more than double the volume of candidates that we had back in March in the month of June and that is not driven by advertising. You know, people have not increased their advertising budget but they are getting more volume, nonetheless.So does this mean that advertising is over advertising is dead, not at all. I think there's two facets to advertising. One of them is indeed finding your audience. The other one is making sure that you're attracting the right kind of audience and today the opportunity is there for you employer you know, employment branding, experts to attract the right kind of audience by having a very differentiated message which is where the battle lies today.

Anybody who spends time on LinkedIn and I assume everybody on this webinar has spent time on LinkedIn as a talent acquisition professionals do we'll agree that it has become an overload of spam of noise. And it's very hard to get hurt, very hard to stand out kind of the way Facebook was a few years ago.

and in this environment I've seen over the last few weeks, some advertisers who were able, some employers were able to adjust their strategy very quickly, sound more authentic, create more unique content and win market share in that sense and in the war for talent, win market share and win mind share by standing out from competition in a world where everybody is advertising everybody is moving online, where every company is doing webinars as well. It's not just Talkpush then. It really boils down to the quality of the content and, you know, the authenticity of the message. So that's kind of leveling the playing field. It means for people who are on this call, who do not have a big advertising budget.

Okay. We don't expect that you do, you know, entering into Q3 2020. Obviously your finance department is not going to give you an increased social media advertising budget compared to the beginning of the year, considering the recession. But even if you move 20% of your ad spend from job boards to social media, you're going to be able to experiment and do a lot of things with that tiny 20% bunches because if you have a real differentiated message where you can talk about something that you're doing, that's uniquely speaking to our time. For example, you could talk about how you're taking care of your work from home program or your company culture, or how you're adapting to the new normal, this kind of messaging.

We'll find an audience in this current climate and will allow you to attract. A lot of candidates for a fraction of the cost that it would cost you under normal circumstances and that it would cost to only six months ago. So this is a great time to experiment. And I think that this is what we're seeing with our customers.

Pablo if you could share the slide that I sent you with the data. Thank you. This is the number of job applications that are coming through our software and through Facebook jobs and Facebook job currently does not charge for advertising.

Meaning these applications just come in free of charge and are passed on directly to our customers and so far Facebook is not advertising for it. They will, at some point in the future we have the same trend actually happening with job boards and with aggregators like Google jobs.

And so, you know, as I said, there's more volume, more volume than ever. So I think the battle has shifted a little bit to who has the biggest budgets to who has the most unique voice. And I think there's nobody better qualified to speak on this particular topic than Adam who has staded a company called athlete chat, who specializes in conversational interfaces for recruitment and, and social media sourcing.

So with that, I'll pass it over to you, Adam.

All right. Thanks very much, Max. I appreciate your introduction. Yeah, we're using Facebook jobs a lot, so in my age, We help recruiters like you all source for hard to fill in roles using social media. So we're all about getting in front of account continents, where they like to spend time on making it very easy for them to apply to your jobs.

So what I'm going to talk about today is how we're using the hub specifically for nurse hiring, which is a major job shortage in the USA, but this can work for any role really using social media. So yeah, I'll reach out. So our specialty is really a consultative approach. Sourcing difficult possessions. So clients will come. They often say, Adam, we can't hire enough nurses. We've used it indeed. We've used it onLinkedIn. We've tried cold calling it, but it just isn't working. Hi, can we get in front of our ideal candidates?

And how can we actually get them to change their lives and come on, work for us, the solution and the way you do that is by making them offers. So what I'm going to discuss today is really about how we can make offers to our candidates and how we can disrupt the patterns of scrolling on social media to make them stop, look at the ad and actually take action on it.

So I, first of all, outline, if you're not really convinced of the route, either the impressive opportunity which exists so much over there, I'm just going to reiterate it and make it relevant for jobs. So 10 times, many people. Every single month would go on Facebook or Instagram all the job boards and on indeed.

So yeah, people are going on okay. More people are going on. The job board is on, I think about 60 to 70% of nurses would go on Facebook or Instagram every single day. And the average person with him has a demographic mood span, two hours or more on the sites.

So charge the people who are scrolling for two hours or more. Each day, 60 to 70% of them are doing it. And these platforms run off advertising. So, you know, Facebook owns Instagram as well, and they make money by serving odds to customers. In this case candidates, whenever someone clicks on the ad Facebook makes money.So they will share that ad. The opportunity compared to job boards. I just want to make it a little bit more clear if we looked up our demographics. So we looked at Toronto and Canada and we just looked up nursing jobs and we found 974. Next step. We looked at those hospitals, agencies, health authorities that advertised on deed, and we only found 20 of them posting jobs on Facebook.

So nobody else you think about the visitors to jobs posted ratio for Facebook? It's over 3000, but on the job board, it's five to 10. So massive opportunity, massive market, and a massive opportunity to get ahead of your competition here, trying to recruit the same people. However historically the reason my agency exists is there's a bit of a problem with sourcing on Facebook.So of all the different categories of jobs or of ads posted on Facebook and Instagram jobs are to get the lowest amount of clicks. So less than a third of the best performing category, which is legal ads. And my opinion, like the reason for this is threefold. So a lot of job ads just stad with saying, we're hiring.

This is what you get, submit your resume here. The fact is most people on Facebook are scrolling. They're looking at pictures of cats that they are selling to their friends, and they're rarely gonna have time to go away and create a CV. And because there are what we call passive candidates. So mostly not seeking a new job.

They're rarely going to have an up-to-date CV to Sandy. They're just not gonna disrupt their schedule and disrupt their crucial experience to go off and go over to their computer and create a resume that kind of leads into 0.2, which is making a direct call to the options. So asking people who have seen your ad for the first time, perhaps to learn about your company, your hospital for the first time, to create a whole job application for you.

The third would be really shouldn't be yourself in the food. If you do a great job on the ads, but not on the targeting, whenever someone clicks the ad, if they go to a career site where they have to meet a client, create a password, tell their life story, and register all that stuff it disrupts the experience for the candidate.

It actually results in Facebook showing your ad less. So Facebook prefers to show out which gets more engagement and results because then. Customers will pay Facebook more money. So whenever you put up an ad, which links to a career site, which doesn't generate applications and isn't more optimized for mobiles your ad is going to perform less.

You're going to waste money. You're going to sort of go around in that circle of wasting budget, not getting enough candidates, looking for another solution and wasting money. So what is the solution to that? I want this to be very actionable, something which you can all Google and implement in the next couple of weeks to source more candidates from these sites.

Sum it up in three words, it's called pattern breaking offer. So to help me visualize this I've split it into three. As three separate divisions, which I'm going to sort of use as the structure for my presentation here. So a pattern break and offer is something which stops your ideal candidate from scrolling, convinces them to engage with your job up and then provides an easy way for them to exchange information with you.

Whenever you advertise outside of job boards on sites like Facebook and Instagram, you're competing against McDonald's, you're competing against the gap bowl. All the biggest brands in the world are vying for attention and they will use this exact same strategy. So they will post an offer, which stops the target customer from scrolling.

Keen to engage in and provide an accessible guy for them to make a purchase. So this isn't something I invented, like in my bedroom here this is something which has been tried and tested and billions of dollars being spent on this. So before we get started, I just want to do a little bit of a pool for everyone watching.

You're going to have the opportunity to vote on this and have a guess how many feeds does the average person scroll on their phone each day. So just sorta like there's are many feeds, would people scroll on their phone per day?

Drum roll.

All right. So I'm just going to give a few seconds, Mary. There it is. So those are the results. 600. Okay. I'm interested. If anyone here scrolls 600 feeds a day and what are you looking at if you do? So I think I would be in that 600 mark, cause I'm just always like on Facebook for some reason. The answer is I can go to the next slide.

Here are actually 300 feeds a day. So that's the size of the Statue of Liberty, pretty hundred feet today. You need to do something which is going to stop that person in that 300 feeds Germany. And that's, that's really what I mean. When I say stop the confident scrolling, you need to put something in front of them, which makes the form pause mixed up.

This is interesting. This breaks the pattern, and this makes me want to do something about it. The biggest stung, the most effective way to do that is through an image. So we, as humans, love to look at things. We're very curious creatures. And whenever someone sees a striking sort of emotional image, which has bright colors, which is shiny objects, they will usually have a look at it at least for a few seconds and give it some of their attention.

I also want to know a bit about what images do you think work on? What images do you all use for job ads? Could you let me do one another? Paul, who would use stock photos like this one in your job?

Alright, perfect. So with people answering there is let me share those results with you.

Oh, cool. So we got absolutely. No, I mean I'm 30%. Yes. 30%. Sometimes I would probably fall into like, I think sometimes if I have to its, fair enough. I would say if you're a staff. It's fair enough. Sometimes you can't go under the employer and put an ad up, but if you work in a hospital or if you're working in house, in my opinion, really, there's no excuse for using stock photos because it's so easy to just take your camera go and take a picture of people working doing their jobs.

So we actually tested this, we put up a stock photo like this one on the right, and now we put up a photo like this one on the left of real people. This one on the left hair dog, 50% better conversions. Whilst we can't be a hundred percent sure why few things, if I'm scrolling that 300 Feed a day, one of the things that is gonna make me stop is if I see someone who's exactly like me, who is in a similar situation to me, So if I was a nurse I saw the one on the right here.

Let's just talk a little bit about what would interest me. So there's three nurses in this photo or three medical staff, at least you've got a one smiling looking on in the background. You've got a sort of mother and father type figure here, and you've got a child in the middle, in a car. The research behind this was we talked to the hospital and said, what sort of situations do your nurses enjoy being in?

And they said, Hey, Joey, caring for families are seeing their patients happy whenever you compare that to this photo. Here it's a much more realistic situation. It's a much more natural situation. It really just breaks the pattern of other stock photos on social media, because even though we saw.

Like a percent of people use stock photos and really most recruiters people's job out. Something really got to the stage yet where they're not using them. I even heard reports of like different hospitals using the same stock photo to advertise their rules. Whenever you use something, like I said, it captures attention.

It helps people's eyes looking deep into the soar, the, of it. And it really just sort of makes them stop looking at it. And that's really all you got to do with the image in your social media job, replace the stock with the reality and get people to stop and sort of drink in the photo. So once you've done that, you've made them stop.

You've used an interesting photo. Maybe you've got it from your branding team, your marketing team, or even if you've just gone into the office and took a photo. How can you convince people to actually engage with your advertisement? Because. If you look here less than half percent of people on Facebook would ever click a job, this is the most important thing, the most important part of your offer.

Really this is about, as I said, being like big brands making offers, which got people clicking. So again, I want this to be really actionable. So if you're taking notes, split this into four parts, and that will be calling out your ideal candidates, pinpoints, which they would currently name the clear reason for taking the option.

Let them know why the new rule will be of direct benefit to their lives. Highlight the urgency of taking action. So I'm going to show you an example of a job ad for nurses. ICU nurses. In Toronto. And we actually managed to hire two nurses for three and a half thousand dollars using this ad, using this offer which see if the client paid 30,000 and what they would have paid staffing for.

So here's this $30,000 job. And I'm going to explain that if you look in the second paragraph, you can see, you know, we even had a mistake in the punctuation. We didn't put a question mark after the nurse even though it still performed really well. That's because we made a direct offer to our ideal candidates.

Talk through this. That's how it will look on how this is structured and how this was built. You can see in the first line, we stand off with calling out the audience. So again, if you want people to stop scrolling so much, you have to communicate directly with them. If you put in the first line of your advertisement, their location and their job title, it's gonna trigger something in their brand compared to, if you just say we're hiring.

So it says, Hey Toronto, I see nurses whenever we just sorta, yeah. Check, check off each of these, we're going to call them like their pinpoint next. So the way you do this is you talk to your current employees. You talk to your current candidates and you talk amongst yourselves as recruiters. And you say what the ideal candidates our employees dislike about either their current job or their previous job.

So with this hospital, it was ICU nurses having to do administration. So that's the pinpoint. We have identified that they don't like doing administration. They want to focus on caring for. The sickest of the sick when they need the nurses the most. So that's what we did. We called it the pinpoints they experienced in their current job.

We drastically reduced the album. So again, think about it, think about what difficulties your ideal candidates are facing, and then employ that in our advertisement. Next, you want to name the clear reasons for taking option and then kind of let them know how it will be of direct benefit. So you can see here, we put sort of three little texts and the main reasons they would get an education bursary and to get the opportunity to do less admin and follow their calling.

And then they could experience working in a digital age. So really kind of drilling home. The benefits of taking action is going to make someone do it. It's much better than talking about yourself, saying we're a world-leading hospital, and have this many patients spending beds. People don't care about that so much.

They care about how the ad is going to change their lives and their career. So if you say we're a world-leading hospital, what's that going to do for me? We could have said , we're a technological hospital. We've got an advanced theater. We did bring that in. We say we have a digital command center, but the benefit of that to you is informing your decisions better using hospital idea.

So make it all about the benefits to the candidate. Really focus on them instead of yourself. Final one I want to point out is the urgency aspect. So a lot of major Browns will do this as well, say limited to a mine or a limited time only. And even if you can hire anyone you gathered, there's always going to be a limit to the amount you can process.

So I would encourage you to say no where, either we're seeking one person, two people, five people for this rule, a soup that people take action on, have a bit of urgency there. So that's an offer. That's an example of an offer. If you would like after this webinar. Create something a bit like this.

Even you can do it on a job board or on social media and then send it to me. Chambers on LinkedIn on our that, you know what I think about it, again, review this slide. So here's the four points about making an offer and take massive action, put something out there, see how it goes. The final point I want to make.

So we had our image, which makes them stop. We have our offer, which makes them want to take action. Now we need to provide an accessible way for them to take the next step. So don't ask for a resume and don't send them directly to the homepage of a career site where they need to search for a rule.

That's very difficult to track. There's several ways you can play this. So instead of actually putting on your Joe about applying, you could say click, learn more to find out if this is a good match for you. Or fix our message to find out how much actually you can earn. What this does is this gets more people to engage with your ad.

So Facebook will know that people enjoy engaging with. We're going to promote that above. Say the competitors are, who only get people click and who won't they apply. I always recommend putting a bit of automation screening in between the click on the application. So you can use a landing page or a chat bot, like Talkpush to ensure only qualified people get through.

But just because social media sites are built on a paid advertising model, they always promote the outlets, which get the most interest and engagement from the users of the site. So it's really useful to trial these different calls to action, to see which one your convenience respond best to.

Just to sum up, I'd love to answer any questions you have at the end. There are three kind of main points that you want to follow here in advertising on social media. So, number one is you want to stop people scrolling about 300 Feed a day by using a real life image. Then you want to convince them to engage with the ad with a relevant offer, which speaks to their deepest desires and highlights the benefits of why you can solve their problems.

And then number three, you want to provide an accessible way for them to exchange more information, stad a conversation with you. So I hope this helped sell me a message on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, I have this, my name, this is my LinkedIn COVID or whatever.

Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Those are great advices. I really appreciate it. And like you said, any questions, please feel free to put it on the shack and we're going to go over at the end of the webinar, answering those questions as well. So we do have our next speaker which is David Lim.

Let's really have you. Thank you so much, Navy. He is performance marketing lead for think trumps was gonna, who's going to talk now and give us some great advice, some to just thank you so much, David. Awesome. Thanks, Pablo. So hi everyone. My name is David and I am the founder of ThinkCrumbs.

We are a performance marketing agency, essentially. We utilize all types of paid advertising across the board in all of them. And one of them is also in, in the, in the jobs industry. So today I actually wanted to go over some action steps that you guys can take immediately to actually elevate the processes that you already do at the moment.

So let me just share my screen.

Awesome. All right. So first things first, what I actually wanted to go over was how we communicate with our existing audience, right? Today, I actually want to go about controlling the narrative. And it's more on optimizing your ad strategies for your ideal customer experience. And when I say customer for you, for some of the people we have today, it may be candidates that you are ideal candidates that you are looking to hire, or it can even be customers that you want to get.

So these fundamentals can be essentially used across. So are we communicating the right way, the talent in the context of actually hiring and talent acquisition, we want to make sure that we fully understand who we're speaking to. Right. So let's say we go into more specific, such as are, do we know how we should be speaking to people based on their position based on their technical requirements or be based on certain talent personas the way I would speak to somebody on the rank and file level versus somebody I'm speaking to at the C level or managerial level is definitely different.

They both have different aspirations. They both have things they are both comfortable with and they both have different drivers of motivation. So going back to what Adam was actually saying before in hand and how we draft up your actual ad in terms of copy you want to make sure you first understand how you can actually speak better or communicate better through your talent personas.

This way you have a higher chance of actually stopping them, but from the very onset of advertising, right? You don't want to be like every other market out there just pushing out something, you know, I'm applying now just to go to a job that ends up in the career page. So those things, every other person, every other company will be doing.

So how you can essentially stand out is from looking at and scenario working backwards, right? So based on your customer personas, based on your higher purpose thousand personas you want to make sure to understand what they really want. And what their fears, their motivations are and utilize those data points to actually improve the copy.

A fair advertisement. So that's the first part, right? So let's say we already understand who we're speaking to. We already understand who, how we need to speak to these individuals. The next up is we have to now understand how to utilize the existing platforms. Right. When I say existing platforms, this is for the example of Facebook.

So let's talk about your ad objectives. Now, for most of you out there who have already done advertising that say on Facebook you're probably know that Facebook offers you different types of ad objectives. Now why it's important to actually look at this in the first place. Number one it will heavily affect the cost of advertising that you do for your business.

And again, this isn't just for hiring. It's also for other industries as well. Now how it works essentially is that you have a little bit of machine learning involved in advertising which is why myself as a performance marketer, we always make sure to take a look at the data. So let's get into it.

From the leftmost side of my screen you'll notice that it says brand awareness or reach. Facebook offers an ad ad objective called brand awareness or reach, right? So with brand awareness and reach the you're telling Facebook, I actually want to find more people or just reach more people regardless of the quality of the audience, or regardless of the quality of who you're speaking to the, the ad will help you find more people how you can actually augment this type of advertising is of course you do more detailed targeting, but overall brand awareness and reach objective will help you find more people.

Now I do suggest to use the brand awareness or reach if you're at the scale, if you're a bigger company and really want to reach out to a massive scale, right? Not just something that's hyperlocalized or something that's focused on on just one city. Although it is a possibility the brand awareness and reach objective is really for a massive scaling in terms of getting people aware in terms of brand recall people are aware of your brand in general.

The example that I actually placed here is by McDonald's. So McDonald's was hiring, not just a rank and file level but more on at the managerial level, right? They were hiring restaurant managers. So what they did is that they push out this ad towards here towards a local group, a local asset.

And the goal of it is really to make sure people are aware that they are hiring as a map for managers now that's one, this very specific case scenario when you're using brand awareness. Where you want to just reach more people. if you're a bigger company again, and your budgets maybe not really infinite.

But then in the higher average level, then you may want to explore this type of objective because the cost of actually reaching the certain users is cheaper, essentially overall. Now the next ad objective in the middle is what I call a page post engagement or BPE as we call it now.

The page post engagement ad objective I believe is much more specific in terms of campaign oriented push. The ad I did place here is from VSI via the call center. And what they did is they grabbed a group of individuals from their company and they place a credit in the middle, right.

Middle of the room. And in the each side of the curtain, You have two individuals, right? One individual who is an actual call center employee. And one, who's probably just a random bystander. And what they did was is that they asked the bank standard to give their opinion of what they think about call center employees.

And, you know, the, mostly the opinions were kind of harsh. Call center employees are barbaric. They're not educated. So on the other side of the curve, then you have the call center employee just listening to all this. And what this triggers essentially in terms of advertising is emotion where I would use the page post engagement ad on Facebook is if you are.

Very much running our campaign level specific type of execution where in it's for a limited time only I would say probably around the three to six month period, if you're running a very campaign specific, you know, you've got a production company, you made a very engaging video and you want to push it to a good degree.

Then you may want to explore the page upon page posts and location. So how is it different from the brand awareness part? So in terms of actual optimization and machine learning the page post engagement gets people through their app, more to your certain posts. Okay. It's very different from getting people aware about your brand versus getting people aware of the type of campaign you are running at the moment, you know?

So a brand awareness type of campaign, you can probably run for a longer period of time for a page post engagement campaign. If you're doing a very campaign specific objectives, then this is something that you want to do as well. Now onwards the third type of objective. And this is something that I believe more businesses are used to doing.

It's more of a direct response type of marketing, which is direct and messenger or direct a messenger essentially means that you are optimizing your advertising to get people to message you on Facebook, right? As more specifically the messenger platform. And what this does is that the type of creative you can essentially use is more focused in terms of the benefits you are giving to your talent personas.

And in my example here, if the salary is something that's very important to the people you're speaking to, then I see no problem why we cannot highlight the salary at the first onset of the ad itself, meaning the creative. So that's something that we can definitely do. Now, the thing about this is that you can be smad about it, right?

So if let's say you are a multi hub type of business right now, and you're across the board, dealing with different types of languages, different types of people. So we can do hyper localized targeting that matches up with your advertising as well and direct messenger this way, it becomes more personal as well.

And you have the ability to change the creative as you please. So that way you have a higher probability of actually getting people to respond to your ad. At the end of the day what I'm trying to say is we just have to make sure to take a look at all the different types of optimizations we are doing, right.

Because if we are certain and if we're not really sure how each of these objectives have played for us, then there's really no benchmark. But then as we move forward, as we do a lot of more AB testing you'll be able to find out which one works for you guys better. Now. One very important thing to note is that the goal of an ad is to get a click.

The goal of an ad is not to get a sale. It's not to get somebody hired immediately. The main goal of an ad is to get a click. It's a different way of saying the main goal of an ad is to sell the next. Right. So that's what I want to talk about as well. So the next step is actually what happens in your, we have a couple of use cases that can happen, right?

So for example, On the left side of my screen. You'll see that. Okay. We have an ad. All right. It's a more direct response. Creative. Let's say rather when it's creative, we're looking for you. And what happens is that if I click on it, it might bring me to a landing page. Right? So that's use case number one.

When somebody clicks on the ad. You can choose to bring them to a landing page. But something here that I see a lot of marketers and the businesses don't do as well, is that sometimes their landing page isn't conversion focus as we call it. So a conversion focused landing page is something where in, it's not just a big deal, some texts and an apply now button, right?

It's not just that. Every other page looks like that. And we don't want to be that a conversion focused landing page in the context of hiring with include maybe a campaign video that I showed you earlier, a main power statement that you could actually implement on the page highlight the pains, benefits, and pain points of the thousand persona of your customers, or ideal hires that you're actually talking to this way.

When somebody goes through the actual landing page, you will you, there's a, there's a conversation, right? I see it as relationship building. And as we go through the slides later on, you'll see why, how this can add up to your entire ecosystem. But the general idea is we don't want to just waste your budget to bring your hires and bring traffic to a landing page that isn't conversion focused to begin with.

Otherwise you might see potentially 50 to even a hundred percent increase in our advertising. If you're just bringing them to a landing page that is not conversion focus. Right? Of course there will always be opt-ins and calls to actions on the landing page. It's just a matter of how we lay it out.

How we communicate in terms of copywriting and making sure that we really know who we're speaking to now. The good thing about this is that you can actually automate the landing page as well with other solutions, right? Maybe you want to add in a scheduling system, maybe you want to add in a qualification questionnaire or maybe some third-party solutions.

The cool thing about this is maybe you can even add a feedback loop, right? Where in the landing page essentially can qualify the audience before they actually get to you and be considered as a lead cause. If you're doing really massive hiring and you're reaching out to a huge number of people, you don't want to spend every waking second and every waking minute of your day, just trying to qualify these individuals.

What you want to do is make sure that you also have a system in place where it automates that, that part. And eventually all you have to do is make sure that the final interviews, or probably just making sure that this really is a person that you want. Right. So definitely this is something that doctors can do.

I do believe in learning, you can build very conversion focused landing pages. On top of Bush. Now the general idea of a landing page is to qualify and convert, right. Again, if we think about it, the fundamentals are the goal of every step right. Prior to actually getting the lead is to sell the next step.

The goal of an ad is to sell the next step, which is to get them to visit the landing page. And the goal of the landing page is to sell the next step, which essentially is get them to opt in. Now again, this is where we have to make sure it's conversion focused, but at the end of the day, it's the qualification and conversion.

Now, if this is something that you guys aren't doing, this is definitely I do encourage you guys to explore how to improve or let's say make your landing page a little bit more conversions. So let's go to use case number two. Now for use case number one, we're talking about landing pages, but for use case number two, and this is what I believe you guys do a lot of as well is instead of leading them to a landing page, you lead them straight to messenger.

So. How that works is the main benefit of a direct messenger campaign is that somebody there's a need to leave Facebook to actually build a relationship. Right. What happens is if I click on the ad it probably leads me directly to messenger probably. It's an iframe inbuilt type of pop-up and I'll have the messenger chat right there, similar to what you see on my screen.

Now the general idea is the same. The goal of the messenger is to always qualify and convert. And I do believe this is something that top push does very, very well. Where in if you're running. A response type of marketing, right. And you know, the benefits and features that you want to highlight. Based on the pain points we know of your talent personas, then there's a high risk more there's a likely chance at that.

Your ideal personas or ideal hires will actually click through the ad. And we have a metric in marketing, it's called a click through rate, or as we call it a CPR which is the percentage of people who click through after seeing an ad, right. Essentially doing everything that was just we spoke about over this webinar will help you improve your CPR.

If you're spending a lot of money and you notice that your CTR is looking kind of monotonous, then it might be a good thing to actually take a look at improving your creativity. But then let's say you do realize that you are getting a lot of traffic, but not getting leads. Then you might consider improving your landing page or improving the copy on how your messenger bot the setup.

Essentially messenger can do that all for you, right? It's just a matter of putting up the system making it a little bit more automated messenger can also qualify and convert all the way to the part where they can schedule a meeting for you. I've tried it myself. I've seen the capabilities and it's something that I do encourage a lot of talent acquisition departments to utilize.

It'll make the process a lot easier. And at the end of the day you're not left with people who you don't want to hire. Right? You're left with people who are prequalified and can provide you with value very immediately. So those are the main two use cases that can happen.

Once you get a click, right? You can either bring them to a landing page or bring him to the messenger button. But the idea is the same: the landing page or the messenger bot qualify and convert the ad to make sure you get the clicks. So what's next? Right? So we know all of these things, we know how to run an ad.

We probably set up the landing page and have probably taken a look at which one works in general in terms of creatives. But then I actually wanted to take this opportunity to go into a deeper level of understanding. I myself, I am very data oriented and very much focused on the numbers.

And something that I'd like to speak to you guys about as well. Let's go into analytics and tracking. Right. You don't know what you don't know. If you're blind in terms of the certain data points or you are unaware of certain data points that could have provided you value, then that means there might be a chance that you're making decisions that aren't very data driven, right?

If you're making decisions based on feeling and based on opinion without any data, then how can we be so sure that what's effective or what's ineffective? So that's why it's very much important to go into the deeper level which is the numbers, right? So I'll make it very simple if you guys don't know, Facebook has something that we call a Facebook pixel. Now a Facebook pixel is essentially a piece of code. And again, this is totally free that Facebook offers for everybody, but you can install it on your own website, a landing page or whatnot now. And on the right side of it, you'll see a Google analytics or Google tag manager.

Now Google analytics functions, same way. It's a piece of code that you can install on your website. It can solve on your landing page that can provide you with a wealth of data for you to actually determine if what you are doing is effective or not. So let me go through. Some of the data points that you can actually track.

Number one with the Facebook pixel, you can actually track website visits. Now website visits is a very surface level data point that that doesn't really provide so much value other than how much traffic is going through your website right now, what you can actually, the good thing about this is that you can actually track how many people are visiting, which page off your certain way of your website, right?

So let's say you have a career page and you have probably a dozen 50, a hundred career landing pages that you have. You know, and you can easily merchandise all of these pages on your website almost immediately. And what you want to do is use the Facebook pixel. You want to make sure you are able to track how many people are visiting which part of your website.

And with the Facebook pixel as well, you can track your form submissions, right? So for every person who actually visits a certain page, let's say a certain career page, a certain thing, a job page, how many of them are actually clicking on submit form or actually clicking on your call to action button.

Right. And why is it important to track this? If you have if in your IC do believe that you have con conversion focused landing page, and let's say you have a thousand people going to this certain page, 2000 people going to this certain page, but then your form submissions are below a 1% meaning only 0.5% of the people visiting this page actually design the site to actually apply.

Then there might be two things that could be the problem there. Number one, you're sending the wrong traffic or number two, your landing page is not as conversion focused as you expected. Meaning you can take a look at adjusting the copy or. Adjusting the layout a little bit, right? So that's a few things that you can get from this data point.

And of course you can track link clicks, link clicks is more of a top funnel or an awareness type of a data point where, and you want to make sure that you want to see how many people are actually clicking through your ad. Similar to how Adam was speaking about creating the perfect copy, not using stock photos, making sure that it's very real.

Just, just drill down into reality, then you want to make sure if the actual creatives you are using are effective or not now going back to it. For myself, if you guys are using, let's say stock photos or more photos that are more organic either way, whatever it may be, you want to take a look at how much link clicks you are getting to properly evaluate.

If it really is, if your hypothesis of this one will work better than the other really is true. Because if you, if let's say if we're running ads and we don't have any visibility on them, our assumption is that probably one way work better than the other, but we always want to make sure to let the data do the talking and not just our feelings, our opinions do the talking, right?

So this is where the link clicks. This is where the click-through rates will come in. Another data point that we want to make sure to take a look at is page scrolls. A lot of people stay away from long landing pages, right? Or long form landing pages wherein you have a bunch of copies, a bunch of calls to actions, make it a little bit longer than the usual landing page.

For, for myself, I do believe that I wouldn't shy away from long form landing pages. There is a lot of value to long from landing pages. It's just a matter of making sure that the copy you do implement on these pages are very much the right copy. And you're speaking to the right audience.

So why is this data point important? And to give you an example, if you have a law firm landing page, somebody who actually goes through the page, let's say 50% of the page versus somebody who goes through 75% of the page. I think it is a valid hypothesis to assume that somebody who scrolls through 75% of the page is more likely to be more interested in the job that they are applying for or the action they are to take.

So those are definitely some things that you guys have to consider now. Again, I don't want to take too much time on this, so let's move on to the Google analytics site now for the Google analytics side this is more on checking your bounce rate, right? So to give some context for bounce rate is essentially how many people clicked on your ad and go to the page, but don't end up taking another.

Right. So this is the percentage of people who essentially end up not going through to another page or people who exited the page immediately. Right? So that's what the bounce rate is. If you're bouncing this probably around 60 to 80%, then that's a pretty high average. And you want to make sure you bring that down to around 50, 40%.

What this means is that you were essentially trying to make sure that our page is more engaging. And we elevate the experience of the customer of the client, of your ideal hire as they go through your page. Another metric you do want to take a look at is tracking the time spent on the pages, right?

How long are people actually spending on your pages? If they sculpted the pages, if around, if they scroll through your page 75%, but they are spending only around 10 seconds on the page. That means they just did a couple of swipes and then left. So merging these two data points will help you understand who it is, who it really is.

You're trying to look for it. And if this individual already exists in your entire ecosystem, right. Because maybe if we're in our, if we aren't really tracking all of these things, then how do we know that they don't already exist? And this is something that's very important moving forward.

Tracking the time spent on pages is a good indicator of how well you have built your landing page or probably some sort of website. It can either be a landing page website, whatever it may be. Right. And what Google analytics can do moving onto the next data point is it can also help you track the top pages being visited on your website.

Right? So this goes back to my earlier comment about if you have a career site, that's it. And I really have nothing against career sites. It's just a matter of if it's conversion focused or not. If you have a career site, we'll probably. Then 50 separate individual career pages and each one with their own URLs, each one with their own traffic.

You want to take a look at which one of your pages are being visited the most, right? Which one of these pages have the highest amount of traffic, which one of those have the least amount of traffic and why? Right. Is it because the copy is different? Is it because we're pushing out ads to different pages?

Is it because if we push ads or the homepage we merchandise these pages more than the others. So it's essentially an ecosystem, right? You want to think about it that way. Where in you have multiple things working hand in hand at the same time, and it's never, it's never just, you know, one as to what there's always moving components of your whole ecosystem.

So let me go through some of the action steps that you can actually take immediately. Once you understand what the data is pointing out. So with Facebook pixel, once, you know, everything that I just spoke about, you'll be able to understand which jobs need boosting based on prioritization. So if you have 15, 20 career sites career pages each with varying amounts of traffic and you notice that there are some pages that are not getting enough traffic, and assuming that you have a limited ad spend, you want to think about it very strategically where any move your advertising budget towards careers that are not getting enough organic reach or not getting enough priority.

So this way you can essentially match your, your, your pipeline in terms of your, your talent acquisition. And what happens here is, again, this does not only apply to the industry of hiring and can apply to anything as these are the fundamentals. Now. The next question is, how can you actually leverage more on machine learning now with Facebook pixel?

As we know, all know there's an algorithm, there's machine learning through it, whatever it may be. How you can actually leverage it is going back to when I first spoke about your different ad objectives, right? Facebook will offer you a ton of ad objective objectives that you can choose from.

And there really is no one answer to what works for you. I do believe you need to go through a couple of AB testing which is why you want to do a lot of different campaigns. Take a look at which one works and based on what, what works, then we put more of your budget into it, right? It's really more on the cost effectiveness point of the scenario.

At the end of the day, you want to make sure that you're getting the biggest impact with the smallest amount of investment. So that's what you can get. Now knowing what the data points are in Google and the Mythics, here's some things that you can actually learn which pages are getting visibility organically, and which ones are burned.

And again, this is a matter of merchandising it on your site or for lack of a better term organizing the layout on your site map or your website. Right? So if you notice that some of the jobs or some of the pages are not getting enough views organically, then you might as well shift out the way the site is positioned or where the actual URLs and the links are to the site, right?

And overall once, you know, all of these data points you'll be able to understand which pages have a low rate of conversion. And for everybody's context, a conversion rate essentially means how many people go to the website and how many upper, what percentage of those people actually decide to go to the next step or in this case, actually perform an action that you, that you want which is to click on the opt-in, but then submit the form, whatever it may be the higher your conversion rates, then the better it is that your, your, your overall ecosystem is working.

The bet your, the money that you spend on Facebook is working harder for you. The lower your conversion rate. That means the money that you spent essentially might be the wrong audience, or it might be an audience with potential, but it's not just there yet. So there's a lot of back and forth and type of in terms of analyzing this data that you need to do.

But Overall, what I really wanted to share with you guys is the power of data. And I think the gap nowadays in terms of advertising is we don't appreciate this data enough as we don't know what actionable steps we can get from it. But really with the power of data, you can do almost anything.

Right. So the next question is, are you actually missing out on your low hanging fruits, right? Are there already some ideal customers on your website, on your messenger bot that are already your ideal hires, but then just haven't opted in yet. Just haven't taken the next step. Just haven't taken action.

So this is where retargeting comes in. So retargeting is a term for advertising. We're following people based on the actions they've taken. Right. So, I'll go through this very quickly. On Facebook. If you remember early on in my slides, I did present a video. That's probably around a minute, six minutes long.

Now, if you have a very engaging video, that's a little bit in long format videos, more than one minute, more than three minutes. And you have a varying amount of individuals who watch the videos in different types of duration, meaning you have people who watch for 10 seconds. You have people who actually watch it for 30 seconds, you have people who watch it for the overall.

Now with the data points that I have explained earlier, you can actually track how many people are watching a bigger percentage of the video. Right? So what does that mean? I do believe it's safe to assume that the people who watch your video longer are people who are more engaged with your brand, people who are more willing to explore our relationship with your brand and people who are more willing to consider taking the next step, which in this case, as an ad is actually clicking, right?

So what you want to do here is to take a look at people who are making these high-level events, but not but haven't clicked yet, right? So we're taking a look at people who have watched your video, 75%, 100%, maybe 30 seconds of the video, but haven't actually gone to the next step, which is visit your landing page, visit your bot or whatever it may be.

A lot of people ask me why this happens? And the answer is very simple. As you go through a person's daily life, there's a lot of things that can distract them from their feed. Maybe they need to go to the grocery store. Maybe they need to go do an errand. Maybe they just had to go to the restroom, whatever it may be.

When a customer stops their journey at any point in time, as they scroll through their feed then we want to make sure we hook that customer back into the customer journey. And that's what this is essentially what we call it. Customer journey mapping, where you are making sure, you know, each touch point of your customer as they go through your whole hiring process and make sure there are no offs.

And if there are ups, we make sure to hook them. And another example of this would be retargeting or based on message responses, right? So let's say you have people who have opted in your messenger bot and you have people who are ready to schedule an interview. But they just didn't click on that call to action button.

So what happens here is that two things, number one, you can do automated follow-ups. This is something that talks to push can do as well. Automated follow ups are wherein you can detect when a customer has stopped, actually interacting with the bot and send them a message, right? And this is all automated or in terms of advertising.

If you're going to use paid media to actually do this, then you want to retarget people who actually message you within a period of time. If you're doing very fast scaling in terms of massive hiring on the daily level. And you're spending maybe around more than $500 and more than a thousand dollars every day.

At some point what you want to do is take a look at your, your time durations, right? You want to retarget people who have not gone to the next step, let's say within one to three days and within the past time. So this means that people. Who have not opted in or who have not done the next step within the seven day, 14 day period.

I'm not really people you're actually looking for because you want people who are more engaged. You want high level hires. You want people who can give you the most value and people who show you that kind of engagement, who show you that kind of interest at this phase already at the beginning.

These are people you may actually want to consider retargeting because they can provide you and they have the behavior of what is indication to something that's worthwhile exploring. So that really is retargeting based on message response. And now we move onto the next type of retargeting, right? To find out if you're you do have these low hanging fruits in your website.

This is where I think we can get very creative which is based on website visits. And I'll give you a quick example. Let's say I'm afraid of five job pages on my website. And there are a mix of rank and file to C level to managerial level, whatever it may be. Right. And we know how much traffic is going to each of the pages.

We know the bounce rate. We know the page scrolls, we know all the data points, but then. It looks like that. With pages with high traffic don't actually end up with a lot of leads. So what does this mean? Again? It might be something because their customer journey must stop. Maybe they got distracted at one point, but then what happens here is that you can actually read, target or follow these people who have visited specific pages on your website.

And we can define this by URL. So based on your website company ABC forward slash job title, right? So the specific syntax of each URL, you can actually track how many people and retarget people based on the specific URL they are visiting based on the syntax of your URL. So although again, this is very surface level in terms of what you can explore in terms of our retargeting, your website visits.

There are a whole lot of things you can go about in terms of retargeting, but these are, these are the main key action steps that you guys can already take to make sure that you are tracking all of these data points. And you're actually following up with your high level leads and leads who indicate the high-level value for your business, right?

Depending on what they may do, essentially I'd suggest to let the data work for you. You will always have assumed your actual behavior, and you want to always adjust and optimize.

What do you think will happen will not always be the thing that happens and you always want to adapt to it. That's essentially what I want to convey overall. It always will take a village to make sure that your marketing is an ecosystem. I won't go through this. But I do have an example of how the ecosystem will look like we're in, you have your organic and paid traffic going through your pages.

And you can request information from your customers all the way to the third part, which is qualifying a lead all the way to scheduling an interview.

Thank you. That's great. I hope everybody enjoyed this. I had a good time and enjoyed this webinar. And thank you so much. Thank you, David. Take you out. Thank you Max with time and see you next time.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I have the honor and privilege of hosting the legendary Greg Savage, who is a principal at the savage truth, a great source of industry commentary on the recruitment and staffing world. Welcome to the show, Greg.

Greg: Thank you Max. It is a pleasure to be here and I think you may have gone a bit big with the word legendary but fine let's all say it then why not.

Max: I was told it was legendary when I came down under. I don't know if your brand recognition is as powerful and in all timezones but certainly, in my timezone, it applies.

Greg: Well I mean I don't know about brand recognition or anything like that but prior to COVID I used to go to a lot of speaking tours around the world and if you watch the calendar of those speaking to us it always seems to coincide very fortunately with international rugby matches and football matches. But, I can turn up in Manchester or Singapore or Cape Town and we will get three or four hundred recruiters turning up and it's actually a story I tell about brands, because at the end of the day. I'm actually just an aging unemployed extra crud art, and yet I can go to most cities in the world, people will turn up the list, and pay money, still astonishing.

Max: Amazing. Well done. I must say. I read your bio you come from Cape Town, right?

Greg: Obviously yes.

Max: Yes, I made my way to Cape Town or Joburg three years ago to the future of talent event, and it was on my bio I had San Francisco on it, and that opened the doors to the front stage for me and there was an international cache to bring in CEO from an international destination and I was too happy to latch on that. But, yeah, I guess today, the borders are down, the frontiers are down. Everybody can build their brands at the global level because even the advantage of being able to afford a plane ticket isn't an advantage anymore, so there's no more barriers to entry.

Greg: That's true. The only barrier to entry into building a brand is that it's very very hard work. And you've got to have a few things in your kit bag including something useful to say, an ability to say in an interesting way and I think then. And if you're consistent and long term. People often say to me, "Well, you're lucky Greg you've got this brand". Well, I've been blogging every week for 15 years mate, 15 years, and videos and Twitter and LinkedIn. So, it is hard work. But the rewards. I've tried to teach my recruitment companies that I advise them there are, and recruiters, that there are devilish rewards to amplify your brand. As long as your inr real life brand is good, you can amplify it online, you can't finish it, long term anyway because people will blame you and call you out. If you're not if you're not authentic.

Max: So authenticity, okay prerequisite. How about having something interesting to say, some people will, maybe, of course, most people don't have your experience or humbly I may say, my experience. I'm on the wrong side of that equation right and I've got 20 plus years of work experience myself, so for those in their 20s and 30s, the imposter syndrome must feel so overwhelming. How do you have the balls to pardon my expression. Well it’s my show, so I'll pardon, to go out and start to brand yourself as a thought leader. Was there a special moment in your career where you thought okay now I can start to take the front stage, or how did this moment of revelation come to you?

Greg: Well, I'm not a great example but I've got some good, I mean that's a great question you asked about authenticity and imposter syndrome, and have I got something to say. Prior to building an online brand I've been in this so long I spent many many years standing on stages at conferences and I really had a bit of kudos around having something to say or maybe that kudos was in my mind, but I thought it had something to say and I had a lot of experience, even when the internet started, so it was a little bit easier for me, but let's come to your point, two little anecdotes. I often find myself walking down the street and a recruiter will stop me, someone I don't even know, and say, 'Hey, I like your blog' and then I go, 'Oh, that's great. And then they say, 'I don't actually agree with you. But what I like about it is, I know what's your point of view, and I love the fact that you tell it the way you see it and that gets me thinking, so you don't have to always try and be I’m not suggesting you be controversial or rude or anything like that. But people value authenticity, they value a point of view. That's the first thing. The second story is about having that same conversation that you raised about. Do you have the balls to do it, etc. With a young recruiter, well she's an experienced woman with a couple of years experience as a recruiter and I was talking to her about her brand and she said, Greg, I've got nothing to say, who would want to listen to me? And I say, well tell me this, what's the biggest frustration you've got with your clients right now and she said, they're taking too long to make decisions. They say they are desperate for talent and then they drag.

Max: Sorry Greg, your mic is off.

Greg: Oh! I don't know why.

Max: You're back now.

Greg: Just when I'm telling a great story. I don't know if you're going to cut this or whether you want me, where should I start again with that one?

Max: Yeah, we can cut this off, for sure. So Greg you were saying this lady was giving you an anecdote, you had an anecdote about a lady who is saying.

Greg: The short version was that she believed she had nothing to say. And I asked her what her biggest bugbear was with a client she said was taking too slow to make decisions and I said, that is an insult. That's the story, just write two paragraphs, it was a LinkedIn post she wanted to write. She wrote a couple of paragraphs about how while she encourages her clients to be fairer, we've got to move the process, otherwise, we lose the best candidates which is true. And it got traction and people commented and I said that's what we did, you do have insights, and my message to a lot of recruiters is you think you don't, but actually you're in the market 365 days of the year, you're talking to candidates, every day. You've got a view. You've got a narrative, you've got a point of view that's valuable. And that's what I comment about. I think too many people on social media are trying to be funny, trying to be provocative. I don't think that's the way to go. I think you've got to be adding value, which reflects on your expertise so that I think is how we got to build a brand in a professional field.

Max: There is something about a great family name Mr. Savage and you wrote that one for a long time. I'm just reading the Elton John biography right now. He came up with that name because he thought he had a name that didn't work well to be a rock star. But I guess, for me, that's your brand, your brand is savage, your blog is the savage truth, and it just is very punchy, it's very direct.

Greg: I didn't create my name like Elton John. My name was Reggie Duag, my name was Greg Savage from the very beginning. And I don't think my personality was formed around my name. I think it's just good. If you've got a name like that people are going to ask questions about it and make jokes about it. As I've encouraged my children to do is to embrace it because it's memorable. And in the case of the blog it just seems like the obvious thing right to the savage Andrews I like to speak directly and that's what people like so.

Max: I was thinking about what you said for these recruiters who tried to be funny, and instead of trying to be truthful sometimes or direct. I suppose the industry would tend to attract people who are pleasers, who want to be popular, who don't want to make enemies, as opposed to, maybe truth-tellers or people who embrace a more ideological kind of debate, who are willing to take one side of the debate that naturally the industry we kind of attract people who are matchmakers, if you will. So maybe that's why the industry sometimes lacks a little bit of honesty because people are just too afraid to accept their clients.

Greg: Well I think it's a good point and I don't believe that we want recruiters as I mentioned, to try and be provocative, or try and be controversial, or to be profane, or to push the boundaries in that way I don't think that's what I'm saying and I don't even advise. I started blogging when I was running my recruitment company. I was actually working for Quint at the time, which was American digital marketing as an international CEO, and then out of that we started, we did a management buyout and I was running my own company fiber and we had to build that brand, this was in about 2010. We had to build that brand without any money because it was a startup and we went to eight countries. So we didn't use what was at that stage the beginnings of social media almost and was very successful and at that point, I was much more careful about the things that I would say because I was trying to build a recruitment business. I am still very careful about the things that I say, but I'm not that concerned if someone doesn't agree with it. I think that a recruiter doesn't have to be provocative. What that secret is that most people go on social media Max, with the mindset, what can I get from it, which I understand, what can I get jobs, fame. You actually want to go on with the mindset, what can I give. Generosity is the fundamental plank upon which a social media brand is built. And I spent hours preparing once every week, hours with videos, hours answering questions. And yes, there is something in it for me, as I've explained, but you give to get and give insights, connecting people, sharing information with people. That's how you build a brand, and I don't think you are in fact still being a people pleaser by doing that is the avenue you want to look at it from. I'm really referring to people posting pictures of cats and trying to compare them to a recruiter’s license. I mean, for Christ’s sake I am not interested in it. This is bullshit.

Max: Yeah gimmicky stuff. On LinkedIn, if anytime I see something with more than 5000 likes. You know, alarm bells go off. This is clickbait stuff and it pisses me off personally. There's a lot of that going on. Great. Well, I hope it's not like that. There are a lot of thought leaders quote-unquote thought leaders in the industry, and we don't want to encourage every single recruiter out there to do that either. Of course, you can be a listener you don't all have to grab a mic, like I did, but for me I get great joy out of talking to people like you Greg and everybody else who comes on my show, and it's an opportunity for me to travel without traveling in a year when I've been locked in. This year has been a transition in the recruitment industry, which used to be a lot of in person meetings and a lot of building relationships, whether you're doing executive level hiring or you're talking to your customers, most of that is gone now. So, I've read an article in the Harvard Business Review and then said that the new leaders of the post COVID world are more introspective are more introverts are better at writing and more analytical. So, kind of, not the traditional qualities we would imagine from your prototypical recruiter. Would you agree with that assessment and what do you think are some of the qualities that are necessary in 2021 for recruits to thrive?

Greg: I think there's a natural tendency to view leadership through the prism of where we are right now. And you got to understand that we all have to understand that we're on a journey when COVID started. People were saying to me after a month or two, how far are we through it, and well a blog on it actually and I'd say like I don't know but I reckon we're on a marathon and a marathon is 42 kilometers and if you want me to tell you my feeling is we're on a kilometer five, everyone was shocked. In this country, we have a state New South Wales 10 million people, we've had zero cases of COVID for 23 days straight, there is no one in the state with COVID but one human being. There might be one locked in quarantine when coming from overseas. So we're having meetings I'm in my client's office today. I've had a meeting all morning where we can go see people.

Max: Right.

Greg: So, my point is precisely that Harvard Business Review that said that no I don't agree with that. I actually think that a good leader right now in my city, for example, is actually coaching and mentoring people to get back out in front of people. Here's the irony. The differentiated recruitment down now is those people who do go and engage, because it can be on zoom, can be on the telephone, can hardly be by email but it's better face to face, not everybody but we can do that. And so leadership, to my mind, is, if you want me to sum it up, leadership coming out of post-COVID is a cocktail, a blend of empathy mixed with accountability. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about in the middle of COVID one of my clients said to his staff. They're all at home, they're all working from home was difficult. He just said my message to you all is to do your best. And I took him to the task, I said what kind of leadership is that it's like saying to someone who's about to run out in the Rugby World Cup final a plan, they might bite you and do your best. I mean, for god sake he's gonna do his best, we are all doing their best. What we needed was greater clarity around what in this environment, what does this look like, what should I achieve by tonight. And that may mean different things from pre COVID where we'd like you to make two placements now we just like you to be engaged in candidates of conversation with 10 clients or whatever was right, empathy for the situation, definitely and we need more of that. But outcomes, leaderships about outcomes. So people actually the irony is instead of saying just do your best, you actually need more measurements now, helping people to understand what a good day week or month looks like, and giving them the nurturing mentoring and understanding that they're going through different stages of stress to do that. So I think that's what leadership looks like and I think it will evolve. You know the big thing and I'm conscious of is that we've had to use the word good and COVID in the same sentence Max, but if anything good came out of COVID is the opportunity for us to reinvent our business. I'm encouraging my clients to look at every step in their business and I think I said this to you on the intro 'let's slow these sacred cows'. People are scared of the word, the word to reinvent the business so to disrupt the word that's overused. What disruption means to me is small steps of incremental change. So let's look at why do we pre to COVID before we filled one job out of four. Why is that, what could we do differently? What changes can we make to improve the outcome? So that's what leadership is about to reinvent and some recruitment companies will thrive post COVID with flounder. And it's all about reinvention and changing the way we operate on, that's leadership. Let's take the insight, just empathy and introspection and being analytical trust me, those are good skills but that's not leadership completely. I may have misunderstood this. And who am I to disagree with the Harvard review? I'm sure they're very well but on the other hand, I doubt they've read very many recruitment companies and I've done a lot.

Max: Now, they were talking about a style of management, I would say, rather than specific to what recruiters need but it was a style of management that worked best when you're in the office and you've got a team of people listening to you to have a loud voice and a big presence can help, but those attributes are no longer as powerful in a world where people don't need face to face.

Greg: Yeah.

Max: New attributes come to the fore. That's all it says, just as slightly tilting towards a different type of communication style seems like.

Greg: You asked me my opinion Max, that was it? Actually looking at leadership to me is action, what you do that counts. And that has to change because you can't be in the same room and we have to understand. Of Course, introspection is important, of course, analytics, we need data we need to understand. But does that impact the guy sitting at home with no clients and no candidate? Leadership is how I impact that person, the conversations I have, the guidance I give, the goals, and the feedback, that is where the value is. And it might stem from introspection. It might stem from analytics, but to that individual, it's how I impact him or her that will decide whether I'm going to get value from the leadership. So I think a lot of leaders, sort of focus on themselves like, how am I behaving. We really got to focus on the impact on the other person because that after all is leadership is how it impacts the other person for the greater good. As we should think more about that.

Max: I cannot disagree with you on this 100%. Very easier said than done. But yeah, absolutely. What are some of the other sacred cows we want to slaughter in 2021?

Greg: By the way, it is easier said than done, but if it was easy Max, all the older stupid and lazy people would be rich, wouldn't that? It's fucking hard running a recruitment business, it's very hard being a leader, and responding by saying it's difficult is not really. I had a conversation with people the other day. They say in this country we've gone from a job market to a candidate for market we've got shortages of candidates. Recruiters are complaining. I'm saying that is Nevada, having a shortage of candidates, should be dancing in the streets because that is where we can show our value. It's not complaining about having a shortage of candidates. What you gotta do is become the world champion in finding candidates because that's what clients will pay for. A shortage of jobs is the beginning of the end, it will starve and die but a shortage of candidates if you're good you'll thrive. But you asked about disruption. I think we should be looking at the way we pay recruiters bonuses. I think we should be looking at measurements and KPIs. KPIs and micromanaging have got these awful connotations to them, mostly because they're badly delivered; it's a leadership issue. The concept of measuring, there is no one who's good at anything they do doesn't measure their performance, do you think footballers and all the other top performers around the world don't measure what they do and then try to improve those things. We should have that in recruitment but the problem is old-style delivery by management is everyone has the same KPI, the KPIs haven't changed that often not reflecting the market needs. So that's a leadership issue, we should be reinventing the way we market our businesses, we should be much stronger social branding and talk about it for years but people don't do it, you should be looking at reviews, and how do we manage those reviews, we should be looking at connecting with people and creating opportunities, the whole point of marketing is sales, sometimes you just slap people figuratively Max and say. Marketing isn't about a nice brand or a pretty logo, marketing is about whether it opens doors for recruiters to engineer sales and so we need to think of it from that point of view. Excuse me. Other areas that we could look at disrupting is how we train and coach people to work from home needs examination and so does what structure should have consultants doing a 360, everything or should I have sales and delivery or should I have candidates and clients. We should reinvent how we tackle the temporary contract as it is. Yes, it is massive. I've just done a five and a half an hour webinar on this which is actually a commercial enterprise and that later watch a series of it, and that's on this topic.

Max: So, I think people who don't know you by now, have a good idea of the depth of your expertise in the recruiting industry and if they want to get more they can go to gregsavage.com.au and is there another place for them to connect with you?

Greg: Thanks, gregsavage.com.au is a good start, and of course I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. I always accept invites from recruiters. And so thanks for mentioning that but I'm not really trying to sell any of our products or anything at all. I kind of actually prefer not to do so much work. I just would love to see us grab this opportunity to make the recruitment agency more functional, it's deeply dysfunctional in many ways, people working in recruitment companies where they fill one job out of five. You think about that Max, they fill one job out of five that means, they are not filling four out of five which means they're failing 80% of the time. Who wants to work in a profession, imagine if I went to a brain surgeon and he told me, 80% of his operations were a failure or an accountant, said 80% of his tax returns were wrong, they wouldn't last in business but we seem to, and the negative is bad service, speed over quality, candidates getting the road end of the deal, so many dysfunction. I mean I love recruitment being in it for 40 years thank you to you all. Don't get me wrong, but I hope we can use this COVID, I said this in the board meeting this very morning. If we go back as the markets pick up, and we go back and do everything they've ever done before the same way, it'll be such a wasted opportunity, now is the time.

Max: Yeah and we can all learn from the power of building a brand in this day and age. I think it's amplified compared to two or three years ago, and it can deliver a lot more business value for an agency, for an individual recruiter. Before we part ways, Greg. One question I love to ask people is to take us back to a time when you hired somebody who you thought was gonna be a total rainmaker and broke your heart. And you don't have to give us names, but tell us the origin of your hiring mistake.

Greg: Well, you're talking about a guy who's made more hiring mistakes than anyone that you know. Here is almost 40 years of hiring people and I still get involved in hiring decisions and it's a very difficult thing to do, there are hundreds of those cases but fortunately. I will tell you a story. They're pushing their cases the other way around as well but I've got a story about a woman called, I will mention her name and her name is Julia Ross.

Max: Oh no! Julia.

Greg: Yeah so Julia Ross. I started recruitment solutions in the early 80s-mid 80s-late 80s, and was three years in, we were flying with the $13 million with a revenue of five offices and we're doing accounting recruitment. And Julia Ross lost her job wherever she was, I think it was Upward Mark, this is going to be over 20 to know any of these names anyway, over 20 years in the industry. So she came to see me and she said, I am looking for a job, and I will build a business support clerical, secretarial we call it those days. Secretarial business support recruitment business, leveraging off your clients. I'm good at it and I got well with it, and I thought she was impressive and then I got my two colleagues to see her, my two partners started the business with me and they said, 'Greg, she's good' we should hire. And I wisely said no. I don't think Julia Ross can build a business support recruitment company. And I didn't tell her that but I turned it down and she went out and started her own business and built the company about 10 times bigger than mine and listed it on the stock, and became a zillionaire. So, good old Greg and what an expert he is. You get those situations, but plenty of times I remember hiring somebody to run up and go to carefully because I want to identify anyone who's running one of my overseas offices when I had offices around the world and I was convinced it was the right guy, I've got on with him well. He was a rugby player and a rugby fan and that just endeared him to me because I love the game. And when I look back I was more stuck on that than anything else, and it was a disaster. It wasn't any good and I hadn't done my due diligence and I'd ignored the warning signs that were niggling at me every time Max I've hired someone with something niggling in my belly about it being wrong it's turned out to be wrong. And in this industry we often say, let's give it a go. He'll be right.

Max: What are the odds you would have made that mistake if this person was not a rugby player?

Greg: I think I would not have made the mistake. I would have been, you know, this is a long time ago, and I can look back at it as charity but I think I would have seen the flaws. I convinced myself he was the right guy, we got all well, so he is a nice guy.

Max: Of Course.

Greg: He had done some good things but he couldn't do that size of that job. I convinced myself that he was what, you know and I think it actually leads on to a much more serious topic and leads on to the topic about diversity hiring and I had a conversation with my brother, 10 or 15 years ago which changed my view. He said we were talking about promoting women into jobs. And I said at that time, I have never discriminated against a woman for a promotion in my life and I was convinced that was right, he said well maybe that's true but Greg, how many times have you and other men did about a young man that he's a good lad let's give him a chance, he's not ready but let's give him a chance you've said that right, I said yeah. Tell how many times you've said that about a woman and this was 10 or 15 years ago and since then, I've consciously said yeah she's not ready but she's got potential and with help, she'll do it, and I put them in those roles and I've actually back three recruitment companies run by women like that that have all gone on to be greatly successful I can tell you who they are, consult recruitment in New Zealand. We just sold it to a Japanese company, both from three people to 50 women owners. People to People in Melbourne we started with Aaron Devlin and she put it, and they were women in exactly that state. I wasn't hiring them or did hire them. I was backing them, investing in them, or hiring them, and it was consciously saying, hold on, if this was a guy, you'd say he is a good person with potential let's back him. And that is getting on the dangerous garbage. That's what I think men can play a huge role in getting this thing equalized. You've got to not only say I don't discriminate. You've actually happily weirdly almost, amongst I won't say reverse discriminate but you've got to look for opportunities to promote people who otherwise wouldn't get them and I think that is where we can make a difference, but it's also self-serving because you end up with the best people doing the best thing, that's what we want.

Max: You identify your own biases

Greg: work against them whether that's against

Max: Yeah you work against your biases, whether it's the love of rugby, or your faith in young male talent that you got to go look for the opposite of that and great opportunities will unfold, will arise for you. And maybe next time, a rugby player applies for a job, maybe Greg shouldn't be the one interviewing him at all.

Greg: I've lost you can you hear me.

Max: Yes, I think, yes yes you're back. you're back. You're back to back Greg

Greg: Can you hear me? I've lost your last couple of sentences sorry.

Max: Well, no worries I was wrapping up to say, yeah, absolutely. You said this work against our biases, make the next time Greg you're interviewing somebody who's a rugby player, maybe let your colleagues take the lead, of course, you've learned that lesson 15 years ago. And thanks for coming to the show sharing your insights and I'm sure you've won a few new followers, with this episode.

Greg: Thanks, Max. I want to end by just reminding you that if you've got two equal people, equal in every respect, go with the one who likes rugby, that will be the right one. I'm kidding.

Max: Who better to advise us on how to build our personal brand than Greg Savage really enjoyed what he had to share on the topic and the encouragement. I hope that you all got to as well as I did to be bought, to be honest and to be consistent over a long period of time, the best way to build your personal brand and a wonderful tool for anyone in recruitments to start using now.

Do you enjoy this content, it's more like it's on the recruitment hackers podcast. Please subscribe and share with friends.

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Hi Hackers Talkpush Marketing, jumping in real quick to give you the lowdown on this week's episode. Max, we'll be diving into different elements of the candidate experience and how we can improve. First stop: making an automated process feel authentic and human.

Hello, recruitment hackers. This is Max from Talkpush. And today I would like to speak about a nice warm and fuzzy topic, which is how do you keep a human touch in an automated recruitment process? I work a lot in high volume recruitment situations and, you know, we're talking about employers who receive thousands of applications every week, some of them every day.

So obviously they can't really give that very human, one-on-one conversation that you would get in a much smaller company, but they try and I've seen some great things out there.

Some great examples of companies that have figured out how to keep things very personal and human while working at a large scale.

I think one thing that really works well is when the hiring manager or the person who is going to be working with a future hire sends a personal voice note or video notes to the candidates at different stages in the recruitment process. So after the first interview, the candidate comes to site, and then they go home and get a little voice note that would say: “Thank you so much for coming today. It was great to meet you. And I really wish you the best of luck in the rest of your recruitment process.”

And then again, at the hiring stage, “congratulations.” Somebody gets an offer letter, why not record a little video between you and the teammates, a 30 second video that you send to the candidate on WhatsApp or on Messenger or on email, where you say, “Hey, we're also excited to welcome you on board. Here's the team you're going to be working with.”

These are small touches that have outsized return on investment. And the technology is there to make it easy for anybody to produce. But you know, the imagination there, I can go in many different directions.

I'm curious to hear what other beautiful examples of human connection you can recommend that you've seen in your recruitment process that is differentiated and that makes people feel good about the recruitment process and remind them that it's a people business it's about establishing bonds.

Hope you got some ideas on where and how to establish those human touch points up next: it's all about rejecting candidates nicely. And at scale.

It's not fun being a job seeker. Most of the time you have to deal with, unfortunately, most employers do not spend the time to figure out how to reject candidates properly. At Talkpush, we always look for ways to make that experience a little bit better.

I brought it down to four things we can do to improve the candidate experience around being rejected. Number one. The last thing you want to do is ghost them. So no silence. If somebody is being rejected, it's always best to let them know so they can move on with their lives. Move on with their search.

Number two, you might want to give a little bit of delay from the moment you've spoken to them, to the moment you're sending the rejection. Ideally your software, as ours does, will allow for you to set up a delay in sending that notification so that the candidate feels that you've given them proper consideration and enough time to really evaluate their application.

Number three, you might want to personalize and maybe even give them some feedback. What I mean, by personalizing, at the bare minimum, address them by name and referring back to the position they've applied for rather than send them a template message. “Dear candidates. Sorry, but you're not there.” And maybe personalize them with a reason for your rejection. That's always a little tricky because it can open a can of worms and a long discussion. So try to keep it, you know, as objective as possible.

And finally, number four, you can communicate to the candidates a time at which they can reapply for the position. Most software, as Talkpush does, will allow you to set a time for candidates to reapply within three months, six months or a year so that you do not close the door.

Remember rejecting candidates is also an opportunity if you do it well, it can increase referrals. And it can build good karma for your brand. Remember that today's recheck may still be tomorrow's hire or maybe even tomorrow's customers. So treat everyone nice. Even those who you don't think will ever join you.

So there's definitely lots of things we can do to turn rejected candidates into brand promoters. Up next: why candidates hate resumes and what to ask for instead.

Do you still need a resume as part of your recruitment process, and I'm going to argue you do not argue that the reason you still use resumes today is because you're being lazy.

Instead of asking yourself, what are the qualities that I need from a candidate? What is an assessment that I can ask them to do that could be done in a few minutes through an interaction, instead of asking yourself those hard questions. You're defaulting to your old habits, which is I'm just going to ask for a resume and, you know, that'll be one way to screen candidates.

Maybe I'll pick the ones who go to the best schools or the ones who know how to format their resume the best way. But I mean, unless you're hiring for a job that requires resume editing as a core skill. You're not going to really be able to draw much information from that resume. So many tools out there today that allow you to assess if somebody has got good communication skills, empathy, or analytical skills, math skills, and even if you don't use those tools, just with a couple of smartly phrase screening questions, you can get so much more value out of it.

I know, I often ask people, if you have the choice between looking at, you know, if you're having a 20 something year old salesperson, you got the choice between looking at the resume or talking to them for one minute, which one is going to help you make the right decision in 2020?

You don't have to go back to resume.You don't have to use them anymore. And I challenge you to start looking at your process and seeing all the jobs where you can flush them out. Now, for some jobs I may be wrong.

Yep. We're not fans of resume sifting here, especially with so much tech available to make the process better for our candidates. Up next: how to make your career website actually convert.

The Question I have is how do you imagine the best career websites to be? What would the best career website do in your dream world? That's a question I asked myself and I've been asking our engineering team for years, and I think there’s a good way to answer this question.

That is to say, well, if money was not a problem, if you had an infinite amount of resources, how would you as an employer, like to engage with a candidate who is coming to you? I guess what you would want to do is open the door and you would say hello, and ask them how they're doing and ask them a couple of questions about what they're interested in, what they want to do.

And based on that you would immediately be able to direct them to the right place and say, well, okay, that's cool. So, based on what you're saying, I think you should go talk to this department. You should tell them about your story.

Bizarrely, even though that's very obvious and intuitive most career websites aren’t designed that way at all, they're designed in a way where you come in and instead of asking a question in a sort of engaging and welcoming way, immediately the candidate is asked to search through a long list of jobs to figure out what those keywords mean, all those job titles, they need to navigate through all this.

And hopefully at the end, to develop a sense of comfort that, oh, maybe this is the right job for me. Or maybe it's this one. And just to be safe, I'm going to apply to all six of them, you know, to maximize my chances of being hired. And that creates a world of problems for recruiters, as you know.

So I think that the best career website is actually very much like the pulsating red dots from Al from 2001 space Odyssey. Simply a robot or an AI that you can talk to that you can say, hello, this is what I want. What do you have or, maybe it's to put it in a more traditional way to simply have that Google search button in the middle that says,

Hello, you know, tell me what you're looking for or a robot in the middle of a page that engages you. So giving you a little bit of an insight into the kind of R and D that we're focused on and where I see the future, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic. What is the dream career website?

What does it look like? What does it do? So thanks for sharing in advance, and I'm looking forward to building the best career website with some of you.

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MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today, I'm delighted to welcome on the show Lana Morgan, who's VP of talent at TOA Global. TOA is an Australian based outsourcing service provider, which is specialized in accounting services and so I was interested in inviting Lana to talk about the art of hiring for a position that every company in the world needs internally, and then sometimes also with external support, which is accounting, which might sound like a bit of a dry specialized topic for some of our listeners, but we'll try to make it interesting, Lana.

LANA: Thanks, Max. It absolutely is a very interesting career for people who love numbers in particular. So I think accounting used to be dry but now it's absolutely very interesting.

MAX: Yeah, great, I took up accounting when I was in school and I thought it was the foundation of all, the balance sheet, profit and loss statements. If you can't read those you're not going to get very far in business, so absolutely essential foundation. So, Lana, thanks for joining, thanks for coming on the show and sharing some of your specialist knowledge on this topic. Before we dive into recruiting accountants, tell us a little bit about TOA. Let's start with TOA, what do you do?

LANA: So TOA Global supports our local clients, so both in Australia, New Zealand, and then in North America and Canada, to find support from an accounting function so that could be accountants bookkeepers, or financial support staff, and they would work in our Philippines office on behalf of their clients. So we really need to present the clients with really great candidates that not only can do the functional aspect of their role, but they still have to be a good cultural fit. And they treat them like they would any team member. And during this period of the pandemic when lots of onshore companies have become remote, it is just like having a remote team member anywhere in the world so we provide that service to our clients. We have over 1600 employed accountants, bookkeepers and financial support people across all of our regions. So, including all of our support staff, we've got 2000 employees at TOA Global so we're growing, we're definitely in that growth phase, and really specializing in accounting, because a lot of our counterparts or our competitors do a little bit of everything, whereas we just focus on that niche market of accountants bookkeepers and financial support.

MAX: Great, so I'm trying to make a mental picture of like 1600 accountants, all gathered up in a place so I guess there's a lot of coffee, and a lot of calculators.

LANA: Exactly so many calculators.

MAX: So, yeah it sounds like a great business to be in because, for people who go into accounting, to have that kind of support where you have 1600 peers that you can learn from and exchange with. So, you're allowed to develop your deep domain expertise, and to help onboard people that are younger in their career, right.

LANA: Exactly, up and coming, accountants who have finished their qualifications in the Philippines, would have exposure to that global platform of our clients and to their peers as you said, who potentially have been in the role for a little bit longer who would guide and train them in their role. So our candidates are very much aligned once they've employed with the client who employs them, and they've got sort of mini teams within that group, the 600-800 ads spread over three different sites in the Philippines. So we're in Clark, in Cebu, and in Manila, the biggest site is in Clark so that 1200 there.

MAX: Okay. I can't wait to get into the topic so let me just ask you about psychology. I know we're gonna generalize a little bit. I apologize in advance. But the psychology of an accountant, so if you're an accountant, sorry for the generalization that may be coming up, but we're talking strategy here broad lines of course there are plenty of exceptions out there but what is the kind of environments that an accountant is attracted to, to begin with, what is the persona that we're targeting from a recruiting marketing standpoint?

LANA: When we're looking for someone who's entering the accounting career after finishing their degree qualification. It really is, I suppose, once upon a time it used to just be numbers if you're good at numbers, good at the analysis, you had good attention to detail, you would be attracted to doing accounting, and that would sort of be a job for life right you just go through and you would potentially work with one or two firms for your whole career. That profile of accountants now has changed so we are expecting a lot more from our accountants, we want them to be strategic, they're almost like a project manager, they're communicating with stakeholders, they're also making recommendations to the business based on their analysis. So, it really has evolved and as you said before every business needs an accountant, but we are now relying on that function a lot more to provide that strategic direction so even we're looking to make a decision, we get that information from that accounting function within our business and then we move forward, that profile of the accountants therefore when we're interviewing we need to make sure that they're comfortable communicating, and particularly at different levels of the business so they may be communicating at their level or with a very senior manager, they do have to be in a space where they can make recommendations and be a little bit more confident than potentially in the past. So it really has evolved as a more of a project manager as a career for someone who's a little bit more dynamic I suppose and what they used to be years ago.

MAX: Yeah. When you say adapt to your audience. It means to be able to move up from doing reporting for a departmental manager to all the way to the CEO of the board.

LANA: Yes correct, yeah so now we sort of rely on that function at all different levels of the business which wasn't the case, I would say 10 years ago, so it really has changed and evolved.

MAX: What are some of the macro trends that are helping your business grow from a talent perspective as well as technology, or just general trends.

LANA: Yeah, we would say, from an outsourcing perspective we're really focused on the people, the technology and the processes. So it's really about making everything simple, easy to follow and be able to do things more efficiently through these platforms. So that's sort of what we're doing at the moment, from an internal perspective. So when it comes to recruitment, we utilise testing platforms and we do different types of assessments for these candidates as they come through. But one thing that we don't do is remove the personal touch. So we sort of feel like we still might need to make sure we're doing that, face to face interviewing. So when we say face to face, it's all online these days so we had to pivot very quickly during the pandemic. We used to run assessment centres on site and do a lot of our interviewing in the office. We now as the rest of the world do, we now do it all online. And it's actually proved to be really efficient. So, allows us to process that higher volume, and to make sure that we're really able to connect with people, and in our recruiters being able to do that it's about developing the rapport on a zoom call that we're doing today so that I would have a candidate online. There would be standardised questions so that the candidate would have already completed all of their testing, and that final interview is really for cultural fit, and the ability to work in this outsourcing environment so we make sure that they had that adaptable nature that they can communicate well that they were able to understand instructions and follow up.

MAX: When you are hiring an accountant, they already have their accounting degree and maybe some certification, what is the bare minimum that you look for from a candidate?

LANA: So that would need to be degree qualified, so that's a degree in accounting in the Philippines, that is very aligned to the accounting principles globally really across Australia and in the United States. So they have really defined the foundation as you would get if you had qualified here in Australia or in the US, and then we're moving towards a training programme which we're calling the accelerated programme where we will help and enable those locally experienced degree qualified candidates to then be able to apply their skills in that global platform whether it be Australia or the United States.

MAX: As you said, accounting is a global practice. I mean there are some mild adjustments from one market to the next, mostly nomenclature, but it's the same principles that rule the entire world. So, there's no barriers to relying on the international outsource provider other than perhaps the cultural barriers that you were referring to earlier. And so the minimum standards for applying for a job would be. I've got my accounting degree, that's the basics. What are we talking about if I'm hiring an accountant coming out of school, what should I be looking out for, what are some of the essentials that I should be looking out for if I'm taking somebody who's quite junior, and I want to be, let's say running, accounting for my small business?

LANA: That's a great question. So a lot of our clients are small to medium businesses so they need to make sure that this person that they hire, as you mentioned before, not just has the principles in accounting because that is something we would expect all of our degreed qualified candidates to have, but they need to be able to adapt that experience to the client's requirements. So you would be looking for cultural fit. The fact that they are able to listen to an instruction and follow through and also follow up, to be able to make sure that they're deadline driven, able to manage prioritise their tasks during the day, but I would say, a key thing is to be able to put their hand up and ask for assistance when they don't understand something because we sometimes forget about that cultural difference but that is something a skill that they need to have. So if they're not understanding an instruction or they need additional guidance they need to be comfortable and confident to be able to ask their manager to help them in that way.

MAX: Is that something that you would find out once they're on board or is that something that you can establish in the recruitment process like the ability to put your hand up, because nobody wants this. Everybody is afraid of sounding stupid in the interview process.

LANA: Yes. So we use behavioural questions to try and understand how they've performed previously in a role and how they will perform in this role if they're successful. So we ask for examples, for example, one of the interview questions we have is we get them to do a video to explain to us when they've made a mistake at work before and how they would explain that to their manager for example. So we can get an understanding of how they approach the question, what their communication skills like and how they can then apply that in their new role. So we try and have a good understanding but as you said, really, when they get into the job that's when you uncover how confident they are in that space, but as long as the manager is giving them the feedback that they require to be successful and encourage them, I think they're relatively streamlined into the team as if they were sitting with them in their onshore.

MAX: You mentioned in that interview question that you would refer back to their past experience and tell me about a time when you made a mistake. The risk inherent with hiring somebody who has zero experience in this domain might be too much for many employers to stomach. And thankfully, there are big houses like PWC and others that seem to be taking the majority of graduates into their fold, and then releasing them into the market, is that dynamic that's a play for you as well?

LANA: No. We pretty much pick up those candidates once they've worked for a PWC or an Ernst and Young for a couple of years; they don't hoard on to them generally. And then they would come to a company like TOA Global with that two years experience, and the feedback we get from the candidates is they have a much better work life balance so they work very hard in those graduate years when they go for one of those big four firms, and then they come to us for more of the ongoing career. So we would hope to retain that candidate for at least five years so we sort of put them through, we offer different training and learning plans to try and keep them with us. So they have a career with us rather than that turnaround time of two years, but it's definitely valuable experience. An experience that we would seek out so we would definitely try and attract those candidates to us who've graduated in the Philippines, they've gone to one of the big fours and they've done two tax seasons and then that would come into us.

MAX: Okay, so then they've got tax seasons under their belts, plenty of mistakes that they can talk about in the interview. It's almost too good to be true when you think about it. It's like these Big Fours producing all of this talent. Is the supply thinning out? Are they able to continue to attract sufficient numbers for graduates? Are the Big Fours still hiring at the same volume today as they were ten twenty years ago?

LANA: They absolutely are, if not increasing in the number of graduates they're taking, and expanding into different areas of the Philippines. So setting up more of those hubs where they're able to attract those candidates. So their strategy is changing, and as is also when you're looking at the talent insights of that market in the Philippines. They're definitely an emerging market of graduates, and also those candidates that then have the two years experience. So at this stage we're not running out, but we are trying to be very targeted as to which areas those candidates are located in.

MAX: Alright. Will you give us a good tip with the interview question and tell us about a mistake and how you communicate it with your manager? What are some of your other favourite interview questions to ask accountants to make sure you've got the right fit?

LANA: Very good. We do do technical questions, so we will give them, like you mentioned before, like a P&L or a spreadsheet and we will ask them to do the workings in the background so we're able to see how they applied themselves to that question. It's not always about the answer we want to see how they've gone about it sometimes so it is very much the technical questions. And then, before the cultural fit, like as I mentioned we want to know more about what they've done in their previous work history, how they would apply themselves to this role if that was successful, definitely understand in their previous roles how they have practically applied the accounting principles. So for example, if they mentioned that they're zero certified during the interview, we would ask them to demonstrate how they applied that in a practical sense in the workplace. So great, you've got this certification, and that's fantastic. Tell us about how you've applied that in a practical sense within the workplace. So we can not only understand the qualifications, skills and experience. But sometimes, if you've just done a certification but you haven't really applied it is not as practical or as useful as you would think. So we're getting better at asking those questions. Our recruiters at TOA Global are not accountants, so therefore their responses we need to make sure that we're able to understand the examples that they're giving us. So our recruiters would go through training, I mean, we call it internally, accounting for non accountants, so we try and have the basic principles so we can understand the examples that they're giving us, and we rely heavily on tools so we use testing tools that are specific to the accounting function so we can make sure that we're getting a true indication of what their accounting experiences.

MAX: You said you've got over 1600 accountants on your payroll.

LANA: Yep.

MAX: Surely one or two of those will end up in your recruiting team.

LANA: We've got one at the moment, so yes. We took a graduate into the recruiting team and she's working out very well actually. I think she's got about two years till she starts asking us for an accounting job. But definitely, I think the profile of what you're looking for in a recruiter is slightly different. So we look for very outgoing people, they have to be a little bit more sales oriented. So, I'm not sure if an accountant would be able to do the volume of activity that we do in recruitment.

MAX: Well sure, but some people go into accounting because it's a safe career choice. It was something that made their parents happy. But perhaps a couple years into their career they realise actually I am an outgoing person that needs to hit the phone every day. So does that happen quite often, and it's a source of mishire?

LANA: I would say that there are different types of accounting roles so they would therefore gravitate to the ones where they have more of the customer facing experience, and they might go into something, there's a good example in our team. In the Charter Academy team recently we hired an accounting trainer who has completed his accounting degree in Australia, he's worked for a couple of years, exactly what you said, I want some more dynamic role where he's chatting to people every day, so he's gone down the path of being an accounting trainer, so he understands the principles he's applied it for four years and now he's moving more into that L&D space with a certification for in training, so that's probably a good example of someone who's gone into accounting loves the numbers loves the financials, but also people person.

MAX: Yeah and in your company until he's going to find what he's looking for sure.

LANA: Yeah, exactly.

MAX: There's enough people to train there.

LANA: We've definitely got enough people to train that's for sure to keep him busy.

MAX: One of my favourite questions, and it'll be my last one for today is one that I ask around hiring mistakes because everybody's made mistakes.

LANA: Everyone has made mistakes. Absolutely.

MAX: And it's easy to talk about them in general terms, but where it really stings, is when you think about that one person that you hired maybe this year or maybe 10 years ago, where you were deeply invested emotionally, intellectually into their success, and it didn't work out professionally into their success and didn't work out. Lana, can you walk us back through that moment when you hired somebody, and it was a complete fail, and what do you learn from that experience for us to learn from your mistakes.

MAX: From a personal perspective in my own team. I absolutely try to learn from my mistakes, and I have made a few over my career history. So, thinking of one example, I think, probably a good example of when someone has the technical expertise you bring them into your team you think they're going to be the superstar, but potentially that cultural fit is not there, and they're disruptive to the rest of the team. So I think I've learned from my previous mistakes that that cultural fit, making sure that person is going to be a positive influence on the rest of the team is so important that I just wouldn't compromise the skills and experience over that so it definitely is my number one, to make sure they've got a positive attitude, they come to work, ready to perform and be successful. I'm really lucky with my current team actually so we've really got that philosophy that we bring in the people that we really get energise us from an activities perspective and when we invest in them from a training and get them up to speed so they're able to perform at the same level. So I think once you have the formula and try and repeat that you think about not only five years but the real success stories and how can we then look for people with those similar skill sets to be successful in our team.

MAX: I'm trying to dig a little bit for some dirt here now. You're talking about somebody with a positive mindset so that's sort of a bad hire that you're thinking about as somebody who was smart, but, sorry, what was the word?

LANA: Disruptive maybe. I think in recruitment, you can have great recruiters, but they're not team players, they're sort of in it for themselves and they're not necessarily there for the overall success of the team, and for the client, so that's what we're looking for because we're really there to support our clients. Outsourcing is really sort of like a recruitment agency when you think about the model right. So we've just got to make sure that we support those team members to be as successful as we can, If we have one person in there that's really self focused and disruptive to the team that has a negative impact. Absolutely.

MAX: Yeah, so don't go for the short term win with that Maverick superstar. It's gonna demotivate everybody around him or her.

LANA: Absolutely, yeah, it causes more damage in the long run, you're right. So that short term gain for the long term pain so we just stick with the tried and tested formula of the cultural fit that we're looking for, and invest in those people for the skills that we need as we move through. Recruitment is a real personality fit. I think once you've got that right, you can then train them up and make sure they're successful.

MAX: Smashing. Well, I hope one of our listeners will avoid that long term pain. Thanks to your good advice. Thanks Lana for joining us today.

LANA: Thanks Max. Thanks for having me today.

MAX: That was Lana Morgan from TOA global.And if there ever was a position. That is ripe for outsourcing for small, medium sized business. I do think accounting is a perfect fit, so I hope you enjoyed it and that you got some tips on how to find the right accountant for you. If you want to see more content about how to interview for these positions in the high volume space and more practical tips on how to attract the best candidates, please subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast and share with friends.

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Welcome to the The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Now we'll move on to the panel discussion. So I'd like to invite on stage our wonderful panelists. MeAnn Batallones from 24[7}.ai , Hazel Camacho from Inspiro, Jarrod Kagan from Probe and Omer Molad from Vervoe.

Okay. Omar is on. Hi, max. Hi Hazel.

Max: Perhaps, so a quick introduction for looking at the list. Hazel. If you would please introduce yourself to our audience. We've got 168 people on the line listening to you now under 16.

Hazel: Wow. I'm just so excited to be here. Max. Thank you so much.And all of you who actually signed up and decided to be with us in the next few minutes. You are really investing on you know, how you would really move forward with your job, hunting up DVDs and all that stuff. So, yes. So my name is Hazel and I work for inspiro. It's a BPO company that has over 30,000 customer champions in 35 different locations worldwide. So I take care of a team that takes the lead in bringing at least 20,000 new hires in a year. So that's a pretty, not so boring job. I would say, you know, most of the feeding job, I would say, you know, because it's not this job that they're giving, but it's hope, you know, it's worth any nowadays where things are quite often in short, I would say so.

Max: True. 20,000 lives changed every year. Anybody jazzed up in the morning. Thank you. Hey Jarrod welcome.

Jarrod: Hello. Thanks for having me very excited to be here. Yeah I think this is a really exciting topic to be discussing because I'd say all businesses, people are the most important. And for us as a business we were absolutely passionate about our people and. Every time we recruit people into our business. It's just what we say. It's bringing people into the family. So look as the world changes and there are new and exciting ways to recruit people and bring them into our family. I just think it's a really exciting topic and look I am sitting here today, obviously, but we just have an amazing team in everything that we do in all the investments that we've made in terms of the recruitment process and automation. And it really goes down to them. We employ close to 14,000 people now across five different countries, obviously Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, and. Yeah, really excited to be here.

Max: Thanks Jared. For the listeners who don't know about Probe, can you tell us about the Probe group, the Probe family? Cause I think you've had some additions to the family.

Jarrod: Yeah. So Probe we've been around actually for 40 years. We started in 1978. Originally our background was more in the credit and collections outsourcing space, but we've grown significantly, especially over the last five to six years. We've invested heavily into the upstream. We call it customer managed space, but for want of a better word, BPO space that we provide customer service, customer attention, digital automation as process simplification really invested heavily. We've probably grown up probably in the last two and a half years. We acquired a business called cellmate's contact center, which was at the same time as us Australia's largest contact center.And then in the Philippines, in the last couple of years, we acquired micro sourcing, which is a managed service operation, providing knowledge process serving and shared services. And another smaller company called Beepo, which employs around 500 people in the Philippines. And most recently. About a month ago, we settled on another business called Stellar, which employed about 6,000 people as well.So taking our total head count to 14,000 globally.

Max: Okay. Well I, for one, knew all of those names from before. So, and I did not know Probe until this year, so. I guess yeah. Different types of brand equity in different geographies.

Jarrod: World's best kept secret. Great. Thank you, Jarrod and MeAnn.

MeAnn: So good afternoon to everyone. And thanks for joining recruitment hackers. I think it is a good two hours that you'll have with all of my co-panelists. And of course the Talkpush team. 24[7].ai has been in the business for 20 years. It's a BPO and technology company, specifically in the Philippines and just during the last seven months of the pandemic. We've shifted our recruitment to a recruit from home model and quite surprisingly towards our road to recovery. We did not just recover, but I think I mentioned to you that we managed to get, I think, four new accounts, even in the midst of a pandemic, something that was unexpected because we thought that we were just going to continue with how we were doing things, but.I think the pandemic pushed us to really make our process a hundred percent virtual, but at the same time, be opportunistic and really be able to tap into other accounts or other clients who were in need of our service. So the last seven months, as you described it earlier, were amazingly painful. And I think I'd like to agree with that. My team has been working from home for the last eight months, all of us. And it has been. Amazing. Yes, but also amazingly painful because of the changes that we needed to do, how we needed to be adaptive and how we of course needed to still continue with the business. Good. Overall it's still so much reason for us to be grateful.

Max: I'm sure everyone agrees. Omer, did you have a painful year? Tell us about, so a Vervoe.

Omer: I personally had a great year because we just had a baby. So I'm feeling good, no complaints, but thanks Max. Thanks for having me. So I'm with a company called Vervoe and what we do is we predict job performance.

We put job candidates in situations that they would normally face on the job and give them an opportunity to showcase their skills by doing tasks. And then, and we do that at scale and we then use machine learning models to automatically grade and rank those candidates. And so we do that for a range of roles and industries from, you know, including call center, customer service and retail, but also for software developers, sales reps, and designers, and pizza cooks and everything you can imagine. And really we are about testing skills and showing you whether someone can do your specific job at your company or not. And, you know, here on this panel, we partner with Talkpush and we work together on clients like Walmart at very high volume. And we also work with Probe and it's group of companies as well. So that's great to be on this panel and look forward to discussing some of these very real issues around, you know, can you automate, and does it need to be human can machines process these sort of things, and you know, very interesting questions to discuss those.Thanks max for inviting me.

Max: Yeah pleasure. And I hope you'll get to meet. So some of the panelists in person when traveling is allowed again, I'm sure. It's going to be one of the first trips you get to take. Look forward to it. One of the first trips I took to the Philippines, I think we have a lot of our audience coming from the Philippines.

So I'm tilting my presentation a little bit towards that audience. Was that in every recruitment office that I visited. There were these small phone booth setups where people would have the verse saunt assessments where you'd have to walk down and sit in front of an actual touchdown phone. I don't know if those things are still around.I imagine. No, Hazel's saying no. So as this place has been repurposed, is everything all the assessments going on online now? Or are you still have some of this stuff happening in the real world, I guess it's no longer possible, right?

Hazel: Yeah. Well, if I could you know, shaking my head because well, since the pandemic, so March 15, you know, right after it was announced up until this time we've shifted all of our processes 90% of our processes are now done on night, you know, from sourcing up the onboarding, you know, so the things that were left that we do onsite are pretty much the paperwork, you know, like things that you can no longer automate, you know, things that are required by the bank to being on physical copies.Right. But basically if you would look at the entire talent acquisition cycle, You know, from sourcing to screening, to onboarding, all of those are pretty much done online, you know, in Virginia, because what we first thought of during the time, you know, our safety of our team members, we know that we have to deliver, but we do not want to compromise, you know, the health and safety of other people.So we shifted everyone to work from home setup. Provided them with all the clues, they're not going to DVT, laptop, pocket, wifi, even mobile phone credits. And most importantly, we invested on platforms, you know, because one of the things that we realized is we cannot really do the usual face-to-face setup and therefore you have to introduce a lot of automations, you know, so that you can really adapt, you know, to the influx and the urgency to handle earlier, Max was talking about how amazingly painful and you know, I have to be with that.you know, like in our case, would you imagine in a pandemic we've increased our hiring requirement by at least 50%.So it was really crazy. How do you process in a totally different environment with 50% more volume? That is just so crazy. And I'm so happy that our company has invested so much When it comes to automation. Suspension platforms. And with that, you know, modesty aside we've even increased our revenue, you know, by at least 10% compared to last year. So it's pretty amazing because of the uncertainties, I would say we really don't know how it went, but I think we realize, you know, whether there's a pandemic or not , I think the tpe setup would continue. It would be the new normal, whether we like it or not.

Max: Let's see if we have a category example, are there some things that are going to go back to the old way, MeAnn?

MeAnn: Just to piggyback on what Hazel said and your question earlier, I think I'd like to confirm your prediction number two and prediction number three, when you'd said that when you visited offices, Many years in the past, there were cubicles, there were phone screeners.So that's gone today. And I think I'd like to validate that second prediction of yours, because a phone screening is no longer done today. And you've asked about whether the space in the office has been repurposed. So that's a definite yes for us, because they've now been repurposed to something that's more useful. I think whether they're for onsite accommodation and whether they're for production or whether for training, because as mentioned, recruitment is now 100% virtual, a hundred percent work from home. So again, to validate your prediction, number three, many recruiters will not return to the office and that's the reason why the large recruiting spaces will now I think be repurposed for other more relevant needs and objectives. Will there be things that will go back to the old normal? Was that your question, Max?

Max: Yeah. I was fine then, you know maybe this is a question that Jarrod wants to take or .You know it sounds like it was painful that everything went okay. And everybody met their targets. And so let's just continue. Right. But maybe the biggest price that everybody had to pay was more psychological. One.

Jarrod: Yes. It's really interesting because from our end I mean, thankfully we invested in a number of different platforms that enabled us to really deal with this situation before it came. So if this situation had come and we had invested into platforms like Vervoe, We wouldn't have been able to get through because what's the beauty about these types of I guess automated recruitment platforms and especially, I mean, you talk about the way that it can integrate everything from verification screening through platforms like Talkpush. What enabled us to do is produce a mass number of recruitments and process a mass number of applicants.You know why that we'd never done before. And when you're talking about a C -9 environment where you can't actually. Talk face to face, no matter what, these are the types of things that enabled us to get through. And that we'd invested in before say 19 actually hit, but it's not even just the ability to do it.Actually, it enables you to actually recruit better candidates. So the quality, the way that and I'll keep talking about Vervoe because they're our partner, but the way that it leverages through machine learning and AI to really refine a good candidate looks like into score and continually build that out.It simplifies the process and it actually enables you to recruit not only and process more candidates, but recruit better candidates in line with what you're trying to achieve. So it's just by chance and good fortune that we invested in these types of technologies before C-19 hit. And then the other benefit is it actually allows you to pass the information to the candidates digitally as well, in a way that's better that humans couldn't do either so through videos and there's a consistency. So you can through videos and through messaging and really give these applicants the information that they need, that they weren't able to do.

You know, through humans, so all through the face to face. So, you know, for us, it was just, as I said, good fortune that we invested in these types of technologies before C-19 hit.

Max: I imagine that it sounds lovely after the facts, but, but initially you always get a little bit of pushback, right?When you present an automation solution, that's. No, it doesn't matter how good your platform is. It's not going to be as good as a phone call. You must get that a lot Omer. Right. When people are saying, I don't believe we can automate this piece.

Omer: Yeah. So, one of the early objections we used to get was candidates won't want to do this. You know, candidates will be scared of this. This won't feel very personal, personalized, or, you know, it'll feel called. And we did a lot of research. We don't hear that as much today because I think it's been proven already, but we did a lot of research, we surveyed all our candidates and we had an enormous amount of data.And what we learned was that there are two things that candidates care about. One is I want an opportunity to prove themselves. I want a genuine chance to apply for the job to put their best foot forward. And the second thing is that if they're not going to get the job, can someone please get back to them very quickly and tell them that's really what they care about.And when candidates say things like, I don't want to be traded, like, you know, I don't want to be automated or I don't want to talk to a machine. What they really say is. I don't want to be unfairly disqualified. There's no candidate that gets a fair opportunity to put their best foot forward for the job that says I don't like technology.They don't care if it's with technology or in the room or whatever, what they care is that they get a chance to apply for the job barely. And if they get that chance and by the way, using technology, they get a much better chance because you can. Process of volume of cat. You're not eliminating guiding those candidates based on their resume or something arbitrary, actually giving them a chance. Technology enables all that to happen in parallel. And you're actually looking at their genuine ability and then subject to interview interviewer bias and all these other things. And so long as they get a chance. And so long as someone gets back to them promptly, and that's a nod back, the new technology.Imagine trying to get back to five or 10 or 20,000 people in a day. There's no recruiter that can do that. And so technology addresses those two points. You've got a fair opportunity to apply for the job, and if you're not going to get the job, we'll tell you very quickly.

Hazel: Yeah. And Max, yeah. If I could also share my thoughts, you know, on what could be that thing that will go away, you know, if there's any, I guess it would be the denial, you know, that you can do things and alone, you know you can like veer away from doing things digitally at this point.That denial will eventually be gone. No, because what we've seen really, you know, it's the fact that you have to go digital or you, you know, business would be then something to that effect. No, it's digital is the new default as say and what could actually continue, but what we've experienced for the past eight months simply accelerate that, you know, The disruption that we've been seeing for several years on the back of, if you need the automated call and it's just call us, you know, it's better to do things manually.But one thing I've learned from a book that I recently read, it's entitled, future-proofing your career and your company. It says that there are two things, you know, that the world is really changing. And what are these drivers first would be the market, right? Whether we like it or not, you have the millennials and the gen Z's storming the workplace.So how do you adapt to this labor force? And as we know, this younger generations are very tech, heavy. They want things done fast. They want things very accessible anywhere, anyhow, anytime. And that can be addressed by automation that can be addressed by digital, right. And then the other one would be, you know, the changing business landscape. According to this book that I've read, there's also something that is changing, you know, the relationship between employee employers and all that stuff. So how do you copy the nights of people and we're located in different regions, different countries, for instance. Right? So if we continue to do things face to face, Then there are certain limitations, geographic, because not everyone can travel at the workplace, right? Or your recruitment hub, but with people waiting to work for you, but they're in another country or in another province, as long as you can reach them via the internet, you know, they can do their stuff from home. Then you have an access

Max: You mean to hire people outside the Philippines that you would normally domestically

Hazel: Yes actually. We've been doing a lot of work from home set up nowadays. Obviously we have to continue on, we have never ceased operations since the pandemic. And it's good to say that our employees are pretty much adjusting to the new norm. Obviously, you know, we need to provide a holistic approach to them, not just in terms of technology, but also on a lot of thingsWhy did this non or HR services while they are done through automation, just to make it a point that there's a human factor in it, because one thing that would probably need to be emphasized this is the time where we really need to be more human now than ever, you know, because of the social distancing, right.People are now more young ING, you know for the worm. No. And the usual feeling of talking to someone. So I guess that's why some people are not comfortable talking to chat bots, right? Because if the chat bot is not engaging enough, they'll be able to still, you know, relate to a candidate or to an appetite.So those are things that are really interesting.

Max: You need a good design, good UX. And to be on the lookout for that anybody who's on this conference call and this virtual conference should at least try to apply for a job at their own company and be ready to give feedback because you can never test your system enough, I think, and build more empathy into it. So I want to ask about some practical tips from people here. I have two questions on my mind, the one which is on a higher note, which is how has the town pool changed in 2020? You know, is it expanding?

Is it better as a difference, but before that a practical tip for our audience who wants to automate, they want to do more with less. They probably have. You know, less headcount, more volume. We talked about eliminating the initial phone screening as a potential, you know, very time-consuming step in the recruitment process that could be eliminated. What else? What are some of the other things that we can knock off to lighten the load? Are there some things that are a little bit a thing of the past that we can just take off from their to-do list? It's a big question. And I'm happy to take the answers from anyone. Jarrod. I think, I think you're about to say something.

Jarrod: Look, I mean, yeah it is a very big question. I think, from our perspective we focus on what we are. absolutely. If there's something that can make a process better, you, you need to do it. But look for us, the path was to invest in partners. And so businesses like Talkpush and Vervoe. They're the experts in this. And what I would say is getting. Together all key stakeholders, which would be operations, recruitment, HR training, and trying to understand what are the things, what are the pain points and what can you do to really improve them and then reach out to the experts.I mean, you know, you can sit down and you can talk with your partners about what your vision is, what your values are and how they can help. And, you know, true partnering can deliver those types of things. What we've also been able to do internally is obviously we have divisions that are, you know, RPA and machine learning and simplification automation. So we've done with them if we've been able to, as an example, take certain repeatable processes and be able to automate them ourselves so they can then help supplement those, the partners that can, that you can bring to the table for the recruitment process. I think powerful is that a lot of people look and think, Oh, well, if you have a range of different applications and software and you bolt them all together, it can get quite clunky. But the way with cloud-based technology and open API is you can really take the best of everything and build something together that just builds this unbelievable seamless experience that delivers great candidate experience, great quality candidates, the ability to pass great information from your business to them and really deliver an amazing experience. So I'd probably say that's something to look at as well.

Omer: Can I jump in? So I agree with everything Jarrod said, and I want to add to that and maybe offer a different lens to look through, which is most people, what they ask is what can I use technology for? But I would look at it in the opposite way because technology can do everything.Technology can do, and definitely in recruitment technology can do everything. So just, let's just assume that technology can do anything you want. The real question is what's the best way for you to spend your time as a human being. Right? So just like today, we don't use typewriters because that's not an efficient thing to do there are better ways to do it. You've got to ask yourself, is it a good use of your time to write a rejection email to every candidate? Probably not, but in some cases you might want to call the candidate yourself. And so you should do that. And so I think what recruiters should be asking is what is a good use of my time? Is it people analytics? Is it attracting talent and doing candidate attraction and employer branding? Is it selection? Is it executive recruitment? And for the things that I'm not a good use of your time? Well, technology can do all of those things. It can do all the rest because there is literally no limit now and you couldn't say this five years ago, what's possible today is fundamentally different from what was possible five, even two even 18 months ago.And if people had that recognition that. So much is possible. And I started thinking about how to use that time more efficiently. I think more companies would get that balance right between I would stop stressing about, you know what's going to be automated. And he's my job at risk.His job is not at risk. There are so many things recruiters can and should be doing. And so many other things that technology can help them with to make their job easier.

Max: So I found out about Omer’s company, Vervoe from one of my customer success managers in Costa Rica who told me this platform is awesome. And here we are. No talking. And where it is in Australia, where the technology is very small. It connects fast and good products. They'll come to you.If you ask for permission, you will find it's out there.So we've only got a couple of minutes left, perhaps. MeAnn. Tell us about your talent pool. Has evolved in 2020, are you hiring the same people this year that you did last year or did this pandemic change the composition of your team?

MeAnn: You know what, since we, the operations never ceased for us, just like, I think the rest of the BPO companies, we thought that we were just going to be, you know, hiring the usual talent, but quite surprisingly, and this is a feedback actually from my country, head and operations and training was that.Quality was never compromised. I think quality for recruitment is always a challenge, you know, from time to time, especially whenever hiring requirements are very high, but quite surprisingly and. Amazing. Actually, we've never had any quality call-outs or performance call-outs, which is actually very good. So I think that talent is, yeah, the talent landscape is changing such that they're adapting. Because the process now is a hundred percent virtual, so they need to be adapting. You know, I always get around and say that internet speed, I think, is going to be the new communication skills. So back many years ago, when we started the PO, we were very particular of course, with communication skills today, I think.Profile should include already, also mentioned that digital is the new default. So I agree. And I think based on our experience, based on our observation, all enough to remember.

Max: You have to pick your typing skills, typing speed on your resume.

MeAnn: Yeah. It's changing for us, at least for hires that we've had, they've changed for the better, which is actually good for us.

Max: So from the firefighters speed now to internet speed, that's the new way to evaluate town. We could go on forever. Thank you for sharing your experiences in a traumatic year, you'll get an opportunity to share them with some more people.Because what we're going to do now is I'm going to move us to the networking section, which means we're going to click on the left-hand side. There's a little networking tab here. And then if my memory serves me, right, the moments are in there. You're in the hands of God, you know, you don't know who you're going to speak to next.

And it's just moving from one to the next. It's like a speed dating thing. So I know Omer told me before the call that he's married, he doesn't want to hit it. He doesn't want to play, but that's obviously keeping things professional and we're going to have fun and take the opportunity to learn about the audience that we invited here.And find out about, you know, get a bit of that real world feeling that we all miss so much from the pre COVID times. And then when we're done with that, we'll have another panel discussion and that'll be back on the main stage.

Thank you. Thank you guys. Thanks everyone.

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MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today, I'm delighted and honoured to welcome the VP of talent acquisition at Lowe's companies, one of the largest retailers in the world, certainly in the US but also big enough that we can say it's a worldwide leader and DIY. DIY equipment is how I would describe it as an outsider.

ROBERT: Yeah all home improvement but at this point it's anything for your home.

MAX: Anything for your home, that's ambitious. So I didn't yet introduce you, Robert. It's Robert

Daugherty, VP of TA for Lowe's, thanks for coming on Robert.

ROBERT: Happy to be here MAX. Thanks for having me.

MAX: Pleasure. Before we go into the Lowe's story, you've been there for a year and a half now so it must have been an unprecedented time.

ROBERT: Yes it is.

MAX: Tell us how you ended up in the field of high volume recruitments. I suppose that all began back a long time ago.

ROBERT: Yeah a long time ago. My hair was much darker at the time compared to the greys and the bit of weathering.

MAX: All those candidates have depigmented your hair.

ROBERT: Yes, that's right. So yeah I've been recruiting now for almost 25 years and I've yet to meet somebody in recruiting that intentionally went into recruiting right so I got my degree in finance and statistics. Started out in commercial banking for about eight months and realised I didn't like it, and met a guy and I'm like what do you do?, he said I am a headhunter, like what the heck's a headhunter, and ended up having lunch with the partner of the small boutique firm, and I've been in it ever since, moved over to the corporate side a little after 911 back in 2001, and here I am still surviving in this race of TA.

MAX: So after you jumped into recruitments I saw stints in the logistics space, health care, then the insurance base, and then more recently at American Airlines. I guess you jumped ship at a good time, American Airlines. You left just before the crisis. And, the bulk of the hiring there at American Airlines must have been a cabin crew?

ROBERT: Yeah it was, I had a little bit of everything. I wish I could say I was smart enough to have the insight or foresight to leave American Airlines in January and jump over to Lowe's but it was definitely some blind luck. But yeah at American Airlines, we had what I thought at the time was high volume with about 15,000 hires a year, both from cabin crew but certainly gate agents, our men and women that were on the ramp. So it was, it was across the board, but I truly found out what high volume was when I made that switch to Lowe's about a little less than a year and a half ago.

MAX: And American Airlines business has been around for such a long time, good year or bad year, the volumes don't fluctuate that much right.

ROBERT: Correct, yeah they went through a down phase obviously after 911 and then about almost 13 years before they started hiring again. And one of the things about my background is, I've somehow fallen into a niche that I tend to love which is going into transformational projects where it's either building something from scratch or Turner out. If somebody wanted me to go somewhere, it was like hey,everything's perfect to steer the ship straight, definitely wouldn't be the right role for me because I'd be pulling levers and breaking stuff so going into somewhere where things are broken or the rebuilding and that's why it wasn't they hadn't hired really since 911 until the merger with US Airways and then it was okay full steam ahead with two different RPOs, three different applicant tracking systems, none of them had been really touched in probably eight or nine years, no processes. So it was a fun kind of rebuilding

that organisation or you know post merger.

MAX: And the RPOs are probably gonna have a good year in 2021 as people are rebuilding as well. But,they can be a symptom of an organisation that has kind of given up on its core duties.

ROBERT: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I think RPOs really play a strength right as anytime you've got that seasonality to your business, where you've got those fluctuations of kind of busy season and non busy season to where you can really be able to scale up, scale down. I think that's really critical to have that at least as a strategy in your back pocket versus kind of that static organisation that you're kind of tied to,where you're either almost always under worked or overworked and you very rarely get it perfectly right.

MAX: So you were talking about the seasonality of hiring and I suppose at Lowe's you have holiday season, and maybe the back to school.

ROBERT: Yeah. Actually our busiest season is the spring. So, we're recording this one day after

Memorial Day weekend is our Super Bowl. So, we think about all the honey-do lists spring cleaning, all the people have been cramped up all winter and want to get out and start doing their projects, focused on their yards flowers, plants, this is the busiest time of year for us so we've been in in full hiring mode really since the end of January.

MAX: And I think correct me if I'm wrong that your space has also had a record breaking year where everybody's home and spending more time at home and therefore, investing with the money they have into their home.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, so once COVID hit really back in, in March of 2020 and everything

started to shut down, right, those honey-do lists grew for a lot of people. Alright, it's time to repaint this room, all these little projects just to keep people busy, and Lowe's as a recognised an essential employer, our business took off. So we started seeing sales go through the roof, we had to hire a lot of people, and we hired 280,000 external people in 2020. So, in the first four months this year we're already over 120,000. So, our fiscal year starts February, but yeah about 120,000 our first four months, so we were well on pace to continue to hire a lot of people to make sure we can take care of our customers.

MAX: Okay, well, you must have a lucky star to have moved into such a high growth. I mean I don't know if it's a lucky star or not. You said you'd like to change so I suppose that kind of stress to the organisation should keep you entertained.

ROBERT: Definitely, yeah. There's always new problems to solve every day right and and going from 2020 was so interesting because nobody obviously planned for that as you start going into the pandemic and the availability of workers was a lot higher. Now fast forward to 2021 and between stimulus,enhanced unemployment, and all of these companies the demand for hourly workers. I don't know if it's ever been higher, right, and the supply has gotten a lot lower. So as your demand starts to really outpace that supply, it really creates some interesting dynamics around what companies are doing, how they're trying to attract candidates, focused on some of those, employee value propositions, leveraging dollar sign on bonuses. I mean there was a fast food company, I saw a sign the other day that it's basically come work here, we'll give you a free iPhone. So, I think everybody threw in there and everything but the kitchen sink, trying to entice workers to come up to them.

MAX: Okay, so that's interesting: the Battle of giants, we got the Burger King, McDonald's, Lowe's,Amazon, all fighting for that hourly worker. And so, in this war for talent. How do you stake your claim and what was the EVP that Lowe's is going to try to get ahead of the game, particularly I'm wondering, I mean I don't know if you can expand on demographics but I suppose you have a few candidate personas

that you're working around.

ROBERT: We do, yeah. And having been here for just over a year brought in the leader of talent

attraction at the beginning of this year who were starting to work on really building out what that EVP looks like, building out those different personas. So most of it we haven't quite rolled out yet, but we're starting to get a better idea of what we're looking for, or what makes successful workers and as I really start to think about what differentiates us, so much of it is really evolving around I think career opportunities. So we don't have a lot of limitations as it relates to, you have to be in a certain role, you have to be here for six months or here for a year. And so many of our most senior leaders started their careers as a retail associate, whether it be a cashier or a seasonal worker. We have people in our C-suite, right, or at our EVP levels or SVPs. Yeah they didn't go to college, they grew up in retail learning the operation, built strong leadership skills, and that's really valued, so I think as we really started to look at things like, bachelor's degree and master's degree and it's really challenging to know if that is something somebody truly needs or not. And if I've got somebody who's a good worker who's motivated,

who can learn, how do we develop them, train them to figure out where they want to go in their career.

MAX: Okay, so have you managed to do away with the resume entirely for some of these positions?

ROBERT: Not yet. We're working towards it so it is kind of a year into this transformation and really starting to get to the point we're starting to implement technology and look at that TA tech stack. We went through an HR transformation at least with moving to our core HR system, 2019, but we didn't touch any of the TA tech. So right now we're in the process of implementing an AI solution. We just finished an RFP for ATS, CRM. So we'll be continuing to look at those but everything is a plan right now by summer fall of 2022. Full new tech stack and then continue to build out from there but Lowe's has been great. We really value talent and to go and get a very large multimillion dollar investment from our leaders to go and really address the TA technology of moving us into modern day is really important. So they've been open to ideas and I think going through that moving past the resume will be something that

we've got on our radar in the future.

MAX: Yeah, so the traditional providers of talents and resumes, which are Indeed and ZipRecruiter perhaps and then of course your employee referral programme which I'm sure takes the lion's share, you don't have to confirm that. I imagine it's typically like 25-30% of hires.

ROBERT: Yeah, well so as of today we don't have an employee referral programme, so we don't have we don't have technology that can track it, so it was starting a little bit bare bones with some of the stuff that we're walking into.

MAX: It was going to be 100,000 hires.

ROBERT: Yeah it was a lot of grind I will tell you, so we did 280,000 hires with certainly not the greatest processes, we've got some opportunities that relate to a candidate experience for sure. And that's where moving down this path of being more mobile based, be more from an AI candidate engagement, just being more focused on what that experience looks like. We had three and a half million applicants last year, every one of those were a customer of ours, and on the vast majority of them we probably did a pretty poor job of being able to stay in contact with them. Just because of some of the limitations we had technology wise and that was something we walked in right away and said like we gotta go fix this.

MAX: So three million plus candidates, that sounds expensive but I suppose it doesn't have to be if you've managed to activate all your stores as sourcing channels, is that where a bulk of the applications were still coming through, like, people coming in and applying at the store?

ROBERT: Yeah, when we started to look, we just had our big national hiring day about three weeks ago, and through that I think we ended up with about a little over 20,000 hires, the two biggest drivers from a source, Social was number one, and In-store signage was number two, right, so being able to make sure if people are shopping right they see the now hiring banners, we've we've got some things around the stores, there's still a lot more opportunity to get more consistent with that branding message but so much of it is just, people will see that and be like, oh, my son or daughter's coming out from college, they're i'm looking for a job or somebody who's retired and it's like, I'd like to pick up some hours on the weekend. I've always been interested in tools or gardening, whatever it is. And I think just having them see the signs and stores is really important.

MAX: And has the battle for the talent in the younger generation shifted the messaging, a little bit towards new. Are there other new demands in terms of employee value proposition from younger generations. You've never had to deal with these in your career, you were doing retail, maybe a long time ago. No? Not even this time? So this is a new audience for you?

ROBERT: Yeah. This was my first retail gig, you got it.

MAX: Yeah, and so, are you seeing some shifts and expectations from the hour resegment in particular,are their expectations higher or lower than 10 years ago?

ROBERT: Yeah I think one of the big differences especially in retailers right. We've got four different generations in the workplace right now, right from Baby Boomers to Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Y, I don't know what's coming next right, whatever that next wave is behind them. And, because at a company our size right I do believe there's something for everybody right. There are selling points for people who are retired and want to pick something else up and for the person who's it's their first job to come work, seasonal employees. So you know how you start to market and target specific audiences,right.

MAX: And that's where the concept of personas come in.

ROBERT: Yeah, you got it. Where do they hang out?

MAX: So, maybe a good chunk of your hires will end up being people in their 40s, or 50s, who are looking for something a little bit more permanent.

ROBERT: Yeah it's such a mix. We've got such a diversity not only from a demographic but when you just look at I think who we are, how we serve our communities, Lowe's has always been very big in serving our communities. Some of the best stories that I hear about are, when there's hurricanes right and what we call the 'blue bucket brigade' and the people who will drive for hours and hours and hours to go be on site to help these people that have literally just have their worlds torn apart and to help rebuild, to provide shelter, water, whatever that looks like, I'm amazed by it. And, it really just starts to look across from generations demographics, it's really, I think, a unique place where we value diversity and inclusion. But really that focus on belonging, and trying to find that larger purpose of somebody who wants to just come, like we talked about pickup jobs, but I think really one of the areas for us from a focus on is getting people to understand, you don't have to know about home improvement to come work at Lowe's, right, you don't have to know different kind of drills, you don't have to know about concrete or

drywall, you just have to want to come in and take care of people and work for what we're trying to build is the greatest retail company in the world. That's what our goal is, it's making sure that we provide right.Good talent is good talent, I can train you with product knowledge, it's harder to train you to seek out a customer because you want to help.

MAX: On things like seeking out customers' empathy, listening skills. How much of that do you think can be automated in the screening process and how much of that has to remain with a live recruiter interview?

ROBERT: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's one right. I know there's several assessment companies out there they're trying to figure that out, whether that be around how their facial recognition as they answer questions and I can tell you at least as of right now our legal department, we're pretty conservative still as much as I want to sometimes be on the bleeding edge or Trailblazer sometimes they want to let somebody else kind of figure that out first, at least as it comes down to some of those things that are a little bit harder to validate. But I think for myself if you just start looking from a science and technology perspective on where things are going, the more that I can bring an objection into the interview process, the better right. We've got 1730 stores, in between each store there's probably five

people who are decision makers, between store managers and assistant store managers, so that's quick math right, 8500 probably different interview styles and different questions that can be asked and how they assess so if I can get down to the point where I'm leveraging technology and science to start to say hey, here are the characteristics, here are the behaviours, these are the people we should at least be talking to first. I think that really starts to get things a lot more consistent because if you think of companies, I always use Starbucks as an example, hopefully I can use a company as it doesn't matter where you go, you have the same experiences as a customer, right. So, whether you go to one here in North Carolina, or I go to a Starbucks here in Hong Kong where you're at, for the most part it's the same experience right. You've got the barista, they're gonna ask you what your order is, take your name, you step to the side, wait for your name to be called etc.

MAX: I finish my coffee and I walk out of the store. I get nervous and jittery, I start calling people, way too fast, same spirit.

ROBERT: Exactly. Yeah, so how do we kind of do the same thing where I can get that repeatable process because I'm hiring the same type of people with the same expectations so it doesn't matter what mode you go into, you're gonna get great service, and be able to find what you need.

MAX: So you didn't quite answer my question on screening for empathy or listening skills, customer centricity, what I gathered from your answer is that you're trying to do a first level filter, but afterwards you still need those 8500 decision makers to be involved and to be included.

ROBERT: Yeah, as of today, I would say, yes. So we're trying to actually centralise at least that high volume recruiting of really starting to take that off of the hiring manager's responsibility. So having a centralised team that's making those hiring decisions internal within TA to bring that consistency. And I think one of the big benefits from the business is, it gives those 8500 people time back to go take care of our customers, take care of our associates, and to focus on running the business, and let us take some of those hirings. So I'm anxious, I'm looking forward to at some point being able to leverage some of the science to focus on empathy and some of those things but I think as of today, having a good well educated talented recruiter can probably pull that out a little bit safer and better.

MAX: Yeah, and then you've got it, yeah. I am always wondering how the hiring managers at the store, some location managers would resent being told who to hire, of course, and there could be some pushback there. But, ultimately it's a decision that a company would have to make based on output.

ROBERT: Yeah that's exactly right, but some of them are like, heck yeah, take it, you go do it, I'll focus on the other stuff. And then others don't want to give that up but it all comes down to being able to have the right data and then being able to tell the story, right. To be able to say and do it in a way that even though I would like to say at least better than well into the high 90% that my team can do it better because this is what they're trained to do. There's always going to be some that think they can do it better.

MAX: And maybe they are right in some cases.

ROBERT: Yeah, they're probably great at it but to what level right, and is there time more valuable spent on doing other things. And when you look at a company our size, right you just kind of have to go off the economies and scale and say okay hit 95% of the time this is going to be a better situation and we'll live with the other 5% based off of what we're doing or what we're getting.

MAX: Yeah, the rate of coverage of your stores has such a big impact on sales right.

ROBERT: Absolutely.

MAX: It's not negotiable. It's like you have the ultimate power to say, now we've got to fill this position at

all costs, or at very high cost if necessary.

ROBERT: Yeah, I can tell you exactly how much every time we've got openings, what that cost our store in sales.

MAX: Okay, that's huge. So one question that I love to ask, and we'll make the last one Robert, is a question around hiring mistakes, and if you could go back in time, travel through your 25 plus years of recruitment history, and think back about a regretful hire that you made directly for yourself, for your team, or potentially for one of your stakeholders. What was the mistake there and what did you learn from it?

ROBERT: Yeah, there's two that come to mind. I think one of my first ones and this was, I would say probably earlier in my career. And I went through and I wanted to go one direction from a hiring perspective, my boss thought I should go in another, I followed his path instead of trusting my gut and it turned out poorly, so I'd bring that one up because that was one of the most painful so there's a little bit of a lesson of trusting your gut, going in right if especially if it's something you think you do well.

MAX: Unanimous decision on recruiting is something that I think is generally a good practice like if there's five people who interviewed somebody and one person doesn't like him or her. Usually that should be the end of the debate but it rarely is.

ROBERT: True, very true. Well, and again sometimes it's hard to get, if you and I and three other people trying to figure out where we're going to go grab lunch, it's tough to get consensus on where you're going to go eat so I think that was one of the learning experiences for me is listen to all the feedback but still kind of trust my gut. And the other one was just not digging hard enough into some questions right, the person was incredibly engaging, it was a fun conversate like this is the type person I'd love to go out, let's go to happy hour sometime or you know just a great engaging person, and at that time in my career just

didn't have probably enough experience on my side to be able to really dig into, okay can this person really do the job that I need them to do, really likeable but can they actually do the execution piece of what I need to, and yeah, turns out it didn't. So we definitely can't get them all right.

MAX: Right, and if anybody's listening and wondering, how do I remove the location manager from carrying the load of course these kinds of anecdotes will come back to support the case that everybody can make mistakes, everybody can hire someone based on, and it's funny how your two examples are like, one is where you were with your gut and the other one you didn't go with your gut and your gut was right, half the time.

ROBERT: That's right, that's right.

MAX: So, yeah, we'll have to figure out maybe we'll do a special show or conference around the role of the gut.

ROBERT: That's right.

MAX: And we'll invite some gut specialists, and so on. Well, Robert it has been great to get to hear your success stories at Lowe's, and in a time when a lot of people are still waiting for the lockdowns to be lifted and for retail to come back, wonderful success story for your organization over the last year, which will get people excited for other industries, perhaps what's to come over the rest of the year. Thanks

again for joining.

ROBERT: I appreciate it Max. Thanks so much.

View Details

MAX: Thanks for joining us. I'll be inviting on the stage, Jun Abo from Transcom, Alethea from Manulife, and Fleurette from iQor. Each of them had the talent acquisition function for their respective companies, which all hire north of 5000 people a year in the Philippines alone. And so we'll be talking to them about onboarding and hiring without an office. After that, I'll be holding the mic for a little bit longer to talk about what we've experienced at Talkpush in the last year, overcoming the fear that was initiated by the crisis and building on the change that was forced in the market. And then afterwards we have a networking session, So we have 150 plus people currently online. You'll have a chance to interact with each other, and you'll have a chance to interact with a panelist at random very soon at the end of the session, but also the reason why you should stay online till the very end, is because if you stay, you will be entered to win a raffle. And if you win the raffle Talkpush will pay for a slice of pizza for everybody in your recruitment team. Terms and Conditions apply, we don't want a 100 people team, but maybe we'll go up to 10 to 20, we'll see. And so you get a chance to feed pizza to your whole team, whether they're working at home or they're working in an office if you win the raffle. So we thought that would be a good team building outcome if we could win this. So, yeah, as I was saying, these are the panelists who will be joining me on stage right now, Jun, Alethea and Fleurette from Transcom, Manulife and iQor respectively. And so, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd be kind enough to join me on stage. Hi Jun.

JUN: Hey Max.

MAX: Hello Fleurette.

FLEURETTE: Hey Max. Hi, everyone.

MAX: And Alethea. Hello.
Fantastic. Thank you all for joining. Welcome to the stage.

PANELISTS: Thanks Max.

MAX: So, you all had the HR function or talent acquisition function for some of the largest employers in the Philippines, and about a year or plus ago, you'all had to adapt to a really rapid change. And I think we're all past the trauma of how to adapt a little bit and we've kind of shaken it off. But, take us back to that time perhaps of a year ago, when the biggest challenges of hiring remotely, and particularly on the onboarding side hit you in the face. Can you remind us what you went through at that time, and I don't have a particular order in mind so maybe we'll do alphabetically, starting with you, Alethea. Yes?

ALETHEA: Okay. I think I've had a very interesting experience in this pandemic simply because I was actually in a different organization when I first joined, or when they first experienced a pandemic and I was the Global Head for onboarding for that bank. So I was managing all the regions across the world, and was basically the one responsible for ensuring that the digital onboarding was happening. And then I decided for some crazy reason to change organizations so I actually experience digital onboarding as a candidate, right. So, I think, from both of those perspective, the main concern was really how do you maintain the candidate experience, and it was very interesting because I didn't have the best experience on boarding on with Manulife, and that was actually the reason I decided that their job offer really focus because I said I can do this better than they're doing it now. And because I was a candidate right at that point in time, and you know it was really seeing that in both perspectives really just highlighted and how this pandemic is going to turn everything into a digitalization concern, as well as coordinating with a government so it was such a shock to actually be going through that last year.

MAX: Yeah, that's a really good hot tip for everybody who's in talent acquisition which I know is most of the audience, if you're applying for a company that has a horrible onboarding process, that's it. That's where you should be working because you have a lot of things you can fix. Great. Thank you. Fleurette, tell us about those challenges from a year plus ago, and particularly on the onboarding side.

FLEURETTE: So Max I told my husband that once we have grandkids. I'm going to be spending days and days talking about the horrible experience of pandemic because we get to live through it right, but as we all know there's so many learnings that came through but let me discuss to you a few things that really shocked us to our core because there's no playbook, there is no training that will prepare you for this. So one is, it was really difficult to connect with employees, right. You can't just call them and expect them to pick up the phone and on the onboarding side it was so difficult for us to get all the documents completed on time. So every company will have a list of mandatory contractual requirements for them to be able to join us. And that has been really difficult and then in addition to that, when the government started reducing the capacities of your government agencies, like NBI. The schools aren't open, their online portal is not very helpful, you have issues with your pre employment medical clinics, all of those put together is clearly a nightmare and I'm sure everyone in attending this event is nodding their head trying to relive that experience. So when you put really big issues in front of people, that's when you're gonna see teams actually working together, because for us, this is the time that we have to prove our worth. This is the time that you have to do the noble job of giving Filipinos the jobs that they need. So, yeah, I can, I can go on and on but trust me, you want Jun to also weigh in.

MAX: I do. But yeah, there's a double message here, it's like, on one hand, it's overwhelming, on the other hand, it's hero mode. This is when we do our most important work. So that was, I think a lot of people went through those two emotions at that time. Jun?

JUN: Yeah I echo everyone's sentiment. So there is a Chinese curse that goes, may he live in interesting times. And like it or not we are living in interesting times just like everyone else. When we transition to the lockdown in the pandemic its impact on work, initially a lot within the talent acquisition team it's okay, we're not going to be hiring. So there's not enough work for us. But lo and behold after a month of slowdown, we started hiring and hiring, and hiring. One of the few questions that we started asking ourselves is with our onboarding process, how do we make our candidates feel that they've made the right decision in terms of joining Transcom. Second one, and the most important one for me I think it's, How do we make them excited about being part of the Transcom culture. How do we help them prepare for their role that they signed up for and how will employees fit in based on the new team, which they could not be meeting for weeks or even months. What we've learned early on, it's the pandemic, and the shifting to working at home. It's much easier for new employees to resign when there's no feeling of loyalty to develop and again organizational culture appears remote. Again most of our organization was centered towards building that rapport, that engagement and culture when they're on site. When you can see them, when you can touch them, when you can talk to them. But how do you translate that into this new normal. So, yeah those are the challenges that we face early on.

MAX: I'm gonna go back to what Fleurette was talking about, and the paperwork and working with the administrative side of onboarding, but before going there, you touched upon a key point Jun, which is the fact that you don't have the same opportunity now when you onboard someone to make them feel part of a community, and so it's easier for them to just stop showing up. And I'm sure we're all looking for ways to create that social fabric while not meeting people in person. I'd love to get some of the tips from this very experienced panel. What are some of the initiatives that you can recommend as part of the onboarding specifically, that will make somebody who is not going to shake your hands, not give you a hug, not have a meal with you still feel part of the group, and the community? What are some of the actionable tips you can offer our listeners or our viewers?

ALETHEA: I think one of the things that really are very low hanging fruit that we did was to change our templates right. You always have gathered a template that you send out via email and automated responses. And we really made it into a point that they were a little bit more engaging, warmer, and I mean just adding, I hope you're safe as you receive this, those types of little nuggets that you input just to help them understand that you do understand that there's something happening in the world that may not let them respond as quickly as usual I think one of the other things also on those templates is that we really spoke with cross functions, and had them understand that from a family that experiences standpoint, we're seeing that there's a better opportunity to engage, so especially with IT managers, tapping them and having them communicate better with their near hires not even the ones who have accepted offers yet but really tapping the hiring managers to ensure that they are part of that community and making sure that they understand that if somebody wasn't able to appear on an interview and there was no notice, we can't just blacklist them because that was in some functions that was what they did, but our next reaction is always, are they okay? And we would send out a message saying that we notice you weren't able to do your interview, so are you okay? And those little nuggets really help us ensure that they see us as a caring organization. And we really meant it, so it was really just putting more of our heart into the communication instead of just thinking it off as another template that we send out.

MAX: Right, so don't listen to your instincts, and send him a hate mail, no, just hold back. Okay, I just been ghosted again, something could have happened. Compassion first. Yeah, that's good.

JUN: Yeah, just to add I think this remote working environment, it provides a sense of not fitting in, it can develop really quickly, especially with the lack of interaction, I really agree that he can't over communicate enough, we need to make sure that the candidates would feel that sense of belongingness right from the get go. One tip I could share with you guys it's for the ones watching this, we've started investing in our onboarding concerts. So it's both people driven and automated. So for people driven we have our onboarding ambassador. So these are folks who would manage the relationship in the communication from the moment a candidate signs their job offer, all the way up till they show up. They attend their training, they do their orientation, the relationship is there so if there are any questions, concerns that the new employees are too shy to ask their hiring manager or supervisor, then the onboarding ambassador is going to be their buddy. So they can ask questions, or even escalate concerns. I mentioned, automating it and you know Max I've been working closely with your team on how we can automate our onboarding process especially for our frontline advisors, and the key for us when automating that is how do we focus on cultural immersion, so that, again, focusing on that sense of belongingness, leveraging on our well being platform and programs because, again, like what the earlier speakers in the earlier panel mentioned employee wellness and well being. Mental health is important. How do you create that sense of belonging, and we also tried to add that virtual meet and greets, virtual coffee chats with our new hires.

MAX: Great. Fleurette, do you want to add to the topic was everything covered I can move to the next question.

FLEURETTE: Yeah, go ahead, Max.

MAX: Okay, I will. Well, it's an ever ending topic anyway. How do we make people feel at home but I do like the ambassador's suggestion. It goes a little bit against what calpak was saying, where he was talking about the generalist where everything is handled by technology and recruitment is done by a generalist, there's still room for specialization perhaps like a specialist onboarding, specialist sourcing. I don't think that debate is settled, of course. We talked a little bit about, you were mentioning, people who quit their jobs a little bit more easily when they don't come to the office. How's the experience of the journey from somebody, applying being shortlisted being hired and then actually showing up on day one on the job. Has that funnel yielded some surprises and some shockers compared to a year ago? In other words, what are some of the drop off points that people should be on the lookout for where there's a risk of somebody disappearing, doing a Houdini on you? What can you share with us on this Fleurette or others, yes.

FLEURETTE: The unfortunate reality is that you have to master dropouts on every step of the way. So, because I have this ability for all recruitment and all of HR and we track this and it is making us sad. I do have recruiters and by the way, plugging hi to my loving HR and recruitment team, they come to me and say that they got ghosted in real life on their personal life and even at work, they get ghosted and so it has becoming to be something that they're very concerned about, and what you can do is first, work with the data that is available for you, right. And based on that data, we have consumed days, not only hours but days, looking at the data, trying to analyze why people are ghosting us and some of the data points that I can share to the team is that one, are they not showing up after the offer? So, for sure, it has something to do with the offer, 80 90% of the time, are they not showing up when you give them a long list of onboarding documents? I can tell you that they're afraid and they don't have the time and they don't want to go to those physical offices to get those documents. So, what we have done is really an investment, all around, an investment on technology. Let me talk about technology first, we made sure because the 201 folders that are used, it's something that we used to call many decades ago and I'm probably giving away my age. That is something of the past, you cannot do 201 folders anymore, physical ones right. So, we have invested in a platform where candidates can submit it can be uploaded, indexed in that particular platform so that when someone needs to audit you, it is available at your fingertips, right. The second part is we have made an investment on a vendor. If your candidates cannot go or do not want to go to government agencies, schools, right, you have someone to do that for them. I know this is not something that everyone is accustomed to. Not all companies are not willing to make that investment, I get it, but for us we have computed the financial benefits of doing that versus not doing that. So every person that we don't hire is obviously, a loss in revenue, so you just have to put forth a good financial comparison on the investment versus the loss of revenue. And above all that Max, I'm a mother and Happy Mother's Day to everyone that is here, technology and platforms can only work if you have parents and support systems that can nurture them, right. So you have to train them properly, you have to invest in them the same way that we invest in our kids' education, you need to make sure that you are patient, because technology will not work 100% of how you desire that technology to work. So again, spending time with your frontline nurses is critical, spending time understanding what the candidates are talking about you is really critical at this point in time.

JUN: So to add to that one. For one of the aha moments that we've seen, and then I'm talking about our CSRs and PSRs frontline advisors, we've seen an increase in terms of fallouts across the various stages of our recruitment funnel, it's really critical that you have a very rigid and strict funnel management in place, just so that you know what's going on at every stages of the funnel, but just focusing on the fallouts at the end of the funnel so we see fallout for those folks who signed their job offers, but did not proceed with their pre employment background checks. We've seen folks who have signed their employment contracts but did not show up on day one. And when we try to look at the different drivers, what we notice is that we categorize our candidates or new employees into three profiles, the starters, the shifters and the adapters. Starters are fresh out of school, shifters are those with BPO experience and then you have the adapters who are coming from different industries for the first time to work in a BPO. Shifters what we found, they have a tendency to get attracted to the next shiny object so even though they've signed a job offer if another company comes along and offers them 500 pesos or 1000 more than what they got on their job offer, they jump to that offer and ghost you. For adapters and starters, it's more important that we are able to reaffirm that they made the right decision. So identifying what are the different drivers that will trigger their motivations. So for example, is there a specific benefit that we have that we can then share with them so as they're more inclined to push through with joining us. And I think a lot of it it's really how to properly communicate, and ensure that you have the right platform that you're able to send this communication templates, messages, as well as a live person that can still reach out and address their concerns at any given time.

MAX: A real human being flesh and bone, so old school.

JUN: Fine.

MAX: We're not over yet. The robots haven't won yet. Okay, well I think you raised an important, old school weapon or a tactic of the recruiter which is, adapt to your audience, recruitment and sales adapt to your audience. The audience of course is shifting the psychology of the candidate says different than it was a year ago, their demands are different, so a lot of things have changed and so I'd like to ask our panelists about the demands of the new hires, what are some of the questions that they ask now that you never thought they would asked a year or maybe two, three years ago, Or let's just say that the frequency of these questions has risen up, what are some of the new trends in terms of demands, and that that we need to anticipate in talent acquisition?

ALETHEA: Thanks, Max, I think, it's maybe less of a trend but more of like a huge impact. Now, of course, everybody is basically having nightmares about a question, do I need to work on site if you're hiring for contact centers. The current quarantine conditions that change every week that determine our public safety, public transportation and all of those things really affect decisions on a daily basis, that's one of the things. The other thing also is that, so Manulife hires an actuarial analyst to salespeople to the contact center role and what we can really see is that there is an ask in terms of what mental wellness support we have. We have questions about how we support the family. So there's really this need to not just speak about monetary compensation but non monetary as well. And how often do they need to go to the office. Manulife currently for most of us 90% we still work from home, and we don't see that changing over the next year or so, given where our vaccination is, so even when we share to people, to the earlier panels point, do you want to work from home or stay on site, and that leads to a different type of conversation every single time. I think one of the other things is that links to the initial question, or the former question that you had was the major fallout for most of our higher strike now and maybe because I'm volume hiring IT roles is intermittent interruptions. So, the current assessment that we have a lots of people after 60 seconds so it automatically fails them, and we have to adapt to that because a lot where people may be on prepaid, or a short borrowed boost aid, so I think that's really it that really supporting them, not on the process itself of hiring but what's in it for me, as you support me through the pandemic.

JUN: So that's very good, just a word that I think the employee value proposition for work at home needs to evolve, then going back to what I shared earlier, a lot of the traditional BPOS our employee value proposition is centered around working on site. Case in point for Transcom we have childcare facilities on site, you have coffee shops on site, you have gyms on site. But what uses are all of these on site facilities if your employees are working at home, how do we then evolve the employee value proposition. So when you're targeting folks whose preference is working at home, you're still able to attract them and what's attractive for them. I agree with employee mental wellness, that's one of the key programs that we heard our employees asking for us to do more. We also seen an interesting development that's actually what we're seeing as a trend especially in our Bisaya sites, it's for those without any call center experience, they're actually interested in working on site, just because they know that they don't have any previous call center experience, they would like to be trained and mentored closely by supervisors and by trainers, so we're now looking at bringing in training so as they can then be handled, and get the proper training and the mentoring by their trainers and supervisors.

FLEURETTE: Hey Max, I'm going to add something that is slightly off topic but very much related. Okay, so talking about internet issues that's a given. In fact, all the companies have lobbied for IV BAP to really talk to the telecom companies to make sure that this is on top of their radar. You can only push so much work at home as long as the technology can support it, so the topic that I wanted to share with the group is, I think it was mentioned briefly earlier, that new hires always want to work from home because of the fear of the pandemic. However, once they started doing that they realized that, first, it is not sustainable, very noisy, you have siblings, you have parents or vice versa, that are very noisy in the background with roosters and dogs that are making noise.

MAX: And the Aircon.

FLEURETTE: Yeah and fan, not always Aircons Max, fans, right. So, you do have this real problems and then they realize that it's not only that I miss my colleagues, my friends, but it is not logically possible for me to sustain this, and then they do the reverse they asked to be placed back in the office but then, companies will have to weigh that end versus what the government is asking us to do, right, you can only have so much capacity at work. And then the other issue that we're also seeing is that, the engagement, regardless if you coach or train at some point in time you need to think of something new, whether it's gamification, whether it's giving them you know five minutes of doing something radical. I think those are the things that will keep them engaged, right, they're there, people are so done being at home, whether it's for work or personal reasons, it's just something that we need to be aware of and cognizant of.

MAX: I believe everybody is reading the same articles as we all are, people coming back to the office, and in some parts of the world but actually I just looked at the stats just this week that office occupancy in the US, which is supposed to be way ahead of most of the countries in terms of vaccination, still only adds 25 or 30% of what it was 14 months ago. So, it will definitely take a while, and so this investment in wellness and well being is absolutely a smart investment today because if it's bad today and people are fed up today, you can imagine it's just going to be worse six months from now. So, anticipate. Now talking about something not really related but we talked about our new hires being fed up. What about our recruiters being fed up, having to do all that, chasing documents and all that repetitive, mundane work around onboarding, repeating to them: go through the checklist, send me the documents, etc etc etc. It can be a very repetitive task. Now tell me, what do you think can be automated. I mean it's definitely something that my company is working on, we don't have to do any product placement here but I'm just kind of curious what your thoughts are on what can be automated and what will remain human.

FLEURETTE: So, Max by alluded earlier to a long list of requirements right. It begins with a serious review of the HR team with the support of their operations leadership team to really review it. Is it mandatory, yes or no? Is it a contractual obligation with the client, yes or no? or maybe it's a nice to have, because we have been collecting it for many years until now we carry that practice. So, we've done that, it's a painful exercise, but the result coming out of that exercise was huge, right. So, from a list of a couple dozen to now very critical. And by the way again because of the pandemic, you have to categorize them, which documents do you need pre offer, pre onboarding and post onboarding, I'm addressing the elephant in the room I don't think that all companies are going to share all their issues all their problems. I am doing that a little bit so that folks can actually learn. What I can share to address that problem I will repeat, a bit of what I shared earlier is that every time you invest on a technology and Max should be happy if I say this, every time you invest on technology don't think of it as an additional expense for the company. You have to really weigh in and compare how much revenue loss you are experiencing for not being able to hire them on time, not only hire them, but hire them on time. So, every week, that you're missing filling in your classes, that equates to 1000s of dollars for every company, right. So, technology platform, you need to be able to submit indexes, and report on those documents real time. There couldn't be any delay in those particular processes. Latency is something that we hate, right. We cannot afford issues of the system being down, latency. So those have to be considered when choosing the right technology platform and even the vendors that you're going to be working with.

JUN: For me, just going back to your question about what can be automated. Pre day one communication, how to keep your candidates warm from the moment they sign job offers, reach a certain process all the way up to day one, the communication there can be automated, document collection can be automated and tracking. And then, document the creation so employment offers and contracts, including signatures that can also be digitized and automated.

MAX: So that's quite a lot Jun. In fact, with your permission in my next presentation I'll give a sneak peek of a robot you have running on Facebook. Permission granted, yes. All right, great. Well Athleta, did you want to add to the topic on automation or was everything covered, we move on to the next question?

ALETHEA: We can move on.

MAX: Okay. All right, I'm gonna look at audience questions then. We have one audience about wearing multiple hats. Are you considering partnering with recruitment firms, what are the things you expect from them. Okay, I think that's an interesting question, staffing firms used to account for maybe 20% of hires in the BPO sector and in this space I think that number has come down, but the RPO sector, our Recruitment Process Outsourcing always does well on the backend of a recession over crisis because it gives companies an opportunity to grow without having to grow their headcount internally too fast for TA. Do you think that staffing firms and recruitment partners have a nice few quarters ahead of them or do you see that their share of higher will continue to fall in trends with the last five years, anyone?

ALETHEA: So my own personal experience has been that what Jun said earlier, we thought we were not gonna hire a lot. And we actually ended up hiring a lot, and one of the two sides of a coin, were countries, especially first world countries, can't cope quickly enough with the effect of the economy then they move the work to third world countries or developing organizations where labor is a lot less and that really means that countries like the Philippines, and locations like Chengdu to start getting this huge amount of work migration that you did not plan or forecast for, and that's really where the RPO and a third party comes in right. I think that definitely an RPO and the third party vendors for direct placements are one of the three legs of my stool right now that's keeping me sitting quite well. On the other hand, though, I think there is definitely a change in the way that we interact with RPO or the third party vendors. We find that they can't cast a wide net right now. We have to be very specific in terms of sourcing strategies and be very strategic in what requisitions we give to them and for how long. So, I think from an internal recruiting team standpoint, the team is a little bit more hands on even over junior recruiters who work directly with a vendors recruiters that we actually have to be very aligned in terms of KPIs and deliverables, and be aware that the best people or you need right now is really just for open communication and consistency and let them know that we basically have to ensure that they're we're aligned in terms of the process and targets that we have but currently we depend on them.

MAX: Yeah, it's like the RPO model more than their traditional staffing firm role.

ALETHEA: Yes.

MAX: Great.

FLEURETTE: Max, if I may. I like recruiting firms that are results based right, so obviously depending on how many you hire that's the contract that you have with them. We have our fair share of successes with some of our recruiting partners, but also something that I'm not sure if my peers have encountered. Because our leads management database is so big and robust. When a recruiting firm gives us a list of 190 plus percent of those people are actually on our leads database, right. Specifically, our offices are in the provinces where we are either, the biggest or the top three biggest so it's really difficult. I'm being upfront and honest that recruiting partners will remain important to BPOs, but also they need to think of a way of elevating their game as well because again, we have those names in our own databases.

JUN: Yeah, for us, I think we've been fortunate to have weaned ourselves from headhunters and this is for volume hiring, for non volume hiring so these are for support folks management executives, they will always have a niche. Specialized hiring like multilinguals, yes will have RPOs and headhunters, but for volume hiring we're fortunate enough to have followed the global trend, it's gone down year over year, I think our highest was around 24% higher share 2-3 years ago, now it's 5% higher share. And I think part of it that's because we keep asking ourselves, these guys are sourcing based on the same board that we're sourcing, so we just need to do a better job in terms of added attraction. And one of the things that we wanted to get away from it's we don't want to just keep on getting leads and endorsements from headhunters, we want them to if a vendor would like to partner with us. They need to own part of the recruitment funnel management, chase after their candidates, overlay the job interview stages. So, yeah, I think the future for headhunters for volume hiring for Transcom it's going to continue to go get a smaller piece of the hiring share pie.

MAX: Okay alright. Well same message, up your game, specialize or otherwise your market share will shrink. You've heard it from the panel. I'm sure the recruiters have that competitive fibre that will find a way to reinvent themselves as we all do. In Fact that would be the topic of my next presentation and I'm going to jump into that and thank my esteemed panelists, Jun, Alethea and Fleurette for joining us. They had some of the most cutting edge talent acquisition operations in one of the most tech aggressive markets in the world, the Philippines, which I had the pleasure of working for years and well thanks for sharing and of course where to reach, they are all on LinkedIn and if you want to continue chatting with them I hope they are going to be attending networking session later. Jun, Alethea and Fleurette, thank you for your time.

JUN: Thank you, bye.

FLEURETTE: Thanks so much Max.

ALETHEA: Thanks so much guys, bye guys.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Larry Nash. Larry is Director of Talent Acquisition for Americas EY: Ernst and Young, formerly known as, what was EY called a long time ago, Larry?

Larry: Well, Ernst & Young but yeah it was Ernst & Whinney and Arthur Young merged a long time ago to form Ernst and Young. I think it was 1989 around that. So it's been a long time since we've been EY or Ernst and Young.

Max: Yeah it was, and then EY the acronym became the official name just a few years ago, right?

Larry: Correct.

Max: All right, great. Well, welcome Larry. Thanks for joining us today. And I'll start by asking you how

you ended up working in talent acquisition, if you can go back to your pre EY days, which you've been there for over 18 years. So, take us back to the start of your career, how did you end up in talent acquisition?

Larry: Yeah, great for at first, Max, thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to theconversation. So yeah prior to joining EY, I was at Arthur Andersen, another professional services firm, where I was for 13 years in a variety of human resource roles, mostly in the recruiting space or talent acquisition space. And prior to Arthur Andersen I started out at Price Waterhouse. So I have the theme in my career Max where I've spent all of my career within professional services and have just really enjoyed and love the culture, the focus on people, constant innovation and progressiveness and focus on inclusivity and diversity, so it's been over 30 years in the profession, as you said, almost 1985 and it's been a wonderful experience for me and for the last few years now I've been leading our America's, what we call actually talent attraction and talent acquisition.

We used to be called recruiting, but recently we change that to talent attraction and acquisition to recognize the broadness and diversity of our roles, and the focus of not only getting candidates interested in the profession and in opportunities at EY but obviously then having an amazing process to bring them in and assess them and hopefully join the organization.

So we have an excellent community of recruiters, or talent attraction and acquisition professionals across the world. And lucky to be a part of that team.

Max: You're mentioning this industry. What should we call it, management consulting? Well, professional services at large as being an industry that you feel great kinship to because, from the outside it's something that's always good to have on your resume, something like that so it's a great place to attract ambitious young talents, coming out of the best schools, and that's the main thing right from a talent acquisitions perspective, you don't have to fight too hard to get some pretty good resumes.

Larry: Yeah I think we use professional services because there's a multitude of services from consulting and tax and energy work to a whole slew of services that all the organizations in the industry offer. And yes, we do feel we have a really strong brand and part of our value proposition for candidates is an exceptional EY experience, it's yours to build right, we provide the tools the experiences, the platforms to help you grow your career as you want to grow it, whether that's working in different service lines over the course of your career, whether that's making partner, wonderful achievement or having just wonderful experiences and becoming a CEO somewhere else or CFO or Chief Development Officer or starting your own business. So we're really excited over the course of our life as an organization to build careers across industries and within our organization. And I would say though, Max, it is certainly a competitive market out there right now.

A lot of organizations, not just those in our vertical, but really in all facets of industries are looking for a lot of the same talent that's technology transformation or strategy work or technology skills or tax consultants, I can go on and on about what we're looking for, but a lot of organizations are looking for that top talent. So we work really hard to differentiate ourselves, and to get to know talent, and hopefully distinguish what we can offer versus what other organizations can. Certainly on the student side we do a lot, we have a lot of programs to offer from a variety of internships, challenges and programs.

Max: Let's stay on this topic Larry on the competition that's stiff, to simplify things we could say the MBAs, they end up either in consulting industry, or maybe technology is the hot one right now. So are the looming threats today, where a greater proportion of the deep thinkers, the strategics end up working in technology, and that's eating part of your talent pool.

Larry: No, I wouldn't say that I think a lot of MBAs, and we certainly hire a number of MBAs, but we also hire a lot at the undergraduate level. I think, continues to be the case as people are looking for a variety of work and I think one of the things that has become more common lately is wanting to work at an organization that aligns with your values and purpose. For us at EY it's building a better working world. And that's not just what we're doing with our people but how we help our clients build a better working world. And that could be working with an organization whose bringing a drug to market faster right, to address and be working with governments or entities to create infrastructure and programs to help the needy. So, we offer a lot, around an individual's purpose and hopefully that's aligned with our purpose of building a better working world. I do think though that individuals like you mentioned MBAs, they certainly are interested in strategy work, working for financial services organizations, technology companies. But I also think, again, that sector is really interested in aligning with their values and purpose and that is a big reason. I think that is why individuals are joining organizations or where organizations might be differentiating themselves is the purpose that aligns with that individual.

Max: And almost 19 years at EY and so you must have seen different styles of leadership and adapted to a changing market. So, can you give us a sense for how EY's EVP has evolved during that time. It sounds and I'm reading between the lines that perhaps EY is focusing a little bit more on the transformative power of it's work on the workplace, and I am still attached to the romantic notion of no the road to partnership and the hyper competitive world of consulting, where you come in and you're treated like cannon fodder, but if you rise, then you can rise fast. So that's an image that maybe is a little bit dated.

Larry: Yeah, having been at EY for 19 years I would respectfully say that's a little dated, and we've always been focused about offering the right experiences and getting the right training. So training, learning and coaching and being part of an inclusive and diverse culture, I've always been mainstays of what we offer that hasn't changed.

But we also recognize that experiences and learning are building blocks to where you want to take your career. And that's why it's evolved into it's yours to build. We as an organization need to provide the tools and the experiences and the learning and the platforms and awesome technology so you could do your job well and learn. And we also provide mobility where you want to take your career, but a lot of it is on the individual, how do I want to grow my career and how do I want to develop in different ways.

So you had mentioned how the leadership evolved, and obviously coming out of that pandemic over a year right, it's been a challenging experience I speak for US leadership, where I sit out of our Pittsburgh offic,

Max: Go Steelers!

Larry: That's right, the leadership here has just been so tremendous since, we all still were in we're locked down started back in March here in the US and the focus has always been on the safety and health and security of our people and our leadership, Kelly Greyer our US, Chairman and CEO just set a tone from the beginning that we're in this for you and we're going to get through this together. We're going to come out of the stronger and that tone was just exceptional and gave people a lot of comfort in a very unusual right and precedented time, and certainly our recruiting team, just to transition a little bit to what did we do, we had to change everything virtually overnight, and move from a lot of in person events to exclusively using virtual talent agencies from video interviews and virtual onboarding and virtual events, as we were still recruiting students from campuses to a virtual internship program where in the US we had over 3300 interns, a summer ago and we'll have an equal number this year, which we're excited about.

So, the ability to pivot quickly, sometimes by choice, sometimes not by choice has been something we've certainly had to experience and leveraging more tools like social media right to engage candidates in a much more and in a much bigger way has been something that has changed and transitioned. We had our interns in fact Max, do an Instagram takeover last year and really showcase a day in the life of, and it was very authentic and real and people got to see what it was like to work at EY. So there's a lot of things we've had to do to pivot over the course of the last year, and some things that we'll continue to endure as we get back to. I don't know the terms are evolving but to what extent will our workplace be reimagined where things will be different.

Max: Yeah, and EY probably already allowed for people to spend a lot of time working from home or working remotely. And, you know, of course would have been less impacted than say traditional manufacturing business where you have to show up at the office every day, but the white collar work can be performed from anywhere.

Larry: Yeah we were able to do that, although it was a big change, certainly in our business, we're out at our client locations quite often and even there, and that stopped overnight, so our teams really had to pivot and figure out what type of tools, zoom, other tools, Microsoft Teams actually was a lifesaver for us.But tools to collaborate in a way that could accomplish the work and yeah, we were able to surely showcase and demonstrate that but, it takes a lot to change how you've done things for a long time to doing it in a new way overnight.

Max: And you're mentioning tools so I want to latch on to that and you know I'm a technologist. I'm super interested in how you were able to transition to 100% virtual hiring. Perhaps you could tell us what we know, what were some of the favorite tools or some of the technology that helped you through that transition.

Larry: Yeah, we were fortunate we've been on a number of years ago, invested in video interviewing. So on our campus side we use the yellow platform and we're able to easily switch from live interviews to video, because that has already been going on actually before the pandemic. And then we also use HireVue where we will leverage recorded video interviews and live video interviews and working with those technologies just has been seamless and allowed for just a very real experience and it didn't really impact our ability to meet and assess and compel candidates, so that so that was fortunate, and then Max actually this had started before the pandemic, but we have been on this journey to implement e-based assessments, which is a new thing in our assessment process, which gives us greater insight into a candidate's cognitive abilities and personality constructs and we rolled that out just a few months ago. So, the pandemic gave us more time to profile our high performers and one of the qualities they have that new joiners to have. And so far it's been a great experience getting that additional insight so it's another data point for us as we make determinations on whom we forward in the process. But it's fun, it's engaging, it's quick it's 12-15 minutes of games, not too long. A lot of the feedback has been, hey it's fun, it's challenging, and every participant gets an insight report, which gives them a take, they move from process or not and things that they can learn more about themselves and understand.

Max: Yeah, I've even heard of some assessment vendors that would, if they're if they're not a good fit for the employer that submitting them, would go as far as recommending alternative careers, to those who say fail the test, although some tests are impossible to fail because there's no wrong answers. It sounds like in the case of your game, you're measuring the cognitive abilities so there is a way you can fail right.

Larry: I wouldn't say there's a failure. No, I would say it's just getting an additional insight to more of your shrinks and, the important part of all this process whatever vendor you choose is, what is it that that you're looking for, and what's the right match and I do think you get better insights, I do think by having a consistent game you're helping to reduce some unconscious bias in the process, and it just adds another data point to making perhaps more informed date decisions, and not going on gut, which sometimes can happen in the assessment process.

Max: We know to love and hate our gut. I've had many people on this show, who have shared moments in their recruitment history that they've come to regret, a hiring mistake. A good chunk of them could be put in sort of in the gut basket, where you just go with your gut, and you forgot to ask all the questions,you forgot to go through the process. Larry I am going to ask you the same question, you know in your 18 years at EY, don't tell me you haven't made some recruitment mistakes. We all have.

Larry: Never.

Max: Been back to one particular thing that's done, and without giving names, could you share with me,what was the source of your mistake?

Larry: Yeah, no I mean certainly, of course, we've all made I'd not say mistakes but maybe. Yeah, I mean missteps, I know that's a nuanced word. I think for me when I look back, it's when I didn't probe enough, I really didn't get under the surface of the traits, and capability, someone was bringing in and got a little bit too enamored with this as what was stated on the resume so this had to be the truth. So, getting underneath it more is something I've been focusing, I focused on more after some of those experiences. Pardon me for that noise and interruption. So getting underneath that surface so when I didn't do that enough, then I had certainly some mistakes so you always have to take that resume, take that background and really dive underneath it to understand the worst capabilities and what they did and what they bring to the table to truly know more of what you're bringing into the organization.

Max: No wishful thinking, basically. No wishful thinking. Don't assume positively. Great. Well, thinking about the last year and changing the landscape view. I'm wondering about the geographical elements and whether you know the longitude and latitude data that we get tagged on to every single individual, as to where they live or where they're going to go to work as that element has lost its weight over the last year. How's that affected the map of the town for you and your recruitment strategy? Are you now looking at North America differently than you were a year or two years ago?

Larry: Yeah, I think even before this, just the insights that we're able to get from some of the tools out there, give you a better idea of the supply and demand for skills. And that has certainly helped us focus when we see a bigger supply of talent for a particular skill set, right, in that location a little bit more than maybe we did in the past and there's certainly some shifts going on right there's some shifts in technology from the West Coast down to Austin, down to the other parts of the US.

So we've always been following those trends and using the data we're getting from a variety of tools. But yeah, as we are reimagining the workplace, we are gonna, as an organization, work differently. And I mentioned earlier, we're a consulting firm or professional services organization so we spend a lot of time with our clients. And now as we listen to what our clients are thinking of doing as we come out of this, many of them, want a hybrid where we're in person but also working flexibly a little bit more than we did in the past and is something we're able to factor into where should people be hired into and where can they be and open different doors, so I wouldn't be able to tell you right now there's certain locations that we're particularly focused on but it does open up the funnel of where you can find talent and then imagine how we're working.

Max: Yeah, I'm not gonna ask you to open the books on the specifics of which state is performing better than others but would you agree with the statements that the big metropolitan areas have a little bit less veneer today than they did a couple years ago, is that a fair statement?

Larry: I think it depends on the talent you're looking for right and you've got to get a bit granular, to where that talent is so for example if I'm looking for deep financial services experiences right certain cities are going to come to mind and at a point to come to mind because that's where the talent is. Now some of that talent may be shifting elsewhere so we'll have other areas to look at but we certainly aren't going to ignore where those pockets of talent exist.

I do think that there's a personal choice that's occurring for people from the pandemic of where they want to work right and that certainly that's gone on. I do think it's hard to know if that's completely permanent, Max, or that's what's happening now. But things could shift back so I think we have to pay close attention to those themes. I would say where we're headed, if we're looking at an integrated workforce being our full time staff, where does automation play a role, right in delivering work. How does the contingent workforce play a role and how does our global organization also play a role and how do we serve clients effectively. So I think all those levers are parts of our integrated workforce that are getting looked at even more closely and differently with just some of the changes that are going on in the world.

Max: And is a portion of your new workforce, coming from location undisclosed to New Mexico,

Tamarindo Costa Rica or some other exotic places where people can deliver consulting services from any old place now, these days, or we're still attached to sort of more traditional models.

Larry: Yeah, I'd say right now in the US those working in the US organization are our residents in the US. And I don't think that's changing in the near future but certainly something we need to pay close attention to.

Max: Who knows. Yeah, it's becoming a small world. And, well, the small world has brought us together for a nice chat. I certainly am personally thankful for the time that I've spent in management consulting because I thought it was a little bit brutal but I loved it, and I thought that it helped to shape some of my thinking and made me a little bit more demanding to myself on the thinking part. So, I think it's a great career for a lot of people who want to be a little bit more structured, and thanks for coming to share your stories, Larry, on the podcast. How do people get in touch with you if they'd like to?

Larry: Yeah, certainly you could always look me up on LinkedIn, that's probably the easiest way, Larry Nash. And I'd say with management consulting Max and I totally get everybody's going to have a different experience. But I'd leave you with this or leave those that are listening, the ability to work with, fortune 1000 companies and emerging companies and being able to see all of those over the course of a career, can truly, right, make you just a more well rounded individual as well as give you experiences that will help you over the course of a lifetime. So I certainly if anybody's interested in a career in professional services look me up on LinkedIn and Max I appreciate your time and talking with you today.

Max: Thanks, Larry. Well we'll leave you with those engaging words for EY. And thanks again for coming on the show.

Larry: My pleasure.

Max: That was Larry Nash from EYI reminding us never to waste a crisis. In the case of EY, they were able to transition a lot of the initiatives to accelerate a lot of the initiatives that they had already started around video interviewing around gamification in order to get a more automated process and to be able to consider a wider talent pool across the last year. Hope you enjoyed this interview and that you'd like to hear from more talent acquisition professionals from a variety of industries. That's what you'll get on the recruitment hackers podcast. So please subscribe and share with friends.

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Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast.I’m Max your host and today I am delighted to welcome on the show, Elena Valentine from Skill Scouts.

Elena: Yes.

Max: Hi, Elena. Welcome.

Elena: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 3:30 PM my time and 5:30 AM. Hong Kong time.

Max: Oh, don't embarrass me, come off as this person with social skills.Now, everybody knows I work before everybody wakes up. It's sad, but it's true. So Elena thanks for coming and for taking time off your working hours to share your story with us. I connected with you after hearing your voice on LinkedIn, which by the way, is getting increasingly populated with crazy content.I don't know if that's part of the strategy that you support for your customers. But we've got a lot to cover for today's interview. I'm going to ask Elena how she ended up in the wonderful space of employer branding and production of content for employers. And how to give a talent acquisition team, an edge through content and maybe if we're lucky and then I will sing a little bit for us. I don't know.

Elena: Depends how close we hit to the 20 minute mark.

Max: Perfect. So yeah, Elena, tell us how did you end up in employer branding? Did you grow up dreaming to be in recruitment?

Elena: Not at all. Didn't even realize this.Yeah I didn't grow up as a five-year old wishing I could recruit people to a company. I didn't think that existed, but where my story, you know, does start is I'm a former design researcher that used to work, you know, for design thinking kind of an ideal like environment. And how this really came to be was because of a project that I worked on there as a design researcher that inevitably would change my life and that of my co-founder. And in particularly it was a national kind of challenge here in the U S around, how do we connect 6 million young people to employment? And primarily young people who may not look good on resumes, Maybe they don't have a lot of job experience. Maybe, you know they've had to go through the juvenile justice system. So how do we connect those who are not in school, in the workforce to more meaningful pathways to employment. And that's where, you know, we saw our lives change and what our purpose would be, which was, we were talking to hundreds and hundreds of incredibly talented, young people of workforce development leaders and employers and what we saw loud and clear is that there was a hiring process that was shutting out non-traditional talent. And out of many of the challenges that were there. One of the things that we saw in particular was that you cannot be what you cannot see. And for young people who have never left their neighborhoods, they lack access and exposure to jobs, so at the essence of what we started to do, even prior to founding, skill scout was just a film jobs. Realistic in a visual way so that young people could kind of see what these jobs were actually like. And it started to work, they started to put their phones down. They started to ask questions, they started to get excited.And that's when we realized that we had something that we could hack for candidates, this opportunity for them to really understand what jobs were like. But inevitably for half companies to hack what it could be to really differentiate themselves to provide more realistic previews for candidates so that they have an opportunity to self screen in our self screen out.And that was really the origin for why we started what we do.

Max: Yeah. Well thank you for reconnecting all of us and me to why we're in this industry. Yes. It's great to help people get to work and find employment and find a place in society and I think whether you went to, you got the best education in the world, or you never graduated from high school it's a real mystery. What goes on in most people's jobs when you're at that age, when you're 20 something when you're starting out, you just don't know what you're getting into job descriptions. They don't tell you anything really. They don't feel real.

Elena: Yeah the whole thing was, that we saw, look, job descriptions don't show what a job is like and resumes don't depict a candidate's skills. And so, you know, look at what we're seeing over the past several years. Of, types of via technologies or approaches like ours, like yours that are really coming into this market to, really helped to de-mystify and provide a bit more transparency, provide a bit more humanity into, you know, how we really care for in our case candidates.

Max: And Elena, how does your business work? Do you typically work with a recruitment marketing team that says we want to run a big, national campaign for our graduate hiring program? Can you make us look good? Is this kind of what kind of agency type of arrangement, or is it more a pay as you go? How does it work?

Elena: It's really any, and all of the above. So inevitably we exist to capture the humanity of work primarily through the power of film. And so we work on behalf of agencies. We work on behalf of companies and employer branding, recruitment marketing leaders, themselves who are looking to infuse content to support via the employee experience and, you know, for our conversation, the candidate experience. And so what that might look like might be. Us, you know, working to produce a job video or a cultural video, or, as we're thinking about the pandemic, we have so many processes that are changing. We have so many approaches to how we might be interviewing and what the candidate needs to expect that, you know, right now we're actually creating a lot of content, new content that needs to be created.So that, hiring managers can ensure that candidates are still having as much of a seamless experience as they can during this time.

Max: Right. And even though. The buzz is remote work, work from home and all that the majority of jobs still require physical presence still require for people to come in and some time put on a uniform and do the things they do.

Elena: So yeah. Yeah, I mean, so especially, so for example,we recently worked with Kohl's. You know they're hiring warehouse, logistics, distribution jobs, like crazy, but even more importantly, they have to show the realities of today because candidates are paying attention to, in addition to everything else. How is that employer going to keep me safe, going to keep me healthy? And so we've certainly been working with, you know, several companies that are having to not just rethink well. Yeah, the world is trying to rethink workplace safety right now as it comes to the pandemic, but even more so, when it comes to the questions that we know that candidates need addressed, how are we ensuring that we're telling the story of safety? and that's a really big one right now that we're seeing within kind of the candidate story cycle.

Max: Do you have a big theme like this for every year you've been in business like this year was masks and gloves and your videos and two years ago it was maybe something else. I don't know.

Elena: No, I like this, you know, it's hard to actually define the trends as close as they are.Now I will say when we started out. Because, you know we had a focus. We primarily had built this business proudly on the shoulders of small to midsize manufacturers in the Midwest. So, you know, we spent two or three good solid years. You know, really working on behalf of the tool and die makers and the CNC, machinist and production operators and engineers. So certainly there's been themes like that in terms of work. Certainly in the beginning, it was around attracting young talent between you know, of a certain age. So that definitely was a huge theme then. So yeah we've definitely seen some of those cycles. I think in part, because, you know, from business owner to business owner, we're kind of pivoting and in thinking through our focus But it's certainly, definitely shifted now.

Max: So I'm thinking maybe it's because I work in talent acquisition, so I'm very exposed. I'm thinking I'm saturated. I'm like safety, safety, safety, safety, safety. I mean, if everybody's talking about safety, then I need to, you know, we need to latch on to a new theme or something else, but maybe that's me, you know, I'm never looking for a job, but I'm always exposed. So I may be a little saturated perhaps for it is still universally a driving force, I guess, for all employer branding campaigns right now to take care of their people. And but you know, I mean I started as an entrepreneur attracted to the kind of ethos of the startup culture of the Air bnbs of the world and the Netflix of the world where it was very performance driven and it was not about safety. I'll say that it was about something else. So I'm just thinking that It must be difficult to differentiate yourself right now, if everybody's talking about the same thing. So maybe that will come back stronger talking about but switching gear a little bit talking about video do you have a position on whether video is better as user generated content from the employees, scruffy and real or polished and you know, manicured.

Elena: There's room for both. I mean, and I think maybe it's worth talking through the considerations of what that is because we've seen it done really well on both ends. And in fact, we work with many companies where they literally leverage both professional video and user-generated video. Sometimes it's a mix. So I don't even necessarily know if it's about one or the other, certainly there is data behind why user generated works. I think in part we're all very used to social media we see this as being most authentic and raw, right. There is data around that, says 55% of candidates see employee generated content as being more trustworthy if you will, you know, but I would say, typically what happens is..

Max: No stock photos for sure.

Elena: No stock photos and no stock photos.
Max: And you still use actors.

Elena: No

Max: No actors. Okay. That's good. No, I mean, if you come to a company, people should be on the lookout for you because it's their chance to be on camera.

Elena: Yeah. Well, clearly you know, getting back to the point of professional user generated typically for example, stories that might not change for a long time, or think about origin stories, founders, stories, you know, kind of missions and values, things that don't change. Often times that's where we might see companies who are investing in more kind of high-level professionally professional quality video, especially because if this might be seen by even more kind of external audiences and communities in sometimes what it is sometimes it's just a capacity issue.You know, you have a talent acquisition team, employer branding team that is just stretched so thin that their ability to, I think, be able to implement something like a user generated initiative just might be too challenging at the time. And certainly then there's things around budget, but sometimes the reason why companies might go to a professional video versus user-generated is because of marketing and legal, right? Like, and we know these companies where you might have these marketing brand watch dogs, where it just might be just. Next to impossible for, you know, the HR teams to get approved, to be able to use user-generated. So there's definitely some factors that are there for while

Max: that's going away, progressively where the strong hold on, we want to control every piece of media that goes out.I would imagine it's eroding with time, but I mean, these are powerful forces, marketing and legal,

Elena: For sure. No, and certainly I think that Marketing and legal is coming around to it. I think part of that is also a need for control. And so we're kind of constantly seeing the tug of HR and marketing doing that.

Max: There'll be an endless battle really. They'll never, yeah. So continue forever.

Elena: Yeah. And certainly the case for user generated content outside of the, some of the data I shared is. One it's you get to tell more stories more often. If what we're really trying to do is at scale, be able to tell a diversity of stories and experiences.This becomes a great way to do it. And because plus one you're democratizing the tools. You're allowing anyone from any country from anywhere they're sitting to all primarily have access to things that they already have access to. And our big saying is, if you can take videos of your dog, cats and kids, you can take videos of your workplace.And so there's, you know, certainly kind of a level of access that everyone has, but then people are also thinking about a lot. How updatable are these videos? That's the biggest thing is, you know, roles, change events, drastically change.

Max: Oh yes. You're a star employee will become a persona non grata.

Elena: Yeah, exactly. And so that's kind of certainly a case, you know, as we're working with clients, Long-term where, you know, every year we might update that video because it's evolved or maybe in this case, the environment has changed in this manufacturing facility and everyone's wearing masks that they want to be able to kind of provide some freshness to that video while still keeping some of the foundation.So I could go on and on about that. But yeah, those are the key factors.

Max: Yeah that's a question I always had talking about these employees that leave is, what about the content that they filmed before? Are you in trouble? If you didn't get a release form and the right to use their image on your social media maybe, you know the answer.I know you're not a lawyer, but.

Elena: You know, I would say primarily most folks that might be participating in engagements that we work on typically are all signing media releases. And typically there is that language where you know, that employer you know, has kind of rights to that footage.

Max: You guys I'm sure.But if we do like fully user generated content and we just kinda let the.

Elena: Yeah, I think that really depends on the culture of the company. I think so much of that is typically defined by what are kind of the rules already in place for so many other things. And so you kind of get a sense already if that's the company that's like, as soon as that person leaves we're done or inevitably look at that, if that employees still had a great experience and they're in a, you know, a little fraction of a video it may not be the biggest cause for concern.

Max: Yeah, sure. I guess I'm getting my models. My demo models you know, on the cheap and I felt a little bit guilty asking my staff to play out on videos. So maybe that's where it's coming from. And well you see some trends in terms of the way media is being consumed?The rise of TikTok and the new platforms does that affect the production work that you do? Are people I would assume wanting to consume shorter and shorter videos might be one trend. Are there other trends like that?

Elena: Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, more than one, anything, what we're seeing even back from when we started six years ago was that video is no longer a nice to have, it's a must haveso that's certainly kind of becoming even for some of your most traditional HR, unfortunately, maybe a checkoff, the list. You know, certainly some of the big trends we're seeing is that you know, just the need for more and more content. All the time, whether that's around celebrations or a project, right.It's never, here's this one big video initiative and we're pushing it out for this one year. It really all kind of happens over time. And it's a living organism just in the same way that your workforce and your company is a living organism. So we've certainly seen a lot of trends around that. And certainly then the user generated content, which is something that, you know, we've kind of done really all the way from the beginning in terms of offering that at this point now for many companies, it may be the only way, right? You do have folks that are now all kind of working from home and everyone kind of has to figure out how do we still push out, you know, quality content? How long do we wait? So we've definitely seen an uptick in that, but I will actually, you know, at least I pushed back a while.It is true that candidates are, you know, anyone online is going for shorter and shorter and shorter content. Sometimes it's not just because we have short attention spans sometimes it's because. The content is bad. And so, you know, especially I think the kind of new energy that I want to bring as a leader to skill scout films, is that, you know, look, you could create incredible, beautiful 20 minute documentaries about someone's work and the entire time that person doesn't realize that this might be someone who's really talking about a role. And so that's what I think is really interesting about storytelling is that I would argue

Max: Is that just a story or this movie, are we going to go inside the life of a warehouse operator forklift driver. You can stretch that out.

Elena: Yeah. We just Maya for talking about just kind of you know the changing kind of world of work. Absolutely. But it goes beyond, and I think this is what we're seeing, right. Especially for this generation, Z you know, our personal lives, our work lives are often one in the same, you know, this is no longer separate.And so for me, what I see as being a good film, That people resonate with is because it gets personal is because they, you go behind the scenes of that person outside of their suit. And outside of what you see on zoom and you really helped to kind of understand the context of their lives and even more so really start to see why is it that they do what they do and what does bring them meaning?

Max: I work with a lot of call center companies and so. They're not a consumer brands, so nobody knows about them except in the countries where they hire, they're known as an employer brands, which gives them quite a lot of freedom, actually, because if you have McDonald's or Coca-Cola, maybe you have a much stronger marketing department, you have less room to play.And it was like a beautiful campaign. I remember the exci where. It was a single mother that was talking about how work allowed her to send her daughter to school. You know, these kinds of stories that just lifted everybody's hearts. And I'd like to see more of that really kind of fallen off with it.

Elena: That's what makes it all relatable? You know, like I don't have to know about exactly what you do, right. If I were to see a film, right. About recruitment automation, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Some of that is likely to go over my head, but what won't be right is when I get to see, Hey, like he has this wonderful relationship with his mother or kind of look at who, how he's honoring his mentor.Right. And these are all kinds of life experiences that many of us have, or have a connection to negative or positive, but it allows us to feel something. And that allows me to even better understand how you show up to work as a leader of talk, push.

Max: Okay I'm going to give it a go. The zoom revolution, zoom was maybe the best performing communication platform of 2020 an opportunity for people saying and get-together on group calls. Did you use that medium to create some content last year, or is that just using the generated.You let the other companies handle that without any,

Elena: Oh, this is so I'm a heavy user and fan of Prezi, which is, you know, originally a presentation tool and they've come out with a really great video product. And so, yeah great for presentations, great for training, sales enablement, all that kind of stuff.So it's been a really cool product. I've been really excited to use it more as it just came out last year. Long story short. That is all to say, no, I don't sing on every presentation. If at all ever there typically, never is a reason why I would break out into song during a sales conversation, but a Prezi put out a fun challenge to create a 32nd to video that they could potentially leverage in a real and the winner.Would receive a $1,000 donation to the charity of their choice.

Max: Oh, and did you win ?

Elena: I did !

Max: did you, did you give it to the Elena Valentine charity fund?

Elena:I gave it to Mezcla media collective, which is a nonprofit that I helped to co-found.

Max: Yeah. Okay, great. And what does this nonprofit do? we might as well, a little bit of advertising for it.

Elena: Yeah. We're a kind of a nonprofit community of femme identifying filmmakers of color, primarily in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. So we started in 2017 and we've grown to well over 600 community members.

Max: Congratulations.

Elena:Thank you.

Max: Okay, well, what, where can our listeners find out more about the Mezcla media collective and Skill Scouts and what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Elena: Be my friend on LinkedIn, let's start there. And however, I can be helpful. Either myself or Skill Scout will always find the right path for you.

Max: We didn't do any singing. I just don't know how to bring that up.

Elena: I haven’t been a part of a band in years.

Max: Where can people log on to listen to you sing.Connect on LinkedIn. And maybe if they asked nicely, you'll send them a little on LinkedIn. You know, you can send a little voice now.Yeah. I hear that's an effective way to do sales these days. If I had your voice, I wouldn't hesitate a second. So thanks for coming on the show and all the best between 21.

Elena: Perfect.

Inspiring words from Elena Valentine, CEO of skill scout, who reminded us that there's nothing like a personal story. Tell the story of why the people came to work for you. Their personal story, and maybe as a differentiator in a world where everything is bite-sized and short, maybe this is an opportunity to go deeper and tell a long story and try to make a film that people want to watch.

Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll come back for more. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Please share with your friends. Thanks.

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Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. Today I'd like to welcome on the show, Manjuri Sinha. Manjuri is the Head of Talent Acquisition for Technology for the OLX Group. Thanks for joining Manjuri.

Manjuri: Happy to be here.

Max: Manjuri is dialing in from Berlin. One of my favorite cities in the world.

And over the last few years, Berlin has become a tech hub, certainly in the startup space. But I think also beyond which is how the OLX group ended up setting up shop in Berlin. You were telling me?

Manjuri: Absolutely max. So I think this was pretty much the reason, the talent market.

So let me also give a little bit of context on what OLX is. We are a classified platform my lovely friends in Germany, you can, maybe relate to it with EBA, Klein and Diagon. That's something for the emerging market. So classifieds for a resale of cars, a resale of anything. If you talk to someone in Poland they literally tell you that from their phone to their cupboards, to their cars, to the apartments they have sold or purchased on OLX platforms.

Of course we have different brands that front-end us but that's why exist. Yeah, across countries and being in Berlin is definitely due to the tech talent market that we have. And Berlin is our OLX Europe's tech hub. And in terms of usage we pretty much you know, have more than 20 brands.

Also we have around 300 million active users. As well as you see, the number of people is 10,000+ a strong employee sprint. And of course, we’re part of the overall process group. Which is one of the biggest investment companies in the world

Max: I imagine that building marketplaces in all of these emerging markets means you need to have teams everywhere, all around the globe, right.

And that you want to have designers, product managers, marketers. Living in each of the markets you serve is that part of your remit or you're purely focused on the tech, which is more centralized perhaps?

Manjuri: Yeah. So my remit is product, data, and technology.

So yes. All that you mentioned actually falls in that bucket. So designers, UX, researchers technology. When I say technology it's engineering. And data is everything to do with data science data analytics, as well as data engineering. So this is the world, and this is the gamut. Of course, we also have the offline part of the business where we have, you know, car inspectors and people who really look at when you do the, you know, inspection of a car before it's resold, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's another world, warehouses, car inspectors, et cetera. So yes, and we do need to have presence in our markets, for sure. So even our tech hubs are distributed accordingly, Max. We have a huge presence in Poland, in Portugal, which are bigger markets as well.

Now we have stepped up on our building up of a tech hub in Romania and Ukraine. That's what we are doing at the moment. Super busy. India is a major tech hub in the Northern part of the country. We have a home office as well. And then we have Latin America where we have tech teams based in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.

Max: Do you find that hiring managers have moved past the reflex, that habit of associating a job with a location and that now it's you know, they're not thinking that way or I mean, how fast are we moving in the other direction where everybody's remote and you can hire anywhere.

Is it moving fast and as fast as you'd like? Or would you actually, maybe you prefer to go back to a localized hubs? What's your position on this hire anywhere or hirer somewhere?

Manjuri: I would still say so there were two parts to your question, Max. One is how do we see hiring managers actually reacting to this?

I think for hiring managers, they need that seat to be filled. That's one of the basic you know, really important things for them. Yes, they do feel that there should be some proximity to their teams. However, the understanding with most technology teams that we are hearing is either we go remote first.

That means that you don't have a partial thing, that you have 10 people sitting in the same room and a meeting room. And you have another 10 people sitting in different blocks because that's what is not good for the culture. So if you have a remote first team, everybody should be remote. And if you come together for a workshop, then you commute for that workshop.

But you shouldn't be divided half and half. The second aspect that you asked about hiring anywhere, hiring anywhere is a wish and a luxury because what we have not been able to kind of crack, and I think it's the same with all organizations is insurance, taxation, and so on and so forth. So we do stay close to our hubs.

We do hire remote in Poland. We hire remote in Romania. We hire remote in Portugal, but because we have hubs in those countries, we can. You know, basis that paperwork, et cetera. So I think that's one of the challenges for sure.

We see the demands. I mean, I was just looking at a report just yesterday from this organization called Talent International and they were talking about this, I think the second, most important point that all of their survey respondents talked about in changing jobs, what will they consider? Is flexibility.

And this flexibility is around whether they can work remote, whether they can work from home or they can work from anywhere. So this will become, this will come from the pandemic push. And I think the second aspect will be the candidates demanding this also going forward, especially for the tech market, because that's a candidate driven market.

So what we would have to look at flexibility and hybrid ways of working that is definitely here to stay. You might have organizations saying, Hey, you know, it's three days. Come to office two days, work from home. I heard yesterday, Revolut has given a two months option to all employees saying that two months in a year, you can work from anywhere.

So every company is working different working out different ways of keeping their folks happy and keeping their ways of working flexible. And that's the way to go. That's what we will see in the future.

Max: It's moving slower than I anticipated really. I mean, we've been working from anywhere for pre-crisis and I thought that by now everybody would be this is it. I love it. Yeah, I guess people. With this new cycle are also a little bit tired, and we would like to just kind of turn the page and that means going, the office, they'll do it.

I found myself actually reminiscing and thinking, wow, I really miss commuting. You know, cause commuting was the time when I would switch off from one world to the next.

But I've learned how to commute while staying indoors.

Manjuri: Absolutely. You made a very, very correct point, right? We are not what is happening right now. Right. You know, I'm sitting at my living room and at my dining table, you see a fake background behind me, but this is where I am. This is not working from home.

So this is the pandemic push of making me stay at home. Right. That's a very different thing. I don't get to meet those 10 friends that I would love to for the after-work drinks. But within the real world, post pandemic world, working from home will be different. That's what I can relate to when I was working with Accenture way back.

We used to work from home a lot because of the model. You know, I had colleagues distributed all across the world. So if I had to commute to office, which would be two hours in a car in India, I would rather work from home. And it would suffice because everybody was kind of, you know, co located in different countries, et cetera, et cetera.

But that was working from home. You would work through the day and yet meet your colleagues may be for after work drinks. So the socializing is there. Also in setups where you have children, your children are going to the kindergartens, the children are going to school. So they're not all at home. This situation is not working from home.

So it's a way different situation that we're in. And a lot of that increase as you pointed out.

Max: Well, how is it different? It's just because it's forced whereas before it felt like an option,

Manjuri: No, because you had a human interaction. And what I crave at the moment is, you know, kind of going back to the office and having those conversations while filling my coffee mug, et cetera.

Because also, because I don't have other human interactions right. Based on the rule, I can only meet one person, another household, et cetera. So I'm not having those social interactions and yeah, that's where it's a little different.

Max: Yeah.

I imagined that part of the job that we were talking about, which is influencing the job description, influencing the job, which is an expansion of the traditional job of recruiters and talent acquisition.

Where traditionally you would think the hiring manager describes bullet point by bullet point what they want, all the keywords and off you go that's your spec sheet. She'd go to work, come back to me when you've got 10 resumes or 20 or a hundred. And it's a bit of a one-sided dialogue. And you're trying to move it in the other way.

You're trying to say, we're going to change the type of profiles that we're hiring. We're gonna change where we're sourcing them from. That job, that part of the work has become much harder now that you can't force somebody into a coffee break or a longer conversation.

Manjuri: Absolutely. I mean, I think the rapport building especially, I mean if I, again, take an example here for myself, I joined OLX in 2019, December four months is when I got to literally travel around the world and meet my team as well as meet my stakeholders. But post that everything is on zoom.

Everything is on you know, calls, et cetera. So the rapport building you don't have that. But anyways, when I'm on video, there is a bit of conscious feeling and so on and so forth. But you have to work with it and make do with it. It is what it is and that's okay. That's a challenge for sure.

The influencing part and building that relationship, building that trust takes a bit more time than it would in a face-to-face communication.

Max: It takes a bit more time. Okay. And can you tell me more about the I'm not going to say the mistakes, but the inherent bias that you've managed to eliminate in some of those job descriptions or some of those job specifications.

How have you influenced you and your team have influenced the direction for OLX where they were going to hire a certain type of people and you were able to change their perception. Can you walk us through an example and some tools that you use?

Manjuri: Yeah, absolutely.

Max, I think that's a very good question. And it is an extension of what I was saying, right. It's typical to build those relationships. And that's where data helps you to make your story along with validating it with data that really helps you. And that's the example that I like to take.

So it is definitely a collective drive. And for OLX we see hiring as a problem for everybody. So it's an ownership for everyone. So I'm partnering with my engineering, leadership person, it's a similar ownership that we have. So that's one, the collaboration is very important.

Second, I think the things that I've learned through my experience, and this is not just OLX. Many a times in a TA function, we take the plans as is. We are, you know, the person we are the team that comes after the workforce planning activity happens. So you take a whole load of roles and saying that, okay, these 200, 300, depending on the organization, or maybe 700,000 people have to be hired by so-and-so date in these locations.

And then you have to chase something which has been planned without your consent, which has been planned without your inputs, et cetera, et cetera. This is one of the biggest mistakes. Most TA professionals and TA teams also make. Also not saying no, or also not going back and saying that, okay, this is maybe something that we need to re-look at.

An example would be we did have a situation where we were kind of struggling to hire talented folks in Lisbon onsite and this where we sat down. First of all, we looked at LinkedIn insights. We looked at what there was definitely, you know, when you're hiring you start getting a hunch.

As a recruiter you hear from candidates, how the market looking like, et cetera. And numbers that we wanted to hire. We needed people coming from really good product companies as well. And of course, if I'm sitting in the Berlin markets, it's a very different scene, but the Lisbon market is still maturing and getting there.

You have a lot of services companies, but the product companies are yet to mature with their seniority, et cetera. So yeah, we couldn't really relocate a lot of people, but we did have to hire and so on and so forth. So we got the data. What does the market say? How has the market responded in the last two, three years?

We looked at other reports from local providers, which also talked about the salary increases, which are, you know, on the lines of 18%, 25% and 35%

Max: in Portugal?

Manjuri: In Portugal for certain.

It's a very, very hot destination.

Manjuri: It is. It is. It's absolutely. I saw a similar trend when we had gone and with our Zalando office in Lisbon and had to actually close it down after some time.

So that was there. Okay. I can talk about handshakes and talk about experience and so on and so forth. So we collected all the data and say that this is what the data tells us, and it actually tells us that there's excellent talent sitting in Porto. There is talent sitting in Puembra. If we can go remote in Portugal, we can hire all these people.

We can bring them into the pipeline. We can see a bigger pool of talent and we can still hire in Portugal. And this is the discussion that we have with our engineering leadership team. And they were also very upbeat because they actually saw the data. This was not the time when we were talking about our hunches and experiences.

We have actually showing data that if we are looking only at Lisbon, this is a talent pool. This is already what we've sourced. So what next? Right. And then we also talked about, okay, let's look at the other part. One is remote. Second is let's start hiring trainees and grow with them from there.

We don't have a lot of product companies, et cetera.

Max: And you come from the BPO sector, Manjuri.

You also have that background where you've seen this industry, which went from tier one cities to tier two cities, to tier three cities and now anywhere applied for let's say the more high volume environments.

And now you're, you're saying especially with this remote work or work from home situation. That flexibility that is now global. Everybody should take another look at those second and third tier cities, even if you're hiring for more professional level hires more experienced hires.

Manjuri: Absolutely. There's definite potential. There are a lot of you know, people that we've kind of maybe overlooked previously with the talent and this, and this also helps us Max, in increasing diversity. We've seen situations where everything goes. I mean, it definitely goes beyond binary gender, but if I just take example of binary gender as well, we've seen situations where women don't move a lot, right.

Because they have responsibilities and they would rather move countries for their spouse, et cetera. Now, if we say that, hey, move your life from Porto to Lisbon. That might be tough. But if we tell her that. You can stay in Porto and work for us, remote. I mean, that's one of the best things again.

So even your diversity aspect, how you can make your pipeline diverse that also gets pushed. If we can look at more markets tier one, tier two, I mean those steps, right? That's it. I know where this is coming from. It's mostly how we do in India. Look at tier one, tier two, tier three and everything.

Max: Yeah. You don’t want to use that language in Portugal. You’re going to start a civil war

Manjuri: And I know you can relate to that. But yeah, we used to have, even back in the days with the emphasis with the BPO sector, our voice processes would be front-ended from tier one cities, but our Non-West processes ere also supported. We used to have a lot of people moving in from different cities.

They're in my roster and coming and really changing, you know, cities, et cetera. So.

Max: Yeah. In a way, you know, if you're hiring for a sales job or voice job you know, in the customer care world, you want to have that hungry young person that moves to the big city. But if you're hiring someone technical who works on more long tasks and can work in isolation, maybe that person is less likely to move out of the, you know that birthplace, or like you said some demographics or could also be less mobile than others.

Manjuri: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: Yeah. So I think they've given me and probably anyone who's listening, some ideas on let's look a little bit broader into those cities we haven't looked at for a while. So that's a really great takeaway. One question that I like to ask is you Manjuri, to go back to a hiring mistake that you made for your team or for your customers.

And tell us what you've learned from it.

Manjuri: I've made so I would say I. This is actually for my own team. A couple of years ago, I did make a hiring mistake. I would say I was about to make a hiring mistake, and I kept on doing that by not hiring certain people.

So I had this, you know, this was bias for a very long time. I had to nurture this bias of, Hey, you have to, you know, I'll also, maybe it was conscious, unconscious, personal bias because I had done a lot, strived a lot to get my MBA, et cetera. So when I was looking to hire for a particular role for my team, I was looking at the qualifications.

I was looking at the degrees that the person had accomplished and so and so forth. And I was actually prioritizing candidates in that pipeline who came with an MBA degree. You came with a higher degree of masters, et cetera. And I was overlooking certain people. Whereas when I came back and realized that, okay, I've interviewed maybe more than 24 people, but somehow they don't, on the functional side, still didn't come close to what we were looking at. And finally, we were slightly about to make a mistake and I was about to make a mistake and maybe hiring someone. I don't know whether that would have been a mistake, but then I looked into my own team, existing team, and then I saw people who were, necessarily did not have those degrees, but they were exceptional performers.

They were exceptional team players. They were people who would go beyond. They were people, like you said, they were hungry to learn. And then I started scaling back then I looked at okay, the resumes that had not been selected, shortlisted, maybe those are the resumes that I would pick up. And then the person that I hired, she was amazing and that was a learning for me. And I also took that learning after that, even in my conversations with hiring managers, that let's not reduce our talent pool by putting four or five degrees requirements and qualifications, because that doesn’t always indicate that this person will be the highest performer in the team.

Max: Yeah.

Manjuri: That's definitely a learning that I've had.

Max: And there's two lessons there, right? One with the inflation of the requirements. And the second one, look within the team and you were able to create some internal mobility. E

Manjuri: Exactly. That's definitely max for short.

Max: Great. And well it's been a pleasure. I have tons of more questions, but we'll do it another time and jury. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Manjuri: Thank you. Thank you so much, Max. I really enjoyed this.

Max: That was Manjuri Sinha from, OLX reminding us that if you don't have to come into the office every day, If socializing with your teammates can be summed up to gathering to once a week or so once a month, perhaps it's time to expand the radius of your search and to go look outside of those cities where your offices are and start looking at commuting times that are two, three hours long because that's just a once in a week or once in a month. Okay. Hope you enjoyed the interview. I certainly did. And I invite you to follow us for more and share with friends.

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Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Bob Mather, who is a private investigator, as well as the founder and CEO of one of the leading. Background checking company, Pre-Employ, Bob, welcome to the show.

Bob: Hey Max, how's it going?

Max: Going strong going strong. We in the introduction introduced you as a private investigator. Is this how you stumbled into the world of technology? With long rain coats and you know, stalking people in their private lives.

Bob: Wow. You have really just painted quite a picture.

No, but close. Even though at one time, I didn't have a rank though. I did have one of those coats. It was probably 20 years ago. I started out my career specializing in embezzlement for retailers. So I would be the guy in the company that they would hire when they were missing $10,000, $20,000, whatever.

And then I would bring in a forensic team or a surveillance team and would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together and find out who was embezzling. And then I would also help. Yeah. I would help with the prosecutions. If there were criminal charges, advise them my opinion on what they should do and how they should do it.

And then also work with civil restitution recovery.

Max: Wow. That's great. This is the great foundation, right? Because you have seen the crimes committed and with your own eyes, so you can really empathize with your customers.

Bob: Yeah, well, yeah, I've done thousands of interrogations for the specific embezzlement type cases. I also work with employers when it comes to workplace investigations and always have whether it be discrimination of sexual harassment other types of things, my team and I will come in and put the pieces together and show what really has happened with all of the emotion out of it.

But when I first started doing this was in the early nineties and background checks really weren't a thing then, and back in the nineties and you know, there wasn't even an internet. Really, the internet had just started. We had Netscape. Right. We had this world of background checks that was done, when we did do a background check, it was very expensive and it was done by paper.

And you might call the local sheriff or even try to get you could walk into a courthouse. You couldn't, there was no technology then. And hiring. If you wanted to hire someone you needed a background check on them. It could take a month. it just was the way it was, had been done forever, but with technology and I was an early adopter in technology, you know we started doing background checks.

What happened was I was doing embezzlement investigations. And in one region of the United States, I caught, I investigated, prosecuted, and put a person in jail that was stealing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. About a year or so later, another company called me and said, hey, We're losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

And I said, well, okay, I can schedule to be down there. I'll start the investigation, but can you send me your employee list? Let's see who's working there now. I'd like to see. And there was on the employee list they sent, there was the same guy.

And I said, well, you know, If they only would have known, you know 400 miles away, he just got out of jail.

Max: you know, all the great embezzlement guys that should be working for you.

Bob: Yeah, no, no. When you work that type of work, the only embezzlement guys and girls, I know are the unlucky ones or the ones that are not that smart. The good ones I've never met.

Max: I was just thinking, yeah maybe there's a limit, right? If you embezzle $500, you never get caught.

If you're inbezzlel, half a million, obviously you're the venture you'll get caught pretty soon. Maybe there's a sweet spot there. I don't know.

Bob: I think it's like playing blackjack or gambling. If you quit, you might get away with it. But the longer you play, the odds are against you.

Max: Okay, great.

Well I suppose yeah, millions of dollars are being saved now by the retail sector because of providers such as yourself. Have you been able to quantify that you know, for the industry or how do you put a number on it for your customers at the beginning of those discussions?

I suppose now it's not so much. I suspect someone is taking money from you, it's more, standardized, right?

Bob: It's more standardized now. It's for safety, is really the big concern right now. Safety of customers, safety of other employees. And as the industry progressed in the early 2000s, I mean, basically it was this.

If the company. Whether it was a hospital or a retailer down the street did background checks and you didn't, you only were really sure of one thing. The people that were afraid to get their background checked were not applying at the guy who does the background checks. They were coming to you.

And we actually would see that. So when we would get a new client. We would do background checks on all the employees and to do that, they would have to sign a form. Well, we would get people that would just leave. Like they wouldn't come to work. It was over. And then once we looked into it further, we could see that they had, you know, quite a background and then they would go to the next company that didn't do background checks.

And, and today it's 90%, 96% of employers in most industries do background checks.

Max: I was thinking about that.

So for those 4%, that's that don't do, you know, maybe they have a wonderful opportunity, right? Because then they really have to pick up the litter. They can choose between anybody who has a criminal record, they can choose between them and they can take the best ones, the ones that truly want to reform their lives and, you know, start fresh, the ones that quit like a blackjack.

Bob: Yeah. Or the ones that had a type of crime that really doesn't have anything to do with the position. So in the world of finance, for example obviously embezzlement would be a very big concern. It would be a killer of any opportunity, but not necessarily let's say a bar fight or where you got drunk driving.

Right. So You know, the industry has changed and it's still changing, Now there's not only a demand. When we first started out in the 2000s and 2010s, there wasn't the emphasis on speed as there is now, or talent acquisition leaders now are driven by the need to hire and to hire at scale.

You know, we've got a starting class. We need to have X number of people. Hundreds of people are coming in and I need these done now. And for a lot of organizations that can be scary because the person who's ordering and overseeing the selection of what company to use is in such a hurry. And it gets bonuses and it gets financial payments for getting people through the system.

They don't necessarily care about the quality like it used to be. It's a strange relationship.

Max: It's commoditized and it's looked as as a necessary, a mandatory step, as opposed to something, a selection that you make purposefully, just like you said, like someone, you should also select a vendor very carefully.

And of course, nobody is very as educated on the art of selecting. A background checking company as they are on the art of selecting a candidates. And I suppose every vendor will propose the most thorough checks at the most competitive price. And I don't, I've never personally gone through the tendering process of selecting between different vendors within your position.

Bob: So many hidden, there's so many hidden secrets in it. You know what most talent acquisition and HR leaders, or procurement leaders don't realize is that we can draft a background check based on what you demand from us. You want it super cheap. Don't worry. We can do it. It's like walking into an ice cream store.

And if you said to the person behind the ice cream store, I want an ice cream sundae, but I only want to pay $3. But I need it big and they're like, okay, well, they're probably going to select the ingredients that makes you happy, but it's not really the best. So there's things that background check companies do that the type of tools they use to find where a person has lived.

So in the States we use a social security number, and a social security number is put into a database and the database then says, look, Max has lived in seven places around the world in the past seven years. And so we would send investigators or do our, have our technology going to the courthouses. In those seven geographic areas.

Well, if your employer is demanding fast, they don't care. It's fast. They want fast. We can choose between one and probably 35 different social security number, locators, or address locators, including some that bring back, it will probably show that you lived in two places. Right. The quality of what a background check company does in the hiring process is actually negotiable.

And it's demandable and you can put together service level agreements and demands that look, we need the best. We want to protect our employees. What is the price going to be? Or most people just say, I want a background check. I want an ice cream sundae. It's the same thing. It's a commodity. Right? Give me one.

Max: There's some of this background checking that is still being done in house. And then I guess increasingly it has been, I don't know, is it increasingly done? In-house are increasingly being outsourced?

Bob: It's going more outsourced now. But you know what it is, what a lot of recruiters do do, it's now starting to be outsourced. Is and most, and a lot of recruiters and a lot of talent acquisition won't admit this probably let's see what next time you get some of your next guest, ask them if they've ever looked at Facebook or a social media profile for one of their applicants. Most of them secretly do. It's not part of the background check.

Max: Oh, of course you have to. I mean if you're a hiring manager, that's what you would do. I would imagine. Yeah,

Bob: But think about that. Is that part of the background check?

Max: No, it's just, you know, curiosity. Yeah.

Bob: That's part of the background check. It's part of the interview process that no one knows is going on. In the background check industry it's actually becoming a formal part where with technology, we go through your profile and look for keywords or phrases that may, that gives it brings back a score that says this person may not meet your profile. Based on 17 times using this word, which is deemed offensive to most people.

Right. Now there's a big argument if that's right or wrong, but that's really what's that, like you said, of course it's happening now. It's just now coming forward and becoming more I don't know, just more efficient.

Max: Yeah. It's unfortunate that it's seen through the prism of basically the background check as a veto power to say no to a particular person, if they use a particular type of language as opposed to being a sourcing engine where you would match the tone of the people in your company with the tone of the people outside your company and find some commonalities and culture and attitudes.

Bob: That's where it's going. I think I have one of my divisions, my background check it's called it's pretty simple. It's my background check. Because if you think about it, Max, what we do in the world is crazy.

Talent acquisition goes out there and we pay a ton of money to put ads. To put out things saying, please come to work for us. So you have an ad that says, hey, I'm looking for someone like Bob, and I see your ad. And I'm like, hey, I might like working for you Max. And we start to do this relationship dance.

You say, hey, here's my benefits. Here's what I'll pay. Here's the working environment. I say, look, here's my resume. Here's what I've done. I say, Max, I really like what I see. And you say, hey Bob, I really like what I see. We should form a business relationship and we should spend 40 hours a week together for a common goal.

Let's do this. I'd be like, all right, let's do this. And then you say, Hey, stop. I want you to go pee in a cup so I can search your urine for drugs. And I need your name, your date of birth and your social security number. So I can search your background. It's a crazy world. It's like, I'll be like, Ooh, max, wait a minute.

Max: I just thought we were friends.

Bob: Yeah. I was excited. Think what's happening and what we're doing with my background check. And I think over the next five or six years, you're going to see a flip in. What we're going to do is lead the charge to make a background check mine. And it's part of my resume.

I'll show you a copy of my degree. I'll give you the name of my employers and I'll show you my background check. You can verify it, but let's get this done at the beginning. This is who I am. And you know, I had a DUI or I got in a bar fight, but this is who I am. You want to talk about it now?

Max: Yeah, the first baby step was let's move our resumes to LinkedIn, which everybody did 20 years ago.

Still, you know, 90% of the welders is not on LinkedIn, but of course, for me, it's more valuable to look at a profile, which is publicly available with, you know, references where, you know, I mean, I'm sure you can lie on LinkedIn, but it seems like you would lie a little bit more on the resume, right?

Just you have a little bit more artistic expression? I like freedom.

Bob: I can tell you stories, Max. Trust me.

Max: Okay. We'll get there. They're bobs. But the point is, yeah, the baby step is more validated content through third parties. And of course rather than making it awkward for you as an employer to ask for my urine sample, if you need to have access to it, why would I refuse it.

I mean, I suppose some people would, by the way, if anybody feels they've got something to add to my company at Talkpush, but they don't want to take a urine test. They're welcome to join Talkpush, we don't check for that.

Bob: What about background checks, max? Do you do.

Max: We do not.

But I'm not so proud of that. I suppose background checks do have a place even for a tech startup.

Bob: Yeah. you have to go with what, how you feel, what's right for your company.

Max: I mean in our case, it's you know, we try to mimic what you just described, where it's a transactional approach to 40 hours a week and just , build trust on that and on outputs rather than background. But yeah. You seem like, I do think that there's some pushback. I mean, it is the world's plugging into not red state blue state, but you know, privacy, non privacy maniacs whereas some people will just, even though they have nothing to hide, they just refuse on principle to take part in some of these investigations?

Bob: We don't see a lot of people who refuse to take part in investigations, but in the States we see a lot of legislation that is being pushed forward to do things like delete somebody's criminal record, once they're done and to reduce access for an employer.

But look if you've applied for a job, you probably need the job, and there's a compelling reason for you to comply with what the new employer is going to say. But you know, background checks to me, background checks should be part of the discussion, not a speed bump to recruiting. not something where you say, stop, I need to go dig into your background.

And then you come back after we've spent all that time getting to know each other. Now I come back and say, oh, sorry that you know, this probably isn't going to be a fit because of this or that. It should be at the beginning of the process. You know, you wouldn't, interview me if I didn't put in an application.

Right. If I just, if I walked up and said, hey, I'd like here, CFO job. You're like, all right, can I see something like, ah, no. No, we'll talk about it later. Let's why don't you waste your time and interview me? And then later I'll tell you about my experience, once we get into it.

Max: So , you're an advocate of putting as much of that at the front of the funnel.

Bob: I think somebody, yeah I think it's my background. I think it's my background check. I own it. And I should share it with who I want when I want it to do it. And by the way, that's probably going to save you. It's going to save businesses about 9 billion a year in background checks, and it's going to speed up hiring

Max: that's the size of the industry.

Bob: Yeah, roughly it goes back and forth. No one knows for sure.

Max: Yeah, it's big. We know it's big. It's probably bigger than the recruitment software industry.

Bob: And that's big too though, but yeah, in a different way. Yeah. A different SAS model.

Max: Yeah. Great. Well let's go into the horror stories.

Bob: What do you want to know that I can talk about.

Max: Well, we don't have to give names, but I, what do I want to know? I don't know what I want to know. What's gonna keep me up at night?

No, normally I ask the guests on the show to talk about a hiring mistake that they made. And it has nothing to, I mean, the stuff that's come out has generally not been tied back to background checking, but rather with, I mean, indirectly with, I didn't really check their qualification or I picked a friend instead of picking somebody who is right for the job, things like that. And well, I'm sure as you’re a decade, plus, as an entrepreneur, you've made hiring mistakes too.

Bob: I have, I've definitely made hiring mistakes. My biggest hiring mistakes have been salespeople that have sold me that they can sell and they can't. What happened? You sold me. I'm like, yeah, you are easy. If I go, well, I can, you at least call Max wants and see if he wants to do business?

I've heard he doesn't do background checks.

Max: That's universal. We've all made those hiring mistakes.

Bob: What I see from my clients is first of all, 99% of the people in the world are great people, you know, and their background and a background check mistake they've made in the past, really has nothing to do with who they are now or who they're going to be.

But there also are the career criminals and the really, really, really bad people. If you do a Google search right now, you'll see a Florida babysitter that was on several nanny websites, who was a child molester and was a teacher, another one that was a teacher for two year olds. And I think maybe five-year-olds. These are people that are predators, that have to go to a place that doesn't do a background check. The end. You can't, if you are a predator and in this case, a sexual predator, you can't have access to children for a place that does a background check.

If you are a career criminal from embezzlement, you can't get access to cash, unless it's a place that doesn't do background checks.

If you are a prescription drug stealer, we see this actually a lot. They'll find a place where they have access to elderly for home care purposes, and that they will do horrible things to elderly people besides stealing their prescriptions or part of their prescriptions.

Max: Of course, all of this makes sense, but there's also a sense of futility about it because you know that 80- 90% of crimes and theft and you know, misdemeanors and all those actions committed are unrecorded. And that there's no trace left behind.

Bob: Correct. Right. Yeah.

Max: I mean, that's my estimate.

Bob: Great. Thanks Max, now I'm depressed.

No, you know, but for business reasons, there's also that if you don't do it, you're going to have tremendous lawsuits when something bad does happen that you could have prevened. Yeah. So there's not only that, you know, a lot of business, people don't necessarily care if they sleep good at night, they don't care.

It's what's the bottom line and you can save a lot of money if you don't do background checks, or if you do cheap background checks, but the litigation that can come and the damage to your reputation and your company's reputation can be significant.

Max: Well, of course, 9 billion in revenue didn't come out of nowhere. Obviously people can see the ROI.

Bob: Yeah, and it's also can be used as a preventative. So, like I said, the bad people move on and you know, you can sleep a little better at night.

Max: Okay. So. It doesn't make you a bad person to use these background checks. It just makes sure that you don't end up with the leftovers, the people who self-select out of those companies, that'll be more vigilant.

So look at what your peers do and at least try to align, unless you have made a conscious decision to attract a certain breed of dangerous characters. Is the message from Bob. And where can people get a hold of you and connect with the Pre-employ.com? Well, you can find me on LinkedIn or my profile is accurate.

And it's Bob, M a T H E R. Or you can get a hold of me at any of my companies, pre employe.com or my backgroundcheck.com. So you can also find me on Twitter at @BobMather.

Max: And then me as an individual I can create my background check

Bob: Yeah.

Max: Oh, great. So I can decide how much I want to share and decide my medical history or this history or that's and the other.

Bob: Yeah, well we don't delve into medical history, but we do into you know, the background check, the verification part.

Have you ever applied for a job that you had a background check done?

Max: I don't know.

Bob: It's an unnerving process. I'm telling you. It's unnerving. It's weird. It's like this secret investigation and people sit there and go, what are they going to find? Are they going to call my mom?

Like, what if they call my mom? Oh my God. My mom knows stuff that I did, like calm down. Because we deal with applicants who call us and they're like, what are you? You know, I did this in high school. You 15 years ago, like, no, we're not going to report anything like that.

Yeah, it's a scary process for applicants.

Max: So with my background check is it possible for an employer to direct, a candidate to my background check and say, just share with us what you're comfortable with sharing with us. We'll take care of the rest.

Bob: Yeah, it is.

Max: It's more of an opt-in process

Bob: Depending on what country you're in. What state you're in in the States, what jurisdiction, if it's legal or not. To require that as an applicant, but basically yes. And that's my end goal. My end goal in five or six years, as the majority of people will want to know what's in their background check and really want to make sure it's accurate, you know, to make sure that somebody didn't put the wrong criminal record when my identity was stolen three years ago.

What if someone did a crime with that name? You know, we find people, we have helped people all the time that have arrest records. That they said that's not me.

Max: That it takes forever to get that wiped off. Right.

Bob: You can't, it's almost impossible because there is a criminal record with your name, your date of birth, your driver's license. They stole your identity. You stopped your credit cards. That was smart. Good job. But then they walked around with a whole new identity and can do almost what they want. It's crazy.

Max: Well, if that doesn't keep you up at night.

All right. Thanks a lot, Bob. Thanks for scaring the bejesus out of us.

No, thank you for setting up a nice direction for the industry where people can have control over their identity and all the best to Pre-employ.com.

Bob: Thanks Max. It's great meeting you and I hope to meet many of your listeners.

Max: That was Bob Mather from Pre-Employ, reminding us that a background screening is not strictly about who you want to employ proactively, but it’s also a way to define who you are as an employer with regards to your competitive landscape. If ever yone of your competitors is screening for a particular type of criminal record, but you're aren't, you’re most likely to end up with a talent pool filled with criminals. So look at your competitors and calibrate yourself accordingly. Hope you enjoyed the conversation with Bob and that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, I'm pleased to welcome Diana Trasolini from Paladin Security, Vice President of People and culture at Paladin Security, which is a company that hires, well as the name suggests, hires in the security sector, and has over 16,000 people working mostly in Canada, is that right, Diana.

Diana: Canada and the US.

Max: Canada and US. So, welcome to the show.

Diana: Thank you very much for having me, Max.

Max: Pleasure. I'm excited to find out about how to hire security, and what are the specific challenges around that. But first, perhaps, tell us a little bit about Paladin Security, what do you do, and what kind of people do you hire.

Diana: Yeah Paladin Security has been around for a while since 1976. I've been with the company for just over 10 years, so for a pretty long time and I would say that the company has been growing extensively since its inception, but also extensively over the last 10 years. So really fast growth for both organic growth and through acquisition. So since I've been with the company, it's been about eight times growth. And it's been fun to be a part of that. We do obviously specialize in physical security so security officers or security guards. We also have several other companies that fall under the Paladin name, so Paladin risk solutions which does investigations, emergency management and risk solutions, we have a parking company palette of parking. And then we also have a US company, PalAmerican security. So, again, all these services on the US side of things. So, yeah, kind of sums us up on what we do,

Max: What is the bulk of your hiring? What kind of positions?

Diana: The majority of our hiring is at the security officer level for sure.

Max: And that service, I guess the private sector mainly. You were telling me before the interview about the work you're doing in the healthcare sector and hospitals. Is that a big, big industry for you, and what are the other industries you serve?

Diana: Yeah we serve a variety of different industries, so healthcare is a big one. A lot of the hospitals, care facilities across Canada, we provide security services for. We also are in commercial, retail, business centers. We do mobile security so security officers in cars do mobile patrols. Yeah, pretty much anywhere that means security, we provide the services.

Max: So, last year was good for business, business kept growing, as you said, eight times growth in the 10 plus years you've been there so from a few thousands to 16,000 people today. Congratulations on driving that enormous growth. Do you miss the old days, you know, just 2000 people? I mean 2000 is still too big where you can't really remember, you can't really remember everybody's name, but now 16,000 like, you probably don't even know everybody on your own floor.

Diana: Yeah that's a great question. I mean it's been so exciting to be part of the team that's helped with the growth. Do I miss the old days, I would say in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. You're right it is, you do miss knowing almost all of the employees by name, but to be part of this big organization that still managed to keep a very like small company feel. It's been fun to be a part of that and to build the culture around how to be a big company that still maintains personal touch to everything that we do.

Max: Yeah. I noticed the word 'culture' was in your job title. It's obviously something that after being in a company for 10 years, people will come to you to answer culture questions. But culture is a living thing, has you has your culture evolved recently or have been challenged with the events from last year?

Diana: Yeah COVID definitely, it shifts things, but I think when you have a strong corporate culture, it helps that that foundation helps the company persevere through difficult times like COVID. So, yes, of course it's been tested and tried with having to shift people working from home and having security officers who are working in certain healthcare facilities during a time when there's a worldwide pandemic. I mean, it's tricky, and we have to be fluid and flexible and be able to shift within our culture to make sure that we continue to meet our employee needs and I think that's kind of been the key is to foundationally, you stick true to your culture, but you're also fluid and flexible enough to move with the times.

Max: Yeah the shifts to accommodate the concerns you said some of the security guards did not want to work in the health care sector in your hospitals. I've heard that from other people that it was really difficult to hire in the healthcare sector during this time, due to all that's going on and the coverage, the crisis. But let's talk in a more general sense about those security guards, like, I think a lot of us have have watched, unfortunately, the mall cops movie where we imagine sort of a comfortable job where there's not that much happening, but you do get to wear either a gun or a taser. Is that the bulk of security is mostly just maintenance and kind of like making sure everything is okay and surveillance, or are there other similar like squat teams that are a little bit more action oriented?

Diana: You know what this is a good topic to discuss you need to know. You talked on what really is the crux of what causes our recruitment challenges in security is the stereotypes.

Max: Yes, I am great at those.

Diana: Yeah, and you knw what everyone is, it's not just you, but the security industry has the worst stereotypes and that makes it so challenging in so many ways, but I can tell you, lots of like lots of companies I would say yeah sure like maybe stereotypes come around for a reason, and lots of companies maybe have those minimal standards. But I mean for Paladin, that's something that we as an organization are pushing so hard to set the bar higher and to do things differently, so that we can rip those stereotypes so that we can show the true value of security. And it's really does start at like the onboarding and hiring level but all the way through our organization, I mean, we pretty much have no sites for our work. Well first of all in Canada we don't carry a weapon, so no guns and tasers unfortunately. But also, our security officers are often embedded in our clients programs, so we're not just maintaining status quo, and walking, we're often embedded in their health and safety, embedded in their concierge and customer service. We provide such a tailored approach to the services that we offer. And then on the security officer side we provide such extensive training for everyone coming in and then ongoing training to ensure that we don't just have bodies, the mall cop stereotype. That's just not not really how it is for us.

Max: But I guess, I apologize for the stereotype, somewhat, didn't want to say there was anything wrong with kind of having a surveillance, more passive approach to security. Because, obviously, it's one of those things where you're there, you have security for when things get bad, but 99% of the time, things don't get bad, right. And so, I would imagine that it is a career where it's not going to be filled with day to day excitement, and that you also need to hire for a personality type that can adjust to an environment where 99% of the time, you have to stay alert, but also you know, it's not an action movie.

Diana: Yeah.

Max: So, do you look for people who are not too action oriented, I guess. And would that be a hiring risk if somebody who would apply for a security guard position. And I know you said there's no weapons but I was gonna say everything especially trigger happy.

Diana: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, as a company we tend to steer away from contracts that are 99% nothing jobs. Of course, we have some of those in across the country, we're going to have some of those contracts, but like I said if our security officers are more embedded in the actual work that our client does, it's very infrequent that they're static and have nothing to do. When it comes to hiring, are we looking for someone specific who could do that static work, because we have such a vast contract base at a variety of different sites. Really, if we say post a job for security officer and one person is, really action oriented, Go Go Go, and one person is a little more passive and, has a different skill set, we could easily hire both of them and stick them, it's a matter of at that point, figuring out where is that person, and we do this through, we have a very extensive hiring process. Where is that person going to be best suited for success, because if you put this what you call the trigger happy person or just someone who is more action oriented at a very quiet site, they're going to be miserable. And alternatively if you put a more passive person at a very high action site, they're also going to be unhappy and that's just going to cause turnover. So I think it's more about hiring the right person at, not necessarily a skill level, we can hire that or we can train that, but hiring a person who has the values, and is a cultural addition to our team and then figuring out where they fit.

Max: Okay great. Well can you tell us a little bit more about exactly how you would interview somebody for for one of these positions?, some some interview tips. If I have never interviewed, I've never hired anybody for my own firm and security, so I'm really coming from a place of ignorance. I would imagine it'd be, you have a few questions around different scenarios how you would respond to that and understanding how they would maybe create some protocols around certain situations, to see how they think around that, and maybe you mentioned a little bit about values. So identifying what the kind of world they want to be part of. Am I on the right track?

Diana: Yeah, we have a little bit of of all of it. So we obviously, well there's a fine balance between, especially in an entry level position in having a short enough interview that keeps the person engaged, but a long enough, interview that you're getting all the information you need and also allowing that candidate to get to know the company a bit. So, for interview question specifically we have a few questions to get to know the candidate. So a big part of it is going to be experience they don't necessarily need security experience to work for us. But what experience do they have, do they have gaps in their employment?, have they been terminated from previous positions? So all of their employment history questions, any red flags, kind of digging in a little bit there. And then you're going to want to go into like behavioral questions, so you know tell me about a time when, how did you react in this situation. And then, of course, we'll do a couple of scenario questions, so give them a specific situation that really might come up in the everyday work that they do, and then see how they react or how they would react in a situation like that.

Max: Can you give us an example. I mean, I know you're interviewing 1000s of people every month, I don't want to give up your secrets to trade secrets, but.

Diana: Let me see if I can think of a quick scenario on the spot that we might ask. Okay, I'll think of something really simple and basic. So, say you're a security officer and you're on patrol at one of your sites so you're doing an exterior perimeter patrol of the site, and you find a wallet on the ground, and you're, you open it up then there's an ID in there and there's a whole bunch of money in there. What do you do? so something simple like that where you can kind of dig in and figure out does this. First of all, is this person like well, I don't know it's going to the 'lost and found'? Well, in most situations in our sites security handles lost and found, or is it like, take the money and run. You know what exactly would they do. Can they problem solve, or are they going to call the manager and ask them what to do. There's so many different ways that a person can go in so many different ways that you can kind of probe and find out this person's ability to problem solve a little bit about their morals. So it can be as simple as that, where you can dive into things a little bit.

Max: I love that question because it puts me in a great mood. Like, when's the last time I found a wallet full of money. It just kind of like puts you in a good mood and I want to continue the interview, kind of, what else you got for me. Incidentally, I have left my wallet in a food court. And I came back for it and an hour later, it was still there, but that was when I lived in Singapore, which is the safest place in the world. But I think like half half of the country is undercover cops, so it helps. That's great. You talked about hiring for more junior roles and younger staff. That's typically the space where more automation happens, as people become more senior, they expect to have a more personal approach, high touch approach, but in for young and college or high school graduates, they would expect. First of all they are a little bit more technology friendly and they go through a few more hoops to before the interview, typically. What kind of automation were you able to do on the recruitment front to help you with either sourcing or pre screening?

Diana: Yeah that's a great question. I think a big part of cutting down on time comes around recruitment metrics, It's a big one. So making sure we're optimizing the time and the money that we use by tracking metrics on everything that we do with regards to recruitment. So track the source of hire, to optimize the spend, to track conversion rates so we can eliminate unnecessary steps in the process, create multipliers, so maybe it's a referral bonus or something where one candidate becomes three or four candidates. But yeah, those metrics are key figuring that out so that we can optimize that approach. So any sort of software, whether it's a recruitment software or in HCM, that's tracking every step of the candidate process, metrics is going to be a key one. Through COVID obviously switching to video interviews. That's obviously going to be big and I think we're gonna see that more and more, even pre recorded videos, we're going to see that more in the interview process where candidates are pre recording answers to questions and submitting those.

Max: You said background checks are, I mean they're obviously very important in your industry. Is that something that is typically outsourced to a third party?

Diana: Yes, so well, yes and no. All of our like criminal record checks and those kind of checks have to be done. We have to do those internally, but reference checks, and those types of things it's done a little bit differently depending on the province that we're in. Some of them are done third party and some of them are done by our HR teams directly, so a little bit of both, but we definitely see obviously more efficiencies with outsourcing that.

Max: Yeah. I was thinking about the fact that you're doing those video interviews and asynchronous video screening. I believe some companies have moved to the place where they can authenticate someone through video, and their documentation as well. An automated and semi automated manner. So, gradually I guess this is where it's going. Though unfortunately, there hasn't been sort of a crypto passport that would tell all employers, this person has been verified, and that could be used throughout. There's only the LinkedIn profile, but I don't think there's any security equivalent to a LinkedIn profile, right?

Diana: No.

Max: No. I'm sure people are trying to build that over the years, you must have heard of few pictures.

Diana: Yeah. I don't think so.

Max: So it' not something that we like to think about in our own time but usually but there's terrible hiring mistakes we've made in the past. It is an opportunity for the audience to learn from each other's mistakes. Can you take us back to a hiring mistake that you've made in the past. And what lesson there is to learn about that hiring mistake?

Diana: Yeah that's a great question. I would say that that any hiring mistakes that have happened, obviously there's been a few. In my time in HR, it usually comes down to the battle between being under a tight timeline and rushing the process. So you know you hire someone on and you skip a step or you rush a step or you don't follow the standard process and you end up with someone who is a bit of a bad egg. And then you go back and you look at your process and you're like, okay, I can see exactly why this happened. And you get the organizational time crunch where this position needs to be filled now and that's the priority and you budge on your HR best practice or in your standards that you've put in place to make sure that you're hiring the best people. So yeah I think that's kind of what I learned is, at the end of the day if it means the position is open longer than I want it to be or then someone else wants it to be, the most important thing is kind of sticking to the process to make sure that all of our ducks in a row when it comes to hiring person because a turnover is more costly than leaving a position open a little bit longer.

Max: And there's a conflict, inherent to your position, because you went into HR because you trust people, you love people, you love psychology, but you have to be that process person who is going to drag things out sometimes.

Diana: Yeah totally. It's a constant battle between as HR being a part of the business so needing to understand the strategic objectives and day to day operational needs, but also meeting to understand how the people approached things and sometimes they don't go hand in hand, that the processes don't necessarily match the organizational needs so it's figuring out how do we work with the organization to make sure that we're safe and sound and everything that we do, but the needs are also being met. It's a challenge.

Max: Yeah. And then the particular challenge you also alluded to when you talked about making sure people have good morals good values that they align with Paladin security. That must be difficult to extract in the interview process. Is that a standard thing? Is that just part of the interview guideline? Or how do you validate for values?

Diana: Yeah, I mean, there's several ways, like I mentioned, you can kind of embed questions that will give insight into a person's values, you can embed those questions into the interview so like I said, asking someone about a wallet. I mean, not very many people even if their values say I'm going to steal the money, not very many people are going to see that in an interview so that's a little bit tricky.

Max: It's not stealing if it's on the floor. I guess you can tell what I was gonna say if you asked me the interview question.

Diana: Yeah, you are definitely not hired. You can ask a person directly, what are your values, what do you stand for. But also I think in a lot of the questions that are embedded in like, you asked them, if you're going to be late for work, what you do or what is your process?, and you can kind of see, are they someone who kind of takes accountability. Are they someone who's like, well, I've never been late for work in my entire life or are they someone who's like, well, I feel terrible I'd call my manager right away.

Max: Panicking.

Diana: Yeah you can kind of sense a person's values based on the way they respond and the way they react. But also I guess if you ask them directly. What are your values, what do you stand for, you can get a sense of get a sense of who they are.

Max: I can tell you in HR, the tendency for people who have attendance issues is to really over communicate on their medical condition.

Diana: Oh boy!

Max: TMI.

I've been a recipient of many medical reports, but.

And probably have some good stories to go with that.

I don't know, I try to forget. But you've given me and our listeners a lot of great tips on the use of situational questions to get to the psychology and the morals of someone, obviously critical for the security industry but I think applicable across many other industries. And so thank you very much, Diana, for sharing. And what's a good way for people to get in touch with you, or find out more about Paladin?

DIANA: Yeah I mean to get in touch with me, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best way you can find me on there. Paladins obviously on LinkedIn as well or the website paladinsecurity.com. You can find out everything there.

Max: Fantastic. Thanks Diana.

Diana: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Max: That was Diana Trasolini from Paladin insecurity group. Two good lessons for me from today's discussion one, the important role in HR and talent acquisition to force everyone to follow the steps, every step of the recruitment journey to avoid making hiring mistakes. Because when you skip steps that you start making mistakes and the second one, if you want to get to the values of your candidates, instead of asking them what are your values?

Ask them. How would you react to a certain situation, but then in a situation and ask them how they would handle it and you'll get a lot more value out of it. Hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like more of the same, please subscribe and please share with your friends.

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Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Bianca Stringuini. Bianca is a specialist in inclusion and culture, and has worked for some of the leading employers in the world, some of the Fortune 500 companies including Visa, JP Morgan, AIG and has a unique global perspective on matters of inclusion, coming from Brazil and having spent most of your career in Asia Pacific, does that introduction suit you Bianca?

Bianca: It's very nice. Thank you Max. Thanks for having me.

Max: Thanks for coming. So we're going to talk about diversity, which I think you have a unique perspective on not just because that's your space but also because I'm always interested in the Asian perspective. I'm in Hong Kong and you're in Singapore. You come from Brazil. So we have a very, maybe different perspective than where our American colleagues, and I'd like to talk a little bit about that difference and to help our audience shed some light on what diversity means in different parts of the world. But before we get into these heavy topics, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in the inclusion space. Were you trying to right some wrongs?

Bianca: Now I don't think I had such lofty goals when I started. I kind of started to get into inclusion and diversity completely by chance. I was moving to Singapore, from Brazil. My background is in trade, and I was working for the Singapore government actually then the ministry affairs, and we were bringing Singaporean companies into Brazil and taking Brazilian companies to Singapore and I came here a couple of times, and kind of fell in love with it and decided to do my MBA here, and I had a friend of mine that worked for American Express at the time and said, oh there is this role here for the first inclusion and I think you should apply for it, because I think you really fit the bill and I was like 'Why me?' like I didn't even know what it was because in Brazil, in 2007, this was not a topic that people would talk about, and I had to google it for the interview. And it was such an amazing finding for me that there were people in the world that worked to really kind of improve employees well being and belonging, fighting against discrimination and all that, and as a woman that started my careers in the early 2000s in Brazil, I suffered all of that, as the only woman in a trading desk with 16 guys and all that so I was like oh there was a job like that. So I was kind of amazed about it and what I loved about the role itself was at Amex, I said to them 'Look I don't come from HR, I don't know this field', and they say oh that's exactly what we want and I was like 'what?', and they are like, we want someone with the business experience that can figure it out what diversity inclusion means in Asia and Asian countries of Asia, because they were an American company that had a global, probably a more American strategy around DNI for a very long time and it's very successful at it but wanted to really figure out what does this mean in this part of the world and that's kind of how I started my journey. So my question throughout all the other roles that I had in inclusion and diversity have always been, what does this mean here, what does this mean with this company, what does this mean this function because diversity is different everywhere and it needs to be locally relevant, if not, it doesn't work.

Max: Right. But it was an initiative that was started in the US, and then kind of spread out, and within that company into a global initiative. Of course, it doesn't really make sense from my side on the recruitment side. What we see is these job application forums where you have to self identify as a certain ethnic group, and then answer you're applying for jobs in China and you have to say whether you're a US veteran, or one of those things, these standardized forms. They just tell the audience that we have not localized. So, just at the application level there's plenty that needs to be done.

Bianca: I think on that point, I always ask, when you're collecting data, what are you collecting for and what are you doing with it? So I'm very very pro standards and processes that are consistent, but specifically with data we need to be very careful. Why are we asking these questions and what messages are being sent, because I am all forward to asking self ID questions when you have an application form where I am looking for candidates with disabilities for instance, you want to provide accommodations, you want to know what will be required for this process. You want to know if people need any kind of self declaration in the country where you were in, where you do have other kinds of self IDs that you need. But if you ask me from veterans everywhere in the world. It really doesn't make sense but then my question is, what are you doing with the data you're collecting, and that kind of data collection for me, kind of principle. So you have to think like why are you questioning the question.

Max: Before we started the call you said you like the word inclusivity better than diversity because maybe it's less political.

Bianca: No, I think the inclusion is kind of a secret sauce is what makes it work. Because if you have a very diverse workforce, but very low inclusion, it's just chaos. It's still a lot of people that don't give to each other, don't respect each other, don't work together and are not creative together.

Max: You can hit the quota, but everybody hates themselves, hates everybody else.

Bianca: There was no dialogue, there is no arguments that are constructive, there is no platforms for people to feel that they do belong to something because, at the same time, I think for me inclusion begets diversity. I think if you create an environment that is inclusive, you will attract a diverse workforce because they want to work in that space where I don't understand when people say to me, inclusions are hard to measure and so diversity is where you can get the measurements for success in a sense that you can have hard targets, I think you have can have our targets in inclusion as well, but they have to be more related to engagement, to kind of productivity, to leadership capabilities. I think that you will get diversity, if you have an inclusive place, but it's kind of like you always clean your house before inviting guests over. You don't invite your guests and say, Oh, the house is a mess and maybe you guys can help us fix it. I think that's a little bit naïve, because it creates, especially in a Goodman point it recreates a revolving door where the recruitment team is always trying to get more and more diversity into the door and people come in and they are now welcome, they don't feel like they belong, and they leave very quickly, because they have places to go, they have offers.

Max: Yeah. I mean there's no doubt some employers will specifically look for Chinese speakers, and specifically those will mostly be ethnically Chinese. There's a strong business rationale for it and it's supported and if we drop in somebody that doesn't speak Chinese in the middle of that environment, it's going to be a little bit awkward so they have to be ready for it. These kinds of pragmatic realities don't seem to translate well into North America and so they're not applicable right. So they just sense these obvious differences that require a completely different approach to this field as you move out of North America.

Bianca: Yeah. So the biggest difference between the US and UK to a certain extent, and Asia, is that the US has a lot of recognition around diversity. The US has affirmative action, which all federal contractors for instance have extreme regulations in terms of, so it's something that the government is highly involved with, and so these things are very different in Asia, where there is not a lot of regulation where governments are mostly pro employers. They don't want to exercise too much into HR practices as much as possible, although to be fair, I think that translate the Singapore government has an agency department that agency though looks at things like if I have a recruitment ad that says must be Chinese, doesn't really must be Chinese or is it a way of getting specific race in a sense of Singapore. But I do think that in Asia it came much more from the business, like I think that the focus in diversity and inclusion in Asia has come much more from the mere fact of the economic growth and the diversity that is coming to the market and just the diversity of the region itself and just having to learn various different millennial cultures that exists right. So you have to balance a lot of differences, whereas the opposite in the US, north from south, east to West is a very different country but it's regulated mostly by very similar federal laws that kind of dictate this diversity first inclusion following the agenda. Where in Asia, I think there has been a lot more pushing maybe it's because, a little bit of the Buddhist culture of harmony etc. of bringing like enthused belonging, all that has always kind of been intrinsic to Asian culture.

Max: I certainly like the connection back to Buddhism. Maybe at some point we can have a chief. Well, we have tons of Chief wellness officers but we don't have a specific Buddhist reference.

Bianca: Chief enlightenment officer.

Max: There was the Buddha of Zendesk at one point, which was a great mascot, but I think it got taken down. Yeah, the regulatory framework in the US is what has moved the needle or has made that such an important industry in the US. But I think the rest of the world and you were just saying, how do you adapt a company for the millennials. I think millennials are more likely to be somewhat Americanized, and have a vision of the workplace, which is influenced by what they see and what they read is coming out of the US in terms of these particular debates around diversity. And so their expectations are that I'm walking into a diverse workplace which aligns itself with the global cultural standards set by America, itself set by the laws. And so maybe that's what you meant by being millennial ready?

Bianca: I think one of the things that we need to think about. I think millennials actually just care more, maybe because they have bigger problems, or they saw maybe our generation or previous generation not doing much about most of the problems that they now have to solve for. And i think definitely one of the biggest problems that they have to solve. And I'm not saying only the US has these problems, but definitely the US is coming to this crucial point of reckoning like we need to do something. So for instance, I think that the whole discussion around racism and anti-racist, what's happening in the US is really important because a lot of the discussion has been so regulated, and almost like, we must do this or we're doing this because it's the right thing. And I think businesses are coming together and saying, actually we must do this because this business is imperative because actually this is going to generate inclusive economic growth, which is kind of the take on from Asia for instance like why do you have a paradigm mostly in the private sector in China, in terms of gender. Women in the private sector have parody in China because there was economic growth that pushed the Half the Sky kind of motto. So I think the millennial what I mean by saying we need to kind of fix this and we need to be better, but we also expect better from our employers or our environment, and the problem that you say they are American, I don't think they are Americanized, as much as their Silicon Valleyanized in a sense. I think we have this vision of Silicon Valley as being the way that all American workplaces are, and I think it's not true. I mean, I can tell you I worked mostly in my career for companies based in New York. I worked for Visa based in San Francisco, there was a night and day difference in terms of culture, and that would be across the US so it's also a generalization to say America right as one thing. So I do think that the millennials have higher expectations. Because they do believe in work with purpose, I think a lot more than that, they don't want the money but they want the purpose, they want to say I'm doing something that's ultimately good.

Max: Yeah, well the purpose for most businesses is to increase shareholder value. And to do so by delivering great service, great products, and building wealth into the economy, but that kind of talk, not so hip with millennials. We want more direct impact.

Bianca: No. I think making profits to shareholders, I cannot imagine a company today that can make profits for their shareholders without having members in their workforce. I think that the lack of diversity in the workforce, proves itself on the lack of creativity, on marketing blunders, on not being able to do customer service to the level that people expect. So, I think diversity is sort of a business imperative but again inclusion is this important piece that kind of gels it all together. I think millennials care about that.

Max: I can help you imagine some businesses that would do well without diversity. I mean, you don't have to think very hard, there's plenty of great examples out there of businesses that are very profitable that have zero diversity. You could have a language class to teach, Portuguese, filled with Portuguese speakers native speakers, you could have Hooters, you could have a coal mining business, there they just don't have the kind of diversity. Every industry also has a certain profile, so, I don't know if you can make that statement.

Bianca: I feel that, yes you can make profit and be a successful company up to a certain level. If you want to be, my bias of thinking about global companies, I think when you want to get a business that scales, when you want to go broader than your neighborhood. If you want to be a big business, your clients, your customers are bound to be diverse and that will then change, look at a lot of the signals that come out of Facebook, I think, the starting group was diverse no.

Max: If you are consumer facing in particular.

Bianca: Yeah. When you start to like I need to broaden this up, I want to be global, you have to bring in diversity to your leadership team, if not you will face just, I think, creativity, block kind of thing.

Max: For people who want to leverage or who want to, what are some good examples, have you seen of companies who are good at communicating to millennials around inspiring themes around, I guess well being, and maybe inclusivity of, if we want to go there. I mean, for me, inclusivity communication is mostly around showcasing the groups, the underrepresented groups within your workforce, and putting them on your website and putting them in on your brochures and so on, talking about their success. But, I'm looking maybe for examples of other inspiring employers out there who are talking about well being.

Bianca: Well, look, I think to millennials, you cannot talk to them, you have to talk with them. So I do think that is like when you bring a topic like wellbeing or engagement, or I think it's a conversation, you have to ask people what they want to do and you have to find ways to build platforms for this kind of two way discussion. So for instance, in Visa, the young professionals, ERG(Employee Resource Groups) just phenomenal at creating, kind of campaigns and challenges and pictures and stories and people to send it back and engage in that audience but I do think that when you think about well being in general, you have to know, what do people care like you need to ask them, what is well being means to you because it's such a broad topic and it can be many things for many people and so you need to say, okay, what is my role as a company, and what is your role as an individual, and like what is part of you take care of yourself and my role in allowing that so I think companies that have been, just doing really well with giving time off or companies that are doing really well with making sure that people have flexible working, that's okay but you have time to also time to do other things. But what are the top three four things? Obviously, last year I think mental health was one, and I think that millennials are a lot more engaged in this conversation just because, to be fair, it does has a prevalence to happen in teenage and early adulthood, but also I do think that they are less worried about talking about this because they know that their generations are kind of tabooed, let's not talk about it.

Max: We don't want to come off as soft but younger generations are more open. You were talking about San Francisco culture beforehand. I've been in technology. I've made a few trips to the city. And I've heard many employers complain about how soft the people in San Francisco are and how they just expect so many benefits compared to other parts of the world because you know you really have to compete hard for talent there. So, they're just always competing for the new coolest thing that people can talk about, Oh I am at work, I don't have to wear shoes. I don't have to come to the office, I don't have to do any work. Wow, that's the best job of all.

Bianca: I just get paid, yeah.

Max: In a world where that is always looking for trends and counter trends. There are some companies that will stand out. Because, like let's say the Elon Musk companies, they're going to go counter current, they're gonna say well we don't care about well being. And that we're gonna, we're gonna work 80 hours a week because we're changing the world. Now, are you seeing a resurgence or come back for some of these trends. Are these are these competing trends, because for me like I was thinking about well being, like, well being for me would be a hyper competitive environment, where I work very hard and I perform well, and I get paid, that could be that could be my well being.

Bianca: Well that is well being for most people. I think that will be positive, are our synonyms, I don't think you can be productive if you don't feel that if you don't feel good, but obviously, I think that, well being doesn't mean rest or days off or things like that. I think what it means for you, which is, do I have a high functioning environment?, do I have safety?, do I have an environment that motivates me, gives me creative ways of expressing myself, but also, does my company kind of takes care of me, let's say, for instance. Do I have the training?, do I have the learning? So many people last year use their time to pick up new skills, how much does that involve, do I still have career progression? So I think that it's important to really think about how well being means productivity. But yeah, I think it's not self exclusive in a sense.

Max: That's a very good reminder. I must say, I've fallen into that trap of considering well being, to be time off, associated with time off, but really, is to be associated with time on and working well.

Bianca: Feeling wow right. So I think that what is good for my well being is mostly, Do I have flexibility? So for instance, how are companies or going back to work. I'm going to go full time into the office. I still have time to focus, there's a lot of people that picked up a lot of fitness for instance, and they want to have that 30 minute in between meetings to exercise so they can do that at home. So, it doesn't mean that they won't continue to work until 11pm But they want to build that into their schedule, and they need that flexibility. Do I have the tools and resources for instance if I want to learn how to set up my office and I wanted to be having the right economics like, do I have some sort of guide, do I have some sort of budget to how to set up an office, when I'm thinking about wellbeing, I'm thinking about learning right. If I want to learn for instance as a people manager how to have conversations about mental health, how to understand if an employee of my friends is feeling depressed or isolated. How do I do that, as a people manager before I didn't really have the skills or the skills, does my company provide me that learning. So I really think it's flexibility is tools and learning, if you provide that, then individuals are able to make their own choices to be as productive as they can.

Max: I'm writing some of these ideas down. I'm going to act on them as soon as this call is over. So that was super good. Thank you, Bianca. I would like to ask you, where can people get a hold of you if they want more of these solid advice on building an inclusive environment?

Bianca: They can find me on LinkedIn. I think you can add my bio to your podcast and people can find me there.

Max: Absolutely!

Bianca: Thank you, Max for this opportunity.

Max: Thanks Bianca and talk to you soon.

Max: That was Bianca Stringuini reminding us that wellbeing in the workplace. It's not like wellbeing at home. Taking a break, resting and meditating, wellbeing in the workplace is being productive and creating that wellbeing is something that we all should strive to as employers and as recruiters, we should talk about how we've created a hyper productive environment for our people. Hope you enjoyed it and if you did remember to subscribe and share with friends.

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MAX: All right, good morning, welcome back everybody to the Recruitments Hackers Podcast. Today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities for future of work at Prudential Financial, who has led some initiatives at Prudential around the future of work for the transformation of talent, is working on talent mapping for the future at Prudential. And we'll talk about organizational developments at Prudential and maybe go back to some of your work at IBM before, if you're willing to walk us down memory lane Wagner.

WAGNER: Thanks so much, Max. Nice to be here, and I'm looking forward to the dialogue. Thank you.

MAX: Thank you. So now future of work, I feel like nobody knows what it means. So perhaps you could start by telling us how this came about at Prudential Financial the decision to create a future of work group.

WAGNER: Well it's interesting because if you ask your audience, 'how many of their companies are going through a transformation?', probably everybody's gonna raise their hands. So transformation now is a continuous process of finding differentiation in the marketplace anyway. So Prudential embarked on a major transformation we knew we had to accelerate the way we engage with our customers, the way we offer services and start creating experiences for them. So that logically lead to, we need to focus on our people, do we have the capabilities to go through this transformation to be successful, what are the new ways of working, what are the new ways of designing your organization, what are the new ways that we can engage the right talent out there to come join us. So, all this came into fruition in the future of work. Today people say what's the future of work. To me, the future of work is nothing but creating the capabilities, to create a future-ready organization and future-ready requires you to be adaptable and be conscious that things are continuously changing, so that's the future of work.

MAX: I mean we all have the same, we have a joint future hopefully. And our future, I think, is all kinds of pushing the marketplace towards the same types of talents, digital, good with numbers, creative, nimble and quick, these are universal qualities we look for. So, how much of that search will be recruitment lead versus development lead, because it's kind of like nature versus nurture debate. Are you adapting the organization, by changing your hiring practices, or is it more around training and development.

WAGNER: That's very interesting that you say that because in my view, everything is contextual. Prudential has a long history of employee-centric policies and strategies. So of course, as we evolve, as we create new capabilities, as things evolve and we need to shift to new higher value skills. We need to focus on upscaling and rescaling. But that does not necessarily meet our needs for fresh thinking and fresh skills that sometimes is much better for us to buy or borrow than build. So I think what you're saying is recruitment plays a key role here because now at least at Prudential we have a strategic workforce planning process that we are implementing now we're piloting phases, but it's very critical that the TA team starts getting acquainted with what the business needs are in terms of the capabilities they are building, because the roles are changing. My team does grow reimagining roles so we are deconstructing roles, we are rebuilding. There's so much technology now, that helps to rebuild roles based on skills and valuing skills. So even those traditional surveys that we use for TA, they are going to be outdated very soon, if we don't keep up with reinvention of roles, job descriptions are going to change. I always say in HR, for example I come from HR and I think we need the talent systems architect. What is that? I would create a job description immediately because I think we need it. We need a digital-savvy HR leader, we need an HR leader who is a synthesizer of analytics, we need an HR leader who is strategic in their thinking about the outside in. So, to be honest, it is a prime time for recruiters to reinvent themselves.

MAX: Yeah. I think the recruiters that I'm coming across now, very different than at the start of my career when we were looking for pure sales guys, hustlers, people with charisma, the ability to remember people on a first-name basis, very naturally fluently and to go on. I live in Hong Kong where recruiters are working at the bars, basically exchanging name cards to create a portfolio of customers. Well, the bars were closed most of the year and today most of my customers, I see that they're more likely to be working on automated workflows, Excel sheets, can I deep thinking work, of course, it's also because it's the different nature of recruitment when you're doing with high volume recruitment versus the more white gloves service you would get in the financial services. But basically, I think it's the rise of the introspective deep thinking recruiter which I witnessed. Is that similar transformation that you're seeing at Prudential?

WAGNER: Yes, you know why because as you're speaking I was thinking, how important it is to create the right candidate experience nowadays, right. We can no longer just pretend that the candidate experience is not relevant to us because at least for Prudential a candidate that comes through our doors and is not hired, that's a lost customer if they don't have a good experience. So the idea that customers, the market you're serving, your candidates, your employees, they are one community thinks this way. We have one community of people who might be coming in and out of your ecosystem. So this creates a lot of complexity, and then deep thinking. If we talk about deep thinking I think about the tele marketplace. Every company is thinking about the tele marketplace. If you're not thinking about the marketplace you better accelerate your thinking, because we have about six or seven top-notch vendors out there, and they're all using machine learning, AI to really enforce skills and compliment the recruiters' savviness, right. You talk about the quality of the recruiter. Today a recruiter has to be a little more analytical in their approach. They need to understand the algorithms that are helping them source their candidates. So all this is very exciting but at the end of the day, you cannot benchmark your future, I truly believe in that. If you want to differentiate yourself, you go forward with something that is innovative and you build the future you want. So, I think digital platforms now are allowing us to do this. We enable ourselves with technology, with platforms, and then we create a special engagement. What I say is that systems of record are there, systems of insights are there now. Now it's time for us to create the systems of engagement, they are going to create a differentiation.

MAX: The role that you just talked about earlier.

WAGNER: Talent systems architect?

MAX: Talent systems architect. That sounds good. I think I've seen a few of those but they were more like HRIS Manager, which is the old way of calling things I suppose. What I saw in the last few months from my very unique perspective, unique as in biased, from my angle of the world, was that with shrinking budgets for many companies that were going through cost reduction, came a desire to reduce all the fats in the system including all system integration, and to consolidate their spend with one or two vendors, one or two system of records. And so the architects that were populating the world, I guess had less budget to work with and so I had to consolidate their spending with a few number of vendors. So, I think it was a good year for really big systems of record, and maybe a more difficult year for the smaller tech vendors that were not a must-have.

WAGNER: Yeah. But that's a good point too because the challenges that we face with less budget in a more constrained environment leaves you a lot of innovative thinking. And to be honest I think the advantage of smaller vendors and partners, I call them partners, is that if they are in front of you in the right time with the right products things go very fast. That's the other thing. Things can go very fast, if you are in the right place in the right time in the right context, but it's hard to find those niche, but I think that the curiosity that we have to apply, we're always curious about new vendors, new partners, because sometimes you'll find something that is really genius and you need to go with it.

MAX: Yeah, a real differentiator.

WAGNER: Exactly.

MAX: Yeah, I've got a couple of aces up my sleeve for next year, for this year. I wanted to go back to IBM. I know IBM is a while back for you already a couple of years but it's got such a reputation and you've spent 10 years there almost and it's got such a reputation as a place where talent is being developed, as a place where you spend your entire career. I was hoping you could walk us back on what workforce planning meant at a giant like IBM, and what their philosophy is around talents, because, I'm going back to my MBA days and all the case studies were about IBM this place where you create an extremely competitive environment and manage to attract the best engineers in the world.

WAGNER: Yeah. Actually, it's funny. I'm so fond of IBM, once an IBM always an IBM or by the way, but what is striking to me is how amazing it was in 2008-2009 with Transform HR. We started creating strategies that were so ahead of the time, we had the influence of skills, we had already applied our algorithms to the propensity to learn, who are the people who had propensity and curiosity. We had so many streams that helped us create an even bigger strategy into our point. Why IBM has its own philosophy of talent because actually, we enable the people to own their careers. We always talk about owning your career or your career is yours, you make it, but if you don't enable the talent, you don't have much to promote that growth. So at IBM you have the tools you had all that but beyond that, it's important to have clarity. I keep thinking about this, in a world that's so crowded, think about clarity creating capacity, capacity to think, capacity to strategize, capacity to focus on the priority you have, but think about capacity, always comes out of clarity. If you have clarity don't waste your time confused. So at IBM it's very clear what we stand for. So we had our clear strategy, career velocity for example. We understand that you want your career to go fast. So how do we enable you to think that way? So all this creative leadership we had this at one point, all this based on skills. And this is the funny part right. Now today everything is skills based but we are doing skill-based everything in 2009-2010 so now it's been 11 years of skills as a currency. Now we are evolving to capabilities and now we are evolving to what are the enduring human capabilities. So, recruiters now have a responsibility to actually not only serve the managers hiring the talent, but actually we have a consultative approach to that, because actually the recruiter could play a big role in identifying what are the nuances in the capability you're looking for that actually you didn't describe being or description. So it's interesting how the recruiter is now in a great position. And to your point, your company too. You had to accelerate the experience, people don't have patience to wait for phone calls back from people and all this. If you have a platform that interacts with candidates in the onboarding like you said. I love the idea that you could have a frictionless onboarding experience. I love that. IBM has been doing that for a long time, but because we have technology.

MAX: I suppose that you want to hire people who are ambitious, want to progress their career rapidly as you did in IBM. It wouldn't be suitable to have a recruitment process, which would be longer than your competitors. Say, hire slow fire fast. I always try to counter it by saying, no it should be the other way around. I mean, hire fast.

WAGNER: I agree.

MAX: But maybe fire fast as well, but definitely hire fast if you can make the right hire fast, rather than the right hire slow. So, if somebody is listening here and falls in love with the idea of working for IBM. How could they self eliminate themselves, what would be somebody who would not be happy at IBM, because I used to work at SAP, 70,000 maybe more now employees worldwide. And I felt a little bit like a nobody in a really big ocean like a drop of water in the ocean. And so it wasn't really right for me. I guess IBM is gonna be a little bit the same, like you need to be very group-oriented.

WAGNER: Okay, I can't talk for IBM because I'm not there right now. However, I'll tell you how I got a job at IBM, this is interesting. I didn't know anybody at IBM, I had my own practice as a consultant, executive coaching trainer. I did everything in HR consultancy, and I moved to a place far away from New York City, and I was right next to IBM, and somebody said why you're going to sit every day, go work for IBM. I said, why not. And I found the name of the head of talent there in diversity. And I called the assistant to job three to meet today. I called the second I talked to him now? No sir, can I give him my resume? No sir, can I get his email? No sir, go through the regular process. Okay, that's not going to work for me. So I knew somebody from New York, in our HR community that was at IBM, in the suffix of their emails was us.ibm.com. So I got his name and I remember writing fifteen combinations of his name nr.glovaglova rn and I kept doing combinations, one of them went through. And he said, interesting resume, I will pass through HR. I said okay everybody there says they will pass through HR. And two weeks later I was sitting in front of HR. He says I'm interviewing him because he asked me, but what am I gonna do with you. I said I don't know but I can't be your greatest cultural evangelist for IBM. So you can consider me one of your champions. In three weeks I had a job offer, and the rest is history.

MAX: Nice.

WAGNER: So it's really interesting right how things happen. But if you want to be disqualified, talk about expecting predictability, expecting predictable work, or expecting certainty. So you know that's not a place for you because IBM evolves quickly and we are always still dynamic there. It's really cool for somebody who wants to grow capability skills, it's incredible. But not for somebody who is looking for certainty and predictable work. That doesn't work that way.

MAX: I think that's a great insight. I would have expected the opposite, actually. I would be like IBM which’s so organized because that is my mental picture. So I would associate that with predictability but I understand it's different. And with Prudential Financial, what is the type of profile you would encourage not to come? It's like the opposite of employer branding, who do we not want to hire.

WAGNER: Don't tell us how good you are. Tell us how good you want to be because we are very much into the learning phase of our history. We are becoming a very learning culture, and it is really taking hold. We're talking to our leaders about learning, being curious and it works, because we are hiring. For example, we are hiring for propensity to learn for capabilities that are ahead of your role. We are asking people to tell us how they envision their careers progressing because if you want a vertical career path that's not the place to be. I think we want people to experience as much as they can because we depend on the diversity of thought, we depend on your experiences being diverse because our customers are expecting different offerings. We can't do things in silence any more. So if you expect to come to a role in progress to become the senior vice president in that role in that vertical, that's not really a good thing to say.

MAX: You also have to own your career and be ready to move.

WAGNER: Exactly. Be ready to move across everywhere.

MAX: Nobody wants to get financial advice from somebody who'd be saying the same thing for 10 years in a row.

WAGNER: Exactly. Very good point.

MAX: Great. Well, one question I love to ask is about traumatic experiences around talent. We've all made bad hires in the past. Can you walk us back memory lane and tell us about somebody you hired, where well it was the wrong hire for the role.

WAGNER: What I tell you it actually ended up being a success story, Okay, I'm very into taking bets on talents. So, when I was transforming management development at IBM. I got a call from somebody who was in Mexico and I said interesting as I got one international mindset and really multicultural thinker but was a catastrophe. She arrived and actually she was so stuck in her old way and she was so afraid because her experience in Mexico was really not great and her maturity wasn't there yet. So, I was so close.

MAX: And she had done a great interview. She nailed it.

WAGNER: And she had done a great interview. She was so excited about the dynamic ways of doing things. She can't wait to try new things. I say okay, I like the raw material. The raw material comes with a dose of consequences, and buddy good news is this. I don't give up. I was this close to firing her, I have to say. However, I said you know what this is my challenge. As a leader, this is my challenge: how can I make her successful in a different role, somehow I am gonna make her successful. It took me three months to turn something around. Today she is still at IBM and she is the Head of communications, one of the communications leaders there. I love that story because we're still friends and we laugh about it, how hard it was in the beginning because it was horrendous but at the end of the day, you know what I could have fired her but I didn't. So don't give up on talent that quickly.

MAX: Okay.

WAGNER: It was dramatic though. It was dramatic because I needed somebody.

MAX: It was dramatic. But if you could do it a bit differently would you do it differently?

WAGNER: Oh yeah, well I would think about capabilities, like I said before, you need to think about capabilities, you have to explore what are the capabilities people bring. You can have certifications, you can have diplomas, you can have experiences, but tell me how you're bringing all this together to build capability and value. And I think that's the next frontier of interviewing.

MAX: That's like capabilities more like skill-based?

WAGNER: Skills plus abilities plus what's your intention. How do you merge skills, capabilities and abilities into this capability of actually creating value, and that is something between skills and abilities, that is the art of interviewing that you find. But it's funny, I love this because it's not concrete, but I think it's real.

MAX: And then you had to go in panic mode and basically upskill her.

WAGNER: Yes completely, was coaching one on one every day. It was good at the end.

MAX: All right, so even if you make a terrible hiring mistake if the desire is there, don't give up. There's still a route to salvation. Invest reinvest in the person, give it a few months and maybe.

WAGNER: You see now you said something interesting, maybe why because the person needs to be willing. She said help, this is the problem, that's the differentiator. I would fire her if she said you are the problem, but she didn't, she said I know I'm the problem, help me and I took that bet. So it was very cool.

MAX: Okay, I've got a few names, running through my head about who needs help. I think everybody has got to be thinking about that all the time who needs help. Great, well Wagner it was delightful to get to know you and to learn a little bit more about the future of working is today at Prudential. I mean we went down memory lane a little bit more than you probably wanted, but thanks for sharing. Where can people get a hold of you, if they want to find out more?

WAGNER: You can find me on LinkedIn, you know I love interacting with people on LinkedIn Wagner Denuzzo on there and I'm open to new connections, it's fun.

MAX: Great. Thank you again.

WAGNER: Thanks, Max.

MAX: And that was Vagner the New so from Prudential financial reminding us that even if you make the wrong hire, if that person is aware that they're not, I'm quite ready for the job, you may still salvage the situation and you may still work with them to make it work.

Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast.

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Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Roy Baladi, who is the new founder of take this, Jobs for humanity. It's a new company with grand plans, and I really love the initial intent of helping humanity, connect them with jobs. I think all of our listeners will connect. So welcome to the show, Roy.

Roy: Thank you so much. Thank you for having Max.

Max: Pleasure. So, Roy, we had been connected sometime back when you were the head of the marketplace at smart recruiters, which is an ATS company based in San Francisco, and you're now back in your home country I believe after a long time in the US.

Roy: I'm in Lebanon now, and I left in 2001 to study computer science and finance, and math at Virginia Tech. And now 20 years later it was my birthday this past weekend and I celebrated my very first birthday in two decades in Lebanon, surrounded by family, which feels really good. I'm not here permanently, but I'm enjoying the fact that the world has turned remote and I can actually explore a lot more than I could before.

Max: Of Course I hear Beirut is a great city to celebrate birthdays I believe. Very good things. So, maybe without going into the whole career path. But how did you end up in recruitment I should just ask, I suppose it was you, came in on the product side. And you said you were studying math and ended up in recruitments, a little bit by through the accidents of a career.

Roy: Yeah, well my first job was on Wall Street. I was a derivatives trader on Wall Street, and within a year I realized what the heck am I doing here. That really doesn't resonate with me, I love the quaint side, but it didn't bring purpose. And then financial crashes that were 2006-2010 and the world came upside down and as we came out of this crash, I told myself where do I fit? I'm going to find myself at age 35 with no skills that I'm interested in, that thinking led me to start to ask myself a question, where do I fit? And that got me down the rabbit hole of psychographics, which are able to identify career paths based on natural skills and natural interests, and that was the genesis of my first startup that got me into the recruiting deck on the candidate side called fresh ground, which did exactly that in 2010.

Max: Behavioral assessments for young jobseekers right?

Roy: Pretty much.

Max: Great. And then after that, smart recruiters and now Jobs for humanity. So, tell me more about this new project,

Roy: Jobs for humanity is honestly a cry from the heart. It is not something that I came in and said I'm gonna put together a business plan, this is what I'm going to do. It's a global movement of job creation for overlooked communities, and the communities that we really want to start to work with either blind. There are 285 million blind and visually impaired individuals in the world, 36% are unemployed. And if you go on Google and you look for jobs for the blind, you're not going to find the job word for them, you're not going to find out. Then, other clauses are jobs for the neurodivergent. Most people don't know what that term means and this is where you have all the autistics, Asperger's, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and that's if you add them all together whether diagnosed and there's a lot of people not diagnosed, yet it's about 1 billion people on earth, 70% of the population and is growing very fast. You've got your geniuses there, Einstein, Newton were on the spectrum. A lot of people say that Bill Gates is on the spectrum but that's not confirmed. Sir Richard Branson is on the spectrum, a lot of scientists, yet they're having a hard time. 80% underemployment in that community. Then you've got single moms. A lot of people don't realize that one in seven women above the age of 18 on earth today is a single mother, raising children. In the United States that translates to 14 million single moms raising 16 million children. Their average income is $35,000 a year when the national income is 80,000 a year. So imagine over $3,000 at the US expenses, a month is what you have to raise a child and work, and pay for yourself and one or multiple children.

Max: At least you aren't to pay the beers for that lazy husband.

Roy: Yeah.

Max: I shouldn't joke. Of course, it's very difficult to be a single mother, but I never thought about it as a disfavored population on the employment side. In fact, as an employer, I've always looked at single moms like that's absolutely a place to go because they have so much great work ethics and purpose, compared to, maybe, I don't want to call out the other groups.

Roy: The unemployment rate among single moms is double the national average apart from the normal average. And the national average in the US is about six point something percent. Global is about 5.6%, single moms are 13%, blind is 36%, neurodivergent is about 80% underemployed, underneath or less.

Max: Did you say 80% for neurodivergent?

Roy: 80% underemployed yeah. So they could be working but they're working in something that really does not utilize their brain and the barriers are honestly not that hard, that's the big opportunity here, is that companies just don't know how to open up. Like for example, I've interviewed hundreds of recruiters and asked have you ever interviewed a blind person? The answer is almost always no. If you interviewed a blind person, do you even know, you can send them a follow-up email. Will they be able to read it? Do you know what the analogies are?It's not hard and this stuff is not in recruiting school, because the training doesn't need to cover that. But there's such a big margin of the population that really needs it. A lot of people were not blind when they started their lives, they have regular jobs, and they lost their eyesight so they couldn't really do any job, and with the system technologies like screen readers, magnifiers, apps like be my eyes, then you can do pretty much any job, complex big sheets, done, presentations, yes, all of that, be a developer, yes, you can do that as a blind individual. The three other causes are returning citizens from incarceration, we are refugees and black leaders, the black community.

Max: Well, I'm super interested in digging a little bit deeper into the blind problem because it seems to me that, I must admit personally I've interviewed 1000s of people but I don't think I've interviewed a blind person. So I'm part of that statistic. And I've never really thought about it, to be honest. But now I am and I'm wondering, isn't the biggest impediment I mean the fact that I don't know how a blind person would see my job ads. And I don't know exactly what you said if they can open and read my emails. I've met blind people who have corresponded with me through email and I guess they have an app that reads it out loud for them. How do you approach this from your angle as a technologist, looking at the blind community, do they need to have an Alexa for job search?

Roy: That's one way, that's a really cool way. And actually when I worked with smart recruiters just hacking with few developers and we have built an Alexa for job search. And so she reads, these are the applications that you've submitted, this is the stage that you are in. It's not the job search actually it's the follow-up post-application. But the first thing that you as a technologist is to make sure that your career page and your job ad are accessible, that's the most important thing that you must do, or else you're just not opening the door. There are two types, so after 380 million people on earth, who are visually impaired, only 39 are completely blind and 340 have low vision. If you have low vision and think about an adult, right, when you look at their phone the font is much bigger and actually, this feature is an accessible feature for the blind that we're all using and enjoying today. And the older you get, the worse your vision is going to get, the worse your hearing is going to get, so people started to kind of use them without realizing that it actually was meant for accessible individuals but now they're catching up in popularity because everybody uses them because they are convenient. So three things that you really want to take into account are 1. Am I able to, if a screen reader is reading my page does it make sense? Or am I using flash and there's an image covering the text and the screen reader can't read it? And am I able to know where to tick and what to click through basically? The second thing that you might want to pay attention to is the color contrast.If you have low vision or if you have colorblindness, you want to make sure that you're using the right colors and you have the right color contrast. And the third thing is you need to be able to have the text laid out in a way where it can be magnified 5-10X for low vision. And I'm simplifying it quite a bit because there was a lot of things that our developers and testers on our sites had to go through in order to make sure that the site jobs for all the sites that we use on jobs for humanity each individual job site for each individual community is accessible for the client.

Max: So it's going to be, you're not going to have a job site just for the blind and a job site just for neurodivergent? You will?

Roy: We will.

Max: Well that makes sense. I mean for me it'd be like something that may be Google could work on, just like they translate the websites when I go shopping for things on Alibaba, they could translate things for me if I was visually impaired or blind. Just show me the blind version of the website.

Roy: I've met people at Google who have worked on that problem specifically, and even have braille, raise, braille keyboards, and things like that, but it hasn't made its way to perfect commercialization. Like for example, I've got a reacher that live translates everything from one language to another and I can just press the button and it translates the page immediately which is just super effective when I am traveling. But when it comes to blind accessibility we are way behind.

Max: Are there some jobs that are more popular with the visually impaired than others. Are there some industries and some job types that are a better fit, and obviously, we're not going to give someone they're not going to be driving a truck, for example, or plane, those are the obvious ones but are there some jobs that have a higher chance of success?

Roy: Honestly, I don't know, we're launching in two or three weeks. And every company, and this is a frequently asked question. So, the companies and so I'm starting with 10 pilot customers. And I just want to give them a quick shout-out to those companies because they're awesome. They immediately said yes. So that's booking. There are 15,000 employees that have got hundreds of jobs all over the world. They are headquartered in the Netherlands. And they said yes to all six clauses, yes to all jobs, which I loved. And my suggestion is to put all those jobs and then the others are spectrum 70,000 employees, a telecom company, Jazz pharmaceutical, Auburn-Washburn High School, which matters so much to me to have a school, not high school it's a unified school district a full school in Kansas, which matters so much to me because imagine having a blind teacher that really impacts rows of students who will then grow to be very inclusive, and very aware of that and then turn it in, at their company contentful, lot of technology company, checker who does background checks and has been supporting the returning citizens, and actually checkers offering few background checks to any forming customary individual, going through the platform and actually they're opening it up so that they can see the results of the background checks and better define themselves and better prepare. Kygo, which is a telecom company, the largest telecom company in Latin America. And Nielsen 35,000 employees, all of them say, Yes, now with all of them I am telling them to put all the jobs in, so what we'll do is we'll automatically pull the jobs from their job sites so they don't need to make that effort. We'll put them on these six individual job sites which are beautiful and very modern. And then from there, candidates will start to apply, as they apply they end up with the backend recruiting system which I am using smart recruiters and partner link with a bunch of recruiting technologies to make a seamless program. So once the candidates are in the backend the algorithm identifies the top three candidates for each job and then we'll have recruited volunteers. They could be volunteers from the companies that were working with, external volunteers where recruiters are needing care and feel like learning and supporting or community members who, for example, come from a rough neighborhood or lighthouse for the blind who say yeah I want to help my community get connected with these job opportunities. We're trying to before and help them get a job. And so, the company all they have to do is say, take my jobs. We'll get back to them if we have three highly qualified candidates, and they guarantee an interview and then we'll have a training program run by experts of our team. So for example for the blind it's the Lighthouse for the blind, be my eyes, and the Center for accessibility at spectrum. And we have this program that will then help the job seekers with the top challenges they have, and how to address them, the employers, the top challenges they have, and how to address them. Open up awareness on basically, what are the assistive technologies and how through the interview process, all the way through the hire, the onboarding, and beyond, through a very nifty training program.

Max: So it's like, it's an end-to-end solution where you also deliver screening and interviewing, almost like an RPO.

Roy: Yeah, you can say so exactly.

Max: Okay, great. Well I mean I’m not surprised that you've got these employers who are signing up for. I think it's a wonderful story and you'll have no problem getting signups, and what other kind of help, you're registering help right now for volunteers who want to build those communities, and those volunteers are doing, what exactly are they interviewing the candidates/job seekers?

Roy: Yeah, so, volunteer, if someone wants to volunteer can go to jobsforhumanity.com scroll through the page, if this page speaks to them, there's a volunteer section they can volunteer, they can use their skills. The two main sections of volunteers that we're looking for are, and then there are a few others. One is to be a recruiter. And you don't have to have prior recruiting experience. We'll train you on this, for example, to say, I want to help the blind, or the blind and the neurodivergent. We'll give you the training on both through elegance. Ah! There it is. That's a job site.

Max: This is a podcast so we're not supposed to describe the screen too much but I'm showing the people who are logging on YouTube, to see what the website looks on. So go on I didn't want to interrupt you.

Roy: Yeah. So exactly. So you see the six causes that you can volunteer for each one of them open up to the job sites, underneath is this volunteer section, you could basically say I want to be a recruiter for one, two or all causes, and then we'll give you a really cool training, practical training on how to get into the product, identify the top candidates, connect to the hiring managers and support growth through the hiring process. You can also be the second big group as an ambassador if you want to spread the word to the different communities that all these jobs are available and exist for them. And then, in addition, if you are a designer you can design, if you are a developer, you can code, if you're a grant writer you can help write grants. So all of these basically your natural skills in what you normally do you can put a couple of hours a week. If you're interested in drawing this movement.

Max: This is very practical, which is what the world needs, not angry people on social media but practical people who help others get jobs. So, well done for taking this problem by the horn and I hope our listeners will go and visit jobsforhumanity.com to sign up as volunteers. Is there another way to get a hold of you, Roy?

Roy: Yeah, you can email me at roy.baladi@jobsforhumanity.com, or also the alias roy@jobsforhumanity.com.

Max: There you go. Thanks and hope. Well, all the best with this project. And we hope we'll find a way to support your cause, through Talkpush as well.

Roy: Thank you so much, Max. I really appreciate the opportunity and the visibility. And thanks for listening if you made it all the way through.

Max: That was Roy Baladi for jobs for humanity technology does its best work when it reduces transaction costs and creates opportunities for people. So I have no doubt that jobs for humanity has a bright future. Hope you enjoyed the interview with Roy and if you'd like to hear more from entrepreneurs in the talent acquisition space or talent acquisition professionals, please subscribe and share with your friends.

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Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment hackers podcast, I’m Max, and today on the show, I've got my friend, Julie Sowash from disability solutions. Welcome to the show, Julie.

Julie: Thanks for having me, Max. It's nice to see you.

Max: Thank you. Nice to see you too. We used to meet at events across the North American territory, but now, this is my only way of meeting people, is on my podcast. So, thanks for coming on and I hope we're going to speak about your favorite topic of all, which is how to make organizations more disability-friendly.

Julie: Great.

Max: But before we go there, could you give us a little bit of your background and how you ended up in this very specialized field.

Julie: Yeah. So, as you said, I'm the executive director of disability solutions so we are a nonprofit based out of New York and Connecticut that work with fortune 5000 global companies also SMBs to help create really end to end talent acquisition solutions for people with disabilities and veterans with disabilities, you can almost think of us like a niche RPO for that talent pool. So there's like employer branding, videos, culture training or like even I need to fill these positions, go find them. We've helped companies hire a little over 3000 people with disabilities, about 20% of them are veterans with disabilities. Over the past five years. I actually also just became the leader of our overall diversity, equity and inclusion strategy for our parent company, which is a very large nonprofit on the East Coast, and the co host of the Crazy and the king podcast. My god!

Max: Nice. Good show.

Julie: Thank you. I love it. Lots of different hats I wear right now but I really came into this world about 12 years ago, I was managing a grant for the state of Indiana, that came from the federal government to help overcome barriers to employment for people with disabilities. And it was also at that time, where I was really struggling with my disability and my mental health and I've had several mental illnesses that I'll live with for the rest of my life since I was probably 19-20, and really through the work that I did in the disability community and through this grant and through the amazing people that I worked for, did I understand I didn't have to live in this constant instability. And so I really found that right around the age of 30, and have been just passionate about making a difference for my community since then. And what I really learned is that the government is surely not going to change the world for anyone. They're not going to change the way that society perceives us, the way that employers treat us, and so we have to work directly with the employer to help them understand our value, understand our impact and really understand that just like any other community you're investing in from a top perspective, and we should be one of those.

Max: Brilliant. I was showing you this presentation and I just came across this umbrella term called 'neuro divergence'. Is that what we saw?

Julie: Yeah

Max: Is that how we talked about people with mental disabilities in general, these days.

Julie: So, no. So neurodivergent is like people with autism, people with Asperger's, people with ADHD, ADD. Technically I fit in the neurodivergent category but I don't say I'm neurodivergent, I say that I have a mental illness, because there's so much stigma around mental illness that we keep coming up with new terms to not deal with us. But in full transparency, it was my neurodivergent disability that took the longest to get diagnosed and was the one I needed to diagnose to get stable. So, you know, it's just how people label themselves and as I have this really big opportunity and big platform, and I don't feel like I can hide behind any of that stuff. I have a lot of privilege that comes with having a hidden disability and being white. And so I try to talk as much about mental illness as I can to help remove that stigma.

Max: Yeah, I totally get it. That honest talk about mental illnesses, is why I think a lot of people would kind of, outside of the US would roll their eyes a little bit when instead of calling people blind we would call them, you know, what's it called

Julie: Hearing? I'm sorry, visually impaired.

Max: Visually impaired, yes. Thank you. Yes, it's all these terms that are used not to offend, which are describing the same thing.

Julie: Yeah, Exactly.

Max: But, talking to employers directly then, once you say that's the solution we need, we need to talk to employees directly as part of the approach to talk about, the upside, that comes with a downside, meaning. If we're talking about mental illness, I guess some of the greatest geniuses in the world have had a serious mental illness. And some of the greatest philosophers, many of the people I've read when I grew up, I found out that they were really troubled people, because we had to read philosophy in school, and, you know, these people, they all end up in the loony bin at some point.

Julie: Yeah.

Max: But obviously they're geniuses, they're great writers and so you know I don't want to draw general conclusions, doesn't mean that everybody who is schizophrenic is a great writer, but how do you communicate around the upside of hiring someone with a mental illness.

Julie: So, I think maybe it's not the upside of hiring someone with a mental illness is that you've already hired lots of people with mental illness, but you're losing them because you're not building your systems, you're not building your benefits, you're not building a leadership structure that allows them to flourish. Right. If we teach our leaders how to lead mental health in the workplace is going to be a much more manageable thing. So, I've had good leaders, I've had good mentors who had mental illnesses that have taught me how to manage the things I need to manage. I'm lucky enough to be able to pass that on now. And so much of the thing around hiring mental illness is just what you said, it's either fake. Julie or just high strung get over yourself, or it's fear. Well, Julie might come in and shoot up the place. And so we really have to get past that piece first and say, the first thing that you need to understand is that we already exist in your workplace, we're already thriving and driving a lot of things in your workplace. But you're losing a lot of people who could be thriving and driving because you're not attending to the whole person. And you're just treating them as the cog and I know that doesn't answer your question exactly, but there's a lot of barriers we have to get through first to get to the place where you see a benefit because right now so many employers can't even see past it as a reality. And so that's kind of the first step. And I would say you know just kind of keeping things, Uber personal. I wouldn't give my disabilities back. They make me really good at what I do, like really really good. And if my brain didn't work the way that it did. We wouldn't have 3000 people working, we wouldn't have systems and brands and things that we can, we can change the world with. But I wasn't always that way. And so once I had an employer where I could talk openly about who I was, I was able to get the help that I needed to become who I am today. And that piece if we think about it, that's the long-term benefit, that's why you hire someone because they're going to come and they're going to stay. They're going to get shit done right. Sorry, explicit podcast. They're going to get things done and they're going to bring to the table a different way of thinking, than how you think as an able-bodied-able-minded person. And that's the benefit.

Max: Yeah. Well, as an employer, maybe it's so much easier to focus on skills-based assessments rather than to get into personal matters, which is everybody's psychology because it's more directly measurable with the outcome as opposed. So when you're recruiting you're not going to. But I don't know if people will be able to say well I definitely want somebody with Asperger's because now I don't know how to know what's the upside of that.

Julie: Well, maybe you don't say you definitely want someone with Asperger's but maybe when you interview a person who looks down a lot or doesn't engage in small talk well, that you still give them the opportunity to get through the interview and if they have the skills, or the ability to be trained you don't care that you can't connect with them directly. We hire people that we feel comfortable with, but you understand that he or she has the skill set, even though they don't have the best interview skills. So, it's not that you necessarily have to go looking for that person but you shouldn't actively be shoving that person out the door because they didn't have the best interview skills, you know what I mean.

Max: This gets me thinking that maybe 2020 was a pretty good year for people with disabilities. If it puts an end to the face-to-face interview for a lot of companies. Maybe it allowed people to shine a different light on a group of job seekers.

Julie: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for a lot of people it was very hard, mentally, but it also kind of cut down a lot of those barriers. Button a sea, have to be best friends with everyone that you work with, have to be physically present, no sort of flexibility and accommodations and schedules to now understand that the entire world has the ability to work at home. When an employer decides that that's an allowable thing to do, it's not that we don't have the tech it's not that we don't have the interfaces none of that was a barrier when the world stopped, and for our community coming out of COVID, the conversation is different, the conversation is, not working at home it's not an accommodation that we do at this company. Yeah, you do. Yes, we can all have team-building experiences and build leaders within a corporation, when we're on the phone like this. And so I think it did provide a lot of opportunities for people to get their foot in the door with remote positions and with lesser degrees of intensity on interviews. That's not universal, but I think we should come out of this a lot stronger, from an employment perspective than we went into it.

Max: Yeah, I mean if you don't have wheelchair access now it doesn't matter so long as you got the internet. I mean, at least for the white-collar jobs but of course, you still have a lot of jobs where I mean most of the market I guess in terms of headcount where it hasn't gone full virtual yet of course. Well, that's great to hear about the markets and the talent pools opening up and processes being adapted. I'm curious. One thing is that I run a company where we try to expand the talent pool as much as possible. The more applicants come in for our customers, the better. And the better for us actually because then we get to use all of our technology to really fast-track the best candidate. So, I'm all for opening things up. And I'd be curious to hear if you have any advice on how we can create a good experience for different groups. I don't know where to begin because we cover a lot of ground on disability but perhaps you could pick one, that you think could work for me.

Julie: Yeah, I mean so if we just even think about recruitment marketing, we've got candidate pools and talent pools and all these kinds of things for everyone. We've got all of this very intensive diversity branding, that's out there that companies are trying to use to draw in candidates that value diversity. Almost none of those include talent with disabilities. And when they do a lot of the time, it is the stock wheelchair photo. It's not real stories, it's not real people at work, it's not leaders within your organization. And so one thing that companies can absolutely do better is to tell that story right. We can't bring our whole selves to work if we know that by hitting the you value every diversity group but ours. And we're the largest right I mean there are 61 million Americans and what over a billion people in the world with disabilities. And so you're actively pushing that talent pool out the door, and you're not inviting them in the way that you're focusing on bringing any other group in. And I think also with that in terms of a branding perspective you also have to recognize that we are the group that everyone can be a part of. So when you're trying to attract black talent when you're trying to attract black women, disability runs through those populations, and they have sometimes less access to services and care than I do.

And so when you live in the intersections right and you start to understand that from a branding perspective and employer brand perspective, the nuance of including disability becomes a lot easier. And then you need systems that, and I'll say this from an American perspective, the systems that we interact with as job seekers are designed to exclude, they're designed for the most part to give you the most efficiency. The most likely successful candidate in 30 seconds or less. And not just this ability but those data management techniques, assessments all of those pieces and parts will push disability out. And they push other diversity groups out too This isn't, rocket science. If you build systems to give you exactly what you have, then that's what you're going to get. And so, when you're really thinking about how to make an impact, all of the data is in your ATS, you have that information. And if you spend the time in it you will find the places where people with disabilities are falling out, you will find the places where veterans are falling out. And then you adjust for it, and you create that opportunity within the systems because you don't want to create extra work for recruiters, you don't want to create extra headaches. In the talent function. You've got to have record keeping. So you create those opportunities there and then you build actions and outreach and brand to drive those candidates into a pool, or into a process that is going to be built for them and built with them in mind instead of built to physically remove them.

Max: Okay, so let me recap on this a little bit. Let's say I'm listening to this podcast and I feel energized and I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna make my company more friendly. So, I would go back to my pipeline, my talent pipeline, look at people who've been rejected and understand, okay amongst these populations. Is there a way I could have made the process a little bit more encouraging and easier, and who can I have salvage from this talent pool and give him a second chance? That could be one approach, and then, of course, everything you said on marketing or branding and communication. Just find those stories inside your company that can inspire others to apply with confidence.

Julie: Yes. And you'll see in your data when you look at your pool, you'll see versus the general population, you will see where people fall out. It really is those adjustments that make it scalable and make it doable for a company at a very high level or a very enterprise-level without creating subprograms and things that live and die with champions.

Max: Great. Some people have told me I've got a face for the radio, others have called me Robert Pattinson. But are there certain jobs, I mean, is there a way to match a certain disability with certain jobs like I'd say, perhaps if you're blind, you have an end steering and therefore, be great to take on phone calls, for example on customer service. Is that also part of your recommendations to certain employers?

Julie: So I think so much as trying to match a disability to a job. You want to match your outreach to the job. So let me give you an example, you brought up customer service. If you know that your customer management system is web-based and accessible, it can work with a screen reader, then you definitely want to reach out to the blind community, and be able to attract blind job seekers and know that they're going to be able to be successful with that screen reader to manage those customer service calls. If you have a Siebel based system, and you know it would cost $4 million for you to make it accessible, then you probably don't want to reach out actively to that community because you're going to give them a terrible experience right, bad for you, bad for them, bad for the brand. And so, I say there is no person or no job a person with a disability can't do. But if you know what kind of roles that your especially your high volume roles, what you're looking for, then you really can target those groups or those community based organization that serve those types of individuals and provide education, about what the requirements really are, and help people to understand that because you also have to think that this is like what you and I do every day right we live in the systems we live in all of those processes and data management things, job seekers don't and job seekers with disabilities who have supports from community based organizations or from family members. Most people don't know talent acquisition, all they're doing is just applying the more transparency and education we can provide upfront during the process to help people understand what their real requirements of the jobs are will help people to self-select in or self-select out.

Max: And with the employers, you're encouraging employers to reach out specifically to groups that could work well in their environments as well. And do you have success stories where, because I know as a business owner, you would see this as an opportunity, gives you a leg up on the competition, here's this great talent pool of job seekers who typically are shown the door, because they don't perform so well in the standardized selection process. I'm going to reach out to them and this is going to give me access to a new talent pool. Can you give us an example of a company that's done a great job?

Julie: So I'm going to say my favorite Pepsi, who just won an award from the federal government and doesn't have to do those nasty compliance audits for three years. We helped them create a program called the Pepsi act which is achieving change together. They've hired several thousand people with disabilities over the past several years, and two of my kind of favorite stories with them. One since you brought up neuro divergence is, we had a young man who was sweeping the store, like a clothing store right like a retailer, and he really wanted to move out on his own and wanted to get a car, do all these things. And he was autistic, and he literally was the worst interviewer on the planet, like we practiced and practiced and practiced. We finally got him through the interviews with a lot of help and a lot of patience from the hiring manager on the other side. And what we found was that Henry is his name, Henry was incredible at solving people's problems. So you think a person with autism may not be super social, maybe not great at customer service. You call you're upset about something, you're not gonna get Henry to let that go until he fixes it for you. And so, not only did Pepsi get a great employee who spent several years in the call center. Henry got to move out, Henry got to buy a car, Henry who has been told his entire life he could never live on his own. And those are the kind of things that can be achieved with not that much work like this isn't rocket science. It's just a little bit of time. It's just a little bit of process. And then we had in that same actually in that same call center, a lady who had been in a car accident and struggled with mental health issues had been off work for several years, single mom actually a black single mom, three kids, couldn't get in the door because she'd had such a gap in employment, every time those systems just shoved her right out. She was in her first quarter the top salesperson in the gold club, in all of PepsiCo for the sales team that she worked with, she got a visit from the Secretary of Labor, still works with Pepsi to this day. And she was just really good at her job and somebody gave her a chance, they didn't give her pity, they didn't give her charity, they just gave her an opportunity. And that's what it takes. I mean those are the kind of success stories that you can build but you can build them at scale. It doesn't have to be one Henry, doesn't have to be one person, it can be thousands.

Max: I want to hire Henry.

Julie: Henry is awesome.

Max: I want to hire Henry like sometimes you've got this nagging issue with a customer that you know if somebody was obsessed enough on it, it would just go away eventually.

Julie: Yes.

Max: But nobody has the time because everybody's got a hundred things going on. And, you know, you need to put Henry on that stuff so I could see how someone would, you know this disability would potentially have a really good outcome in this kind of problem. So, a really good example. Great. Well, Julie, we've only just touched on these topics. I'm sure people will want to know more, and study this and open these opportunities for their talent acquisition strategy. How do they get a hold of you? Besides connecting you, maybe you should first connect them to your podcast, and then what's the best way to get a hold of you.

Julie: So you can find the podcast at crazyandtheking.com, and LinkedIn just Julie Sowash disability solutions, easy enough, and Twitter@JulieSowash S O W A S H just how it sounds.

Max: Alright. Thanks, Julie.

Julie: Thank you, Max.

Max: Thanks for coming on.

Julie: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Max: That was Julie Sowash from Disability Solutions, telling us a little bit of good news that came out of COVID. in last year that the talent with disability was actually helped a lot by the transition of the market as employers realize that physical presence was not a prerequisite for a lot of jobs.

Creating opportunities for a much broader segment of the population. Hope you enjoyed Julie's interview and if you did, please subscribe and share the recruitment hackers podcast with friends.

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Greg: Thank you Max. It is a pleasure to be here and I think you may have gone a bit big with the word legendary but fine let's all say it then why not.

Max: I was told it was legendary when I came down under. I don't know if your brand recognition is as powerful and in all timezones but certainly, in my timezone, it applies.

Max: Amazing. Well done. I must say. I read your bio you come from Cape Town, right?

Greg: Obviously yes.

Max: Sorry Greg, your mic is off.

Greg: Oh! I don't know why.

Max: You're back now.

Greg: Just when I'm telling a great story. I don't know if you're going to cut this or whether you want me, where should I start again with that one?

Max: Yeah, we can cut this off, for sure. So Greg you were saying this lady was giving you an anecdote, you had an anecdote about a lady who is saying.

Max: Right.

Greg: Yeah.

Max: New attributes come to the fore. That's all it says, just as slightly tilting towards a different type of communication style seems like.

Max: I cannot disagree with you on this 100%. Very easier said than done. But yeah, absolutely. What are some of the other sacred cows we want to slaughter in 2021?

Max: Oh no! Julia.

Max: What are the odds you would have made that mistake if this person was not a rugby player?

Max: Of Course.

Max: You identify your own biases

Greg: work against them whether that's against

Greg: I've lost you can you hear me.

Max: Yes, I think, yes yes you're back. you're back. You're back to back Greg

Greg: Can you hear me? I've lost your last couple of sentences sorry.

Greg: Thanks, Max. I want to end by just reminding you that if you've got two equal people, equal in every respect, go with the one who likes rugby, that will be the right one. I'm kidding.

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Max: Alright, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show I have Kimberly Carroll, who is managing principal at IA, you're really welcome to the show.

Kimberly: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Max: My pleasure to have you. And what does the IA stand for. I know AI, but IA?

Kimberly: We were not Internal Audit. It used to be called Inflection Advisors and we shortened it to IA because nobody could spell or say it. So, Inflection Advisors.

Max: Inflexion advisors. That's good. Well, Kimberly, let's get right to it. How did you end up? So Inflection Advisors is an advisory group that helps companies, I guess, manage inflection and notable change, not only in the HR, including the TA space. And you don't become a managing principal of an advisory group, right out of school right out of the gates. You need a career to prepare yourself to get into that space. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up being in this very specialized field.

Kimberly: Absolutely.I have an economics degree which is not anything to do with HR, but when I started my career, I always wanted to help people. So I worked at Fidelity Investments for a little over 13 years, all in a variety of different roles. I implemented the HR payroll outsourcing business. I also worked in systems where I configured the platform itself. And then I also ran their shared services organization. And that was probably the most influential job I've ever had. Because you learn a lot about what to do and what not to do as part of running a shared services organization. I also managed a global outsourcing business. And then I met Mark, who was the founder of IA, and we had hired him to come over and do some work for us. And then once I figured out that consulting wasn't all bad. And that I really liked consulting and helping others. I moved to IA for about eight years, working with a ton of different clients from anything, from looking at their HR processes and making them better or selecting technology to help them implement their change or building vision. So we do a whole slew of different things at IA and just I love it. I love what I do, and so my career has been all around helping people.

Max: I mean I can see, for me as an entrepreneur I could see the joy of moving from managing and shared Services Center, which is all about process and repetition, get everything ironed out to being a consultant, moving from client to client and being in charge of your own schedule, which suits me very, very much. But it's not necessarily a transition for everybody.

Kimberly: No

Max: But I guess it's for that stage of your career also where you're more about, you know, sharing experience and maybe resolving conflict people do people bring you in when there's battles within?

Kimberly: Absolutely. We not only battle with them but battles with their technology partners and stuff like that, so we do help with guiding our clients through the changes that they need to make. We're not shy consultants and we don't have a playbook. So we have processes ourselves but we are ones that we will come in and we don't say yes yes you should do this or we tell them this is what you should do. And it's a little bit different from a consulting process and one of the things about IA that's a little,is that we actually want to work ourselves out of a job. We would like to teach and leave and go to the next client because our role is to help all, as many clients as we can. But if we get stuck at a client for a long time, that keeps us from helping other clients. So for us we do.

Max: That's the model of like Accenture or the Lloyd's to create enough role or enough work for everybody for the next 20 years.

Kimberly: Yeah, we're not, we don't want to do that that's not I mean that's not what we want to do. And it's not I mean it's that's just because when I got into consulting I had that fear of getting into consulting, because I didn't like consultants. So I mean I hate to say that, but it's just one of those things for me that I feel like if I can influence a couple people or a couple clients or a couple companies to think differently to really move forward to, to not just do it because that's the way that you've been told to do it, is to start thinking for themselves and get us out of there, then, that to me is the is the important part of what we do. My first client at IA They're a fascinating client. They clean slaughterhouses, I mean so that's what they do but they're quite large. 16-17,000 employees. They had a hard time with recruiting, they had because their turnover was 150%. They did not have technology.

Max: So they were not able to retain people in their slaughterhouse jobs?

Kimberly: They were not.

Max: Do you think that if you're willing to take the job by that point you're going to keep it because I kind of made the mental leap that I took and retain them. Amazing.

Kimberly: Now, are you really shocked? I'm not shocked. So, but what's fascinating is they were my first clients. They had no automation, no nothing. They had a lot of paper based processes, all of their applications were still paper based. So we finally got them automated on some systems and stuff like that to really get them so that they could make that turnover quite a bit. And to be able to get them to not have so much paper, but that client is still a client that they will only come back to us, they will. They've told us we will not go anywhere else. And it's not. I mean, and I'm not doing work with them all the time it's just a call for Mark says I'm the worst consultant because I give free consulting all the time because they will call me at the whim, and just ask questions and I will turn them down to say no, I'm not gonna answer your questions and so anyways I love that part of what we do is that we build relationships with our clients and their lifelong relationships and that's what we need to do, but that client was one of my special clients because of the work they do.

Max: It sounded a little bit like you were that story where you said they had high turnover. We replaced the paperwork with systems and how is that supposed to resolve turnover issues. How would you, how do you connect the dots here?

Kimberly: How do I connect those dots, is they are able to do better with the automation that they put in place, and in the States, you have to do e-verify, to be able to support it with that automation they've been able to then detect the people that are not able to work in the United States, so that turnover even though it's still high, so they had it like 150%, their metric was to drop it, and I don't remember and I apologize, but I think they dropped it to like 120% which is a pretty significant drop for them, but they were able to with automation, be able to get those employees or those candidates in the system faster. Interviewed through the work verification process, and on the floor and be able to, and the people that they were hiring better suited or legal to work in the States.

Max: Right, right, right. When you speed things up you have less of a dropout when you, when you wait longer candidates, the hires that you're left with at the end of the process, are the ones that are also a little bit less desirable.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Max: I suppose.

Kimberly: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: So, your Fidelity Investments. I know it's a long time ago now, but that was your last big corporate role play and that was running a Shared Services Center. One way to describe change management and change in HR is is a process of centralization and decentralization, and the two are always happening like sort of on balance and counterbalance the arguments for centralization and having a Shared Services Center are well known it's specialization, get really good at something and reduce costs that way. In, in a recruitment context or in an otherwise context, have you sometimes taken the other side of the argument, where you've argued for decentralization and let's do away with a shared service. Have you been in these situations?

Kimberly: Yeah, so I love putting it in the hands of the actual leader, so I am not as I'm not a lover of centralizing shares of putting a shared service together for recruiting. I'm not as much of a lover of that. I just have had a couple of clients that have gone down that path and mostly because to be honest with you if they don't trust their managers and I don't understand that I mean, you're hiring these people, trust your managers to do the job that they're supposed to be doing. A lot of them from a retail perspective, a lot of the time what I hear is, well we don't want to take them off the floor because that's money that you know they're trying to sell they're trying to do all of that and I'm like. But if you make it easy for them. Right, so you get them a device you give them something. The process shouldn't be that hard. So, I am not as I said I'm not a fan of centralization of the talent acquisition process. But I understand it, from where they're coming from because they want to be able to utilize resources that are not trying to sell their products, to be able to do it, then I'm not a fan. I think you should put it in the hands of the hiring leaders and train them and teach them and give them tools that actually help them through it.

Max: Yeah, I had this argument with my head of HR just yesterday where she was saying, let's get it done, because we have a graduate hiring program right now and so this is going to dominance, this is hiring these people, and then she was like we know we need the hiring managers involved, we need them to be to be talking to them otherwise, they're not going to feel the responsibility to take care of them properly. So just from, from that perspective, having the hiring manager involved in the decision, even if it's at the very end I think has obvious benefits for retention and onboarding.

Kimberly: Yeah. Have you ever taken on an employee that you'd never hired? That's me that's hard when you, when you have to now manage an employee that you did not get to interview, or you weren't part of that process. And now you're

Max: I had one of those who didn't even speak English. So that's even harder.

Kimberly: That would be really, that's really hard. So, yeah, I think that managers should be involved, they have to manage those people, you have to build a connection with your employees or your team members or whatever you call them, you have to build that connection and that's how you do it at the beginning and then you talk about onboarding. I have a hard time with onboarding. Yes.

Max: Everybody has. I mean we can centralize some things right like running the ads on Indeed, and getting as many candidates as possible but still do the interview on site on store, and make it easy for them to minimize the time off before the course. What are some examples that come to mind for accesses done in the service services where people have tried to take it too far outside of the recruitment space actually. Do you have examples where you've had to deflate the show services?

Kimberly: Well, I think that one of the things that people think about shared services is that they're just the transaction they should just do whatever you know the COE says or the manager or whatever they should just take on the transaction no matter what. And that's a misnomer, like, that's not what Shared Services is all about. Shared service is about good repeatable processes and as soon as that process is no longer repeatable and that can just be done, it should be pushed back out to whoever owns that business process because shared services that own the business processes themselves. Typically the COE or whoever they, they, they dub as the owner of the business processes should develop processes that make sense, shared services so that's when I seen good Shared Services actually in good Shared Services leaders push them back out I have an example of a process that we had at Fidelity and HR wanted us to start terminating people manually in the system for them. When the manager should be actually terminating them. And it was because of a one field in there that for an executive it had to be pushed that you couldn't do it because there was a rule in there that you couldn't push their health and continuation date past six months. Well for an executive you can go however long they wanted to. So they wanted to push us to term all executives because they couldn't enter this one field. And I push back and push back hard on them, I said, No, we are not taking on that process because it's not repeatable and the manager should be able to do it, there can be a ticket open for us to update that field for you but we're not going to be taking on the whole entire termination process because you all think that the fields can't be entered. That's where shared services should be, they should be able to say no to their business partners, but then it should also go push back to their business partners when things are not when they're asking for requirements that don't make sense from a business process perspective.

Max: I think, psychology or groups, groups like to grow,growth is always something that is appealing to a team and is kind of, you know, washes away problems and things are growing then everything else is kind of sort itself out. And so far shared services organization, or for any organization I think the temptation for growth is always there as well, where. Well, the customer said so are the internal customers that suppose I'm just going to do it, and resisting that temptation must be. I mean I guess systematically it's impossible. So, It's hard to argue against it but yeah I guess you're doing. Well it's about process ownership, and then, you know, reminding the operations of their responsibility to build something unique something that's there.

Kimberly: That's right. And they own it, they need to own it. And to add services can help support, but it's not the owner, and they should be able to have leverage to say that and a lot I will say that I've known a couple companies that have rolled out shared services, and it wasn't a dictated model, like you didn't have to. And you could just opt in, which I think is a huge mistake. You either do it or you don't, you don't halfway do it. And I've told that company that multiple times and it hasn't resonated quite yet with them but I will continue to push them on actually putting it in there because you got to think about shared services. It's almost like you're outsourcing to a third party, but you're internally doing it, which is great. But it's still a cost center, and it's not making money for you as a company, but it's supporting you making money. And that's what people have to remember. It's not, you should always do it.

Max: Is it possible to turn our shared services into a profit center? Have you seen these examples where it started out where we're servicing internal customers and while we're so good at this let's start selling stuff to the outside world.

Kimberly: I haven't seen it successfully done. But I've seen it, where companies like they do the Manage processes so like the Alliance, the PwC, they actually manage business processes and outsource so they, you know, maybe they started as a shared service but they go into the Manage business processes outside but not an internal. What's funny is, you always think that you can do that and you could build these processes to go out outside of your company, most of the time you can't. I don't think you can, because your processes are typically not that well refined, that you can do that. Yeah.

Max: Also people involved.

Kimberly: Yeah. Yeah.

Max: Do you in HR, there's a very strong local and regulatory component to dealing with payroll benefits, even hiring. So, how do large shared services handle that today, unable to have like one global shared service or is it done for our country. I mean, you know I mean if there is some tension there.

Kimberly: There can be. So typically what I see is that you regionalize, the shared services they all report under one, but to get closer to your local you would regionalize those, so Europe might have one the North America could have one and then EMEA those would be local, but we're also seeing a lot especially if the company has little volume or little employee a smaller population of the employees. That's where you'll see another technology come into play and that they actually do and a more tiered model where they actually outsource some of that servicing to another provider that has local resources that can help them with that. In the United States, you typically see a centralized service. But in other countries it just depends on the volume of employees that you have, like I have a client that has maybe like 10 people do you really need to put a shared service in for 10 people, or do you manage them via a tiered model.

Max: Okay, so you're gonna have your main business supported by a shared service and for the geographical branches. That's when you bring in the consultants or third parties.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Max: Yeah. And I do a lot of work in the offshore call centers space, and it seems like 2020 was as good a year as any, work continues to grow, and, you can say, American jobs keep going abroad.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Max: Does that sound about right or is there or because sometimes once in a while the industry talks about jobs coming back in and so I'm wondering if you experienced the 2020, same way I did when, basically, not much has changed their transmissions anyway.

Kimberly: Yeah, I think that trend will continue, especially as companies outsource, some of the business processes, outside of their company. I think that a lot of companies are starting to do that more and more. It was a trend that slowed down, and then the trend started coming back because I think that people are realizing or companies are realizing that there isn't a need to have that type of resource in house right so payroll right so take payroll. Payroll is one of the biggest ones that gets outsourced because it's such a pain in the butt process to manage internally. And so that's one that gets outsourced quite a bit, but I think it just depends on the company and what they're looking to do. We're seeing a lot of shared services coming in internally, and then some of the companies that even they they build the shared services they're like, you know what, we're now going to outsource it because now we built the shared service now we should be able to, we have now cleaner processes, we can now outsource it. If you can't outsource if you have to say a bad word, terrible processes. Was gonna come out of my mouth.

Max: You can manage what you cannot do ideally, with a few exceptions but generally, trying to manage somebody's process. It's gonna be horrible.

Kimberly: Well, you can automate processes via robotics now so I mean, you might as well start looking at that and if you can make processes easier then why have a person doing it when the system can do it just as well. So.

Max: Yeah and most of the business process outsourcing industries is all about selling that expertise there, they start with the robotization conversation, and then oh yeah and by the way we also have 100,000 accounts that can help you with everything that cannot be automated.

Kimberly: Right.

Max: Really change the pitch. Okay, cool. Well, the one question that I really like to ask for my guest is to talk about some of the traumatic experiences, regarding hiring mistakes. I want you to think back on your assignments at Fidelity, or another place where you hired somebody, and it blew up in your face, and it was, there was blood on the wall slaughterhouse style, and if you can relate for me and for listeners, what you learned out of that hiring mistake, why you made it, or what you got out of it.

Kimberly: Yeah. So, one of the challenges I have with my hiring is that I am very, I'm not as strict as reviewing a resume and I don't typically ask for it. I want to get to know people better. One of them actually it's not even with Fidelity it’s with IA. We hired somebody that used to work for me and another company.

Max: It's like fresh wood.

Kimberly: It kind of is. And the problem with doing that sometimes is you expect them to understand how to move into a role that maybe they're not prepared for and that was my biggest mistake is I, you know, did they did a great job at another firm, they were very good, but coming and doing this type of work. Not everybody can do it. And for me, what kind of sucked about this was I almost lost a friend right so, I really knew this person and you almost lost this person as a friend. And that is my mistake. I should have thought through and probably been a little more forthcoming not forthcoming about the work but more forthcoming about asking questions about how she would handle or they would handle the work, and give her examples and, and I didn't do that and I think that that's a mistake and we're a small company. So losing a person in the middle of, you know, a project or something like that that's a huge loss. And I think that was my mistake and I don't live with regret because I don't think you can, but I can learn from what I did. And so the next hire I do, it's not it's not always going to be somebody I know because it's going to be somebody based on the work that we need to do.

Max: Right. So I think, probably, anybody who's hired somebody they know has dealt with that.

Kimberly: Yes and I've hired others that I know that are great.

Max: If anybody's listening and wants to work for Kimberly and you know her.

Kimberly: Not over yet not giving up on it it's just gonna grill you a little harder I think.

Max: I think we're in for time to get to know your business. I'm talking about shared services. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Kimberly: Yeah, thank you so much, I appreciate it.

Max: Bye.

Kimberly: Bye.

Max: It was Kimberly Carol reminding us that even if you decide to go with a shared services center for all the right reasons, you should remember that the operations own the process, especially for talent acquisition, but also for all businesses.

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Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I am delighted to welcome Katrina Collier. Katrina is the author of the Robot-Proof recruiter, which I think, it could be retitled-how to protect yourself against the chatbots or how to protect yourself against Talkpush, like the company I started. But that's just me being paranoid, perhaps. Katrina, welcome to the show.

Katrina: Thanks Max. I think that's the best introduction I've ever had. Please protect yourself from my business. That's not technically what's written in there. You know that. You've read half of it, maybe you've not gotten to your bit.

Max: So I read this book and it's a wonderful reminder to everybody that if you are working in recruitment, you're working in an extremely, I'm not gonna say tactile but extremely high touch human environments, which, if you list all the jobs in the world recruiter should be the last one to go almost, you know. The last one to be fully automated of the jobs that we operate today, like who wants to be hired by robots? I mean I don't know anybody who would put their hands up. I've seen a couple of case studies here and there, but actually I don't think employers even want to showcase that, they're not that proud.

Katrina: I know we talked about this before we came on. It's just like this book is very much aimed at people who are recruiting people who are in demand. So my whole background is IT recruitment. All of the clients I've ever had have been in IT or health in general it's been a few other things obviously, it's always those people who are to recruit. However, there are examples for high volume there and one of those is Yodel who is a courier company in the UK and all they recruit is drivers. Therefore, actually they can automate it. There is a chatbot on their site that pops up and goes through the process of can you carry a 35 kilo box? no you can't, tell WordPress yes you can proceed through, and they can actually get someone through the application, because they realized their recruiters were on line nine to five and applicants were coming in at 11 o'clock at night. So in that respect when it's the same role, over and over and over and all you really need to know is that they've got to claim a driver's license no criminal record, and you know, they're gonna turn up. Actually you can, but really for the rest of us. Oh my gosh, put a human in please.

Max: There is a recruiter and there is recruiters.

Katrina: Really and love it. Yeah, and actually if anyone's been following me on LinkedIn lately, I've started the college recruiter revolution which is because the clubhouse has appeared. It's just a conversation in the clubhouse. Yes, it's iPhone snobbery if you can't get on there. But the idea being that like please if you don't love this job that we do please leave the industry, because it's so important we play with people's lives. And I just think so often that's forgotten. Just like you said how we can automate when we play with someone's life which you know I take Max and I put him in the wrong job. He fails. Three months later is out the door. We're in the middle of a pandemic. What happens actually serious case of that someone last night we were on the kind recruiter revolution as I'm calling it was talking about the fact that actually he was hired, and then the person that hired him basically had a meltdown, and said I can't do this job I can't cope I can't bring on someone new right now I have to let you go. And he turned down two other jobs to take this job, has a pregnant wife at home and is now in the middle of a pandemic trying to get another job. And you're like, we can't do that stuff we,playing with people's lives. So that's the book was off the back of that please stop saying tech can do what we do, it cannot.

Max: Well taking your example. I would say this person was put in the wrong job because we didn't do all the checks and balances and the psychological assessment and if we had done that if we've done the psychological profiling we could have identified a risk and mapped it against a bell curve and said, spotted something that the individual recruiter might have missed. You can be more thorough when you have an endless battery of tests available to you and you could just plug as many as you'd like.

Katrina: Yeah. Or it could be that actually this is an experience, none of us have ever been through before, so no amount of testing would have said that particular team leader was going to meltdown when having to homeschool having to work remotely having to manage your team remotely having to, like you were saying, you're an extrovert you can't wait to get out. I'm an introvert. I'm very loud and by the way if anyone wants to argue the case with me, those that are listening that know me. No, she's not. No, I really am. But I'm really happy in these four walls. I'm missing traveling, but I'm not missing it that much that I could, I could do this for another year or two, but other people are melting down because they're missing. If they've got a close family bond they're missing that so, I don't know I agree, it could have helped. But I also think. Yeah, it's a really interesting example obviously but.

Max: I can continue on this example and to say, well, perhaps this person was hired because the recruiter at hand only had five or six profiles to choose from. And because you can only invest so much time in sourcing. But, if you really ramped up to your sourcing and you use. Let's say social media and increase the pool of candidates tenfold or a hundredfold, then you could have eliminated a much higher portion of ice because well.

Katrina: Oh sorry, this wasn't about the person that was hired. It was the team leader that melted down and let the person they hired go. So they hired them and let them go in three days.

Max: Oh!

Katrina: But yeah, absolutely. I think I agree that we need to have a bigger pool of people that we recruit from, and we need to get the hell off LinkedIn. Like, everybody is on LinkedIn going after the same pool of people. Now, most regular people not recruitment, not sales not entrepreneurs not marketers. They're not on LinkedIn every day, like a message one of your mates on there who works outside the industry. Will they get a reply no but if you send them one somewhere else like messenger or WhatsApp, boom they reply. It's like, get off, go. I agree, get off and find for your high volume recruiters obviously you're like, oh my god, no more applications no. But for those that are seeking people who are in demand, please go. You know, go and ask the people in your business if you're in house, go and ask for candidates if you're an agency where are you, you know what social networks do you use.

Max: One thing that really got under my skin with the whole AI wave was there was 2017-2018, when you had all of those movies that came out, like Her, and Ex-machina, and a few others like the western TV show in virtual reality. Anyway, I ate all that stuff up. I really loved it, as entertainment but in a span of just a few years. It went from people asking me, oh you're creating a robot that interviews people? What a stupid idea? like nobody will ever do that to like in literally two years people, the question went from that to. Oh that's cool, can you robot tell if the candidate is lying, can your robots, you know, the expectation just inflated all of a sudden there was a complete change of expectation, and perhaps, your book was born out of a backlash right as a reaction to the inflation around expectations.

Katrina: Yeah. I was actually asked by Kogan Page who's the publisher, Katrina, would you like to write a book. First, if that doesn't happen so that literally blew my mind, and still blows my mind and sometimes I literally look at the book and god I can't believe I wrote this book. And then it was like, Oh my god, yes, we're going to write about this. Okay. Asa Bien. Right. Humans recruit humans; it's as simple as a requirement that's the case. And what we do is so important because we woo, and we use empathy and compassion and kindness and curiosity and all of that stuff to pull you through the process right. I don't believe technology can replace that. However, I wanted to go. Okay, so in this part of the process. This technology here, that puts the human first because it's supporting you, but the technology is supporting you. And it's freeing up your time to deliver a better human experience. And all the way through the book that's what I'm talking about. So in this particular part of the process I tried this, which would do this, which will help you have more time, again, to deliver a better human experience. And a few people that were surprised when they've read it and they go you talk about tech so much. Yeah, because it can help you. I'm not saying not to use it, I'm the biggest user of technology. I've been using it like I've been working at home for 11 years. So I've been using so much technology to deliver my business for so long, so of course I'm an avid user like everybody, but use the right technology. And on that it's like getting technology where a recruiter had input in creating it or created it, because they've done our job they understand what we do so they understand where we need support to save time and effort and frustration to deliver a better human experience and that's experience for the hiring manager who I'd like to call partner, because I'd like them to partner with us. Now the conversation, the recruiter, and the candidate is everybody so important.

Max: And enabling the recruiter to design experiences. I think that's the new role of technology. And so, you know, you can call it robots and not robots because I think robots is kind of a dangerous word because immediately people think Terminator. But think just a robot as in, you know, press button command begins, and then boolean search send a message, you still got a human at the wheel and increasingly technology companies that are doing well now are the ones where the human creates the loop, there's a human in the loop there's an opportunity to send personalized message and so, I don't, I actually specifically picked this area to work in because I thought we've got a ways to go we've got many years before. Yes, industry will be completely poof, disappeared. I don't think it'll ever happen.

Katrina: I don't think it'll disappear. But I think that then the recruiter can become more of a talent partner, become more of a, working more to understand what the business is proactively finding out what's the future of that business within your agency or in house, and really almost doing workforce planning, if you will, and pipeline building and all that kind of stuff. But the one thing that nobody at all, ever talks about when they're like AI can do sourcing for you AI can do your messaging all this kind of stuff. Nobody ever talks about a human's inability to write a CV or a LinkedIn profile. During this pandemic thousands of recruiters have lost their job and whenever I've had the opportunity to look at one of their profiles and provide some feedback which some have not wanted but they've got it anyway.

Max: Thank you.

Katrina: It means you have no achievements on your profile, you don't use the word recruiter you're not going to come up with a search.You spend your day looking at CVS and you have these really bad profiles. So for recruiters and sources and talent acquisition and whatever you want to call us cannot write their own profiles, or CVs, how are we expecting normal, regular people to do that. I shouldn't call them normal, regular people sit outside the industry.

Max: You can call them normal.

Katrina: It is a massive massive problem. What are we actually what data, are we feeding into these AI tools. And this has always been my issue with the sourcing buttons, it's like, what are you sourcing from because people can't write their profiles. Developers are the worst at writing.

Max: So, yeah, there's been a shift away from, the resume has had a bad name for the last couple of decades where people say do away with a resume and I tend to agree with that because I find that if somebody gives me a resume, I'll look at it for exactly three seconds to see if the person stays in the job for more than six months, you know. But then, the first thing I want to do is hear what they have to say. And anyway, I'm just.

Katrina: Your high volume recruiters are squirmed and gone. Yeah, no, I don't want to hear what I have to say I've got to get through 100 CVs every time, every hour.

Max: My high volume recruiters actually get to hear the candidates. If they want to, because we know we can collect with our robots voice and video, but I feel.

Katrina: Okay so I get like what you mean. So then, the issue is uptake. So the issue is, who's comfortable doing that. So you and I before we came on air, you went, I don't feel like I need to prep you will be fine and like no you don't because I have been talking on video for years, as someone of my generation so I've been talking about for years it's quite something. So it's like I'm really comfortable. I'd happily sit here and just talk to this screen and come across as normal. As most people like the second you put a voice video, they go eh ah. First of all generations of all age groups and that's the issue. So, I agree it would be fabulous, but then you've also got to get around the recruiter resistance, and then the old school hiring manager that I just want the CV, don't make me listen to something. You got somewhere to do, like I said, we're not going anywhere. We've got to overcome all these different resistances. I'm not saying it's not valuable. It's just whether you can get people to use it. Does that make sense? This podcast has now been deleted for insulting the host.

Max: No no no, it doesn't make sense from the standpoint of everybody's sending videos, spending time on Snapchat, spending time on TikTok, you know, what is the percentage of the population that does not record themselves on videos on a regular basis?

Katrina: Massive. What I do if you ask me.

Max: Here to great 20 to 30 year olds.

Katrina: Okay, so my nephew's actually asked my brother how old they are, isn't it embarrassing. They're 28 25, and they absolutely do not. They are there but they're not there. Because I wrote Happy Birthday to my oldest nephew in brackets so it I don't think you actually see this, and she said oh no I do, I just look like I never, and he said I see all your Instagram posts that he never does a video of himself, or video, oh I'm at a rock concert or I'm at a sporting event.

Max: Yeah, so granted, it's good to give them the options and then we do you know we tell them to video if you can if not something else is fine.

Katrina: And I think that's it, use it as part of the toolkit that I'm all for it. And if I was a job seeker, job seekers listening to this absolutely stand up. I mean I just follow up, send a video follow up, all that sort of stuff. Absolutely agree with you.

Max: What do you think about this technology that is coming from the higher views of the world which gave sentiment analysis on facial analysis on video? They've kind of toned it down in recent years because of some bad PR.

Katrina: I'll go with backlash about the bias in the algorithm.

Max: Something about the AI doesn't work the same on different skin tones, which.

Katrina: Oh gosh!

Max: Yeah so, I always thought that was, I mean I think I'm on your side on that one, that it was absolutely inflated, and that there's no value to it. But, and to your point, there were some early studies saying that some people are uncomfortable in front of the video not trained and they don't perform as well as they would face to face, and I've even met somebody who from the retail world in France, who does a lot of thousands of hires who told me.

Katrina: Yeah.

Max: I know my recruiters are biased, I know that they're racist at some degree. Yeah. And, you know, as we all are. We all have different levels of racism in us. But when they meet someone face to face for 30 minutes. Maybe that'll kind of go away, you know like, the in person experience will make you realize that it doesn't matter, you know, because now you're listening you're looking in their eyes, and it's about content and not about what you see on paper, and in a way it's easier to express your biases in a hidden room where you're just flipping through resumes but in person it's harder.

Katrina: Yeah. Unfortunately, we are just naturally biased and everything that happens in our world. So if I go to gender bias. I was, I just recently did a piece of facilitation that where I work with HR talent acquisition and hiring managers to get to the facilitation discovers where all the blocks are and actually create some solutions, it's all design thinking around like what's going wrong with the recruitment, and they had a big gender issue,technology company. And interestingly, I won't tell you what like French hiring managers were thinking about female applicants. But being that you're from France, I'm sure you know what they'd be up against. But I was talking to people about generational stuff. So my mother was born in 1938, and in 1959, when she got engaged to her first husband, engaged. She had to leave the bank. She wasn't even married, and she wasn't pregnant.

Max: That's crazy.

Katrina: She was engaged. So you think about my eldest brother and sister who are boomers, who are looking at this kind of role model of, well you know mum does the cooking and the cleaning and the, you know, well did your mum worked really hard, but that was the role, and then there's the husband's role and mum gets paid less for the same job as now because that's just how it is. And we've sort of seen that. So even just to the gender bias and like every other bias that exists in our upbringing. This is what we've seen. So for us to sit up and go why should I that's not right, and some of it's subliminal sometimes it's women doing it to other women as well like when the market is put out something that's very putting people in boxes and we just had a big backlash here that the government put out a, stay home, keep your distance thing for COVID, which was like a nice something from the 1950s that literally had man sitting on the sofa women doing household chores and homeschooling. Yeah, oh yeah social media kicked off thank god social media in that respect, that it's like, so if you just think that, here we are, we're trying to get people in an interview to just change everything they've witnessed and heard as they've grown up and it's passed on. So, my parents would pass it on to my brother and sister and they've passed it on to their kids. Not intentionally it's just a thing to go okay right now you need to. This is on behavior and achievements, just ignore all of it's just hard, we're humans, we're flawed. But until then we can create algorithms that are not flawed which was the big problem with the hireview video tool. I'm sure there was a huge thing in the US about that, you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but the algorithms can be biased because they were created by humans. It's like you have stuff going on.

Max: Yeah I think that, trying to address missed biases is a good intention. And I think that you know from a technology perspective, I want to minimize my liability, so I'm like, it's dumb it's not my decision. It's your decision. By the way, did you know that you're 20% more racist than your neighbor. If I could just inform the recruiter.

Katrina: Exactly.

Max: Yeah, just around that stats like that and then let them self adjust, educate them.

Katrina: That's where the tools, the brilliant. That's where it's great. That's where you start going okay right we need to do something about this, what can we do and then there are options out there for people who are far more experts in bias than I am. I'm an expert in discovering where the problems are in your recruitment process. I'm not the expert in fixing it I'd rather you put in the experts to then fix. But it's that you know you're doing the same thing you're going Hey, are you aware in comparison to. And I think that's really important, and we have so far to go because the 1950s was not that long ago. If you think about, like, a lot of the racism and the gender biases all stems from around that time, it's not that long ago.

Max: And there are some of these biases that could be also by choice, you know, a group or company can decide I want a particular profile. And if we're not talking about profiles that are where adverse it affects their ability to to stay within the law. And of course, you're perfectly allowed to hire only beautiful people or only massive jerks. I mean there are no laws. Yeah, to regulate that.

Katrina: Yeah. You also get the, I call it the eye roll. So, you know, I run events here as well, sorry, ideas, when there wasn't any pandemic. I ran events here in London, because I can't see my screen when we're on a podcast. I've got my London view going on zoom. And I would work really, really hard to make sure that it was gender balanced. It was in house to consultant balance. It was like I've got everything, disability, ethnicity, everything I could possibly think of. I was putting a lineup that reflected the audience, that was always my aim and in some cities that was easier than in London, are harder than in London. But, you kind of saw myself and a few other event organizers have taken to calling out other recruitment event audience organizers. If they just have what we call the pale, like a pale male lineup, a metal, if you will, and they usually a boomer aged or male or white, or middle aged men.

Max: Of my age?

Katrina: You're not that old. Nice try mate. It's kind of a compliment, I think. And what happens is you will get the white boomer male he'll go, oh well then you're just being discriminatory against us you know we've got a right to be here it's like we've been heard for a really really really long time, and we're not saying you're not going to be heard. You might just have to wait a turn or two, but you get that exact resistance and that exact comment every time. And it's just like No. Does it really hurt if you've got a male and a female and you can wait one term and speak the next one. every time. So we've got work to do. I think it's really important that we look and go. Gosh, I really am just recruiting people like me. When was the last time I recruited a load of men for example I probably would be more inclined to recruit women. I may have a bias that way. Thank goodness I'm not recruiting at the moment. I have to check.

Max: It's very, very dangerous to start talking about our personal biases on camera. I'd rather not.

Katrina: I do when I react to people and I think it's because, and I feel very open about this I have, I'm a survivor of child abuse, I have done a hell of a lot of therapy and life coaching and I bring that into the mastermind that I've created off the back of the book as well. It's amazing. It all comes in. So I've learned to like to listen to that voice when I, and I react to somebody. And I do go, that's really interesting now am I reacting to their behavior or am I reacting to what they look like. And it's like, you have to really think about it, and I think most of us are just going through our day was far too busy to go. Oh, what are you thinking about Max, that's a bit strange. You know.

Max: Oh no, we don't have time for that.

Katrina: Yeah we don't have time for that we're too busy.

Max: How often have you read, and maybe even said yourself, and all you have to follow your instinct. Yeah, it would be extremely presumptuous of us to think that, you know, we should just switch off all instincts. It's like what you're saying I mean, when you're saying the robot proof recruiter. Yeah, if we decide to eliminate all biases what is left of us. There's almost nothing.

Katrina: Yeah, absolutely. Because at the end of the day where we are actually going from a hundred applications to one person that we actually have to. I know it's a balancing act. But I did talk about when I got to the interviewing chapter and I know someone called me out for this because I never said I was gonna talk about that, like you really didn't go into like what questions we should ask in an interview I'm like, No, because I'm a really bad interviewer. I will literally go with intuition. I like Max. He is lovely, can we hire him, that is. And so when I got to that chapter I focused purely on the technology side and how it could or couldn't help. And I was like, I didn't want to go into this is how you conduct an interview, but it was more about like you've done the interview, how to record the feedback or how to know how to use the tools to save your time.

Max: You're not selling this book well at all right. It has a ton of very practical tips on how to not just protect your career and future profit but also. Every step of the journey from promoting yourself, talking to the hiring manager, preparing your sourcing effort, everything. And you can tell, you know, decades of experience, poured into that.

Katrina: Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean I'm not joking about I'm a bad interview, but they. What I realized when I started writing this book was how different it was from when I started in recruiting, because when I started in recruiting the internet hadn't gotten the way technology hadn't gotten the way it was. I Max is in my database. I call Max and have a conversation with you about the role and you go, yes or no, no, it was easier. I didn't send you a message you look at me and God I want to talk to you. You didn't get inundated with all of the jobs that you could say it was like, the world has really changed. But what really got to me was when I realized, chapter five, that is all about the intake strategy session, that is the most crucial thing. If you don't get the right information from your hiring managers. If you don't get them to partner with you. If you don't shift your attitude so they do partner with you. All of the recruitment becomes really really challenging. And I think any recruiters who are working off a job description that they just got thrown via HR, that is three or four years old. They should be going to forget it, unless you're going to give me an hour upfront with the hiring manager, so I can partner with them properly to fill this role. Then don't do it, and that was that to me the whole crux if you get that wrong, then everything goes wrong after that, the interviewing, the pre boarding, the onboarding, the employee experience, the reputation of the company, and then it comes around in a cycle of bad reputation.

Max: Same for when you're building software if you're doing a project it's all about requirement capture. I've got a question I ask to every one of my guests so recently because it's emotional, and it's back to a time when you made a, terrible mistake, hiring mistake and identify the room, go back to those days, think about that person visualize that person, and share with us how you got there and how can our audience avoid making the same mistake you made at the time. Are you crying?

Katrina: No. I just literally can't think of having made a bad hire.

Max: Oh wow!

Katrina: I can tell you a different experience, which was not so I can remember the time I didn't give somebody feedback from an interview there was one person I've never given feedback to from an interview and I still feel bad about it. That one person. No, because it was never my, I was not the person making the hiring decision. I was interviewing them and shortlisting them, handing them to a hiring manager who made that decision. So, I've never had a chain. However, I worked at this IT consultancy which is really early on, and the search allergist just says in house I don't really talk about it because it's so toxic in the end. And I brought in people for this. It's quick, do you consultancy so it's really new technology they wanted people who've worked on billions of rows of data, it was, I was bringing people in all over the world. And they decided without any input from me to hire a sales director, and the sales director couldn't sell. And I watched the bench starting to fill up with these IT consultants and I watched the projects not being renewed and the COO was the narcissistic piece of poop. And when I was going. We're going to implode. We are going to implode. He fired me, and he fired the delivery director who was saying the same thing. And sure enough, that's what happens. And it was all because they hired the wrong Sales Director, they hired someone who couldn't sell, and then they didn't manage them properly. And it was absolutely heartbreaking watching the first year it was more than that, that I brought in from all around the world to London to work at this company, and to watching them one by one lose their jobs, was the most heartbreaking thing and then I wasn't even there, I was watching them from afar. So in that respect, I've seen how damaging it is, and how we play with people's lives. And if we get it wrong, my god did we get it wrong but when we get it right. Wow, I know I have somebody it's now I think 17 years since by chance I changed his life, and he will just message me periodically and go dude I'm still so grateful for you, you just put me on this career path and I love it. So we can do either side. So, yes, it is arrogant as you found that of me to say I haven't done that but I haven't because I've only been at the prescreening side.

Max: You didn't manage recruiters directly.

Katrina: Oh no I have. I think it takes a hell of a lot of self awareness to sit and go, I would be the world's worst manager. I am the world's best, I would not do it. I have no tolerance for it. I have the most incredible virtual assistant who basically self managers or that would be that literally is one person. She is fantastic. And this whole world that she's in Johannesburg. Sorry I think she's in Durban she's in South Africa. This is the world like it is. It is yeah no I could do that kind of robot but what I'm doing isn't like copy and paste stuff. She does all sorts of bizarre stuff for me. But I think it needs self awareness to know that.

Max: Thank you, Katrina and I, again, advise everybody who's listening to check out the robot proof recruiter.

Katrina: Can I just say one quick thing about it?

Max: Yeah. Yes, please.

Katrina: Yeah.

Max: Where can people get a hold of you? and where can people get a hold of the book?, and I believe this charity is behind.

Katrina: That's what I just wanted to make sure I said yes. I have been to Africa and seen firsthand the work of hope for justice charity. They aim to end modern day slavery which impacts 14.3 million people around the world. And I guarantee there are people in slavery in your vicinity wherever you are in the world and it's a massive problem. And I donated the royalties from the robot proof recruiter to that charity and they're really struggling like everybody else's in this pandemic. So, every purchase not only will you get the most incredible book that has contributions from 74 of your peers around the world. You will also get to help end modern day slavery so I cannot recommend that enough. You can get it in all the usual places like Amazon, Kogan page directly, of course, you can get ebooks, you don't have to just get the paperback, personally, I grab both because you want to write one in New Zealand and quick links but I'm biased. And finally oh my gosh Google me, I'm everywhere. I'm very easy to find.

Max: I'm Katrina Collier, I'm very easy to find on Twitter and LinkedIn. We’ll put the links on the books.

Katrina: Yes, please. And if you're in the clubhouse come and join the con recruiter revolution, we have a chit chat might be a bit late for HR actually thinking of it, timewise but we're having fun with it.

Max: Awesome. And if you're a Talkpush customer and your favorite chatbot is starting to take too much room in your virtual virtual space. That's the book. That's the book you need to read to to fight back against the robot. I don't think it's a real fight, I think it's good enough for you for joining and looking forward to listening to your upcoming podcast.

Katrina: Thank you very much. Thanks Max.

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Max: Hello everybody and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'd like to welcome somebody who's dialing in from Switzerland. Suzanne Lucas, who is the owner, and chief writer of a little place called evilhrlady.org.

Suzanne: Yes

Max: evilhrlady.org, go check it out. Welcome to the show Suzanne.

Suzanne: Thanks so much for having me.

Max: Thanks for joining. So, where do I begin? How long have you been evil for?

Suzanne: Well that's kind of like a bad pickup line. I have been the evil HR lady since 2006, which it doesn't seem that long ago until you do a math in your head and then you go Oh boy! It's been a long time.

Max: I love the website it does have that 2006 vibe a little bit, you know it's got these, you know when we were all building our own websites too and and just the format, it looks just a little bit like going back in time I must say, but it has an edge because of it. In fact, I've always thought the best websites are the ones from that era, like, in terms of layout, nothing has ever been drudge or the eBay for evolved and so on. Even though I'm in the business of changing interfaces but for those who are listening and not on their computer. What can they expect if they go on to the evil HR lady, what audience are you attracting to your website?

Suzanne: My audience is a lot of HR professionals and then, a lot of people that are trying to figure out how to handle situations at work. So it skews strongly towards the HR professional but there is a good contingent of non HR people as well that are just either interested in the topic, or they are literally coming to find an answer to their question.

Max: Right and I see there is plenty of ways to kill time here there is a big red button that says show me a random post, you click on that and then you can go right into some serious topics. The one I got was enforceable severance clauses, so serious questions for HR folks.

Suzanne: Okay, so maybe that's not the most exciting as post. But that's the type of thing that you know you don't know about unless you've been through it, and a lot of people need that kind of information and I hope to be able to provide it.

Max: And from your background, obviously, you got into this space because you were a practitioner at some point, and you're a consultant on Labor and Employment Law. How long have you been in Switzerland? Is your background more focused on US law or do you also cover international markets?

Suzanne: My focus is the United States that's my main focus. Of course, I've been in Switzerland for almost 12 years now and came for two years and a little bit longer. But, you know, I have my finger on the global market but I'm certainly not an expert in like Swiss employment law. I feel confident in saying, I'm an expert in US employment law, but I'm not really an expert in Swiss law or anything. My audience skews heavily towards the US. And that's where my focus is I do intend to return to the US someday, about 10 years ago.

Max: Yeah. And when it comes to employment law. I mean I guess the US has a reputation for being one of those markets where it's relatively deregulated compared to Europe, but when it comes to employment law, it may be actually the opposite. My perception, purely from talent acquisition is that it is more litigious than Europe. Is that in agreement with your views?

Suzanne: I mean I think that American culture is far more litigious than European culture in everything. Like my Swiss neighbors would never think of suing anybody for anything, you just don't do that, that's just not something that you do, that's not what comes to your mind. Whereas in US culture is very heavy on the law suing in the court, attitude, so that's a very very different cultural thing. US employment is different from a lot of the world because we have almost always what's called outwell employment, which means that I can quit and you can fire me and nobody's required to give notice on either side. And that's something that's very very unusual, especially in the Europe. I mean that's just, that's not something here, in Switzerland and nobody is that out well employment you know you've got a minimum. But after you have a probationary period but then after probationary period, they have to give you three months’ notice before they can terminate you, whereas in the US your boss can walk in today and say, Thanks so much, Max but today's your last day.

Max: So, by that. By that formula, employment would be easier in the US. Are there some ways in which employment is harder in the US?

Suzanne: You know, I am a huge fan of the outwell employment, and when I say out well, keep in mind that you can't terminate someone for an illegal reason. So I can't walk in and say, Max, you're a white male you're fired. That I can't do. I can fire you but I can't fire you because of your race, your gender or your religion any of those types of things.

Max: I thought that you could make an exception for a white male, but okay.

Suzanne: You can, lots of people think that you can but you cannot.

Max: It means I am protected too, yes.

Suzanne: You are protected too and if you're over 40, then you have another layer of protection.

Max: Oh!

Suzanne: But I know. 40 is not officially old in the US employment law. Yeah, right.

Max: So when you're on the wrong side of 40, go to the US you are protected there.

Suzanne: Although in Switzerland, when you're over 40, then they have to give you six months notice before they terminate you.

Max: It's lovely.

Suzanne: Because you come to Switzerland. Anyway. So the nice thing about this and people don't realize this so much but the easier it is to fire the more likely people are willing to hire. And so, you know, if you're in, say, Germany where it's almost impossible to terminate anybody.

Max: Hmm

Suzanne: You're going to be so so so cautious about hiring, and you're going to use temps and contractors, as much as you possibly can.

Max: Mhmm

Suzanne: Because once you hire someone if they are not, you know, completely you know i don't know burning down your office building. You're stuck with them until they retire. And so people are very very hesitant to make hiring decisions in in those cultures where it's very difficult to terminate, whereas in the US, because I know that I can get rid of you tomorrow, if I want to. I'm much more willing to give you a try and I think that's a real advantage and employment even though, when someone gets terminated for no fault of their own it's a really big bummer. But the fact is is a lot of those jobs wouldn't exist if.

Max: So it's more of a red market. Yeah, does the sacrifice, you have to make you create a more competitive market so that there are more opportunities, but maybe we're getting too specific detail but it's in California i think that i mean in many states I guess there's also a state level protection, where you cannot Fire at will, or rather there. Isn't there some sort of compensation for tenured employees people who've been on the payroll for a long time?

Suzanne: There is not Montana, the only state that doesn't have outlaw employment. Now there are protections. California is especially bonkers and very employee friendly. I say bonkers because I would never want to be an HR practitioner in California.

Max: Too much paperwork.

Suzanne: It's a lot of paperwork and there's a lot more restrictions, ultimately it's still an at will state but there's a lot of things that are gonna come down on you more. Like California says, specifically that terminating somebody because their salary is higher than other employees is illegal. So if I'm doing a layoff and I just want to get rid of my high dollar people. I can't do that. Now, I can eliminate their whole department or whatever but I can't just say, you know, here I have two accountants one's earning $10,000 more than the other, so I'm going to choose the highly paid one. I have to be able to give another reason. Now I can still terminate that person but I have to have another reason, and the reasoning behind this was actually not salary protection but age protection because who tends to earn the more money is older people. And so, by saying you can't fire people just because they're the highest earner.

Max: White males also.

Suzanne: Well, there you go.

Max: All the white males, yeah.

Suzanne: Then you're protecting your, your older workers. It's kind of bonkers as I said, you know when I was working as a labor and employment law consultant for a big pharmaceutical company, we had, you know, we had sales people in all 50 states of course, and we have three attorneys that handled that, and one handled 24 states, one handled 25 states, and the third handled, California, you know, that's just how California is, it's just so complex.

Max: The complexity that I was alluding to when I said the hidden cost of employing in America, is the lawsuits around the Equal Employment Opportunity law. And for me on the tech side, you know, in the US you have a few more layers of data that you need to collect about everybody that you interview, and it just it's always, you know, an awkward moment for employers in most of the rest of the world including in Asia to be asking people if they're obviously you know a US veteran or what their ethnic origins are because that's not how it's done in other parts of the world.

Suzanne: Yeah, that's something that frequently bothers job applicants too. They'll be like, why, why are you asking me this and like they don't want to ask it any more than you want to answer it, it's just required to for our reporting to be able to say, this is what we did.

Max: Okay, so do you advise people who are moving into the US for the first time making their first hires there, you to be ready on this front or is this is this more of a nice to have. Because, I mean, I guess if it's a small business, keeping track of everybody's profile is maybe a little bit easier than when you're a big corporation.

Suzanne: Well, I mean, the reporting requirements really depends on your business and your business size and if you have any dealings with the US government, and more companies than you would think work with the US government. For instance, my brother is a real estate appraiser he works for a small company, maybe 20 people altogether. They only do property in, you know, Southern Utah, but sometimes that property is government property, which means that they that are a government contractor, which means that they're subject to some of these reporting requirements. So, even though you would think, Okay this is a tiny business and they're not like Lockheed Martin or whatever selling jets to the US military or whatever you know they're appraising land but sometimes when that land is owned by the federal government then they become this government contractor. So, you know, there are these regulations but not everybody is subject to them. And some of the things are ridiculous like you have to be able to report on, you know, the race of all your applicants but what if I don't tell you my race, then you have to guess which is so ridiculous. You know, if we meet face to face, you see me face to face, I am as white as white can be, and with red hair, although the red hair is fair.

Max: I couldn't tell.

Suzanne: But if we don't meet face to face, then you're gonna be making a judgement based on the stereotypes of my name and my accent. You know, that's.

Max: I mean I'm really good at that. But I'm not gonna do it on the air.

Suzanne: I'm guessing you're probably gonna get me right because you can't see me. But, you know, that's something that I find bizarre. But we're not the only country that does that. The UK has this completely. Huge recommended list of questions that you ask for demographics, like, How were your parents married when you were 14. What's your parents income level, what's your sexual orientation. Have you ever been on welfare and people see these questions and they freak out and they're like, what does my parents income, why does it matter if my parents were divorced, then why at 14, I could be wrong about the age but it's like a specific age. And they're trying to gather this demographic data, and their goal is to be able to do these long term studies where they can look at upward mobility and it's got a nice goal to it because if I if I can say look you know I was super poor and I was on welfare when I was a child, and now I'm, you know, a marketing manager and I'm making 80,000 pounds a year or whatever. Look at me I've really come up in the world. But when people get these huge questionnaires, they're like what in the heck, and the first time I saw when I was like this is wrong and so I start googling and I'm like, Oh, well here's the government office that gives you a form I'm like okay this is real.

Max: Yeah. That reminds me, I think I had a similar form to come in as a tourist visa for India-is my parents, my parents marital history religion, just making sure I was not from Pakistan, no matter what. So that was, that was that experience but, yeah, I think it must be reassuring actually for somebody who is not based in the US and hearing you say that this employment. What's a call outwill determine at will, protects them means that, you know, we can start hiring tomorrow, start hiring in the US tomorrow, there's not going to be that much paperwork and, you know you're not if you make a mistake, you can still mend your ways later on.

Suzanne: Absolutely. It's a really great boon for businesses, and in a roundabout way it's good for employees too because there's just more jobs. I mean, even now, are the unemployment rate in the US. As of, like yesterday was like 6.7%.

Max: Yeah.

Suzanne: Which, for most of the world that's super low in non pandemic time. For US it's quite high, because of the pandemic but for the rest of the world that's, you know, incredibly low like if you look at like Portugal and Spain, they're always hovering between 20 and 25%. They also have incredibly strong protections for employees, so nobody wants to hire.

Max: Yeah. 6.5 is remarkable. I just googled vacation on your website. It's a subject which is dear to my heart because we've had in my company or culture where we've said, We want you to take a vacation, but we also don't really have time to monitor it so take as much as you want. And we've realized that they don't take any.

Suzanne: That's correct.

Max: So, can you advise me on me and anybody who is in the same predicament as I am, on what should we do in terms of forcing people to take a vacation. How can I impose vacation on people, which is, I can assure you a very weird thing coming out of my mouth but It is coming in, I'm saying it earnestly. I do want people to take a vacation, but it took me a while to get there.

Suzanne: Yeah, well you do and there are lots and lots of reasons for it and this is something that was a big culture shock moving from the US to Switzerland because, by law, everyone gets at least four weeks of vacation here whereas in the US, there's no required minimum vacation, you can have zero if you want. Most places offer vacation but definitely not four weeks. And a lot of people the higher up the food chain you are, you're likely to have six weeks of vacation. And there's a big cultural shift there. But I'll tell you why you should enforce vacation. There are really nice warm fuzzy things. When your people have a vacation, then they're rested they have time off and they have time to recuperate and everybody needs a break and that you already know. But vacation also reduces fraud. And one of the US banking regulations it's, I guess it's not technically a regulation it's strongly recommended. And every bank I'm aware of actually does this, is that every employee has to take at least one week off completely with no contact. No phone contacts, no email checking, no access to any system. And the reason for this is fraud because if you're running a fraud thing. You really need to take care of it. And so, if you go away for a week and you can't even check your email or your voice mail, or log in at all, someone else has to do your job. And as a result, you uncover fraud, and you prevent fraud and it's even better if you do two weeks and you may say, we're not banking, we don't need that. If you would be surprised at the number of people that embezzle from companies, and here's the other thing about the embezzlement. They're not like you know in the movies or whatever where it's someone takes the job with the plan of taking over. It's usually someone that gets behind on their credit card bill or something and they just front themselves $200. And then they pay it back, you know. And then next time it's $300 and they pay it back and then the next time it's 500 but they don't have the money to pay it back. And it's

Max: It's because they gambled! they gambled it all off.

Suzanne: Or whatever, it starts out, generally accidentally not I mean, obviously, you embezzle on purpose but you know they don't intend to a lot of these people, and having this vacation time this mandatory vacation, actually prevents that fraud and catches that fraud. So from you as a managerial perspective you trust your employees they're awesome, but vacation actually prevents fraud.

Max: I mean even if they're not, you know, dealing with a financial transactions. If they really have to switch off, it forces your system to be ready to function without them, which is continuity one on one. You know what would happen if I get hit by a bus.

Suzanne: This is also true. This is also true because you've got to do that cross training, you've got to be able to have someone be able to step in and handle you because you may get hit by a bus I mean, fingers crossed, nobody's getting hit by a bus but I mean it happens. And what happens when the guy that gets hit by the bus is the only one with the passwords to your system. That's what you know that's something that you really can't have happen and so there's just so many good reasons, besides the ones that we always think of like you know everyone needs rest and relaxation but everyone does need rest and relaxation, absolutely do.

Max: To change the topic and thinking back about 2020, which is the time when everybody left the office, and it was bye, bye everything work from home doesn't matter where you live. Everybody can work from anywhere I have some friends who were working in the US that were Europeans and that they basically moved over to Europe and said well I'm still drawing my salary into the US and US dollars but I'll be working in Europe for the time being until dot dot dot. Have you noticed in your practice, these, these shifts and a lot of your customers are permanently moving towards work from home, and kind of higher from anywhere, or is everybody still thinking of going back to the way things were?

Suzanne: You know, I think everyone in everyone. Almost everyone is leaning towards a little bit more of this flexibility model people really like the opportunity to work from home. Now I say that, but there are definitely people that hate working from home and don't like it. And there are definitely jobs that can be done from home but they're much better when you're in a better collaborative environment.

Max: Hmm hmm

Suzanne: But there are some things that you have to think through before you make this a permanent thing and a lot of this depends on your employment law. Nobody really has a problem with I'm going to go, you know, back to my home country for a month to help my mother who had hip surgery, and during that time I'm going to keep working. You know, just remotely. Nobody has a problem with that, you know, tax authorities are going to come after you or whatever. But if you say, I'm going to move to my home country. Then suddenly, it's a different deal. And then your business needs to register in this other country you're subject to that country's employment laws.

Max: Your tax

Suzanne: Your tax withholdings and things like that. And, even within the United States. There are 50 different states and different states have different laws as well and you'll need to start registering in those states if people aren't coming into the office at all anymore. And so that can really limit what you do, certainly people do it, talked with a guy who has like 11 employees and they're in seven countries. But, you know, you can do it, you absolutely can. But there are things to consider on it, it's not as easy, you know, if you want to chair globalization, this would be a way to do it and be like hey let's make it easier for people to work everywhere.

Max: Yeah. I think it's there, yes there's some work to be done on filing and registering in a new country, but by offering that freedom for a lot of the white-collar jobs is there and where I intend to take advantage of the global talent pool for sure, personally.

Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely a great thing. I mean, look at us. I'm sitting in Switzerland, you're sitting in Hong Kong. And we're having a conversation like we would if we were in the same room.

Max: It's a miracle. Yeah, and, and last year I hired somebody in the US, and all I did is I sent him a contract and I started sending him money. And then he did work, and it was just that simple. But I walked into it, you know, with a lot of fear in my heart, because I'm European originally and I just thought it'd be way more complicated than that. But turns.

Suzanne: And if you probably didn't hire him as an employee you probably hired him as an independent contractor.

Max: Yeah, but in California I was told that doesn't make a difference.

Suzanne: It does make a difference.

Max: I was told by the person I hired, so I guess that's why.

Suzanne: We can talk later. But, yeah, it's pretty easy and that's what you know I most of my clients actually all of my clients but one are in the US I have one client in Paris. But I work as an independent contractor, which allows them to hire me when I am sitting over here.

Max: So yeah they don't have to worry about where you file your taxes and so on.

Suzanne: Right, I take care of all of that. Right.

Max: Great. When you started your blog in 2006, you pick the word evil HR lady. Can you take us back to that moment in time when HR was evil, what did you mean by that. Did you mean that this is, this is how people perceive HR, because HR is always getting in the way that that sort of that old notion of. I have to go through HR it means I did something bad.

Suzanne: I wouldn't say an old notion.

Max: You think it's still alive.

Suzanne: It's still alive. I mean think about it, if your boss calls you in, and you walk in and sitting there in his office is the HR manager. How is that meeting going to go? You already know it's gonna be a bad meeting. Nobody calls HR in to say, Gosh, Max You're doing a great job I just really wanted to give you feedback clients love you your employees love you I just think you're great. They're not calling the HR manager in for that. HR shows up when there's a problem. And, you know, one of my favorite definitions of good HR comes from my friend Kate Bishop she's an employment attorney and an HR consultant and she says, Good HR is like the CIA. When we do a good job. You never know we were there. You only know when we mess up. And that's, you know, really true we're like this secret operation that goes on behind the scenes and when HR is functioning properly you don't think about HR at all. It's just like, what is that I don't know who that lady is. But when things go badly, then you're aware of them. So people still have this really negative attitude towards HR, and you being in the recruitment space should know this, that recruiters have a terrible reputation. Everybody blames the recruiter for everything that goes wrong in the hiring process. Some of it is the recruiters fault, some of it is the hiring manager’s fault and some of it is that you were just a terrible candidate, but nevertheless who gets the blame the recruiter. What, are we done for the day?

Max: I've heard some bad things about recruiters but you know I mean, at least recruiters are have something to celebrate right. This quarter win that they hired somebody. So there's a lot of upside there. It sounds like HR is a little bit more bitter where you're just, you know, you'll never be celebrated if nothing happens. But you'll be there when there's drama. And so, you must need a particular psychological build, to be able to do well in those conditions right to, you have to be able to have a very even calm temper.

Suzanne: It would be a good plan. Does everybody have that? No they don't. Do we all have cats? Yes we do.

Max: Did you all study psychology? And then no, a good chunk.

Suzanne: My degrees are actually in political science so that's a

Max: Not too far, not too far from psychology.

Suzanne: You know, you deal with bureaucrats that's a charm.

Max: Yeah. Great. Well, I've already given the name of your website. Is there a better way to get ahold of you than to visit evilhrlady.org.

Suzanne: There's so many ways to get ahold of me, there's my website, evilhrlady.org, I have a Facebook group called evil HR lady that right now we have about 6000 members and we discuss all things HR, and we share all the best HR memes. So, anybody is welcome to join that if you're smart enough to be able to answer our entry questions which are, why do you want to be here and if you just write yes I'm going to reject you. So you have to be able to at least put a sentence together. And that's a good way to reach me, I'm on Twitter at real evil HR lady, and I'm on LinkedIn every day.

Max: I guess I still don't know if you're evil or not but I'm still very thankful for

Suzanne: I am good and Holy.

Max: Holy? Okay, so there's the two sides of the coin there. Thank you, Suzanne It was a pleasure to have you on the, on our show. And we'll see you online.

Suzanne: Alright.

Max: Looking forward to those blog posts.

Suzanne: Absolutely.

Max: That was Susan Lucas, also known as the evil HR lady. That's not the title I gave her. She gave it to herself. If you want to get an idea for the kind of articles that she writes, you can find articles labeled or titled how to get your boss fired or I'm in trouble for working too hard. Or president Biden's fire on the spot policy is a bad idea for your business.

Another social commentary and commentary on HR practices. The main lesson I got from this exchange was that it's important to make sure your staff takes holidays. And the best way to ensure that is to start tracking it and enforcing it with, or without regulatory mandate. It is the best thing to do in order to keep the same workplace.

I'll be implementing those immediately. I hope you got something out of it too, and that's, you'll be following us for more. On your podcast platform of choice.

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Max: Hello, welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today on the show, joining us from, I believe Philadelphia. Ward, Christman. Hi Ward.

Ward: Hello, great to be on. Thanks for having me.

Max: My pleasure. So, are you in Philadelphia? Did I get that right?

Ward: That's the, the general area. We're about almost an hour west of the country somewhat, but yeah.

Max: In the pine trees somewhere?

Ward: Actually not that many pine trees around here mostly of the big leafy kind that people love raking up and fall.

Max: Okay. Well I met Ward a few years ago, in Boston, in an event organized by HR tech tank, where we were a strategic advisor. But today Ward is the co-founder and chief advisor for the HR tech alliances, which you can go on hrtechalliances.com and works with as an advisor to HR tech vendors around the world. And so, I hope we'll take this opportunity to talk to, to share some of your insights on the challenges felt by the buyers, which are the TA directors, and the TA departments all over the world. When dealing with vendors, and the fact that the HR stack keeps growing and growing, and it becomes more work to manage the integration, than it is to manage the vendors, actually I imagined at a pretty fast rate for some of them. So that's the direction in which this conversation will go. But before we go that word for audience, I'm sure they'd love to hear a little bit about your background and where, how you ended up being this matchmaker for the HR tech world which is quite a niche role, but I believe you're, you were a long time ago you were an engineer, and then an entrepreneur, an HR tech entrepreneur as well.

Ward: That's right. Yeah, engineering was great building plutonium factories and all kinds of weird stuff, but actually it wasn't for me. But somebody introduced me to the internet back in like 1989-99 range. And it was just text based and I thought this might go somewhere so I actually left engineering and started one of the first job boards. Before the web was even commercialized so I told them. But, yeah, it's coming up on 30 years and I ran a job board for, gosh, how many years was it nine years and then the.com crash.

Max: I am logging into your LinkedIn profile, it says, from 92 to 2001 year you ran jobthat.com, so yeah that's nine years.

Ward: Yeah, it was a great run and got a couple, you know, master level I think degrees out of it, you know, how to raise money what not to do, especially when the.com crash or 911 type activities.

Max: Perfect timing.

Ward: Yeah, exactly. So it's just like, you know, the COVID pandemic and all that stuff it's like yeah I kind of feel like I've been through the wringer a few times so we actually grew last year and you know it wasn't by accident, because there's just different ways to take on things but from a talent acquisition leader standpoint, obviously, those of you that are lucky to have your job, and are able to keep your technology if your budgets didn't get slashed that's wonderful. If you didn't, you know we're doing now to maybe rebuild it or is it with the coming recovery let's put it that way are you going to rebuild your tech stack and what are the what are good approaches or bad approaches we've seen it all over the years and you know it's it's great to have a chance to kind of have an open dialogue about how.

Max: I think nothing is completely new,every mistake has already been made. And so you're, you're reminiscing without giving us specifics on some of the mistakes, you did a jobnet.com, a few decades ago. Coming into what was at the time, Armageddon, the end of the world, the.com, boom bust which was just when I was graduating from school, by the way, so I entered a market with high unemployment, no prospect, and everybody in my MBA was talking about the paradigm shift and the internet economy. And then as soon as I graduated, I mean I was talking like one of those startup guys but there was no startup jobs to be had anymore.

Ward: Yeah. But they're, I mean they're out there now for sure and as you can imagine, in recruiting tech. I mean how many of those are started by a staffing leader. If not internal and certainly a recruiting company or staffing company right. We're like, oh can do it better than bullhorn or whoever and, and then they build it and guess what the tools are so much easier every year. There's more and more tools that you can build your own thing. And some companies as we know, build their own ATS and stuff like that. Yeah, we have 457 ATSs that we are tracking down in our database, and I'm sure we're probably missing half of them on a global basis. So, why would a company build an ATS cheaper to go buy one especially if you wanted to own it.

Max: It'd be cheaper to buy an ATS company you mean.

Ward: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's so true. But, you know, I remember a few years back, Facebook recruiter called me and said hey we're building our own ATSs once you know your background and product and the product projects before IBM took over. Do you want to consider for this job and like you're building your own business to take out the market. I mean if it's take out the market. Yeah, talk about just gonna build it and run it in the house. Why would it. Why would you do that? Of course, you know, Facebook has a few engineers, I get it.

Max: Yeah, they could build anything they want but

Ward: And apparently you know the TA leaders are like, Well, why should we settle for whatever we can build around and they did it. I don't know if they're still good actually but

Max: Google built their own ATS and Microsoft will probably end up buying an ATS so that was, that was the rumor that was being circulated by Chad and Cheese on their podcasts.

Ward: So these things yeah they continue to happen. And, I mean, I remember six years ago I was running. I was on the blog squad for what was HR tech world now on leaf in Amsterdam and they're like oh hey we want to interview some, we want you to interview some of the folks here at the conference that are speakers and influencers today. Okay, great. And, again, why don't you interview Jason Averbook, and Josh Bersin, like, thanks a lot you know my first time to this event, gives me the two biggest names in the industry to interview on camera. It went great. But I remember talking to Josh Bersin I'm like hey, let's talk about consolidation for a minute right you got big fish even though the small fish. The way I see it, it's gonna keep happening but I see a future where there's more point solutions kind of being assembled in a way that people can use that they don't have to necessarily buy that pre canned giant offering that has everything in it. Right and he totally agreed he said he thinks it's going to get much much worse but more choices more

Max: More fragmented.

Ward: Yeah some of your listeners were like exactly right it's like well, all I need is a chatbot in our current providers is not on the roadmap for another year or two, we need it now. So where do we go look, you know, there's all these choices and there's new ones popping up all the time. That's just one tiny sliver of TA tech stack is helping roleplaying come to market. One of they needed referenceable clients so it helped them get their sales strategy set up and get some of those references with clients. I remember one of them. Because Brad is with Informatica. And like I said he really liked what he has to offer you know how's that gonna fit into your stack and I was expecting you know we've got five or six pieces right he said yeah we got 32 TA tech solutions today in house. This will be 33 a month we'll find a plan like are you kidding me. They were maybe 1000 people or something. How do you have 32? It's unbelievable how many solutions are out there. And that's not even the best.

Max: But that's a testament to how easy it's become to buy and to start using, I mean, that would be impossible 20 years ago, when everything was on prem on premise to have 2010 solutions.

Ward: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Max: And most of our tracks are not a hard logs right so if they were not useful these 30 Solutions would probably lose the contract within the next year.

Ward: Well, that's, that's one thing i mean he liked, he liked to play with new tech kind of guy which is great and he commanded the budget to play and that's wonderful. So many early stage companies love to have that. But if you're on the consumer side you're the head of talent acquisition and you're trying to figure out stacks a little wobbly why is that what his issue was in most is how do you get them to talk to each other so you're not doing double entry or triple entry or the data is flowing at the right time or if it's filling in. What we found that one of the reasons we exist, advising the vendor executives is a lot of mark don't even know they're supporting the same client, let alone working together. So our mission in life is to help them discover that. Who else is there supporting that client and get them to play nice in the sandbox, because there's always overlap right. And if there is overlap, how do you keep them from trying to point fingers at each other, and then anybody listening system errors. Like, oh yeah you go call one vendor and complain that hey that data is missing where to go or it didn't get there, while they're gonna say well it's somebody else's fault right and then you ask them and they're like well it was their fault,

Max: Yes those meetings are happening all the time. And what's the overall trends that you're seeing the sort of five year tenure threads, is it that the vendors are becoming more often are more closed? Are they are they trying because, in 2020, there was consultation people wanted to, to become more essential for their customer, because as budgets were being slashed. They tried to hold on to, as much business as possible and so, in that, in that environment I guess it does not favor a very collaborative mindset because if the pie is shrinking, then everybody wants a bigger slice of it.

Ward: Right.

Max: But maybe that's maybe that's a bump on the road. Generally a more a more collaborative mindset and trend or am I being, or is that wishful thinking.

Ward: Well, yeah, you're right, there's some people panic in the wrong place and I think, you know, last year taught many of us anyway. He had a strong partner network and if you're a consumer buyer these systems. If your vendors aren't playing nicely together in the sandbox. It's only going to get worse when stress levels go up, or if you do have to cut, you know, how do you how do you know what the cut, if anything, You know what's gonna. If it's like Jenga or something and you pull out the wrong piece, the whole thing could come collapsing right and so it's not easy but reality is yeah there's definitely some consolidation, driven by the buyers and I don't see that changing necessarily but what I also do see on the flip side is with more options for better point solutions, more mature point solutions ones that can evolve more quickly. I mean that's the main reason that big fish, eating small fish because they can't, the big ones can't innovate, they're like, Titanic they're, they're great at cruising across the ocean, but they can't maneuver like a smaller boat, that's where the point solutions can really showcase innovation adapt to the environment more quickly. And the only way the big ones are going to get that typically is through acquisition, consolidation. That just leaves a vacuum frankly for innovation to bubble up and take shape.

Max: Yeah, it seems to me as technologists, that when I, when I hear about this consolidation that happens, and these mega mergers, from a couple of years ago from K1 and jobvite. And I think you were saying you were involved with withdrawal points. Be familiar this one. That's the the size and ambition of this is that this is a sales driven consolidation like I don't think any engineer came up with the idea. Let's bring all these things together, and it'll be a beautiful product at the end. The engineers will probably still, still wondering, what the hell happen to them, you know, right.

Ward: Well, actually, we've been talking to a number of different investment groups lately. We're seeing the same thing they're where they're looking at that solution stack and think how do we stuck together solutions that can be an offering in the marketplace right and that's certainly what the job I roll up meant at least to me is how do you fill the gaps without building sides by your partner like some buying going on. Their partner strategies have always been kind of rollercoaster rides from what we've seen. Lot of opportunities I mean Alison, a lot of opportunity for them to really revamp their partner network and make a difference for the customers. Instead of trying to build everything and take tends to take longer than finding a partner. And your question earlier about openness versus closed, definitely seeing a trend more towards the open API's and different ways for the vendors to collaborate share the data, and sometimes invisibly to the customer which is maybe a perfect scenario right where hey if I hire somebody I just want that data to flow through our various system. I don't need to know exactly how it happens or what happens, it's gonna happen reliably save us time and effort, get people on board you know into the company.

Max: And have you seen some of the employers talent acquisition, folks, start to build in-house system integration teams to serve as the glue between all of these systems is. Does, does a TA director and 2021 need to have an engineering team.

Ward: They could, and the vendors don't get their stuff together. They might be the only way to fix it. Especially the bigger companies because they've got long term contracts they can't just rip and replace things so easily right, even with open API's and all that. There's a lot of investment, which is why legacy systems need to be named they're still chugging along. You look at the benefits, space, my goodness, they're still sending data back and forth, flat file CSV files. So recruiting, kind of, often the leader of the pack when it comes to using leveraging technology and open API's, but

Max: It's a little bit more playful, and then perhaps because you're dealing with candidates instead of staff, so you have a little bit more freedom, but also perhaps because you're dealing with the markets, which is every town for every geography has its own dynamic and for the buyer, an opportunity to play and say, Well, I respect our global tech stack but here in dot dot dot, we do things differently, and I have to go. Because they have the budget to spend on advertising and if you can buy an ad in a local newspaper then you can also buy a support service, the same budget. So, That's something that we've been leveraging at Talkpush.

Ward: Yeah, no, it's, it is charted. Now, more so than anything with work from home policies right we are becoming more global organizations across the board. And not at all HR tech are built to work in all these different local geographies and so forth, local laws all this stuff that varies from state to state sometimes let alone country to country so. And that's what's interesting too, you know, when, I used to do more consulting directly with the employers. If they were on a global footprint my recommendation is that if you need a system that's global, you might want to start looking at solutions built in Europe or something that are kind of more of multicountry enabled out of the box.

Max: Yes, yes.

Ward: Because that's how you operate, whereas in the US, it's like, oh yeah, you know, we got a 100 clients and it's English only, it's only domestic and going to other countries, it becomes a much bigger task than let's say European company I think often coming here to the states to support that.

Max: Yeah that is actually a lot of European software company in our space which ended up going to the US, right, I mean a lot of the TA tech and HR tech spaces with entrepreneurs from America who are now Americans, but we're not always American, the CEO of Smart recruiters mountain, the founder of Phenom, you know a lot of companies. I'm sure more than half of the CEOs come from abroad, but they end up building American companies. And what I mean by that companies is that have the regulatory framework of US in mind, specifically on the candidate side. A lot of this is around the law employment opportunity, and diversity hiring, which does not work the same way outside of the US. You know, it's very strange for me to, I just took a survey. And I was asked about my diversity metrics and I'm like I don't know who is the minority in my company, I don't even know I think I'm the minority I don't know. It's also it's just a different narrative outside the US.

Ward: Yeah, remember we were trying to figure out who was the client. They had trouble getting all their resumes parsed properly and we had a good parsing partner it was nothing wrong there but all their resumes had pictures on them and the birth date. This was the golden role in that country you know that's just how it was done.

Max: For sure.

Ward: The parser wasn't expecting these kind of things yeah so yeah that's it is the global world. You have to really accommodate into one size fits all good luck.

Max: I can't keep track anymore, which countries are we putting the pictures in and then which countries are we not putting the pictures in, and it's hard to keep track sometimes.

Ward: Right. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's different. So from a consolidation standpoint, certainly we're seeing a lot more we're even, whether it's consolidating or growing, you know the acquisitions sometimes it's the market share. Right, so, others have been buying companies abroad. And I think it's hard actually compared to investing a lot of money in developing new teams to try to make those relationships regarding to sell especially at the enterprise level and in any enterprise level type TA leaders listening is probably the same thing like hey if our abroad type operations want to make their own decisions about their solution if it works for them, and we still get the global like metrics or whatever we need. Why not have a different ATS in every region or something if that's what it takes to get the right results and maybe aspire to consolidation but. And there's some interesting new groups coming out right now that are continuing to push the envelope of vendor collaboration and data analytics is a great example of one we just had a collaboration done in December on that, and some great innovative solutions presented to influencers in the industry and there's some interesting results from the scores and all that but the feedback that came in was was amazing from a competition standpoint, they realize hey, we've got, whether it be geography or industry or business units. You look at the bigger the company is the more likely they're going to have different systems running in house. How do you get that data across actually need to actually prove results, especially in talent acquisition.

Max: Yeah.

Ward: Third Party perhaps even just to help figure out what's there, what do we need to measure, what can you measure, what can you ask to be anonymous. So many rules. But if you don't measure it you can't improve it. Somebody's got to be paying attention.

Max: Yeah, I really liked the analytics as perhaps the central function that needs to work with every country every geography and bring it all together. You of course also need to have a central employer branding function, low, you would also want to have a local element to that and of course you would want IT to have a central policy around data privacy and personal data for the company. But beyond that, I think, I think a decentralized model probably works best in talent acquisition. That, that's my opinion, and I will keep sharing it with everybody who's willing to listen.

Ward: Yeah. It's hard to get it right everywhere so stick with best things you have and try to make them work together and you're listening and go for our vendors don't, they don't work together with each other. I mean that's the problem that we try to solve platform level for alliances and partnerships, but also on the advisory side because if you want to keep your customers you got to know what their situation is and the situation is they've got other systems in house, doesn't matter workday Oracle or any of the big shops it's even more so than because there's a lot of holes they know it and even if they don't have the holes that they think they have or don't you know they do they have more than they think they have and their partner networks, need to be strong and plug and play and as I said they can't deliver that companies are going to start, either hiring their own integration experts in house which is sad to see but if that's the only way to solve it so be it.

Max: And to ask for help or advice on these tricky topics which no, no recruiter, got into recruitment, to do system integration and talk about alliances, like it just happened. So, a lot of them are probably asking for help but how do they get in touch with you.

Ward: Yeah. So, I guess. Probably the best start would be Linkden but not the only word Chrisman I don't think on Linkedin but pretty easy to find. Yeah, it's, again, our job is to help vendors better collaborate with common customers and get a better result. So if you have vendors that are collaborating well and you want some help there let us know and make an introduction, we'll see what we can do.

Max: I've a list. I've a list. I'll send it to you after we're offline. And before we part ways, I wanted to ask you one of my favorite questions is for you is to not think about your current job but think as a practitioner of somebody who's hired people, and as a manager and go back to the days when you made a terrible hiring mistake. I don't want names. I don't want to instant fix, I just want to know what was the terrible hiring mistake that you made and what can we learn from it.

Ward: Wow, okay.

Max: You got a few names I see your eyes are glazing.

Ward: Yeah so yeah everybody has their own strengths or weaknesses. Right. But I guess one of my bigger mistakes was just believing that somebody had the technical skills that they said they did and just didn't totally fabricated and took a while to uncover that, delayed this was years ago but

Max: Still remember it.

Ward: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like, I mean that's always the challenge how do you know until they get in front of you but thankfully these days there's so many wonderful tools that can either help assess their technical prowess, at least from a capability standpoint. What do they actually know and there's almost too much information out there now right so good tech partners that can help kind of cut through the details.

Max: There are some engineers out there who are way better on paper, than in person, or in fact in reality so a good reminder for more to don't skip the technical assessments. It's absolutely time well spent. Even if it's, you know, if it's gonna avoid you one mistake out of 20. That's still a good investment. That's a good investment so add that to your workflow for every position where it's applicable. Right, thanks, thanks Warren. Great to have you. And, well, I'll send you that list of all my naughty partners very shortly.

Ward: Sounds good, enjoy it. Thanks so much Max.

Max: Thanks.

Max: That was Ward Christman from HR Tech Advisor and HR Tech Alliances. You can connect with him on LinkedIn if you have one of those tech stack headaches they’re trying to solve. And of course as you’ve heard from Ward, there are many companies that are dealing with dozens of different vendors. He was quoting one that had more than 30 different existing software providers on talent acquisition.

And so I like to think of it as a trend which will continue to evolve and to enable our audience with more ideas and encourage them to try new tools. But when you do so, to always favor those providers that have open API, good documentation; otherwise you might be accumulating what could be called interoperability debt. That’s the word I’m looking for?

And just like you can have a technical debt, you can have interoperability debt, which is the concept that if you work with vendors who don’t play well with other vendors it will end up costing you a lot of money. So I hope you enjoyed that.

And if you did, please follow us on your podcast player of preference and share with your friends. Thank you.

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Max: Hello and welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast, I am your host Max and today I am delighted to welcome Jeff Wald. Jeff Wald is the author of two books including The end of jobs, The rise of on demand workers and agile corporations hot topics, kicking off into 2021, Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff: Max, thank you so much for having me.

Max: It's a pleasure. And we're at opposite sides of the planet Jeff is logging in from Florida, I'm in Hong Kong. But I think the world is smaller than it has ever been. With so many of the so many of those jobs being kind of remote, being advertised as it doesn't matter where you're, where you're hiring you know it's anywhere in the world as long as you've got the skills. So, it must have been a busy year for you, promoting the cause of the remote worker and the on demand worker. I'm even more excited about the international dimension of that, as opposed to, let's say, the creation of a new job category. I just like the fact that now the talent pool is universal and global.

Jeff: I agree, I will say this man. Let's not gloss over this small little fact that you're sitting in Hong Kong, I'm sitting in Florida. This is mind blowing to me if your mind's not freakin blown by this anyone that's listening to the fact that the two of us are sitting on literally opposite sides of the planet. That is amazing. You know pre pandemic I'd said a bunch of times in the book down the hall, on another floor, down the block, or halfway around the world. You don't need to be in the same place to be on the same team. And that has become all the more true during the pandemic or I should say all the more true, it's always been true. Over the last few years it has been all the more aware than people become of that. And this is exemplified here I mean we had a wonderful conversation, prior to you know hitting record here, as if we were colleagues on a project, just working and it to me there was no difference the conversation we had then are having now than you, me sitting in your office.

Max: Yes, yes, Well all the mess in my office is outside of camera view. It looks a lot better. Actually, I control this environment better.

Jeff: I'd probably be wearing pants. Those are all things that are slightly different than if I were in your office. But still, it's all amazing to me.

Max: That's great. So far listeners out there. Jeff is pantless.

Jeff: Allegedly, allegedly!

Max: Well. So Jeff, maybe you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, before you became an author on the topic of employment. It's probably not what you grew up, dreaming to become a kind of happened with life. Can you walk us through the main steps in your career.

Jeff: Sure, I started my career in finance with JP Morgan,moved to venture capital, which was just an amazing, amazing experience working with entrepreneurs, and getting to see men and women that were just trying to change the world. So exhilarating that I left and started my first company, that failed miserably and basically bankrupted me. But that's the thing with entrepreneurship, pick yourself up dust yourself off and keep going. Second company we built up, and eventually got sold to Salesforce and that was a good outcome not a great outcome. And then this last company Work Market, founded 10 years ago. Work Market is enterprise software that enables companies to organize manage and pay their freelance population, raised about 70 million from Union Square ventures SoftBank and a few others sold the company to ADP almost three years ago. So it's been a great, great journey and the sale to ADP specifically gave me the space, Max to finally sit down and finish this book because I've been working on it for like four years prior to the purchase of ADP.

Max: Okay. Well, congrats on that entrepreneurial journey. I haven't read that. After you sell your business, there was a moment. It's a moment where most entrepreneurs kind of struggle with depression. Suddenly a drop, drop in activity and energy. But apparently, you made the most of that sort of drop.

Jeff: That's super super interesting. I guess I understand it conceptually. It's one of the silliest reasons to be depressed, not that I wish to ever make fun of depression. I will tell you having your business fail and going bankrupt. I'd say bankrupt as bankruptcy is a technical term. Have your business fail and virtually going bankrupt. That is something that did in general did a lot of depression in me. And, you know, having not leaving my apartment for some time. As I was super bummed out by that, but I had no experience like that with the sale of joy upon joy and gratitude and fortune.

Max: Yeah. Good, I am really happy to hear that because you know who knows maybe one day I'll have to sell some of my shares. And I'd like it to be a happy moments as well.

Jeff: God will. God will.

Max: So, your new book, The end of jobs, The rise of on demand workers, I'm excited about this topic, because it is all of our, our mission in the corporate world and the enterprise world, to, to create a performance driven culture, and an output driven culture where people are measured on, you know what they produce, as opposed to you know how why they smile. And I think that the transition towards task base job assignment, as opposed to job descriptions, is one for the best because it actually gives more freedom to be able to just get the job done in as much in as little time as possible, which is giving people more freedom to run their lives the way they want. I mean it could be looked at. It could be looked in that way it could be looked at on the opposite side of the spectrum as like a cold market driven approach to employment. Instead of where many employers to position themselves as we are family. But I think the 'we our family' message is a bit outdated personally. How do you feel about that transition? Do you think that we're moving towards a world which is, is that what's covered in your book?

Jeff: So there are a number of things that are ever covered in the book about the future of work. The first and the most important is to look at the history of work. I wrote the book because I get very frustrated with people that make predictions about the future of really anything quite frankly without evidence, specifically in the world of work. We have the history of work and how companies workers have come together to produce goods and services throughout different societal changes different technological changes. So let's study those. And the second body of evidence is data. What does the data, tell us how to data trends and patterns, play out. Currently, and obviously through history as well. The third is how companies actually engage workers. You know a lot of people think the labor resource planning meeting goes like this, CEO walks in and says, 'All right, what are we gonna do ot her workers. Let's hire the cheapest ones, meeting adjourned'. That is actually not how those meetings go, there's a lot of variables that go into that equation. And so understanding how companies actually engage workers, understanding the data and the data trends and understanding history, and how society has coped with some of these struggles before. That to me is a very thoughtful way to think about, or start to make predictions about the future of work and that's what we endeavour to do with the book.

Max: So the book has a historical component that goes back to the the history of work. I was excited when I read about the time of Abraham Lincoln when they were talking about what's it called wage slaves, or where it was considered that every man should be his own employee, there was a vision that was articulated at the time that you know you were to be on a regular wage is somehow less envious, that everybody should be self employed as kind of coming back a little bit right from one or two years ago.

Jeff: It certainly is coming back to the whole idea behind freelancing is the idea that you get to have flexibility and choose your own path that is a very very powerful thing it's something very encoded in our DNA to want to have control of our own destiny, of course, and all the things that the freelancer faces are starting to permeate the full time workforce. So, like called the book The end of jobs the rise of on demand workers. That is not to say I think everyone's going to be a freelancer, that is to say that all the things that the freelancer deals with task based labor, personal responsibility, algorithms, allocating work data driven HR all of those things Max are permeating the full time workforce and all workers are dealing with kind of things.

Max: Okay, so, everybody who's looking at Uber drivers thinking, I'm glad I don't have an algorithm, looking over me. Time is coming up. Yeah,

Jeff: it is coming. No question. It is coming.

Max: Okay. From a talent acquisition perspective which is really my focus. How does this affect recruitment How does the rise of the on demand worker affect recruitment? Do you think that. Are you noticing that they're, they're being hired in a different manner than the permanent staff?

Jeff: Well I think there are a few ways that all of these changes impact recruiting. The first is the recruiting is that tip of the spear right your listeners are the first people out there that are dealing with the changes and how companies are structuring their workforces. We need more of X we need less of Y. We need more people in this geography, fewer in that geography. And so recruiting is seeing in real time, the shifts in labor resource management, and that is super super interesting in and of itself. And we can spend some time talking about the types of recruiting they're gonna be more important as we get into skills based labor, and more remote work, and more on demand work and how robots and AI are going to impact the workforce with large. That's one conversation set that is a very interesting conversation to be had. The other part is how does that specific function change, given all of these things is more recruiting going to be done in an on demand capacity? is more recruiting going to be done via robots or AI systems going to be doing more recruiting? And that's another very big impact that quite frankly we don't know how that's going to play out yet. You know there are just way too many variables and it's way too early in the game, but we certainly have seen some trends around on demand recruiting. And we've certainly seen some trends around some of the tasks inherent recruiting starting to be done by machines.

Max: With the start of the new year. Are you talking to companies who are setting targets around. I'd like to move, you know, 10, or 20% of my workforce to on demand, does that come down from the board to the operational level?

Jeff: Short answer is, look from the board down the answer to that is usually No, that is. You'd hope, but boards, I don't think, sitting on a few public boards myself boards don't get involved that tactically even though I would argue it is strategic and they should be having that type of conversation. Those conversations are very nuanced very complex, and so I've never seen somebody come down and see any point out. When I was running Work Market because if you wanted to increase your usage of freelancers there weren't any really other places to go, if you wanted to manage a large freelance workforce and Work Market. So, I would usually get that call. And I will tell you we very very very rarely got the labor force transformation call. The call of a we're getting into the change how we're doing things we need to bring in, and we're frankly, what I would get those calls, I kind of was like this is going to be a two year conversation, this sucks, but it usually, the call will come from real big companies so you take it and start having obviously if we could work with fortune 50 company we're going to do it. What the call, we would get Max, the calls that we would get all the time is we currently manage a freelance workforce. It is a very large part of our labor force strategy and it has been for years or decades, in some cases, but it's a mess. We don't know who's where who sent what legal Raymond who is working on what is good and what we need a piece of software to help us efficiently and compliantly manage this workforce, that call, I would get all the time. But the idea that, whether it's on demand work or robots and AI, that there's going to be some huge shifts that data doesn't support it. History doesn't support it, and how companies actually engage workers does not support an argument that oh my gosh all those jobs are gonna go next year, 10% of those jobs are gonna go. Labor force statistics and labor resource planning happens very slowly and very methodically and that's that's just the reality. So it's that reality that people should be mindful of when thinking about the future of work.

Max: And there's a huge regulatory component where a change in the law, and how easy it is to hire and fire will immediately impact the percentage of the staff, which is on demand right because it drives a lot of the demand.

Jeff: It is a incredibly powerful maybe the most powerful, powerful variable and what I call the labor equation, very complex equations series have a system of equations, I should say that guide how companies actually engage workers, and the regulatory environment, especially when it comes to freelance workers, I would argue is the biggest variable in that equation. And the problem with that variable is that that variable itself is all over the map. It's very different how you engage worker in California than what you do in Louisiana. Workers comp board in Wisconsin has an entirely different point of view than the Labor Department in Portugal. So you got to be super super mindful of how complex it is and that's why most companies go, oh my god it's too complicated just keep everybody employed. Obviously that's a bit glib of an interpretation, but it's not that far from accuracy.

Max: Yeah. Yeah, I believe it for sure. For me, I experienced it the other way I was like oh my god it's so complicated I have all these full time employees and be better I'd just have contractors, but either way. Either way, the decision towards a simpler way of doing things. I mean, I imagined that it's a little bit easier to decentralize, the compliancy, meaning. Instead of putting the onus on the employer to be in charge of everybody's, you know, being compliance is to say to the on demand worker, it's your responsibility. And by the way, here's a little bit of money to help you file your taxes or, you know, manager, your stuff.

Jeff: That is a really good point there. A increasing number of companies out there that are helping the freelancer set up a corporate structure, which really makes it a vendor relationship, and that stuff certainly helps shield the company, but in no way can the company. And I would not pretend to understand laws in China, or anywhere else. But in the United States, you can't pass that liability down to the worker. So when the State Department of Labor comes, you can't say well I, you know, they all signed these legal agreements indemnify me the department labor's we go okay I don't care. There, we view them as your employees, where is our back payroll tax? Where's Social Security payments? Where's unemployment insurance? let's go gimmy gimmy gimmy. They couldn't care less. But there are ways to your point, that companies can certainly mitigate their risk.

Max: Great. Well, what else can corporations think about your talking to you know it was in your title the Agile Corporation. What are some of the trends Do you foresee in 2021 for companies who want to become more agile, Besides that, besides work market. What other what other tools or methodologies do you recommend?

Jeff: Well I don't anticipate a huge increase in the size of the on demand workforce. But the on demand workforce as a number shrank. So there were over 240 million workers in the on demand workforce now there are high 30 million workers in the workforce, but the labor force as a whole film. And so we're still trying to parse together, did the percent of the on demand workforce shrink grow or stay the same? My guess is that it probably that stayed about the same. So I don't anticipate in 21, a huge movement back. I think it will stay about the same. percent of the labor force, because companies are just focused elsewhere, right now, right they're trying to make sure their teams are safe they're trying to make sure that their supply chains are safe and trying to make sure that their employees are being productive and they're not thinking about labor force transformation and 21. 22 might be a very different scenario. And as we discussed earlier regulation I think it's going to be the biggest variable in that equation. But when we talk about agile Max there there are a host of different ways in which a company can be agile. The best way is managing an army of freelancers. They are completely agile. The next you know you can move into temps and the vendors to other types of relationships. The biggest change that we saw in the labor market unquestionably in terms of how work gets done, I think the biggest change was unemployment and obviously horrific impacts on labor because of the pandemic. But the biggest change in how work actually gets done was clearly remote. It was moving to remote work and does that make a company more agile? of course it does. Allow your workers to be able to work where they want how they want is a very important step in kind of breaking that bone of the one office one manager 9-5 job. And that's the job by the way that is referenced in the title the end of jobs. Robots are taking all of our jobs, far from it, they are not, that is a very clear conclusion from the book. But this idea that you have one office, one manager, you work 9-5 that job is dying and it gets replaced by people being nomadic people having flexible work arrangements, people working in different contexts so that certainly on demand. Temps of freelancers and all that jazz. Those are the kinds of changes that were sped up by the pandemic as companies had to become more agile, there was no everyone's got to come to the office from 9-5, that wouldn't happen in almost anywhere in the world, in April of 2020. So, that is a huge step forward in the Agile corporations.

Max: Actually, to your last points on, I've noticed the same trends and of course but the 9-5 aspects, there are still a bunch of companies that still look at the nine to five hour. And, and there's a strong case to be made for for the work life balance to say, yeah, starts at nine five so you don't invade people's lives, but on the other hand, it does remove you know to do so because you, you say we want to create boundaries and we want to create overlap or people working at the same time. It does also mean you're removing a little bit of freedom from your employees, from your staff, let's say, to decide when they work.

Jeff: Of course.

Max: It's not that great right, like. I would argue like work whenever, and we try to minimize the number of conference calls if we can.

Jeff: That is a fine way to think about it, but when we're thinking about 164 million people in the US labor force actually 154 million now, 164 at the beginning of the pandemic. That is not the way all of them are gonna work. If you have a shift at H&M. That's when your shift is, there's no hey I want to work from Barcelona this weekend no no your shift is here in the store and that's when your shift is, if you're working on the line at Volkswagen your shift is nine to five, or maybe, whatever it is, there is no a I'm going to you know come in late. And I'll stay later, I don't know, that's when the shift starts like you have to be there. So it's important to think about the full context of the labor force. When we have conversations about the future of work it's easy to slip into this idea that everybody works in these remote first type jobs that are very enabled by remote work and digital work and all these other things. The reality is most people don't, that's just not the reality for most workers in any labor force.

Max: Agreed. Agreed. And I work in these industries where people do have to physically come a lot of the time, so I know that's the case, but I guess, for the knowledge worker. I still see, I still see people trying to cling on to this office. You know way of work, sure where, whereas all communication, eventually, as much communication as possible should be moved to the asynchronous. So because we can read faster than we can sit through a meeting.

Jeff: I completely agree. But to your point, some people do enjoy it. And there are tremendous benefits to it. I saw a study that 93% of remote workers still live within a commutable distance of the office. Because going remote doesn't mean you never go to the office, there are benefits to having everybody come together and have brainstorming sessions and do small talk. Those serendipitous encounters at the watercooler, they're actually incredibly good for productivity, do they need to be every day? Of course not. Can we allow people to flexible work arrangements, those that want it and those that can do it. Sure. But here's another important thing 42% of the US workforce can work remotely. That's it.

Max: yeah.

Jeff: And the US by the way is the highest percentage of any workforce on the planet that can work remotely. But another way to say that is 58% of workers, cannot do this digital lifestyle, cannot work remotely their jobs won't allow it. So we need to be mindful of that when having these types of conversations.

Max: Alright, so it was a bubble 2020 bubble and the narrative, to a certain degree that was not really supported by hard data. In fact, most people will still be coming into the office and, and the on demand worker or while it's an ongoing transition. We haven't seen a huge rise in the percentage of the workforce that goes on demand. And the robots will now take our jobs. I'm sure that there's a lot more depth to this book, than my cliff notes here. How do people find your book, I'm gonna put a link to where do you want to sell, are we selling through Amazon or is there another place?

Jeff: There are tons of other places but 98% of the books that have been sold have been bought on Amazon and, you know, certainly when the book came out in June, there was almost no other place to buy the book. That's not true actually was on barnesandnoble.com, a few other web sellers but it's funny I'm down here in Florida now and Florida's COVID restrictions are much looser than my normal home in New York, and I passed the Barnes and Noble today. As I was going school, get my office set up down here. Home Office, and I'm super excited to go tomorrow and see if my book is there, so hopefully it is in bookstores where it's supposed to be but it'd be the first time I get a chance to go into an old school Barnes noble I'm super excited.

Max: All right. Don't forget to put on your protective gear for that Barnes and Noble experience.

Jeff: No question. No question.

Max: And, well, how do people get a hold of you? What's the best way to reach you?

Jeff: Well, you can certainly follow me on twitter at @Jeffreywald, that's the only place that I go by Jeffrey for wells I go by Jeff, but I couldn't couldn't get Jeff Wald, and LinkedIn, I'm always I will always accept connections on LinkedIn and Amazon is certainly the best place to find the book.

Max: Wonderful. Well thanks Jeff for sharing your insights and coming on the show and. Well, I look forward to my FREE copy in the mail. No, I'll go and get myself a copy I've got a bunch of books,I am a little bit behind on my reading, and I'll go get myself a copy right now.

Jeff: I appreciate it thank you so much. It was so great to chat and I look forward to listening to many more episodes of this podcast.

Max: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you.

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Max: Hello everybody and welcome back to the 'Recruitment Hackers Podcast'. I am your host Max Armbruster, and today I'd like to welcome to the show Mr.Doug Updike, who is VP of National Sales Recruiting at Nations lending. Welcome to the show Doug.

Doug: Thank you. Appreciate you and what you are doing and thanks back.

Max: Thank you. Doug connected with us listening to some of our content and feeling we were just talking about the fact that we are feeling a little cooped up in 2020 and that we miss the opportunity to connect with others and so this is the chance to connect and to connect with the audience as well. So for the audience, tell us what you do and the company that you work for?

Doug: Sure. Yeah

Max: that's about Nations lending.

Doug: Yep. Nations lending, I'll start with the company. Company is at top 80 lender in the US, traditional retail mortgage lender so our customers are first time home buyers but people who are buying you know moving up in the market place or in the last year we finance here in the US within a huge marketplace for so a top 80 mostly in the central US and I was brought on a year ago for national expansion and then brought my team from top five competitor with me over to the nations almost exactly to the day a year ago.

Max: Happy anniversary.

Doug: Yeah

Max: So refinancing is a hot topic in 2020 you are saying?

Doug: Absolutely! In my lifetime I have not seen rates like this in you know in giving people opportunity to get into their dream home or first time buyers to get in the market when they didn't think they could not afford a home, so.

Max: Right. Alright, I am curious to hear more about this firms but perhaps before, for the first to understand where you're coming from, can you tell us how you ended up in recruitments? I am looking up at your Linkden profile now and I can see it was sometime in 2004.

Doug: Naah before that

Max: No it was before this century. It was back in

Doug: You guys were calling me in grade school or before that. Let's not make fun of me too much. Like most folks I did not think I was going to end up a recruiter. 100% by accident, fun story. I had sold a company was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and a recruiter, nice fellow, he had been calling me I had a non-compete and all through the year he would call and ask me-do I know a person this wasn't a bank card/credit arena but you know do I know a person in Salt lake city that I might give a name he could connect with and this went on throughout the year like I say, so he invited me and wife I was living in San Diego and he invited me to a dinner and I made the mistake of asking him 'you know the folks number I gave you, did you make any money at all?' you know how does that work, and I didn't know the industry one bit.

Max: Yeah

Doug: He happened to tell me that he made quarter money dollars on the leads that I'd give him and all of a sudden the steak and wine didn't taste as good as I thought it was going to because I was trying to figure out what to do. So I actually worked with him for a few years and learned it, he knew that I was going to start my own company, went on to start my own staffing company which I integrated into a mortgage company right before the credit crisis. So that's how I got in, again 100% by accident, just happened to ask the right question at the wrong time and decided to jump in.

Max: So you have been in this industry specifically not just recruitment but mortgage recruitments for a long time and I suppose some of that is because you know the people, you know the industry, so you go from one opportunity to another organically but are there some specific profiles and skill sets that this industry has homed in the recruiter in you?

Doug: In the arena, yeah absolutely, but I think like most one of the reasons I picked mortgage right is the freedom. I'd like to have some freedom in what I was doing, the other piece it was an industry that had when I had back when I got in it, there was a wide gap between the folks that were doing it for a long time and I didn't find any rookies any folks that were newer in the industry that changed probably in the last three years, but I saw this huge gap and so being a connector of people, I kinda just went where people weren't. Mortgage is really sleepy. They kind of it was old school recruiting it was a yellow pad, believe it or not and who did you meet at a conference and so some years ago and then you know stuck in it dabble the outside of edges and you go back to what is comfortable. The biggest part of the mortgage arena that I love is you know personal friends that it was one arena where you stay in touch really the rest of your life. So I have this round table of folks that either you follow me or that I follow them that you know they became colleagues and friends at the same time.

Max: There is always that advantage of you can probably dig and do a background screening on a lot of people indirectly you know where only one or two connections removed away from somebody in mortgage by now.

Doug: Yep. I would take that. The other piece in staying in one arena that's very much helped me and my team with that is you know when you get to know people and you like people, people refer you a lot of business so staying in that probably still today 65% of what I do is somewhat referral based. Now I might just be that I heard that you know you guys did a great job for my aunt and my uncle who lives in Florida, can you help him? but there is an awful lot of texts, quick conversations and to that I think a big part of a way that I recruit, I wanna help folks even if it doesn't help myself so if I can open the door and it's in a different arena or different part of mortgage I am gonna do that everytime, just especially in these times I wanna help folks you know a lot of people got kicked in the butt that didn't have any idea in February and March that life was gonna change. So taking that platform and making it bigger than just mortgage and being able to help folks if they need it with an introduction could be any industry but staying put has allowed me to do that.

Max: Yeah. I heard that it's less and in 2020 would be explosion of volume and digital hiring and digital channels that it's a bit less about who you know and little bit more about what you know that now for a recruiter that there is more talent available than ever before if you know how to use the tools and so you're gonna be less likely to use the buddy network. On the flip side what you are saying is you are all scoring points with your network inorder to build good karma and referral for the future. So the network remains critically important, though perhaps on the sourcing side less on than before, right. I mean if you source your talent digitally I assume.

Doug: Yep, a good portion. I think you nailed it too. If you were to look a year and half ago I came from a place that didn't have much technology to Nations and Nations afforded me this look into technology that I'd never experienced. A lot of your audience would laugh but I mean I didn't know what to do with the salesforce license. We had a team building out some work force but SMS I hadn't used. So when I got those tools..access to those tools and had a team that we were just traditional cold call recruiters and we integrated the technology with our network and those were bounce store steps they were something different. I think it was different I think out tech guys would tell you, you know I get there but I would call it 'too much ice cream' you know technology for me for that first little bit when I have access to some three hundred and thousand something loan officers, that is lot bigger than any network what I would have ever thought that I could built. So I am probably one of the few people that said 'wow'. I didn't fully believe it until I started using it, meaning some of the technology that's just coming out.

Max: Yeah

Doug: Specifically in my world, I used to scoff and laugh at text because I didn't like getting them. Text SMS technology

Max: Yeah

Doug: And we probably half of our business came from SMS, starting campaign that's not how we ended it but we started a relationship that we didn't have. So I am you know honoured to say 'Hey!' we are now we are adapters and we are catching up with probably the rest of your audiences with

Max: Cool!

Doug: some of the mortgage'.

Max: I don't know. Sounds like you are quite advanced. Text recruiting is still a relatively fresh area. I mean I guess the early adapters were 5-10 years ago

Doug: Some of them were laughing at us. Yeah but anyway.

Max: Well that's interesting. So are there some specific pieces to your text act that you would recommend for the text hiring or for people who are listening or who are looking for solutions?

Doug: Yep. So, it could be so redundant and stuff that you guys it is intuitive to your audience. A couple of things that we did that were just simple is, literally taking and looking up birthdays with a quick text first thing in the morning. I know it's your birthday today, I wish I would've known that and I would have texted you, and Happy Birthday by the way, which is awesome.

Max: Thanks!

Dough: A lot of personal touches along with our brand 'Nations'. Here is a product that we would like you to learn about. Getting down to just even a 'Happy Birthday' right and making it first thing in the day. So we make sure they go out before 8AM, there is a birthday text and it's not just branded with and by the way now we are going to try to recruit you in the second paragraph. So some of what we have done is just take or what our call would be, but a lot of it's been congratulations when we see it, in our industry there is a magazine that comes out with top 200 you know loan officers and the top branches. Using that as an SMS but just to acknowledge our competitors without you know beating them over the head.

Max: Yeah

Doug: We call it beating them over the head recruiting has been you know helpful. And the other thing as you guys probably all do. Once we became a consistent show. Tuesday mornings you know we know within a half hour that there is gonna be a campaign going out, we know to our competitors. Once we got serious with it in building it into our everyday activities we started having some real success, with the text.

Max: Right. I don't think you are behind the curve at all. I am actually thinking of taking some of your ideas right to my product team and you know we send millions of SMS every month so I should've thought about it at all but I don't think we have automated birthday messages going on, which I think is a pretty cool feature for us to add so I am writing this one down.

Doug: I'll take it like I say we try to make things super simple.

Max: Yeah.

Doug: Right. In the recruiting world and so we look at it and go like how simple can we make it, it's like you know how complicated, and then how many touch points. And that's the other thing that is broadcast. We are doing a little, I don't want to plug that slide dial is the one that we happen to users lots of them, but on the broadcaster's piece same thing is that we use a lots of humor with here to get some of our what we'll use a broadcast. Hopefully this will go out this goes out after January 1st right?

Max: Yes

Doug: Good good. Then I'm gonna say this or you'll leak it that part out, whatever. We're having some fun, making fun of ourselves is a recruiters. January 1st we have a campaign going out at 12:01 on social media making fun that we wanted to be the first recruiter to try to recruit you in 2021.

Max: Nice

Doug: and then at 08:01 we have a bet going that we wanted to be the first recruiter in our space that reached out to you because there is so many recruiters in our space and it's just so competitive that we've actually decided to have a little bit of fun, it will be..we are gonna report back to you if this works but we are literally gonna take and have a little humor because there are so many people that we get you know you are the eighth or tenth recruiter this week that have called me, what do you have that's different? So you know, using that technology but then getting personal with it is what the team goal is.

Max: Brilliant! Brilliant! And you can make use of tools that will personalized as well as the outreach, so obviously using things like the first name of the recipients 'Dear Doug' etc etc but you can now also automate things like voice notes and even sending out videos and GIFs in order to give it a little bit of you know spunk and branding. Yeah.

Doug: Good points on your part. The other one that, and this is gonna be just kinda down what we call it 'down and dirty recruiting' we did it by accident and it's become part of our whenever we can now. We did a little, we are quick on the iPhone, a little twenty seconds in front of the competitors office coffee shop we all like to go. 'Hey Max I was thinking of you, I am right in front of your office, I am not bold enough to walk-in and try to recruit you in person but I'd love to have a coffee with you next time I am you know off to twenty fourth street'.

Max: Yeah. Love it!

Doug: It was returned within thirty seconds because it was clever. The guy just said 'super clever. Next time you are buying me coffee, I can't wait to meet with you. Different than anything that I'd got this week'. Now I'll take a week. I'd like to say ever you can pattern me out, but you know we'll take it. So we are trying to use technology but put a fun spin with traditional cold call recruiting, which our industry is not an early adapter to just about anything. We wait for everybody else to make all the mistakes and then as an industry we have to go out reluctantly we come crawling in at the end. So trying to get the team up to you know what's new? What's exciting out there? How come we have a fresh take to what we are doing?

Max: I like it very much. I think just try to..I am thinking of all ways we can help people re engage with their townpool and do that kind of messaging because yeah you generally, if you have a good database you know who your competitors are employing, so you can have a targeted campaign just for them and because you've been in the industry for so long you know every lender out there so it would make sense if you'll be able to use that, yeah. And yeah going back just on the way the industry or the market is changing, you're saying is your industry generally doing well? I know in the insurance phase, the insurance world and life insurance they are having a good due in 2020 and refinancing is the hot area overall. Would you say that the lending space has grown in 2020 or for your market?

Doug: Yep. Absolutely. Probably one of the top three years that I've ever had in the last twenty five. Some of the challenges have been, it's been so good but we are watching other people in other industries. You know and I'll use where I am here in Arizona, you know we've had a tough tough time with converting a lot of what is around us, is some warehousing, you know electronics, manufacturing and it's, that we've been growing as an industry you know watching others have to pivot or navigate that, has been tough but I were doing so well right and in the end I don't want to, knock on the wood, I hope this continues in our space but it's been an odd year to watch others really struggle and try to find their ways especially recruiting friends.

Max: I mean it's a bit countercyclical right, when business is gonna be doing great and everybody is gonna have money in the bank then you'll have a slow year.

Doug: Yeah. That's well said, well said but. You know seeing recruiters too that you know we are getting a lot of calls from other industries where they just can't recruit right or they can't recruit the way they had, so that's been a challenge but overall for our industry a top three in the last twenty five and really a time for people to pause and look at a new way to do business too. The tough times of covid have forced us to we don't get to jump on a plane and have a steak dinner. That would have been a majority of a lot of what I do was, coming in the town, face to face, breaking bread and it took a minute to get hold, 'hey! we can't just crawl and haul, we have to keep recruiting if we have to keep growing' and so you know all of this is forcing us to do that. And five different avenues and tactics to say much.

Max: Sounds like you are not running out of ideas there and found other ways to build rapport and that's gonna be..yeah..continue to be the same for many years to come. Looking back at 2020, are there lessons that you've taken away from this year or ways in which your industry has adapted?

Doug: Oh you are not going to cut me off guard a little bit, yes. But I think what we have to do to adapt is really slow down and it can't just all be about comp, because so many people did well, so we had to slow down and go wait a minute you can't just have a compensation conversation, right, you can't lead with compensation, everyone is doing well. So it's a time that you know I used a..mentor used to tell me you know I would feel horrible you hold up mortgage company and he said you know if people having to hit their brakes at yellow lights because they don't want to work here like I wanna slow down and look at that and go 'can we do very well?can we do incredible?' and still change the way we're doing, give people more time with their families those sort of things. So my recruiting team, we are really focused on you know 'Hey, get a little get better at your pitch, get better at your craft. Ask. Listen just listen better' and I think what we learned in you know in 2020 is, we didn't listen very well. We just kept yelling on message instead of listening to what people want. Right.

Max: The more competitive and the harder the industry is, the more you've to adapt your employer or value propositions to your audience and think like a salesperson.

Doug: Yeah, and again a lot more listening. Right like there is a lot more empathy, there is a lot more caring, but you are hearing. You know I tend to be storytelling I tend to recruit by story telling and but just hearing what people are going through and slowing down and going you know, it might not just be comp, it might be hey you know we just had this on a call I was today so it's just six weeks of working seven days a week fifteen hours like I don't really care about the money. I am already gonna split it in half and get divorced. Doug is joking, everybody is like I am gonna split my money in half like can you tell me you know hey I just wanna be able to do this and have baseball literally with my kids you know. So those are the things I am gratifying.

Max: Baseball is not legal anymore, Doug.

Doug: Oh you guys can't and you are closed down. Here in Arizona we are not closed down on anything so come on over. Everybody come visit.

Max: Anyway. The one question I would like to ask is to move back down the memory lane into the dark memories and to thinking about a terrible mis-hire that you've made. We make mistakes and of course retract you thought about your mistake and realize that could have been prevented or you decide you weren't going to make the mistake again. Can you walk us through that experience and you know for our audience to learn from your mistake?

Doug: Yeah, so like it was yesterday. Unfortunately I probably think about it far more than I should. I think our losses right we think about probably more than our wins at times. Quite frankly it was this, I knew of the gentlemen and his whole team. I knew of him because he did great advertising right. He was on every billboards on this town, he was on shopping cart, he was everywhere, and in our world that must mean you have a lot of production.

Max: yeah

Doug: So it didn't quite match up. There was ways and excuse to why he couldn't provide right any substantiation of income or this and I kept valging and valging and valging and there is no way you could be doing these things, you have to be incredibly successful. It was probably the largest sign-on bonus that I'd ever been involved with that I was just fell flat and it was one of those things where you walk to the room and everyone is looking at you like "that's on you. Like you're the one that pushed it pushed it everytime' and you know there were yellow lights there were things I could look at but I had just decided it was gonna be the deal of a life time, right, like and probably the only time or first time. I can't say the only time I had thought of my commissions ahead of slowing down and doing the right thing. I started getting literally added like you know month three it's gonna be this month four it's gonna be that, like I had my scrunchie and I got blinded by the you know just all that you know he wouldn't be there and doing what he's doing if he wasn't successful.

Max: Yeah

Doug: So I started finishing my own sentences without proof right like, well he has a good reason as a tax attorney couldn't get us what he needed, but I know people that know him. So horrible mistake to just again I started finishing my own sentences and writing my own email with what I wanted to be true instead of slowing down and getting a lot more..

Max: Sounds like you got greedy, Doug.

Doug: I did. There is no other word to say that yeah. I got excited and I started wanting to cash the cheques before they showed up.

Max: Alright, that I think we've all made that mistake and doesn't matter whether you are selling a career or selling something else or you are selling a talent. We all get greedy sometimes, but it does hurt you in the end right? I mean you got your commissions still

Doug: What does it look it. I earned on what they do. I got I got..

Max: You got nothing then

Doug: But you know relation-ly I did too, it hurt, because there were plenty of people that said you know slow down,'Are you sure Doug? Are you sure?'and I just decided I was gonna be the smartest guy in the room like I couldn't be wrong and I just stopped listening and I stopped waiting, I was gonna answer-yes this is gonna be the deal of a lifetime.

Max: And in your world to somebody who is good at self promoting by bill boards and ad space and as you said it seem everywhere in the city, but for most industries we are seeing this kind of self promotion happening on social media now like people touting their success on Instagram or on Linkedin or other places and endlessly promoting their own success. I guess there is a measure to which this is necessary for them to be successful but sometimes it's just a compulsive attitude that doesn't necessarily add anything to top line.

Doug: I 100% agree. The other thing and I think our team learned this at Nations. One of the things that we slow down and see is, if you are infront of..I am gonna make fun of it so it's not just a car or boat, a plane, a car or boat. It's very easy to connect on two or three or four parts of social media and it's just is the human being you are talking about the same human being five pages into a Facebook feed or Linkedin or do they have a different lifestyle on every one, right. Some of the things that we are seeing are really conservative with a nice suit on Linkedin, we won't even talk about Tik Tok or whatnot, but is it congruent and does it tell a story? and it's slowing down and watching and looking because you are right we get a lot of people that are you know in front of whatever, now I make fun of planes if somebody can afford that, that's awesome, but you know they are just trying to build it before. I'm gonna have all these things and because of that you know I'll end up working.

Max: I see what you're saying. So they are so obsessed with self promotion that they are putting pictures of themselves in front of jet planes but then asking you for a 50K job.

Doug: There you go. Yeah that's right. They will build it and they come you know after the fact, yeah. I just need one break, Doug and then I can start buying all these things that I want instead of you know the success let them attain it.

Max: If hiring people who are in a commercial role but who are not over selling, over promoting, or pushing the envelope too far and threatening the trust of your brand, maybe a good tip there is go take a look at their social media profile and yeah see if this holds up.

Doug: And are they the same person all the way through,right? Are they trying to figure out their identity on social media?

Max: Right

Doug: Are they kind of fake on Instagram, but then you know on Linkden they are another human being, on Facebook where their family might be they really can't quiet brag as much as

Max: I agree

Doug: as much as they lie during an interview, that kind of thing. Just you know we are in a mostly who we hire is commission based folks so that trust level, and it's somebody's home we have to be very careful that they're gonna handle it in a professional manner that isn't all about just the commission.

Max: Right.

Doug: and can they do the right thing if no one is looking is a potent quality for what we're doing.

Max: So you have it. In a world where people are hiring increasingly work from home commission based folks, trust and consistency of character is more important than ever, so Doug some really good actionable tips here for our listeners. Thanks for sharing and thanks for coming on the show.

Doug: Yep and a Happy Birthday. Celebrate well my friend and I appreciate you having me on.

Max: Pleasure. Thank you. I'm really go and celebrate.

Doug: There you go. Appreciate you. Thanks guys so much.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host max. And today on the show I've got Heather Myers from Tratify. A company which gets inside the head of candidates and finds out what their psychology is made of. And Heather will tell us all about that and more welcome to the show, Heather.

Heather: Thanks, max. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Dr. Myers, should I call you doctor? You can call me. Heather is fine. I am doctor Heather Myers, but Heather's good.

Max: Okay. I'll stick to Heather. But for the audience out there Dr. Myers has got a PhD in psychology and statistics, so you've got the perfect background for this company. Tell us about your life pre Tratify. Where do you come from? How did you put this PhD to good use?

Heather: Sure. Well, I actually grew up in Pennsylvania. And when I was a kid, my friends used to call me the marriage counselor.

So I kinda knew from an early age that I wanted to go into psychology. Immediately I thought that was going to be therapy. It turns out though, when I actually got to College at Carnegie Mellon, went to university. I realized that I actually really liked research psychology and understanding kind of what makes people tick.

And then I went to Stanford for my graduate work and within a personality psychology program there, which I found really fascinating. And I actually got along with the PhD. I got the master's degree in statistics, so I have a master's degree in statistics. And so there, I found that the combination of psychology and statistics was amazing because a lot of people are afraid of statistics, but when you're not afraid of statistics and you really like it, you're so much better at evaluating the research that people put out and that you can see. So that's always been a passion of mine merging the two. And I did a lot of consulting.

A lot of helping people actually do. Figure out how to do research and analyze that that and understand it and define what variables they were looking for. So I did a lot of that. I have a couple of kids, I mostly stayed home with them and did consulting. And then I heard about Tratify through actually one of my professors from Carnegie Mellon who was, you know, knew some people who work there and she called me and said, Hey, they really are looking for someone to kind of up there statistics kind of prove their validity, reliability, those kinds of things. And that's how I got connected to Tratify. And for me, it's my dream job because it's the perfect combination of my psychology, the personality piece, statistics, all of it together.

So that's how I ended up here.

Max: Amazing. Yeah, I yeah, your, your resume looks. Yeah. It's just like the perfect match. Like actually we don't need to do a psychological assessment in your case, we just read your resume and match you directly to that company.

Heather: It's true. It is kind of dreamlike. I mean, and I think initially, you know, when I first started talking to them, it was really more around the statistics.

So you know, once I started doing some consulting for them, then it was like, also, I have a PhD in personality psychology, so it was like, wait, what? So when we kind of expanded and I started working full time, then I was able to put really my full skill set to use. Yeah.

Max: That's the beauty of a startup life. People are quite an opportunistic. They take advantage of who happens to accidentally come into their employment.

Heather: Absolutely. For sure.

Max: But from the little you've said, I can sort of glean that you were able to earn your living on the masters of statistics more than on the PhD of psychology.

Heather: I would say that's true. I mean, the PhD part helped when it came to teaching people how to do the research because that I didn't get through the statistics when teaching them how to better design studies. But the statistics is the piece that most people know that they don't have. They don't know, they don't understand research.

That's just kind of, they just don't know. They don't know, but they do know that they don't know statistics. So that was certainly a much easier in, when I was consulting for sure.

Max: All right. Well, tell us a little bit more about Tratify was my intro accurate when I said you helped to get inside the head of the candidates?

I don't think that's your official tagline.

Heather: It's not our official tagline now, but what we do is help understand personality. Right. So it's all about understanding the candidates better the way they see the world. So I think of personality as the lenses, through which we see the world and it doesn't equate to behavior, but it is linked to behavior, right?

So it's understanding more the way a person views the world, the kinds of environments they tend to like to work in, the types of people they tend to like to engage with, the way they communicate. So, all of those things are sort of something that you can have access to, if you really understand the personality. And it's really just helping to understand candidates better to help candidates understand themselves better and really you know, providing this, I think that the key to Tratify’s success has been doing all of this.

Personality, obviously isn't new and understanding it. And it's been used to kind of help make good fits, but where Tratify really stands out is the experience. So it's a fun engaging candidate experience, you know, really that mobile first, but it's also steeped in the science. And so we help both employers and candidates understand the candidate better and understand where there will be a good match.

Max: The exercise of assessing someone's personality is as old as recruitment is.

Heather: it is

Max: Pretty much based on first impressions. Well, face-to-face interviews, phone interview sometimes. This is the part that Tratify wants to replace, is to have a more scientific approach to that first impression.

Heather: That's right. And I wouldn't say necessarily mean replaced, so we don't want to replace all interviews. Right. But it is to get to replace that first impression. And it's true that if you think about a job and you think about having an interview, right. Who tends to do well in interviews?

Well, very clearly people who are extroverted. Right. Yeah, exactly. We do fine in interviews. But depending on the job that we're looking to fill, that may not be a plus when it comes to actually doing the job, but when we make a great first impression and so part of what this is allowing companies to do is to have a person fill out this assessment, have a sense of what their personality is, where they fall on various dimensions. So we use the model called the big five or the five factor model helping, which is really the most predictive model of performance in the workplace. You know, over the research in the last 50 years and we see where people are in these things. And so what kinds of environments are they probably likely to be good at?

What kinds of jobs are they likely to enjoy and be a good fit? Right. And so it's providing this impression that is really, instead of just what they happen to be good at in a 30 second interview, it's really getting a comprehensive view of sort of the way they see the world and the way their personality is constructed.

Max: The risk I suppose with applying this methodology at scale is that you're going to have a very uniform workforce, where if you're only hiring people on a certain psychological profile you may impact the diversity of thoughts and of cultures. So I'm sure this is a conversation you've had a hundred times with a hundred potential customers.

What's your take on you know, maintaining a diversity of thoughts post application.

Heather: That's great. And actually that, I'm so glad that you brought that up because it seems like that would be the case. And that's true. If you were really looking for one narrow ideal profile across an organization, but we aren't.

So the truth is that when you look at the profiles that we have and that we sort of put together, they tend to be role specific. So a specific job. Sometimes they're even regionally specific, depending upon requirements of different locations. We evaluate them and change them over time as new data comes in.

But they're also relatively broad. So we're not saying you have to be an extremely narrow range on each of these five dimensions to do well. They're relatively broad. But for example, in some roles, we know that people who are very low on a dimension, aren't going to do very well.

And in other roles, people who are very high are actually not going to do very well. Sometimes either the very highs or the very lows don’t. Right. So, and sometimes you need them to be a little higher, a little lower, but the range is relatively broad. And so you don't have people who are all exactly the same.

In fact, you have people who might be higher on one dimension and lower on another, when someone else's high on both. So you really do still end up with a diverse set of really that diversity of thoughts. You're not restricting it so much that you are you know, decreasing the likelihood that you'll have diversity of thought as well.

Max: Right. And I suppose your ideology and your personality are not the different constructs, right?

Heather: Absolutely. That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Max: And so to put things to illustrate this with examples you would want someone who is affable, extroverted to be in a customer facing role. You would want somebody who is organized and meticulous to be working on the backend, things like that.

Heather: That's right. That's right. So I say one of the ones that I think is super cool is if you're looking at sales positions, so that's one where there's sort of this curvilinear relationship between extroversion and performance.

So, if you have people who are too extroverted in sales positions, they spend too much time talking about themselves and like not listening to the customer. So they don't do exceptionally well. But if they're too low, they don't engage the potential customer either. So it's kind of, there's a sweet spot in the middle.

You need just enough and you can't have too much. So things like that are really fascinating.

Max: I've definitely met that sales guy before. I think I might've been that sales guy. And so what's a good job for somebody who's too extroverted for sales?

Heather: Well, that's a great question.

So actually extra real extroverts people who are like really extroverted are very good in roles where you often like leadership or kind of visionary roles where you need to like energize people and you need to get everybody on board and get them really excited. And, you know, things like being a CEO, right. Starting your own company. Because you need to get people on board with your vision, a life coach. There you go. Things like that. So, yeah. So there are rules like that, for example , that really capitalize on that.

Max: And it makes sense. I have a lot of my former sales team that moved on to go on leadership roles.

Cool. Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the format on how we're capturing information from candidates and text versus voice versus video. I believe that at Traitify to find you. You help to assess talent pools, which have a diversity of languages as well.

And because you're focused on personality, you do not want to put the non English first speakers at a disadvantage, and you're trying to make things a little bit easier for them through the use of image. Could you tell us more about that?

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. So really the goal is to just find out as much as you can about the candidate that's, you know, not dependent on their language, for example, or other factors that might make it more difficult for them to respond to a standard personality assessment. So how do we do that? We pair images and short captions. So there's still some texts to anchor what you're supposed to look at within the image. We also have it translated into a number of languages depending upon what customer needs are.

And what you find then is that… So several people in my family have really bad dyslexia, for example. And so taking a standard personality assessment is really painful for them. Because it's like, by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you can't remember what was in the beginning and there's a lot of conditionality and it's just, it's harder.

So this makes it easier for that kind of thing. Right. And it's also more fun, more engaging, and it's just, so we're going more for a gut response. We're not asking you to rate it on a longer scale where they're seven points and you have to say it's very, very much like me or not very much like me and for some people that can be a little harder.

But we're really trying to get people to just sort of go with their gut. Go through quickly, look at the images, look at the short caption and really have a sense of, you know, kind of who they are across the assessment. So the way that you respond to any one image, isn't going to drastically change your results, right?

It's a pattern of responding across it. And I think what we do is make that so much more fun, so much more engaging, and it allows people to just kind of. You know, do it relatively quickly. And you know, not rely a whole lot on a lot of reading. And it's in the language that they speak. And so it just gives us, I think, a more accurate picture of their personality than if you had all of those other kind of confounding factors.

Max: Are there a lot of concerns from candidates that what are you going to do with the profile? Do you get a lot of like requests GDPR type requests? Like we want to please delete my information? I'm perceiving this as it's a gamified experience where perhaps you're giving them something fun to play with for a few minutes.

And so it's not intrusive.

Heather: Yeah, we don't have very much of that. Honestly, very rarely will we have a candidate coming and asking questions. Occasionally and it's funny, they tend to have a psych background and it's more of an interest in how we did the tool, which is kind of funny. But we don't get that often for sure.

And I think in part, it's sort of a fun experience, we do offer, and some people do give this a candidate report that you can give your candidates about their personality that just sort of describes them and talks about kind of what some of their strengths are, which I think some candidates really like as feedback for sure.

And some organizations choose to offer that and some don't, but I think in general people don't, you know, it hasn't really been something that seems to put people off. And our completion rates are very high. I mean, we have 96% completion rates, you know, for most of the candidates who start taking the assessment.

Max: And how long is the average duration of assessments?

Heather: It's like somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes. So it's pretty quick. Yeah, so it's a very quick assessment, so that helps as well. You know, obviously some people take their time, take a little longer. Some people just go through it more quickly, but yeah, on average, it's still very quick.

Max: Did you find that the requested personalities and the personality traits that succeed in a remote work culture are going to be different than in an office environment? And has that already trickled down to I mean I believe that a remote workforce requires people who can write well and who are a little bit more autonomous and things like that. And of course you have good internet connections beyond that can you add a layer to those comments?

Heather: Yeah. I mean, I think that, so we've been looking at that over time and across our organizations, as some of them have shifted from completely in-person to completely online now, remotely. Others have stayed sort of hybrid approach.

There are certainly some things that make it easier. Some personality traits, if you have them like, you know, being high in conscientiousness, like making sure you get things done that generally is associated with success period in a job. But now when it's work from home, there's that accountability piece.

But you know, it's interesting a lot of the work that we've done around work from home has been less about what specific types of people will succeed and more around what can you do as an organization to help all of your people succeed? You know, based on their personality. Right. So what do you do when you have the people who are a little lower on conscientiousness, how do you help them ucceed in a work from home environment? And so we've been writing some materials around that and things that people can do.

So I would say that in some of our clients we've seen a shift and in many of them, we haven't really yet seen a shift in terms of what the profile should be. You know, having like now we suddenly want to look for this versus that

Max: Okay.

Heather: And it may just be that we haven't quite had enough data over the time to really see that yet.

Max: Yeah. It's not like the remote worker thing is new, people have been working from home forever and ever. I talked to many people who've come on this show. No, like, I don't know what's up with the news that I've been doing remote for the last 20 years, what’s new? Nothing.

But we're knowledge workers and the majority of the workers are not knowledge workers still. Or maybe are, at the starts a little bit of knowledge workers. I don't know what that category is called. And I guess the majority of your volume is coming from jobs that require physical presence.

Heather: Many. Yes. Many of them are that's right. Many of them are call centers, for example, that don't, that have moved to all remote. And actually I'm analyzing some data for one of them. And now to see if we've seen any shifts, so stay tuned. But yeah. What were you saying, Max? I’m sorry, you asked the question at the end there.

Max: Yeah. What was the after this year of torment what were the industries that performed well overall and that think they have a bright future in 2021?

Heather: Yeah. I think it's still shifting in I mean, obviously as we all know, the hospitality industry has just been decimated.

So that's for sure been really challenging. I think, you know, a lot of, even things like restaurant chains some of which do well, depending on what state they're in or what country they're in and others, not so much certainly places where we've seen growth or things like warehouse packaging, kinds of roles people who are working in warehouses, right?

Obviously delivery services, those kinds of things. Other kinds of retail have done very well. People have nothing else to do, but shop online if they have the money to do so. And even if they don't the stores that provide the essentials, right. That you have to have like food. So I think those kinds of services have done very well and probably will continue to do so.

Max: Yeah, I heard those salaries keep going up for our warehouse and packaging roles. And it's becoming harder and harder to hire for these roles in spite of the high unemployment. Yeah. That resonates with you. What's the dream psychology for somebody working in a warehouse? Because for me, I don't care. I just want them to be big and strong, is that outdated?

Heather: Well, but they have to be there, so they have to be dependable. Right? So you want them to be dependable. You can probably things like introversion, extroversion, you probably have a wide range if they're going to be working by themselves a lot, though, that might drive an extrovert absolutely crazy. If they have a bunch of people to work with. So it a little bit depends on, you know, the environment. And there are things like agreeableness, right? Like how likely are you to think about what other people need? So if you're working by yourself, it probably doesn't much matter. But if you're in some sort of, you know, no con not like you have to work cooperatively with other people in the warehouse, then you probably should be a little bit higher on that.

So, yeah. Again, it sort of depends on, cause we've seen, look, we have a couple of different warehouses that we've done profiles for and sometimes they're different, depending on what the environment is and kind of how you work within that warehouse. But certainly someone, what is consistent, you want someone who's pretty high on conscientiousness.

And oftentimes you want someone who's a little lower on what we call openness to experience, which is that sort of intellectual curiosity, needing to do things differently all the time and be visionary and super creative. Doesn't always do particularly well in a warehouse where you often have to do the same task and you have to do them right. And over and over again, you probably want someone who's a little lower in that dimension.

So, those are sort of the, the key things really that higher conscientiousness, maybe some mid range, lower openness. And then beyond that it just depends on the environment and whether or not you're working with people or not.

Max: That is very insightful.

Heather: It might be more information than you wanted, but you know,

Max: I'm interested, I’ve never thought of it that way. Like you know, Oh, I would want to ask somebody who is low on openness. I mean, it's never crossed my mind, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense. If I were to do that through an interview question, I don't even know where I would begin.

Heather: Obviously you don't want to have a leading question. Like how low are you on openness? That's right. So we have some interview questions actually that go along with the results of our assessment, which helps that are personality based. But for things like openness, when you, when you're really trying to get at low openness, what you really are asking are you someone who's comfortable with routine, right?

Are you someone who's a little more rigid? Like, do you like to be able to do you know when you have like a set series of instructions or. You know, an outline, a checklist, like it's the checklist manifesto lover, right? It's a person who has checklists and likes to follow them, make sure they're right. And is okay repeating the same tasks every day they go into work. Right. How much variety do they need?

So I always say, for example, like quality control is often the way that I think of someone who's a little lower on openness. Because they're okay doing the same thing over and over. And usually it's paired with a higher conscientiousness.

Right. Cause they want to do it. They want to do it. Right. But they don't mind the monotony. And that's really kind of the thing, like there's something fulfilling to them about doing it the same way, knowing how they're going to do it. So you don't have to overthink it and doing it the right way. Exactly.

I can see that also being applied in a non, I don't mean that to be demeaning. I think that I've been to the studios of artisans in Japan, where they used to make the same clay pots over and over again, you know, passed on from generation to generation.

It blew my mind, like, how could you do this? Like, I would go completely insane.

Heather: Exactly. Right. And that's the thing about personality, it's so funny. I feel like as a society. We're super judgmental about people who are, you know, higher, low on specific dimensions, like at the U.S we are like are extroverts, right.

And we kind of diminish introverts, but really introverts are really good listeners and they like, don't talk unless they have something important to say. So there are these things where it's like being high or low is not necessarily good or bad. It just depends. On what needs to happen. Right. So there's no such thing as a bad personality, right.

It just depends on what needs to happen within that role. We all have the bias of hiring people who are a little bit more like us.

Heather: Oh, we totally do. Absolutely. The “just like me bias” as we call it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Totally.

Max: Well lots to think about and I think I'd like to have your back on the show at some point to talk about how to interview specific job types because that's a series we'll be launching, I've already, I think we've gained a lot here on how to interview the warehouse folks.

What's the best way to get a hold of you, Heather? People get in touch with you if they have if they want to talk to you about all of this or about Traitify. Yeah, absolutely. You can find me email is always great on heather@traitify.com, but I also have a LinkedIn and Twitter. And now you're going to ask me for my handles, which I can't remember.

You'll have to edit this out. Hold on. I've done that before. Anyway, you can find those and put those in, but I think it's Heather M Y E R S. We'll put the links in the show notes.

Thank you very much for joining the conversation today and yeah. Opening our minds on the beauty of diversity in psychology and the fact that we should be looking for our opposites and in some instances anyway, that's right.

Heather: Thank you, max. It was wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me. And I look forward to coming back again.

Max: Cheers.

Max: That was Dr. Heather Myers from Traitify sharing with us some of the methodology behind Traitify of technology that allows us to assess personality within 60 to 90 seconds, a few minutes. Pretty cool stuff and some interesting insights on how you hire for a position, which is quite repetitive, such as working in a warehouse and what kind of characteristics and personality to look for and how to ask for those questions.

I got a lot out of it as I hope you have too, and if you want to hear more we'll be doing more on how to interview different professions in the coming weeks, coming months. And what we'd love for you to come back, to listen to more, please follow us on your. Favorite podcast platform and share with your friends.

Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm Max from Talkpush and today I'm delighted to be welcoming on the show Cristina Mihai, who is VP of HR and communications for, I don't want to butcher the name, Cristina, it's Conectys. Thank you. Welcome to the show, Cristina.

Cristina: Thank you for having us and having me here. Lovely to be here.

Max: Lovely to have you. And Cristina is well, I said what you're doing but you were telling me before we got on about your very international team. Around some very exotic and lovely destinations with people in Turkey and Taiwan and the U.S all over the world.

Could you maybe start by introducing us a little bit to Conectys what you do and what makes this workplace special? Sure Conectys is a very, very special place. It's a very successful entrepreneurial endeavor with you know, just a guy who 15 years ago, decided to move from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial world and start a contact center, BPO business in a country that is not so, let's say familiar to everybody on the BPO map, which is Romania. And it's been a very successful story of growing from 10 people, 15 years ago to 3,000 plus in 10 different sites right now. And now the sun never sets on Conectys people.

Max: I noticed before we started our chat that you kept on growing in 2020 while others were retrenching, Conectys continued to grow through 2020.

So it's been a good year for the business. I mean, I'm sure traumatic in many ways, but you managed to get something out of this traumatic experience, some growth.

Cristina: Yes. So we really partner with our clients and even if this year was a very difficult one for some of our client partners, the good risk distribution within our portfolio allowed us to, you know, get some hits together with our clients but also grow very, very steeply with some others.

So we were also lucky, obviously. We did adapt.

Max: Only the good ones are lucky.

Cristina: Yeah, you make your luck within a degree, but you have to have luck as well. And we capitalized on our ability to move very quickly. I mean when the COVID situation hit us, we moved everybody in work from home in six days.

And I think this is the story, you know, working very closely with the clients and making this really entrepreneurial move, taking some risks, adjusting. I think that's the story behind it.

Max: And now we're in December. And those six days, they sound like the most fun time we ever had. Right? When it was like everybody was moving was exciting. And now we're all stuck at home and we hate it. Actually if you go back in time and you remember those six days, they were not so much fun, I think.

Cristina: No, they were not, there were legal technical implications. You name it. And everybody was happy to move from home, and now everybody's saying, can we go to the office pretty please, you know?

Max: Yeah yeah. The grass is always greener on the other side. That's why I'm back in the office now because everybody's stuck at home. I'm like I'm going.

Cristina: Yeah. And I want curly hair, but yeah. Not going to happen. So what can I say?

Max: So Conectys is a wonderful entrepreneurial success story from 10 to 3000 in 15 years. Well done. And you talked about the distribution of risk. I think in the BPO sector, there's a distribution of risk on both clients where you don't want to have all your eggs in one industry, but also geographical. Right? The clients are looking at the political risk and the cost of labor and how that changes with the currency rates exchange and things like that, for our audience who don't come from that world. Can you tell us how that factors into the decision from going for one BPO or another?

Cristina: Yeah. So in the latest years clients have been shopping for right shoring, right? Not offshoring like it was like 20 years ago, but right shoring to strike the balance between the lowest cost. In a BPO, typically 80% of the cost is human cost — or has been human cost, until lately. Now, technology is kicking in and that's changing a bit, but yeah. So you have to strike the balance between the lowest cost you can find language talent and the right quality. Because there's no difference between us and our clients. We need to service the needs of users, the end users. And that means that some people want really, really high quality, not just, you know, low cost.

So if you are the BPO partner of high-end luxury brands it doesn't matter so much if you cut the cost by 10, 20%, you have to maintain the quality so that the end user of our client company feels that they’re getting the value of customer service.

Max: They want that Chanel experience.

Cristina: Exactly. Even if my French speaking colleague, the talent in French is based in Tunis or Egypt or whatever it is ...

Max: I thought it was in Romania. I know I have so many of my Romanian friends who are fluent in French.

Cristina: True. But it might be in other territories.

Max: So I've only been working with the sector that you've been in for a long time for five, six years, myself. And so for all this time, in my mind Romania was like, you know, number one for Europe because of the multilingual talent and so on.

But you were saying that 15 years ago that wasn't the case.

Cristina: That was the case. This is why Arnold Cobbaert who is our CEO and founder chose Romania. One of the reasons he chose Romania is because it was a very, very strong talent language territory. Cost has gone high though in Romania.

So now we have to fight and find our edges for language talent in all the places we can get them.

Max: Destinations like Romania and maybe Malaysia are famous for having... and Dalian in China, are famous for having multilingual talent, where you can have one team that handles, you know, five or six languages. Is that model kind of, you know, old news now that people are working from home, like do you need everybody in the same room?

Like the multilingual city doesn't make sense anymore because the city is all on zoom anyway.

Cristina: It is true and probably COVID changed the philosophy of the BPOs forever. We will never go back 100% in offices, that's clear. But, this raises a lot of other issues and they have to do with leadership and management because these people have to be led and managed.

And it's not so easy to do it via zoom or whatever we're using, you know. And people really need the connection, the human connection at some point. We operate in delivery sites in territories where people are very relational. I mean, can you imagine Romania or Turkey or the Philippines, even, when people really like to get up to be together as people and you know, zoom doesn't do that.

I mean we haven't found the right way to team buildings on Zoom, you know, and stuff like that, Christmas parties. These are efforts that everybody's doing these days. So you’re right, it will be work from home forever and ever as an add-on to the business model, but we will have to strike a balance here somehow.

Max: Yeah, well maybe with all the money that people are saving on office and office rents, we can throw some really, really good parties and really big parties.

Cristina: Trust me, this is on top of our minds how to make them happy, you know, I'll put it in front of the freaking computer.

Max: Well I'm excited, it's on my mind too. I mean it's Christmas season in Hong Kong and the bars are closed and we're just trying to figure out how to squeeze some fun out of this season, this holiday season. And so yeah, I'm going to be sending some wine to people, I'm going to try the whole drinking wine on zoom with other people.

Cristina: While you're not on shift, preferably right.

Max: Yeah, well I, yes. I'm on 24/7 shifts. So I'm afraid that it's going to have to overlap a little bit. So, interesting comments you made about these cultures that are very relational. I've often heard, I've traveled the world, looking for sales, hiring salespeople. And every country I go to, they always tell me the same thing. Here it’s different. Here it's all about relations. The exact same words I hear them everywhere in the world. So at the risk of ostracizing, maybe some groups and some nationalities. And so as the head of communication I advise you to thread carefully.

But if on one hand of the spectrum, we have those warm, super relational countries. What's on the other side of the spectrum? What other countries that are maybe less likely to ask for a hug?

Cristina: Yeah, I'm going to answer that, but maybe elaborate a bit. Maybe it's the frequency of hugs, you know maybe, I don't know. Some countries have people that are, you know, satisfied with one hug a week. Okay. Others that need to huddle three times a day. So that's the difference I'm talking about, but human connection is something we all want and we all long for, so it doesn't work with that. It's just the frequency and the intensity of the bonding. That is a bit different.

And on the other side it's about the fact that some you know, country, characteristics go about being very individualistic. You can stand on your own, you can make your own decisions, have your own, you know, paths of action or very group type of thinking. People who need to chat between themselves in the team, for instance, to make a group decision and to move on like the Philippines, for instance.

So this is what I mean by the difference between, you know, okay.

Max: Okay, I'm going to answer my question myself. What you mean to say is the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons are more individualistic.

Cristina: You're the one pointing fingers. Not me.

Max: Okay. Yeah. So that's not a denial, so I'll take that as a yes. Yeah. I totally get it. I mean every time I talked to somebody in the U.S, for example they tell me I've been working on zoom for the last 15 years, it makes absolutely no difference to me. They've been doing it for so long.

And let's move from these sensitive topics to something more universal, which is the progress of technology and how technology has impacted your world. What are some of the technology initiatives that you've undertaken recently that have changed the nature of your candidate experience and maybe made it more automated? And you know how has the transition been managed?

Cristina: Traditionally Conectys is a consultancy type of a BPO. We, like I said earlier, we partner with clients and we give consultancy to optimize their businesses as well. Not only to deliver, you know, transactional results and stuff. So for us, it's been a while until we found a way to mix this — I wouldn't even say strategic approach — I would say the way we love to do business, you know, with incorporating automation and other kinds of tools that would help us on the cost side and efficiency side.

So what we've done is we have for instance, our software is 80% proprietary. We have a Conectys OS operating systems that we have been developing for years and years. And we keep growing functionalities there, but we have started this year to use a very, very strong internal automation team to help us build better interfaces, optimized processes and stuff like that.

And in recruitment, in talent, acquisition, recruitment, and selection, that business area, this is crucial for us. Because we operate very high volumes, we typically hire hundreds of people per month. So for us automating the sourcing part, the first part of the funnel elements, the ones that are not value added for customer experience, our candidates are our customers in this process, right?

Yeah. So we try to build in highly automated processes at the beginning of the TA funnel, the talent acquisition funnel to the extent that they don't hurt customer experience or candidate experience. This is the phase we're in, and we're doing this. We are building robots that funnel in from different talent sourcing pools, things into our proprietary systems, so that then recruiters can move into them, you know, taking care of our candidates.

That’s let's say top of my mind thing that we've been doing this year.

Max: And what do you think about video screening? Is that in or out? Hot or not hot?

Cristina: It is hot. But, it's not on the top of the list because of the issues that we're having in certain territories with the internet.

Max: Yes. The Philippines.

Cristina: Yeah we are seeing talent pool areas where the internet is not so good so that the machine can’t do the work properly.

Max: How's Tunisia for the internet. Good enough?

Cristina: Asia is not good enough.

Max: Tunisia, Tunisia.

Cristina: Ah, Tunisia. I haven't done that in Tunisia yet. We haven't done it yet.

Max: And then chatbots hot or not?

Cristina: Very, very hot we're working on it. But you have to be smart because if it's not smart, people are being hurt by interacting with the machine.

Max: So, yeah, well we have our thoughts on best practices, you know be transparent about the bot being a bot and let the bot accept when there's a mistake, escalate to a human when needed.

Cristina: Exactly.

Max: And ideally create a system which is hybrid where you have the bot and the human that can take different parts of the candidate journey.

Cristina: Absolutely. That's the way we're going. And we're building on it.

Max: All right. We've reached the same conclusions. Good stuff. And so with all of this hiring being done remotely now and no parties, no hugging. Do you have some tips and tricks for our listeners on how we can humanize and build stronger bonds for people we're not going to meet in person?

You said you haven't found a solution and everybody's trying to solve the same problem. But You know, we'd be happy to hear them, even your bad ideas, we're happy to hear them.

Cristina: Oh yeah, we have a lot of those. Because like I said, we're entrepreneurs, which means trial and error. We keep experimenting things until we get some stuff. We have really moved — it's about leadership practices, obviously. It's about each person's team manager being really, really close in the huddles.

It's about using Well, the chat system that we have. It's about being in proximity, because you can have virtual proximity very easily. If everybody knows that the peers and the managers are, you know, one word away or even when you open the channel and stay in touch with your colleagues, even if everybody's working independently.

For instance, when I work with my peers and my colleagues, we may open the screens just to be like in the same room, we do our own thing and we just make jokes together. So, this can be as good as it gets right now.

Max: These principles, I guess, can be applied for onboarding as well, where you have a new class of people who are being hired and you're giving them a chance to immediately interact with each other.

I've seen this in virtual career fairs where you got some networking between the candidates, so they feel that they're part of a common experience. It feels more real if you're in it together.

Cristina: Yeah. And maybe one of the biggest recent wins, I think is the ability of people to pop up in meetings like we used to do, and we were in the offices and somebody would open your door and they would say something and, you know. We're doing that right now in a virtual environment, we have the meeting lines that are being open.

Even yesterday, somebody popped up, said, hey, sorry to disturb, but I have a question: can we sort it out with the two of you that are here? So they popped up in the virtual meeting. They popped out. It's feeling like you're there, you have access. You're not stuck in your own home with your own computer, with just planned access to people.

Because I think this is the point. Planned access is fine, but the unplanned thing that you feel the need to solve is the difficult one.

Max: Yeah. Sometimes it's just like, ah, so frustrating. I just want to grab somebody and meet them now and it can not happen. But then if you get that time with them and you open a Google slide or a whiteboard online, like it's just as good, you know, it is just as good. It's just a little less natural initially.

Cristina: It is, but again, an example from training. We had a group in training and we wanted to work together on some phrases, you know, setting objectives, goals, stuff like that. And it was even better than in real life, because in real life you can’t have a group of people going to the white board and writing on top of each other.

Max: No there's always some asshole who holds the pen the whole time.

Cristina: HAHA, there you go. And you don't have physical space in front of the little screen, but here it's entirely possible because people were all on the same document you could see who is changing what. And we even took pictures of that because it's good interaction.

Thank God for technology. I mean, this crisis struck when we had options, you know?

Max: Yeah. I felt the same thing on my side and that you get more productive and you do the meetings.. where it used to be, you run meetings, sequentially asking everybody to talk: you, then you, then you, then you, and now you can do meetings where kind of everybody is pouring out information at the same time.

Cristina: Yeah and you have new options, for instance now we are really having a lot of fun, for instance, is one of the values of the company. So we get ways to do that. And it's really fun to play with a mute others button when you want to play a practical joke, right. Or when somebody feels in a funny way and just puts some, you know, ears and noses thing in a very serious conversation. These are things you can't do in real life, but you can do it now. So let's take advantage, there you go, that’s the one.

Max: So for our listeners, I just went ahead with the bunny ears, a courtesy of zoom technology.

Cristina: Yeah. That's the point!

Max: No disrespect Cristina. I mean, it's an honor. It's the first time I'm taking the bunny out for the podcast.

Cristina: Looking good on you. What can I say?

Max: Yeah, the more stuff I put on my face, the better I look.

So you've brought a little bit of fun into our lives and to this discussion. So thank you for that. And I hope your company's good fortune will be contagious for our listeners, and that they'll have the same kind of success your company has had next year. If they haven't had this year.

Cristina: Fingers crossed.

Max: And yeah any parting words or tips for our audience? I have one more question.

Cristina: Yes, please go.

Max: This one is darker and then we'll do the parting words. The darker question is go back to a time when you hired somebody that was a really, really bad hire. It's normally a memory that you've erased from your memory. And what did you learn from that mistake?

Cristina: To track my instincts. You know, that moment where, you know, something's off, but your entire logic says, oh, no, it's fine. Sooner or later managers or people in talent acquisition learn to educate or to listen to their instinct. So that was the biggest lesson.

Max: Well I agree with you completely. I know we've all made that mistake.

Cristina: And we keep doing it right?

Max: Well, yes, because we should also not trust our instinct.

Cristina: Exactly. You're right. You need that mix.

Max: Okay. So yeah. on the automation journey advice for our audience for our audience?

Cristina: Always ask the question, can this be automated? That's how we do it. Always ask, can this be automated? You know and the second question is, is it worth it? So just use those two questions.

Max: Yeah we can cut those three hour meetings down to a few minutes where those two questions. I think you've given us a very good working tool, Cristina, thank you very much for your time and thoughts and well Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Cristina: Thank you, Mr. Money.

Max: Talk soon.

Cristina: Talk soon.

That was Cristina Mihai from Conectys, VP of HR, reminding us how important it is to have a sense of humor and a positive outlook when you work in HR and when you're helping an organization go through a big transformation. It's important for people to not take themselves too seriously. And even when you're doing automation, technology and various serious things, you need people like Cristina to make the organization stay strong together.

Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more on the Recruitment Hackers podcast. Please follow us and share with friends.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talk push the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today. On the show. I've got Jen Thornton, CEO of Three O Four coaching. Welcome to the show, Jen.

Jen: Hi and thanks for having me.

Max: Pleasure to have you. So Jen is someone who comes from the high volume recruitment world of retail. And worked at American Eagle for over 20 years if your bio is correct.

Jen: Yes, yes, I did.

Max: Which must've been quite the journey. So, well, we'd love to hear a little bit about that, where you come from. And then of course if you could introduce us to three or four coaching, your current business.

Jen: So sure. So my early career was in retail and I've always loved the retail industry, you know, even as a young girl fashion and trend, like all of that was just exciting and fun. I always thought it was interesting. And I come from a long lineage of shoppers, so I wanted to be in retail. And so that's what I did.

And I spent the first half of my career in the operations side of it. And the second half in HR. And so my approach to HR was always very different because I had the operations mindset, you know, waking up to your KPIs every morning, you know, making quick decisions, prioritizing 100 number one priorities, you know, all that stuff you do on the operation side of retail.

So when I went into HR I actually started in talent acquisition, and that was my first HR gig and it was a ton of fun. And we did the store recruitment for American Eagle and then things progressed. And when I left A. E. I was the head of international HR. And then, you know, I came to that point in my career where I was ready for something new and something different.

And I didn't really see myself ever working for another retailer. I mean, I'd worked for one of the best in the world and I, you know, worked for them when they had 160 stores. And then, you know, when they were in 27 countries, I needed to do something fresh and new. And so I started 3 or 4 coaching.

And what the team does today is we help organizations think about their talent strategy. And how does that match up to their business strategy? Because we all have business plans, but not everyone has a talent plan that matches it. And so we work with organizations to look at their hiring practices, their onboarding practices, how do we educate and grow our teams? And we do executive coaching. So it's all about delivering on the talent.

Max: Wonderful, great. I'm sure the people at American Eagle appreciate the fact that you didn't go to the competition or something like that. And that you came to that stage of your life where it was about giving back to as many people as possible, you know, as a coach, rather than as a soldier. And thinking about this journey from operations to HR and through talent acquisition it sounds like you were focused on getting the stores the right talent. And I imagine the key person you want to get rights is the store manager, and everything else kind of follows from that, right? Is that the way you organize your TA strategy on the retail side?

Jen: Yeah, we did look at the key positions and, you know, those positions that we're making the bulk of the decisions. In a store environment that store manager or general manager is making the bulk of the decisions.

And so, you know, I think that it's all about getting the right store manager, but we also thought a lot about the right store manager for the right time. And, you know, oftentimes a store may be in high growth, or it may be in a leverage mine, you know, they are in a solid market, but we want to leverage what we have.

You know, there may be a time where there's a big remodel, you know, there's just always different things going on. And so we not only focused on the right store manager, but really the right store manager for that time, for that generation of that store, to ensure that they could deliver on the expectations.

Max: So you were looking at the right generation for that specific location? Not at the brand level, we're hiring the same store manager, regardless, you know, you don't have like one global model. I mean, I'm sure you have a little bit of both, but I wouldn't have thought that a big brand would be able to localize it's hiring for the maturity level of a single location.

Jen: Yeah. We worked really closely with the leadership for those markets. And we were involved in the succession planning. We were involved in, you know, where that business was going. And you can look at talent acquisition in two ways. You can look at it the way where you just produce candidates and you just push them out, or you can become a trusted advisor. And that's what our goal was, to be a trusted advisor.

And to really understand the unique business of every market and to help those leaders make great hiring decisions so that we could leverage the talent. And, you know, my team back then every single recruiter on that team had been a district manager or a store manager. So they really understood the business. And I think that was one of our biggest success markers was that we had been there. We did that. We understood the business. You know, we could look at a report and know where there were opportunities from a KPI standpoint and help people make really great decisions.

Max: So for example, to illustrate that and you'd have one, one candidate, that'd be a little bit more experienced on the management side. One that would have a sensibility around. Maybe design and you know, merchandise. I don't know. I have zero experience. Yeah. Could you illustrate that with maybe some profiles or personas?

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. So if, you know, if we were looking at, say a flagship store in New York city, and it's a new store, it hasn't even opened yet. So then we would be looking for general managers with experience in flagship but also experience in opening large volume stores. Because, you know, there's a lot, you learn when you open a store you know, an iconic New York city flagship store. And so we would look for people that had that experience.

And then we would blend that maybe with internal candidates, maybe an internal candidate that didn't necessarily have that experience in a flagship New York store, but maybe they really understood our brand. And so not only would we want to say, okay, here's what the GM needs. So look like here's maybe what the system needs to look like. And we would take a really hard look at how to blend experience to make sure that all of our decisions came together and could execute, you know, the plan.

Max: Makes sense. And how big of a team for how many stores? Give us an idea of what the ratio is because I do a bit of work in retail and for many retailers, the whole concept of having a centralized recruitment team is still new, foreign and political. Especially with organizations that have a franchisee model. They haven't necessarily figured out how to do it. And then they're basically let every location owner run the show. And so I'm always curious to ask about the business models that worked.

Jen: So, you know, when we looked at brands, the brand that we owned and operated, so there's American Eagle, Aerie, other brands over the years. And so if we owned and operated it, we were highly involved and we as TA, we worked strategically with the leaders of those markets. And so typically, there were five people on the team and we supported all of US in Canada. Those were owned and operated. And so gosh, at any given time around a thousand stores.

So you know, American Eagle was fantastic. We had a very low turnover for retail. And so people may be thinking, how did five people support a thousand stores? But the type of decisions that we help people make, you know, when you make good hiring decisions on the front end, it improves your turnover. It helps everything on the backend. And so I really believe that a lot of the work we did on the front end of making really good hiring decisions helped us with the retention. It was a key factor in keeping those numbers.

Max: A thousand stores, typically a store would have between 20 head count-ish or more. So it would have been impossible for a team of five to manage all these openings. And that's why the focus was on the store managers and their assistants. And from there, I guess there is a manual, we give her the manual to the store manager and say, you know, please apply that to your local hiring.

Jen: Yeah. And as a TA team, we were also responsible for education. And so we produced, you know, education material and did workshops to help individuals understand good interviewing practices and how to make great hiring decisions. And so, you know, I think sometimes, recruiters think, Oh, well, my job is just to give candidates out, but you're really also the face of the brand or the person that candidate meets the first time.

And so, yeah. If you aren't representing the brand, in a way that shows, this is how we treat our customers. This is how we treat our peers. Like all of that's really important. And so we were educating people from the minute we got on the phone with them. This is our customer service model.

We care about you, we care about your future. And I mean, we did LinkedIn courses. We did all kinds of things to help educate the teams on making really great decisions and for them to, you know, be able to find their own candidates too. Cause we couldn't do a hundred percent of that. It had to definitely be a team sport when it came to recruitment for that many stores.

Max: The education of hiring managers is never ending pursuit because when you're first point in a position of power where you can decide who to hire. That power can easily get to your head. I think that, you know, too many managers who immediately default to, I'm going to grill this person and forget that most of the employer branding happens during the first interview. I don't think it happens on a website, on a Facebook page.

Jen: No, I think you are so right on that.

Max: Yep. So like what would be some tips for driving employer branding for hiring managers? Personally, I'm rewriting our manual right now, so that we explicitly say these are the people we don't want to hire. That would be like a hard message to deliver for managers, but because it's hard, it's worthwhile.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when you think about employer branding, there's some, I mean, you could go a million different ways. And there's, you know, all of the social media and all the videos and all this stuff you're supposed to do, but at the end of the day, it's really about the relationship you create with the candidates that you're going to hire and the candidates you're not going to hire.

And. You have to be organized. You have to communicate, you have to be respectful to these individuals. If they're not going to go to the next phase, you have to tell them. And I think what we often heard from candidates back then was you're one of the few teams who told me where I was in the process, or thank you for letting me know I didn't get the job and not just ghosting me. And. You know right now I know a lot of retailers that are looking for jobs and a lot of incredibly talented people and time and time again, when I talk to them, they're frustrated because of the lack of communication from a recruiter and, you know, that speaks of the brand. It's how you're treating your external customer because every candidate really is a customer in retail. They could be in your store shopping at any moment. And so, you know how we treat our candidates, says everything about the organization.

Max: Yeah. And if you scare a few candidates away, by describing an idyllic version of who you want to hire that does not represent who they are, even better. Like it wasn't for me. I mean, you just have, you need that brutal honesty. And I think that's that's hard for most people to do, you know, it's not a natural behavior. Cause we all want to, we all want to be as attractive as possible, we forget that a true brand is differentiated.

Jen: Yeah. And honesty is a gift. And though sometimes it may not feel like a gift, you know, always put yourself in that person's shoes. Would you want to know the truth about a job if you're a match or not? Would you want to know the truth about, Hey here's, you know, feedback. Or, you know, here's a job that I know of that I think you're going to be a good fit for.

And I would love to introduce you to the recruiter, you know, be a good citizen and, you know, go out there and treat candidates with ultimate respect and honesty, just like you would want to be treated. And you never know where those relationships are going to go. One of my closest friends that I've known for 15 years, I met through a cold call recruitment call.

She was a recruiter for a competitor. She called and said, Hey, do you want to interview? And I'm like, Nope, I'm super happy here. And she stayed in contact with me. She sent me a Christmas card every year. And then when I became a recruiter, I was like, I'd never done the job. And I was like, well, I'm going to call the best recruiter I know. And so I called her and we've been friends for gosh, 13, 15 years since then. And it's nuts. I mean, we are super close and it was from a recruitment call and she treated me with respect and I treated her with respect and now we have a great friendship.

Max: Did you ever do business with her?

Jen: I actually started a retail networking group with her and retail networking solutions. And we hold events through the US and Canada. And we've gosh, we've been doing events for gosh, 10 years and we have a huge LinkedIn group with over 16,000 people in it. And we started that with a logo and, you know, that's it. And it's just a group that we manage and we have a good time doing, cause we just, we love the industry, but yeah, we did that together.

Max: What's the group called on LinkedIn?

Jen: Retail Networking Solutions.

Max: Okay, we'll go check it out.

Jen: Awesome.

Max: Well, the events business probably took a small hit in 2020. How was 2020 for you as a trainer, coach, events organizer? Were you able to come out of it without too much hurt?

Jen: We were so fortunate and we have so many great clients and every one of our clients were impacted in a different way. Some got busier, some got slower. I mean, everyone had their own unique impact based on their business. And we were actually pretty busy this year. And I think that with the business challenges, people saw the opportunity to provide additional education and training.

You know, it was a tough year to be a leader. And great organizations recognize that and brought support in through coaching or through workshops. And we've always had a virtual, a primary lead virtual model at three O four. All of our leadership academies were all developed to be taught virtually. So we really didn't have to adapt much because it had always been. And we were very grateful that we were primarily a virtual business, for sure. I would say that definitely helped.

Max: And the difference between doing something in person and virtually when you're in a training environment, could you tell us how you have to adapt the content or the audience when moving from the real world to the virtual?

Jen: So I think one of the key things you have to recognize is the adult learner mind and take advantage of how the adult mind works. And it actually, in some ways works really well virtually. Because if you put an adult in a training room for three days straight, they're going to remember very little of what you taught them.

But if you give them short one hour and two hour increments, and then you allow them to go use that information and then come back and learn more, use that information, come back and learn more. You're actually going to create more retention in the education. So all of our training programs are overall, you know, seven, six months, but it's strip content. And so you're learning stuff consistently, but then applying it. And so the learning actually sticks. And so if you're training virtually never do it more than, you know, 60 minutes is a good place, but never more than two hours at a time. And then allow that adult learner to go and do something with the material.

Don't just train them for something and go, okay, well, I taught you something today. Talk to them about how they can apply it immediately because that's when retention of that information starts to stick. And that's where you start to see real behavior changes.

Max: Okay, that's a good lesson for us. We just launched our own Academy in my company to teach recruiters how to use social media advertising to build their talent pool. We try to keep it very practical as the best part of the training, for sure. To give some hands-on training.

And you said that your customers were reaching out for help for their managers, for their executives, in a year that's been transformative. Where you're dealing with transformation on the talent acquisition front in particular?

Jen: So one of the pieces of the business that we have, one of our arms is a pre employment assessment. OAD, organization analysis and design. And so we saw heightened interest in that tool. You know, when you think about making hiring decisions, you can interview people for experience, you know, you can give them some situations, see how they would, handle it or say they'll handle it. But what you can't always interview for are the traits for a job.

You know, whether that be the level of assertiveness, or level of detail, or decision style. And so. You know, the way jobs were being managed were different this year. And we had to evaluate what traits matched a job and, you know, along with skills and experience.

And so I definitely saw a heightened interest in making really good hiring decisions. And then really understanding these employees once you hire them. How do you know how they work and how do you coach them based on who they are? And so our OAD business definitely saw some tickup because people really wanted to make great decisions and then do great things with the team. Once they hired them.

Max: We also saw an increase in the use of automated assessment solutions and. That came alongside with an increase in volumes. Now that wasn't the case necessarily. I've spoken to a number of people who said actually volumes were flat or down in some industries in the US, but internationally with the increase in unemployment, there was an increase in the talent pool, and it just became impossible to screen everybody. So assessment platforms gained popularity this year.

Jen: Yeah. I've worked with one of my clients and they're a large retailer and of course their call center and distribution center, you know, everyone was doing everything online. So they had to really ramp up those areas of their business and they had to find speed. They had to cut down on the time in which it took to touch a candidate. And so we did studies on success markers, you know, what are your top? What consistent traits do your top performers have and then looking at candidates and saying, okay, these candidates in that pre employment assessment have those markers. So let's start with those candidates. Let's start with candidates that we can predict have a higher probability of being successful so that they're happier employees. And so we use that to help reduce time with candidates and reduce how many candidates we were touching.

Max: Yeah, works and makes sense. And then for the changes that occurred last year, do you believe there's a new normal? Are people going to come back to the office? Or do you think people are going to come back to the office? For most of the customers that you've dealt with? Do you think that some of the change for 2020 is permanent?

Jen: I think there's going to be a blended approach and a more flexible approach. And I think that organizations who weren't flexible with work at home realize that people can work from home. And if you hire the right people, they can be trusted to do their job.

But I think that, you know, people are valuing their time in a different way. And I think the smart companies are going to be very nimble and take the time to think about how to have a flexible work schedule or half the time in office, half the time from home or any of those types of models. But I think that the good companies are going to learn how to be much more flexible.

Max: The younger the talents, the more you think they need coaching and mentoring and the more you need them to be there. And so that's all fun. The main metrics were, which people decide who needs to be in the office or not. Because the younger you are the less data points we have to work with. So we don't know exactly what you're going to be good at. You know, when you start out, is there a way to determine who's going to be a good remote worker from a young age?

Jen: So I'm going to flip it on its head a little bit, and I'm going to say the determination is the leader. And, you know, a great leader who understands how to lead virtual teams. You know, it's not going to change anything for them. If they are great communicators and understand how to motivate, excite and lead virtual teams. Then your entire team, no matter where they are in their careers, is more likely going to be successful. And so I think it really depends on the leader's ability to be successful as a virtual leader. And it's interesting, you know, I have never had, I've never worked in office in my entire career.

I've never had my entire team. I mean, I've led virtual teams since I was gosh, in my twenties. And so as a district manager, you know, in retail your stores are all over the place. And so it's interesting watching people talk about virtual, cause I'm like, is there another way to manage? That's all I've ever done.

Max: Now that you mentioned it. I mean, most of everybody I've worked with in the last 20 years I've been doing the same. Same as you.

Jen: Yeah. So it can be done. And it's really about the leader. Cause I've led people that are straight out of college and I've led people that have 30 years of experience virtually and it always boiled down to how good is your leader?

Max: All right. But I mean, I did enjoy managing a sales team where everybody was in the same room as me and we had that comradery and all the drinks after work and all that.

Well, I'm talking about the leadership hiring.

Jen: Yes.

Max: I want you to go to a dark place. A bad memory. A hire that you made where you invested love and trust. And was rewarded with a bitter lesson in life. Can you revisit that moment for the audience and tell us what lesson they should draw from it?

Jen: You know, I've got a long list of those. I've been hiring people for a long time, but there's two that I'm thinking of, and now that I think of both of those people, there was a common thread and I think the common thread was, I put blinders on because I saw experience that I was impressed by, and I saw a lot of stories, or I assumed because of, you know, something that was on their resume, you know, automatically made them great if they work for this type of company, and my two toughest hires that I've ever been a part of, that was that's the common denominator.

I let kind of that experience and that little rockstar status influence, you know, the substance of who that person really was. And you got to get into the substance of who those people truly are. And now those are my two worst hiring decisions, both come down to that.

Max: Okay. And to go dig a little bit deeper into that, they had a deep industry expertise or deep functional expertise that blinded you to some psychometric or personality flaws.

Jen: Yeah. They both had experience with really high retailers like really popular, like really nice. And, you know, they were the fancy, shiny toys out there. Right? And I thought, well, gosh, if they work there, surely they're fantastic. And you know, that doesn't always work. And so so yeah, so I've made that mistake. And one was kind of earlier in my career and one was later in my career. So it can happen at any time.

Max: Yeah. And of course, when you make it later in your career, you're going to ask all those questions. Like you understand this is different than you have to adapt, but nonetheless, I mean, branding works. And just goes to show how powerful a strong employer brand is because it reflects positively on all the employees becoming much more attractive to hire. But of course, you know, the onus is on the employer as well to exercise that kind of judgment.

So, you know, it's definitely a shared mistake. Yeah.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: So who should contact you at a three O four coaching? When should they reach out to three O four coaching? And how did they get a hold of you?

Jen: So we love to work with organizations who are passionate about creating environments, where individuals can grow their career and, you know, organization to bring in managers and see them as vice-presidents down the road.

And that's the kind of companies we'd love to work with. We love to jump in early on the runway and help employers. You know, take this talent and grow it with them long term. And we love working with fast-growing companies. They have unique challenges and those unique challenges are our favorite.

And, you know, we do that through, you know, all the talent strategy. You have to think about the strategy of how to get these teams up and going. And so, yeah, so you can reach out to us@threeofourcoaching.com or you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn at Jen Thorton.

Max: Great. If you want to make vice-presidents out of your managers, please contact Jen. She's got, she's got the key to their success.

Jen: Absolutely.

Max: Thanks for joining on the show, Jen, and wish you a brilliant 2021.

Jen: Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun

Max: That was Jen Thorton from three O four coaching. She reminded us that when you're in talent acquisition, nothing beats, actual operational experience, and really projecting yourself in the shoes of the operator when recommending a solution. In the case of Jen, that meant thinking about what each individual store would need and what combination of people would work best. I hope you enjoyed the interview. And if you want to hear more, remember to follow the recruitment hackers podcast. And to share it with your friends. Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome. George LaRocque who is SVP of insights for unleashed. Welcome to the show, George.

George: Thanks Max. Thanks for having me.

Max: Pleasure. George and I met in the real world, a real world event with real people you can touch and feel, right? Well you're not supposed to touch him, but that was in 2018, I think. And, back then unleashed was, I think the leading events company in an HR and TA tech, or one of the leading ones. Anyway, I mentioned you've had a pretty, shocking year.

George: Yeah. That's to say the least, and I'm sure everybody who's receiving this podcast will nod in agreement. When we met, I think I was partnering with unleash, and my involvement has increased over the last couple of years. So I actually jumped on board in the middle of this craziness, as unleashes moved the business to the media, given that we get to your point, we can't get together physically at the moment.

Max: Right, right. And can you tell us, for the audience, a little bit about your bio, how you ended up being a voice of TA tech? For many of us knowing. Are you a practitioner basically?

George: Yeah, I've been in this market. It's just over 30 years now, which is crazy. I spent the first 10 as a practitioner, I came out of the staffing world. Like many people make their transition. I moved from the agency side, where I was working in tech just at the end of the eighties, early nineties, and then moved over 10 years, moved on to what would have been the client side, into the employer side.

Then started a consulting firm. What would have been now called an RPO in the Boston area, focused on internet startups and our customers were all involved... Customer was called the monster board. We did all their hiring in the Boston area for sales. ThreeComma, a Datacom company in the US back at the beginning of like, you know, TCP, IP and networking protocols.

And we did engineering for them, but through that, I jumped onto the tech side. So I spent 10 years in HR technology and I was employee number 10 or 11 at a company called Brass Ring and took them through to 50 million. I had a couple of good runs and another one people might recognize, I ran global sales for Bull Horn, through their first big VC ramp. Yep. And then I was a general manager at telemetry, which actually was Higher Desk and turned into telemetry and now they are part of Jobvite. And, 10 years ago I started in this advisory and analyst world. And that's what brings us here, it's been an evolution, up to date. And so that's where I am.

Max: It sounds like you've had some pretty stressful jobs. You were well-prepared for 2020, for a stressful year. Because you were there when beating salesmen Bullhorn was going through its rapid growth phase, I guess from 10 to 100 or 10 to 50, maybe.

George: That's about right. And you know, to go from, you know, zero customers at brass ring to 50 million in a few years. Right? Yeah. And then to watch the bubble burst in 2000 and be right in the, you know, like sitting on the bubble when it burst then the financial crisis of 2008. I would say the thing that prepares you just in a general sense is stress, but also you get instincts for a down market, you know, that's the part that we've seen before. But even that's different here. It's spotty, like your people are either drowning in. You know, overwhelmed with business, or they can't find it. And there's very little in between. So this is unusual, but yeah, I would say, it didn't make me any more confident than the next person, but I felt like I had some instincts to fall back on.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. I guess, in March and April, I was trying to, yeah. Some up those memories from 2008 because I was a business owner back then already. And I remember the bad news just kinda following each other. It was bad news like for six months straight.

You just never see the end of it. And so 2020. I think most people knew if I head back into March that, okay, this isn't going to be a bad year. It's going to stay with us for a while. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly if we're out of this yet, but it teaches you to be more conservative. I'm sure people have had enough of the gloom. I hear about those businesses that can't keep up with demand. You mentioned some companies are doing super well right now. What are they focused on?

George: I would say, well in the HR tech space, there are two types of companies that have done well. One, would be those tech providers who were really exclusively marketing into a really large enterprise, and had an established brand, established product. The larger employers have while they may have furloughed or had a reduction in force, you know, within recruiting or HR, some percentage of their workforce. They've also invested in some digital transformation. So we're seeing that, and that's just a fancy way of saying they're upgrading their systems, in some cases.

Max: So the guy from the eighties, it's coming back.

George: There you go. Yup. They've crossed the chasm. So there was definitely a tapping of the brakes, you know, April, May. Big companies weren't buying software at that time for a moment. And then, I think as we moved into later in the spring, early summer, some of the vendors that are in that segment had some of their best quarters, deals were accelerated or deals came back to life.

The other type, even where you would expect companies that were marketing into the SMB or middle market would have been hit hard. And that's true. If they were focused with customers, if they were lucky enough to have companies in industries that were, let's say a grocery or a healthcare, or logistics or tech, they did better than they should.

There were some vendors who cut staff and then grew at a rate greater than they expected,. and which is, you know, it's been such a difficult time for everyone but a lot of folks, a lot of vendors we're really at an early stage, they didn't have any momentum, maybe the product wasn't mature, the point solution. There were some really, tough tales to tell that came out of... There's just bad timing, for them, they weren't able to get out into the market and get that momentum, to sustain.

Max: You kind of have to be past that certain level of maturity to survive a crisis like this. You are a young team perhaps, and I don't mean like literally more than 12 years old. I mean like, you know, to a point where you have a solid base of customers.

George: Yeah, absolutely.

Max: And we've seen, in the industry, a lot of consolidation, I guess not everybody in my audience is going to geek out on TA tech news and find out who gets bought by who. But that's your world and, maybe you can tell us, what are some of the negative trends we're seeing. On my side, I saw that there was a lot of movement from companies that were doing video. Video used to be a category. But I think now video is more of a feature that everybody has. That was my main takeaway.

George: Yep. I'd agree with that. I think the reason I tell practitioners or leaders in talent acquisition, they should watch both, what's happening in investment and with consolidation is to have a sense of what's coming their way. So if you're looking for the emerging technology, I'm not even talking about the specific vendors but, you get a sense over the period of, you know, a few quarters as to where investments are going on emerging tech, emerging solutions. It might not be emerging tech. It might not be that it doesn't have the bells and whistles, like something conversational, but you may see that, for example, right now there's a lot going into analytics and process management around recruiting.

You might see not a lot is going into job boards anymore at the moment, or marketplaces which surprisingly have led the category for years. You'd see a lot going into internal mobility and matching and those areas. So you get a sense of what's coming at the same time for consolidation if you're using point solutions and platforms, you particularly get a sense of what those capabilities are at a platform level.

So if you're using an ATS, what moves are these vendors making? And if you're thinking about your tech stack in the next one - three years, I think it's a good Indicator for trends and you need to solve the problems that you have and seize the opportunities that you need to seize and look for the Cape. And it's not one size fits all out there, but these are things that I think are helpful. In that way.

Max: A lot of the practitioners got into recruitment for the same reasons you did probably. To be on the sell side and busy dealing with people. And, you know, buying tech came as an add on, not the main thing and a bit of a chore. And, I think last year, people were still. They had a little fun budget that they can spend on where they can try a few initiatives every year. And then some of those customers would sign on because they needed to show initiative. They needed to show I'm going to try something different this year and it looks good on my resume. And this year, maybe that's not so important anymore. It's more about doing more with less and asking more from your existing vendors.

George: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Another good reason to keep your eye on tech and what's happening, in our market and outside of our market, you know, what's happening in the world of technology? And I'm not one to ever recommend that you would modify, let's say a solution from outside of recruiting, into recruiting. That never goes well, it never scaled. But yeah doing more with less is something that as I mentioned, you know, there have been a lot of layoffs. There are probably fewer recruiters in any given company and those recruiters are asked to do more and, having a sense of what's available to help accomplish that goal is a good thing. And it tends to look like, I think companies are either forced to address the need to automate tasks and what would be administrative to get the recruiters and the leaders in TA focused, you know, where they need to be. On with candidates, candidate engagement, working within the organization, with managers, working the process you know, they're forced to do it because they're doing more with less, or they're taking that step back.

I think a lot of larger organizations that are investing in technology right now, it's, it's a way to justify some of the headcount that they're keeping they're implementing these technologies, evaluating these technologies but at the end of the day it's the same goal, which is, you know, how do we get to where freeing up the recruiters, the operators, to be on that process and driving that process and not drowning in it.

Max: Yeah. I can say from my experience, on our side, that the volume of candidates and leads process for the recruiter has tripled over the last six months. And obviously you just can't do this same thing you did before if you have three times the volume you did before. You have to change a little bit, the way you do things, because you adapt to your environment.

You were saying job boards, the big hits, I think most suppliers there and with the compounding effects of Facebook and Google driving also traffic, at least in the high volume space, the driving traffic, a lot of those traffic is free. I imagined, 2021 is probably not going to be an amazing year for indeed, and zip and those guys. Yes, there'll be some recovery. Right. I saw that Zip had some recovery in Australia in Q4. But I want to go back to, you're telling us about your early story. You're not in Boston anymore. Are you?

Geroge: No I'm in New Jersey. Like most people in New Jersey, I'm, you know, 40 minutes out of New York city. Yeah.

Max: Boston, for those who don't come from Boston, it's not necessarily seen as a tech hub, but I found out over the years that there was kind of the TA tech hub of the world 20 years ago. And I guess still today. Can you tell us about how'd that happen and give us a little bit of the history?

George: Sure. So it really, back in those days, you know, Silicon Valley's was always the hub, right? It was always where it all sort of exploded, but there used to be maps that had, it was a map of the US and it had Boston and they shrunk the rest of the country. And then it had Silicon Valley. And you had your tech belt. It was the highways that went around, the two highways, one 28 and four 95 that went around Boston and all the different tech shops that were either in... Cambridge was a hub for a lot of startups. MIT is in Cambridge, Harvard's in Cambridge.

And then out toward the suburbs, you had a lot of larger campuses for tech shops and a couple of the larger, employment advertising shops were out. Emerging shops, innovative shops were out of Boston. And I would say that the first one to really explode and drive traction around HR tech was Adyen, the founder of Adyen was Jeff Taylor who started Monster. And so, I was at that point running a consulting shop. We had about 60 people all around Boston. And, we were dealing with some really some of the first e-commerce shops. And, I mentioned three common others, and Jeff Taylor would show up with a salesperson. Carol McCarthy was her name and they would offer us, you know, we partnered with them and we would bring free postings to our customers. And we would argue with them at the time about you've gotta be on the internet. You've gotta be on the web. And they wouldn't. It was a really fun time because we took employers to the web.

We created their career sites and we. Hook them up with, places like what was called the monster board back then. and at that time, the ATS market was run by a couple of shops called Resumex and Rex Track. They own the large enterprise and larger middle market on-premise software and you had a brass ring, which came out of the Boston area. It grew out of a resume processing company. So all the job fairs, all the resumes that came into employers were on paper. And you had these systems like Resumex and Rex Track and others. You would literally go through a factory process that gets scanned optical character recognition turned into data, uploaded in a total QC process.

And then, as the web was emerging or able to take applications to the web. That's where the Brass Ring emerged. And there were some other shops on the West coast that emerged, but didn't, you know, Taleo, which was recruitment software, came out of Canada and then came down. I want to say through Chicago to, ultimately to Silicon Valley, but it was, yeah, the Boston area was teaming with, you know, early job boards early recruitment technology, this was 97, 98 to 2000.

Max: It sounds like Monster had a key role to play in that.

George: They really did you know, like any success story. It was a combination of vision. so they could see where the market was going and how this was going to evolve before really anybody was seeing it. And timing, they were there, and hard work. Right. And they had some good ideas. Where do they end up going? And that's a brand people love to hate on and that's fine. But they were a major player and they really helped create the space.

Max: They got big and then other problems appeared. But I mean, at the time in the late nineties, They picked that weird grand, they called themselves Monster. Everybody had a much more corporate sounding name back then. The internet was just getting started, all those dotcoms and, I think they did it a little bit on purpose to say, you know either you're with us, the incident folks or you're against us, you're part of the old guard. And we don't need you as a customer. It was a bit of a, you know, the boldness, the choice of brand.

George: Yeah, we would do all their sales hiring. They were on the, their first office was, the second floor over a Chinese takeout restaurant. And you know, we'd go on site, spend an hour. A couple of hours with them, with the consultants we had there, you'd leave. And you'd just smell like Chinese food from being in the office. And then as he started to grow, I remember, telling people that they would have to, you know, don't worry they're expanding. They're going to have a facility, but there are two trailers in the parking lot for now. And then just those, you know, these sorts of things that, I'm sure there are people out there somewhere that worked in those trailers. Well we put them there.

Max: Yeah. And so with the universities and then maybe circumstance having this gentleman's at Taylor and starting this company in Boston for no other reason than he was there. And then, many of the alumni that moved on to start their own companies. And today I think there are a number of companies that are there, including your old employer of Bullhorn. I think phenom people are quoted there. And then a number of other companies. Was SmashFly as well in Boston?

George: Yep. They were founded there. In fact the original founder of SmashFly, Mike Hennessy, was probably employee number three or four at Brass Ring. And so we worked closely together for several years and, you know, like any of those shops. And there are still people that when I've...

Back in those days when we could go to events, Brass Ring is now part of IBM. And, if I go by the IBM booth, I see old friends and they've really never left. They've just gone from Brass Ring that connects to IBM. But we used to joke and say there are probably, you know, 300 people that are like the core of the industry. And they just move around and a lot of other people sort of come and go, but there are a lot more than that now, I think.

Max: That's true. You do see that. And we hear that in your story is that these companies don't just die, they just merge and they move from one animal to the next. And this is sort of a Darwinian experience. Right. So it's see how it evolves. And they changed names. Like Hot Jobs do you remember that one?

George: Yeah. HotJobs got acquired by Yahoo.

Max: Oh, yes.

George: And, you know, it was Yahoo hot jobs and Dan Finnegan, who was the founder of Jobvite, I know, was involved with Yahoo hot jobs and I believe the founder of, Avature came out of one of those groups. You know, early on, when you look at Brass Ring, it had, newspapers behind it.

So the newspapers were, they had Excel partners out of Silicon Valley, very small stake, but over a hundred million came in from the Washington post, the Tribune companies can net newspapers, which is USA today. So newspapers were hedging, their bets against, you know, the classified business was starting to dwindle.

They were looking at how that was going to go online. They also created an advertising network, which Knight Ridder became a part of. Which is where career builder grew out of, which is also where, Dan Finnegan came out of that Knight, Ridder group. So you've got different camps from the late nineties like the Post's Tribune camp and then the night Ritter camp, and then a few big brands that came out of that, that were all different. In some cases, the same newspapers in different investing groups that were putting their chips on the table, sort of hedging their bets based on what they were expecting to see with changes, and impact on their classified ad revenue. They didn't do any of it fast enough or go hard enough as we've all seen. But that's an interesting subplot to the whole, the whole thing as well.

Max: With your unique perspective of seeing people moving from place to place and companies evolving, it makes sense that you would be working in automation now. Which is, you know, a great networker and a place where the industry meets.

And I think your story is one that can serve as inspiration for people who end up in recruitments and say that I don't want to be interviewing people for the rest of my life, or I don't want to be doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah you can move into technology. You can move into sales, you can move into media, and touch a lot of things and it prepares you for a rich career. And, and if you stick around long enough, then you can see the same faces over and over again.

George: Good, good point. You know what? I used to think that, but it was just my great timing. You know and of course there was some of that, I entered the space and the internet was emerging and the web emerged and on demand, you know, cloud-based technologies emerged and I'm passionate about technology. So I was in the right place at the right time

And the other thing that's true is that I think the profession has evolved and emerged. What technology has done and what, you know, changes that all businesses have experienced is it really demonstrates how I think recruiting can really have a massive impact.

And I think if you look beyond the matches that you're making and the interviews that you're scheduling and if you sort of step back and think about the impact you can have on the business. And if you pursue that internally in your current role or in your career, moving to the next role, there are a lot of places to go with that.

If you can see the impact that recruiting and recruitment technology and talent acquisition can have on the market and on any given employer. I think that's another thing that I was, there to see was sort of how this all, you know, has unfolded and I've been lucky to watch.

Max: It's so important to go back to that feeling of I'm helping people get a job and, you know, a good year, a bad year, and you know, God knows 2020 wasn't a great year, but it's still up to this, you know the industry and our people to think: I'm going to help somebody get their next game.

George: Yeah.

Max: I guess that's why when you go network with people who've been in the industry for 20 years they're nice folks to be around because they have that purpose in their career. And I hope for the listeners who are in the early stages of their career they can see that, it's not that easy to find purpose that once you have it and you sort of hold onto it,

George: Yeah good point.

Max: To wrap it up, I'd like to give you a chance to maybe promote some of your upcoming events perhaps with Unleash or tell people how to get a hold of you.

George: Well, you can find unleash at unleashgroup.io, and you'll find me there. And the HR winds was my previous brand. It's still there. There's still content there, reports there, unleash is really, for the foreseeable future. It's all about media and content. So everything's there. So the. content about recruiting, about recruiting technology and the rest of the employee experience and HR spectrum, is there as well. So I would encourage people to go take a look and I'm sure they'll find something interesting if they're listening to this podcast.

Max: Absolutely. I go there myself. George interviews some of the industry leaders and has unique data on how the market is changing. So if you want to be ahead of the curve and know what's going to hit you a year or so now that's the place to go and check it out. Thanks so much, George, for joining us and for reminiscing on the old days. I am actually quite happy to know that there's now a record of those souvenirs about the Boston era that has, you know, foundational importance to the world of TA tech saved on our blog.

George: Excellent. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun.

I hope you enjoyed my interview with George as much as I did. George is a real historian of the talent acquisition tech space and from the evolution and meanderings of the industry, we can all get inspiration to constantly reinvent ourselves and renew our industry. If you enjoyed it and you're up for more subscribe to our podcast and please share with friends.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today I'd like to welcome the show Aarthi Rajasekaran from VDart Inc. Aarthi, did I pronounce that right?

Aarthi: You did Max!

Max: Okay, cool. Awesome. So Aarthi, please introduce yourself to our audience. I believe VDart is in the recruitment space, helping companies who are, doing contingent hiring, in the technology space. Does that sum things up correctly?

Aarthi: Absolutely. Yes. Now VDart is an information technology, staffing and solutions company. And we incorporated back in 2007 and from then our growth has been exponential. We are a global firm and our customers are the ones that have taken us to spaces. I served them as their director of procurement and strategic sourcing. So record that recruitment is very near and dear to me as well.

Max: The procurement in your case is sourcing talents, right? And sourcing talent through third-party vendors.

Aarthi: Right.

Max: Okay.

Aarthi: I base, I manage the contracts, the compliance, all those mandatory components that keep us going.

Max: Okay. 2020 was disruptive for everybody and perhaps, for some of the traditional staffing firms that were more reliant on their Rolodex and maybe more reliant on events and doing things in person, you know, which is maybe like the old way of doing recruitment. Those, those probably suffered the most because when you could not meet in person, then what do you have left? And I believe you do... you're a global company with offices everywhere, but you have a good portion of your hiring that takes place in India, right?

Aarthi: We do. Yes. Our hire operations are from India. We have close to about 600 people based out of India who are our engine. They are the ones that are pumping in resumes for us day in and day out. About 500 of them are just recruiters who are the backbone for our company.

Max: Those recruiters, a lot of them are physically based in India, but are they organized by geography, focused on different markets?

Aarthi: Right. That's how we operate. All of them are based in India and there is sometimes a need for our customers to have local presence as well. So we have recruited all over, but the majority of our recommendations are based on India, and they are based on geography. The time zone is for that particular geography. That's how they will operate.

Max: Well, I guess you look at the micro dynamics of 2020, and now this, this kind of business model works great. You know, it was harder to do business beforehand because you were competing with people who had the boots on the ground, but now everything is remote. So you can work from anywhere, that gives you a competitive edge, I guess. Right?

Aarthi: It does. It's always been a competitive edge for us specifically because we had the vision of bringing in fresh talent, fresh out of college and groomed them, and trained them in recruiting. Those are fresh blood that always have the thirst to learn and achieve. So that model always worked for us really well. That operation is based on talent from Richie, which is a small college town in India, in the Southern part of India. And our recruiters are either from the town or from a neighboring town, nothing beyond that. It is very unconventional for a staffing firm to have its base in such...

Max: I'm sorry, I interrupted you. It's very conventional for our staffing firms to be close to the uni? So you say?

Aarthi: No, it's very unconventional for a company of our size to be operating out of a small town.

Max: Yes. And I think that, probably that unconventional choice served you well, because for the big metropolis, the top, the big cities have become impossible to live in. Right? And it's, you know, I was there in one of the last trips I took before we were all locked down. I was in Delhi and Pune, it's a little bit cloudy and foggy down there sometimes.

Aarthi: You are talking about the north, I'm talking about the Southern tip of India.

Max: The North was very polluted. Anyway, it was hard to travel on. I know some employers were using the fact that you can live in a second or third tier or a smaller city that would improve their quality of life. And that was one of the selling points. Less traffic, less smog. Yeah.

But going back to those 500 recruiters, so you like them hungry, young, curious, energetic. And then, you were talking to me before we started the show on the importance of knowing your local markets. So is that part of the training that goes into these young young minds? I'm kind of imagining in my head, you have a team dedicated for Latin America and one for Europe and one for the US. Is that how it works?

Aarthi: Yes. That's how it works.

Max: Okay, cool. So, then you teach them the cultural differences.

Aarthi: We do. We teach them the cultural differences, how to talk, how to address people. Everything goes up, it plays a major role when you're talking to potential candidates. You need to understand their culture. You need to respect what they believe, and you have to keep them engaged. That's how you build a bond that you are gonna deliver a candidate to a client. That way the intern may choose to work for you.

And it is so important to create those candidate experiences. I mean, that is the industry buzzword these days, unless there is a good candidate experience, people these days have so many opportunities. So they always value who treated me better, and that is the opportunity they lean towards. So it is so important for us to impart that knowledge in each and every recruiter of ours on how to understand the cut-up candidate.

A candidate is no less than a customer to us. So treat them with respect, give them what they are asking for, answer their questions, be respectful. Those are the basics, we want to keep talking about them. That way it does not get lost over a period of time.

Max: It sounds, from listening to you, I feel like there's going to be employment for many decades for recruiters. The kind of work that you're describing is not one that will be automated and replaced by robots anytime soon. Is that your feeling?

Aarthi: Absolutely not. I mean, at the end of the day, people buy from people, people don't buy from robots, so it is important to have human connections. Although sourcing can be automated. I mean, AI’s an RBA has been playing a large role in automating certain features, but taking the human element out, I don't see that happening. It is so important to have that touch point, human touch point for you to really feel connected. It is so important to have the connection between an employee and an employer before somebody comes on board.

Max: Since you focus on your, let's say, your external family, your extended family, the recruiters that are not directly working for you that are part of your suppliers. Give us an idea. Are we talking about, 5 suppliers, or 50, or 500? What's what's the range?

Aarthi: A little lower 500. So the way we work with our suppliers is, any contract that we signed with the supplier we do not want that to be a one-time gig. How is it that we can optimize a particular supplier? Understand what it is that they bring to the table? Are they unique? Do they have skills that we often sought out for? Are they good in training and deployment? Are they specializing in any niche technologies? Based on that, we evaluate our suppliers and try to partner with them on a larger scale. So we have suppliers, who signed up, during inception. And even today we worked with them. We know who to reach out to for what technology, and as we grew, our suppliers grew along with us.

They get first shot to fill out requirements. If they have candidates, they reach out to us. We cross sell skills, whatever they have on their bench to our clients as well. Sometimes even before we get a requirement from a client, they can foresee that there is going to be a job opening coming up and it is easier for us to save time and effort.

Max: Does that work under what's described as the MSP (managed service provider). Where you'll hold a master contract and then there are some sub contracts?

Aarthi: It's technically not MSP. It is more on a vendor... The terminology used is corporation to corporation engagement.

Max: Okay, great. You said you've worked with some of your suppliers, that you have hundreds and hundreds of suppliers, and some of them you've started working with them from inception. You've seen the ones that have grown. Which ones have suffered in 2020 after this pandemic and which ones did well?

Aarthi: I would say this is such an unforeseen situation we all are in and everybody has taken the plunge. It is not easy to say that some did not suffer and some suffer. Everybody had to come together as a staffing community to help each other out. When there were layoffs happening. We were trying to figure out if there is any other engagement that we could take the candidate from the supplier and put them on. We all partnered in it together. Everybody did well. Crisis called and everybody was ready to help, ready to work along with. The rates were reduced. Suppliers were okay working with us on that. They did not put their foot down. Everybody did their fair share and everybody came through with flying colors. We are so agil we can make things happen!

Max: Okay. It sounds like generally it's been rough for everybody, you're saying. that, but then which are the vendors that are best positioned for tomorrow. That we're able to come out, winning some market share. That have a bigger market, a bigger share of the business today than they didn't 10 months ago.

Aarthi: Quite a lot of suppliers. We are running a preferred supplier program now as well. We are in the third phase of the launch. So we are handpicking a few suppliers for one particular engagement based on how they performed on the previous engagements.

So based on the evaluation, certain metrics went into the evaluation and we are going to be handpicking about a hundred suppliers exclusively for this engagement to be working very closely with us.

Max: Yeah. So it's all performance-based, it's you know, I guess a fill rate, time to fill, cost per hire, that kind of stuff.

Aarthi: Everything plays a large role. Maybe their SLS is what is important. Whether they are delivering on time. Those are a few key areas that also go into a vendor evaluation.

Max: Aarthi, if you were in the seller's shoes now, you are no longer holding that wonderful position of power, director of global procurement, but now you're one of them. And you have to start your own firm today. You're just starting from scratch. It's just you and maybe your husband, and you are starting a business together. What kind of a recruiting business would you start today to give yourself the best chance of success?

Aarthi: It's my personal opinion. I wouldn't get into recruiting.

Max: Okay. Okay.

Aarthi: There area number of companies that are in recruiting. Identify what is the niche that is missing in the market. A product, it could be software. It could be a RPA. So those are the kinds of damage that I would take. I am in the recruiting space, my husband is in the technology space. So probably a hybrid of something of that nature is what we would be doing.

Max: Okay. Yeah. Your earlier example of picking a hot area, hot technology like RPA. I guess, you know, you were saying earlier that sourcing is something that can be to a great degree, automated. There's a good amount of sourcing that can be done automated. So if you and your husband are starting a recruiting technology company tomorrow, you're saying, we're not going to be in staffing. We're going to be actually going into recruiting. I'm imagining that's the area in which it would go, but let's focus on the staffing world per se. And because we did say there is a role for humans, there is that human connection, and that will not be automated. So within that world, you know, which staffing firms are going to perform better. Are they going to be the ones that are focused on the right keywords? Or the ones that are focused on the right geography?

Aarthi: I would say it is more on the people, that is how a company can stand out compared to the other. It could be the large recruiting stacking companies, which have done well, but a smaller company could change the industry by giving the experience of which a candidate never had. Currently, the market is not the same, like what it was a decade back. It's not just apply, apply, apply. Now it is more on a candidate picking a company to work for. They want to see what the company does. Is there a purpose? Is it a purpose driven organization? The millennials and gen Z, they are all focusing on what is it that the company would do for me? If I go for them, is there a vision for me? Do we have any common ground? Those are key things that need the human element as I said. Unless a human connects and talks to a human about, Hey, this is the purpose of a company. This is our vision. This is what we do. It's not age and people are going to be selecting companies based on their experience. I would say companies would succeed if they are focusing on the right candidates, giving them the experience that they are looking for and connecting the right person with the right opportunity.

Max: Is the candidate experience better this year than it was in previous years? You know, the fact that now people are not expected to physically come into an office. Has that improved the experience for candidates?

Aarthi: It has. I mean, the industry has shifted a little bit. Organizations, which said no remote work, or work from home, have adapted to remote work. There has been a shift, but has it changed the candidate experience? Well, to an extent, yes, because these are technologies, the space that we are in is primordially technology. So talking to them about what the company does, what the project is about. It inspires them to pick the opportunity. And a little bit of empathy in the conversation goes a long way. Trust me.

Max: Right. Yeah. I've heard a lot of recruiters say, empathy, care and you know, showing how they care about the employees around the coronavirus has become a key communication strategy for most employers. I've also heard that in India in particular, staffing firms have struggled to have lost market share compared to the overall size of the market. A bigger portion went to work, you know, without stepping from basically hired directly, because more hiring was happening through digital, less events and career fairs. Do you confirm these trends? That 2020 has shrunk the market a little bit in India for some of the staffing industry?

Aarthi: Not to my knowledge. I mean, There are certain organizations that have done well, in fact, V Dart, we did not have any layoffs. In fact, 2020 was the peak of our hiring. We've got talent that we always wanted to be a part of our company. It was easy for us to bring that talent on board. I would not say that has been common for every organization. It is the organization’s approach what makes the difference.

Max: For the kind of talent that you're hiring, high-tech talents. It's always going to be quiet in high demand? I understand that, but I imagined for... Maybe the reason I got this news from the industry is because it was a little bit more on the high volume side and entry level and for staffing firms that were working more in the high volume space where the margins are smaller and the margins got even smaller this year. It became even harder to do business. But you know, at the higher end of the market for more experienced staff, I guess things remain competitive.

Aarthi: Indeed there is talent available. Of course you have to pay the pretty penny for the right talent. The market did change and margins have shrunk, but for organizations who have the muscle power, it is more of an investment that they are doing for their 2021 plan. That's how I would put it.

Max: Yeah. Did you change the way you work in 2021? Did your company roll out some new process and new technology to respond to the changes in the market.?

Aarthi: Well, we have been doing everything that we planned for 2020. Of course there was a little disruption early in the year, but that hasn't slowed us down. We are in the midst of our product launch as well. We are developing softwares which we plan to do for 2020 so 2021 is going to be a launch for the new product as well. So yes, our growth has been consistent and our plans are going through, although there was a little slow down, we are still on the right track. 2021 looks fantastic for us.

Max: For listeners who are... Most of our listeners are in the talent aquisition space, and some of them may be considering a career in… You know, preparing the bang themselves for the future. What would be your advice to advise somebody who is a new recruiter or talent acquisition professional, in their twenties, what kind of training should they be seeking in order to stay on the cutting edge and be competitive in the next 10 years?

Aarthi: The first thing is, learn about the requirement that you're going to be working on. Do not just blindly dive into the market to find the talent, talent is available. All you have to do is understand what is the skill all about which the industry is using? Just to get a little insight about the project. So when you have a conversation with a candidate, it's going to be more of a meaningful conversation and you don't have to be spending hours on the dice and monsters to identify the right candidate. You just have to understand the requirements, go to the market, have a meaningful conversation. You'll be able to figure out. Always be hungry. No knowledge is unimportant. Everything is important. Talk to your peers. The requirement that you work in could be different from what the other person is working on. Have these conversations. It is important to have those conversations.

Max: Yeah. It gives you an edge, and it also prepares you for the future. And next time, you know, every requirement that comes in, there's the immediacy, it'll probably come again. And so the deeper your knowledge, the more you're prepared, so stay very curious about the areas. It's impossible to know everything. So specialization, I guess, is also good advice. Right? Okay, great.

Aarthi, It has been a pleasure. We're up on time and I'd like to ask you. How can our audience get in touch with you or with V darts? What's the best way?

Aarthi: They can go to our website and fill out the contact form. I would get an email and the consent person will be responding based on their area of interest.

Max: Okay. www.vdarts.com?

Aarthi: That is correct!

Max: Okay, great. Well, thanks. Pleasure meeting you. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Aarthi: Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, Max, for the opportunity. Happy recruiting.

Max: Yeah, recruiting never stops.

That was Aarthi from VDart, a director of procurement and strategic sourcing, telling us about some of the secrets of our business and reminding us that from here on out it doesn't matter where you're based. As long as you put in the time to adapt to the culture of the market you serve, you can serve all global markets from any location in the world.

And her business has done a great job. Of bringing young talent into the industry, teaching them about recruiting and teaching them about different places, different markets. Hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to hear more, I've got more interviews coming your way on recruitmenthackerspodcast.com

So please subscribe and share with the friends!

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today, I'd like to welcome to the show Jim D'Amico from ATAP and from Celanese. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim D'Amico: Hi max. Thank you very much for having me, appreciate it.

Max Armbruster: A pleasure. And Jim was telling us, we were having a little chat before the show. He was talking about the transformation from talent attraction to talent seduction, which I guess is taking a more active role in recruitment. And I can't wait to get to that, but before so, I think the nice thing to do is to ask you for an introduction. Introduce yourself, what got you into recruitment? If you could go back in time.

Jim D'Amico: Oh, sure. So currently Max, I lead global TA for Celanese and the board president for ATAP. I, like everybody, got into recruiting through a non-direct manner. Right? I did not grow up wanting to be in talent acquisition. So actually my background was in the military, a failed stand-up comedian. Needed food. So I got into sales, and from sales, the company I was selling for got bought, and a friend of mine said, Hey you gotta try recruiting, it's sales, but it's really cool. Cause you're selling two wins and it's exciting. So I got into third-party recruiting. And I loved it and I was hooked and have enjoyed it ever since, launched an RPO very early in the Midwest, sold that. And since then I have spent my time working with various companies, to help really improve their TA function so that they're the best in class.

Max Armbruster: It's quite the journey. And I think, obviously a stand up comedian and sales is a great place to start for recruiting because, you've got to find a way to break the ice and warm up your audience where you call them. And there was a time when recruiters had to deal with a very cold audience. You had to deal with a big downpool of people who got a phone call. They didn't even know where they got their phone call from. Right? And, and I think today is quite different, you have very few cold calling recruiting happening, or is that still happening? I don't know. Maybe I'm missing part of the markets. Now I'm more focused on the high volume space.

Jim D'Amico: You know, I think you see less of the cold call, but I think what's moved from the cold calls, moved to the Inmail. So where I used to get recruiters calling me to recruit me on the phone. Now it all happens in InMail, but really the other thing that's changed back when I started. So, you know, to date myself, we still put ads in the newspaper, right? There was no monster career builder. This was even pre OCC days, right? So in order to get the word out, you had to go to the candidate. Now, you know, for the past 20 - 25 years, now we can find jobs. If I'm looking for a job, I have a million tools to find jobs and connect myself to a job. So the role of the recruiter being the town crier for the job, isn't really part of that anymore.

Max Armbruster: Tell us a little bit about ATAP. I think it's an organization that was founded just a few years ago. But a much needed organization to bring the industry together. I think most of the membership is in North America. We have an international audience, but why should they join and how do they join?

Jim D'Amico: Sure. So, ASAP is the association of talent acquisition professionals. And, you know, we exist to improve the quality of life for our members. And we do that through education, community, advocacy. We are a global organization. Yes Max, most of our members are in the US however, after September, our international members have shut up.

So membership is fairly inexpensive at $95 US dollars a year, but we do the global town acquisition day event. It's a 14 hour conference. First Wednesday of September, I believe this year within that 14 hours captured 35 hours of content from speakers globally. And that's available to all of our members for free, we have programs that we just launched and we just started adding international people to as well, our diversity inclusion, center of excellence for TA professionals, a year long cohort program, that is very inexpensive for members.

We're building out programs to elevate recruiters from recruiters to talent advisors, to talent strategists. So teaching recruiters how to manage, analyze, present data, develop their narratives for their business. How to manage projects, how to manage executive communication. So we're really working to elevate this field that we all love so much and support people. One of the things that I feel is a crime in our industry is how many people get into this field and then leave disappointed. And we really want to put a stop to that because we think that this is not a stopping point on your career. This is not something you do when you can't do anything else, but this is an actual career that adds value to your share and stakeholders.

Max Armbruster: Well, it's going to be a hard sell in 2020. Jim. I imagine, I don't keep track of this, maybe you do. I imagine a lot of people lost their jobs this year in talent acquisition, and they must be relaying and you know, some people might be thinking, wow, recruitment is the last place I want to be right now.

Everybody's being furloughed put on hold. And on top of that, there's all this automation coming in. We have a disappearance of some of the manpower consuming activities of recruitment. What do you have to say to that? Are there going to be more talent acquisition professionals tomorrow than there were yesterday? Or is the industry shrinking? Because in 2020 it will probably be shrinking a little bit.

Jim D'Amico: You know, but it's been randomized to some degree. So our membership's up over 15% this year. And what we see is that the market is recovering. So Celanese, we're back to pre COVID hiring my team's bigger today than it was March 1st. And we're seeing hiring, picking up. I think what we're seeing though, is that there's different work that the recruiters are doing. I think automation has had a tremendous impact on transactional recruiting. So in a differentiated recruiting pyramid, that bottom tier. That your tier two supports was transactional. There is a lot of automation there, but what we've seen is that the value of your top two tiers, the recruiting that you do there, has a tremendous impact on the return to the company and the value to the company. When your top performers in that strategic tier are producing value at eight to 10 times the value of people that are just slightly below them in quality of hire, it becomes really, really essential that you are hiring well.

And to do that, you need people now that are not focused on finding because automation can help us find people still requires a human state, that human intervention, is the actual recruiting, that's the deduction, but also then the assessing of the talent. And I think that's where our work becomes more valuable.

And as you move to a talent strategist, what you're now talking about too, is not just filling individual positions, but how do you leverage your knowledge, the data that you have, your experience to help craft hiring? Not just immediate, not just one, two, three months out. But how are you looking at hiring as a strategic pillar of your company long-term? And how are you working with the C-suite to help craft those strategies? Not just for today, tomorrow, five years from now.

Max Armbruster: The C-suite it sounds like where everybody would want it to end up, but for somebody who's 20, 22, years old picking up recruitment, like you said, because hey that looks available! You know, why not? You know, you could make good money if you're in staffing at a young age, you can do well. So maybe that's how a lot of people end up in that industry, but not everybody can end up with a C-suite. So do you foresee that there is going to be a bit of a contraction in the head count of talent acquisition? That contraction that we saw in some companies. well you said in your company where you're back to pre COVID levels?

I actually saw that while the volume of candidates grew considerably in my world, the volume of recruiters kind of was flat or a little bit down for 2020. I'm just wondering whether the industry is growing. But 15% year over for your association, that's certainly an indication that there are plenty of recruiters out there.

Jim D'Amico: There sure are. And again, I think it's how we repurpose the work. So a new recruiter, probably not going to be in a C-suite or talking to the board, but they can be talented advisors to their individual customers, to those hiring managers and to those candidates they work with, data has really changed that and the ability to take data, parse data, and craft narratives around that has changed.

So for example, a new recruiter, the two things that they're going to do right away when they join my team is, they're going to get recruiting fundamentals. You know, they're going to learn how to source, how to recruit, how to interview, but they're also going to start to learn data analytics, right?

And we start them off. The first book is always Freakonomics because that's easy and digestible. But it also teaches you how to craft a narrative around the data.

Max Armbruster: I love that. Yeah. So you teach some numbers and storytelling and then you can build some exercises around that, right? It's like, did you know that this career vs that career and etcetera. Those kinds of narratives.

Jim D'Amico: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, for hiring managers, you know, hiring managers right now, they see, Oh my gosh, unemployment is so high. So there must be tons of people for my roles. Well, a lot of the positions you hire are degreed professionals, right? The unemployment for degree professionals for COVID is 4.2% in the US. Right?

Max Armbruster: So that's not much change. Nobody got laid off. The data scientists kept their jobs.

Jim D'Amico: Yeah, sure.

Max Armbruster: And at the bottom markets, we also heard that it remained equally hard to also attract, because people felt unsure about going back to an office and working in retail, working in healthcare, as well as, de-incentivized to go back to work. Because there was government help for them to stay at home. So with all of these compounds to basically make the supply side a little bit tighter than people thought it would be tighter than 2008. You were there in 2008, right? So how did the two prices compare from, you know, from a market talent pool and supply and demand standpoint?

Jim D'Amico: Yeah. So there weren't those, you brought up a really good point. There weren't those supports in 2008, right? So people were actively looking. This has been a change in 2020. Is that in a lot of countries, not just the US they've strengthened sort of the safety net. So people were not as quick to look particularly for a lot of entry level positions. It paid more to stay at home, plus it was safer. Right? So in 2008, Oh my gosh. It was, you know, again a very sudden sort of situation. And the biggest change we saw in 2008 was this was the first time that we got overwhelmed with resumes and we were now struggling with technology because technology was supposed to save us. Right? We were going to be able to process people quicker, respond to people quicker, do all these things, but we actually just became overwhelmed. And to me, this was starting the era of sort of the ghosting.

Max Armbruster: That was the start of ghosting 2008. Okay. And we're only just starting to beat that ghosting, problem with technology now in addressing it. There's some industries that were absolutely decimated back then. And industries where you normally have a really hard time finding talents.

So yeah, I guess it was a great opportunity for somebody who is a talented advisor, like you said, to help people reconvert and change careers maybe. And say, wow, this is the chance for you to chase the dream you've always had. Have you had any anecdotes along those lines, you know, people hitting the wall and then helping drive their re-conversions and changing people into a new industry.

Jim D'Amico: So, yes, and I have taken several people that felt that they hit a wall and got them into recruiting. You see a lot of people that, you know, in the US and I'm sure it's the same in other countries. There's a big push for people to get their college degrees. There has been for, you know, 30 or 40 years, right?

That's if you want to be successful, you get your degree. Well, kids go to school, they're very smart. They get their degree, but they get their degree in something that really doesn't have applicable work associated with it.

Max Armbruster: Half of our audience has a psychology degree. Be careful what you say.

Jim D'Amico: Well, you know, but there's like, my degree is secondary education, social studies. I never had an interest in teaching that was just a class on the civilian campus where the girls were. Right? So I'm a product of that too. And look, I said, I wanted to be a comedian and that didn't work out recruiting did.

So, you know, I've worked with people that have, you know, very interesting backgrounds and I try to help show them how wonderful recruiting is. And you can really build your own career there and create your own career path. But by the same token, I've had friends that have gotten burned out in recruiting and we've helped them transition into other jobs. One of the beautiful things about being a recruiter is you can often find your own next job and you know how to sell candidates and sell yourself into that job.

Max Armbruster: Yeah. I have a friend and advisor at my company who is, you know, a very senior executive at a top technology company. Didn't know what zoom for a couple of years went into executive recruitment and then back into the corporate world. These transitions were very, I think, well, I mean, I have this one example, but I suppose, it's not an isolated case of these...

When you build a network, then you can use your network, even though in 2020, the network is not so impactful. So of course ATAP would always encourage people to come in and out of the industry, and for people who feel a little burned out after, a rough year missing their targets or are dealing with a shallow talent pool.

Or being stabbed in the back by candidates. I mean, that happens. What are some good reconversion post recruitments? I guess, back to sales?

Jim D'Amico: Yeah. No, so there's always that opportunity. And I think that, you know, sales is a very natural fit for recruiting because we are doing diagnostic sales all day. So I think that's very true, but also if you look at the work that we do, as recruiters, there's sales, there's marketing, there's social media. So there's different opportunities that you can leverage based on recruiting, but I think that this is actually, if you feel that that you got crushed or your company didn't support you right now, I don't think this is a bad time to hang up your own shingle and be boutique.

Because there are industries that are really struggling to find people. And if you have those skills and you can fill that void, that's incredible. And in the US, there's such a push on diversity. You know, really remedy where we've been. I think there's a lot of opportunity to provide support for specifically diversity recruiting for companies in the US and we're seeing it now in Europe and Asia, too, where there's a push for diversity based on gender and, you know, as opposed to the US where is gender and race, but we're seeing gender globally.

Max Armbruster: Yeah. The core skill for these boutiques that would do well would be to build a talent pool.

Jim D'Amico: Yes.

Max Armbruster: And building a talent pool is not necessarily something where size matters as much, where you have a big RPO and you're just going to process data, and processing and automating the workflow, and scheduling things faster. But if you're a boutique, you can really take the time to build a town pool basically.

Jim D'Amico: Absolutely. Yeah. And that makes all the difference.

Max Armbruster: All right. Well, I think that's a great happy note to end up on, of course, if you look back at 2008 - 2009, it was also a good year for staffing and for RPO and maybe 2021 we'll replicate that. And maybe someone who listens to us well, we'll get their courage to launch their own boutique and to build a nice town pool and some hot area. On a final note, what are some of the industries where people should sort of start their boutique firm today and the next year? If you had to advise someone.

Jim D'Amico: Yeah. So, high-tech manufacturing is picking up very quickly. Data science continues to be a very hot commodity. I think those two are great areas. Medical is another one. We've seen how we're positioned right now with the pandemic. And so there's going to be a lot of growth in medicine over the next several years, particularly with those, you know, in research and then in those frontline roles. So you're going to see a big expansion in nursing and there's a lot of work to be done there. And this is the first time it was at several conferences last week.

And this is the first time where healthcare recruiters seem to be in. I say this with love. I used to recruit in healthcare, healthcare recruiting has always been a little bit behind the curve of everyone else. They're finally saying, Hey, we've got to close that gap from a recruiting steam and, you know, be more proactive. So I think that's a great area to get involved in.

Max Armbruster: I mean I'm excited just thinking about it, you know, building a boutique firm around a theme, doing content marketing around it, doing storytelling around it. And there's so much you can do there to help people in an industry plan their career. So thanks, Jim. Really good ideas and recommendations. And if people want to get a hold of you or, get in touch with ATAP, where should we send them, or how do they get ahold of you?

Jim D'Amico: Sure. So ATAP is atapglobal.org You can find me on LinkedIn. I am on there all the time. So I'm easy to find. And you can also reach me at Celanese, which is jim.damico@celanese.com

Max Armbruster: Splendid. Thank you, Jim. And all the best to ATAP, I hope we'll reconnect in 2021 to celebrate another year of a 15% growth for your organization.

Jim D'Amico: Fingers crossed. Thank you, Max.

Max Armbruster: That was Jim D'Amico from ATAP, the association of talent acquisition professionals. ATAP is accessible on atapglobal.org And, Jim reminds us of that whether recruiting is a stop along the way, the end of a career, or the beginning of a career, there's a lot for people to gain in that profession that can help them prepare for a career, in sales with C-suites as they're launching their career or as they're looking to make a good income at a later stage in their career.

Good reminder that we should be grateful to be working in this industry and continuously expanding our skills to be better talent acquisition professionals. Hope you enjoyed it. And if you're up for more, please subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast and share with friends.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast, a show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max. And today I'm honored and pleased to welcome on the show Miss Mary Meston from Concentrix. Mary, welcome to the show.

Mary: Thank you, Max. Thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.

Max: Great to have you. So Mary is the VP for talent management at Concentrix. Concentrix is currently part of the Synnex group, but they're separating at the moment. I hope I'm not divulging any confidential information.

Mary: No, you're not. It is public knowledge and we've reported out, and the board recently approved that. So we're still projecting we're about a month out from spinning out and being on our own and being our own entity. And we are gonna miss Synnex. We're still very, very close, but we're all very excited.

Max: And you were together for a couple of years only?

Mary: No, Synnex actually, if you look at where Concentrix came from, it's been out for 16 years. It was a small little group. Concentrix has grown by acquisition. Substantially. And now we are substantially a large player in the industry, quite a large player, and absolutely would like to be on our own. And it just makes business sense. You know?

Max: Well, It is indeed a huge company. I am today working with some of your entities, but I understand Concentrix globally is, well, over 200,000 headcount, maybe 300,000, maybe more.

Mary: We're North of 250,000 right now. And with you helping us there in, certain divisions could be 260 for all I know right now.

Max: Yeah. It changes every day. And then certainly around this time of year there is always a big ramp up before the Christmas holiday, lots of hiring going on. But you're not in those trenches anymore Mary, I think that our audience will get something a little bit different today. Mary is working more on the executive development and talent management at the executive level at the moment. Well, tell us a little bit more about your role in Concentrix.

Mary: I'd love to thank you. Yes. I've been in the recruitment trenches. It was called recruitment then, and now it's talent acquisition. So that ages me quite a bit.

Max: You were saying head hunting before.

Mary: I know head hunting. I think about that now it's like, so politically not correct. Right?

Max: It used to be fun. We used to take our rifles and go out and hunt for heads.

Mary: That's a really aggressive talent acquisition strategy, right? Yeah, I progressed through all of the focuses in HR. I mean, I started as a benefits clerk, a payroll clerk, actually moved into recruiting and helped establish a number of firms many moons ago. Some of the first, software development firms and actually H1B hiring and really focusing on that. I worked in California, and progressed through all the phases and all the functions in HR and I really love the fact that I've been able to bring all that together and really we're focused now with our executive set. Really working on optimizing our talent because as we all know how difficult it is to find that right person, let's talk about time, process, costs, all of that. Once you have them, you don't want to lose them. Right? And it's really important to continue to develop them. Not only helps employee engagement, but that helps move a company forward. Right? If you can grow all those quote unquote human assets, it helps the company move forward. And that's one of the levers in our innovation. Is grow your talent!

Max: It can be so heartbreaking as a business owner when you lose a top talent. And I'm sure it's heartbreaking even if you're not the business owner, the heads-up, you've got somebody who you've invested so much time that leaves, you know, I'm now in my forties, but 20 years ago, I remember thinking my allegiance is to my career and I need to keep moving. Every two, three years, go get another job, expose myself to something new and keep growing.

And I think studies have been made that that's one way to optimize for salary growth, especially at the early stages of your career. But now I have a bit of a different perspective where I think, you know, life is too short to be sending out resumes every two years. What do you think about sort of job mobility for people as they get to maybe the middle of their career or their golden years?

Mary: Hopefully the middle isn't the golden years now, because come on the new 40 is 60, so let's move the scale up. Yeah, I think about it very much. You have spoken about the time in one's career and what the best strategy is, and it is very true. I did this one in my younger days, to jump every two to three years. Some of it, I lived in the Silicon Valley and worked in the Silicon Valley during the dot com days. And if your company wasn't purchased or purchasing someone every two years, you know, that provided that career growth, that career jump. And that was really a strategy.

I too am a believer. Mid-career when you kind of top out and we have a really solid set of expertise, then it's great to find a place where you can grow and grow with the company and grow that expertise with the company. And not necessarily just look for the next, you know, 5% increase. There's much more of a different strategy. And then when I talk with people early in their careers, they're in a learning stage. So you're learning, growing, get what I can, let's move on. If I'm not getting the growth, I'm going to jump!

Then there is the kind of mid career people. I call it the listening stage. As where you start listening to yourself, as well as listening to those you work with. So it's the listening leader approach. It's key to being a really successful leader. Being able to hear others be collaborative and to be very self-aware.

And then there's the capstone of your career. I call it the legacy and that's what I work with really senior executives, not necessarily just in age, but in career. Where they're like, I want to leave something behind. What does that look like? And in working with senior executives that are at that stage, and it's not necessarily an age issue, but it is more about what they feel they've accomplished. That's where it's really a great time to work with senior executives to that's where they're, I want to leave an innovation. I want to change something up. I want to make a difference, you know, and that's, it's a great place to, at least for me to spend with these senior leaders, because there's, that's where some of the most influential, even simple decisions are made.

Max: That legacy translates. I often imagine an ideology, like a vision that they want to materialize.

Mary: Absolutely. You're in a longer time to learn your skill set and you've performed and you know what you do. What do I want to leave that's beyond me? Being an ideology, an impact, and innovation. I know particularly, In the space we're working with now and with the BPO industry. I mean, because we are such large groups, what we do impact so many more, it's kind of that ripple effect. So it's very important to be very aware of the choices. And we have a number of senior leaders that are very into that legacy space about, you know, we are a community, as we treat our employees, they impact the world.

So it's a very significant place to play. And you're very conscious of your choices, particularly, here in the States, you know, with the diversity, equity and inclusion, or I guess globally as well. And the unrest that's been going on, there's a huge, renewed focus on the importance of the inclusions of all. And it's a matter of community. And that's a very interesting space to be particularly with our leadership that is very focused on that.

Max: Yeah. I've heard that. I had somebody on the show recently that was telling me about PepsiCo and how do you connect the people at PepsiCo with a sense of mission and purpose? And I made one of my nasty comments about, you know, how do you get excited about selling sugary drinks? And I was, I was told that for them, the mission was more about the people, about the people at PepsiCo and growing the business and that, you know, it has nothing to do with the amount of sugar inside of the drinks, that it gets them excited.

And so you've got to find that environment where you're going to carry that ideology or ideology maybe is a two way radio term, or just a set of principles and beliefs that you can put into the world. And I imagine that sometimes you've got people who will get promoted because they're super performers. And maybe they're not at that stage yet. Right? They don't, they're not thinking legacy. They're just thinking about performance and you know, where am I going to get my next raise? Perhaps you, can you suss them out immediately?

Mary: Well, you can find them. I mean, in some of that it's, where they're at in their career? What they're seeking? I find that in people when they're just trying to get into the listening stage. I call it the learning stage when you're learning your function and you're becoming known and branded. It's the me stage, and the listening stage shifts to the we stage. And that's often, typically middle management-ish, depending on the job titles, but that's where you have to become responsible for the we, not the me. And some make that shift better than others. Some never tear the peer principle of topping out. When someone just can't get that next rung on the ladder. And what do you want to be? There's the me and we, there's something in there.

Max: Yeah. It's sad when I hear you. I hear you talking about children development stages, almost.

Mary: Well, you know, we are all children at heart aren't we, it's just our bodies don't look at as we age. And, you know, development is in stages. It's developmental stages, right? And we can talk about people we know, or public figures that get trapped in adolescence. Let's talk about political climate, right?

Max: I watch a lot of comedy online. So I love watching those people who never grow up. And, I think they're very entertaining. So I think, yeah, it's precious to preserve that child inside. But, I'm here wearing a suit and a jacket and trying to look the part for my job.

Mary: You're doing a good job.

Max: Thank you, Mary. I know I need a haircut, but don't tell me about dressing for success. Is that some part of your job in talent management or is that something that people come to with questions?

Mary: Well, that's a really softer side of the corporate world, but we did have a chat about how important it is and how different and how much it's changing now with this world of work at home, or the zoom land, or COVID land, or Corona land, or whatever we want to call it. The next normal, you know, the having to dress to look the part is less and less important.

And I've seen it. I've been around for several decades now where you look the part to be assumed you could do it. And now I really work with folks about being who you are, be authentic. I mean, within the appropriate, you know, aspects and parameters, but just dressing the part rarely at senior, mid- senior and senior levels that doesn't.

Max: It doesn't matter anymore!

Mary: It doesn't. Think of some of the names out there and, you know, Steve Jobs was known for his look. We've got the Elon Musk look, I mean, think of these people and they're not necessarily the suit and ties, are they?

Max: Well, I mean, they have a brand and we can talk about the authenticity and the brands. The way Steve Jobs dressed was part of his brand. It was, you know, I'm so passionate about finding the right design that I'm not going to take off my turtleneck. I don't know what message that actually sends. It's like, it doesn't matter how I dress as long as I've built nice pones, I guess.

Mary: Well, I understood while reading some of his stuff that he wanted to reduce the cognitive load about having to think about what he's going to wear. So he can put all that energy into the design.

Max: That sounds like such bullshit. Really the cognitive load of how much... I mean, if you're a guy put on a shirt and a suit you're done!

Mary: Maybe I'm speaking from a female perspective or more of you, my generation, where you had to worry about if everything matched, right? And you can't have the same top within two, every two weeks.

Max: My wife at home, you know, before she goes to the office, she asks me, even though I have no clue, what's to tell her. But you know, I figured it's better to have an opinion than no opinion. So I do, I do comments.

Mary: And you're still standing. So you didn't say you have a good opinion.

Max: You're saying it looks wonderful every time, then it doesn't sound correct. You have to mix in a little bit of criticism. I'm sure in your practice as well, the most exemplary leaders also expect you to push back a little bit and criticize.

Mary: Absolutely. I mean, when I engage with executives, one of our initial conversations it's about, you know, we set the parameters of our relationship. And as I'm not your best friend, I'm not your yes man or woman. I am here to help you achieve what you want to achieve. And I'll be your sounding board. I'll be your mirror. I'll be your coach. And some days I might actually be the person that's pushing you. So I expect some resistance or it's not working. And just to prep them ahead. And, you know, you can tell those that really engage and want to, and those that are just kind of glad-handing, and just going along for the long cause they don't want to step in something.

Max: I mean, and there's, I suppose, an awkwardness with the fact that you are an employee of Concentrix and therefore, you know, it's not like you're a psychologist, right? There's no obligation to keep everything secret from you.

Mary: Interesting. You bring up a really important point in the role that I'm doing. And there have been some discussions about, you know, keep someone external to the firm or bring them in. And it can go either way. In particular, I'm very fortunate. I get to report directly to the CEO and our parameters are that I share nothing that is of confidence. If someone needs to share something with you or you with them, I will coach the two of you to speak. So we have some really clear boundaries, which is essential for this to work.

Max: Yeah, absolutely. But nobody's going to come and tell you, I want to kill the CEO.

Mary: Well, I would hope not because, one, that's illegal! It's really scary. That's a reportable event. My HR is going to come all out.

Max: No, I mean, you're dealing with people who are a little bit more mature, than to express things this way. I'm sure they'd find a better way to. But some advice from our listeners, some of which are not, at the executive level, you know, who want to bring the vision of who they want to become to live. At which point in your career is a good suit to bring in a coach? Let's say, you know, you're starting out. You're a talent acquisition professional, and you want to, I don't know, end up VP of HR, should you get a coach? What kind of coach? Where do you start?

Mary: That is a really timely question. Thank you. Because recently there's a gentleman within our larger company. He is starting on the path, he's in talent acquisition, and his goal is to be VP of HR. One of our values is to be bold. And he just reached out to me. He says, you don't know me, but I would love to have a mentor. I would want to be you someday. Will you talk to me?

Max: Nice.

Mary: So when do you start? Whenever you have that question, when something's telling you to do it, you need to answer that whatever the answer is. And many people go, well, I don't need a coach, or what is a coach? Coaching is different from therapy, you know, I'm not licensed to do that. And in therapies dealing generally with the past, I like to frame coaching as dealing in the present and moving you to the right action, whatever that is, depending on what path you choose. And so when to get a coach? Whenever you feel that in the key things you are feeling stuck. I feel there's more, I know I'm not doing something quite right. Something's unsettled. And fourth is, and hopefully it doesn't happen to you, but if some, you get feedback that certain XYZ performance manners behavior isn't working for you, I mean that's kind of a key when you can reach out to them.

Max: Okay, sweet. I had a different idea because you're describing someone who is ambitious, but has problems they want to solve and they want to address. I thought that you have to be, you know, a super positive, optimistic person. Everything is going right. And then you've got all this space and now like, you know what, I want to go even higher and I'm going to go hire a coach because my life is in order, but I want to reach one more.

Mary: You know, it can be both of those. It's and again, it's about goal-driven. So if people look at my credentials, I'm certified to do some curriculums called high-performance coaching. And in that space, if that's how we frame that engagement, it is about just having more consistency, higher performance at a consistent level.

Yeah, my life's awesome, but I want it to be better. Most often, even those that think they have everything dialed in. There's something amiss. I mean, life is real. We're real people. Not every day is perfect. Not every conversation's perfect. Not every choice is perfect. So how do you manage that? So you can do coaching at that stage too.

Max: Certainly.

Mary: Coaching is not necessarily remediation.

Max: Talent acquisition is one area where it's impossible to reach perfection. You're talking about, yeah, areas for improvement and it is impossible to have a perfect track record of work movements. I think I can say that without… I mean if somebody can prove me wrong, I'd love to meet them.

You know, I've never made a bad hire. I've never heard anybody say that. Although that would be, you know, if that person exists, I would love to interview them for the show.

Mary: Yes. I would like to meet them as well. Either way, we're saying in talent acquisition, there's no perfection. And I was going to ask you, what do you scope is perfection? And you're saying a bad hire. So we could talk about what's a bad hire. There's different ways of saying that, you know, they didn't work out. They didn't fit in. They didn't succeed. They didn't bring in the numbers, whatever that is. But, I don't think there is perfection in anything. Other than a hole in one in golf. Is that perfect?

Max: Yeah. And you know, even if you do make a good hire, you're going to always find there is probably a better hire out there. I mean, it's hard to measure those things, but I think, retention is a good metric and the beacon side to the performance of the hire. Of course, that's great as well. When you're doing more high volume, the cost per hire is a good metric.

But having, you know, with your long experience in TA and and HR, I'm sure you've been exposed to regrets and regretful hires. I'd like to ask you if there's a hire that comes back to mind, and of course I don't want the name, job title or even a company name, but if she could go back to that moment where you hired this person and didn't work out. What can our audience learn from your mistake?

Mary: Okay. One definitely comes to mind for me and I will work my best to cloak the identity. If you notice me already kind of shifting here, but I'm going to kind of share the blame in a weird way. So, VP of HR in a startup, we were hiring a key sales person and through my process, I was like, this is a no go. And it wasn't what they could do. It was going to be about their fit, much more cultural fit. Right?

And I was a solid no, senior team members were a solid yes, because they were looking at what he could do and has done for others. And I'm like, this is going to destroy the firm. Anyway, he was brought on and our numbers popped for a short while. And then, unfortunately he kind of crossed some boundaries with people, as well as markets. And he left the firm in a worse state than when he started with us. Yeah. So it was a long, hard lesson in one trusting your gut to look at not just what they can do but also fit. And taking a longer view of what is success and what your mission is.

Max: I have a lot of names that come to mind where I know the same description and speech would have been easily applicable to this situation. Do not hire based on resume, do not hire based on track record because somebody who's done it before somewhere else does not mean they're going to be able to replicate it or that they even want to do it in the new place, you know, maybe they're a different person.

They're not interested in doing the same type of work. And, it's just not going to relate. So a track record is not enough. You have to have something else.

Mary: Yeah, that that is very insightfully put because it's very true. I mean, while we do need some, I know you can do this or you have the history of this, it's really about, you have to meet that person in the here and now. And it's pretty safe to say that in very rare cases, one's performance really fits in with all else that's going on in the context of the company. Right? Place, time, people. So just because they did it once doesn't mean you're going to replicate it. Because that would be almost kind of scientific and cloning, right?

Max: Yeah. We're not robots just yet.

Mary: Not yet but I hear they're working on it.

Max: Yeah. So we are. And to wrap up our discussion, Mary, and to put it in the 2020 context. This year has been testing for a lot of people and for organizations, I believe Concentrix has done huge progress in transitioning to work from home, and work from anywhere perhaps. Can you share with us, some success stories from your executive team on how that transition was handled? And, you know, what hidden talents this challenging year may have, you know, put before and revealed in your team?

Mary: Yeah. Awesome. That is a great way to kind of wrap this because I think this year, and I think everyone can attest to this. This year has been one of the most difficult for any business you're in. I mean, global pandemic and then in certain businesses it's been a bigger issue. We are global, obviously, we have 250,000 people, so that's a big footprint to manage.

Max: A quarter million!

Mary: Yeah, quarter million is kind of scary. Right? So when you think about it, we went from an industry where it was primarily cubicle work in an office, to work from home almost overnight. Our senior team, I have to say, they worked incredibly well together to get very clear. We knew what the mission was, get everybody working from home as quickly as you can for our clients and for our people, while staying safe. Because of such a strong culture built we have and buy into the culture, the team worked incredibly well, and I can't share data, but quote - unquote, almost overnight, made that happen. Right?

Just imagine what that takes. Here we are, eight months after COVID really kind of started. Having the vast majority of the group still working from home where possible. Actually, and I think this industry I'm speaking up for, I don't know for a fact, seeing this I think this industry may take a look at work from home. It's going to become more popular. Or more the manner. I don't know if it'll ever be the only way, but I think that just shows we could remain in business and we didn't have to have everyone contained in a cubicle or in an office. And I wanna, you know, think and even express, you know, gratitude from so many, you know, 250,000 of us, to the senior executives who are pulling together so quickly.

And really being clear on that purpose. it's amazing when you're someone who is clear on a purpose, and you have a group also clear on that purpose, you can move mountains, right? Or you can actually move a hundred thousands of computers like that.

Max: Yeah. It was beautiful to see what happened to the industry this year. It was difficult of course, for some people, we've seen divorce rates go up, suicides rates, alcohol consumption and other indicators that show that those stressors on the market have been felt. with the commuting time being reduced to zero, however, we can look at it as, perhaps the day is less and less crowded with waste. Maybe it's a little bit more purposeful. Is that how your executive team is experiencing it? Because I know at the management level, managing people remotely takes probably even more time than doing it in the office where you can have everybody in a room. So are they feeling, are they feeling the weights of those extra hours or they're enjoying the freedom from commute? Where's the balance?

Mary: Where's the balance? Well it's an interesting balance. The vast majority, because we are global, a lot of what we did was, you know, via telecommunications. It wasn't necessarily as in person. But for those that have the in-person experiences initially was very difficult, a lot of us miss and who doesn't miss that contact, that said, people are finding and it's going on two different camps here.

They're actually working more because they're in their home. You know, you don't have to get up, commute, change. All that logistical stuff has gone. So you just fill your work into that space. So whereas we talk about setting boundaries, right? Others have actually found, instead of working in that space, that they're getting really good about boundaries and really finding that they're more of themselves, both in work and home.

So I've had others go the other way. It wasn't necessarily divorce and suicide, but more family time, more presence. I'm not on the road. So I wouldn't say it's one or the other. It really just depends on individual cases. I think we can speak to this around any firm or anyone. I mean, this year has been loaded with work, add COVID as a stressor, and then add business as a stressor, add personal schooling. And if you look at all those stressors, it's a stressful time for anyone wherever you're at. And so that is going to impact the greater population.

Max: Well, I'm, I'm taking a lot of positives from your answer, where people have been spending more time at home. And being able to put in more hours and, you know, and so important work as well. And so obviously top executives will respond to challenges with a good level of resiliency. And, it sounds like they have, and they've done a good job of transitioning the company at a scale that nobody could have imagined.

Thank you for sharing those stories, Mary. I wish you and your team much success in 2021. And, thank you for coming to the show.

Mary: Well, thank you, Max. Awesome. Here's to everyone's good 2021.

That was Mary Meston VP of talent management at Concentrix reminding us to create space. That's what she does for the executives at Concentrix and what she reminds us to do for ourselves. I enjoyed it as I hope you did as well. If you did, please follow us, please follow the recruitment hackers podcast.

And if you'd like to be on the show or know somebody who I should interview. Remember to reach out on talkpush.com I'm always looking for more interesting people to talk to. Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today exceptionally I have not one, but two guests, both coming from a company called Experian, which is not a travel website. They'll tell us about Experian and tell us about what they do for this fast growing tech company. On the show we have Lena Lotsey, global employer brand director at Experian. Welcome to the show, Lena. Hello, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. And, Chris Brady global TA director at the same company. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Welcome.

Max: Are you guys gonna interview each other? And so I can sit back, relax.

Lena: Oh, we've done that before. It wasn't pretty,

Chris: That's actually how she got the job. So, but I was interviewing her.

Lena: There we go.

Max: So, Lena you've been there for three years, so obviously Chris had, made a good hire there and the right decision and, it's always a big gamble, a big roll of the dice, especially with a sensitive area such as the employer brand.

I don't know who should answer this question, but what was the impetus for creating this role? Okay.

Lena: I'm happy to take a stab at that. As I understand it prior to my arrival, this role, as you say, didn't exist. So this was a newly created role. And, my background was actually in entertainment marketing, and I worked in LA on the agency side and worked with Netflix and, all of the movie studios for digital marketing campaigns. And one of the last projects that I worked on actually was with Google working on their life at Google campaign and working with their employer brand team. So I spent a year working on that and realized the similarities. Between entertainment marketing, and marketing your employer brand and how you find your fans, because they can speak on your behalf in a more trustworthy, genuine way, telling their stories and providing evidence of these pillars, whether it's, in my case, with entertainment, new show launching or film. But with the employer brand case with Google, using the employee stories to represent and provide proof points of the aspects of the EDP that Google was trying to get across. And their challenge was that people were intimidated by Google.

So that was one of the many challenges that we had to overcome in working with their employer brand team. So in doing that, I realized how much I really loved it. So when Chris contacted me, I probably did think it was Expedia initially, and eventually I got back to him, And we chatted and he just sold me on what an incredible company Experian was.

And it really has, I mean, I was sold as soon as I hung up the phone with him after that first conversation. So as director of recruiting and talent acquisition at Experian, I think Chris has this critical role of showcasing our company. And, representing it in a way that I think dispels preconceived ideas about what Experian is, if we're just a credit bureau and really, amplifying the fact that we are the leading global information services provider, that we have over 17,000 employees around the world, that we have our hands in many different verticals, auto and health, and, you know, convene these, the scale of the company.

Was it a surprise to me all the awards that we've won as an employer? Around DNI, around innovation from Fortune and Forbes? I mean, there was just all this great information, coming at me. So I like to say we have an embarrassment of riches because it's so true. I think Experian is the best kept secret.

And within as an employer and within our company, I think there are so many stories to tell and that's my job. So in this newly created role, basically I had to say, where do I start looking at all the regions? everyone who touches external comms in some way or social media in some way, where do we start to tell this story?

And I want people to visit our site. Our career site or our social channels and come away with the same impression I came away with after my first conversation with Chris.

Max: Yeah. So you want to bottle up what you experience and make it available for the masses?

Lena: Well said much more succinct now.

I totally get that. and I think that we can talk a little bit about the communication to candidates. And how do you use employees as ambassadors? I think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done there. But, Chris since you managed to sell Lena on this vision, maybe, tell us a little bit about what you do and, well if you want to expand a little bit on what Experian does.

Chris: Yeah. So, and I appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast, and you can see why I recruited Lena, just, in the way that she describes all of the opportunities we have, you know, all of that information that she just stated is awesome. And we have so much of it, but we didn't have a central way that we could kind of train and have a consistent message across our recruiting function. So within talent acquisition, you have a lot of different people that are in siloed, different environments. And so I can't, if somebody is recruiting for auto, it might be different than decision analytics or credit services or consumer services.

And so, that was one of the things that we worked on last year is a pitch book. So an actual document that the recruiters could reference and say, okay, if I talked to somebody last week, it's the same experience. and when I started back in 2012 as a consultant, I was working as, just kind of helping with some talent mapping.

And trying to figure out which locations we should hire these specific technologists, as well as help with some projects. And I came from an executive search background. So, I was on my own for 14 years. So it was so interesting that I was always helping people fix their staffing problems, but I would kind of approach things from the outside.

And so coming from the inside, I'm like, wow, there's so much information, but I was going through all this data that we had of all these great points. And I'm like, does nobody know about them? And when they asked me to help with that social media, that was the first thing I started looking at is like, okay, we need somebody to actually know that's what they're doing.

And that's why I kind of reached out to Lena, when we kind of built the role and then figured out, Hey, if we want to bring somebody in, that's going to change things we should probably look outside our industry because we could hire people from a competitor, but we're going to get the same thing, the same ideas, same thoughts.

Max: Yeah. I've got to say, in my time, in this talente solution space, 10 plus years, some of the best people I've seen were kind of people who are just dropped into talent acquisition coming from another function entirely or another industry, even from finance or from sales, of course, sales and marketing, very effective transitions and people who look at the process and say, now, why are we using this? Why are we using that? Why are we still using this form? Can we get rid of this step? And there's, you know, it breaks a few egos, to get that stuff that work done, but it's usually quite helpful. one thing that I've noticed, talking about breaking things...

I've noticed that a lot of international markets are not making the same use of the ATS. Well, as the colleagues in North America, because they find that it's a bit cumbersome for candidates. And I'm wondering whether you've adapted your candidate journey to international markets to reflect some of that experience and these different expectations for the candidate.

Chris: Yeah. I think, from an executive leadership standpoint, most organizations want one system because of our reporting and they can look at all the data across the whole world. But on the other hand, you really need specific separate approaches, from a technology standpoint, some things that will work better in Brazil may not work in the U S or in Costa Rica, and that's not going to work in APAC. And so for us, I think, we try to have a consistent approach across the team, but play to the strengths. I know in the UK and other areas you have to deal with compliance issues and where they're different in the U.S.

It's definitely not a one size fits all, but the training, the collaboration, like I was part of our CRM implementation and the first time I tried to do it, it was like, hey, we have this Salesforce license that we could use. Do you think you could custom build something? I spent probably four months of my life, it was at least twice a week for four hours each time trying to work with a developer. To build something custom. And this was a long time ago.

And, I found out pretty quickly that this is not going to work because of all the nomenclatures of a sales system, taking that for recruiting. So then when we went and purchased a CRM, I think the biggest thing that we found was that, you know, the training, how do you do that?

And how do you get people excited about it?And then have a consistent approach, because, what I tag in the U.S as, San Jose, it’s San Jose, California, but San Jose in Costa Rica is a different place. So we need to figure these things out ahead of time.

Max: Yeah. And the compliance layer is for sure, also another layer of complexity and people consume media differently. Right? In each place. So going back to the employee story and communicating, and experience brands the content needs to be published across multiple channels, I assume. And the channels that work in one place, work less than another. Lena, how do you manage this like a little media empire?

Lena: I like that from now on, we’re using that. We have global social channels, so we have our Experian life, social channels on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and then we have our Experian LinkedIn account. And one of the first things I did is virtually sat down with each of the regions and identified: who was doing this off the side of their desk at this point. And we started to move people in which, mostly recruiters were doing this off the side of their desk, like, you know, lane, the track as they ran. And so being able to identify who my resources were in each region and who could actually dedicate some time to taking a step back and putting together a content strategy.

So what type of content works in your area? What will especially resonate when it comes to, employer value proposition and what are the subtle nuances and sometimes not so subtle of what may appeal to someone in Bulgaria that won't necessarily in Allen, Texas.

Making sure that we were creating content that had real employee faces in it real stories and hit on things that were going to resonate locally and regionally was a big part of our content strategy. And then what we did is created a calendar that we all were able to collaborate on so that we have this through line of global content, but then we also have regular regional content that's coming out.

And to underscore how important it was that we start to globalize our content, we created a campaign that was easily localized, which we called what's your next. And that resonated both internally with employees, what their next personal goal and professional goal, was. And then also externally what's your next, in your career? So externally with candidates. And this really had legs.

It resonated in each region. So we were able to start to embed this visual identity of our employer brand across the social channels and unify the content globally while still having that regional flavor in the content. And at this point now we have about 35 people that touch our employer brands and our social media channels.

Just the social media channels that are part of the candidate experience around the world. So now we have plenty of our heads together to be able to drive the strategy in each region. But yeah, initially it was overwhelming because like I said, what works in one place isn't going to work in another.

So it really came down to not trying to take on that as one person and think, you know best, but really putting your ego aside. Coming to each region, rather identifying who your resources are and then saying, how can I help you amplify your local message globally?

Max: Well, I can't tell you how many companies I've come across who have kind of like cut the legs and arms of their foreign operations because they said, no, we've gotta centralize all branding decisions. I guess that's how you give them freedom, right.

You create a theme and then you let them build around that. And then of course they have to follow, like we said, local regulations.

Chris: I think the other thing too Max is that like, what Lena's done is the fact that she's focused on talent acquisition is a huge game changer for us because a lot of companies, organizations have their branding team, but it's more focused on corporate branding and it's not specific to the talent that you're bringing in.

And so that has allowed us to show up at conferences in areas where we really want people to leave and know, hey, this is what Experian is and really understand what our messages. I mean, we had a great experience last year at the Grace Hopper experience, which is the Grace Hopper celebration is about 21,000 women technologists all in one place.

And, you know, with Lena to be able to come there, and be live tweeting and we're doing all kinds of contests and what a difference that is versus, you know, recruiters trying to do things that they think, “Oh yeah, Hey, I have a, Facebook, you know, profile and I have you know, 10 friends. So I must be really good at this.” And you have no idea how many people were applying when I posted that role that were recruiters that were like, “Hey, I think I know how to do branding.” Definitely a big change for us and, congrats to Lena for taking us into the next level of innovation.

Max: Bringing somebody from entertainment is probably a very inspired choice. I guess you needed to put a layer of polish on some of the employee generated content, maybe?

Lena: Yeah, a lot of the direction when I first started was just to make us cool. Quote, unquote, so very specific. So taking a look, talking with each of the recruiters again, within each region and saying, what is the hardest sell about Experian?

You know, again, going back to what are your pain points? How can I be a resource? But really that's how we approached it. So when you sell Experian, what are the things people are most surprised to know about that? That we're innovative, that we consider ourselves a tech company, you know, these types of perceptions because we've been around for over a hundred years that we want to either dispel certain perceptions or reinforce. That helped me map out my strategy. So, okay. These are our priorities. That if we want to be seen as an innovative company, then we need to hear from our innovators, right?

So let's reach out to our technologists. And then I would work with the recruiters who are your top technologists, who are your great hires in the tech space that we currently employ. Let's have them tell their stories and let's do that on stack overflow and let's look at different ways to attract tech talent. So that's just one example, but the recruiters really are the gatekeepers. They have been a wealth of information of giving you the truth. This is the honest truth of how people feel, the pluses and the minuses. We need more of this and less of that. And that's my job is to try to do that through an authentic storytelling way.

I'm looking at the experience, which it looks like it's your set of a hundred plus shows.

Max: I had no idea the company was that old, I don't know if this is your Experian or another company that I'm looking at.

Lena: That's the old logo top. There you go. That's our new one.

Max: So then the newest logo. When, when did that come out? The rebrand and, you know, were you there?

Chris: Yeah, it's been, it's been around, 7 years. You know, the other thing too, while you're looking at that is having a creative, I don't know if you want to call it almost like a recruiter toolkit. Hey, I'm going to post something on LinkedIn. Do we have any display, you know, any kind of creative assets that we can use? is such a difference versus just, here's the link and here's your crappy job description and hopefully people are interested. Because we want to take advantage of the leaders in the organization,that have large networks in specific technology pockets and use those. So I want to tag other people in my posts, but I want to make sure that they’re focused on a specific network of people. And it's not just like somebody that doesn't fit the exact skills because otherwise you're just creating more volume and more applicants for your recruiting team to go through.

Max: More work for everybody. And so that little toolkit, you talked about a pitch book and, I guess you're also talking about creative contents, animated gifs and that kind of stuff, videos. Yeah.

Lena: And also taking a look at opportunities to microbrand. So using your email signature, one of the first things we did is curate it, hi-rez awards logos for our employee resource groups and encouraged the recruiters to link out to our social channels, have a link to our career site that we're hiring. But also these awards tell a story at a glance, so taking advantage of those visuals and all those different touch points throughout the day when you're exchanging emails that you're able to amplify that story.

Max: I'm sure they work. I mean, that's how I buy my wine. I see this one award on the bottle. I'm like, okay, it must be okay then.

Okay, well, love to hear your thoughts on how the world has changed in 2020, and looking at it not from a traumatic standpoint and we're all shaking today as the election results are going to come in soon. But thinking more about it from an opportunity standpoint, I'm sure your talent pool is changing and the way you're looking at where to hire is changing, tell us a little bit about that and how this new work from home world has affected your TA strategy.

Chris: I think from a recruiting standpoint, it's both an opportunity, but then a challenge, I think in both things, because a lot of businesses were under the assumption and across probably the world that we need these people to have butts in seats, like they literally need to be in an office. How are they going to be successful without that? That's one mentality, but then you have the other mentality of, as long as they have internet and understand how to collaborate that piece of it, is always going to be successful. One of the things that I find super interesting right now over the last six months, the written communication and listening skills are so important.

Like when you're looking to hire a recruiter or just because they're doing those recruiting strategy meetings and it's not in person. And sometimes you can't, you know, when I was on the outside as a recruiting search professional, I would try to learn how can I learn this culture and tell other people about it?

Because if I don't know about it, what am I going to say, hey, it's a great company. They're going to pay you a lot of money. And, you can start next week, you know, Yeah. Right. and so I had to get good at the pitch of each company, but when you're inside and you see all the things and you're like, okay, I feel like the talent of managing people that are virtual is going to continue to grow.

And you will see that over the next couple of years. most organizations now, the Amazons, the Googles, are all saying, you don't ever have to come back into an office if you don't want to. We've had a good opportunity virtually for a long time. Like I started, like I said, in 2012, I think I went two years before I actually put my foot in an office.

I don't know if they're afraid of me. Maybe I came across as a little scary. But I think that in this time I've been promoted three times and I've been virtual the whole time. I do travel.

Max: That's working for you.

Chris: Yeah. It's working for me. But Lena, you know, I mean, they always say that you recruit people that are like yourself, but that was one of the things that I knew for the role that she was going to go into and build out.

It's a global role. You can't be expected to be in the office these hours and then work all through the night. And you've got all these different stakeholders that are across the world. So I think that piece of it, I knew with her coming from the entertainment and that social media agency background, she was used to working, but it was communication style, I think was a piece of it. And then also. Tactical versus strategic. Can you do both and be good at both? So, and Lena, you can talk about that.

Lena: Well, I was going to talk about, and answer your question Max, around how COVID-19 has, kind of playing into our approach and our strategy and our tactics. And the very first thing we did is global comms gave us a directive to lead with empathy. So everyone who touched communications, whether with potential candidates and we gave recruiters guidance on how to talk to candidates during this time, with each other, with leadership, and just with consumers, with clients. It was “lead with empathy” was the overarching directive.

And what this allowed us to do is crystallize how we were going to present ourselves that we are a strong company. Like I said, over a hundred years old, that we have weathered storms before that we are stable, and that after a time period, we're still hiring, we're currently hiring right now. So it was important for us to lead with empathy in our conversations.

Like our recruiters were saying, we understand this may be not top of mind for you right now to be approached about an opportunity for your career, but I just want you to know I'm impressed with your background. And I would love to connect if you feel comfortable with that or, you know, virtually obviously. But really having a shift in our tone that we were a leader in this space that we were confident that we were stable. and that Experian is a company that you can rely upon. Also taking a look at how we cared for our people during this time, we immediately went into action. We have an aspire ERG employee resource group that built this beautiful guidebook that week to week had themes and resources, both internal and external resources to make sure that our people were taken care of.

We transitioned our entire customer service team, in three weeks, something that would have taken 8 to 10 weeks to do, prior to this, but our IT department just worked around the clock to make sure that our employees could seamlessly start working from home. And that they had what they needed in place.

So taking care of each other, emotionally, making sure that we were set up to continue to be successful. We had enhanced COVID sick, time benefit beyond what was required. And our return to office plans, there has been transparency, suite communication, which has been very reassuring to see our global CEO, Brian Cassin and our North America, CEO, Craig Boundy and Justin Hastings our CHRO in North America, from their homes, connect with us and say that we're in this together and really make us feel that we were being supported and that we were safe. The fact that our CHRO was texting me, just saying, I want to check in on you, you know, how many employees was he reaching out to so that you didn't feel alone , during this time?

So I would say it has affected how we communicate both internally and externally. We also launched some social media campaigns, like the stay safe campaign and all of the resources, the free resources and dashboards and heat maps that we have for consumers, that are all free of charge, also for the healthcare industry, for the government.

So using this as an opportunity to show all the different ways that Experian can help our communities and help the world at large deal with this pandemic has been incredibly gratifying to be a part of. And also being able to share those stories, across social and with each other and make sure that we're all aware of these stories so that we can share them.

Like Chris mentioned earlier, a lot of people don't know everything that Experian does. Experian people don't even know everything that we do. So that's also part of our goal. It's so much easier to recruit if, like Chris said, how am I going to sell the culture if I don't understand the culture?

So it's so much easier to recruit if you're aware of all of these proof points of what a great company Experian is for its community, for its people. And, all the more reason in addition to like Chris said, we pay, well, can you start next week? So in addition to that, being able to have work with purpose, I feel that's what I do and what the recruiters do go hand in hand, because I can constantly share actions that we're taking that show that we have worked with purpose.

And then hopefully when the recruiters come in and reach out to an amazing candidate, they can say, okay, I've seen what you've been doing, I've been following your social channels and, we'd like to get to a place where, it makes that conversation, that much easier, like when you get a call from a Netflix and you're like, I'm in, when can I interview, right? That's my goal for Experian.

Max: Of course. So I think that was probably a very, very timely move. I've certainly heard, other employers struggle in 2020. Because people were afraid of going back to work when we went back to the office. So leading with empathy, I'm sure has helped to build your talent pool, and create a bonding experience for your entire team. A way to join in on the experience during a time of a crisis, and to face that time together. Which will certainly help you in retention next year, which will probably be a new area of focus.

Lena: Yeah. We're already seeing that. You're absolutely right about that.

Chris: We actually had a talent summit that we brought everyone together and this was pre COVID. So this was October of last year. And, the timing couldn't have been better on map because we brought everyone together. We kinda got everybody unified. This is where we're going. This is the direction we're going. And it's one thing to say, hey, we're a people first company, but it's another thing to actually follow through with that.

I think we kind of set that groundwork and then just followed through and we already kind of knew what we needed to do, so interesting times for sure.

Max: Good timing. And I really liked your advice, Chris, on finding managers who are strong at the written word, because working asynchronously across multiple time zones as your team is doing, the rest of the world is so important.

So, yeah I think the written word is making a strong comeback.

Chris: I can do probably our podcast on resume writing and

Lena: What not to do.

Chris: Then two pages, I mean, and you know, but that kind of goes to that being concise. And you're really just trying to get your foot in the door.

And you need to do the same thing with recruitment messaging. You know I constantly get people reaching out and asking things and whether they know I'm a developer or maybe they have a TA job, but less is more. It's amazing to me, but if you think about that, 144 characters, If it's more than that people aren’t going to respond.

And the average recruiter looking at our resumes, probably taking less than 20 seconds, it's probably less than 10. And that's what I would definitely tell people as they continue to grow their TA function is: try to teach or even put on your career site that, this is what we're looking for, and this is kind of the best practices, and I would highly recommend people with resumes less than two pages please.

Max: And that applies for us toor right Lena? Short content, bite-sized content for a short attention span.

Lena: Yeah, I was going to say you learn that lesson pretty quickly with content marketing, what works, and less is always more. Being as impactful as you can, as quickly as you can works across the board.

And I think one of the things Experian does really well when it comes to recruiting is taking a look at our job descriptions and doing research around what words may be perceived differently by women than they may by men. Looking at the psychological, looking at things like that. Also sharing the learnings about content marketing or SEO with our recruiters, for instance, on your LinkedIn profile. That very first sentence about you is the most important thing. That's what comes up in your, in Google search when a candidate searches your name or, you know, even if a recruiter were to search Google, a candidate’s name, the first thing that's going to come off is that, for your LinkedIn profiles, that first sentence, you know, tidbits like that. Going back to what Chris was mentioning about arming our recruiters with the toolkit, things they can put in their signature. As I mentioned, creative, that's impactful quickly, like we're talking about, and also some of these tips and tricks around, building their personal brand and making sure they're optimizing that on platforms like LinkedIn.

Max: Wonderful. Well I think that's a lot of great tips for the audience and thank you very much. Lena and Chris for sharing. I'll throw in my own personal tip, if you're writing your LinkedIn profile, do not talk about yourself on the third person, it’s awkward.

Lena: No only Trump seems to be able to get away with that.

Max: Oh, the politics are back in yes!

Lena: I brought it back.

Max: Okay. Well, enjoy election nights. Lena and Chris, thanks for spending the last minutes pre-election with me and with our audience, by the time they listened to this show, of course, we may have a new president in the U.S or an old one, either way a good show for everybody to watch, and I hope, they enjoyed the time we spent together as well. hope to reconnect soon.

Chris and Lena: Thanks for having us max. Thank you, max.

Max: That was Lena Lotsey and Chris Brady from Experian a few years ago, Chris brought in, decided to hire someone to manage the global employer brand for Experian and decided to make the unconventional choice to bring in talent from outside the industry. He decided to bring in someone from the entertainment world, who could create content and distribute content and build stories that could inspire talent acquisition teams globally. That was Lena. And I think inspiration for a lot of companies on how to build employer brand and look for talent, where you would normally look. Hope you enjoyed this three party interview and that you'll come back for more.

Please subscribe to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, and please feel free to contact me if you'd like to be interviewed with your colleagues as well. Three's a party happy to welcome you and your friends on the show, just contact me at hello@talkpush.com.

Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. Today. We are honored to have on the show, Mrs. Susan Hanold PhD, who is also the VP and the ADP Strategic Advisory Services Group. Susan, welcome to the show.

Susan: Thanks Max. Great to be here.

Max: Susan was named top women in HR technology by Recruiting Daily, and works with ADP's clients to build out their recruiting strategies. So tell us a little bit about ADP and then we'll go into our usual round of questions about how this industry is changing. Susan, I will let you talk about ADP, you will probably do better than I can. We were talking before the show that ADP does a lot more than payroll, and through acquisitions has moved into the RPO world. And into the technology world. Can you give us a quick summary of your universe?

Susan: Sure. So interesting to me about eight years ago, when I was first hired at ADP. I came in as a talent strategy expert. So it was like you, I thought, Oh payroll! It's only payroll, but it's not. It's a full HCM human capital management company. And it's been in business over 70 years. And you know, over the last eight years, our talent ecosystem has grown. You know, eight years ago we started our RPO business. We have talent management, talent activation, you know, you have to put different words on all the different types of talent products. So activation is kind of a new area. That's an engagement, and performance area, talent management, and you've got talent acquisition.

Max: You’ve got my attention with this talent activation. We'll come back to it later.

Susan: Yeah. So, you know, to me what's exciting is that, it's a global organization, it's got 140 countries and, you know, of course we're known for payroll and that's very core to us and we have 58,000 employees. And for me, you know, like you Max, as we were talking before, my day job was traveling a lot, I lived on an airplane and what was most important to me was satisfying our clients and helping them build out their talent strategy. And so I was basically traveling around trying to be in person, getting to know them and their businesses. And so that has switched a bit here now.

Max: Well, we have so many hours in the day now. I understand that you're investing some of this time that you got back from all that traveling around the world, into helping your community and working with the University of Texas in Arlington.

Susan: Yeah. So I felt one of the ways to give back is to share those experiences and what I'm learning right now in my day job and the real life experiences. And I just feel like they are really enjoying that. They love hearing, you know, balancing the book work if you will, with the real life application.

Max: Yeah i could make a nice segway on the world of recruitment. Hearing more about the stories and about the book, hearing more about the candidate than about the resume, which is something I believe we must move away from in recruitment. Move away from the resume. Tell us. How, how did you end up in talent acquisition professor?

Susan: Well, it just happened naturally. I mean, I didn't say, Oh I'm going to go into talent acquisition. I am just a sponge for learning. And at ADP, I was given the opportunity to really keep learning and building and learning more about what they offered from a talent product perspective, and ourselves, and our services. And I started off in talent management and then it just naturally evolved to talent acquisition. And with the model that we follow which is attracting, engaging, and retaining.

So many times I'll have clients that'll say, well let's talk about our turnover. And everything comes back to let's look at the whole ecosystem. So let's start from the beginning and come all the way through the talent life cycle. And so I just started expanding my conversation and learning more. I'm so very thrilled to be talking about it today,

Max: I've been asked by a number of companies to look at retention and you know, for me, it's the ultimate success metric for the company. Are you a people-centered company? It should be measured by whether you can retain your people or not. And the unfortunate thing is you cannot really give that number, the retention number, you cannot let any one department own it. Because it really starts even at sourcing. If you source a wide enough audience, a big enough talent pool, then you'll be able to be a lot more picky and find people who have a better culture fit, which should certainly increase retention, logically. So, I think these arguments are a little hard for me to carry on the sell side. To say that recruitment helps retention and sourcing helps retention. But I do believe that fundamentally and in principle.

Susan: Well, it's interesting, how did you know of the email I was just looking at before our conversation, because I had just got a request from a client that wants to have a turnover workshop. And that seems to come up quite frequently. And you know, in my role, my goal is to help our clients. So I'm external focused and help them with a lot of advice and insights. So I'm not really necessarily executing on a product, but it's looking at the whole people process and technology and in my role in product agnostic. So when the clients are coming and asking for help, like hey I've got a pain point of turnover. It's like exactly what you said. It's really having to dig in and look at the bigger picture. And where is it going to, where's it really coming from?

And I'd say about two or three years ago, our team got together and we were hearing a pattern of turnover retention coming up and we're like, well we just need to start at the basics. What is it? What data do you need? And then we actually put a diagnostic together and it sounds really fancy when you say, well, I put a diagnostic together, but I honestly started going to key stakeholders. And businesses and saying, what data are you gathering? What are you measuring? And start pulling this together. And I hate to use the word HCM, but it truly is. It was a full human capital management list of questions. And I said, hey, here's a great list of questions. That you as a recruiter, or you as an HR leader can take to your CEO and say, if you say no to any of these questions, then you don't have a comprehensive turnover retention strategy.

And so I just kind of knew exactly what it said. I started adding more and more questions to it. And it's wider. It was outside of recruiting, it went to performance, it went to communications, it went to marketing, and they all have an impact. So, anyway, I ended up with a good tool out of it.

Max: Yeah, the diagnostic, you can repurpose it?

Susan: I sure can.

Max: I mean, with a PhD you can turn any worksheet into a methodology. Right? There is a way to commercialize that for sure. And I want to go back to that word you used earlier, talent activation, is that a new fancy word for onboarding?

Susan: Not really. Talent activation is really activating talent. So it's really engaging the talent, checking in, keeping their productivity up. It's really a connection to right now. To the resiliency that we're seeing with the pandemic. So as a leader, how are you able to react to adverse situations? So how you act, you activate yourself.

And it's also how managers are working with team members, other individuals or subordinates. To really engage them and keep them aligned to their goals! So that's a whole nother piece of it, which it does. You know, there's acquisition, activation and management. You’ve got to love how we put all these words to things, these new names.

Max: I'll stay with onboarding. I've got enough words in my vocabulary, but thanks for that. Let's go back in time a little bit. And, well actually, on the top of retention, and the fact that it's in your inbox right now makes me wonder. Are companies preparing for 2021 thinking? Well, we kept our staff in 2020 because everybody was holding onto their seats and holding on for their life. And we'll have a wave of, you know, we have to be ready for a wave of turnover insurance. In the coming months you know, do you feel that, going on in the market that there's a little bit of anticipation and fear in that direction? Or is that just in my head?

Susan: No, I don't think it's in your head. I think it's a very real situation. I mean, I think that you have the companies that you've, you know, that are not sure when to bring staff back, so they don't want to have to furlough or lay off again. So you've had some of those companies that have had to go through those situations. And then I was just working with, you know, one of our newest RPO clients that can't hire fast enough! Because they just can't find it.

They're actually, you know, doing some of the COVID testing, but in sense their sourcing is extremely high, yet being able to keep and retain, you know, back to your turnover and where your retention is, and I even mentioned onboarding. So how do you get all of that lined up so quickly? You scale up so quickly and do not want to lose somebody and still need to keep that whole candidate experience high.

Because somewhere it's going to fall through the cracks, so I think that piece is... But there, I definitely think that there is a sense of some folks that are very worried, right? So you have people that are wanting to keep their job, but yet I'm seeing some people, you know, go ahead and say maybe business isn't where, I want it to be. And I'm okay to jump. I'm going to be a job hopper right now, but I still think there's some unpredictability to headcount needs, where some businesses are fluctuating and that can cause a little bit of a roller coaster.

And, you know, I even saw it with our own organization where some departments were busy. So people, you know, employees took a temporary job-hop over to another department to leverage their skills. So it definitely is a little bit uncertain, but that cloud. That fearfulness. I still think that's still there.

Max: Yeah. That's going to stay with us even post election. I think there's still a lot of uncertainty in the market. But, I mean the recovery in Q3 has been very strong in North America anyway. And I guess that ADP should have a strong 2021, on the RPO business and technology, of course. So, you've got your finger on the pulse of the economy. Can you give us, our listeners, some insights on how the wind is blowing?

Susan: Well, you know, we do a lot of labor economy, market calls and so forth. Of course we're known for the unemployment report, but we also have something called the, workplace vitality report, which you know, is a quarterly, real time data or site, If you want to call it that, where you can quarterly know what's happening with compensation. What's happening with unemployment? Is it a job hopper market? What's the hourly rate? What's happening part-time or full-time? And so by that, I'm definitely up to date on what's happening with the market, the trends, you know, really month to month, I look at this and how I can slice the data in different ways.

But I think that's only one piece. I think the other piece that I look at to kind of know what's going on in the market is, what am I hearing from our clients? And, what kind of work are they asking for? And one of the biggest things that I am seeing is just keep it simple. Like since a lot of people are trying to make it easier for the candidate, for their employees and not trying to disrupt or come up with a lot of new stuff right now, new projects.

But in doing this. They're trying to look at cost containment, process optimization, and really trying to say, how can I make my recruiting team as efficient as I can? And still have that high impact candidate experience and get that quality candidate. And so a lot of times I honestly have been spending a lot of time, right now, in workshops going through processes, looking at the current state, looking at the future state and saying, what are some best practices and recommendations to make things better?

Max: And you know, I mean balance of what do you keep in house and what do you outsource in town's acquisition. I think that there's always going to be pressure on both sides, on both ends of the spectrum. And you'll have some mild fluctuations that are driven by the economy.

So in 2021, probably it'll be a little bit more outsourced than usual, simply because people are a little fearful of hiring in house. But there's never going to be a state of balance or a winner takes all kind of situation. There will always be that tension, right? Between the two.

Susan: Well a lot about it, I think, is how open-minded you are and how educated you are to know just what your options are? You know, If I was the CPO five years ago for the people of our chief HR office, I may create my HR team very differently than I would today. And knowing, you know, what are those outsourcing options? And many times it's like, just give us a chance, let us run a business case for you. Let me give you a couple of menu options and then figure out where in your culture it's going to work best.

Sometimes you just need to get somebody who's got the open mind to say, I'm willing to change my structure or change the... Or it doesn't even have to be all or nothing. It can be a hybrid approach. One of the clients I'm working with now, they have a recruiting staff and they have some outsourced. To me, it's just, you know, don't stress yourself out, right? Like you can go at this at baby steps too, right?

Max: Yeah. Yeah. And, in this model and, you know, thinking about this customer that you just mentioned, you're referring to us. Is there a division of tasks or what's an ideal division of tasks for a mid-sized customer view?

I'm curious because I see RPO is coming in for executive level hiring volume, hiring for digital sourcing. And I suppose the area which remains in-house then is most precious for the companies to retain. Is the onboarding experience where the closer you become to being an employee, the more, that experience needs to be in-house and managed internally, I suppose. And that would mean like the front of the funnel is perhaps easier to outsource, but maybe that's just a wrong thing to do. It's not the business I'm in anyway.

Susan: Well, and if you just look at the market right now with unemployment, you know, of course recruiting teams are getting more sophisticated, right? But employees we're finding or having reluctance to change jobs. And so some may be leading for 25 cents an hour or not so sure anymore that their jobs are gonna exist.

So, you know, now when they're comparing their employment to maybe some security, that is causing a little bit of a challenge right now. So I feel like knowing your compensation... I get a lot of questions from folks that, you know, from accounts that are saying, I don't have really good compensation, pay structure. I don't have benchmarking data. Help me figure this out. And a lot of times we'll just say, well, either two things are happening. One, they're truly off on wages but they need to do the analysis piece. Or secondly, it's an easy thing to say, well, it's wages, right? It's compensation. And I really need to look at our benefits, or I need to really look and dig a root cause analysis.

And so, you know, I find a lot of times where I'm helping them find, how do I get good real time data? That's, you know, is not survey data, right? From somebody else to know what your compensation should be. And then also helping them to dig deeper just to ask them so thoughtful questions. Because many times they're not even doing exit interviews. They're just hearing it by hearsay cause they can't keep up or they don't have a consistent process to get that feedback. So that's just another way of saying this. Another thing I'm hearing a little bit about.

Max: And, when it comes to this compensation data, I suppose the ADP is in a very unique place, right? Where you have more data than anybody else.

Susan: Right!

Max: I mean, this data is private. I'm sure. But if you don't put the name of their customer to it, you can analyze it, right?

Susan: Right. So we have two things that have been coming out. We have compensation, benchmarking and then also pay equity. And you know, what we're able to do is take the 30 million employees and 90,000 organizations and take that pay data and aggregate it, make it anonymized and be able to have it filtered so we can get that data to be able to say, here's what the what your benchmarks are based on your industry, your size, and, you know, be able to run that. That's been very helpful. And the second piece that's trending now for me is, you know, we had pay equity. We created that several years ago, but now because of what's happened within the market is that the whole diversity equity inclusion topic. And now all of a sudden that's been a whole other elevated topic.

Max: And this year, I mean, it's gotten even more intention than usual. And where North America leaves, the rest of the world follows, for a lot of things related to systems. I've read and I could be wrong, but I've read that more than half of the world's enterprise software is purchased out of North America.

And that includes most probably, recruiting software. And, and so, doctor I've heard a lot of companies complain about having to build systems, which are very US centric, which asks all of this data, needed to be asked to be in compliance with the US equal opportunity law. And that it's creating sort of artificial barriers for candidates outside of the US where some of these questions are not required. Have you come across these kinds of queries yourself? What is your recommendation for companies who want to be on one hand compliance in North America?

Susan: You have asked a very difficult question and I could write a book and then get the answers to you. And maybe I'll be a millionaire, but, I definitely think that. Being able to have technology that is simple to use that can be used across a lot of boundaries definitely key. And I also believe that you have to play to all the different compliance rules, you know, one of the things I know that we've been looking at is just, this is very new, you know, it's a very hot in discussion right now. It is, you know, diversity dashboards.

And what information do you, and can you even share, right? And then how do you include unconscious bias, into this, you know, inclusion sentiment and what do you do with self identification? You know, all this is out of my expertise, but it's definitely playing into it.

And the other piece is where do you have the human connection too? Where do you have the human in this whole candidate experience? And when do you start to leverage your artificial intelligence, your texting? You know, all that experience with your ATS platform. There's a lot happening there for sure!

Max: And these tools do help diversity because they expand the pool of people who can get in touch with you and, you know, just make it easier to be able to apply. And I think that ultimately serves the purpose of, expanding the town pool and creating opportunity for people you wouldn't normally consider, or that the hiring manager wouldn't consider.

But well, my 2 cents is that there are more demands coming out of North America than any other market when it comes to capturing this kind of data and protecting against you know, let's say, setting up rules to protect the employer against liability, and it creates inefficiencies, outside of North America.

And so it may be. You know, with the internet global markets being large enough now for any company, including ADP, maybe time to consider having, and implementations and different systems. One for global, one for North America to optimize the candidate experience.

Susan: You're helping me with the product roadmap here. But you know, I do a lot of speaking and research around the remote workforce and the work from anywhere, the WFA. And since you mentioned kind of across borders, I think that is also the bigger question. And you talked about increasing your candidate pool and your talent pipeline. Well, you know, that whole diversity piece is definitely a part of it.

But also right now, I can't tell you the amount of conversations I've had with organizations. You're trying to do business cases right now to say, help me know from an ROI perspective if I have a certain part of my population that stays remote, or I phase them in longer, and I know you've probably heard this you're smart and I can see you now saying, I've heard this before! But just truly the trend of what it could do to getting your top talent.

Because, I mean, I just saw a posting the other day and it said New York or something, and I'm like, well, do you have to be there in New York, but why do you put New York? If you don't really have to be in New York? Why is the job description saying New York? So either. You know, clearly communicate that you're shifting or the jobs descriptions just can't keep up with it.

Max: It's almost like the Y2K bug, you know, where they're like, we can't update the machine. But most ATS’s and job boards and CRM’s. They don't know how to list a job as remote. I mean, I should know. We just built that in ourselves just this year, when we've been hiring remote workers for years. But it just doesn't compute.

Susan: But I really hope, in a positive light that this truly would allow people who are interested in positions seriously, and for whatever reason don't want to move. Or they feel like now that, you know, you've tested the times, you're like, hey I've done this! Do I have the networks within the organization? Do I really need to be physically present in that city? And I hope that you at least have a conversation, right? A strategic conversation that somebody wouldn't eliminate me, but please still consider me. I hope that continues to broaden and happen and evolve.

Max: Talking about the work from home and compensation to our areas of expertise for you Susan, I don't know if you saw the news, but Reddit this week announced that they're going to eliminate cost of living payment compensation. And basically what this means is it doesn't matter if you live in, you know, San Francisco or in Idaho, you're going to get paid the same. You know, we're going to pay you based on performance only, because everybody's working from home anyway. Are you seeing other employers follow that model where we'll pay you the same regardless, and we're going to stop, you know, pegging salaries, on cost of living?

Susan: I personally have not seen a big trend in that yet, but I definitely, I tell you Max, you must know my calendar. I've been trying to talk to our compensation director because I'm, you know, trying to get a little bit of a handle on... we had essential employees, you know, paying hazard pay and all these different types of pay differences that we've been going through.

And I think compensation's going to get challenged. So I am all for rethinking our processes. Don't just assume everything's going to be the same, you know I love how people say, when we go back or, you know, whatever this new normal is, the new error that you reset and you rethink, you just don't go back. You actually can do things different. And I'm a proponent of that for sure.

Max: I'd like to ask you some practical tips on how employers and recruiters can stand out in today's markets. We talked about the fact that people are holding still a little bit of this time but clearly the employment market has reheated and companies are hiring again.

And so there's going to be more offers, coming on and a lot of choices. What do you think are the defining traits of a winning talent acquisition strategy as we're entering the end of 2020 coming into next year? What are your recommendations for our audience?

Susan: Well, you know, standing out and in a competitive market is always important and I always believe how people are treated during this time, they're going to remember. And if my manager cared for me, if our company did the right thing, they're going to remember. And I think that ties back to culture. And culture I can see is going to continue to be very important from a recruiting talent acquisition position.

So I would really think about the bigger impact you can have with your recruiting strategy when it comes to culture. The second thing I would think about is, you know, there is a shift in evolving skill sets. So think about how you were investing in the development of your people. So normally we don't see those two necessarily two connected.

But I think when it goes from organic growth, do I invest in you and provide you the training or source the talent? But a shift, definitely an evolving skill set, you know, ADP did some research and a few weeks ago they shared that one in five positions. The way they are today will not exist. So one in five, it's like 22%. So if jobs are shifting that often that they're not even gonna exist, keeping up with the skillsets is definitely going to be a challenge in how important development is. And the last one I'll leave you with is that the focus on branding, you know, around safety and employees first.

So that is going to still be very critical in the upcoming months, to focus on building out that brand and the value proposition. That the recruiters all have the same message and just, what are you doing? Is it through videos? However, you're going to communicate that.

I've seen a lot of good companies that have been doing a great job of saying, you know, this is what the environment looks like we're going to share it with you through video ahead of time. We're going to give you vignettes, whatever it is, but we're going to give you a snapshot of what it is for you. And that's how you're going to keep me either as a customer or even as an employee. So those would be the few tips I would have. What do you think Max?

Max: Well, I think I've got some work to do. I certainly haven't communicated enough on safety and health, internally. I'm a bit of a Maverick myself and I have not been very precautious. I hope I didn't offend too many people. I certainly think that's, you know, personal health and safety is mostly a personal responsibility. But obviously the world is changing faster than I am. And I think your rights, employers would be well advised to follow your tips on that one.

And of course to continue to invest in the employees, invest in your culture, all strong themes. So, well thank you very much, Dr. Hanold for spending a little bit of time with us.

Susan: I have enjoyed it!

Max: Thank you! How do people get in touch with you?

Susan: Sure, they can connect with me on LinkedIn, Susan Hanold, or through Twitter app, Susan Hanold. And happy to be a resource to anybody if they've got any follow up questions, Max.

Max: Fantastic. Well, I hope we reconnect, sometime next year under a new world! And, well, have fun today. I think today is election day. So I'll be watching the results at the American club here in Hong Kong, a few hours from now.

Susan: It's going to be a long night!

Max: Entertaining for sure!

Susan: Yes. Well, thank you so much, Max.

Max: All right. Bye-bye.

That was Dr. Susan Hanold, from ADP and their strategic advisory group. Lots to unpack in this interview. Lots of great tips, notably, how do we adjust our messaging in 2020 and next year around the employee culture? And how does it take care of safety and employees first? I hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll come back for more. Subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast, and please share.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm Max, your host. And today on the show, we have someone from the other side of the table. We normally invite people here from the talent acquisition side. But somebody did something very unique on the other side, on the candidate side, which got my attention and the attention of a lot of other folks. Miss Rosie Maharjan, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Welcome to the show Rosie!

Rosie: Hi, glad to be here.

Max: We are glad to have you! Rosie, I think you'll talk about this better than I will. Tell us about this chatbot you built, you know, my company builds chatbots for big brands like Walmart and McDonald's and does recruitment automation for all these big brands, but we've never built a bot for the candidates and the job seeker yet. So I'm interested I mean, I think our audience would be interested in seeing how you came up with that.

Rosie: Yeah, definitely. So I built a chatbot that interacts with recruiters that come onto my website when they come on to see my design portfolio. And so the chatbot essentially goes through the questions that our recruiter would be curious about in the first place or what they usually ask me in the first round.

And so my assumption was that it would save us both time, and that it kind of goes through what I'm looking for in my next role. Where I'm at? like being you know, younger looking for an associate role. And save the time of people who are looking for senior designers, or looking for something else. And kind of get more clarity of what type of candidate I am, and what I'm looking for as well as really highlight my skills and my creativity in a unique way.

I got the idea because I came across conversational UI, being a conversational UI designer on a job application I saw, and I wanted to look into what conversational AI was. And so I kind of experimented with this chat bot and I had a question that was a little bit controversial. I don't think it should be controversial, but it basically was a little filter at the beginning, before the recruiter could interact with my bot. It asked if they believe that black lives matter, which is a huge human rights issue that's happening right now. And If the recruiter said, no, it would politely tell them that I would not be a good culture fit. And then if they did score that sort of a filter, then they were able to interact with my bot.

Max: Hold on one second, because I've got an international audience and black lives matter has resonated with the entire world, but perhaps not so with the same intensity as it has in North America. Walk us through it.

The recruiter would start interacting with you and asking your bot about the Rosie background and then... Does your bot have a name? Or is it Rosie the bot?

Rosie: I just call it Rosie bot.

Max: Okay. Rosie bot will ask the employer: What do you think about black lives matter? Is that right?

Rosie: Yeah. Essentially, in the beginning, the first question the bot will ask is, are you a recruiter? And if they say yes, then it asks, do you believe black lives matter?

Max: Boom! First question.

Rosie: First question because, yeah, I don't want to waste anyone's time. You know, like if you want to see if you're a culture fit or not, you want to make sure that they're fighting for social justice and equality. And so, if that's not a priority or that seems too political, then I don't know. I don't think I would be a good fit and I don't want to pretend like I would be. And so it was kind of bold.

Max: Obviously it works on two levels. One you're screening them out. And two, you get a lot of attention with that Rosie bot, because it was right in the heat of a strong political discussion on black lives matter. So I imagine you got a lot of interest, you made some new friends like me.

Rosie: Yeah. I was trying to be more transparent than controversial, you know, I just wanted to be like, just straight up. These are things that are important to me. These are values that I have as a designer that will be emitted in my work. And I want to make sure that I'm in a company that also strongly has those values.

Max: Well, I love that. I think we are dealing with a world where there is more and more data. So from the recruiter standpoint, from an employer, they get more candidates now than they ever have before. They don't know what to do with it. And for you, I mean, in a way you're a job seeker and you can update us on what kind of job you're looking for, maybe our audience can connect you with opportunities. But I suppose there's also hundreds, or maybe thousands of positions to consider. So many maket places to choose from. The volume can, I suppose, become overwhelming. Is that how you're experiencing it?

Rosie: Sort of, yeah. I think the way that you have to apply for jobs now is so different, I think, than it used to be. You can't just hit the apply button. That's like going in blindly, you usually would have like an internal referral or something, and that would help you.

But I think that kind of, especially for young designers and new grads, it makes you seem like, ah you just want a job! Like you don't want to just settle for something. Where in reality, I think we have the power to be a little bit more selective about our job, and make sure that we are somewhere that we feel like we are making a difference.

And so that's kind of the filter I wanted to create there and make sure that I am somewhere that holds those values, and where it does make that impact. And I think it really worked for the most part. Whoever contacts me or whatever job I get, I know that they have passed that bar! Like it's not a conversation we have to have.

Max: Yeah. Oh I get that but, can you imagine this forum, this conversational AI form... I mean, most people are not going to get thousands of recruiters to come to your websites to talk to your bots. That's a stretch. But potentially it could happen that you would build an AI that's smart enough that it could, you know, it could handle a first level interview. You could have two bots talking to each other, and they would come to an agreement. And you wouldn't reveal everything until you meet somebody in person. But before that you'd have that first filter happening.

But in order for that to happen, we'd have to have a lot of volume in, on both sides where you'd have to have maybe thousands of jobs talking to your bots before you get just the right match, the perfect culture match that would come to you. But still today for you as a job seeker is it a lot of going through, you know, one job listing at a time? One marketplace at a time? Or have you been able to use that, all the fame that you've gone with that bot on Twitter to generate random job opportunities?

Rosie: Yeah, it was like that in the beginning where I would have to kind of apply. Hand by hand, you know, make sure you have a cover letter and everything for each place, but yeah, with the bot, it helped a lot with standing out. I would say. And even people who didn't see the Tweet or didn't know about this thing going viral, like they can still go to my website and they see that. And it's a really creative and unique thing to have on there that shows a bit of your personality, and like, the way that you work.

And so it's been a lot easier because now instead of me having to apply to a lot of places, people are reaching out to me. Like I've had a lot of companies and startups reach out to me and either be like, you know, do you want to interview with us? Do you want an internal referral for this position? Like we're hiring this. And that's been really great because it kind of easies the stress for me from trying to apply to whatever I can, to like having a lot of options of people who are really recruiting me as a junior. So that's been great!

Max: Fantastic. Yeah. Startups don't care so much about how junior you are, as long as you get it done. And you're showing that you could. Where can people go? Where's that website you're describing? Where you show your portfolio.

Rosie: Yeah. Honestly, if you just look up my name on the SEO, it's going to be the first thing that shows up. It's just my name. It's rosiemaharjan.com and it's going to be right when you enter the website, it's on the bottom right corner.

Max: Yeah. And then for those who are online now, I really recommend you go see that website. It's engaging. it's got movements. It's got some dancing. If I remember correctly. And some animation and it really makes you want to work with Rosie. So you're looking for design work?

Rosie: Yes. I'm looking for specifically a product designer role or a UX designer role. And yeah, I would say I'm pretty well-rounded and I'm looking for a job that is pretty well rounded. Not just focused on design, but the whole aspect of everything. And that provides a challenge as well as a mentorship!

Max: Cool. I'm sure you will have a pick of the litter, as they say. The conversational AI designer roles that you've found online. Are those in consideration today? Do you see yourself building chatbots in the future or you're looking for something more visual?

Rosie: I really love the process of building a chat bot. I mean, just the way you have to mentally map through everything and think about anticipating use needs, thinking about what they're going to say and how you want to create that dialogue. As well as kind of working with the code a little bit to make that happen and doing the research side of it. But I do think at the end of the day, I'm very much still a visual designer. That's where my passion lies. And so I really love this product design. It combines the visual with all of the research and the mind mapping. I'm looking for a role that does have all of that. So I think product design is a perfect job for me, and I'm really excited to see that. I think conversational AI is also really cool, but I do want to take it a step further with visual design.

Max: Yeah, I get that. I think it's very intricate work. To work through every scenario on a chatbot and there's the visual component. It's lesser, even though increasingly, you can have gifs and videos and sound and make it richer.

And certainly platforms like Typeform have also enabled designers to get very creative around the conversational UI. But it's not the same as having a whiteboard, let's say.

Rosie: Yeah!

Max: To bring it back to the political spectrum a little bit, not that it's my area of expertise, but this filter, we could call it a filter. Right? So you're filtering the wrong employers out. I suppose, in the US it is expected for every company to have a position on these topics. Right? And to have like a public position.

Rosie: Sort of though. Not quite, because in terms of other political issues. It's not like every company is gonna be out there having an opinion out there. And it's actually, you know, kind of frowned upon to talk about politics in the workplace. But with this black lives matter movement it's less political, I would say, and kind of more about a human rights issue.

And so that's where the line is really divided. And in America, there were a tons of protests. I mean, it was in the news everywhere, especially in May, with the death of George Floyd and the rise of police brutality. And so with all of that, the issue is to just become more and more pressing with the election coming up and everything.

And so now we're at a point where maybe it wasn't like this a few years ago, but now we are definitely at the roadblock of either you have a say in this or you don't. It's not the same issue as like marijuana. It's about human rights! And so either a company has put up a BLM statement or they have not. So that was a huge thing that took over social media as well during May at summertime.

Max: I mean I did not put out a statement for my company. But you know, of course we're against police brutality, and of course I believe black lives matter!

But i also still see it as a polarizing issue that is going to be a distraction from my main business, you know? So that's why for me, it never came up. To be honest. Except from some people in marketing who thought it would be a good idea to put out a statement.

Rosie: Yeah. It's definitely. It's definitely more of like companies showing their support, but there are issues even if a company did show their support. Like Apple, for instance, posted a lot of BLM statements. And then I had a designer at Apple, reach out to me by email and send me this huge thing of like, this is ideological bigotry! And like sent me a bunch of paragraphs about that. And so it was like, wow an employee at Apple sent me that! So it's like, they are saying that, but not emitting it in their hiring practices.

That's one example of that. Where it's kind of more performative than actually doing it. So I think it speaks louder to actually be doing that in your hiring and make sure you're not having racial bias in hiring, than put out a performative statement and then not do anything else about it! It's really easy to say black lives matter and then walk away.

Max: Yeah well, the discrimination discussion on eliminating bias in the recruitment is one that has been going on for a long time in our space. And no one has really necessarily solved the issue because AI on one hand could be built to increase systemic injustices, or it could be used to, you know, equalize every candidate. And there are some people who even... Some software where it erases the family name or the first name and last name of the candidates in order to avoid the recruiter anticipating, you know, which ethnicity and which cultural background the candidate is coming from.

And I've also spoken with the recruiters who believe that. The best is to meet people face to face because when you do, you see their humanity. You know, like you and I are having a video call now. And, you know, even if I had a mental picture of a candidate who was, you know, a different size, shape and color, then eventually, you know, if i meet somebody face to face. I would get over that and I would start to get over it.

It's a very complex issue. And one that I tiptoe in very cautiously because I don't have any solutions, other than, let's build a recruitment process, which can be as democratic as possible and open the gates to as many candidates as possible. And then give them some questions that are job-related. It's a complex issue for our space. Any thoughts on that?

Rosie: It's a really complex issue because it's on one hand, like the AI itself is racial bias. And as we get more in technology and maybe as the recruitment process gets more evolved with automated systems, there is this risk of, like facial recognition systems, for instance, like there's not enough data on people of color with facial recognition. Maybe that might come into play with recruitment if they ever use that. And just a lot of issues with that. And then on top of that with recruiters, you know, there might be this unconscious racial bias in their hiring practice, as well as, just making sure you're not hiring them for the right reasons.

I think there's a lot of tokenization that happens with hiring practices sometimes, where maybe they just have to fill in this many black people, this many Asian people at our company. Instead of actually making sure that there's a supportive environment for people of color, and making sure that it's a comfortable place and that they feel supported, rather than just filling in a quota.

Max: Yeah!Outside the US there are markets where it's still very commonplace to have, you know, job ads that are asking for a specific ethnicity, you know, in Asia that happens quite often as well. So, I don't know, it's less prevalent outside of the US, these discussions. And it makes me wonder how the US is going to overcome, you know, the current state of tension where it's at. It does not seem to be getting better.

Rosie: The US it's a lot more diverse than a lot of other countries too. And there's a history of oppression there. And that's I think one of the areas that's not really being acknowledged enough. Like there was this whole Jim Crow laws, that created a lot of marginalized communities that because they were being suppressed in these ways they're, you know, in poor communities.

That's something that's like another factor. And that's why they're actions like affirmative action taking place. But a lot of people would be like, what's wrong with white people? Like that's how a lot of people see the issue rather than seeing the history behind it, and understanding why those initiatives are important.

Max: Yeah, I would correct you on the fact that the history of oppression is limited to the US and there's history of the question. Of course, slavery is, you know, pre proceeded, the creation of the US and there are oppressed minorities in every country. So I don't think it's a country specific issue but anyway we certainly, I can tell you, the world is watching and trying to learn from the mistakes that others are making.

And I think you've certainly helped to advance the discussion and help to rethink the way candidates should be treated. Where the candidates are the ones who should be asking the questions just as much. They should be validating culture fit just as much. And hopefully soon, you know, millions of job seekers will get inspired from what you've done and build these AI so that they can find a place where they feel welcome, at home, with a good culture fit. I think, you know, for me, what I loved most about your initiative was the fact that you took it into your own hands! So congrats for that!

Rosie: Thank you. Yeah. I hope it empowers other people, other job seekers to feel like they can take power back, take back the narrative and make sure that they're working somewhere, that they feel comfortable and good about.

Max: Yeah. Super. All right. Well, we already have your website. Is that the best way for our audience to contact you if they want to know more about your work?

Rosie: Yeah, definitely. And I wrote a blog post about how I created it and everything too. It's on the UX collective and the next web, I think if you just search Rosie Maharjan chatbot, it's going to pop up!

Max: I'll put that on the links. And we'll share that with our audience. Thank you so much, Rosie, for sharing your experience on building chatbots from the job seeker or the candidate side.

Rosie: Yeah, definitely!

Max: I hope you enjoyed my interview with Rosie, a job seeker who decided to take matters into her own hands and to create a conversational interface that would validate if there was a good culture fit between her and her future employer.

I do think that there is inspiration there for both job seekers and for employers because cultural fit is probably the most important thing when you're dealing with a large sample and when you're about to enter into a relationship, that could be very important. And for many years, cultural fit is not something that you could adjust for later on.

So thank you, Rosie. I hope you enjoyed this and if you've got more examples of innovation happening on either candidates or recruiter side. I'd love to have them on the show. So please send me a note at hello@talkpush.com and subscribe to our recruitment hackers podcast if you enjoyed this, we'll have more to come.

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Welcome to the recruiting hackers podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show. I normally talk to people from the practitioner side. But today I have the pleasure, the awkward pleasure of talking to what may be perceived by others as a peer or competitor as the chief of staff for Wade and Wendy.

Wade and Wendy is one of the early companies that got into the conversational AI for recruitment space and I first heard about this company, I think five years ago at the very beginning. Dave Mekelburg is the chief of staff and joining us today for chats, which will be a little different and a little bit more about, I suppose, about chatbots. Right Dave? If that's okay with you. Welcome to the show!

Dave: Great to be here. Always excited to talk about chatbots. I don't get to do it enough. Especially in this context. And I will say, you know, I cheat a little bit. So I'm our chief of staff and also our head of people. So I am technically a practitioner.

I do oversee our recruiting and hiring. So I can speak a little bit to that. So I won't be a total foreigner, but I'm very excited to talk about chatbots and talk about, you know, what's happening in the recruitment mission: “hacking”.

Max: Awesome. Were you the guy who came up with a job title conversational designer?

Dave: Oh, that's a good question!

Max: I picked that out from a blog post. By your CEO. And I saw that conversational designer and I fell in love with it so much that I immediately posted for that job, myself at Talkpush, you know, within a week. And I started collecting applications. We hire a bunch now, and it has taken off, and I always thought maybe you guys came up with the term.

Dave: Oh, I would love to take credit for that. Let me think where we first probably encountered it. So there were some early, going way back in time, like PullString, which was like a Pixar backed, conversation design platform. We had met their team and they had somebody, they call it a conversation designer. I think Apple, in Siri, I think a lot of this Siri team was starting to use that phrase. But you know, certainly when we posted that job it got some ice, because people were like, conversation designer? I've never heard of that.

Max: Yeah. We got the same thing. And I also... One of my heads of conversational design, she said that when she changed her job title from product manager to conversational designer, the volume of interest she got on LinkedIn also showed up. Considerably. So it's, it's not a good retention strategy, maybe a good hiring strategy. Conversational designer. Great place. A great way to advertise, but also not a great retention strategy because people will come out and try to hire them away from you.

And so maybe if I'm lucky, I'll find out who came up with that term. And I'll be on a goose chase, Dave I'll start looking at the people at Siri or at Apple to see if I can find the person who coined that. But yeah. Definitely chatbots have been around for longer than we've been around.

Dave: That's definitely true, but they've, It's the rate of change... And I think you've probably seen us over the last few years. The rate of change has been astronomical and just in terms of the penetration, the familiarity from the average person that's interacting with the chatbot. When we first started, we were doing user testing and, you know, having people chat with the bot about work. Like talk to me about what it is you want to do and what it is you'd like to do.

And it was such a novel experience for people. And now, you know, really up and down the... You know, across the country, in every corner. Everyone has some experience with a chabot, whether it's, you know, through a bank teller or through a customer service bot, you know, the depth of penetration has gotten beyond people that are interested in technology or people that are interacting with, you know, the hot new FinTech startup, things like that.

And really gotten into the hands of the average person so that, you know, when we started, we built so much into the experience to make sure that this was intuitive and, it didn't scare people that, you know, might have some emotional, anxiety about talking to a bot about AI and automation in their lives. And get them to put, you know, trust in helping us get them the right opportunity and we're in between them and, you know, the right job.

And that's the responsibility that we take really seriously. And we had to build an experience where people would trust and believe that we would guide them appropriately. Given that it's a technology experience. And I do think over the last few years, that comfort, that familiarity just looking at the feedback that we get and things like, that there's way less like, wow I've never seen this before, too what a high quality conversational experience. We get feedback about the conversation design and that's just something that I think a few years ago, your average, you know, sales person and applying for an entry level job wasn't leaving feedback about our bots conversations design.

Max: I got completely thrown off. You're putting me back to 2018 or 2017, I was in India meeting with, I think it was Expedia, and I was presenting our technology chatbots for recruitment. And this gentleman, this engineer that I met started showering me with questions about natural language processing and how intensely have we mapped that out? And what is our taxonomy of not being tense? And I thought, where did I step into, I don't know, half the words he's using. But I haven't had that experience too often. Still most people they're past the point of, I've never worked with a chatbot before. They still feel like it's a bit of a dirty word, and that it may ruin the candidate experience, but obviously if they're working with us they are past that as well.

I guess it's a bit of a marketing job to change the perception and say, well it's not a chat bot, it's a conversational agent or, you know, it's a virtual agent, just different ways of renaming it. Our system is very much built on the handover to the human and having a hybrid experience, I think, and this is perception. I haven't really tested your product, but I think Wade and Wendy comes from a deep tech expertise where you have PhDs who work in your company. And so you're building intelligence that works without the human intervention, perhaps.

Dave: Yeah. So, the notion of human intervention is a really interesting one. So let me lay out for you, a little bit of how we approach this problem. Right? And where we started from. We started from a place of recruiting that we saw. Our CEO and founder is pretty adventurous for deep tech and wearables for manufacturing and farming, you know, deep marketing tech in the early days of that industry. His first job out of college was as a recruiter, and he felt that pain of I love the problem. And everyone at our organization to a T, it's something that we screened for in our hiring process, is really excited about solving the hiring problem. Which is getting people the right opportunity as fast as humanly possible.

And that experience kind of started it, you know, it is what bubbled this up. And there's so much wasted space when it comes to the recruiting process. So much time spent looking up email addresses and a dozen tools. And you know, spending all your time on LinkedIn, crafting the perfect email, you know, having the same 15 minute conversation over and over again, only to find out that the candidate, actually moved two years ago and they're not really, you know, they're not open to working in your location, all this kind of running in place.

And you're never sure when you're a human recruiter connecting with a candidate, if this is the right fit. And as a candidate, you're not sure, like is it worth my time to even connect with this recruiter? And you have this kind of core problem in place, that we wanted to take that deep tech and automation approach to, which was, we want to clear out all of the road recruiting tasks that get in the way of humans coming together. So, when you say human intervention, our goal is to have as little human intervention in the bot, the chat experience itself. So, you know, in terms of what we do, our platform helps automate. And for an enterprise company it helps automate three core functions. Sourcing. So identifying a candidate for a role, engaging them in an informational interview. Getting them excited about the opportunity, a few basic qualifying questions, and if they're a fit, bringing them into the hiring process. Screening, so somebody applies to a job. They go through a first round, deep dive interview with our bot, all kinds of written texts.

And the last is coordination. So scheduling, messaging, you know, don't forget your interview is tomorrow at 1:00 PM that kind of work. Our goal is to do all that. So recruiters can come in and see, okay, this candidate is excited, they check off all the boxes. Here's the AI recommendation that is leading to me to believe they're a fit. And I'm sure that this candidate is worth my time. Now let me as the recruiter, build a relationship, guide them to the hiring process and, you know, help get them across the finish line.

We do believe that ultimately recruiting is still always going to boil down to a human decision making process. On the other side of the equation, we have a candidate facing a bot. So Wendy works at the enterprise and Wade, we put out into the world as kind of an AI career guide, and you chat with Wade about what you've done in the past, what you'd like to do there, and personality tests. So you can get a real sense of who you like to work with, how you like to work, why you work?

Is it a matter of, I just want to grow my career in whatever way possible. I want to maximize my salary because I want to be able to take...

Max: Wait, wait… Is this Wendy or Wade?

Dave: This is Wade.

Max: I would actually open up more to a Wendy than I would to Wade but fine.

Dave: So this is one of the things. And, I'm going to ask you a question, which I hope is not too uncouth because, you know, I'm on your show. One of the things that we saw from the beginning, which we were not ready for was. There's something about when you know you're chatting with an AI personality, and I know for you and for us, that's key to the experience. Is letting people know, hey, this is not an immediate personality.

There is a level of trust, people don't feel judged. And not everyone wants to open up to it necessarily, but we had in our early days, we had candidates sharing stories that recruiters, you know, that have been doing it for 20 years had never heard. People surviving, you know, terrorist attacks, people going into depth about a personal tragedy that they had overcome, and how it related to the job that they were applying for. And these really deeply personal stories. And when we would conduct, you know, surveys and user interviews afterwards, there's this theme of, you know, I wasn't sure about this, but once I started talking, I realized, you know what? I can just tell my story. And I can get it out of the way, and there's no judgment.

And, you know, work is such a personal, specific context. Right? And I would love to hear from your side of the table, like what do you see when people are interacting with Talkpush? Like, how do they feel about it?

Max: Well, first, to your points, I think it's a good medium for getting stuff out that would be sensitive. So, an exit interview would be a good medium to use chatbots because, you know, you're talking to an AI. And so you can say things as they are a little bit more, perhaps than if you're talking to HR. Because HR can pull back your salary, but the AI is not gonna hold back, hopefully.

And on the matter of people opening up. We do, you know, very large volumes and most of it is you organizing, and sourcing, and screening, and coordinating. But really, we try to keep the sourcing bids, which is like asking questions directly to the job as lean as possible.

And then screening is also quite lean and this is the bulk of the volume. And we collect answers that are text, but also audio and video. So a video is the chance for people to express their creativity and we see some nice things there, of course. And on text it's usually a little bit faster, because people are on their mobile phones and they're not going to go on forever.

So yeah, that's how I would describe it, but there are different pools of population because we work in eight or ten countries that have different reactions. So in some markets, the people are more warm and they try to convince the bots to, you know, treat them nice and put them at the top of the list. Then there's more flowery language.

Dave: Yeah. I'll never forget. The first time we had, you know, Wendy the chat bot personality that is doing the interviewing basically, “she's the recruiter”. And, we had somebody go through an interview and at the end, you know, we have a little wave emoji and Wendy says, you know like, thank you so much the hiring, you know, the human hiring team will get back to you. Something like that, something from the early days, whatever it said. And people were responding, Thanks, Wendy. Hope you have a great day! And people know Wendy is a robot. We had like robot jokes in some of the early chats, like people knew. But you know, there's that notion of, well if I'm going to chat with it, I'm going to treat it like a, you know, like it's a thing, like I'm going to call it by its name. It's Wendy!

Max: We got the same thing. I mean, it got to the point of like, Oh I really hope that you're going to get back to me sooner because I really need this job because blah, blah, blah my daughter needs a surgery something like this.

Dave: Oh my goodness. Yeah...

Max: At the end of the application process. Which, you know, I mean it makes my heart bleed, of course, but the bot doesn't have a heart!

Dave: Sorry. There's nothing in our evaluation algorithm about, you know…

Max: Additional circumstances.

Dave: Yeah.

Max: All right. Well, let's switch gears a little bit, and maybe it sounds like we should have a separate podcast where we put our bot people with your bot people and sharp out stories. That would be fun. It would be for a different kind of audience, my audience are mostly TA professionals, and they could get a little bit bored. So, one thing that... We kind of started at the same time, right? So when did you launch a Wade and Wendy?

Dave: Wade and Wendy started in, you know, like on the couch, like a dollar and a dream idea in 2015. And we've been building ever since.

Max: Yeah. So around the same time, I may be a few months older, but we only did our first text bot in 2016. After our initial run was doing IVR voice collection over the phone.

Dave: Awesome.

Max: And sometimes people ask me, are you still a startup? And I don't know what to tell them because, yeah, the company is more mature five years in, but people want to work in a startup because it's cool and exciting. How do we keep it cool and exciting by, you know five years in, when we have not yet totally taken over the world? Certainly our numbers are very high and, you know, we have purpose around that, but yeah, what are your thoughts on how to keep it fresh? And I'm also curious, you know, to extend a little bit the conversation, on the retention number, which is too high.

Dave: Oh, interesting.

Max: Because I think like the company from 5 years ago did not need the same people as it does now.

Dave: Yep. So that's... What a question! I'll work backwards. I'll enter that first because I think that will help inform sort of, how do you keep it fresh? You know, I think. I completely agree with your point, which is that, you know, at every stage of a company you need different types of personality.

The reality on the ground was really different. When we were tackling an incredibly difficult idea in an immature tech space and market, you know, in 2015, 2016, really up until probably like early 2019. It was when we would talk to prospective clients, we had to explain what a chatbot was, what AI was, why HR was going to benefit from AI and what that even meant. When it came to the problems that we were solving and just the ability to manage a chat conversation and what that took. And understanding from a design and conversation perspective, through the hard tech of, you know, how do you build for the future with this?

It was so much open field, just an empty meadow with grass in every direction. And we had to walk forward. Right? And that is not for everybody, that level of uncertainty of rapid rate of change, of you know, chaos to a degree because I'll never forget when we went live with the first customer, because you know I'd been on a zero to one startup journey before, so I had a distinct memory then of what happened and how disruptive and special having a client like was to, you know, an organization that was, you know, under the hood, trying to solve these deep tech problems.

Certainly we had user testing all the time, but it's so different when you're actually live. So you know, the person that is engaged and excited, with that chaos, and certainly we do have a chunk of our core team that has been with us from those early days, you know, when you get to a level of, okay this is a thing, and there's still so much green grass and there's still so much to do, but there is a clear pathway and the people that we have now, you know, there are people that I think if they had joined the organization four or five years ago, it would have been miserable. You know, being the fifth person on a team, trying to solve this as a really different lived experience than, you know, being an employee 12 or 15 or 20 or whatever it is. And that changes as you go.

Max: Some people would be addicted to startup after startup after startup. And you see those resumes where people spend 6 to 12 months and, you know, you're thinking, okay either this person has serious ADD and is not reliable or perhaps, that's just the way gear. They just have to go at the earliest stage and just keep doing that over and over again.

Dave: I call it. I have this notion, that we talk about a lot, which is startup time. And the earlier you are at a startup, both in terms of company size and like development life cycle, if it's a tech startup. Those early days, every month, you should count as six months!

So, you know, six months at an early stage startup, when it's five people, feels like three years of sort of life experience. And as the company grows, as things become more predictable, that starts to flatten out. We're like, okay, five years at, you know, a late stage tech company is five years. But if you're part of that first year, there's so much emotion and complexity and raw hours that go into those early days that it's almost as if you're operating on a different calendar.

And certainly there are people, you know, that were on our journey for six months, you know, we have a couple of those, especially some junior folks that were interns and things like that. And you know, to this day we have relationships as if we've worked together for a decade, just because those six months really forged that time. And it was a really wonderful kind of moment for all of us.

Max: So, your alumni, your best alumni, they stay in the startup world for the most part? They moved on to their own thing?

Dave: It depends. And we've watched people go to a giant company and then realize like, you've been at it for long enough where a couple of people now in the second thing afterwards, worked for, you know, a fortune 50 company for a couple of years, and we're like, no I missed that! So most went on to start ups, in some capacity, but a handful went to the big places where everybody else is.

Max: Yeah it paid the bill!

Dave: Yeah, what motivates you is different for everybody. And if it's an awesome paycheck, which you can really get at a giant company, then, you know, by all means go after it.

Max: I think so, right? I was saying conversational designers will find jobs and you can go work for Microsoft anytime, and probably get something there.

Well, other tips, that I can appropriate, on how to keep the excitement strong? Especially in these troubled times where we cannot see each other in person?

Dave: So this is the advice that I got. Hopefully you can use it. Both you Max and you felt listener at home, or wherever you're listening to this. You know, when one of the things that... The entire employee life cycle is tied together. Right? So from the first time you hear about a company that you might work for in the recruiting process to, you know, 20 years down the line, when you're an AVP and just continuing to kind of move up the ranks, whatever it might be.

But the best organizations that I've seen, really do illuminate their entire process with that organization's mission. Right? And, you know, I think about, you know, companies where I've gotten to see this up close are organizations like, you know... And I'm not... Some of these are clients, some of these are just companies where I've gotten the chance to talk to leaders and hear what they have to say. But I think about companies like PepsiCo or Comcast that have a real kind of message infused in what being an employee there means. And what the goals of that organization mean to kind of the broader world.

Max: wait a minute! PepsiCo, is the mission to sell more sugar?

Dave: So it's, it's fascinating. PepsiCo has a wide range, and I have no affiliation with PepsiCo. So, I've just heard people at PepsiCo speak about their culture. So PepsiCo's internal mission is really oriented around diversity and personal development. So yes, they are selling corn chips and sugary drinks, and, a whole bunch of other things, which is, you know these are the complexities in the modern world, but internally in terms of their company’s culture and what they do. They are deeply engaged with bringing their workforce into the community with service projects. They are one of the most diverse, leadership organizations. The fact that I even know this stuff just tells you see how, and again, I have no connection to PepsiCo whatsoever.

The way they communicate that brand, the way it filters out throughout the organization keeps people, you know, not just engaged and motivated in a kind of transactional way, but in a deep way, people are committed to the development of the organization. Now selling sugary drinks isn't necessarily what drives me every day, you know, but for us, we're lucky and I'm sure you feel the same way. We're oriented towards this really powerful problem. Right? Every day I get to come to work and I get to work on. Chipping away at the massive unemployment crisis that is affecting, you know, hundreds of millions of people across the globe.

I get to work on issues of representation and diversity by trying to remove bias in the hiring process. I mean, if your work, if you're a recruiter, if you're a TA person and you're thinking about your team. Your team is on the front lines of some of the most important decision making that human beings make. where do they choose to work. Where they choose to spend their time.

Max: It affects society.

Dave: It's such an important thing. And, you know we do a lot to remember that. And to talk about that, we have an internal mantra, that we call 60 to 6, which is, today the average job search in America, and it's different the world over, but the majority of our team is based in the US. So this is the number we use.

The average job search takes 60 days. So when you're looking for work, whether you're unemployed or you've decided it's time for a change, the average job search takes 60 days. We want to create a world where it takes 6. We want to make hiring 10 times faster, where you're not spending all your time searching and trying to eliminate the right and wrong job. We want the right job to come to you, and you are able to just opt in.

For the recruiter, they don't have to spend all this time searching for candidates and putting people to the process. You just get the right candidate, you know they're the right candidate because you have all this data to suggest that it's the right candidate, and how it maps on to their future work at your organization.

This notion of 60 to 6 and removing, you know, 54 days of not knowing how you're going to pay your bills, not knowing what you're going to be doing with yourself, just going crazy, sitting by yourself, like that is so powerful and illuminating. And, you know, I think that really helps keep things fresh. And for a startup, this is a little more specific to startup context, you keep hitting milestones along the way, right? You're never done. It's never like, okay, this is over. It's like we got this contract, or we're able to release this functionality, or this thing that we've been talking about for five years, since this was an idea on the couch, is now about to go live because of the work of dozens of people across the globe.

That is so cool. and when you get to celebrate those kinds of victories, you know, it's just a reminder of why you get up and do all the unglamorous things that being at a startup requires. Cause it's not, I'm probably making it sound all, you know, sunshine and lollipops, but you know, it's a lot. And there's a lot of work that a big team in money can solve that you have to be scrappy and you have to find your clever way around it. And just one at a time.

Max: Yeah. I think we're lucky or maybe not lucky. We picked the industry we chose to go after. And that was one of the reasons I would personally not be motivated to sell sugary drinks. But, you know, I'm gonna use what you said about PepsiCo and go chase some sponsorship money from Mountain Dew for this podcast.

Dave: Yeah. A really extreme podcast!

Max: Yeah. Great. Well, we could go on all day on these topics, and maybe we'll talk again, and maybe we'll have our bot people have a separate chat, but it was a real pleasure, a real treat having you on the show. Dave, thank you so much for sharing and, all the best to you and your 60 to 6 mission! I'll see if I can tweak it and personalize it for my team.

Dave: I would love that. Look, this is a, you know, one of the things that we talk a lot about, is that this is a community, right? And, you know, if you're solving these problems, these problems are bigger than any group, any company, things like that. And it's always exciting to talk to other people who care about these issues.

So thank you so much for having me. I am excited to get to talk with you about this in this setting. And yeah, hopefully people are ready to chat with a bot about work now.

Max: All right. Awesome. Thanks Dave.

Dave: Thanks Max.

Max: I had such a great time interviewing Dave Mekelburg Chief of staff.Head of people at a Wade and Wendy. It's often an experience running a startup, which is very competitive, where you're trying to grab the headlines and grab market share from your competition. And it's so refreshing and so nice to meet the competition. And remember that you are working on problems that are much bigger than your own. And much bigger than your own company. And then we had so much to learn from each other. So thanks Dave for participating. I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and I hope it didn't get too geeky for you, that you'll sign up for more on the recruitment hackers podcast.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platforms.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today I'm welcoming Zac Engler, who is the head of talent acquisition for a company called PaR Systems, which he'll tell us all about. Zac, welcome to the show.

Zac: Hey Max, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Max: It's a pleasure. When I saw that you moved into this new company I thought that was a real good match between the kind of recruiter that you are, a tinker, somebody who likes to play with tours and the kind of business that PaR System does. But for those who don't know you, perhaps, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from? How did you get into recruitment? and then we'll talk about your business next.

Zac: Yeah. So, thank you. I started off with a career in more of an HR generalist capacity at Target headquarters. Transitioned over through to, more of a retail leadership slash talent development and recruitment person while in my time at Apple. And that's really where I got my taste of full-on recruiting. And from there I just realized that it needed to be a hundred percent of my job. I landed an opportunity at Amplifon, the world's largest provider of hearing care solutions, and I oversaw the build-out of their North American talent acquisition team. And from there, you know, was really on a great pace in terms of exploring new technologies and bringing new capabilities to recruitment.

When PaR Systems came along with really the dream job for me, as you said, I'm a tinkerer. I love all things nerdy when it comes to space flight. When it comes to nuclear reactors, when it comes to nuclear energy, when it comes to robotics and automation, and PaR does all of those things. So it just was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that I got to capitalize on, and they're slated from some tremendous growth over the next few years. So they brought me on as a head of talent acquisition to really help grow out that capability and scale the team.

Max: I believe this company has a few hundred people today.

Zac: Yeah, we have 450 people. We have locations here in Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area. We have another large location in Brunswick, Georgia, and then we have satellite offices around the world. Some of the locations are in the United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Japan, but overall, the biggest locations are Minnesota.

Max: Minnesota and Georgia. Okay. And PaR Systems, hires a lot of engineers then, and finds what it's looking for in Minnesota.

Zac: Yeah. 75% of our staff is either engineers or highly technical positions, a lot of the projects and products that we design and build are one of a kind or first of a kind solutions. The robotic crane system currently tearing apart Chernobyl is one example of something that had never been done before. That we designed and built. But yeah, as far as the engineering talent that we're looking for, a lot of that is based here in Minnesota, whether it's applications engineers, controls engineers, systems engineers, mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, you know, we are looking for them all And so getting into those work streams has been a unique challenge for me as well.

Max: Yeah. I think you're the man for the job but, these roles seem like perhaps you would find them in the sort of fundamental research university sector, find these kinds of profiles, because if you said it's first of a kind, you're not going to find people who have, you know, nuclear crane on their resume much. I'm sorry if I'm misquoting your example. Is your funnel focused on more general traits? And then, you know, you need a solid engineering background and then general traits of the tinker? Or you know, can you learn on the job kind of thing?

Zac: Yes, our team full heartedly believes in, in training and development and mentorship. A lot of the people that come into our organization in a junior position are given a mentor almost immediately, and are set on a path for development. And one of the nice things about joining the PaR team is that, you know, if you would go join a larger organization, you might be assigned as an engineer to work on a piece of the widget that's a bigger part of the project for the next two years. Whereas at PaR, you get assigned projects almost immediately that you get to own, you're giving guidance and support as you work through those projects. But you can almost think of us like McKinsey or Deloitte in a way where we're not the company always necessarily turning out the product. We're the ones helping other companies design, then build the things that will go out and make their products. So it's really fun to be at that very leading edge of the production line.

Max: I see. And working on the production line, so from design to production and then figuring out how to optimize there.

Zac: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Max: Cool. So as part of their recruitment process for you, when you were being considered for this job, did they ask you to show the toys you've been building? I remember you were one of the first people to experiment with chatbots for the world of recruitments, was this part of the selection process?

Zac: I think it helped my case. But yeah, in the 10 interviews I went through, it was definitely a great exposure to the organization to learn all the different quadrants that we work within, whether it's material handling, crane and nuclear work, whether it's military, marine. Whether it's aerospace and aeronautics or alive sciences automation, those four areas. I got a chance to work with those folks and share my story of how we streamlined candidate workflow through automation to allow us to actually connect with the person behind the resume, and get to the best candidates more quickly, if we're on the sourcing side of the candidate funnel. So there was definitely a lot of hope and positivity around that aspect of the work that I'd done in the past.

Max: Well in North America, in 2020 people are complaining about the fact that in spite of the highest unemployment rates in the history of the country, practically, it's still hard to find people. It's still hard to find enough talent to go work. And even entry-level jobs like retail and call centers. In your space, I suppose the impact has been lesser, both for the talent and the employer, because engineering keeps on engineering. There hasn't been a massive impact. So two part question, first, hoping my assumptions are correct. And secondly, what can you do to expand your town pool if it is, you know, the ongoing hustle that it has been to find enough engineers?

Zac: Yeah, for sure. So I think your assumptions are spot on. You know, with the baby boomer generation moving in towards that retirement age. You know, we have 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day for the next nine years here in the US, and as they vacate these skilled positions, they're leading openings that we won't necessarily have the talent to backfill. And I think one of the unique things that we're challenged with at PaR, is figuring out what are some of those pathways from skilled trade to STEM, right?

How can we bring in people who maybe don't have a four year degree in an area, but have an associates degree. And train them up, and train them into those other types of roles and positions within the organization. And this doesn't have to be just engineering. This could be, in my prior world of hearing care, in pharmaceuticals and nursing, for example, right?

Zac: There's a lot of entry points to those other types of businesses where you can enter in, as a pharmacy tech, as a nursing assistant. And go through schooling and get support as you then train yourself up to those higher levels within those businesses. It's getting those tracks in place and making that easier for companies to do, that I think will definitely be helpful.

There's a local organization here called Make It MSP or Greater MSP that is focused on drawing talent to the Minneapolis and Minnesota region, and some of the work that they're doing is focused on just that. How do we create more visibility and opportunity for a diverse candidate set that did not always have the privilege of going to university, for example?

Max: Yeah. And so explain to me how that imaginary perfect candidate would look like? Are we talking about a technician who was doing mechanical repair work on, I don't know, air conditioning units? Because he needs to, you know, put food on the table, feed his family, his or her.

Although I have never met a female air conditioning technician, I'm sure there are plenty of them. And, so I had a mental picture. So this person would have the intellectual curiosity and the ambition to move into the engineering space. And then start to receive more fundamental training into these, let's say, into the nuclear field, does that kind of transition can happen?

Zac: In certain instances. Absolutely. And you know, I think women are now a bigger part of the collegiate population in general, in the United States anyway. So, targeting, empowering and creating visibility to these types of opportunities, I think it's one area that businesses in STEM fields would benefit from. Right?

Because a lot of times we're just running into this situation of, It's not top of mind for students, whether it's high school or college students, they don't know that they can become a shop floor technician with only a two year degree, that pays $50,000 a year, right out of school. They don't know that they could become a pharmacist or tech or a hearing care professional right out of school, with minimal training and certification and so creating that type of awareness for students. I think it is a cultural shift as well for us to get through it, because I think that the baby boomers did a great job of, you know, propagating college and saying college college college. Whatever you do. Just go to college. It doesn't matter. Just go!

Max: They got away from the real work.

Zac: Right. And we shifted and pivoted from college being the emphasis, to now I think we need to just figure out where are the priorities for economic success and how do we align that with people's passions and desires?

Max: No, I totally get that. Now that we've put the blame on the boomers, I totally get it. Zac and I are both. I believe gen X.

Zac: Not at all.

Max: No?

Zac: I'm an elder millennial, we'll say.

Max: Okay.So, elder millennials and young fresh gen X-ers like myself. There's a very high chance that we were raised in a family where our parents did not work in industrial work, right? Because, our parents' generation, they're the ones who... Well the industrial work turned South for most of Western economies. And so, I guess, yeah, you've to start from scratch to show a new generation of people, that there is this kind of work available.

Zac: Exactly. I think organizations can also, you know, work harder to create that visibility for those opportunities. And even if you just look at some of the technology that's in place that a lot of major corporations, you know, the ATS can either be a great tool for companies to use, or it could be the bane of everybody's hiring experience, right?

Like there's still sadly, so many companies. That just let the ATS be this never-ending pool of people applying and getting responses. There's also some really great examples of companies diving in and creating those personal connections. Those career networks and giving people, support mechanisms after they're rejected, like what a concept that we would, even though we're saying no to you, we would help you out and give you thoughts and advice and areas to investigate that might be better aligned with your skillset.

Max: Yeah. I think the ATS stronghold is also because in North America in particular, there's a legal concern of compliance for EEO, OFCCP, FCRA guidelines. And, for a tinkerer like yourself, maybe I can ask you, is there a way to be compliance with these guidelines without using the ATS? Are our town’s acquisition people making a big thing out of something that doesn't need to be?

Zac: I think that the ATS definitely has its place in the recruitment process and in the talent acquisition process. I don't know that we're able to get past that, per se, but it's like anything, how you use it should be the focus of every business, and using it just like we're focusing on diversity and inclusion, just like we're focusing on championing women leadership capabilities. We should be focused on creating a highly engaged, personal process for every candidate.

Max: Yeah, I feel like you're dodging the question a little bit. The question I'm trying to get at is, can we do compliance without asking the candidates to go through the ATS? And I think the answer is yes, but I'm happy to hear your opinion on this topic. If you think I'm wrong.

Zac: If we're able to get to the information we need to know to be compliant, then my answer would be yes. Maybe there is a chat tool out there that could help people get to that spot within the process to streamline that candidate flow. The thing I would caution there is just, are you still gonna ask the same question that you would, when people are clicking through the 15 Taleo steps, right? Only just now, they're having to do it on SMS with their thumbs. Not to throw them under the bus, but they're an easy target.

Max: Right. Yeah, the question it's still gotta be there, if I understand your comments on the chat, you obviously know which angle I'm coming from. I am not an advocate for chats interface all the time, for everybody. And if we're talking about a long checklist of tick marks you have to fill in, I do think that an actual forum UI is more appropriate than a chat. But I also think it's a shame. If what you're trying to build is trust, if you're trying to build engagements to get all of this compliance and all these checklists done at the front of the funnel. Might dilute your message. And you might miss out on some good candidates. You can take them from cold to lukewarm or very warm before you have to go through the compliance stuff.

Zac: Yeah. I think that's where automation can definitely step in. How are you finding the best fit for your organization quickly? And how are you teaming that person up with another person as quickly as possible? Because I am a little bias that a recruiter who's looking at a job holistically from start to finish, will be a great, what I like to call a talent liaison, for the company and for that candidate, so that you can build trust with them throughout the recruitment process, so that you can have a true rapport and understanding of...

Even if this particular role doesn't work out, there may be other opportunities that align in the future. and that person will be more likely to participate as well because they had a confidant at the organization teamed up with them, rather than a siloed experience where they got passed off from person to person, or had they continuously apply through this, you know, stale old process, to not get any results or traction with their application, even though they might be a huge promoter of the brand.

Max: And, when somebody changes jobs and moves into a new company like yourself, like you did a few, a couple of months ago, it's usually an opportunity for the new company to like pick their brains and get the best ideas from, from the new, the new person. What are some of the early initiatives that you've been able to implement coming into the new role that you can share with us?

Zac: Yeah, one of the first areas we're tackling is our job posts, actually. To this point, we are just copy pasting job descriptions onto our careers page, and as you may have heard me say in the past, too many bullets kill people. So let's say, if people aren't going to read the full thing or you're only going to pick out a couple bullets that are relevant and then apply anyways, that doesn't help anybody in the process. Right? It doesn't help the company or the candidate.

So we're trying to, pilot and pivot to a performance-based job posting. Methodology, which will tell a story about the role. It'll give you a sense of what your first 90 days or first year are going to look like. It'll also tell you what you're going to get out of joining our organization and not just say like, you will do this for us, but here's what you'll get out of that experience.

And, it's our goal to use that as a lever, to set us apart from the competition. Looking at 30 or so different competitors that we have in our industry. Maybe one or two of them is taking a similar approach. If that. But it'll also help us increase our diversity inclusion efforts as well. Because as you know, some job descriptions can be inherently biased and that can shy people away from the application process.

Max: All right. And helping get a visual around that. We're talking about, you said, I guess less bullet points and more of a journey. So does it look like a slide deck where you move through a few images of this is what your job would look like. This is what you'd be doing. Is it like a slide deck or am I being a management consulting nerd?

Zac: No, no, no. You're just fast forwarding from what I want to implement in the next six months. But, it starts off with storytelling and really, if you check out Lou Adler, he's got some great... He's really been the pioneer in this space, that I've molded our approach off, both at Amplifon and now here at PaR.

So it really is that storytelling approach to encourage people to self select out. Once they start reading and understanding that this isn't a fit for them, and to really accelerate the interest of somebody who it is a fit for. And then yeah, down the road, having those more interactive and engaging job posts, video job posts or video advertisements around virtual job descriptions is on my roadmap for next year.

Max: Well, one thing that, sourcing teams, challenge, you know, are challenged with. Is “Oh, that sounds great”, you know, what you just described, but we don't have enough leads. So we don't have time to build more information and more screens you have to go through in order to get to the applicant stage.

So I was thinking. You know, the salvation may come from changing the main metric from cost per lead or number of leads to a more complex metric where you would only measure a lead if it's qualified, it's interested, it's shown where the first 90 days are on the job, and after all of that, it says yes. Have you had to change a little bit the way you track and you measure effectiveness and TA, or is that part of the plan?

Zac: That'll be a part of the plan. So we're on month two and establishing a core set of KPIs and metrics that will be happening here as well. And I think having that ability to capture the candidate where they live is an ideal place for us in the future. So that somebody, browsing Facebook, browsing, LinkedIn, or just browsing the web. And they come across an ad from us, and they're engaged in our brand either via a chat system, or via an interactive job posting that is more likely to draw their attention than just the standard boiler plate. Right?

Max: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of Zach Angler’s school of talent acquisition and tinkering. Congrats on the new role. And thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharing your insights with our viewers. Where can people get a hold of you?

Zac: Absolutely Max, thanks for having me on. If people want to learn more, they can visit, zacengler.com for a little bit more about myself. Some of the radical ideas I have around AI, as well as the children's books that I've been working on. And people could visit par.com to learn more about our organization.

Max: Children book as well? Did I hear that right?

Zac: Yes. Yes. there is a children's book I've been working on for the last decade. If you have little ones, check it out, it'll bring a smile to hopefully anybody from Age 9 to 92.

Max: You'd been working on it for a decade. Wow.

Zac: Yeah. It's about a family of dung beetles.

Max: Dung beetles. Okay. Well zacengler.com we'll go check it out. Thanks again for being on the show.

Zac: Absolutely. Max. Thank you.

Max: That was Zac Engler from PaR Systems, who I've always known to be a tinkerer and an insatiable mind. Very curious. and isn't it great to see him find a company where he gets to work in robotics. And nuclear technology and other, I think there are very few areas, functional areas, like talent acquisition that allow for people to go into these fields and an opportunity to learn about the areas that they're passionate about, without having to have formal training in this domain. So, I'm sure Zac will make the most of it and be an inspiration for us to always look for the company that aligns most with our values. Hope you enjoyed this interview and that, you'll come back for more at the recruitment hackers podcast. Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the record hackers podcast. This is Max and I'm today with Mr. Trent Cotton, director of talent acquisition at BBVA dialing in from Atlanta. Hi, Trent. Welcome to the show.

Trent: Hi, Max, glad to be here.

Max: Pleasure to have you. So, we were discussing with Trent, some of the big changes that happened in 2020. And we'll talk a little bit about BBVA’s new policy on diversity and talk a little bit about AI and the recruiting sprints that you're running for your team. I think. There's a lot to learn for our audience there. But before we get into all of that, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today?

Trent: Sure, sure. I converted to the dark side of HR in 2004. I spent the first part of my career working through college as a banker, and in 2004 my daughter was two and a half, almost three years old. And, you know, I just got tired of lending. It was like, a loan, a loan, a loan.

And, at the time I was managing four States for a mortgage broker and had, I think, 48 people that I was managing. And I said, you know what, I'm going to make a pivot. And took a contracting job with the bank, working as a recruiter and was trained by six, I'm using air quotes, recruiters. But they were technically like HR people that just did recruiting.

And, I think that their sole purpose for six months was to convince me that I would not like recruiting. I wouldn't be successful, and they almost got to my head. But the difference between me and them is that I could sit with an executive, a banking executive and talk about, you know, the size of the portfolio, yield spread, about the changes in the market, all that business stuff.

And then also, because I used to manage, I knew where to go and find the people. So just like that, I just kind of progressed and it's been a fun ride. I've done a lot of banking recruiting. There's nothing in the bank that I haven't recruited for. I've done some tech recruiting for a tech firm, and did some healthcare recruiting, but now I manage a fantastic group of 28 people that keep me on my toes and keep me innovating. So, like I said, it's been a fun journey.

Max: Yeah, recruitment it's kind of like where people end up, after sales hasn't worked out for some people, but there is a wonderful element of delivering someone, a career, a stepping stone, a next step. But in your case, you know, your timing was pretty good. Right? Getting out of mortgages in 2007.

Trent: Oh gosh! It was providential, very. And you know, that was the other thing that I realized, that I loved sales and at the end of the day, that's all recruiting is. Just like a salesperson you need to have a pipeline, you need to manage a portfolio of talent, and you've got to be able to close a deal working with both your internal client and the candidate.

So at the end of the day, we are salespeople. I just think a little bit more highly refined. And what we do it's harder, because it's not like I'm trying to sell you a TV or sell you a product. I'm selling you an opportunity. And there's a certain level of domains and intelligence that I think is paramount for somebody to be successful.

But I agree with you, whenever I'm looking for people to add to the team, the first thing I look for is, do they have that sales mentality? And that portfolio management and development of a pipeline? And if they have all of that, I can teach them the rest.

Max: Well, I'm a startup CEO of building talent acquisition software. And when people asked me: How do we innovate? My answer is maybe a little bit uninspiring, but it's like, we just look at what sales and marketing does, and we know that it's coming into recruitment in three, four years from now. So we start building it now and we’ll be alright. And continuing on your sales analogy, you know, you were saying, that recruitment is sales. Which I agree with.

In the sales universe, the size of the deal that you make will affect the composition of your team and the marketing to sales mix. How much are you doing marketing? You're going to do more marketing with products that are a little bit cheaper. And you're going to do more sales, more hand holding when the product is a little bit more expensive.

And so, if we apply that to recruitment, you know, the sort of white glove recruiting service would only work up until a certain level, and then for everything else you would have to have a different workflow, and a different sales to marketing mix. Does that apply for you at BBVA?

Trent: It does. It does. So we've got the high volume on the branch side and then we've got the professional and executive, and even within the professional executive side, we've got kind of entry-level positions. So usually if I bring someone in, maybe they were a banker, and they want to get into recruiting or HR. I'll take them on and either have them work in retail, which is high volume, or kind of a higher volume on the professional and executive side. That way they can get used to all the things that as recruiters we've got to be aware of.

The HR laws, what to do, what not to do, to build up a process. And then as they progress, and as they learn to source, and as they develop that acumen, to me, there is a different level for the level of search that I work on versus someone that's working on maybe a mid level. There's not a lot. I mean, at its core, it's the same, but how I have to go about it is a little bit trickier. Because most of the time, if you're trying to get an executive, there's a different type of wooing that you do than someone that's a middle executive, you know, to me it's just a different rapport. So, it's almost like, of course sales is not a good idea.

Because I was trying to think of, how would you market it? But I do think that maybe core sales is kind of your run in the middle basic model. There's a client out there for it, and you need to market it to them, specifically to that audience. But if I'm selling Bentleys or something like that, I have a totally different target market. Totally different networking. And that's a different level of client, a different ego that I have to deal with versus someone that's just coming in and: Hey! I just need a car. It doesn't have to be new. You know, it doesn't have to have even powered windows. It just needs to crank and to get me where I need to go.

So, it's all about knowing your audience. And I think at the core, that's what sales is all about. Knowing your audience and being able to find the right need for them at the right time.

Max: You and I have a commercial brand. And so, if we ever start looking for a job, you and I Trent, I mean we're just going to use our sales experience. Right? We're going to start looking into our network and like finding the job that's right for us. At the level that you're describing, you know, these kinds of bank executives, I would assume that they would also be able to like, find their own jobs to a certain degree. Do you find that to be the case or, you still need to do a lot of hunting?

Trent: I still need to do a lot of hunting. They can go and find their own job if they want to, because it's a very tight knit network at the top. The difference is that sometimes they're so busy or they're so entrenched with their own company, that my job is just to get them to lift their head up and say, okay, is there something else that you might want to do?

Or are there competencies that you're doing in your current job that could be transferred over into this job that you never even knew existed? Or an area that you never even thought about exploring? So, a lot of mine is selling them on the opportunity. And then once I sell them, then I've got to evaluate them and make sure that they qualify. Where I think it's a little bit on the flip side, on the entry level, you don't necessarily have to sell them on the job. It's making sure that they meet the qualifications, that they are a good cultural fit, and that it's the right time for them to make a move. And then you sell them on the brand. So it's a different sales process in my opinion, or at least that is what I've seen.

Max: Well, I'm thinking you might start something in there. I had a career shift and they may not end up working for you, but they may still take you up on your advice, if you do it well. That could be like a side metric. What you could start tracking is: How many of those people we’re having conversations with we’ve managed to influence their career?

I went off track but, you were saying before we got started. You were talking about the AI and ML, transformation initiatives that you're working on. In my company, we apply AI mostly to engage with candidates at the front of the funnel and answer their question and direct them to the right opportunity. And then pre-screen them. In your world of managers and above, how can you apply AI there?

Trent: That's interesting. because you know, you and I kind of geeked out a little bit about AI and ML prior to talking and the first bias. If we were talking about this 18 months ago and I brought AI and ML up to maybe senior management and said: Hey! this is something I want to do.

I would have to get over the first hurdle of explaining what it was, and explaining the efficiencies. So fast forwarding to today, they understand the efficiencies, but the questions you just asked is the first hurdle that I have to jump because they go, well, what if a senior executive applies to a role and they get this AI thing?

You know, that's not the kind of experience that we want for them. And I mean, it all depends on the product. I've seen some products that are incredible, you know, whenever you interact with them, you actually forget that you're dealing with an AI. You know?

So dealing, I guess I struggle because most of the time that there is... Once you get to a certain level, having people applying to that. Yeah, it's very rare and I guess maybe I'm so cynical that whenever they do apply, I'm going, okay, what are you running from? You know, I kind of like the thrill of the chase, but most of the time we're going out and bringing that talent in. And we can actually introduce them and say: Hey, there's going to be an AI that's going to ask you some followup questions. It can also answer any of the frequently asked questions about benefits, you know, any kind of onboarding stuff. So it gives them an extra layer of that white glove treatment that's available 24/7.

Max: I like that. Yeah. It's easy to think that just because somebody has got 10 or 15 years of experience, that they have all the answers, but they've just probably got as many questions as the juniors. And they, you know, they may be even.. The juniors would ask the question because you know, they don't know. And vice versa where somebody a little more experienced might be a little bit embarrassed to ask. But the questions are just as important. So the AI then would service the same. You know, primarily a candidate experience and engagement layer, to prepare them for the possibility of working at your company.

Trent: Yes, definitely because it's still part of the branding experience. And that's the thing that's been so impressive to me, doing some demos with AI assistants. Just trying to kind of explore over the next 12 to 24 months: How can we as an organization implement this, to increase the efficiency, but also enhance that candidate experience?

And I think that whenever people are talking about AI and trying to sell it internally, or even whenever the companies come out to me, and want to do a demo. You know, I always say, you know, do you ever bring up the fact that this is a fantastic candidate experience? You're missing a golden opportunity if you're not, because that's a huge selling point for me.

In my mind, I own the candidate experience for everyone who applies with my firm. If I have an AI out there, that's constantly showing them videos, you know, messages, and maybe they started the application process and they stopped because they need to go cook dinner or something like that. And that assistant goes and continues to engage them.

That in my mind is a fantastic experience for the candidate, but it also creates so much efficiency for my team. Because I cannot wait for the day that the 20 people on my team come in and they have a day that's been booked for them while they were asleep or enjoying their family. The job just posted, that AI goes in and parses out the necessary information sources internally, and externally evaluates them. Once they're ranked, you know, we've set up a minimum limit so that anybody that makes 85 and above, AI goes ahead and books them on my calendar. I mean, how cool would it be?

You know, to think that, 10 years ago, this was just like farfetched, but we're in the grass of being able to have recruiters come in and have seven or eight qualified. I mean, not just qualified candidates booked, but also to be able to have a 360 view outside of the resume. I mean, it's just absolutely intoxicatingly exciting.

Max: I wasn't a recruiter like you in 2005. And I don't know what attracted you to...

Trent: We didn't haveGoogle! When I arrived here we didn't have google! Yeah, I heard some of my new team members. They were like, this googling stuff is so hard! I was like, Oh good God. I had a phone book. I remember getting new jobs, because we had a large footprint, and so part of my intake was asking them to send me a phone book. So that way I could cold call some of the realtors to get mortgage bankers, or some of the banks, or whatever. And you know, now you've got all kinds of things that provide all kinds of contact. I mean, it's sitting right there and it's just mind boggling to me, the transformation that has been done in 10 - 15 years.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. And then that adrenaline and dopamine hit that you used to get from finding a profile that might be a good fit. But, I do think that that's going to phase out over the years because sourcing will be more and more automated and that dopamine hit will have to come from a later point in the process, which will be, yeah, the candidate expresses an interest, says, yeah, I'm going to take the offer. I don't know. It'll come just a little bit further probably, because the volumes are just constantly increasing. The easy access of data is increasing. And I imagine that your bank has also experienced an increase in applicants over the last few months. You're tracking that?

Trent: It's been rather steady. Believe it or not. You know, in the U.S the impact of Coronavirus has been… It depends on the market. You know, we have some markets that... they aren't like Corona doesn't even exist, it's business as usual. And then we have others that were hotspots.

Max: And Georgia was a little bit like that.

Trent: Yeah, Atlanta we got to shut down, I think three or four times under like an executive order. And I think it was a fun two weeks where the governor said the state's reopened and our mayor goes. Nah! And so there were like all kinds of means, but, you know, what is it? Our dad said I could go outside, and our mayor is female, but mama said no. The rest of Georgia was out traveling and the rest of us, you know, in Atlanta, we were just locked down.

Max: How confusing! You know, mommy and daddy arguing.

Trent: Oh yeah. So it was quite fun just to kind of sit back and watch, but we're starting to see candidate flow increase a little bit, but we did not really see a major impact in the amount of candidates. What we have seen as an impact is in some of the critical areas that we need to hire, the marketers became so incredibly competitive.

In the banking world, from an economic standpoint, in the U.S, mortgage is hot right now! And I mean, an underwriter in the U.S, a mortgage underwriter could just about name their price. And if they're good, a bank will pay out and probably give them a bonus. And that's some of the compression that we're seeing in the U.S, not the applicant flow. We're really having to go out on the hunt, and we can find people who are qualified, but then we're competing in things that sometimes are... I mean, I've seen offers and I just go: What? They are offering what? You know, how is that bank even making money? So there's a little bit of a frenzy and some of the key competencies.

Max: Yeah, I have certainly heard a number of sectors where the volumes have gone down, like in retail, and in healthcare, and where people don't want to come to a physical office for health concerns.

Trent: Right.

Max: And I think that there's also limited mobility because people are, you know, kind of looking for safety and security and so less likely to hop jobs right now, which may limit your ability to do your work. Right?

Trent: Very, very.

Max: Hoping it will get a little bit more rosy post-election.

Trent: Yes, yes. We'll see after the election. And then I think we'll see it after the first of the year. But the thing for us is, you know, kind of how we do recruiting. Corona was a fantastic stress test for us. Because it was working. We had just rolled it out throughout the entire bank and then Corona came and it really forced our clients to rank in terms of priority, which jobs are most critical over the two week period.

And so I guess that's why I stumbled a little bit about candidate flow and all of that, because how we view metrics are completely different because of how we recruit. So, whenever I'm on. You know, certainly whenever I'm talking to people in TA, you know, they go, what's your time to fill? And I'm like, I don't know. It's not, I mean, we measure it, but it's not, it's not the driving metric. And it's, especially if we're on video, I like to kind of watch their mind, it's almost like looking at a computer, you see the little time clock turning. It's like they're trying to process, wait, time to fill. You don't even look at it? No, we don't. We look at the priority roles and how many we close within the priority, or excuse me, within the sprint.

What we found in, I think it was 2018. You know, I've been in recruiting since 2004, and it was one of the first times since I got into recruiting that I actually stopped. And I said, am I doing what I need to be doing? You know, is this really? Am I passionate about this anymore? You know, I was dealing, I was managing a smaller team at the time. I was dealing with the same customer comments. You're not getting enough candidates. Not enough qualified candidates. It has taken too long to fill. And then, you know, the recruiters are going, the managers aren't doing this. And I felt more like a daycare owner than I did, you know, a team lead for a recruiter. And about that time, our bank was going through an agile transformation. So I got to spend a week learning the Kanban, or Kanban depends on how you want to say it. Learning that process.

Max: I don't speak Japanese.

Trent: Yeah? haha.

Max: So applying Kanban to recruiting, right? Sorry I interrupted.

Trent: Applying Kanban to recruiting. So that was kind of our beta, but then I went through the agile methodology training for about a week and a half and listened to Jeff Sutherland's book on Scrum. And I was doing like a four or five hour drive and I was listening to the book and there were so many times I went, Holy shit. There it is. You know, that's what I've been looking for!

And so as a group, we identified that there were four pitfalls in traditional recruiting. Everything's a priority, which means nothing's a priority, the lack of feedback, the over analysis, paralysis, FOMO, whatever you want to call it. Whatever the hiring managers have that makes them want to interview 25 people for, you know, an hourly job.

We were also misaligned with our client, because there were so many times I'll sit down with the executive and go, we filled 48 jobs in two weeks. Or, you know, 48 jobs last month. And on average you only have 16 openings. Why are you complaining? Well, those weren't the most critical ones. Well, how do we know which was critical, which wasn't? So there was a lot of misalignment.

And then two, we instituted WIP limits. So work in progress limits. And what that did is that it allowed us to be able to kind of keep that process going. So now whenever our team comes in, they've got a dashboard, they're open regs. Every two weeks we meet with them. We call them sprint owners, product owners, whatever, they can be the executive for a line of business or their designated.

Max: But its not. Asprint owner is not going to be, someone from your team. It'll be the hiring manager, typically.

Trent: It's the client, the client drives the priority.

Max: Yeah. Makes sense.

Trent: So, the four principles are feedback, is kinda like the gas in the car, it keeps the process going. WIP limits, keeps us focused. And then the business drives and the priority. And what we do is we, you know, I'll sit down and go: Hey, Max! Your entire department, you've got 20 openings. And we're going to go… The other thing that we instituted of course, was a sprint. It forces a lot of efficiency. So, Max, you've got 25 positions, you've got a hundred points or a hundred dollars, whatever you want, however you want to think about it. Over the next two weeks. What is mission critical in terms of jobs that I've got to fill?

And so what you'll do is you'll go through, you've got 25 jobs. You can't do like four, four, four, four, because we won't let you, we usually say we need at least two jobs that equal, you know, North of 35 or 40 points. So that way, we're forcing them to say, what is most critical? And so you'll go through and you'll prioritize. Now those that are without points, we still work them, but it's in order, we're going to work that, you know, the 50 pointer first. The 15 next, and then the next 10’s and then 5’s. And then once we have everything going in the right way there, then we move on to the others that don't have points.

So as a recruiter, I can come in and I can look at my dashboard and let's say, I'll cover seven different divisions, and it can be incredibly overwhelming. For each of those seven divisions I know what their priorities are, and it's already stacked up on my report. And so what I'll do is, I'll look at my 50 pointer. Where am I in that? And so that's where the WIP or work in progress limits come into play. So we created three different swim lanes. The recruiter interview sourcing lane, the hiring manager submitted being, I just submitted your resume. I'm waiting on feedback. And then the hiring manager interview.

And so what our goal is, is to have a max of five interviews with the manager, five waiting on them to have some kind of feedback, and then maybe have two or three in my back pocket. Once I hit that WIP limit on that 50 pointer, I move on to my next one.

And so whenever COVID hits, you know, we shut down our branches to drive through only, and a branch manager. You know, we did that for, I think, about a month and a half. And. It was interesting to me because this is high volume and we came to a screeching halt, but it really forced the executive to say, okay, I need a minimum of four people in that office for it to run this office over here has two. This office over here has three. So this one is a 50, that one's a 40, and the recruiters were able to spend more time on the critical roles than just trying to take some easy hits.

Max: It would have taken them three, four months to adapt to the new normal.

Trent: Easily!

Max: With this advance it was clear, you know. How do we keep the lights on, and change everything real fast to change the priorities without having to hold every project? Trying to centralize the decision-making.

Trent: Yeah, but what's cool is that we didn't change the priority. Our client owns that priority. Our job is to execute on it. And so I always tell the team, the point is to define success in the eyes of the client. So what we do is we'll track, you know, what percentage of points do we get? So if the budget's a hundred and we closed 45, of course, it's 45%. We want to see an increase sprint over sprint. And if it decreases. Then that's where, I mean, nobody can hide in sprint.

So, if we've hit our WIP limit and the managers have not given us 48 hours, or they have not given us feedback in 48 hours. We have rules of engagement where we go to the client and say, you are becoming an obstacle. How do we work together and get this done? Same thing on my side. Yeah. If an executive calls and says, you know, we don't have any candidates.

If I look and I see that we're at our WIP limit and I go: No, we actually do! Have you talked to your manager? This is what I'm showing. Or, yeah, you know, you're right. That's a 50 pointer, I need to get with, you know, Susie Q who's a recruiter, and find out what's wrong, is there a sourcing issue with the candidate flow? Do you need more resources?

So we were able to move quicker, of course more agile. It's kind of cliche to say, but we were a lot more flexible. So in our critical areas that had a huge hiring volume, we had others that were normally kind of our main stage. They had stopped hiring and they were kind of violating budget. I was quickly able to move a lot of resources over and make sure that we were able to keep that level of client service that we want.

And for the most part, we have a couple of glitches, but for the most part, it worked. And the thing that I loved is watching. Yeah. Cause all 28 people report directly to me, which can seem overwhelming if you look at it in an old chart, but it's not because they'll look as a team where are the points? And if I've got capacity, I'm going to reach out to Veronica. Hey, are there any sprints, any jobs that have points that you don't have time for that I can take? And then they take it and they run with it. And so there were several times I'm in one on one. Yeah, yeah. So that to me has created a lot of efficiency.

So now my eyes are going even more so to the AI ML, and looking at products and saying: how can we increase that funnel of candidates? Do it by eliminating the bias? Which is one of the things I love about AI, is removing that bias that all of us have. So increasing that funnel, but then also increasing that candidate experience and thus increasing the efficiency of our recruiting team. So to me it's just like hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.

Max: If operations are running, and the clients are kept happy then you've bought yourself some room to do automation and to reinvent your process next year. And that makes a lot of sense.

It sounds like you have a lot more to say on this sprints recruiting, and this means applying the agile. I myself have been thinking about different environments where we could apply it outside of the banking world, and how it would be adapted, maybe even in a high volume recruitment situation where clients are of a different nature, perhaps.

We can have a follow up discussion on this topic, if you're interested, but in the meantime, working people could work in finding out more about the sprint recruiting methodology. Do you have some, some visual resources, that you can send them to?

Trent: Absolutely. So they can connect with me on LinkedIn. It's really easy. linkedin.com/trentcotton and, I've got a blog out there, blog website, sprintrecruiting.com, and I share a lot of bots, you know, things that we've discovered... Yeah, you know, I try. And I'm actually, I'm writing a book and my goal… If I keep up with everything that I should be doing, I should have, in the editor's hands, the first part of December and ready to release in January.

But to your point, I've actually talked to a lot of companies outside of banking, and you know, they ask: How can you apply it? And, you know, is it the same? So for me, It's kind of a curiosity of going, okay, well this works here. I wonder if it works in a different industry? So, you know, I'm kind of doing some consulting on the side with them. You know, just how do they implement it? And try to understand their recruiting process. And for me, it's fun because I also learn how somebody outside of, you know, I've worked in other industries, but you know, how does healthcare takes sprint recruitment and apply it? But then, what is healthcare doing that maybe we should do?

You know there are some things that, you know, some complexities that they have that we don't, and they're able to get around it. How? And, how can we apply that competency, here at the bank? So to me, it's just fun. I like to geek out whenever it talks about talent acquisition, you know, the leadership development within TA and of course, AI and ML.

Max: Let's book another call, another interview to talk about the idiosyncrasies of hiring heads and hiring managers in different industries and the different ways that they can make us miserable.

Trent: Yeah.

Max: Trent, thanks for sharing on the sprint recruiting methodology. And guys, you can connect on sprintrecruiting.com, if I got that right, and on LinkedIn, Trent Cotton. And, looking forward to reconnecting, Trent.

Trent: All right. Sounds great. Thank you so much, Max.

Max: That was Trent Cotton from BBVA, telling us about sprint and recruiting.

And you could practically feel the excitement, the fact that there was too much to communicate in a 30 minute window. So I hope we'll get Trent back on the show, and I hope you investigate this sprint recruiting concept and how it can apply to your world. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share. We look forward to seeing you back on the recruitment hackers space!

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello everybody. And welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm Max and I invited today to our podcast, Mr. Craig Sweeney, from WilsonHCG. Welcome Craig.

Craig: Hi Max. I'm glad to join you today.

Max: Thank you. Thank you for joining and putting yourself in front of the computer on such a beautiful sunny day. I can see the weather is unusually balmy in Manchester.

Craig: It really is. Yes, this is the one day of the year the sun comes out and it's not cloudy and raining, which anybody who's been to Manchester before would know is the usual lab, usual blend of weather we have here.

Max: Amazing, amazing. Here in Hong Kong, we are locked at home, unable to go to work because of a tiger flu. So, it'll come your way. It should get there in about three months time.

Craig: Stay safe.

Max: So Craig tell us what you do, and what your company does!

Craig: Okay. So, we'll say HCG, for those of you who don't know, is an organization. We are a talent consultant firm largely built around RPO solutions, but then more broadly around anything really that links to talent acquisition, from a consulting perspective, from continuing workforce solutions, as well as our kind of core RPO solutions.

My role is within the business areas, as part of our executive team, I lead everything around new plan engagements. I've got a global team that stretches from Japan, Singapore, through Europe and then into North America. And within my remit is our new business growth team. We've got our solutions team and then our implementation function. So essentially my group owns everything before a client actually goes live and becomes a client of ours.

Max: Okay. New solutions team, you call it. Right?

Craig: Yeah. So we've got a technical solutions team that helped to architect the solutions that we're actually putting in place for clients, both commercially, but also in terms of their structure. When they're complex global solutions, it takes some detailed kind of building out to have the right capability. And particularly when that's encompassing things that aren't just, you know, one type of hiring. It may be that we're hiring for specialist roles, high volume roles, graduate and internships or within the same solutions. Building that out and making sure we've got the right team to deliver for our clients when it's on a kind of medium or large scale, is often quite complex.

Max: I guess, the bigger, the volume, the more technology seeps in. And then the lower the volume, the more an organization like yours will be competing with maybe smaller staffing firms. Is that a fair statement?

Craig: I would say increasing technology is important in most scales of solutions that we build out. Because, I think even for those organizations that are maybe just recruiting in the, you know, in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. Having the right technology in place to help fulfill their critical business impact in roles, through whether or not last through engagement attraction, or building our future talent pipelines is all really important.

Creating a great candidate experience and making sure we're out competing some of the other businesses that are trying to hire the same talent is super important.

Max: Well, you may have seen in the news that there's been a little bit of M&A this year in the technology space. Just last week, there was a company called Elio that was acquired by HireVue. There was a Sunroom in the UK that was aquired as well over the summer. It seems to me that video. I don't know if it's hot or not, because sometimes, I mean, it's definitely being talked about a lot in the age of remote hiring and work from home hiring, as the killer app, you know, 15 or 20 years after its conception. This is a first situation.

But at the same time it looks like those companies never really got to the next stage. And I'm thinking, I'm thinking about it because you're talking about, you know, hundred of hires and I guess with these kind of environments, video interviewing, even then, you know, for an executive hire, you don't know if you're going to use video interviewing for an executive level hire, basically, right? It's going to be a little bit awkward to do an asynchronous video interview.

Craig: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, video interviewing and as you say, it's been around for many years. I think right now, everybody in this short space of time with everything that everybody's gone through over the last six months, eight and months, yeah.

Video technology has just become part of everybody's life. You know, if I'd ever talked to my parents about doing a video call, you know, a year ago, they would have gone, wow, that's crazy. Or, you know, people actually thinking about doing interviews over video, they would have said that's not possible but actually now.

I think it's just crept into society and that's when you really start seeing, I think, change happened very quickly when it just becomes accepted that this is a way that people operate. So it doesn't surprise me that, you know, video is kind of the core of some of those acquisitions right now.

Max: But now these companies have to add other things. Right? Because video is so omnipresent and everywhere that it's just not enough to do just video. Right?

Craig: I agree.

Max: That's the realization. And so, are the big guys, like the big enterprise software companies like SAP and Oracle, do they have a live video native solution? Do you know?

Craig: I don't believe so, but whether or not there's products that are in development, possibly,

Max: They can always do bargains anyway.

Craig: Yeah, exactly.

Max: And so, this is a very general question, for an RPO recruitment process outsourcing specialist. You're asked to deliver a number of hires. Right? A number of hires and then retention after that. Probably those are your two key driving metrics. With that, do you also get certain targets around? Like we want you to replace. You know, we want you to change this process and we want you to change this piece of technology? Or it's more of a, you know, deliver the heirs at whatever cost you want, and using whatever technology you want we just want the results?

Craig: Yeah. I've been in and around RPO since, before it was called RPO. It was, you know, before it even took on that title. And I think if you look at the history of how RPO has evolved and developed. If we were talking 15 years ago, RPO was very much a transactional solution for most organizations where it was around. How do we deliver on a certain volume of hiring and just do that quicker and more effectively and often at lower costs than we're doing it ourselves today? I think over the course of the last five years in particular, maybe slightly longer, the strategic capability of RPO’s has just exponentially grown.

So I think, although those measures that you mentioned before are still a component part of what we have when we're delivering for our clients. So it is still around, you have avoidment of firing and some of those key metrics that we have to operate to and that, but actually it's a much more holistic solution now where we are looking at technology that we're bringing to the table either to provide a better candidate experience, provide better capabilities to be able to pipeline or engage with talent, create the best candidate experience, provide better data, to be able to kind of tell the story around what's happening with hiring, but also process redesign.

And the measures that we are now looking at, in terms of the measures that we’re measured against. Aren't just on volume they're on things like, DEI. So how we can help drive better, diversity in organizations as well as just actually deliver the candidates, and make the hires. So it's a much more, sophisticated business impact solution rather than a transactional solution RPO started out many years ago.

Max: It sounds like it's getting more complexity. Maybe one area where things are getting a little more simplicity would be that in 2020, there is consolidation, at least on the tech stack and some companies merging into others. And perhaps that'd be a little bit of a relief for professionals in your field, that instead of having a hundred solutions to choose from, now we have 80. Is that a pain in your back? To walk into customers and every time they've got, you know, I don't know how many TA tech solutions they usually come with. What's the typical number that you walk into?

Craig: Yeah, well, in terms of, you know, if we’ve got just the baseline applicant tracking system then yeah, we work with most of those and have done it at some point. But again, our role is to kind of look at those, make sure they're operating effectively. Clients never liked their applicant tracking systems.

Max: Is universal!

Craig: Yeah it's universal, but often it's because they've been installed or implemented. And they no longer kind of build, they no longer fit around the processes that have changed, but the technology has not changed to keep up with it. So they're trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Part of our role is to help actually either reconfigure the technology or redesign the processes or both.

But your point on what technology we bring, that's unique to each solution that we're building out. And, you know, I think what we avoid doing is just implementing technology for the sake of technology. There's got to be an output there. There's got to be a reason why technology is put in place. It has got to have a benefit and that's going to be different depending on the type of hiring, the locations, the language and various other things that might impact the type of technology that we're building out.

But yeah, fortunately, we've got an internal innovation team that does a lot of the assessments around technology and then advice and guidance around what technologies would fit into a particular tech stack, if there's an existing tech stack, because again, not all technologies fit into every tech stack and integrate well. So I think the challenge is less of a challenge for us. It's actually a benefit for us to have that team to advise our clients. And the reason we have that team is that internal TA factions often don't have the luxury of being able to have people that are technology specialists, and with so many technologies on the market right now doing various different parts of the end to end TA process, choosing the right ones, becomes increasingly difficult. Because they're actually, there are a lot of good technologies out there and the list is growing almost week over week.

Max: Yeah, well, maybe not this week, you know, but most weeks for sure. And your role would entail a lot of traveling, you know, pre 2020, I presume.

Craig: Absolutely. Yeah. So I probably spent maybe two thirds of my time traveling, or at least 50% of my time traveling over the last four or five years, both to around Europe and North America and Asia as well. And yeah, this year has been very different. No planes, no trains. it's all been, yeah. Working from home and I've enjoyed it. Enjoyed the time because it's just given you time to kind of reflect and think in a way that when you're traveling so much, it becomes difficult to have that time to do that reflection. And I look forward to the day when I can go and do that again, but I don't wish for that to come too soon.

Max: I had the opposite reaction where initially I thought, I don't have any more time to think because I used to think while I'm traveling, when I'm on the plane in the air. But I do have a tremendous amount of time though, that was created by eliminating travel. And in your line of work, I imagine that's been replaced by double the amount of zoom meetings and teams and all that.

Craig: Yeah. It has and that was kind of part and parcel of what I would do in my role every day. Anyway, because we're a global team, we're not kind of spending our days in the same office. We're often in parts of the world, in different time zones. And so Zoom was pretty familiar prior to this year, but certainly became more so over the last few months.

Max: I'd like to, to dig a little bit, deeper into the art of sourcing, which is perhaps the area where your clients would, you know, the pain points where your clients would first come to you and say, we're not getting enough quality candidates. Can you bring in the experts? Because our internal talent acquisition team is just not finding the talent. Is that part of the business? I have two questions here. One part is if that part of the business changed in 2020? and how? And then, maybe a word about, you know, how much sourcing can be automated, or rather, what are the limits of automation when it comes to sourcing? What still needs to be done manually? So I blurted out my two questions in a row and you can answer them in whichever order you'd like.

Craig: Yeah. So, in terms of where technology and sourcing are kind of crossing and the benefits is I think, you know, technology can be used really effectively to outreach and do the initial engagement, with candidates. And take that through a certain element of the process of actually initial engagement. But I think it's more effective in certain roles than others. I think it's more effective at doing that with high volume rather than more niche skills. Because I think, in the market today, even though we're seeing high levels of unemployment in lots of different places, I think there's still a higher demand for highly skilled talent.

Max: Yeah.

Craig: And often it's a human interaction and human contact. I think that helps to make that engagement more effective in the first instance. But certainly engaging candidates through the recruitment life cycle, technology can have a great impact there because I think being able to access and get responses 24/7 at a time that's convenient for the candidate is really helpful. Through whatever platform that might be. But certainly on higher volume hiring where it's maybe, you know, lower skilled, often, like I said, larger scale, candidate pools, there's definitely a greater element of technology being able to manage candidates through that sourcing cycle.

But again, I think, where we look at that is not necessarily taking humans out of the process. Is maybe freeing up people's time through technology to have a greater impact, at a further point in the hiring process because quality engagement is still really important.

Max: And, the first part of my question about whether the sourcing activities have changed in 2020, you said, that the jobs that are hard to find are still hard to find. So we'll be thinking typically engineers and data scientists and the likes, and then industry specialists. And so that, you know, the nature of your business has not really changed much in that sense from 2020, from the source design.

Craig: I think one of the things we've definitely seen in the last quarter is, I think what's happened with COVID and the economic kind of downturn that we saw occured from March, April onwards, is TA functions were heavily reduced. Often down to bare bones or nothing at all.

So we found that as the kind of return to work and that bounce in the economy started to happen, those organizations that don't have a capability at all, are looking to kind of give them a sourcing arm that can be very flexible and built around their needs so it can ramp up quickly. It can scale, but it can also scale back. And I think right now that's important for so many businesses, cause they still have uncertainty in the future.

Max: And i've readthat. You were there maybe, that 2009 - 2010 were good years for the RPO industry.

Craig: They were. Yeah, I think, you know coming out of the economic, the financial crash in 2008, a very similar scenario where, you know, organizations were very uncertain about what was to come. And particularly in places like Europe, where if you're employing people on a permanent basis, it's not easy always to kind of make those adjustments to your business and reduce the workforce if you need to. Because the labor laws don't allow that, but having a partner that can scale up and build around those needs and scale further if needed. But scale back if the hiring ramp slows down.

Max: So those cuts have been made and they would typically have been made in the areas where automation was most feasible and according to your reasoning. And I agree with it, most that automation would be more on the high volume side of the business, and there would be more opportunities for RPO vendors and perhaps vendors like us to do more in the high volume space, the high volume of space should be a big opportunity in 2021.

Craig: My prediction is that all hiring is going to be at an altitude in 2021. I don't think it will be limited to high volume. I think it will be hiring, right across the board. And certainly, you know, one of the areas we're seeing a huge amount of activity right now is around sales hiring, that's from enterprise sales right away through sales consultants across clients.

And that's because people are trying to call back their losses that they've seen in the early parts of the year. And I think that will kind of drive through, into next year's plans as well.

Max: For mesome of these recruiters will be able to reconvert themselves into sales people.

Craig: Yeah. Quite possibly.

Max: Not that hard of a transition if you're good at it. Right? And, okay. Well we've talked about, you know the kind of customers that come to you and which kind of scenario. Would you have any thoughts to spare on the kind of customers that you do not want to work with? And maybe, we don't have to share names, but customers that have broken your heart or broken your spine, and what went wrong there?

Craig: Yeah I think we have some really great customers that we've talked with and I used that word really purposefully. They are great customers that partnered with us. And I think when we've historically maybe had relationships that haven't worked out as well as we would've liked. It's where there's an expectation that we are there as a delivery arm to the business, rather than the operator.

Max: You're going to blame it on the sales guys! Of course. Oh, it's their fault.

Craig: No, not the sales guys I think it's just about having the right expectations set, you know, for hiring to be successful whether or not it's pure intel or whether or not you're working with a partner like us, there's got to be kind of a skin in the game and there's gotta be, an upside for everybody to want to work together. And that is the way that things kind of land really well. It is when we're operating in that kind of true partnership, where we have the same goals and outcomes that our clients have.

Max: Well, I'm trying to read between the lines here. So the nightmare scenario is you're being kind of pegged against an internal team.

Craig: No, not pegged against an internal team. I think it's where we're being asked to deliver on something where we maybe haven't had the ability to shape or build or give input into, to how something should be delivered. Or when we have stakeholders that don't have an upside from our success. And the stakeholders need to benefit from us doing well for it to work. With the vast majority of the clients and the partnerships we have in place. That's absolutely the case because we build all our solutions.

Max: I have tried to sell automation, sometimes to the wrong HR professionals. So I think I can relate with that kind of scenario. And also the scenario where people don't adapt their process, where we would say, no we are an engagement tool at the front of the funnel. Do not ask the candidates 10 video interview questions on messaging, like it's going to break. And no! That's what we want. That's what we're going to get. Okay. You know, we wasted so much resources trying to please people sometimes, it's rare, but it does happen.

Craig: Yeah. I think like yourselves, you know, where there to be advisors that's our role is to help resolve people's challenges and their problems with better solutions. And I think there's, again, where we do that and it's successful is where the client actually wants to listen and adapt to our guidance and important advice.

Max: And, what's the customer you've been working with for the longest time? Or you don't want to say names?

Craig: Oh, wow. Yeah. We've got clients today that were the first clients that we ever started working with. So, you know they've been relationships for, you know, decades.

Max: That's nice. Well, I hope they had a decent 2020, and that you're right about what's coming this year, and all of that business coming in. Thank you very much, Craig for participating and sharing your insights on how the RPO industry has shifted or it seems like it has not shifted that much. A little bit less traveling for you, but overall, it's been a good year and things are heating up at the European market in Q3.

Craig: Great. Thank you, Max. Have a good rest of your day!

Max: Thank you, Goodbye Craig!

That was Craig Sweeney from WilsonHCG, giving us hope for tomorrow and the big rebound of the recruitment at RPO industry. Hope you enjoyed it. Subscribe if you did. And if there's somebody that you'd like me to interview as part of the podcast, you can send me their names too directly to hello@talkpush.com and I'll contact them directly and invite them to tell us their secrets. Thank you for listening and see you soon.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast with max. And today I'm pleased to welcome on the show Blake Thiess from Prestige Care. Welcome to the show, Blake.

Blake: Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me Max. Really excited to be here and just chat with you about all things recruiting.

Max: Absolutely. Great.

Well, we're interested in finding out more about Prestige Care and in the midst of this 2020 pandemic I imagine you have encountered some pretty unique operational challenges trying to bring in people to your facilities, tell us a little bit about, as an introduction, who you are what you do at prestige care and then maybe a little bit about your company.

Blake: Yeah, no doubt, Max. Thanks. So, I'm the Director of Talent Acquisition for Prestige Care and we own and operate over 80 assisted living and skilled nursing care centers up and down the West coast of the United States. Mainly in Oregon and Washington, but our footprint does extend down into California, Arizona, Nevada.

We have one up in Anchorage, Alaska one in Kalispell, Montana, but really, and truly we're a Pacific Northwest company, family owned and operated since day one, over 35 years ago, we employ about 5,000 people in that eight state geographic footprint. And we serve about 5,000 residents. That's what we call them.

They're not patients, they’re residents. We live and work in their homes. In my role with Prestige Care, I oversee the entire Talent Acquisition function for a half a billion dollar enterprise with over 80 locations, all areas of talent, acquisition recruiting, whether it be, overseeing the ATS, the employment brand, any sort of TA or recruiting technology integration.

Anything involving talent acquisition recruiting. I oversee, I live and breathe this stuff. I love what I do. And most importantly, I love who I get to do it with. Outside of just the professional realm here at Prestige. I'm able to speak at a local and national level on all things recruiting and talent acquisition as well, which is something I really love to do.

So, that's a little bit about me and Prestige Care really from the macro, Max.

Max: Thank you. Great. And, those 5,000, headcount over the West coast. Could you give us a feel for where the bulk of your hiring is? I imagine a lot of registered nurses.

Blake: Yeah. Good assumption there, Max.

Yeah, the vast majority of the folks that we employ are clinical in nature. So those certified nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, that's on the skilled nursing vertical of our business. On the assisted living memory care side, we're going to split right down the middle half of those 80 are skilled nursing facilities.

And then the other half are assisted living memory cares. On the AL side, the lion's share of those that we employ are personal care attendants. Some outfits might call them caregivers, medication technicians, people who distribute medication. But, we also employ a number of different operational tech professionals that work in these locations.

So you're talking: facilities, we call them maintenance professionals, many culinary professionals: cooks, line cooks, dishwashers, chefs, people of that nature, really any type of professional to, you know, oversee and help run a skilled nursing or assisted living community.

Max: I'm actually paying a visit or a friend in a nursing home later today.

I don't know what the food is like at Prestige, but in my case, I'm always bringing him a little bit of food from the outside world.

Blake: Well, you know, I've been able to visit. I mean, I've been here for over five years, a little over two of those years have been in my director of TA role and I've been to probably half of them.

And I'm not just saying this. Our food is terrific. You know, if you go to our jobs at Prestige, LinkedIn, Facebook page. I actually like to post photos of the food that our chefs prepare. I'm telling you, it looks like a straight off Instagram, Max.

Max: Wow. Well, I could see why you're in recruitment. Because you're a strong salesman, but I reserve… I'd like to believe it when I see it.

Before we jump into maybe this pandemic matter, the type of people that you hire. I mean, of course when we think, assisted care living immediately, we think doctors and nurses, but then there's all this other stuff that's around it, where maybe they're a little bit less demanding on qualification, but just as demanding, if not more on soft skills, like empathy and the likes. How have you, sort of structured and automated your pre-screening in order to find the right talents there, particularly for those folks who are interacting with the patients on a daily basis?

Blake: Yeah. Good question. I wish I had some groundbreaking answer for you, Max. But you know, ever since the pandemic hit in mid to latter March. You know, it has been a challenge. I don't know how else to say that. I mean, it's, here's a great example. So, I sit on the class advisory boards for our applicant tracking system, which is Healthcare Source.

And so I have access to all data points and things. And I was sitting in a meeting yesterday or pardon me last week, week, before. Year over year for all of the Healthcare Source clients, they have seen a 40% decrease in overall applications for certified nursing assistants year over year, you know, in the RN rates, 25 to 30% decrease in overall applications.

And so I wish I had a really great answer on how we've leveraged AI or tech to understand, somebody’s empathy quotient for instance, or something of that nature. But honestly, the volume of our applicants has just bottomed out. So, you know, I hate saying this, but you know, if somebody pre-qualifies, if they're a CNA or if they have that RN license and they have any sort of relevant experience, we're going to talk with them.

That's just the reality of the market that we're in right now, especially the last six, seven, eight months.

Max: Okay. Well, that does ring familiar. Yes. So sourcing is where the battle is and expanding the talent pool will make you do desperate things sometimes, go in places you wouldn't go.

One area, which has seen a lot of growth, we’ve seen in 2020 is the rise of Facebook jobs as a sourcing platform. Have you been able to get some of your healthcare — we don't have to spill the beans on your trade secrets — just out of curiosity, is that an area where you're seeing a little bit of traffic?

Blake: Yeah. You know, we were leveraging Facebook, and Instagram to build our employer brand long before March, 2020, you know, pre COVID. To build our brand, to get visibility out in the marketplace. So I wouldn't say that we've necessarily doubled or tripled down on our efforts there.

I think there's opportunity there for us and quite frankly, any organization, but I think what might be a value to them, those listening is, you know, we actually piloted a new way in which we support our skilled nursing care centers out in the field. And so I've piloted, I developed this job title which was called the Regional Talent Acquisition Partner.

So basically, if you take Max an HR business partner role and only, you strip away everything else, except the TA kind of recruiting function of that role, that's what I've developed. And so why that has been a big value add for our organization, it's a lot more high touch of our applicants.

The Regional Talent Acquisition Partner does a lot of training and development of our onsite folks who are charged with doing the recruiting at our local level. And at the local level, they are not HR professionals and they sure as heck aren’t recruiters. These regional talent acquisition partners are doing a phenomenal job of training and developing our local operators.

Number one, but number two, really driving the recruiting process forward. And that's really proven to be a game changer for us because not only are they doing a lot of cold sourcing to your point earlier, that's you know, the companies who are doing a lot of cold sourcing are really winning right now.

But also it's providing more of a white glove service to our operators out in the field, which in turn, and to use business terminology, we haven't had to go into agency as much to staff these CNA, LPN and RN roles. And as such, we're saving the company a lot of money, through, well, cost savings.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. Great. The one part, I guess, that the hiring managers or operators will never really get good at is, you know, they may get good at interviewing and all that. And even increasing, candidate referrals, which probably is a very important factor in your world.

Because, I mean, medical professionals know other medical professionals. Right. But where they're not going to be so strong, perhaps, is digital marketing and sourcing on digital platforms, that would be the one piece that remains kind of centralized, I guess.

Blake: Yeah. You know, in a perfect world I could employ a full time Talent Acquisition, digital marketer. I really could, but in the absence of that these regional talent acquisition partners are charged with building, localize employment brand and employer value proposition at the local level.

So that's really how Max, that's really one of the ways in which our organization has, I'm gonna use the term responded to an unprecedented time. I've heard the term unprecedented, so many stinking times over the last seven, eight months, but it's really true. I mean, how we have evolved and just kind of rolled with the punches and, you know, really have done a phenomenal job kind of weathering this storm.

I mean, there's a lot of opportunity, but, I think we're on the right track.

Max: Yeah. And, the President, gave a speech yesterday saying, everybody should get over it. And beat the thing. And so, you know, maybe, that'll help your candidate pipeline,

Blake: Who knows maybe.

Max: And so I work with a number of people in the retail sector and they have this structure where they have also a regional sort of TA lead that goes from store to store and they do these sort of hiring events in the store or in a retail location. Then they move and every day is a different place and they have a schedule for like where they're going to go see 10 or 15 stores in the course of a month. In your regional team is that how it's set up where you have different centers within the region or it's one or two or more than that?

Blake: No, it just kind of depends on the area. I mean, I have one regional talent acquisition partner that supports our buildings here locally in the Portland, Oregon Metro area. And then I have another regional talent acquisition partner who's based out in Yakima, Washington, so central and Eastern Washington.

So they're, specifically geographically placed for a reason, you know, our monopoly myself, but our taps also. Uh, tried to leverage a virtual career fairs, um, uh, a vendor, which didn't get that much of a response. I know that's a big push the last, you know, four or five, six months, but, you know, we didn't get a large turnout.

I think quite frankly, a big part of that was geographics. I mean, we ran a lot of these, uh, virtual career fairs in pretty remote markets where we have operations. And so that's a huge, that's a whole other topic, max, trying to. Yeah. Trying to find people in remote geographic markets, it's supply and demand one Oh one.

And so that's a, a business problem. I try and solve literally every day.

Max: And for that sort localized sourcing and edges of the map. What's your tool kit on the sourcing side ? Are you still going to local job boards and I am even afraid to say this print.

Blake: It's really interesting that you bring that up Max as in some markets print still wins. I mean small remote local markets. It's really one way in which people find news or you know stuff like that and that is the local newspaper. So, print is not dead, ironically enough in some of our markets. But to really address your questions I mean It's tough I don't have a silver bullet. One thing we coach and teach and say at our company is that treat every, (especially in these remote locations) treat every applicant like a 10 carat diamond. But you have to roll out the carpets for these folks. But also we teach the art of pursuing them, you just can't reach out to them, leave a voicemail once and give up, you have to leave a voicemail, you have to email, you have to text, do whatever it takes to get in front of them. So, it's constantly pursuing folks leveraging technology, some kind of basic technology, it doesn't have to be revolutionary. for many of the folks that listen to your podcast.

Max: You said that you were working with an ATS which is industry specific, I have never heard of it Healthcare something ?

Blake: Yeah Healthcare Source is the name of it it. It’s primarily focused in the post acute space.

Max: So, I guess the name tells it all they are going to help you source for healthcare.

Blake: Yeah! They post our jobs to various job boards, but yes they do help source.

Max: To get back to the pandemic stuff the volume of applicants has dropped. Have other metrics like show rates and candidate dropouts, has this been affected? And somebody wants the job and they get scared and stay home where they decide that I don't want to be exposed to an environment where there are alot of elderly citizens.

Blake: Yeah, we don't track those kind of data points Max you know that is something we are aware of, we have run into, we can't really lean back on data but we have seen a 20% decrease. But, something that we teach ever since this whole mess started is that you need to be as transparent as possible with the people, that way they know what they are getting into if they chose to go down this path.

Huge issue in late March early April was, “ohh! They are going to run out of PPE kits and it's going to be a huge thing, but honestly I was there in the office just yesterday. I have actually been going periodically over the last few months. Our office actually never closed which is funny. But we have this huge education room which is stocked full floor to ceiling of PPE. I am not concerned that we are going to run out of PPE, I have never been concerned. So you might think it's not a safe environment but all our folks are tested almost on the daily according to state regulations and I ensure that our buildings that are in states that they have really gone all in on safety. So you make the argument that these places are quite frankly safer than going into the grocery stores for instance.

Max: I guess there is still plenty of people who are looking at it rationally, but you did say that volume dropped so you think volume dropped because there was a 30%... I was wondering if you see some sectors of healthcare more effective than others in terms of candidate activity.

Blake: Yeah I don't know. I can't comment on what my colleagues in the acute settings are seeing. Well I know sitting on that client advisory board that some hospitals stats which is really a mirror of what we see in the skilled nursing and assisted living space. But there is a lot of school of thoughts as to why there is a drop in overall applicant here in the states for many months there was a 600$ a week kicker on unemployment on top of the unemployment, people were making a boat load of money by not working more than they were making while working as a nursing assistant at a skilled nursing facility or a caregiver. So, we ran into that quite a bit and that's a major reason why you have seen a sharp decrease and I think a lot of people are also scared to work in some of these locations, so trying to combat that false narrative has been challenging as well.

Max: Wow ! Well What doesn’t... (this is going to be a bad expression) what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and applying to talent acquisition which have new stressors now in the organization. We have to find new solutions as you come out of this crisis candidate volume goes, but probably your sourcing engines will never be the same and they will be optimized in the ways that you didn't know you could.

Blake: Absolutely, I believe that there is opportunity in chaos; it's the people that evolve and level up. I always kind of joke Max, if you can see massive success in cold sourcing and recruiting in skilled nursing or assisted living you can see success anywhere. As it is a challenging environment, but you know when we are pushed beyond our limits that’s where growth is, that's where we evolve as humans and professionals and I have to speak from my own practice and practice of my colleagues, we have to do different thing to scale and I am confident that we are riding this wave and becoming better .

Max: So we don't sound like Tech evangelists who have had too much tech kool aid and to kind of balance it out, with some areas where tech has fallen short of its promise. Do you have some examples in mind that don't have to be recent, I mean from previous years where you tried something out and wanted to automate it but had to step back and put the human back in the loop.

Blake: Good question, I can't really think of anything specific.

Max: We have a lot of customers for example when they heard that we do conversational AI and chatbots and apply it to sourcing, went to completely remove their phone recruitment teams and thought that, ok! Great, we would let the bots do it and instead of reducing it they went to completely removing it and that had very adverse results and we had to find a hybrid system to work.

Blake: I think Max, there are so many tech pieces out there that can help, but in the end of the day recruiting is a person talking, engaging, and hiring another person. It's human to human interaction and we need to use tech as a tool in our tool belt, but it cannot be the golden gun. You need to leverage technology and use it in your recruiting tool belt. As for Prestige we have integrated 2 pretty nice tech pieces into our practice, one is Texting out Applicant Tracking System which has helped us especially during covid and second is interview self scheduling. Our operators on the back end have been able to click a couple buttons and send messages to the candidates saying, hey select a date and time and then line up that interview and that has saved us so much time, and I guess those are few examples of not just fully relying on tech but utilizing tech as just one of the tools in your TA tool belt.

Max: Yeah, for sure. Those will move needles. It’s interesting you say that text especially. I think that especially now, it makes sense that any edge you can get you shall take but text would, I don't know we kind of imagined candidates stuck at home in front their computer are more available on email than ever but maybe there are out hiking or enjoying nature, you gotta go get them.

Blake: It's not a revolutionary piece of technology but at least in the skilled nursing and assisted living space there are not a lot of companies that are leveraging some on these pieces that we have been able to integrate here at Prestige Care.

Max: And just a couple of years ago, by the way most of the ATS did not have text, and interview scheduling, and synchronizing it with Outlook and Gmail. They have added it, there are also those point solutions that people can use, people can usually get from their ATS, if not they can plug in something quite easily so plenty of options there.

Blake we are just about out of time, thank you very much for sharing your story and I am sure some of our listeners will want to reach out to you, what's the best way to get hold of you ?

Blake: Great question Max, anybody can follow me on Instagram and Twitter my handle is @BlakeInthePNW , you can find me on Linkedin machine, Blake Theiss. Outside of that you can check us out on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin. I actually run all the social media here at Prestige as a part of TA and recruiting. It's a lot of fun being able to share employee stories and things like that. I try to put out as much content as I can. Time is limited these days.

I’ll say Thank you so much for the opportunity Max, I enjoyed our conversation today.

Max: I’ll go and check out your social media feed and thanks for joining us and telling us the story of Prestige, sorry, in these unprecedented times.... You can check on google how many times a word has been used and this one is having a great year.

Blake: Yeah, Thanks again.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello. Today we've got a real treat. On the recruitment hackers with a presentation from Jennifer Terry Tharp, who is VP of strategic initiatives at Joveo and previously in charge of talent acquisition for AT&T globally, and for recruitment marketing there. She'll be presenting the opportunities for your remote hiring program with key insights in this hot area. Enjoy it.

Jenn: Thank you so much for the kind introduction and thank you everybody for your time here today. I would like to share with you that, you know, I'm not the be all - end all, but there are some opportunities in your role in the talent acquisition process. You can maybe take action!

So first a bit about myself, like Max said, I'm currently the VP of strategic initiative at Joveo, which is a programmatic job platform. And I'm going to talk just a little bit about that during the presentation. Before, I worked 20 years ahead of EA and employer branding, and also did some HR Tech works and diversity work at AT&T. I am a lover of board games, really bad reality TV and a huge college football fan. So if you connect with me on LinkedIn, you will hear lots more about all of those things.

To get started. I wanted to start with employer brand, right? The handshake that we have with our candidate. So anybody who has worked in employer brand knows that we always struggle with: how to be true to yourself and to your brand?

And this is no different, right? A remote hiring initiative or moving to more of a remote workforce really still requires you to be you. If you're a more formal company, you need to probably show that, even in your remote workforce view. Right? So I hear a lot. I've worked remotely for probably 15 of the last 20 years and I hear all the time from friends.

Oh my gosh. It must be so nice to wear your pajamas for work. And I'm sitting there thinking, are you kidding me? I work for AT&T, I don't wear my pajamas to work. Right? Like I wear a jacket or a scarf or some nice jewelry. And so really one of the biggest things if you're an employer branding that you can take away from globalization and the work from home trend as it is evolving. Is to show what remote work is like for your company!

This is really your time to set mutual expectations. If the candidate is looking for that environment where it's really okay that they'd be on the beach while they're working remote. Like show that! But the reality is, if you're a more conservative company and working remote work looks like working from a home office, like I am today, it's really a good time to show that too. And some of the best ways to better show that is with actual employees. Do things like showing virtual offices, take tours that sort of stuff.

The next thing is marketing. And this is really a big opportunity, but also a red. Right? So if you're going for having varying locations with specific talent pools, globalazing, and working from home, and having the opportunity to sort of spread your wings a little bit further, it allows you to expand your job search. If you're no longer reliant on hiring in Silicon Valley and you can hire anywhere, you can expand your job!

One of the things that becomes difficult in that for an employer is the thought of, well, I just have one job requisition. So where do I put that job requisition? Right? It's like a real tactical, but a real life problem. And the reality is with technology like Joveo or programmatics I've ever taken in general, you can take that single job and expand it to a multitude of locations where that talent pool might be richer or your cost to employee might be lower.

The other thing to be thoughtful with your marketing is, particularly if you're in an industry where a portion, let’s say, your corporate office, are going to move virtual, but you really still have sort of your point on sale employees. People that work in retail stores or maybe in a hospital or a lab. Really, you don't have the opportunity to globaliz! Right? They need to be where the people are. And so it's part of your marketing initiatives, and is also part of your employment branding.

Keep in mind what your message says to those people that are still having to work in a location specific environment. And again, programmatic job advertising hits the right targets - to the right talent. So if they're local or if you have the opportunity to expand, you can do all that with one click, without having to open multiple job offers.

The next area is interviews, you know, so this is when it's really interesting for me because in my time at AT&T I had a real position on this. And that was that you needed to lead with candidate experience, no matter what. Video interviews are just like phone interviews, which are just like face to face interviews. You do whatever is the most convenient to the candidate and to the process. Right? But now that we can really see each other face to face and we might want to get that communal feeling of being able to see someone before you hire them, that sort of thing. It's really important that you still lead with candidate experience.

If at all possible, don't require a bunch of complicated downloads! You know, do what works best, it's sort of like, do I call you on your home phone or do I call you on your wireless? Right. So be flexible. But most importantly have empathy!

And I put this down and I'm going to have to explain this a little bit to the audience, because here's the deal. I don't know how many of you have kids schooling from home right now? My dogs are right out the back door barking, like crazy trying to get in, right? Like life happens! And when everybody's worklife is happening from their home, It's already a stressful situation to be in an interview.

Imagine being in an interview and just knowing that your two year old is like standing behind the glass door. Right? So just know as employers, it's really our opportunity to lead with empathy. And convey the need to hire. And then, all of that happens, and you find the perfect employee, and it's time to bring them on board but really they aren't going to go to an office to do this. Especially if you're globalizing your workforce on an ongoing basis.

So how can you make that new hire experience? Still feel like one of those top five moments? You know? Like when you're getting a job, it's a really big deal. So think of virtual ways to generate excitement. I think that things like leading up to the first day, things like emails, texts, maybe a video from the hiring manager or trainer. Consider a virtual live component.

I had to get huge props from one of my partners in a private agency. Heather O'Donnell. You can look her up on LinkedIn. If you're working on virtual onboarding, she did a great job even before this, on preparing a common experience for all employees, no matter their location or position. So something where in a virtual setting it feels like you're really in a live component of an onboarding. Right?

Like you get to come in, you get to see people that are obviously not recorded and talking and interacting, maybe some hand raising if you're using zoom so that people can get involved or things like that. Now the virtual live component really goes a long way in establishing community. And I would be remit. Right? That would be great. Even if you have the best onboarding virtual live events ever. If I can't get to it on my company issued laptop, that's a problem. Right? So above all else, one of the biggest challenges with onboarding in a virtual environment and being sure that everyone is getting ready to start work, and is excited to be there, and you've done all this work building up to this point. Make sure that they can get in and have access.

And finally, once you have employees here, teaming in a virtual ways can be difficult! So like I said, for about 17 of my last 20 years, my team has been predominantly virtual and it's a different kind of dynamic, right? Like you see things that are happening in their real life in a much more accelerated fashion.

And that tends to accelerate personal connections because the reality is for all of you on this Webinar now, before the shooting ends, you'll know I have dogs. Right? And if I had kids, you would know that I have them in their school. Right? And so, because we are literally giving our colleagues a window into our personal home, it really accelerates those personal connections.

And there was a varied level of comfort in that, right? Like, I'm a pretty open book and I'm glad to have you in my home and to tell you that my dogs are outside. But different people have different comfort levels with that. And as a peer, a colleague, a leader, you have to just be cognizant of that and make choices that allow for everyone to exist in the virtual team where they're comfortable.

A good way to do that is optional activities. We, here at Joveo. We have a lot of happy hours. We have a book club, we have some slack channels that are more for personal things. I was not afraid to share here on my screen that this is actually a virtual happy hour. I believe it was where I got introduced to the Joveo team. And you might notice I am the one with the giant pink wig. I just, I felt like it was the time for fun. And so I challenged people, you know, to put on a funny face and our head of sales. Dressed up like a little cowboy. We had a James Bond, a few others, but we also had others that just had their names on their screen or just their daily person in their place. Right?

So knowing you can normalize all of that and to make people feel comfortable wherever they're at is a crucial component to sort of closing the loop from employment brand all the way to bringing people on. And if you do this part well, these examples are teaming and catering people where they're at. Those become the proof points in your employment brand, and you continue to go full circle and really represent what your company stands for with the remote workforce, all in a cycle. I thank you for the time today!

Max: There you have it. Hope you enjoyed the presentation from Jennifer and some key insights on employer branding, marketing, and interviewing. For remote hiring programs. I particularly liked how she talked about onboarding and how to make getting hired remotely a big deal, and different tricks on how to generate excitement from your new hire. Even if you're not going to see them face to face. Hope you got something out of it. And if you did, there's more to come, please sign up, follow recruitment hackers podcast, and share with your friends.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: This week, we'd like to show you a special episode, featuring a panel discussion from our last recruitment hackers digital conference, which was moderated by the infamous Chad Sowash, from the “Chad and Cheese Podcast.” We had some wonderful speakers for this panel discussion, including talent acquisition leaders, Ioana Mihalache, Jen Terry-Tharpe, from Genpact and former AT & T, respectively. And we spoke about the benefits of a remote workforce and notably, how those benefits, will impact the world of talent acquisition. I was part of that discussion and we had a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it.

Chad: Hello. Hi everybody. My name is Chad. I am the smarter, more handsome half of the “Chad and Cheese Podcast.”

It's really not saying a lot. If you want an insider's view of what's happening in HR, you can definitely listen to Max's podcast or you can listen to HR’s most dangerous podcast. That's at chadcheese.com. I've personally been in recruiting and technology, for over 20 years working and consulting with major fortune 500 companies, actually building a recruitment technology.

And developing hiring programs. Let's just say I was with monster.com before it was actually called monster. And I've also worked remotely for over eight years now. So let's just, let's start off this way. And let's say, Jen, how long have you been working remote?

Jen: So I did the math after my session cause I kind of made a general statement. So I'd been working remotely for at least 50% of the last 17 years.

Chad: 50% of the time over the last 17 years. Okay... I think you've got me beat... What about you Ioana?

Ioana: I've been remote, I think I've been partially remote and partially in office. I've always had teams spread across continents, countries, for a at least the past six years. I'll be conservative six years.

Chad: Right. And Max, correct me if I'm wrong. For the most part, your teams are,mainly remote, is that correct?

Max: Yup. Yeah, we've got 60 people working in Talkpush and well, of course everybody is remote now, but even before the pandemic, I would say, you know, maybe a third of the team would come in a third of the week. So. Yeah, a third, and 10% occupancy inside of the office. We offer everybody access to an office and it's like a hybrid environment, but they don't have to come. We do encourage them to come and socialize once in a while, but that's that.

Chad: What we've seen. Or at least what's been reported in surveys, etc, etc. Companies are experiencing high productivity. From their newly remote staff, from all these individuals who have not worked remote before, that are now working remote, and they're seeing productivity for a variety of reasons. We can talk about that later. Do you believe this type of productivity is actually sustainable for the workforce? Or are we pushing them too hard right out of the gate? Jen?

Jenn: You know, it's interesting productivity is relative, right? Sure. Because you don't have some of the prep things to do. Like the newness of this might generate kind of a temporary outlift, but I also think that once it gets normalized. People start to like, have to divide the lines between work and home a little bit more. I believe over time it starts to normalize a little bit. But I will tell you, I always felt like I credited my company, my commute. So whatever my commute was that I would normally have to make when I would sit in my office. And I credited my company, the commute.

Chad: For the most part though, that's not the case, right? I mean, pretty much the company sees the commute as a part of doing business. So, I mean. In the US, I know that we're seeing high productivity, I think for, for the most reason is because people want to stay on, they're afraid of COVID and they're afraid of being downsized. So they're seeing just crazy amounts of productivity. Are you seeing that throughout the rest of the rest of the world as well?

Ioana: We have, we have noticed that, and it's not only in recruitment. We have noticed that across the company. You know, Green SLA is across, lots of business results that have improved intensively. Which was surprising and unexpected. Is it sustainable? I'm not really sure, but yes, we have seen this trend across the US and outside of the US as well.

Chad: Okay. So, so Jen?

Jenn: Let's just be real. We don't have anything else to do. Right? That's a part of it.

Chad: We have lives to live! I mean, that's the problem in the US, we live to work instead of like the rest of the world. For the most part, not Japan. You know, they work to live. I mean, that's a cultural type of a thing, and we're taking it to the nth degree. And we really need to be able to separate it, right?

Jenn: For sure. And, and I would just add that I probably was five years then before I realized that I had to designate an end time. Right. Otherwise I would just keep working and I'd look up and I'd be like, Oh, I need to eat and go to bed. Right. So I think that that's a real thing probably all over the world.

Chad: Ioana?

Ioana: Yeah. I wanted to share a very close experience. With you know, when you have to go to bed straight out after work. When you just stand out from your desk and go to bed. I've seen that taking a toll on many people actually, that are very close to me. WHo have been less organized with time management, who have been less used to working from home and getting disciplined and organized and becoming resilient. You know, how do you separate that when you're at home? So I think it's real and I think. That's the reason, I don't think it's sustainable in the long term. Unless we do something ourselves and we educate ourselves and we become self resilient with our discipline to separate. And, you know, COVID or no COVID, like Chad said, we still have a life, whatever that may mean now, we still have to take care of that piece.

Chad: So, Max being the CEO, isn't that a leadership stance. I mean, shouldn't the leader say, look, I don't want to burn you guys out. I want you to work and I want you to be efficient, but I love what Ioana is saying. She's saying, Hey, look, I think we need to look in the mirror, but most people won't do that. Isn't that a leadership and management kind of a stance that we need to really focus on? As we know, remote working will probably be a much larger part of the workforce as we move forward.

Max: Yeah. I mean, I've got a very sort of an always changing team because we're growing and our technology is changing and the composition of the team changes. And you know, some people certainly have complaints about the 24-seven, sort of messaging the pace at which we're in.

Chad: You are a global company!

Max: At the same time. They're, you know, they're joining a tech startup. The global company thing is rough. Right. Cause I mean, right now for me it's 3:00 AM and I want us to be on this call. But it's okay. I just took a nap in the middle of the afternoon, so I'm okay. I'd say that generally. I try to encourage people to take it easy if they can, but I also, as a business owner, if people want to put in, you know, their heart and soul into their work and putting in long hours like, who am I to stop them? I mean, it works wonderful. I'm not going to slow this down.

Chad: Yeah. It's just the whole thought process of burnout. Right. So, Jen, I want to flip over real quick, and I want to talk about, we didn't see COVID coming. Right? So all of you get a pass, all of you, talent acquisition managers and business leaders, you get a pass. This was a blip on the radar. Nobody saw it. One thing that's not going to be a blip on the radar though, is when we flip that switch to hiring and we need to scale properly, and that's going to be par amount for us overall as businesses to be able to service those different segments of our business, whether it's sales, marketing, product. Right? Overall. So I guess the biggest question is when you were at AT & T, what kind of changes were you pressing for, to help with scale? Because you guys deal with hiring under a crazy amount of numbers. Right? How did you scale?

Jenn: Yeah, it's really interesting. I sort of touched on it during my presentation and quite honestly, it's one of the reasons that when I left AT & T, I came to Joveo to work on programmatic advertising because the reality is the time of post and prey on things like Monster or CareerBuilder. Those really aren't sustainable, particularly when the volume of hiring candidates flows so much, right? Like going out and buying 200 job postings at the beginning of the year. Isn't something that we're probably looking at doing.

This has taught us that, right? Like we shouldn't hedge our bets. So we should pay for what we need. And so I think a combination of that, and being able to scale quickly without having to have a really heavy investment on commoditized job postings. I think that that will be a thing, but then also the idea that all of these professions where the availability was so compressed, right? Like, think about how many, how hard it was. Find a data scientist in New York city. Right? Like all of those things that were real, when we came into this, when we came out, now we can globalize that now that I can look in somewhere else, it's so much easier. Right?

Chad: I mean, but AT & T was incredibly progressive. If you came to that thinking, I mean, Ioana, will you guys stay in more of this kind of like a remote stance where you will seek talent globally, as opposed to just in those regions and segments?

Ioana: Yes and no. I don't think we have a clarity of vision at this point. What we do know is that we do want to keep employees safe. So we're staying remote as of now. And for as long as we'll have to. I don't think we've made the final decision on whether or not we are simply borderless across the world. And live and work wherever they see fit.

Chad: What stops you from sort of thing? What stops you from doing that? Because obviously you're doing it now. And we had so many companies beforehand said, Oh no, we can't do this remote thing. They were forced into remote and, from what I'm hearing, what I'm thinking and what I'm seeing, is we're going to see a regression. And I don't know what the reason is behind the regression. What's the reason?

Ioana: I am thrilled you're asking this. Because I myself don't understand it. But the behavior that I've seen is with our operations, our senior managers, our leadership, they seem to be kind of putting obstacles to themselves in going for it and being brave about it. And I think what it is that it takes a lot more personal effort to make something work in a remote virtual environment. It does for me, right? It takes a lot more time. It takes a lot more calls. It takes a lot more personal energy that I have to put into making everything work remote. So I think it's coming from a place of maybe I don't want to put in so much effort and coming back to the office, which is something, you know, we were entitled to in the past. Coming to office, having a place to be and not having things be so difficult.

We do a lot of work with voice processes as we call them, like customer service support, support for collections, you name it. So managing such a team in a remote environment has proven to be quite challenging. And of course we've developed all sorts of tools and mechanisms to do it, but it does take a toll on your time and on your energy.

So I think a lot of it comes from the fact that maybe someone is not really open to putting so much in. They simply want to have a place. Where nine to five is what they have to do. And then. Life happens after that. That 's my opinion.

Chad: It feels like we all need to go back to the cave at this point, really. Max question around scalability and how many companies are actually coming to you today to talk about, because they're in a situation they've never been in before, where they've been pressed to go remote and they need tech to be able to enable that. They can't do that just with Skype. They can't do that just with Zoom. They need platforms to be able to help them do that. I mean, what was the difference between the phone ringing before and emails versus after COVID?

Max: Well, to be honest, nobody calls anymore. It's all on messaging. You know, I don't want to paint a too optimistic picture of where the market is at, because a lot of people got furloughed, sacked, budgets have got cuts and people are looking after, covering their assets, to use the Chad and Cheese parlance. The phone isn't ringing crazy, but what's happening is with our existing customers, the volumes are going up considerably. And of course, nobody is doing it in person; it's an offline kind of event. Career fairs are dead. Everything is moving to virtual.

Volumes are going up. There are more job seekers and maybe there's less recruiters to handle them. So eventually these are macro trends that do work in favor of technology. And will favor a few employers more than others. And the ones that are most inspiring are the ones who have jumped the gun and say, okay, this is it. This is how we're going to operate from now on. And we're going to change the way we hire.

And I understand how difficult that transition is. I understand what Ioana was talking about when she was saying people just want to go back to the office and be able to clock in and clock out and measure attendance as a way of managing, because it's so much easier. But in your first question you were saying, you were asking me about the work life balance. I spent so much time motivating the team. Do I have to tell them about work life balance too? I'd rather just continue to just motivate, motivate, motivate, cause it's a full cycle.

Chad: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. And drink as many red bulls as you can. Jen, in the last 5 years, what does this industry look like? How has it changed? Have we regressed back into the hole we were in before? We're an industry that does not adopt technology as quickly as sales and marketing. Will we advance faster? Will this actually give us the kick in the ass that we need? Or we will just go ahead and get sucked right back in the hole?

Jenn: It depends. Right? Is your location a suck you back in the hole location? Is your company that kind of place, right? In the chat, JB says our employee surveys are showing us that employees want to stay at home full or a blended model. I think that sentiment remains the same. The heavy lift here is for HR particular, in talent acquisition and how we structure things. It's really about our hierarchy, right?

Who in your chaine is willing to be brave? Or are we stuck in sort of our social norms? Because the reality is, if we're looking at this from a strategic, how do we attract talent? Globalizing is arguably better. If we're looking at it from what motivates our employees. I mean, we can see from JB’s response and just anecdotal information everywhere, employees would prefer to at least work a blended schedule, most of them.

So, I mean, the reality is it depends on what drives you. Are you losing money? Well, I would argue that you could probably get rid of some brick and mortar locations. If you're a big diversified company. It probably could save you money in the end. So, when it comes to all of that, I think that the real question is. How brave is your leadership team? How willing are you to go out on that limb and teach and learn and foster a culture that can live outside four walls?

Chad: Your thoughts Ioana?

Ioana: I agree completely. You probably saw from my head silently agreeing. I have nothing more to say. I'm in complete agreement. With regards to recruitment I have a vision for the future. Whether we're going back or not doesn't really matter, but as it relates to technology the future of recruiting without the recruiters working the way they do their job today. I want technology to be able to do recruitment for us in a way that I think partly does it today. But if we are able to remove that recruiter job title, I'm not saying, you know, people shouldn't have jobs, but what, what will the new recruiter do in an age of technology? And that can be between four walls or outside of them. Hanging out by the pool.

Chad: How much of that job is actually just admin and minutiae that tech can take care of. And back to Jen's point, I mean, REI just built a corporate headquarters, a new corporate headquarters, and they're selling it. They understand where the future is going. And they also understand that the footprint of that HQ is a lot of money that they can get rid of. And hopefully they can go back to their shareholders and say, guess what? We're hopefully going to turn a profit out of this COVID thing. I'm going to try our damn business. So as a tech guy, Max, I know you want to press obviously your people and your customers.

This is going to be more on talent acquisition. What would you say to talent acquisition today with regard to being able to do exactly what you Ioana was talking about? Taking away those admin and the minutia tasks that really are just a pain in the ass every day. They're there. They're not helping them. What can tech do to help that happen and evolve them into people who can actually do more human things?

Max: Yeah. I think that going through a job ad on Craigslist or Monster, that was boring. I actually, I was looking for a job back in 2000, during the dot com crash. And I spent a couple of months on Monster looking for jobs and it was pretty tedious and boring.

I mean, I ended up having like three interviews and I took the first job that I was given, basically, which is, I think pretty much what everybody goes through. If you look at some of the stuff I presented today, you see that there's room for a human touch and for recruiters to have fun and to, use the digital medium, to create meaningful connections even if it's through a simple thing, you know, a 32 second video on a job ad. That's where that's where recruitment should be going. Is hiring people who have fun creating digital experiences and people who've been trained on Tik Tok and all of those great tools to create communities, and that they can apply those skills into the recruitment space.

Thankfully, I think we've got a big talent pool of people to choose from, if we're looking for Tik Tok creators. And that's going to be the next generation. All the boring stuff of course should be automated. It is the job of, maybe our generation, the people on this call. Not to put anybody in a… Chad, and my job of course, to create some automation workflow so we can take care of the boring stuff. I am constantly being pulled by practitioners, sort of saying. Can we get rid of this? And now I have to figure out how we can read documents and use this OCR in order to eliminate some of the document collection that happens on onboarding, which is still a huge part of recruitment, and something that, you know, I'm excited to work on in the future. So eventually we'll get rid of all the boring stuff.

Chad: So I want to, I want to pivot to something that Pia ust posted and that's candidate experience there.

So there's so much proposed candidate flow. It's there, but it's kind of wonky right now with COVID, especially in some roles where they don't want to apply because it's a safety risk. Right. But overall, does candidate experience matter? Does employer branding matter?

Yes. Okay. I'm going to say yes, but still what's going on. What happened? We're going to see a bunch of employers start kicking employer brand to the curb and candidate experience to the curb. What does that mean for the industry? Do you think that'll happen, Jen? Do you think they'll kick it to the curb and if they do, what does that mean for the industry?

Jenn: You know, we're sort of like the stepchildren of every HR world and every business, right? Like when hiring stops, money stops and employment branding is a function of hiring in the minds of most leaders. So, I think the funding's gonna stop, right? Like we're going to stop getting money to do those things, but that doesn't mean that we can stop doing them.

In my very first slide, I think I said, I'm being along the lines of like, be true to yourself or something. Along those lines. This is an expectation. So whether or not you have more candidates or less candidates or you're paying for them, or they're coming to you organically, the reality is you still want to align your company's culture and values against their needs before they ever get to the application process.

So it probably shouldn't stop. Ioana do you have a perspective on that?

Ioana: I think, not only should it not stop, I think it should be enhanced. And I think in my presentation, I have touched upon that a lot, all the things that I talked about that we did to enhance our recruitment were actually targeted towards our brand.

As in trust with candidates in a fully virtual environment with so many scams going on so many things that you can't really recognize. Having a very strong employer brand is absolutely critical. In my view, no one should cut that corner when they have costs.

Chad: Yes. And I believe in doubling down on one of the things that I've kind of somewhat argued about is talent acquisition should be a part of marketing.

There's no question because you are hitting, especially AT&T every person they touched was a prospective customer. And if they are pissing off candidates, guess who else? They were pissing off customers, people who actually spend money.

Jenn: I was just going to say, we actually did a study with the talent board that hosts the candy awards on what the impact to revenue could be from improved candidate experience and what the deficit would be by not having a good one.

And it's amazing. I mean, let's think about the black hole particularly right now. If you have an entry level job, you have a lot of people applying and you don't have as many recruiters to get through that. Like it is just a literal black hole.

Max: Yeah. I wasn't sure my mic was on. If you look at the options for a candidate before, it was, you know, let's say you have three different options. You're going to evaluate commuting time, how beautiful the office is, if you get food or not, the benefits. You know, that kind of stuff.

Now. It's like, well, you know, all the jobs are the same, I'm in my living room in front of my computer. So how would you differentiate between these jobs? Well, the main factor is going to be the quality of the people that you interact with daily. Your teammates, who you're going to work with. Defining a real culture where you're gonna work with people that you can recognize, recognize their value and what you have in common with them.

That's how you're going to win the war for that. And,what an exciting time to be doing recruitment where you can actually, work with that. Like everybody's working on an equal footing. Everybody can buy a zoom license and everybody can get a lot of traffic.

I mean, you know, of course you can get even more traffic if you buy it, but it's not that expensive compared to a few years ago. So it's all about the story now. I think it's the greatest opportunity.

Chad: I'd like to comment on what Miguel said. Miguel says, when you're recruiting, you're not buying, you're selling.

And that's exactly what marketing does. Marketing's not buying anything they're selling stuff. And you have to be in that mindset that this isn't just a candidate coming to, hopefully, work for you, right? This is a customer that's coming to you. And they're not just looking to buy a, you know, a mobile phone phone, or a service or a cup of bourbon.

They're looking to actually pour their heart and their time into your brand. So I say that if something's worth more, it's actually worth more if they're coming through the career channel, than coming through the buying channel.

What do you think is the most important piece right now, as we get a chance to step back as talent acquisition, to an extent, as we move forward, what is the most important piece that we need to develop as we move forward to hopefully reach our goals much faster and scale faster?

Jenn: I'm going to have to give you two answers because it's like the two sides of me have to answer. So the employment branding, marketing, creative part of me, right? That part of me wants you to have very appropriately aligned expectations in a positive way, because to Miguel's point, we are always selling, right?

Like, so I don't want to tell you how horrible it is to work here, but if we expect you to be on time every day, I don't want to give you the impression in my creative juices that we’re just really easy going because we're probably not. So I think aligned employment brand message, whatever that is.

But secondarily and might be a little unpopular in my TA circles. I kinda got some boos on Facebook for this comment a few days ago. And that is, I think we need to recruit less people, right? Like there's so many people out there looking and our organizations have likely retracted and probably aren't as large.

And so in order to make the best use of your time, you should work to try to touch fewer people at a higher quality as opposed to making the funnel larger. Right? Like the funnel has already made itself big. You've got to get really tight. And instead of talking to 20 people talk to 10 and that decreases your cost from top to bottom.

So those would be my two takeaways.

Chad: So I'm going to throw Ioana a curve ball. Are you ready?

Ioana: By all means.

Chad: Jen just brought something up that is incredibly important to me. How much money have you spent over the last three years in acquiring talent into your database? You don't have to tell me out loud. Just think about it, right. Think of that money.

Now where's the first place you go to try to find qualified candidates, is it your database? Where you spent all that money? hundreds of thousands/ millions?

Ioana: No.

Chad: So I'm going to reframe my question that I asked Jen, as we move forward, do you believe we should actually start to get better ROI off of all that money we've been spending?

And how do we do that?

Ioana: Through technology. This actually goes back to what I was saying earlier about envisioning recruiter-less future in recruiting. And I want to relate back to Jen's example of the funnel. Whenever we have huge projects going on or we have to deliver like thousands of people in like three weeks, leaders come to me and they were like, we need a bigger funnel.

No people, we don't need a bigger funnel. The funnel is okay, as it is, we just need to become smarter at using it and become smarter about where we spend our time and become smarter about who we select so that we don't have to keep going and going every time, attrition happens.

What I said about technology, I think that's what's going to help us bridge that gap between the two funnel concepts. The second piece I would want to add is simplifying the processes. I don't know if anyone else is dealing with this, but when you're part of a big corporate world, you tend to put so many controls and so many hierarchies.

And so many people have to get involved to get one small thing, and that applies for recruiting as well. Whether it is pretty onboarding or background checks that are, you know, unimaginable for people who we want to hire for call center, contact center or collections work have to go through loops and hoops to just get a decent job.

Please let's fight that, let's become more practical about it. Let's decrease the funnel, become smarter, become practical. And I think that's a winning proposition.

Chad: Amen Ioana. We're going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much. Ioana, Jen, you can tell max needs to get to bed.

I appreciate everybody who's been watching. Thanks so much.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello everybody. And welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast with Max as your host, and today on the program, I'm delighted to be welcoming Jun Abo, who is vice president for talent acquisition at Transcom, based in the Philippines. Jun is someone I've worked with for a few years and I’m delighted to have you on the show. Welcome Jun.

Jun: Oh, thank you, Max. Thank you for having me. And I'm excited to be finally getting this podcast started with you.

Max: Yes. Yes. Well, it's a busy time of year for your industry, right? So September to November. It's a luxury to be able to get half an hour of your time, during this, what they call the ramp up period.

Yeah. 2020 is supposed to be the end of the world for a lot of people in recruitment, but it seems that for your industry, at least, things are holding up pretty well.

Jun: Yeah. More than pretty well, because like what you've said, usually September to December is our busy season. That's where we see a bulk of our hiring.

Coming into 2020 with all of the things that are going on. We thought that it's time for us to relax and slow down, and lo and behold, the demand has been greater than what we've seen in the past. So it's a busy time for us even busier than last year.

Max: 2020 is bigger than 2019.

Jun: Yeah.

Max: Your whole year?

Jun: Oh yeah.

Max: That's amazing. There are few, I mean, I've heard this from other players as well in the space. So first, to do customer care it's harder to hire in the US, and so some of the workers are going abroad, but you were giving me another perspective and we were speaking earlier saying that from your end, the supply is bigger. There's a bigger supply of talent than before, which got unlocked because of this year's events. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jun: Yeah. So traditionally, we would normally tap from three types of profiles. The starters, the shifters and the adapters. Starters are the ones that are fresh out of school. The adapters are those coming from different types of industries. And then of course you have the shifters who are coming from other BPO’s, moving or shifting from one BPO to another. What we've seen this year is that because of the virus, it impacted a lot of the industries. We are tapping more and more adapters and more and more starters.

We've actually partnered with local governments, in order to provide career fairs and employment to returning overseas Filipino workers. So you're probably aware that the Filipinos are one of the most robust when it comes to working outside of the Philippines. You find Filipinos almost anywhere in other parts of the globe. With the virus going on, a lot of those overseas Filipino workers are going back to the Philippines, and we're the ones now partnering with the government venture so that the work is offered to them. So it's a sort of a reverse brain drain. The ones who left before are now coming back.

Max: Yeah. I guess that for you. You know, back in 2019, you were investing a lot in the employee experience and you built that beautiful Transcom cafe, and a nice welcoming experience for employees, and this has, well I mean, the expertise of building a good experience remains true and applicable, whether you're doing it from a virtual work or an actual physical work office. And giving you an edge, you know, an employer that gives a career option for people who want to stay at home, an edge compared to traditional businesses that may be a little bit more, stuck in the old ways.

Jun: Oh, yeah. The candidate experience for us is always going to be key, especially in this market. When we were first designing our virtual recruitment process, we thought that technology can be the silver bullet that fixes everything. So we bought, we partnered with a company that provided us a chatbot, but it was vanilla flavored in terms of responses. It was very robotic. It didn't provide the customization that we need, that would make us unique. So when we looked at the candidate experience, we had a lot of detractors coming out of that recruitment funnel. So we ask ourselves, the first question that we often ask ourselves when we're looking at the recruitment technology is, what would it feel if we're the ones ourselves going through this, and thinking, and using this technology? If we were candidates, what's the candidate experience going to be like? If we're not happy with that own experience, leveraging that technology, then we're not going to be using it.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. It is one of the most painful exercises that anybody has to go through, which is applying for a job at your own company. And it's so painful. Nobody wants to do it. And so we keep postponing, and postponing, and I think that's universally true. I started using it as a sales technique by asking our sales team to apply for a job at every company. And then record the experience and send it to the TA director for them to check out, you know, see how long it takes to apply it to your company. But I guess in an organization, your size, you have to do those internal audits on a regular basis?

Jun: Yeah. I think one of the good things that we put in place as well, it's we have a candidate NPS, a tracking mechanism, embedded in our recruitment process. This is a way for us to measure how many promoters and detractors and passive candidates we have, based on their experience going through one of the recruitment processes.

Max: All right. I've always found the ultimate metric of course, is whether they're going to stick around, or whether they're going to take the job and stick around. It's hard to get a clean read on candidates because they all want the job. So they usually say nice things, even if the experience is subpar. So we always get like super positive data, but I take it with a grain of salt.

Jun: I it's true because if you look at BPO’s, especially in the past couple of years, the biggest driver of attrition, you can see it during the first 30, 60, and 90 days. Where on average, you'll see around 40 - 45% of hires attrition during the first 90 days. That's why usually in recruitment, particularly for us, early life attrition is part of our KPI.

Max: How is that evolving in 2020? I would imagine the attrition is dropping because of the recession. But I would also imagine that perhaps, because you're dealing with a much broader talent pool and a lot of, as you call them starters, people who are new to the industry, they may not have the same preparation. They're not battle-tested so maybe more likely to drop out and realize “this isn't for me”.

Jun: Yeah. And that's exactly that, it's a mixed bag. So far it's still trending towards a good direction. Since we've started our digital journey. We've seen year over year 30, 60, and 90 days retention, improving. This year we saw an artificial improvement just because when we went on lockdown March, all the way up, you didn't see a lot of folks moving from one organization to the other. They'd rather stay put because of course job security. But when we started hiring, that's when we're seeing up to your point, the one fresh out of school without any call center experience, that's when they try it out. And then they need to find out for themselves, “well this is not for me”. Again, call center work, BPO work is not easy, especially during times like this when you deal with customers who are frustrated or angry or stressed. And at the same time, your normal support group is all virtual. You don't have your team leader deciding to support. You don't have your teammates to support you. They're all virtual. So it takes a different kind of employee to succeed in this type of environment nowadays.

Max: I'm wondering, I was going to ask you about automation and all that kind of jazz, but, now that you brought up frustrated customers, and since we're just a few weeks away from the first debate between Trump and Biden and a couple of months away from the election. I'm wondering whether your team has had to adapt to this unique political dynamic coming from the U.S, and notably whether from the customers to consumers... to talk to American operations only, because it's always a theme in this industry but, is that theme kind of dying down where people have accepted the fact that, you know, we're dealing with international businesses, or is it still something that you spent a lot of time training people on?

Jun: We haven't seen a lot of a backlash from outsourcing, like we did a couple of years ago. But we're still mindful in terms of — part of the training is culture training. We want to make sure that our employees are aware and can speak the weather, so to speak, and talk shop with the customers. But we haven't seen similar negative comments said about work being done from outside of the US, yeah. If we did it was like a couple of years ago, I think.

Max: Yeah. Back to the question about the work at home trend. Yeah. You were saying you've got an expanded talent pool to choose from. So does that mean you can be a little bit more selective on the type of people that you bring in and how is the prescreening and the selection process been affected by this broadening of the talent pool?

Jun: Originally, we thought that it's going to open up a larger talent pool for us, but it is also pretty restricted. So there's a couple of things. We have what you call, two challenges. The first one would be availability of bandwidth at home, and then of course a PC. There's a massive shortage of PCs all over the world where it’s taking 90 days to supply those PC’s as a workaround for us where we're trying to experiment on bringing your own device. So if you want to work at home, you have your own PC that meets the minimum requirements. And you have the minimum bandwidth, then you can apply for a work at room set up. But again the challenge is the PC. The minimum bandwidth requirement originally was 4 core wifi. Now we've downgraded it because not everyone has the ability to buy that kind of a spec of a PC. Then of course, the bandwidth. If you've been to the Philippines, the challenge with the bandwidth, especially the ones in the province. Bandwidth access is not as common as say the big cities like Metro Manila

Max: And in your industry, there's always a continuity plan. So if the internet goes down somewhere, you have to be able to pick up the business elsewhere.

Jun: Right.

Max: So I guess at some point, I know you're on the talent acquisition, so maybe you don't know about this stuff, but I imagine that. You have to kind of, does the internet go down for the whole country at a time? or region by region?, city by city? and how do you manage the workload?

Jun: So it really depends on which particular provider goes down. So there's multiple ISP providers. And if one ISP goes down, we would normally have backup with another ISP provider. The challenge is if it's a cable cut. So that means. the common cable where in all of the ISP would pasture or would get cut somewhere in the middle of the ocean, then you're screwed.

Max: Okay. So that's when you need to have an international operation because you're going to the other place. Okay. Yeah. Great. Well, maybe I'm taking a little bit of a step back from the day to day and reflecting on the evolution of the sector and for our listeners who are recruiters. Now taking a moment to think about, what are the skills required today that were not required 10 years ago. How has the profession specifically around high volume recruitment evolved for you in the last 10 years? What are the skills that you've had to hire for internally for your own team?

Jun: For my own team, actually, one of the things that we're looking for in recruiters, it's their ability to manage digitally candidates. Their ability to also work independently, because recruiters nowadays we've gone away from big and massive recruitment hubs. All of our recruiters are working from home. In fact, our recruitment hubs in all of our sites have been converted to different functional areas used by the site. It's actually used for teleconsults. So all of our employees coming in, they go through what used to be our recruitment hub, where they get teleconsultation with nurses and doctors, just to get checked. That's when they get screened before they're allowed up into the production floor. Now our recruiters are working from home. What we're looking for is their ability to work independently, the ability to manage candidates virtually, and again, manage their own time.

Max: That sounds fine, except that you're not going to be able to get, you know, I'm sort of a young university grads to have that autonomy, that independence, that experience that's required to work without close supervision. We might run into some problems a few years down the line. If we don't have these recruitment centers, which is an opportunity for the young recruiters to pick up the skills and learn from the elders. I've seen some initiatives from the sales side where they use software in order to record every call in order to facilitate that, and then do more calibration between people. I guess in 2020, you know, we have the luxury of hiring more experienced recruiters, but in the future. That'll be a problem potentially.

Jun: Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. And I think it's an area of opportunity. One of the things that we're working with our own learning and development team. We recently rolled out Transcom university. So it's a learning management platform. We tried creating micro learning courses, targeted for recruiters. So they can upskill themselves, given what are the things that they need to learn, and what are the things that they need to do better. And it's all available through their mobile phones.

Max: Transcom university. Everybody's got one of those one these days, we're launching Talkpush Academy. We hope some of your recruiters will take our new training course, which is being released this month actually.

Jun: Oh, looking forward to it!

Max: I mean, autonomy is always good to have. What do you think, who are the recruiters that are going to be able to perform well 5 or 10 years from now? What are the skill sets? How is the profession going to evolve further?

Jun: I think the way I see it, it's a combination of AI, which is augmented intelligence for recruiters. The more we incorporate social media. The public persona of candidates, and the ability of AI to filter that available information. That's what will allow the recruiters to have basically tons of information available to them. Even before they start the interview. And then from there, the competencies that you're looking for, you interview or you touch base on those competencies that you're looking for. It's amazing how much we often forget that there's a lot of information we put out there on our social media. Right now there's not a lot of companies that are using social media information for recruiting as a basis for selection. But I think that's going to be a trend a couple of years from now.

Max: Oh, we know about Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. Are you looking for people's profiles elsewhere? Are you going to their TikTok pages?

Jun: As long as TikTok is no longer banned in the US.

Max: Oh, I thought they had a local TikTok, a Chinese TikTok. Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like you need more recruiters who are comfortable with data, and well, are you hiring at the moment? Should we be making a service announcement for Transcom?

Jun: No, not yet. We're good. But just adding to that, it's recruiters who are comfortable working with data, recruiters who are also marketers, because what we realize is that recruitment as a role, as a career has shifted. Before it was mostly an administrative task in nature, but now it's really more of selling marketing and branding from a recruitment standpoint. So that skillset in marketing, whether virtually, digitally or the traditional way of marketing, that's also going to be a key competency that we're going to be looking for in recruiters.

Max: Yeah, on one hand, it's costing less money to gather leads than before. Yeah. But it does require more expertise in a way, cause it used to be, you just bought a few ads on a job board and that was the extent of the advertising and marketing expertise that was required. Now, are you training your team on the aspects, like how to buy ads on Facebook and things like that? Is that part of the onboarding?

Jun: Yeah. So one of the things that we put in place within recruitment, is we have our own digital marketing team. So we have a team that manages all the ad buying on Facebook, social media and on Google. We have our own branding team that creates all of those contents and videos that's really meant for talent acquisition, and they partner with our own communications and employee branding team.

Max: Yeah. That's like a digital agency within Transcom.

Jun: That is exactly it.

Max: That sounds expensive, that sounds incredibly expensive. How did you get them to agree to that investment?

Jun: Well, look at it. When I first joined Transcom 2015, we were doing the traditional way of recruiting. I had around 119 recruiters. In Manila, in Bacolod , and Iloilo. I was recruiting on average, probably around 500 - 600 per month. Fast forwarding to now, my total head count is around 52. So I've reduced my headcount significantly. Focus on specialized skill sets. And then expanded our sourcing capability because it's all about sourcing, right? The more candidates, the more quality candidates that you can bring in at the top of the funnel, the more candidates that you're able to then onboard. So I initially presented them my business case. And it's a good thing that our regional CEO, Michael Ansell is a big believer of digital transformation. He saw the need for us to pivot from the traditional way of recruiting, to the more digital and advanced way of recruiting. So he fully supported it. And in a span of three years, we started moving in hiring based on the desired skill set. So when the virus hit and the lockdown affected the Philippines in March, we were one of the few companies that was really already a hundred percent digitally ready to be recruiting.

Max: You said you were a few years back at 500 hires a month. Is that number roughly the same? So you're able to do the same volume with half the team?

Jun: No it increased. Now I'm doing around 650 to 700 on average.

Max: Okay. So we're talking about like a 30% increase in output with more than 50% reduction in headcount. So yeah. Sounds like your CEO should be happy with that. And that does justify some investments into the digital factory we talked about. Congratulations! Thank you for sharing those numbers with our audience, and sharing your story. Where can people get a hold of you? I believe you've got a very cool nickname.

Jun: No, so you can reach me at LinkedIn. Look for Jun Abo. I am Transcom’s Fairy Job Father. So LinkedIn with me and I'd be more than happy to interact with you there.

Max: Awesome. Thank you Jun. And thank you for your time. I wish you a strong end of 2020, and talk to you soon.

Jun: Thank you, Max. Thank you for the partnership.

Max: That was Jun from Transcom sharing some trade secrets on how he has turned his talent acquisition team into experts in social media and sourcing. Hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to see more content like this, and you'd like interviews from the high volume recruitment space, please subscribe now and share with your friends. Until next time.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello and welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast today. I'm honored to have on our show, the Executive Vice President at Cielo Sally Hunter. Welcome to the show, Sally.

Sally: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Max: Sally, what does an Executive Vice President do? Or rather what do you do at Cielo? You've explained to me you're managing your customers.

Sally: So I'm responsible for all of our clients and client delivery across the near region and also some of our global customers. So that is operational delivery and performance, but also how we manage those contracts, continuous improvement, innovation, and really drive the thinking with the customers that we partner with.

Max: Okay. And, Cielo I think anybody in the recruitment industry should know, what you do, but perhaps shed some light on what's happened to this company? I believe they've had a change of ownership recently.

Sally: Sure, no problem. We're the leading pure play RPO business globally. And you’re right with private equity banks, and secured a new banker, at the start of 2019.

So we are now backed by Primera, and that is a good match to our global footprint. So over the course of both organic and inorganic growth, we're now in every continent and supporting clients across all of those geographies and that's with hub locations in places like Manila, Singapore, Dubai, London, Budapest, Buenos Aires…

So it's really about us being able to be where our customers need us to be, but also being able to leverage a tech infrastructure and a platform that gives us world flex and scale across those hubs, because inevitably we still have a lot of team members that are high proximity to apply it.

So they are in the wrong site or near site and providing that support as well as what comes from the sensor.

Max: Right. Well, right now you don't know where they are. They’re in front of their computer somewhere. And you're hoping it's close to their customer and maybe they all move to Costa Rica or something.

Sally: Yeah. And it's a great point. You know, we flipped to homeworking pretty much overnight. And that's been a really interesting dynamic for all of us that we've been driving those virtual conversations, for years. So often customers really want to see recruiters, but actually it doesn't add value to what they're delivering and they're not necessarily spending time with stakeholders in a way that an onsite role should be.

So what's really interesting coming through COVID is that actually accelerates those conversations to make sure that people are where we can access the best talent, not necessarily high proximity to the customer from a present team perspective.

Shame on us If we don't take advantage of that and shift the model.

Max: That's absolutely how I feel that on one hand, the governments and the travel regulators made it difficult for people to travel. And as a response, borders are kind of melting. As a response we can hire everywhere in the world and now it doesn't seem like that's such a stretch of the imagination.

I service a lot of the call center and the BPO industry at Talkpush and I think we're seeing a lot of activity that may not even have happened, in a different context, even though the economy is suffering, there's a lot of work being sent offshore.

Are you seeing similar shifts in the labor and demand of global markets as a response to this 2020 crisis?

Sally: Yes we are. And it's been really interesting to observe and partner with our customers through this. So we work with Amazon web services, a great example.

So Amazon web services pivoted to virtual almost immediately and obviously had a huge growth in demand because we're all relying on that digital infrastructure.

Max: 10%

Sally: Exactly. What’s interesting is that a lot of the talent is coming from cross border. So, what we have to solve for, with them is how we find these really capable individuals, but potentially we can't relocate them yet.

That, and to your point earlier that may not even be necessary. To relocate them. So can we just function with an entirely virtual team wherever that talent happens to be? So that's been really interesting to see that. So actually, when you think about the way a recruiter’s life has changed, that candidate control and and relationship management is so important because these individuals are going to take a long time to be able to ultimately relocate and also to make the decision to change jobs.

Because what we're seeing in candidate sentiment is that often during these times, people have reluctance to leave a current role because they feel there's an uncertainty in the world. So you know that we're managing through that, but it hasn't changed the fact that the demand for talent is extremely high.

And I think all of our customers have acknowledged in many cases, pivoted for good. That they are going to have a much higher proportion of home and virtual working and even needs to be in the same country.

Max: And a bigger talent pool to choose from if they're not limited by searching close to the office.

I also agree that like right now, we're in early September, those who still have a job are probably holding onto it quite dearly. And so, there's not as much movement, for us, you know, we target HR executives. They’re our buyers and people are just, nobody's moving, everybody's keeping their job.

It's hard to like start new conversations in a way, you feeling that too? On the sales side?

Sally: It's been really interesting. So we had a very quiet period for about the first three months. What we are now seeing, I think you made, this point earlier is that there are so many reasons to start talking to outsourcing partners about how you build back. So, those conversations and those sales opportunities are really starting to bubble up now. I think what is fascinating is are there organizations that are reluctant but interested? But may not ultimately make a decision to outsource versus those that really have a compelling set of reasons and also emotionally can get comfortable with the idea of outsourcing? So it's definitely picking up, which has been really exciting for us, but it's also trying to navigate, what is a real business commitment and strategic drive to work with a partner versus a situation where I think we'll see a lot of hybrid blended solutions.

So what we're finding is some organizations that intuitively want in house are embracing outsourcing for some parts of the process or some role types, just to try and kind of understand how they're going to build out and leverage this kind of a solution.

Max: When you've been in the industry long enough, starting with Kelly services before and then working on helping a contingent and permanent hiring at Aviva to have seen at least one previous crisis, maybe two…

Do you think that the RPO industry is going to have a very strong 2021 similar to, I guess 2009 - 2010 was your year of expansion for the industry? I think following some of the dynamics that you outlined where people are getting more comfortable with outsourcing.

Sally: I do. I think what's interesting and to be really transparent is I think we’ll see significant growth. The important thing is how we translate that into being profitable and sustainable. So a lot of new business coming in will demand significant amounts of investment. And so what we've been preparing for is making sure that we're financially in a great position to take on that new business, but it does take time to go from implementing and building, to more business as usual with these types of programs, particularly if technology is going to play a big part in that.

I think what's exciting about what we're seeing coming out of the pandemic is that organizations need to be more agile in how they implement and leverage technology. So often we're presenting a platform, but actually our customers are struggling to implement and integrate and scale into that technology solution quickly. And it'd be really interesting to see if that can speed up because that will make a huge difference on the overall performance.

So I think it will be a very exciting year. We've got to be really smart and savvy about who we partner with, and scaling that at speed. I think you mentioned, you know, having been in this industry like 17 years plus, one of the things I think people expect is mass applications. So that came out of the last challenge from an economic perspective, there was a huge volume of interested applications and how do you manage that?

And as an industry, we've pivoted to lack of talent, not having this huge funnel coming in. I don't anticipate it being quite the scale that we've seen before. But I think that's because we are more sophisticated at managing that and managing our messaging to interested candidates. Because I think what's sad for all of us is to see a high volume of applications that then results in an email telling you you’ve not been successful. You know, we'd rather that people were applying for jobs that were really relevant and that they felt really connected to.

Max: Yeah. You were talking about how difficult it is to get quick results when you propose a new technology. So a customer, a typical RPO contract is that two or three years long?

Sally: Yeah, we typically — it's five in total and then often there's like a three plus two, three plus one. So, particularly, when we talk about that high volume space and the scale of what we're delivering, some of these customers to do anything less, often is not viable and it makes sense to make that kind of commitment.

Max: Yeah. So, I'm curious, the tech stack. It sounds like you've made some bold bets on technology. What are some of the things that are working well for you this year that have picked up technologies that are helping or getting good looks from customers in 2020?

Sally: I think you're right we have, and as an organization we're very committed to tech enabled, but also acknowledging that we're not a tech business. So we need to make sure we've got partnerships with best in class solutions. And I think it's a blend of, there's amazing stuff out there, but to what degree can it be operationalized and deployable in a timeframe that really works.

And also, what do we leverage as Cielo for all of our customers as a platform. And also what we have as point solutions for them. For us, a big part of the run up to what we've seen this year is things like: self scheduling and candidate control of the process. So, just the basics of allowing your candidates to schedule time, to have a conversation that suits them. You know, it's a really simple thing, but the back and forth is time consuming, frustrating.

And coming through, moving to such a virtual set up. That is a given that every seniority candidate is tending to prefer to own their time and to schedule their time in a really easy way. And from a mobile, not from a desktop. The other piece of that is obviously virtual events and virtual assessment centers has been so critical.

So pivoting to being able to deliver group assessments collectively and virtually, and engaging people in those kinds of communities, has been a big part of what we've been delivering this year.

Max: The virtual career fairs are also a trend that's really picking up. For more like graduates, university hiring, maybe that's not something, that you're more focused on more senior hires, perhaps.

Sally: it's a blend actually. So the early talent space is really critical because what a lot of organizations did In the last recession was they removed all those programs and then they didn't have a pipeline for high potential and their next level talent.

So, it's a big part of what we deliver to our customers is making sure that we understand the full life cycle and how we work with that type of hiring. And what's interesting is that some of our customers are pivoting to doing, an early talent program that is still internal mobility.

So then looking at drawing individuals from parts of their businesses that perhaps quieter rule or struggling during this time, and actually pulling them into other parts of their business as part of an early talent program. So, and you're right, that was a big part of the tech solution that we built ahead of, kind of, our next generation was being able to run these virtual events and do that really successfully and potentially across multiple countries as well.

Max: Do you spend a lot of time, you said you used the expression best of breed solution earlier, or point solution. As a tech entrepreneur, I always have to decide whether to buy or build and I suppose our customers are asking the same questions. Should we buy our build and, you know, generally best practice is to buy and buy best of breed and then glue it up together.

And that might end up with you having a number of system integration engineers on your payroll. Is that how Cielo works?

Sally: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we've acknowledged that, we need to ensure that we're leveraging everything that's out there and acknowledging that the way that we're efficient is making sure that we can deliver those integrations and have one source of truth.

What's been really interesting when we work with customers who’ve built and customized it is so challenging to be efficient and effective. And it's really tough for them to outsource because what it then asks of us is a mass amount of administration and duplicated effort.

Max: They’re not the best engineers, actually the ones who’ve built stuff in house. So it's a slower working process.

Sally: Yeah, exactly. What’s really interesting for all of us is that we've moved talent acquisition and resourcing to the C suite. We've made it core we've shown the value that it brings. And outsourcing was born out of your non-core repeatable tasks, so, and what we've now moved the industry on to is thinking about how to do it well. And actually whether you outsource or you do it in house, you have responsibility to do it well and effectively,

Max: What's the most basic sort of easiest thing to outsource if you're outsourcing phobic and you want to start to, you know, reduce the amount of internal costs to your talent acquisition team?

Sally: That's a really interesting point. So, actually to do something at speed and to feel comfortable that you've got accountability, it's better to take something end to end, and ask an outsource to work on it.

If you start to pull pieces out of your process, one, it tends to... You'd need to have a great process to then have something that you hand off and then you hand back. So in order that you don't need to redesign the entire ecosystem, what we tend to suggest is that you look at an area or a segment and you ask an outsource partner to own that end to end, because then you can hold us accountable because there's not too much co-owned and you don't necessarily have to completely redesign the process.

Max: I can see why you say that, Sally, because if they're so good at breaking down the tasks, down to the single you need a deliverable then no, there's no way you're going to get any margin on that deal. Right. It's just not that attractive because they know how to run their stuff.

They can run it so good they don't need you.

Sally: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a big factor as far as tendencies, and that's what everybody's learning is that, you know, we've had a lot of conversations with our existing customers that we were working with before COVID. And, you know, they have been able to take cost out by simply having this model.

So it is just, you know, outsourcing is designed to be unvariable costs. And so I think it's where you've got that volatility outsourcing can really help you handle that. And actually not have to go through very painful redundancy, restructuring, or frankly just have a standing thing that is not fully utilized.

Max: Yeah. You know, and selfish thing I want to ask you, are your customers asking you for chatbots? and I'm wearing my chatbot tee shirt, so...

Sally: Oh no, it's an interesting question. So our customers ask us for innovation. They want to understand what is going to really differentiate them in the marketplace. So I don't think they're specifically asking us for chatbots. What they are asking for is agility and scale, and being able to understand where automation makes sense, where it enhances the experience and where potentially it could be detrimental to the experience from a candidate’s perspective. So I think they're driving us for that thinking.

Max: That detrimental idea is one of my favorite topics.

What's an automation initiative that fell flat on its face? That was unable to deliver its promise. If you can go back, you don't have to name people or clients or situations just, does that ring a bell? Were you able to bury those memories?

Sally: I think this is a partial part of the process that we learned to do differently.

So, we have a number of high volume hiring solutions that are very much tech enabled. And what we tended to find is that if we completely round the process end to end without human interaction, we had a challenge at the backend with no shows. Actually, when you start to really dig in, there are typically very high volume solutions, you will have no shows. That is not possible to eliminate.

What we established with the one call or contact that was personalized between the arrangements being made and the attendance actually made a huge difference to the number of people that did the no show. I think actually it was a huge success from a tech perspective, but we need to keep evolving.

Max: You went too far in one direction..

Yeah. You have to find, well, I mean, we've seen that over and over again. And it was when we launched our technology in this area, the first response from people was like, sorry, it doesn't work. Because we went from all humans to all automation and the humans outperformed the automation.

And we said, well, yeah, we never told you to get rid of everybody. Now it's very much a big part of who we are is this training the users and what we call augmenting the recruiter. And one number that we're trying to drive is the number of hires per recruiter, which I guess is the ultimate productivity metric for an RPO as well.

Sally: It's hugely important. And also what we, each time we're looking at what impact it has on the experience. So you've got to work out how many hires they do, but also how many of them stay? Let's understand what the attrition is. Let’s understand all of the implications of what we do.

But that's a big metric for us. And there's a level where actually there’s limited benefits to going even further. So it's a bit like time to hire actually, how fast. If you get so fast, do you have to not plan? And planning and forecasting demand and workforce planning is so important for businesses to be successful and so the more that we solve things in distress and with quick fixes, the less planning is needed. And actually that I think is always, it's a balance that we have to, I think whether you're providing a tech solution or outsourcing, that's something we've got to really consider.

Max: The two and then opposition, you know, planning and response time. I'd like to think that we could probably pull off both. But there are an endless number of ways of measuring even something simple, like time to hire. I can not get straight answers with people because it's time to fill from point of application to the point of hire, is it the day they came into the office or when they signed the contract, et cetera.

So it's just a lot of definition that needs to happen up front. And then for the cost per leads, you know, we have to also decline it into 10 different numbers. So we're going to do a webinar just to talk about all that soon for our listeners. And it is as boring as it sounds — heads up.

Sally: But it is like the Nirvana of the industry, you know, if we can get to the implications of an extra seat, and to your point, it's different for every client, you know, but actually the philosophy and the science behind that is going to transform the way we build business cases and what we choose to invest in.

And I think it talks to the business average as well because, to really be successful as a TA function you've got to be able to translate the risk and the demand into language that the business is comfortable with. So I get it, it's a bit dry sometimes, but I think it's hugely important for us.

Max: Yeah. It's all about the numbers. It's a numbers game, but it used to be a people's game. It used to be, you meet at the pub, you have a beer with your customer and you negotiate the contract renewal, and that's how you did business. With that option removed from your workforce for the last few months how's the morale holding up and can you give us some practical tips on how to keep people connected while they're talking to a webcam?

Sally: That's an interesting point. And I think for sure that's been a challenge for us, I think in terms of our relationships with our customers, as well as our employees connecting, what we were doing ahead of this was adopting more of a daily huddle approach.

Like a stand up huddle, and that's been really helpful coming through this to actually just do 15 minutes at the start of the day with your core team members and sometimes we talk business and we work through all the priorities for the day. Other times we just take a moment to check-in, you know, and let's hope if I ask you if you're okay and how you're feeling, I want to hear the answer. And that didn't always happen before.

So I think something we should take is that we continue to do those check ins and really listen to how people are getting on and acknowledge that they might need to talk about it being tough at home or homeschooling or all of the stuff that we've had to deal with and, you know, making the time to do that's been really important.

And we use Yammer to connect and just talk about what we’re facing and the stories that we're hearing and what we're seeing from our customers.

So all of those platforms have had significantly more engagement during this

time.

Max: So Yammer is your platform of choice. And then you, of course you latched onto the platforms of your customers, your clients.

Sally: Yeah, absolutely. So, think about our employees, particularly those dedicated to a customer they're operating both in our systems, but also in the customer’s.

So it's on both sides that we're kind of curating information to try and help people through this and that. And then some of the new ways of working.

Max: Yeah. It must be quite actually it's sounds like, you know, for these jobs that are dedicated to our customer, the new normal is probably quite an easy transition in a way, because you know, they're not so dependent on, having that, you know, the company is more of a concept rather than a building kind of thing.

Sally: Yeah. And I think it's, you know, I've seen with a lot of our customers that they've taken a long time to embrace video, to really get comfortable with it. Often they're designed to connect to me in person. And in many cases I would support that I would be doing quarterly business reviews, not in person.

That's really tough. But when you think about the way in which we connect day to day with recruiters and hiring managers, et cetera, being able to do that virtually, it just makes. You have imminently more time to be able to really do what's important and what we're there to do. And so that has been a big shift and a really positive shift.

Because your team is any worse, it's not because you haven't seen them in the office this week. You don't feel like they're doing work for you.

Max: Yeah. Happy times, I guess. One tip that I read from, uh, from somebody who does sales and trying to build trust with our customers is they're organizing cooking sessions, live cooking sessions, over zoom, with a chef giving a personal cooking class to their customers, an opportunity to network while being at home, doing something fun.

Maybe something for the holiday seasons, but people are back in the office

in London?

Sally: So we are not back in the office yet. So globally we haven't returned to office.

What we are doing is building out a rotational process. So actually at the moment it looks like Hungary will probably be the first location that goes back. And we'll start to do that on rotation A and B teams in terms of being able to get people into the office securely and safely.

Max: Where did you put yourself on that list?

Sally: So I've been going into the office in London probably once a week for about the last month. Just because, you know, I wasn't a high worker before this, so it's been important to just stay kind of connected and spend some time away from home.

Max: Well, I know how you feel.

Yeah, it's good to be back. When it happens I like keeping a foot in both, but, thank you for putting one foot inside of our podcast and spending a little bit of time with us sharing your story and the story of Cielo going through this crisis. And I do agree, you know, very exciting times for the RPO world.

So thanks to Sally and wishing you a very strong end of the year.

Sally: Great. And you too, I've really enjoyed it.

Max: That was Sally Hunter from Cielo sounding very optimistic about what the end of 2020 and 2021 has in store for the RPO industry. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you want to hear more, please subscribe and share with your Talent Acquisition friends. Thank you.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Recruitment Hackers. This is Max and today I would like to welcome Lisa on the show. Lisa Shepherd.

Lisa: Hi everyone.

Max: Hi Lisa. So Lisa is someone I had the pleasure of meeting when interacting with Sitel and has a long experience in high volume recruitment in the BPO sector and financial services. And is now a consultant as well. Can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up in the high volume recruiting space?

Lisa: It's pretty interesting. My career didn't start in high volume. It obviously started as most people did, on the agency side and then moved into in-house. But over the years I kind of found myself more in professional services, IT, outsourcing, then financial services outsourcing, and then most recently with Sitel. So it kind of, I think once you start in one path it kind of leads to other opportunities. So, you know, when I moved to Miami, I wasn't expecting to be approached by such a global organization, because in Miami, you assume it's more regional headquarters.

When I got approached by Sitel for the role, I was like, wow. Okay. 80,000 people across the globe, hiring between, you know, 16, 17,000 people a year. So yeah, it was such a great opportunity that I jumped at it.

Max: I love volume. You can make a small difference in so many people's lives. I also started out doing a lot of IT recruitment myself, and I thought the job was tense, which is why I'm happy to work on automation and technology now. But, Miami being international, I'm not that surprised. We have a few, BPO companies that are operating out of Florida. Like iQor and Sitel and others.

How long have you been in Florida now?

Lisa: Oh my gosh, almost three and a half years. And actually originally I was wanting to move to New York. Florida wasn't really somewhere that kind of was on my radar, but the company I was working for at time TMF, had a regional headquarters here. And when I thought about it, I thought, why would I move from London to New York to have the same weather? and expense? When I could move to the sunshine state and be close to them, the beach, my dad actually lives close. So it was kind of a no brainer.

Max: Perfect. Yeah. I think it sounds like if people want to go and retire there, that means that they should just start working there. And, that's the world that we're moving into now where people are finding a work life balance through relocation and moving closer to their dream spots and still keeping an occupation. So, today, you're doing consulting work. Can you tell us a little bit about that? is it technology related?

Lisa: It's interesting, actually. So, you know, this kind of happened due to COVID. So there's always a silver lining to everything. I set up my LLC very quickly and I got approached by a contact of mine and what's happened is over the last few months, I've ended up with two clients who are private equity backed.

And both of them are at, you know, early stages of either a carve out or an acquisition. And so we're in a situation whereby they're smaller businesses. So it's not a high volume, they're smaller businesses, but they're, you know, either it's a carve out with no back office support. So no TA function, whatsoever or it's a merger, people have left.

You've got to organize it, trying to merge during a pandemic. And people leave. And then suddenly again, you don't have a system that's being used across the board. You don't have a team. You've got local HR doing all the recruitment. You've got high spend, you know. Both of them have very similar situations in that they just need someone to come in and put in a process, put in a strategy, look at the team and put in systems.

So, yeah, it's pretty, interesting. Lots of ambiguity and very stressful in a sense, not for me, but for them. And that they're trying to do all of this whilst not being in an office. Really difficult. Very difficult.

Max: Yeah. You have to switch on that camera and smile at the camera a lot.

Lisa: You do, and you have to get your hair done in the morning and get on that camera. So, you know, it's been very interesting, I think either way it's difficult at the early stages of an acquisition or a carve out. You know, especially people that have come from a smaller business and now suddenly they're part of a larger business or they're part of a larger business and now they're part of a smaller business as well.

There's so much change and it doesn't suit everyone and trying to get everyone to come on that journey with you is very hard when you can't be face to face with them. When it comes to setting up a TA function and systems is the same thing, trying to get the hiring managers to align with the strategy.

It's just difficult. It's just different ways of communicating and trying to sell the story to candidates as well. Again, different ways of communicating. So you just have to be, you know, think out of the box. Yeah.

Max: That's the part that I'm most interested in talking to you about, this talking to candidates and how it differs from one team's to another’s mindset. And let's centralize, you know, best practices and then roll them out and sort you know, a one size fits all approach that is going to alienate local teams and local brands, and misses the opportunity to create meaningful connections at the front of the funnel for companies that know their local markets, and they know their sort of, one size fits all approach.

Have you been on both sides of these battles

Lisa: It's funny, I've been in both. I've been in a situation where they were very localized and centralized. So the idea was that we have a global process, but not to lose the local nuances. And then again, a different situation whereby it was extremely localized, but somehow they wanted to have a global process, but still keep it very localized.

And quite frankly from what I've seen, you need to meet somewhere in the middle. If you're a global organization, you need to have one voice. If you're trying to create a culture, and have, you know, competencies and values that align, there's got to be one approach, but with those local nuances.

So how you attract candidates in different markets hugely varies, right? And how you talk to them and the messaging that goes out, but it needs to still be an aligned message. And I've seen it where it hasn't been. So you create silos within a business and you're not creating a culture per se. And no one feels part of an organization.

Max: let's get down to specifics then, like when you're saying, when do you cross the line? If I'm allowed to speak in a different language, through a different channel, advertising on different boards and with a different step by step process, you know, there's five interviews in one part of the business and there's only two in another part. If all of that is fair game, which I believe it is, then what isn't?

Lisa: You need to have at least you’re saying the same thing, right? So who are we as an organization? What is the stress sheet? What's important to us as a business? And you know, what are the type of people that we want to attract into our business that align with our values?

If you're talking to the same language, so to speak, but not the same language, but saying the same thing to every single candidate and assessing candidates against those premises, then I think it's fine, right? You have to have some consistency because you have to have a fair process. So, you know, if you're doing five interviews for one candidate and two for another, then obviously that's not right.

But if it's totally different jobs then that’s fine. My view is as long as everyone's kind of saying the same thing about the business and passionate about it, you know, if you have a central HR function, then as long as you provide those guidelines to local HR, to local TA teams, as long as everyone buys into what that is.

Then I think then off you go. Right? As long as the results, as long as you're hitting your numbers, as long as you know, the tenure of those people that you're attracting is good and you don't have crazy attrition, then you're doing something right.

Max: Yeah, I think it sounds pretty easy when you say it, actually, it sounds like, okay. I mean it’s just a set of guidelines and values and then off you go. On the technology side, it's not so easy because most of the tech stack is focused on the North American market, maybe Europe. And does not really do that well with other markets on the sourcing side.

But maybe this crisis is an opportunity to centralize more than ever. I mean now, if we can hire from anywhere, as long as you got an internet connection, then maybe there should be one size fits all. You know.

Lisa: I still don't think that would work.

I still think, you know, especially if you're looking in Asia, for example, how you manage the process in India versus Singapore is going to be very different. And so as much as you know, yes, maybe this is the opportunity to get one system, for sure, but if that system allows you to have local nuances then amazing.

Which I think is not easy to find when you're looking at technology, when you know, for example, when I was in Sitel and we were looking at various different pieces of technology, CRM, et cetera. We really needed something that was agile when you're working with so many different markets in Latin America and Southeast Asia, you need to have that diversity to say, okay, well, we want this kind of process in this location and this process in this location, but we still want to use the same tool. We need to be able to tell a story to the business. We need to be able to share MI, and be able to see how we're doing against our KPIs as a TA function, then great, we can still show all of that if you have one system. But when you don't or you're working off spreadsheets and you're trying to manage, you know, high volume from social media, from all different places. It's insane. You can't, I mean, it was almost impossible.

Max: I agree. I've been trying for years and I agree it's almost impossible. I know.

Lisa: I think actually over the years, with utilizing things like, you know, Facebook as an example, and Instagram, and really trying to attract people from those tools, fairly hard, because quite often you don't necessarily know where the candidate actually heard about your organization, first off.

So, you know, they could have seen your advert on Facebook, but then gone to your website and applied online. So, that's another challenge that I think businesses have and I've seen is where did that person really come from? Do we know that our methods are working? How do we know? Unless they directly apply from that link, which doesn't always happen. So, to understand how social media is evolving you need to see where your candidates are coming from.

Max: Very difficult. We used to classify channel Facebook, but now we have to split it into communication channel in order to try to be fair with every channel. And ultimately you recommend that...I do see the value that at the end of the process, you ask the candidate, by the way, where did you first hear about us? And they may not remember exactly, but it's as good as any source almost, if you’ve got a lot of channels activated.

Lisa: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's the only way to really get a true answer. As much as we want to automate that piece, you just have to ask the question.

Max: Yeah. It's like one of those questions that, you know, you're never going to get a perfect answer, but that's as good as anything else, like a good comparison would be like, are you happy right now?

There are so many different ways of finding out whether somebody is happy or not. There's like, you know, physiological signs and other things, but really the best way to find out is just to ask them and hope they're not lying.

Lisa: Right. Exactly.

Max: How do you see the market evolving right now? Obviously from your perspective you're dealing with some internal changes in your companies. Could you give some insights into how talent acquisition has changed for your clients over the last few months and dealing with the pandemic? And the response to the pandemic, things that went better than expected and things that went harder than expected, perhaps.

Lisa: So I think it's a fascinating thing, right? So to kind of see these changes and see how different businesses react to it. I think for me, that's been the most interesting because now I've seen a very large BPO and now two smaller kind of private equity owned organizations and how they have various different approaches.

I think a lot of people are talking about you know, there’s going to be so much more flexibility. Everyone's going to be able to work from home. It's going to be amazing. I actually don't necessarily see that in the smaller businesses. What I see is at the moment, yes, people can work from home, but we're planning for people to be back in the office.

So when you're hiring, you need to hire someone that is still in the vicinity of our location. So there's a lot of talk about, maybe some of the larger organizations… You know, especially those that are most well known are talking about, you're not going to have people come into the office. Everyone's going to be remote.

I don't think for smaller businesses that is necessarily a long term option. Maybe there will be more flexibility for people. You come in two, three days a week when maybe before it was five days a week, but I think to create a connection and create a good working environment they feel like they need to have people back in the office. So that's very interesting. And especially because both businesses are at very early stages of their creation, so there's definitely a feeling that we need to get people together. So that's one thing From a TA perspective, it's been interesting to see how hiring managers have responded to interviewing people on zoom and whatever, you know, virtual thing that they're using.

Positives and negatives. I think obviously in terms of having more flexibility on time and, you know, just doing what they need to do, because we still have to hire through a pandemic. They've done it, but I think, again, when I look at the smaller businesses I'm working with, I think we're losing some of our technique.

And you know, trying to make the right decisions when you're interviewing someone on a video is very difficult, especially for senior roles. I think there's still a feeling that I want to meet this person face to face. So that's very interesting. But then when I go back into the kind of high volume space, when Sitel, just before I left, we had rolled out a hundred percent automated process in the U.S, so assessment and face to face, well sort of virtual interviewing process. And that worked from what I’ve seen and what I've heard that worked extremely well for them. And I suspect that they won't necessarily go back to having candidates come and sit in the reception of the call center waiting to do an interview or an assessment and spending maybe two, three hours there.

I think it would be extreme and very different world for them now, which I think is hugely positive and was exactly what they wanted to achieve, but needed a little bit of a push. And the pandemic kind of gave them that push, especially in the U.S actually for sure, in the U.S.

So, you know, when you're looking at high volume, I think it's been great in the sense of going virtual. I think for the smaller businesses that have more sort of intimate relationships with candidates and have to spend more time. assessing candidates for fit has definitely been more challenging.

And managing a process, remotely is fairly challenging. Managing people's diaries and you know, sometimes you have two interviewers and doing that virtually and sharing information on your logins and then the internet goes down and it makes an interview much harder to do, I think than face to face.

But we'll see, you know, I still think it's evolving. When this pandemic comes to an end we'll see how businesses react, but I do think some of these smaller companies will go back to being in the office.

Max: Yeah. There's a case to be made for faster collaboration, faster iteration, easier to make meetings, easier to get people's attention. Easier to do training. All of that is easier in person, easier to go for a drink afterwards as well.

Lisa: You’re creating a culture, you know, if you're a business that is still in that sort of startup mode, you're trying to create a culture. And that's very hard to do when everyone's on remote call on a video.

So yeah, for the two businesses I'm working with very, very hard because really early stages and very interesting that trying to do all of that remotely.

Max: Maybe I can give you a couple of tips on how we do it at Talkpush. We've got 60 people working in eight different countries, everybody working from home and has been that way for a while pre pandemic. We randomly allocate two people together once every week or two weeks for a water cooler chat so that they get to know each other on a non-work basis, mixing departments between themselves. So we build some team building there.

I don't participate personally, but we do have lunches in front of the webcam and a bunch of other things I've seen online. Like people having charade competitions and karaoke competitions, all kinds of things in order to make it, feel like you're connected.

Lisa: Yeah, I love all of those ideas. The two businesses I'm working with are about a thousand people each so I think there's definitely opportunities for them to do some bits and pieces, but I still think they're still trying to deal with this situation as much as where, you know, four or five months in, that there's still an element of figuring out what to do day to day, just to keep the business going.

So I think in some places you forget that you're also still trying to create a culture. And right now they're just trying to make sure that they're keeping the revenues up right? to survive. But that will come because attrition will go up and that's when you really, you have to focus on your employee value proposition for sure.

Max: Yeah. I think everybody's trying to wonder who's going to tender a resignation three months from now when the unemployment goes down.

Lisa: But also, actually I'm finding in some markets, the unemployment is not that high. So, you know, back in 2008, and the last crash that I remember, there was an assumption that there’s going to be tons of great people out there. We're going to hire, it's going to be super easy for us to hire because now we're in a recession. So everyone's looking for a job. And what happened then is happening now. In some industries, yes, absolutely. There are a lot of people who are available, but not in all industries. And, you know, then people get lazy and they don't create a good experience. And I'm starting to see that now with one or two clients, there's an assumption that they're going to get the best candidates, but some of these people are still working and we're actually approaching candidates who are still in jobs, thank God. But, they don't want to move because they don't want to take the risk. So that's the other side, right?

Max: My first reaction, when you said people are getting lazy, I thought you were talking about candidates, it's like, they're getting their checks in the mail.

Lisa: I would never say that, now. I mean corporations are getting lazy because they think it's easy to attract, so they don't want to spend too much time doing it. And you know, us at talent acquisition are having to educate managers and senior leaders to say, guys, the people that you have asked us to approach, they're still working.

Some of them are still working and they don't want to move because, you know, they don't want to risk coming out of a business that whether, you know, still got a job and still earning cash, to an organization that is fairly new. So it's pretty interesting that, as much as there's an assumption, that's not always the case.

Max: Well, I think it's ridiculous to have that mentality If you're in Talent Acquisition to think, oh, now it's easier to hire. And so, of course it may well be true, but if it's easier for you, it's easier for everybody else. Hence you still have to beat competition for the best talent.

Lisa: Exactly. And that's a problem, people get lazy and then you're not able to fill your roles.

Max: Okay, well, parting words, last question. Tell me how you think that the role in Talent Acquisition is evolving and what are the qualities required to be competitive in let's say 20, 25, that are, you know, not such a big deal now or a few years ago, in which direction is the Talent Acquisition profession evolving.

And how do you keep your team competitive and on the edge of this battle for talent?

Lisa: I think it is going to come down to technology. Yes. And depending on what market you're in high volume or not, we need to be able to be on top of the newest technology that's on the market that can help us source the best candidates.

So that's the first thing. But then the second thing is you still need to have that human skill of building relationships with your stakeholders and with your candidates. Irrelevant, whether you’re doing high volume or not. I think there's, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, we won't need people anymore. It will be automated. And you know, you're gonna use AI and it's going to be great and that's how you will select your candidates.

There will be, of course there's an element of that. And there will be in 2025, no doubt, but there will still be the human element. We talk about the human part of human resources, right?

TA is a huge part of that. And as it gets harder and harder to attract talent, you need individuals who can build relationships, who can do that and attract the best candidates. And in terms of how businesses attract candidates it has to be more than the package. And I still have this conversation today with organizations and businesses to talk about, especially smaller businesses, to talk about, okay, you might have a really great benefits package in one of your jurisdictions. But, what is it, what do you believe in right? What's your strategy? What are you doing in the local community? That to me is what people are looking at these days in businesses.

Like what does that business do? do I really align with their ethics and you know, their values? Is that me? Can I see myself working there long term? So I think more and more, it's going to become harder for organizations to really be able to articulate that and focus on that because of course the bottom line is bottom line. You always need to focus on the cash.

But they also need to look at who they are and how they're being portrayed in the market. and that will get harder and harder. And especially since social media changes so quickly. That's the other piece like being on top of where candidates are looking for jobs or where you can attract their attention. More and more, that there's so much advertising on social media these days you get bombarded.

So how do you differentiate yourself as an organization to people that you want to attract? That also is going to get harder and harder. So being on top of that and constantly recreating, it's going to be super important.

Max: Well, it sounds like a very complicated career to be in.

Lisa: Yeah, but you know, we love it.

Max: There's that storytelling piece, then you gotta be on the edge of technology. Then sort of a strategic positioning where you want to stand out and be able to develop an identity that people can feel drawn towards and want to be associated with. Quite a juggling act.

But, yeah, it does sound fun. And, it was fun talking with you, Lisa and catching up after your hopefully temporary departure from the BPO sector. Where can people get a hold of you?

Lisa: So obviously linkedin and I have my email address on there. So get in touch, send me a message.

If you want to talk, I'm here.

Max: Thank you, Lisa.

Lisa: Thanks, cheers, max, have a good one.

Max: And that was, Lisa Shephard, from Florida, an English woman in Florida with an interesting perspective on whether the work from home trend that has been initiated with the pandemic will last much longer, especially for small businesses who rely on speed of execution and the energy that you get from the team meeting in person.

If you liked the interview and you want to hear more about the exciting world of volume hiring and talent acquisition automation, please subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast and share with your friends.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Good morning, everybody and welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast with max from Talkpush. Today I’m excited to be welcoming Paul Noone, who is CEO for HireIQ and someone who is in technology. And I've, we both focus a lot of our energy on the call center and the BPO market and service this industry, which is always hungry for automation and innovation. So we both love this industry and we can exchange our thoughts on this topic.

Paul, thank you so much for joining me on my new podcast.

Paul: Hey, thanks Max, I’m thrilled to be here actually.

Max: So our audience, some of them will recognize HireIQ. And some of them will probably recognize you, but they probably don't know the history of how you ended up starting this business, or how you ended up with HireIQ.

Perhaps you could walk us through that journey.

Paul: Yeah, I'd love to. HireIQ is an interesting technology and we're very focused on the call center. And because the call center has this outsourcing process that's associated with business process outsourcers.

Most of the organizations don't realize that, while Fortune 500 organizations, anybody with a product or service has a requirement to support through call centers or through service locations, they also do a lot of outsourcing. So they're organizations like BPOs, the large ones in call centers are Teleperformance and Alorica and Atento and Sutherland and 24[7].

And those are the organizations that we help with in the talent acquisition, part of this, you know, max, you and I probably talked about this before, but recruitment is the term that we use. But we're in sort of a special place in recruitment. We're in the engagement with the candidates, the acquisition of all the data that we aggregate as much data as we can in a shorter period of time.

And then we provide it to the recruiters in such a way that they can quickly make a decision, because we're talking about maybe 10 interviews for every hire, we're really known for our efficiency. And then we're also known for the AI associated with how we do that. How do we tell whether a candidate it's going to be particularly good at this particular role in collections or in sales? Or in support?

We do a whole lot with that. I actually got here about six years ago through the investors. So I had just, I was working with another technology company on disaster relief, and just sort of an interesting aside, Max, we had built a product around disaster resource management and that's where these large scales or, when you guys experienced the typhoons and we have the hurricane season from June through November and, being able, you know, the shift in technology, the shift to phones, being able to locate all of the things that you need when a disaster strikes is a really interesting use case.

So we had gone pretty deep into that and acquired some large customers, the U.S Red Cross, but we were looking to move from the Red Cross division of emergency management and we were looking for additional investment. So I was on sort of a roadshow talking to investors and ultimately a lot of people made the decision that it, and it's a function of that market. But, without disasters, if you have a good year, meaning no disasters, you’re getting no money into that particular part, the Red Cross every now and then they literally go almost to zero. So they actually need engineering,

Max: Pure disasters once in a while.

Paul: And oddly, when you're in that business, you start to hope for bad things to happen. So there was something wrong, but the investors didn't buy.

Max: I think it's not just the disaster people. I have a feeling that a certain class of politicians also relying on a good disaster once in a while.

Paul: Well, so there's politics in there, the weird thing about funding ,and how funding shifts, and things like that.

I think that actually is what scared investors away, Max, and it's a shame in some ways. That what we were doing was, you know, enabling, with the Red Cross, for example, we found a billion dollars worth of resources that had been sort of lost, and it hadn't literally been lost. It was in firehouses and it was in other locations.

And that sounds like an inventory management issue, but it's not when something bad happens in one part of the state. And then you realize that through a quick app, you can find it. Where everything is: shovels clubs, protective eyewear, and N95 masks, for example. Imagine that you put in an application, you find a billion dollars worth of resources, really through crowdsourcing your own people.

Anyway, that app is lovely but the investors didn't think it was an investable market at the time. And so I just finished this and I had met with the investors here and I called them back and said, you know, so we'll probably shut this down. And they said, great, because we have something we'd love to share with you.

And they brought me into HireIQ. I have a background in call centers. I was with Genesis as they were starting out on sort of the part of the first team. I want to say pre-revenue, but I want to say Genesis is a $2 billion organization right now, 20 years ago when I was with them we had less than $10 million in revenue. So building that to a public company and then moving on, but coming here was lovely in that the technology was solid.

But it was a function of focus. We were trying to do too much. By focusing on call centers and BPOs in particular, we ended up, turning into, from being a typical technology company where we might be losing money quarter after quarter to being one that was profitable, really understood what we were doing and then have been very zeroed in on that use case around language proficiency, around understanding our customer's needs and really, more than anything else, making sure that they're succeeding.

So closing that loop and making sure that they succeed.

Max: Your star product is the product called Audiolytics?

Paul: Well, so Audiolytics is really the technology that underlies the audio processing that we do. So at the heart of what we're doing is, the origin story really comes around. While I submit my resume in a recruiting, in an interview process, what that does is it strips out my personality and my voice.

It strips out the narrative. I moved from the disaster resource management effort into HireIQ, why did that happen? All of those things that you get to tell people in an interview process. So the origin story is really about how do we add a narrative to what's a two dimensional piece of paper that's supposed to represent me.

And so with that, we started to create a platform that would say not only here's the resume and here's some qualifiers about me, but here's my voice.

Max: It used to upset me so much when I started on my career and I would go and socialize, go to a bar anywhere and someone would ask me, so what do you do?

And, you know, I didn't want to tell them my job title and the company I worked for, because I didn't feel like it represented anything about me. And it would always come up with some weird answer I would say, oh, what do I do? You know, I roller skate or, you know, or something, just so that I could come out and shine and that wasn't a social environment in a work and job search context.

Also, what do you do? Should be the first question or rather who are you? rather than a resume.

Paul: Tell me about your expense in this particular business is an open ended question that a lot of our customers ask, but asking open ended questions, which is an old interviewing technique and a valuable one really allows people to tell them more. To talk to the narrative. Tell me about your experience in this particular world. Tell me about your understanding of customer support. Tell me your understanding. Tell me about an experience that you had with your boss that may be positive or negative, but being able to do that and being able to do it asynchronously when, you know, we could collect lots and lots of those became really the most important thing.

But Audiolytics is actually the parsing of that. The audio data in order to get a really good and different understanding. So Max, what it doesn't do, is it doesn't convert voice to text and then parse it that way. But, it literally is looking for tone. So it's in these frames of voice, it's saying that's a positive, that's a negative, that's a happy emotion, that's a sad emotion. We're looking for things that we know are important for a good employee, but are particularly important when you're dealing with call center agents. That they're engaged, they're alert. They're more active than passive. They're not expressing boredom. Which is really interesting when you can pick up boredom because when a recruiter gets this information, they're going to see an Audiolytics score that says, you know, this person is probably not someone you want to spend a lot of time with.

And I would say more than anything else we're not dispositioning customers. What we're doing our best to do is to give them an idea of priority. Talk to Max. He's got a great score. He's good with language. He's got good scores with data entry and even chat.

Max: I didn't know that your technology was able to detect boredom. That's remarkable. Would it be influenced by geography and how do you factor that in? Because you live in Atlanta, people are supposed to speak a little bit more slowly, perhaps have a drawl. You don't, but nonetheless, you know, would the software, not pick up on the intonation and think maybe somebody from the South is bored?

Paul: So it's really interesting. What you're doing is, so engagement doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dialect. And in fact, the tool itself is just sort of mentioned there's no conversion. It's listening for something that would be appropriate for the cohort of folks who are taking it ,interestingly enough.

It's actually self adapting, because the same tool is used for engineers and salespeople and support people — all should have a different dynamic in their voice. And so it actually has to adjust based on the people who are taking the interview. The people who are successful in expressing themselves in that interview, as well as the questions.

The questions and the people are really the dynamic that you're looking for, but boredom might be expressed differently by an engineer, or by somebody from, a Latin expression. But, the cohort itself helps to define that. And so ultimately you have not only our recommendation, but you also have the answer.

So what's interesting about it is how closely we track to what a good recruiter would do. In the initial testing, after we did the machine learning on it. So can we in fact pick these up at a high rate? So can we, in fact, identify that Max is more happy than sad? Can we identify that when he’s taking this test he's more bored? When we do that, we match Max almost 97% against a recruiter who would be listening to those particular things.

So imagine that the technology itself is so wildly accurate in a lot of ways. But you know, to that end, that's what Audiolytics does. We’re really sort of the platform is HireIQ, and it's a whole series of ways to basically create a recipe of assessments to understand more about you more about whoever you're interviewing — at speed.

So we're trying to get the recruiting experience to be three, three and a half minutes. So you don't spend a lot of time with these individuals unless you're really digging in on them. And then with the candidate experience should be less than 20 minutes.

Max: So the questions are not picked from a standard list. Since you're working with open answers, you don't have to use the same questions with every customer.

Paul: No, in fact, they're different in virtually every customer. There are some that seem to be universal people do want, need, to understand what your experience has been with customer support.

So, if you're going to be in that customer support role, you're going to have to have some experience in sales, right? That has come up.

Max: Yes. For me, it's like a yes or no answer. Have you worked in this industry before? That's usually how they ask that question in a chatbot environment.

Paul: So that would be a bad question for us.

What we're always going to do is ask a question that asks you to elaborate on something because we do in fact, need enough content to understand the profile. We need to have enough of Max telling us about Max to understand where Max's orientation is in terms of sharing, communicating. For the question, is he too verbose? Meaning he may be struggling with answering a particular question and trying to overanswer a question, or is it too short, meaning maybe he doesn't have the skills to think through and is that enough for this particular customer?

So there are all kinds of metrics, there are cohort determined, sort of thresholds. It's really fascinating. And now we've done about, you know, close to 5 million interviews with it. So we have a really good base of understanding of how effective it is when matched with outcome data.

So it's really fun stuff.

Max: Does it replace, let's say the first phone call? I mean, if you're going to look at the standard recruitment process to hire it replaces the first phone call.

Paul: So really what it's designed to do is give you a complete understanding. So we have customers who might do it for the engaged at the front end.

We have customers for who it represents the entire interview process. So once they've engaged, they've completed it. They have the scores, they meet thresholds. Then it's appropriate literally for the recruiter when they engage with them to close them. You've probably experienced this, particularly with BPOs is that there's a real machine, there’s a supply chain and with the attrition rates that exist, what you're working your best to do is fill training classes. And what we're doing, of course, is trying to identify people who are going not only achieve the right goals, the metrics that they're looking for, but we're also looking for folks who have an orientation, which would suggest they're going to stay longer.

So that's one thing that we're doing, but because there's such a speed element, to this we are really careful about, trying to do as much as we can in a shorter period of time, giving you a complete understanding so that that particular recruiter can sell when appropriate and be restrained also when appropriate.

So somebody does, you know, in the U S we have to answer, we have to give everybody the same interview experience. So that means that if you answer the first question horribly, Max, I still have to give you an opportunity with the next 7 questions I'm supposed to ask in an interview. It's a fair interviewing process, even if you disqualief yourself right out of the gate.

And so one of the things about being able to acquire this information, offline and, online, as opposed to in front of somebody, it gives that particular person, the ability to advance quickly through that particular candidate and prioritize who to sell and who to, again, disengage with.

Max: I understand the benefit for the candidates to do a short interview and a short assessment and get through those things faster, but it sounds like it's more than just, you know, I mean are you doing it because you get dropouts when ,people are held up more than five minutes? Or is it at the request of your customers? What's the driving force behind keeping it just two or three minutes long?

Paul: Oh, I'm sorry. So the interview itself for the candidate will be as much as 20 minutes, but we're trying to keep it under 20 minutes, really because there's a falloff Max. 20 is about the cutoff. If you've seen some of the older, you know, The 1950 based assessments that had a lot of triangulation, right.

You're asked one question one way and then seven questions later, you're getting the same question phrased differently in order to validate that the first question was like the second question and your answer was consistent throughout. And if you know that that's going to be an hour and a half, you really start to wonder, is there an easier way to get a job? For this wage..

Max: But time is speeding up, right? People have a lot shorter attention spans. They have multiple conversations going on asynchronously with five friends at the time. And so I expect that the 20 minutes would already be beyond the comfort zone for some people who are remote.

Paul: It's very, very close. And you see what we're trying to do. It answers that question: is it enough? What we're trying to do is the open ended questions seem very much like what a typical interview would be. So tell me about yourself. Tell me about an experience that you had. What would your last employer say about you?

Those kinds of open ended questions are the things that seem conversational. And allow you to expand upon yourself, but in fact are dense with data for us to help make a decision. And so the tone, the tempo, and in fact, the content is even important, but only when you know that that petitioner has an alertness and an engagement that pleasantness that you're looking for now go back and listen to those questions.

Is there even more data that we can mine there? And that's why on average, it's about three and a half minutes. Because some you're just going through they didn't meet any of my language proficiency thresholds or whatever. And now we can spend a little bit more time with the particular person that I want to hire.

And that would extend, you know, that's when you advance candidates and things like that, but it really is. I agree with you. I think what you're asking in that question is how do you give the candidate an opportunity to advance themselves, to tell their story? And not be too efficient in the process, that would eliminate me being able to tell enough about me. And so I think this is sort of the best of both worlds.

Max: Yeah. I get the sense that 20 minutes would be annoying if I'm sitting at home and I'm applying to 10 different jobs, but yeah. If I had a sense that this company could be a fit, they are interested in me, then, yeah. 20 minutes is no problem, easy. And certainly easier than traveling physically to sites.

So, have you seen the same thing as we have at Talkpush over the last few months? We've seen an increase in the volume of job seekers, an increase in volume of candidates. And how has that played out for the rest of the recruitment funnel?

Is it, becoming a problem where it just means we have too many candidates and not enough jobs to offer? What kind of dynamics does that create for your business?

Paul: Well, I think for both of us, what I would say is: volume is important because volume breaks process. The more, you know, we got to a point in the U.S, our unemployment rate was down to 3%, you know, at times probably lower than that in certain places.

So it was in fact hard to get enough people to interview, you know, recruiters spent most of their time trying to pull people out of other companies. And then in a matter of weeks, as we all know, it went from, you know, less than 3% too, you know, a lot. And then we're talking about 52 million people at its height, out of work needing to quarantine and work from home. So all of a sudden the opportunity to interview was greater, but the importance of identifying somebody who was really looking for that job and really engaged and would do a good job with both the hard skills and the engagement that we're looking for.

What everybody's looking for, to be committed to that particular role, over the long term that became even more important. So a 100%, I agree with you that the volumes changed. And I would say, you know, in the first, because of the way we're set up and because of the way people leverage boards, that we might've seen a doubling in the first month, which probably created some concern on our part. There was actually a cost every time somebody does an interview with HireIQ, rather than it being a, you know, we do a lot of processing…

Max: and because we're doing processing servers, AWS, bills go off, Google bills, come up. I had all of that happen as well.

Paul: Yeah. So, that sort of evened out a little bit. And while I would say we're up. We're also going into that season, which is a ramp, right? So we're looking for a lot of holiday seasonal workers right now. So I would say we're probably, closer to where we were maybe a little bit higher, but not as dramatically higher as we saw in the first quarter after the quarantining.

And we're seeing some alleviation of that. I think we're seeing some go back to physical work, but, the other part, Max's you may have an opinion on this as well, is that I don't know that a lot of people were willing to let go of their jobs. So are people artificially staying where they were highly mobile in the first quarter? All of a sudden now they're thinking, you know, it may not be as easy to get a job in the next place. So, there may be a false sense of retention taking place at the same time.

Max: Well, yeah, I guess when things heat up again, we'll see whether all those new hires in the BPO sector from the last six months, are meant to stay in those industries.

I guess it really depends whether they like working from home. If they like putting on a headset and getting in front of a camera, and working on Slack, maybe it'll work out and maybe they won’t to go back into the field. Like, I do not have a crystal ball for that, but, I think that some companies are making a shift towards hire anywhere and opening the talent pool so much that they're going to be able to build a very unique group of people which have defining traits, which if you remove the geographical constraints and you say, now I can have such a broader group to choose from. Then you can create new constraints.

You can say, I only want people that think that way, or that have this hobby or that are very meticulous or, you know, you can be very specific and that could create, you know, some very bizarre groups of people and that could give the economy some lift perhaps.

Paul: So Max, this is an interesting thing. I absolutely loved the whole train of thought. So I have a couple of data points on this. I had a company at one point in which I did a lot. The company had lots and lots of training, and we started to do a model, which we were trained from anywhere this go to meeting in a WebEx type zoom.

It was technology, but we were sharing screens. Let's configure it this way. Now this is how you do this. This is how you do that. And one of my employees came to me and said, do you mind if I do some work? So his passion, interestingly enough, was kimonos. So he did he sold, these beautiful kimonos. He invested in them. And what he wanted to do was be able to go to these shows in Asia where all of the best would be there, he’d be able to sell his kimonos. They'd also be commercial. I said, Sam, Do you think I care where you go to a meeting or a virtual training takes place, go do what you want to do.

And by the way, then being skewed 13 hours is in your best interest. Now go spend a day there and carve out the two hours you need for that particular training. Just make sure that it doesn't affect your ability to do that particular piece of work, but I just so loved this and that whole concept of displacement.

If we can, and it's happening more and more in some of our customers. Assurion one of the groups that I heard speak recently, they're doing gig work now, Max, meaning you can opt in to when you're available, you know, you've got to schedule, but sometimes it's via social media, they'll say we've got surge paying.

You've got a surge wage based on how much people, how much traffic we're going to have, you know, based on, on questions, we need to answer about the Assurion products. That to me, being able to opt in, to be able to do what you're passionate about and have that feed your work day is something that I think is really important.

And I think that's where you get energy, you get energy by, you know, middle of the day being able to take, you know, take a swim in a pool. I get energy. I did something recently where I went out and I hit golf balls. First time since March, I used to play golf all the time. I'd say 10 years ago.

I went out and, Max, doing something physical, like that, changed, I swear it changed my brain chemistry. So I think this whole concept of displacement is one of those things that's also going to enable people to do and maintain their passions. And because of that, we may be in, you know what we're doing with call centers and delivering work to location. I literally think that's the future. I don't think the future like I thought the future was cell phones. As soon as you don't physically have to go pick up those yellow slips, you don't have to answer a physical phone. You don't have an extension that's tied to a location. God, the world changes and in such a great way.

Max: Yeah, you were telling me how you got to enjoy more time with your family in recent weeks. Somebody was telling me recently, an article about this reverse migration, which is happening, where people are leaving the cities, and going back to where they came from, to their hometown because of this pandemic and supported through the technologies of remote work.

We are seeing basically these shifts happening everywhere and people spending more time with our family. So, on a bizarre way, family values, family traditions we'll see a resurgence as a response to this crisis.

Paul: Well, I don't want to be overly optimistic. Look, I think everybody's been through a trauma. And so, one of the things that I'm doing as a CEO, I'm sure you're doing it is giving people some room. Right? I want people to make sure that they... look, I have an employee who has three kids at home, all under the age of 10, who she’s starting zoom meetings with, in three different rooms for children.

There's a kindergarten class going on. There's a second grade craft class. There's a third grade class, all her room, she and her husband are working at the same time. It is insane what we're piling on people at the same time.

Max: And the bandwidth.

Paul: That's exactly right. So that's the other thing right? We didn't talk about this, but it's interesting. I read an article last night about why this is different. And this particular article was why New York city would never be the same. Because just as you said, there's an exit, maybe a million people have left New York city. The rates, the rental rates, the buildings that are empty relative to where they were.

But, we saw something like this in 2001, with 911, we saw something, you know, we've had these, national crises in the U.S. 2008. And the contention was why this is different than those other times is because bandwidth exists right now. Bandwidth exists like it's never existed before.

So now you have private equity guys that don't physically have to be in New York City, because it doesn't matter that you're physically there to run into somebody because that person may in fact not be there. So when people were telling me, and in fact, during this period, they said, they'd be traveling. I said, well, that's good that you're traveling. Are people willing to meet with you? Which is the other side of the equation, right? It's one thing for you to be willing. It's a second part altogether once you land in a city, are people willing to meet with you? That will change. There's no question, but, I think some of the positive of that and believe me, I'm sure if you're a real estate magnet in New York city, you're super concerned about this. But, I think the freedoms that it provides for individuals is particularly engaging. It's an interesting thought. Let's put it that way.

Max: Oh, if you're, if you're a real estate magnet in the suburbs, well, you're doing well. Anyway, we’re going to a more realistic conversation because that will alienate my audience 100%.

Paul: But the other part to that, but I would say, listen, the thing that I get excited about is the options it provides. The reality is I think so you can follow those kinds of things in any direction.

The reality is we need human interaction. You and I like to do what we do. I want to meet you. I want to run into you, I want to see you compete at a technology showcase. Those kinds of things stimulate me. So I don't think there's any chance that we don't go back to some more normalcy and sooner than later, more 2021.

But I think taking a moment and understanding the lack of distraction. Which really is the way I described it early in this was, there was no sports. There were no, you know, the activities themselves that would typically take me off center or off of focus were gone. And so now I had family to focus on.

Now I had what's next for the business. Now I had what's best. So I think the lack of distraction helps us to focus.

Max: Yes. I see. I think that you were talking before we started the interview about the fact that, you're going to look for a different type of worker the call center worker working from home needs to be self motivated, autonomous and so on.

If someone is now at home unemployed and is able to find, well, by force needs to find employment of that sort and then by force needs to build certain life habits around that. And then actually it gets through it and realizes, oh, this works. I can put in 5- 10 hours of uninterrupted work in a day if need be.

And now you’ve unlocked something in him or her that they can carry for the rest of their lives, potentially that sense of autonomy and that ability to manage your day. That becomes something you can keep

Paul: It's a freedom and it’s magnificent. So rather than your work being dependent on your relationship with your employer or your boss in front of you, you’re focused on becoming valuable, is your ticket to the next role that you have or greater responsibility or in frankly being as engaged in your passions and things outside of work could in fact, energize that in a way that we might not be able to today. I promise you, nobody's complaining about the lack of traffic.

Max: Well, one thing, one thing I do complain... I still hear some people ask me, Max, you’ve got so much experience working with remote teams, distributed teams. How do you check on them? And like you just totally missed it. You don’t.

You're rethinking about what your job is as manager. But that question still comes up so often.

Paul: Here's how I keep in touch with them. I engage with them on how do we make what you're working on better? How can I help? And then they'll tell me.

Max: Yeah, there are certainly a few ways.

I'm sure some, some of my employees will listen in and think that's too engaging. But, it's great to see how your business has evolved over the years. I hope that we can be part of this bright future. And have more of these partnerships as we've had with some of our customers where they integrate your assessment platform with our, conversational chatbots and engagements to take care of the whole workflow.

So if anybody's listening you want to match our two technologies. They work very well together and thank you very much, Paul, for joining me today.

Paul: Maxm I love it. And I appreciate your engaging in conversation with this. I love Talkpush, I always have, and I love in particular the fact that you're doing what many other people would be required to do.

So being able to get out in front. Engage those people to make sure that they stay in touch and then keep that information about them. Just, you know, in a way that really becomes a system of record for employment. So, we're thrilled to be working with you. Thank you very much for your time today. And, we're partners, so anything that we can do to help you we're available.

Max: Thanks. Paul, we'll both continue burning resumes and replacing them with conversation.

Paul: There's a whole discussion about bias and all of the other things that we really should talk about it some time. But, I think the answer is engagement and we're both doing everything we can to enlighten people about who they're talking to and why they'd be a good fit.

Okay. We've got the topic for our next interview, it will be about bias. Maybe we'll wait a few months for that one.

Paul: And so we'll give people some time.

Max: And the topic may be a little bit less dangerous in a few months time.

Paul: Yeah. I think there'll be more light at that point.

Max: Great. Thanks Paul. T

Paul: Thank you, max.

That was Paul Noone from HireIQ, a company, which has figured out how to measure the empathy, warmth, and care of a voice and allows employers in the call center industry to evaluate those voices in a scalable way. If you liked the interview and you'd like to hear more about some of the movers and shakers from the high volume recruitment industry, please subscribe to our podcast and share with your friends.

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Welcome to the Recruitment hackers podcast show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to the recruiter hackers podcast by Max Armbruster. And today I'm pleased to welcome on the show the global talent acquisition capability leader at Accenture, Jason Roberts. Welcome Jason.

Jason: Thank you. And thank you for saying all of the words in that title. I know it's a lot.

Max: Can we mix them around? We can move them.

Jason: You got it exactly right and t's a bunch though. We were just talking and it's a whole lot of words. I'm not sure that it says anything. So, What that means is that I have a pretty fun gig and that I'm responsible for processes and technologies and how we do recruiting for Accenture's customers. And we will do that for large organizations where we hire several hundred thousand people per year.

So we get to try out lots of technologies. We have a pretty nice clean standard process that we work from. And I get to, to be a part of that and work with smart people every day. It’s good.

Max: Yeah. Fantastic. You said a few hundred thousand people every year. And I guess that number is getting bigger than ever now where the industry is kind of figuring out how we're going to get these 30 plus million people back to work in North America and I don't know, it must be hundreds of millions worldwide. So the pressure is on to, to deliver you know, I'm gonna say a good, maybe a decent experience for most of them.

Jason: Well, what's interesting is what I worry about with, with COVID is that candidate experience will stop being a priority because candidate experience is a big deal when you've got 3% unemployment and it's necessary in order to, to achieve the hires that you need to achieve. But when there's 25% unemployment or 20% unemployment, you don't need candidate experience, people just need jobs. So it's, it's one of those things where if I'm worried that we might lose ground in the candidate experience side of things. I think we all want to be in a position where we treat people well, and we had started seeing real improvements in that space. And it was because companies were making investments in the right things in order to make it happen. I'm hoping we get to continue that, but there's a, I think there's a real risk that we'll take a step backwards in that space.

Max: Yeah. I've definitely noticed that people are not getting back to candidates as fast as they should be and positions are being kept open even though they're not real. And so it's kinda like candidates sending beautiful offer letters and resumes and hearing nothing back, hearing crickets.

On the plus side, the candidate experience is improved by the fact that companies are not defaulting to asking people to come physically in person. And when you consider how time consuming that can be and demanding, that can be, well.. We were meeting in person. It was a lot of work for me. I mean, I had to take a plane to come and meet you.

Jason: Well, no, you didn't have to. I was always great with being on video if you want to do that. I found that suppliers really wanted to meet in person. And I've worked remotely for over a decade, probably 13 years now, something like that, that I've worked remotely. And I was completely good being on phone and people would just would want and meet, man. Okay, well, I'll meet with you. You know I actually had an office for the sole purpose of meeting with suppliers when they came into town. That's the only time I went to the office when I met with somebody that came in town to meet me.

Max: I remember that office. It was, it was a, We Work

Jason: It was a We Work, We Work, right. That's why I only went there every once in a while. I just, I would reserve a conference room. And I think you, you came back to the actual inner sanctum. You saw the actual office. Yeah.

Max: Yeah. Well I know you have a very cool job with Accenture today and you had a very cool job with Randstad before. Can you tell for our listeners, give us a quick overview of, where you come from and how you got into this space?

Jason: Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I started recruiting, my age will show for sure. 1997. Was my first, my first piece of recruiting work.

I was, I had a person, a friend that I knew... The internet was still pretty new. Right. So, like I got email for the first time in 1994, I think. So it was, it was still relatively new and a friend of mine said, Hey, I'm a recruiter. And I, hear you can find things on this internet thing. Can you help me with that? I said, well, yeah, I can help you search the internet.
So I became an early sourcer and it was with a staffing firm and, that sort of, I progressed over a period of time so that, so that ultimately, I, I worked for the staffing firm full time then, did some consulting then I spent about seven years with Cisco systems and started out as a recruiter. I recruited Sales and sales engineers for them. Ultimately we built our own applicant tracking system back then there were no web based ATS everything was client server. So we thought, okay, well we’re the backbone of the internet we should probably have something that's a web based deal. So we built our own and it was my job to be sort of the functional expert on that. And I worked in HR IT for a little while, built my own ATS with Cisco. And that was fun.

Max: 2003 ish around that.

Jason: Yeah. That's about right before Taleo showed up.

Max: Yeah, it must have been frustrating to see the startup Taleo pick up all this business thinking...

Jason: Yeah you know what, we built my module and of course dot com bubble burst along the way. And things slowed down a little bit in recruiting. And we built the module that was basically how we take job orders and approve things and we hadn't built a lot of the candidates stuff yet. And Taleo came out and with a few other things there and and we were like, Oh, these things are way better. Let's not build the rest. Let's just find a way to connect to these other deals. And that's what we did. We never finished, we just did the sort of requisition piece. It was called cafe rec, was the tweaks that..

Max: Back then recruiting happened mostly in Starbucks.

Jason: Well, apparently that's how it worked. It was a good thing. And, I learned a lot. Along the way, I became a certified project manager and it was great and then I had a boss that told me, you know, I'd become the operations leader for Cisco. And my boss said, you can either have my job, which I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. Or go to a place that does recruiting for a living. And I said, Oh, that's not a bad idea. And I'd outsourced our recruiting along the way. And I was responsible for the relationship between outsource company and Cisco and I played that sort of client side role. So the company that went through the RFP process, they actually told me no, they said, yeah, I don't think we can help you much. What you're trying to do is, is really not exactly the right thing.
And there were a hundred percent, right. Like it was the, the worst conceived RFP and a terribly conceived sort of a model that we had designed and the only company that came back and said, this is a bad idea, we're going to bow out. We wish you luck and we'll help you with something else the next time. It was Accenture.
I thought, man, that took a lot of integrity to do that. So, when I went to look for a job, they were the first people that I called. And, they made a job for me. So I went to work for Accenture, loved that, did that for six years in various roles. And then went to Randstand Source Right. And I loved Randstand Source Right. That was a good time.
I, I went over to lead operations for them. And I did that for a number of years, uh, moved on to the, Senior Vice President of Strategy. Uh, it was Strategy and Standardization because a big part of the strategy was to standardize. Um, so that was that. And then, um, ultimately I ended my run there as Head of Technology and Analytics, uh, around the globe and, uh, Accenture is a funny place, man. It, uh, it calls you back at some point. There's lots of us that are boomerang. So we've come back. That's the role I'm in now I really, um, I really like. I remember the guy who had the role when I was here before and, uh, I loved what he was doing and we where he got to spend his time.
So I, when that was open, I said, all right, let's do it. I came back back to Accenture.

Max: Now, if you could go, you know, you go back 15 years. Um, um, would you do what I'm doing and start, uh, an ATS company. I started one in 2008, 2009. I was, I think, a few years too late, uh, on my first run.

Jason: You know what? I do look back and think, um, I wish I had been a founder. I have a lot of respect for the founders that I know. And I look back, I think that quite a bit, um, I was, I had a family very, very young, uh, so, uh, we had our first child. I was in that spot. So the gamble wasn't my gamble. It was the whole family's gamble. So I, I never did it. And if I knew, then what I know now I might have, like, I understand the venture capital space. I understand how that all works. And I did, I was just so clueless back then. I had no idea. Um, but, uh, who knows? I have an idea. Maybe one of these days, I'll get to try it out. I do have and idea.

Max: Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, Jason. It's the worst, worst thing that can happen to you. No money. Uh, no, uh, I don't recommend it.

Jason: Ok, that's good to know! My other founder friends are like do it, do it today! I’m gonna wait until we're not in a, you know, a crisis.

Max: Apparently recessions of the best time to start a business.

Jason: Well, you know what a bunch of people that did that, did well doing that.

Max: Yeah. Um, it, it sounds like, uh, throughout your career, while you were not an entrepreneur, you were able to tinker and build things and build toys. Um, and I picked up on the job title you shared with us. You said it was a Standardization in it. That doesn't sound too sexy, but there were also, um, some more creative exercises that you were involved in. Um, you were telling me before we started the video that you, learned about the limits of automation and where the humans were needed in an experiment that you ran a year or two years ago. Um, could, um, could you elaborate on that?

Jason: Yeah. Well, we’re actually experimenting with that right now, even. Um, so the technology exists to fully automate the recruiting process, especially at the, in the lower level jobs. So think retail, uh, warehouse workers, things where you're not making big decisions on the skills and capabilities, but it's more processing someone through with a very low threshold of qualification. So we call those high volume, low skill. And so for those roles, it's possible to fully automate. There's not a lot of discernment involved that needs to be made, a human doesn't need to make that decision on “Do we hire this person or not?” Everyone is qualified if they hit some basic knockout questions, like, can you lift 50 pounds? Literally, “can you have work boots on your first day?” Um, those are the sorts of things you have to, you have to ask them. So when that happens, uh, I remember I went to one, one interview center for massive distribution, uh, site, uh, one of the biggest in the world, I think. And, um, There's a building for interviews.

And I sat down with a lady who had been interviewing in that building, interviewing candidates every day. Um, for, uh, I think it was six years. She had interviewed candidates every single day. And I said, well, how often do you say no to a candidate? And this lady said, “Oh, I've never said no.”
She had never said no. She had interviewed for six years and never said no. So when that's the case, that you don't need the interview anymore, right. That discern was done necessary. So we tried this with a fully automated process. And what we learned is these sorts of roles. You always, you have dropout rates at certain points. You know, you're going to have a certain percent that fail the drug screen, way more than you would think if you do white collar work. You hear the failure rate, it would surprise you if that's all you've ever done. Um, But there's a failure rate of drug screen, you know, you're going to have, and then there's a certain number of people that just won't ever show up for the job.
And, um, what we learned when we fully automated is we could get people all the way through the process up until the day they're supposed to start and they just didn't show up. They didn't think it was real. Some of them would get nervous when filling out the background, check paperwork, thinking it might be a scam because they're asked for, you know, personal information, social security, and so forth, even though it was from a reputable company, they're worried that it's a scam. So in order to ground the position, we are experimenting with the right place to insert a human contact. So where do you insert a phone call to ground this, to be that it's a real position, a real job for someone? Not because you need to say yes or no, but because they need human contact to feel good about the job.

Max: Well, that's what the lady was doing for six years, right? It was, uh, she wasn't saying no, but she was saying here's, here's a human contact.
Jason: That's it exactly right. That's what she was doing all the time.
Max: Uh, yeah, I I'd like to insert more video in the process where you know, that human contact could be, Hey, check it out You know, here's the, the warehouse where you'll be working. You know, do a little phon, recording, and say, we can't wait to see you on Monday. And that, little video can be, it can feel personal, but it could be actually general, you know, you could send it to everybody.

Jason: Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're exactly right. And we're seeing more of that. In fact, we're seeing, um, seeing a shift to video interviews for certain, um, a lot of companies are just using zoom or Skype or not Skype, but Microsoft teams, the Skype, Skype got replaced, uh, Google meets for some, but they're, they're using sort of their conferencing platforms to do that instead of, uh, instead of the the formal sort of modern, higher and higher and things. But it's a little bit broken, right? When they do that, because they don't have the formal scoring, they don't have, they don't have the staff, the they're not able to what's happening like the candidate, your platform. Um, they it's, it's not as strong of a solution.
Um, so I was talking at one point with, uh, With one of the founders of another one of these companies. And they said, they said we're running into companies that have sort of the scrappy solution. And they're using zoom. And then the ones that are, that were prepared for something like this, um, the adoption rate just skyrocketed.
So people, cause video, I always had trouble getting people to use it and getting people to actually lean into it because you still have to review the videos. But once we, um, once we hit this pandemic, everybody seems way more comfortable or, you know, it's become a necessity in their world at least.
And they're accustomed to it.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've done a lot of zoom and team integrations and then, um, have the live video call asynchronous video. Um, I still, I'm still a luxury for, a lot of positions they're more interested in getting people through binary, you know, outcomes or multiple choice questions and getting them to move to a human interview through a phone call. Um, and also still a lot of markets where asking people to log in for a zoom call would be too, um, demanding on the bandwidth. So they do phone calls instead. And, uh, you know.

Jason: Well you're, in markets that where that's a significant challenge. Right? But you guys have WhatsApp integration, correct?

Max: Yes. Yes. WhatsApp integration allows for collecting video, but asynchronously, you wouldn't be able to do a live video call connected through the business API. You can do it person to person, in the consumer market, but it's not yet supported for businesses. Unfortunately. Uh, same way that, uh, Facebook picture, you know, otherwise. Yeah. I mean, all those companies, whether you're, you're an ATS and CRM, um, uh, social media or a communication platform, you all have video now and everybody has it and everybody can switch it on and it's relatively cost free. So I don't understand how the Highervues of the world are going to stay in business if their story is we're good on video. So is everybody else.

Jason: Yeah, that's true. No, it's true.

Max: Yeah. Um, Very commoditized.

Jason:I thought they needed to do something different. Um, but yeah, we're we are seeing more video. Um, SMS is big for us in the US um, of course, different mediums elsewhere as well. So, uh, we're seeing a lot of that shift as well.

Max: The, um, uh, continuing on what we were talking about, the lady, um, that says yes. Um, um, do you think her job will still be around in, uh, in 10 years time? Or do you think that, uh, eventually, you know, um, we can go to a full automated process with no human contact.

Jason: Um, I think probably not. I think probably her role probably doesn't exist the way it is. What I think we'll end up with is, you know, instead of a 40 minute actually interview candidates were scheduled for an hour, an hour time slot to come in and do your interview. I think we're going to have 10 minutes, um, basically, uh, uh, Welcome calls. They're their introductions. We're welcoming them to the company. “Oh yeah we're ready to make you this offer. It's already been sent to you. Welcome to the welcome home. And here's your, here's all the stuff you need to know. Here's where you show up what you do” but it's a 10 minute make somebody feel good call, um, and not an interview.

Max: Yeah, that's a big productivity gain potentially there.
Um, and I've seen, uh, for, uh, some people doing group interviews as well. Because then you have that human factor, uh, you know, you were saying, is it real? Well I mean, there's 10 other people logging into the call and I can see their faces and it's probably real.

Jason: Yeah, I saw I was, um, there's, uh, uh, one of the big online retailers, uh, they were doing this thing where they would do a drug swab. This was years ago. This is before I came back to Accenture. Um, they were doing a drug swab. Yeah, as a part of their interview process. So they would have these massive hiring events. They still do it right now, I think. And, um, basically you go, you sit down, you watch a video about working at this, at this place.
If you're good with it, um, they have like a long Q-tip. You swab your cheek, it's a drug test. You put it back in the package, you seal it up. You sign an offer letter and you're done, like, that's it. That is the whole, that is the whole process you've been processed and the way that they were paying their suppliers was based on the number of return offer letters and, uh, drug screens that they got.

Max: Wow. Well, I mean, I just had to do my first swab, uh, coming into Hong Kong to check, they were checking for my coronavirus. Uh, yeah. Um, but that uh, sounds brutal. And I guess these drug tests have had to, I mean, those are private enterprises can ask whatever they want. Right. it's they can decide what drug tests they ask. There's no, restrictions on state law or anything like that.

Jason: No, it's strange. You'll have more stringent drug screening requirements for Businesses than the States in which people live. Yeah. So there might be a state where marijuana is legalized, for example, but it's not legal for the drug screen.
Well, tell that to the, you know, 18 year old warehouse worker that they're interviewing for those warehouse job, you know, they're really just picking up boxes. They’ve been moving them from point A to point B. And I'm not sure that whether or not they smoked it makes much difference in that, but that's there oftentimes there's rules that say, yeah, you can't hire them

Max: After a stressful day of carrying boxes.

Jason: It may be, I don't know, but it's, there are these more stringent things, but if it's legal in your state is if it's legal where you are, I guess nine, 18 year old, usually usual is 21. So 21 year old warehouse worker, I guess she could have a problem. You could, you, it's not as big of a deal in my mind, but the 18 year old, shame on them, they should wait till 21 based on that wall.

Max: It should be the other way around. Absolutely. We should have a world where it's illegal in the state, but it's legal as soon as you come inside the company. You know, Basically an office where we only accept people here who smoke cigarettes all day long.

Jason: So you joke, but, um, one of the big tobacco companies I did work with years and years and years ago, um, And the first time I walked in there, I saw the ashtrays on the desks, the whole thing.
So, yeah, I don't know if they still do that, but this was way back when. But yeah, it's the only company I ever walked into with ashtrays on the desk, because that had sort of gone by the time I made it into this line of work.

Max: Yeah. Well uh, I've experienced that as well. I've had business meetings with cigarettes, um, in Asia. So it does feel, uh, like you're, traveling in time when that happens.

Jason: Well, I've had business meetings with cigars. That's a different story.

Max: Yes. Yes. I don't get invited to those then. Okay. Um, before we wrap it up,

Jason: Max I’m pretty sure that i invited you to one at some point along the way.

Max: With cigars?

Jason: Yeah. I'm pretty sure along the way. Maybe when we were in San Francisco, but I don't know.

Max: Oh, I missed it. Well, okay. Talking about the, uh, the current events and where you see the market going a few months ago when, uh, the world uh, was collapsing. You, told me that the RPO industry had rebounded strongly in 2008 and 2009 and had its best run right afterwards and gave me some hope for your industry, our industry. Uh, coming out of the coronavirus pandemic, um, um, has your, um, yeah. Are you on track with your predictions or, um, or you, uh, surprised with, uh, the pace of the slowness of the recovery, I guess, um, how do you anticipate the next few months will pan out for people in staffing and in the RPO world in particular?

Jason: Um, so yeah, uh, I don't know what the starting point of the sort of rebound is. Right? So coming out of the 2008 slowdown, um, 2009, when companies started bringing you back. Uh, employees, um, the recruiters came back first, right. And, uh, when the recruiters came back, the ramp began very quickly. And a lot of times they said, okay, well, let's bring people back, but via outsourcing. That's why outsourcing grew so much at that time. What's difficult about this one is we're not yet at the place where I think we're ready for the rebound. I think um, we're still sort of in the low point. Uh, and we're, nobody's really sure when, we sort of swing out of this thing, I'm confident that we will, right?
I'm confident that yeah. Eventually everybody gets to take off their mask and go back to their jobs. And there are some hurdles that have to be reached along the way for that to happen. So I'm confident that the world will go back to what we were accustomed to one day. Um, but it's not something that happens, you know, in three months or four months, it's something that happens, uh, over a long period of time.

Max: There’s a cycle to recruitment. And normally, you know, end of the summer, everybody gets ready for the big shopping push towards the end of the year.

Jason: October. Yeah.

Max: Yeah. So now is when people need to, normally when they start ramping up and start you know, setting up the machine. You’re saying well, maybe it's taken a little longer this time.

Jason: Well, what's funny is the online machine is ramping like you wouldn't believe. So the people who do your online shopping through, and then who fulfill those orders on the back end. Yeah. That that's going strong. It hasn't slowed down. In fact, um, It's where we're seeing the most competition for workers, uh, warehouse workers are right now.
Like it's like a software developers and Silicon Valley in the early two thousands.

Max: No, I don't know if I want to go into a, you know, carrying boxes or data science.

Jason: Seriously. What I think is going to happen is those wages are going to start increasing really significantly. Much to the chagrin of my customer base, but they, I think that, um, you know, we're, we're being asked in some cases to monitor, um, uh, to monitor salaries or offers like what the, the offer that people are making to candidates on a daily basis. Because Amazon, when you drive past has billboards that say I'm offering X number of dollars per hour and they change. And sometimes they'll change uh, there'll be a different number when you go into the office from versus when you come back and yeah. Yeah. If that's how fast this, this thing is moving and it's not going down, it's all going up. Uh, and the reason that we think that is that, um, These jobs used to be the jobs that were, you know, the next level, they were the good paying jobs. If you didn't have an education necessarily, um, but uh, you wanted something that could actually pay your bills. Um, it's sort of the, the first job that was able to do that most of the time, um, you know, just above you would see the grocery stores and things paid just above minimum wage. And these jobs were always several dollars per hour or more.
What's happened is Target, Amazon, even Walmart now have pushed that based salary up to, you know, if anyone wages somewhere in the eight or $9 range, they've pushed to 13 or 14, a minimum wage, the California minimum wage, I think through the end of this year, end of next year. Uh, it will be $14, right?

Max: So they as high as high as, as a logistics or, yeah.

Jason: Right. So it's, it's now you can, you can either, you can either work in a really, uh, challenging environment in a warehouse where you're lifting things a bunch and you're, um, it may, it's probably climate controlled. They've all added climate control, but there's these big Bay doors. So where the trucks have to pull in. So, uh, it's you can't get that completely cool or, uh, completely warm in the winter time. Um, so you've always got to deal with the weather to some degree when that, when that happens, you can't have total climate control. So you've got those jobs that are uncomfortable and require more physical activity versus, you know, the, the grocery store chain, the, uh, big box retailer, those, those other ones paying the same amount of money. So all those people that have to work with your packages from the Amazon people who have to load them to the, uh, delivery drivers, to the, uh, uh, you know, the UPS guy, whoever, um, all of those, workers, um, they're in great demand. Cause there's more, we need more of them, but their salaries are deeply compressed because of what's happened with all of the retail salaries. Yeah.

Max: Yeah. Well I'm, um, you know, from an economic standpoint, I think increasing minimal wages, does uh, accelerate the pace of automation and ultimately, um, force companies to automate more. Uh, so that's probably the response as well as, you know, um, in the short term an increase in, uh, and paper hour, but we know that, um, it's going to drive more automation and will eventually, potentially cost a few jobs.
Uh, but if those are the hard jobs, um, that may not be such a bad outcome, it's just that, as you were saying if you have no education, um, and you need to pay the bill, those jobs are very precious. So I don't know. Um, I'm not, uh, a policy guy, but, uh, um, it sounds like you're in the right market. Even though you're fighting some, uh, difficult trends.

Jason: It's fascinating, right. If it were easy, the clients wouldn't call us to help. Right? They'd be able to do this themselves.

Max: So many times after eight hours in front of my webcam I'm like, Oh man, I wish I was outside doing physical work and I always thought that that would be like a good employee branding employer value proposition. Come in to work in our warehouse and check out, our guns, you know?

Jason: You know what you need to do? You need to go, and I don't know about tha EVP, but the next time you feel that way, go dig a ditch and see how you feel afterwards. Because one time I at one was hiring people who would bury the lines for the phone company and they literally were ditch diggers and I could not think of a worst gig. And they, uh, so every time I, when I look at this, I think. I could be doing that job. That would be terrible. Yeah, it's exhausting by the way.

Max: I, uh, when I was, uh, 16 years old, I had a chance to go work in, um, an, a modeling agency to just to do intern work. But then my mother insisted, I go instead, go work in our plastic factory so that I would understand the cost of physical labor. And so I did end up going to school afterwards and pursuing an education.

Jason: Wow, How old were you when you could go to the modeling agency?
Max: 16. Yeah, peak of my purity.

Jason: At that age. I think, I think your mom might not have done the right thing.

Max: Um, I'm pretty sure she will not be listening to our conversation, but, uh, if you are, I'm still so grateful for, uh, for your choice, mom, and I'm very grateful for your time, Jason. Today and in previous conversations, helping, helping me understand the macro trends and the limits of automation. Uh, thank you very much for joining us today, uh, on this podcast and looking forward to our next chat.

Jason: Happy to do it. Thanks.

Max: A treat talking to Jason Roberts from Accenture and, and learning about the new dynamics of the marketplace currently shaping, uh, North America with the pickers and the people working in logistics in higher demand than the engineers of the Silicon Valley.

Who would have guessed? And if, uh, if you liked this interview, please subscribe for more on recruitment hackers, podcast, and share with your friends. Hope to see you here again soon.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast show about innovations technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello everybody. And welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max and today I am delighted to be welcoming you on the show who is Senior Vice President of recruitment at Teleperformance, Preeti. Welcome.

Preeti: Thank you, max. Pleasure to be here.

Max: Pleasure to have you. Last time we met was a few years ago in Mumbai. I believe that at the time you were working for a company called, Intelinet,, but now it's part of Teleperformance again. Can you explain to us a little bit,, how you ende, up in your current position as the senior vice president at Teleperformance?

Preeti: Certainly. So, firstly, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure, always to speak with you. I think every interaction with you has been very, very enriching and very rewarding. So, thank you again. Let me take a, maybe a step back, down memory lane. When I started off, this was back in 2001, as an advisor in a call center, that's what we used to call them back then.

This was before the term BPOs and business process outsourcing and BPMs came into play. Back then it was plain vanilla call centers, and that's when I started. So that was my journey into the BPO spectrum, as an advisor, part of, a semi tech process. We used to handle calls with customers.

That was my first experience of understanding that we can actually service customers to another country with them having no idea. We're not really in the country from where they're calling. So that was an exciting journey. And I think that was my first interface with technology and how it's making in the world really small.

It didn't matter where I was sitting. I could still speak to a customer actually, and resolve something that was work related. Personally, obviously you could make calls to anybody you wanted, but this was work related. So that was an exciting journey for me when I started in 2001. And, I think from then on I never really looked back.

I've had an extremely roller coaster ride in the BPO segment. I've done multiple shades of roles starting from being an agent to taking on some roles in the operations teams, as an assistant manager, as a manager, And that's when I folded into recruitment. I wouldn't say that it happened because it was something that I dreamed off or something I had planned for myself.

I think it was just a natural course of journey for me. The best part was that the organization was open enough to adapt and absorb someone who didn't come with that background into a leadership role. And I think those are things that you will only find in the BPO segment, where we're so open to allowing people to explore their potential.

And we're not fully so bogged down with experience. We know that people have potential. We allow them to take up roles and start delivering and sometimes experience does not really become a limitation for you to pick up something new. So I guess that was an interesting learning point for me.

Max: I've seen a lot of people in talent tech position and the BPO sector that, that have that first experience as an agent, or that first experience in sales and, at the same time, often the industry is a little bit old school where they say, oh, we only hire people with past PBO experience and you could see why it’s because they've got a very high dropout rate right in the first three to six months on the job. A lot of people give up, but for those who stick around, then, they can adapt. They're tough. Right.

Preeti: When I joined Cytel, that was my first experience. I still recall those days, the first time I joined the organization, I went with the mindset that I'm going to probably stick around only for six months.

Because at that time it didn't seem like a career opportunity. It just seemed like something you do until you figured out what you wanted to do. So it wasn't something that I was planning for myself, but I guess the industry just grew on me. It gave me the opportunities to learn, to grow. To do stuff, which, I would've otherwise never planned for myself.

So whether it was learning how to manage, to work with people, to work with data, to work with processes, and to work with a certain kind of discipline. I think the BPO industry just grew on me and I guess I just chose to stick around. So as I progressed, I think the talent acquisition piece came as more of a...

And I'll not go too much into the details those are pretty boring, but yeah, I think the talent acquisition piece also started with a similar experience that let me try this, you know, it's different from what I've been doing for the last four, five years, let me try and do something different.

So the opportunity was there. I picked it up and, from then on, it's been 10 years now. And things have just looked better and better. And today I'm able to at least reflect back and say, what was it like 10 years ago? So, yeah, I think Teleperformance as an organization, while we’re really, really large, I mean, we're 300,000 people today and we're spread across the globe.

We've got a footprint practically, you name a country and we exist. So I think for us, today, there’s no limit to what each one of us can and will be able to do considering the fact that we're part of such a large organization. So, prior to Teleperformance, even when were Intelinet, we were about 50,000 people strong and, I guess, with India being such a strategic partner in the entire scheme of things with us now being taken over a large organization, like Teleperformance, the best part has been that nothing's changed in our DNA.

Nothing's changed as far as our values are concerned. I guess because these two organizations were so similar in their value system, it didn't seem like there was a takeover or there was a company buying out someone. That didn't feel like, I would say, at the ground level, you obviously have the more legal changes and the more backend changes.

But as an organization, we just seamlessly transitioned into Teleperformance. Considering the values were a match, the people were a match. The direction we were heading into is a match. So, I guess everything looked the same. It was just the fact that we changed our name. I guess that's what it seemed like to people on the ground.

Max: Yeah. In Teleperformance you said 300,000 people worldwide. A decent amount of turnover, a decent amount of volume, really big volumes in some cities and in some countries I think in India is probably your biggest market in terms of headcount?

Preeti: Maybe not anymore, actually. We're neck to neck with Manila. The English world. We write ourselves here. We're fairly a decent size. I think if I were to just refer to the India headcount we’re close to about 80,000 people today. Spread across nearly 14 cities in India. So we're pretty much there from the North to the South, to the West, to the East. So yeah, we're pretty much everywhere in India.

Max: Okay. I think you, you touched on this topic a little bit. You said, you know, you, weren't thinking about talent acquisition and you weren't thinking about HR. And when we think about these functions, often people, I imagine somebody who studied sociology or psychology and was interested in doing competency mapping and working in training and learning and development.

And I think in your industry, we have a different kind of profiles that go into talent acquisition, slightly different, and a little bit more numbers driven, a little bit more aggressive. I'm wondering how that's evolved over the last five, five years. And if you're seeing some new competencies that are becoming more critical for the success of a recruiter in this space.

Preeti: if I go back 10 years and if I reflect on how, and maybe I can compare to what we were as talent acquisition, in our own family, versus if I compare ourselves with competitors, I think, yes, you used the right word, we're a fairly — talent acquisition is a fairly aggressive setup by default. it is about numbers.

But I think the way we've evolved today is that we've not limited ourselves to numbers. We've instead started focusing more on experience. We've started focusing on being able to deliver, so while time seems to always be the most critical attribute as far as acquisition is concerned, because if you do not have people at the time when you need them, you're gonna derail everything that's coming up ahead. You're the first piece in the value chain. And if you differ, if you default, you impact the rest of the value chain down the line as well. So that makes talent acquisition a really critical piece in the whole train.

If I say running a train, then we'd probably be the one right up ahead, you know, steering how that train is going to move and whether it's going to reach the destination on time or not, Maybe that's a good analogical thing. So essentially we have transport. It is the engine. I mean, not to say that other functions don't matter, butI think talent acquisition is what kick starts, everything. It's being more, I would say more, um, collaborative. Considering, you know, we need other functions to feel important as well.

Max: Well, the audience should know that we're talking on a Saturday and so the other functions are probably sleeping right now.

Preeti: Recruitment is working today. Recruitment was working late night yesterday. And recruitment’s going to be working tomorrow as well in some of my teams.

Max: I don’t know if that's something that's gonna attract a lot of talent to your team, this 24/7 kind of activity. And so the experience, huh? So you're talking about, people who are building, I mean, designers, people who design a candidate experience onsite or digitally, that stands out. So people who are more about, crafting a design rather than simply processing interviews.

Preeti: Right. It's not enough to just, you know, allow a person to feel that someone who’s coming, looking for a job. It's no longer just the employer’s market. It is a job seeker’s market as well, which means, the job seeker is now that much more vocal about the company they want to join. And sometimes the experience of recruitment can also be a deciding factor for them to take us as a premier opportunity or not, and no longer can we assume that if I have to hire a hundred people I'm going to get thousands of them who are vying for that position. That's not going to happen because if I need to get a hundred people, I'm not going to have the luxury of time and effort to be introduced, to hire, to interview and screen maybe tens and thousands of people because firstly tens and thousands of people don't exist.

Max: Even in India?

Preeti: Even in India. So it's not such a factor of population versus people available for the right kind of job. Because today, as much as we believe that, you know, people who go to work in a BPO, anybody can do that. It's not going to be that easy anymore.

There's so much more that we take out from an employee who is servicing a customer. There is so much more that's being put on that person's shoulder to harness those responsibilities. Of how do you take care of customers? How do you take care of stakeholders? How do you take care of your metrics? How do you take care of so many other things that it's no longer, just someone who can walk in and do the job, even if they don't have the skills for it.

And hence, it's important that if we do not invest, in a good experience for that employee or for that candidate who is still deciding our effort. But sometimes determine whether he or she is going to take up our offer or not. And it's not enough to just say we're offering a job. What do you want?

Max: Of course, the experience begins and often ends with, having a good interpersonal contact and, and being, courteous and being on time and all those basics, there are bare necessities, but those are not really technology trends. They're just good behavior. Are there some changes that have happened to the digital landscape that you've had to take into account in order to be more centric and offer a better experience?

Preeti: I think the whole pandemic has kind of turned our lives upside down, as people. And what we have come to realize is that when you're able to speak. And I think this isn't new. I mean, this is age old, you know, communication strategy where you seem to communicate better when you're with people and when you're talking to them in person, because there are so many nonverbal cues, there is so much about your body language transferred as part of that communication.

And in the digital world, there are going to be so many moments when none of these nonverbal cues are going to be available to the person you're speaking with. Which is going to mean that everything that you do is going to start to be that much more important and not enough of what you see. You can do the same interview in person.

You can do the same interview on the phone. It's going to have radically different outcomes. And that's why traditionally recruitment's always been, I want to see the person, no, I want to meet the person. They've never really warmed up to doing something remotely or digitally. And hence, culturally, traditionally, I would say recruitment is a function, no matter which country everybody wants to see the person.

No one wants to assume that if I've interviewed someone digitally, I'm not satisfied. That's generally the feeling inside. You still feel, maybe if I meet the person, I may have a different perspective. Having now transitioned into a work from home or a digital environment. The recruitment team as a whole is having to go through that transformation where they're going to have to be convinced that if I am interviewing someone on video, or if I'm interviewing someone digitally, that's good enough.

Max: It's such a psychological thing, right? It's almost like, if you can, if you couldn't bother to put on a suit, take the bus, come to the office, come and meet me, then I can start to trust you. This was a barrier before now, we have to come up with a new barrier in order to ask the candidates to demonstrate how much they want it.

Because if you start giving out jobs to everybody who raises their hands, then it's going to be very hard to get a real sense for who really wants it. How do you measure today? Whether a candidate really wants the job compared to before, considering that, you know, it's so easy to just jump in front of a camera and start to do an interview. Maybe you end up with a lot of candidates who drop out or, or are not going to be that motivated to join. Have you seen the volume of dropouts and people who try and after a few months increase as you moved towards to work from home?

Preeti: Let me answer that in a different way.

Let me say, we're still in the middle of the pandemic. There's a huge, I would say influence of how the pandemic has affected people around the country. And there's been a mixed bag of situations where people have lost their jobs. There are some who are on the bench. There are some who are still trying to figure out if they're going to have a job or not.

So there's a fear today that exists. And until we move away from the pandemic situation into a business as usual, where we work from home is offered as an option, not as a driver because of the COVID situation. I guess then metrics and numbers will look probably more different, but if I were to stick to the here and now, yes, we've seen a surge of people who are applying for jobs who probably may not have done that pre-pandemic because this wasn't the industry for them.

There's such a huge shift in the kind of people that are applying today. They come from all different industries. And unfortunately the industries that have gotten impacted significantly because of the pandemic, have let go of staff. And obviously those people are now looking for options. The BPOs do seem to offer a good option for them because it was the customer service or it was support there.

They're still able to see themselves working in the BPO sector. And hence, we're starting to see a lot more flux of people coming in from different industries and from different backgrounds. People who are willing to try and start working all over again in a different industry, even though they never would have thought about doing that maybe a little before March, that's when India went into a lockdown.

Max: That's a great opportunity for the industry to. If you can afford to hire them, and they're quality hires from other industries and they're willing to overcome their natural sort of reticence towards the industry then, yeah, you're planting seeds for tomorrow.

You're hiring people that were outside of reach. We've seen it even at our level as a small tech company. We were able to hire over the last couple of months, people that would not have been available otherwise.

Preeti: So if you look at it, I mean, let's say, let's say if we name industries, we know travel got impacted significantly.

We know the hotel industry got impacted significantly. Obviously they will bounce back. Now the decision that lies with the recruitment teams in a BPO is do you invest in this talent today knowing that they may also be here for a temporary period of time? And chances are that tomorrow when their industry bounces back again, they're obviously going to prefer them over us.

Now with that being the confusion in the mind of a recruiter, I think that's the part where we're trying to fix to experience because there's a possibility that some of them will still maybe go back once hotels come up once travel starts again, I guess people will shift back, but there will still be a huge population of people that we can hold back with us.

Only because of the experience that we were able to get. So those would be people who work from their previous industries to maybe the BPOs. And I guess that's what makes our job that much more particular. If we fix the experience and not just focus on the numbers, because we get the numbers today or we get them tomorrow, but if we can fix the experience, then we can hold these numbers back and not make them a stop gap arrangement.

Max: Alright, bouncing from the topic of experience, to the topic of the Indian market and specifics, the powerful position that vendors and staffing firms have in the Indian market. Do you think that the current pandemic has tilted the market in favor of the employer so that the employer can control more of the experience compared to before where a lot of the vendors, the staffing agencies would really control the entire candidate experience until the point of hire.

But maybe that sort of monopoly or that dominance in the industry is starting to crack a little bit given the new dynamics.

Preeti: If I were to give a one word answer to that I would say yes. If I were to explain why I say yes. So India in a huge number of cities has been extremely dependent on external agencies or partners who would recruit for us, but the basic grounds or the premises on which the design of that hiding was built was that they would bring people into their facility.

And because they're partnered with multiple organizations, their value proposition was that if you walk into my office, I'm going to make sure you walk out with an offer. It could be company A, it could be company B, because they're obviously contractually working with so many firms.

Now with the entire premise of can I walk into your office now? With that piece shifting to can you make sure that you can still give me that same value proposition, but not make me come to your office? Now for me to be able to hold on to an audience without physically bringing them to my facility, I guess that's a challenge that every organization is facing, because sometimes it seemed very simple that people would just walk into your office for an interview.

But just that simple activity seems so much more difficult now because everybody wants to see, do you have something on the offering, which does not force me to come and physically walk into your facility? And unfortunately, the agencies or the vendor partners weren't prepared for something like this, because they were always dependent on bringing people to their offices because that's their way of securing an applicant or a candidate and giving them that assurance that we will make sure you get an offer somewhere.

Now with everybody shifting to a digital platform. It's an open market today. If I can attract talent by virtue of my organization's name, then yes, the dependency on me sourcing through external partners is going to go down, but it's never going to go away.

And the reason being that an agency in a recruitment set up, always works as additional capacity.

Max: Yeah. You need that. And then to do some backup and to do some pointed search and sometimes competitive work, you always need to have that middleman, but, I mean, it can go down from being 70% of your volume to 7%, over a period of 10 years or something like that.

When I interacted with Teleperformance a few years ago in India and they told me that they were advertising Jaipur as a really great destination to go to because of the great weather and lots of access to greenery and not as polluted as Delhi and Bangalore and I had a very different mental picture than what I saw when I came to Jaipur.

Jaipur is a big city. There is a lot of traffic jams

Preeti: But if you compare Jaipur with Delhi, you have the benefit of not traveling beyond a certain distance. So you would always have the opportunity to compare distances, but you know, if you actually meet people in Jaipur, they're going to make that little distance also sound an inconvenience.

So someone living in a big ground is always going to feel that traveling for 40 minutes is okay. But if you were to place those 40 minutes for someone living in Jaipur, they're going to be like, nevermind, I don't need this job. I'm going to look for something closer to home.

Max: Well, it makes sense. I think I'm on the side of the Jaipur people on this one, that commuting time needs to be cut, cut to 10- 15 minutes.

I like a little bit of commuting time because it gives me a moment to stop thinking about home, start thinking about work and vice versa. But, maybe there are tricks. You can also create that commute time within your home because you're stuck at home. But I was thinking about Jaipur.

I was thinking, When I went to Jaipur last year, I did not find that beautiful, full green place with birds singing and and pink palace. I thought it was still quite, quite rough. And I was thinking maybe I need to go to an even smaller city, to go see, you know, a more untouched part of India and less industrialized.

Is it possible today for your agents to work in even third tier or smaller cities than that? Or are you finding the infrastructure is still too much behind?

Preeti: So that's an interesting one Max, and maybe I can spend some time explaining how we've transitioned into having a dependency on moving.

And if you see the erstwhile, traditional cultures in India, people would generally move away from their homes to bigger cities. Because the bigger city offered the opportunities, the infrastructure, there's so much more that used to be tied behind a big city. And there was generally a feeling of growing up, just for the lack of a better word. A child would feel that, you know, once I'm done with college, I'm grown up, I can live independently and hence I'm moving to a bigger city for seeking a job.

Now, not that shift has now happened in a way where people feel that, yes,I have to go, but I don't want to go.

To the earlier impression where people were, we used to look forward to moving to a big city, because it seemed like a new experience for them. Now that shift has happened where people are being forced to move from their families, move away from their natives, purely because they don't have opportunities that exist in smaller cities.

And hence they have no choice, but to move. Now, the fact that the willingness is in question. There is always an option where people feel that I'd rather go back home. I'm going to work for some time, but my heart is still to go back home. Nobody wants to live away from family. India is very heavy into family.

We want to be together with our families for as long as we can. And that's one of the pull factors where people feel that I get something where I live, where I have my family. Then I would want that. And, fortunately, or unfortunately, obviously the pandemic was an unfortunate situation, but the fortunate activity that came out of it was the multitude of options where everybody was willing to explore a work from home culture, work from home opportunity, which made sure that the recruitment team was able to reach out to a person with a value proposition saying, look here. I have an option for you. You don't need to move from your home. You don't need to walk out of your house for now. You're not allowed, but at the same time, anytime you can continue living with your family and you can still choose to be part of a large global organization.

And how am I being able to do that? Obviously, technology is supporting me. A person just needs to make sure he or she is having a system. They have internet connectivity, which is pretty much everywhere they are today. And I'm connected. I do not need to move to a big city, I don’t need to leave my family behind. I don’t need to go and find a place where five people can live together because I can't afford to live alone.

And all of those things have gone away and it's just been a matter of four or five months. We've not seen this transition over years. We've just seen this transition in the last four or five months since the pandemic hit. And it was a quick and, you know, swift shift into moving people into a work from home option.

Max: Okay. I guess that's been the massive positive that's come out of this. And, and to tie back, to close the loop on where you began your career. Did you make that big move when you were coming out of college and moved to the big city?

Preeti: Actually, yes, I did. I've lived in, in multiple cities. I've lived in another country before this.

So when I grew up as a child, I lived in the Gulf. I've lived in Saudi Arabia. That was where I grew up. That's where I did my schooling, but I shifted back to India sometimes in my high school, when I came back to India and I lived in two different cities. And then I finally settled down in Mumbai, thinking that's where I want to do a job.

And yes, and I've lived in Mumbai ever since, I guess it's been a really long time. So, I guess you have Mumbai as being my workplace, my dream place, you can call it whatever you want, but yes.

Max: I like the city. It's got a beautiful architecture. The recruitment offices were a little crowded for my taste before, but, I’m glad to be here india embraces the work from home revolution and what it might do to keep families together. And to expand the talent pool, to change the culture of the whole country. I'm excited about what's to come. I'm gonna come back as soon as travel is allowed.

Thank you for sharing your story with our listeners and we wish you all the best in continuing the revolution and making the best out of a difficult situation with the pandemic. Thank you very much Preeti.

Preeti: Thank you so much, Max. I'd like to just close off by saying, it's such an interesting conversation, always with you.

I guess we in India seem to be looking very promising as a hub where work from home opportunities are going to grow multi-fold; it's not going to be a stop gap arrangement to cater to the pandemic. And, the only message I'd like to give to the entire recruitment fraternity is to never say no to any person who's applying for a job, because you never know who's going to stick around and who's not.

Sometimes those traditional biases of this isn’t the right profile or this isn't the right fit. As recruitment, as organizations, we need to learn to trust our instincts on potential, on people's ability to adapt to a job, not just by virtue of what they bring to the table, but by virtue of what the organization has to offer as well.

So as much as people need to shape up and fit into a skill or a competency matrix for us, I guess the organizations also need to start being more adaptive and open to exploring so many more profiles. So many more people who are seeking jobs outside today. And I think we can safely say that for Teleperformance.

You know, everybody matters to us, every interaction matters to us and we're very hopeful that people will look at us as an employer of choice. And we're working very hard to become that.

Max: I don't doubt it. I've seen the content on social media. I've seen your CEO promote this work from home revolution and I'm with you. I think this is a transition which represents an enormous opportunity for talent acquisition professionals that could very much be something we look back on as the best thing that could happen to our industry. So, thanks again, Preeti.

Preeti: Thank you, max.

Max: I had a great conversation with Preeti, which went on a little bit longer than the usual interview and went on after we stopped recording because India is really going through an exciting time, exciting revolution with people working from home, changing the landscape for the whole industry. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please sign up for more and subscribe to the podcast here and share with your friends.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Good morning and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast with me Max Armbruster, talking to some of the thought leaders and leading executives in the talent acquisition space, looking at how they're leveraging recruitment and talent acquisition to give them an edge for their business.

And today I am honored and pleased to welcome on the show Kim Howell Chief People Officer at ERC. Welcome Kim. Thanks for joining.

Kim: Thanks for having me, Max. Good to be here.

Max: So, Kim, we're going to be talking about how you and ERC have adapted to the new normal and how your organization has responded to the challenges of the pandemic and the transition to work from home.

Then we'll see where the conversation takes us. But, before we go into that, perhaps, if you would, give us a brief introduction on what you do and your background and on ERC.

Kim: Absolutely. So, yeah, I'm currently with the ERC. I've been in the industry now for 25 years.

However, I'm still 21, so don't do the math. Okay. I started years ago in a call center in Buffalo, New York. As an agent on the phones, collecting past due bills and, you know, throughout the years, I attribute a lot of my successes to the fact that I stayed very grounded in where I came from.

I think that you can exceed much better in business if you did the work you're supporting now as an executive. So ERC, I've been with them now, gosh, since 2006. It's been a little bit of a blur because it's an excellent and forward moving company. We're a global BPO. We support our clients cradle to grave.

Anything from phone work, chat, email, tech support, you know what I mean, full global provider. We really strive on having the best experience, starting with our applicant experience through to our candidates’ experience onto the employees’ experience, which we all know deeply impacts the client's experience and our customer's experience.

So that's one of the things that we've really held true to.

Max: All right. Thank you. And I think collections is indeed a skill that will serve anybody for the long run. I certainly have been doing a lot of collections over the last few weeks. It doesn't matter, you know, where you are, whether it's Chief People Officer or CEO, I think you have to collect sometimes.

So, well, that was my experience with the recent few months. We had a bit of a scare on who would be paying the bills on time. Tell us about your scary moments from the last four months at the company level.

Kim: Yeah. So first and foremost, biggest scariest moment is how do we protect our staff, right.

Clients absolutely being our top priority. And our staff being the top priority to one, keep them healthy and to support the business. And at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that we could retain the most number of employees because it's a scary time for them, right? Their kids are being sent home from school.

Things are getting shut down. You know, they're getting locked away at home to quarantine and not everyone was getting locked away in the best circumstances. So our biggest scary moment is how do we keep our staff to still have the best experience while keeping their jobs? We were very fortunate that we were prepared.

You know, outside of your typical disaster recovery plans and what do you do if, and knowing that a lot of our sites are in Hurricane Valley, you know, we're pretty nimble. But that was kind of the scariest moment, will the staff be able to work from home? Will we be able to deploy them quick enough?

And then how do we continue our business, in this new norm? We executed very quickly. And I think that's what we are most proud of. Although it might've felt chaotic. Although maybe in the background, there was some chaos. I don't know that we ever let it get out.

Max: You, you were telling me earlier, you moved to a work from home in a 48 hour span.And I guess over multiple countries, which geographies do you operate in?

Kim: So currently we are in the United States, the Dominican Republic, India and South Africa.

Max: Okay. So that's about five or six different time zones. If my math is correct and two and a half languages, or, well, one English.

But, what was some of the logistics that you had to deal with that transition? In late March. How did you figure out the move to work from home in such a short timeframe?

Kim: Yeah, so domestically, it was a little bit easier. It was a matter of letting our employees know when you go home today unplug everything on your desktop monitor screen, computer units, your headphones, everything that you need, unplug it, put in your car and take it home. Right. And obviously we had inventoried those and done the right signup process. So it was a little bit easier there, weird feeling to watch all of your equipment walking out the door.

But it was easier in the Dominican Republic, a little bit differently due to laws there, they couldn't necessarily walk out with stuff. So we had to deploy our transportation team to deliver the desktops, to all of our agents that had the ability to work at home. Right. And there's a lot that goes with that.

We were having everyone do their, you know, internet speed tests to find out whether or not they could work from home. If they couldn't we were trying to cure my five devices to support the internet that they would need. And then obviously trying to get more equipment when the entire nation is going work at home at the exact same time you had, a lot of supply versus demand concerns.

Can we get enough headsets to continue to support ongoing recruitment efforts? But yet in about 48 hours, we were back up and running very little downtime. Couple little hiccups along the way as we figured out tech solutions or internet concerns. But at the end of the day, you know, very little client impact, nearly no employee impact.

There's a few clients that were not comfortable with the work at home or work from home solution. That's really the only place that we saw any employee impact, but anyone that was not working.

Max: Those customers will probably be out of business soon enough. I don't wish that of course, but they may sing a different tune today than they did three months ago, of course.

Kim: Agreed

Max: And so you delivered 800 PCs to people's homes, you have to hire a few trucks to, to run that operation. I presume.

Kim: Yeah, within DR, 800 total pieces of equipment, deployed within a matter of days, we used everyone's personal vehicle that could drive. Obviously we had a, there were some deadlines that the government had put into place that you have to have it all done by this day.

So it was definitely a scattering of anyone that has a car, or two hands and can drive. Let's go. Because you need to pick up these equipments and you need to get them delivered in. It was a wonderful showing, a force by our employees there, folks that weren’t part of the transportation team that became part of it, just to get it deployed.

And I think that really speaks volumes, well, not just, you know, of ERC and our culture, but definitely of our folks, down there in the DR, just working together to make sure everyone can stay working.

Max: I didn't realize you were present in South Africa and India as well. We also have clients in these geographies at Talkpush. I'm a big traveler. I noticed that these waves did come at a different time and what people don't talk about is the universal kind of nature of this crisis. Almost every country reacted the same way. And every group reacted the same way. We keep talking about our differences, but really those kind of universal responses.

One thing that I keep hearing back though, is we didn't think that emerging markets were able to work from home. We didn't think that we had the right internet speed, but these were, you know, these were overcome a little bit easier than people had thought that it would be. Does that reflect your experience?

Kim: It does. And for the most part, there were a few folks that we had to furlough because they did not have the internet support that they needed or, and we couldn't, for whatever reason, get them a device or even with the device it wouldn’t work and what was most prevalent is their home environment didn't support a work at home situation, right. Five kids, kids screaming and yelling all day, multiple, dogs barking, whatever the case may be.

And also, especially when you look at some of our folks in the DR it's kind of a different environment, right? You have multigenerational families. So it's not where you can lock yourself away in a room and get work done. So we had to make sure that they had the opportunity to work from home.

Max: Yeah. The sad part is these are the families that probably need the job the most. If you need the income and you need to have the structure in your life where you can get away from that noise. Yeah. All the more, traumatic this crisis would have been.

It goes back to your earlier point that, you know, people need a job sometimes even more than they need the income. They just need that structure.

Kim: Yeah. And you know, that's one of the things that did work out well for us, both domestically and in our international sites. For the clients that could not do work at home because of whatever security restrictions that they had.

We were able to classify some of our staff as essential workers. So we were very selective in who was going to be an essential worker. If you can work at home, work from home. If you can't we're going to find a way to get you right size or rehomed to the projects that's essential so that we can keep you employed or keep you in a safe harbor or whatever the case may be.

So there was some shuffling of roles and responsibilities based upon people's abilities.

Max: The talent pool that you're picking from now is going to be vastly expanded with your work at home program. And you were telling me before our call that, you've seen a significant increase the applicants from pre-crisis to today's, right now we're at the end of July, almost August. Can you give us the numbers in terms of how much of an increase have you seen over this period?

Kim: Yeah, actually, absolutely I can. And we've seen a few shifts over this new norm or the COVID period. So historically when we were hiring for, there are brick and mortar sites, we saw anywhere from 400 to 600 applicants per month, right.

Pending on recruitment needs. At the time, once we went to work at home, that volume increased to 3,500 a month. That was fairly significant. And we didn't have the time to double our staff or more appropriately up it by 10 more people to keep up with that volume because it takes time to train a recruiter.

It takes time to get them up to speed. Then we really had to find ways to deal with that increase in volume without the candidates experience being monopolized. And that's one of the things that we really. We had to get creative with technology and we had to get creative processes, right? Because the processes of the past to have one on one interviews and one-on-one screens, none of that works unless you want to give yourself three months to reach back to a candidate.

And that's a horrible experience, right? Especially in today's environment, when everyone needs that immediate gratification, you need to respond to them within 24 hours or you've lost them. That's no longer a warm lead for our recruiting staff. And, you know, not only that, but the shift in the demographics of people that were applying was also different.

So historically work at home, you see about 70% part-time utilization, meaning people looking for part time work, 30% looking for full time. In the COVID environment so many full time workers were displaced that that completely reversed, where we saw 70% seeking full time employment and only 30 seeking part time.

So it changes scheduling. It changes again, the process flow when we recruit fundamentally changed and, and the how .

Max: it sounds like it's a better talent pool to choose from, which makes sense. When you go from 3.5% unemployment to whatever it is today, maybe 10 times that yeah.

Kim: You know, max, it's funny, it's not necessarily a better candidate. And that's one of the things that has one of the places where we get to change our questioning. And our processes, because if you think about it, historically, the only people that were applying for work from home are folks that had a need to work from home, not a want, a need, right? Because they're differently abled. They are working parents, they are single parents, whatever the case may be. Now it's different.

So you have people that have never worked from home and don't understand the discipline it takes to work from home applying for a job that will have you locked at home all the time. And that's, it's really in the recruitment process.

We'd never, before had to explain that because the only people applying for work at home are folks that did it in the past. Now we're having to spend time of our recruitment process explaining what to expect working from home. Because it's easy to get distracted by the load of laundry that needs to get changed out or a TV show that's on during the day that you don't typically get to watch or the doorbell ringing.

They're really making sure that we're explaining the expectations of working from home before we even get into whether or not you're a good fit for us.

Max: Do you have a dress code for people to work from home?

Kim: No, we really don't.

Max: The benefits of the new normal

Kim: It is, and that's one of the things that, and it was weird that you say that because when we initially moved to work from home, our brick and mortar folks, we saw an immediate uptick in productivity because now they're sleeping a little bit longer because they don't have Jacksonville traffic commute time.

So they're getting that extra couple of minutes. It has them more refreshed. They can go get their cup of coffee very quickly versus having to wait for break time and then wait in line to get to the Keurig machine. There's all of these conveniences of home, it was new and fresh and exciting.

Everybody was uber productive. Then the challenges became kind of post recruitment. Post-deployment post all of these things. Now it has shifted to engagement because it's very easy to lose your staff at home. Because you don't see them. You don't know when they're having a bad day, cause you can't look at them.

So that's really where Zoom and the different technologies that we use for engagement became very necessary just to know if they're having a bad day.

Max: Yeah, we do a few of these things ourselves internally. We have a coffee break or a water cooler chat where we're randomly paired with somebody in the company to do a random chat and related things help and create connectivity.

Of course, the zoom calls, are a factor, but right now I'm trying to a company, 60 people. Um, I kept not ask all to come together, right. So I have to commit method of thinking.

training, classroom, tactical

training or onboarding.

Kim: Yep. So through training and onboarding, we have a couple different things that we do, um, onboarding right now we do in a group setting and we do a couple sessions throughout the day because we do hire route multiple time zones. So everyone can't always join at the same time. So we'll set up multiple times throughout the day, both with am and PM offerings, but it is a total group session.

And what we’ve learned with that, even in the past,you know, post recruitment or onboarding has always been in a classroom setting. Let's all get together, but now you have even more opportunities to compound factor that in. Classrooms of the past: 20 people. And our classrooms of today are still not much more than that.

But you can onboard 50 at one time, as you can fit more people into a classroom, a virtual classroom. You still want to break out for the actual training, because obviously you want to make sure that they're getting the attention that they need, and that you can keep up with the questions that are happening via polling or chat.

But from an onboarding experience, you can onboard multiple people at one time. So it really makes the team more efficient because they're not spending as much time on those isolated touch points.

Max: You're using that for the, uh, for the interviewing process as well. These group sessions?

Kim: Ee are. And that was a very big shift that we had to make.

Like I mentioned earlier, application flow went from 400 to 600 to 3,500. It was impossible for our process of the past to keep up with that. Our former process was everybody got a one on one phone interview. And if you were advanced, then you sat down for a face to face interview with the hiring manager.

That's not realistic for 3,500 people. And again, there's no brick and mortar to bring them into you for that face to face. So one of the process changes that we did was that first initial phone interview, we'll invite anywhere from 10 to 15 people into that interview. And we'll have one group interview.

And this is just the preliminary interview. If you think about recruitment, it's a joint sales effort as a candidate you need to sell me on why I should hire you. But as an employer, I also need to sell you on why you should want to work for us. So in this setting, I'm able to do that sales pitch one time versus 15 isolated times.

And if you think about a normal course of an interview, that phone interview is usually about 15 minutes long, sometimes a little bit longer for supervisory or executive low level roles. Obviously they're significantly longer, but think about 15 minutes over 20 candidates. Versus having those 20 candidates come to one 15 minute interaction so that I can give my sales pitch once, but more importantly, engagement of that team or excuse me of those candidates is so much better because typically these are awkward, right? They don't necessarily want to ask a question because what if it exposes me as having a weakness? Now it's a conversation.

Max: Your story made me kind of flashback to when I was a job seeker, myself and I was invited for a group interview.

I flew from London to Paris for that interview, I think, or from somewhere to somewhere. And, I put on a suit, I took the train, I went to the office and then I was accepted, you know, welcomed into a conference room with 10 others and I had to do whole thing. And all of this was just like a buildup of tension and anxiety.

As I came to present myself, I was very, are you nervous. But if I have to talk about who I am for a couple of minutes, while I'm looking at my computer in the comfort of my home, I'm sure I can knock it out of the park, even 20 year old version of me, you know? Right. So, one of the tricks of recruitment is putting the candidate at ease so you can see really who they are, then you're working from a better place, actually, if you're letting that happen from their home.

Kim: Yeah. And I think that putting them at ease is so important, especially in today's environment. It's a great point that you make Max, because if you look at where we are today and in the environment, So many people need a job and they're going to therefore tell you what they think you want to hear to get that job.

So it's not just a recruitment to put candidates in the seats of our training class, but recruitment needs to put the right candidates in the seats, in our training classes, ones that are going to have stickiness, and that are going to stick with us for a long period of time. Turnover is expensive.

Recruiting is expensive. So the less people you have to introduce into the organization, the better. So you really need that stickiness. Hmm, but then what the recruiters are really tasked with doing now is candidates need to be at ease. It's less about the skills they bring to the table, and it's more about their ability to be taught the skills we need them to have.

And that's really what we've changed in our philosophy, because it's not, we want to experience or you have to have X number of years in the industry. It's are you teachable? Because teachable individuals have more loyalty and have more stickiness. If I've taught you a scale. If I've taught you how to be successful.

And then more importantly, I've made you successful within the company, based upon the trainings. You're more apt to stick with us versus coming to me with 10 years experience and not necessarily liking the environment and know you can go someplace else. So we like to really have a good mix of tenured people with experience, and then just the teachable individuals go a long way.

Max: I don't know where you're going to get the best retention from, from the old timers or from the freshers. Because of courseboth come with a risk, um, going from 400 or 600, hires per month to, or candidates per month to 3,500, almost 10 X in volume. Um, You've been able to perhaps a bit to create a few more filters and what are some of the filters that we can use, that recruiters can use to determine if candidates are teachable or, or to make sure you hire people who are adapted to work at home?

Kim: Some of that is done even before we ever talked to them. And that's really where I think employers can leverage whether it's their ATS or just standard processes to have people self select their course, meaning what path are they going to take?

Beause we have various different openings, whether it's collections, chat, email, customer service, retention efforts, whatever the case may be. So you want to go through some questioning within the application process. That's going to have them select the right course. That's best for them. Are you looking for a PM shift?

Okay. Well, that's going to put you into a different pool than if you're open and can work whenever. So some of the questions that we do even before we talk to them, we have them do their internet speed tests. You know, you have to have proof of a workspace, show us your workspace, submit those pictures to us.

All that's done via our ATS portal. So that when we go to sit down with the candidates, we've already done all the checklist work, right. We already know that they pass the sniff test so to speak on a tech solution and an environmental solution. Now we need the teachables. And in that group setting, you'll be very surprised on how much you get from that.

Because one of the requirements of the interview is you have to be on camera, right? We need to see you. We need to know the reaction. So as people are asking questions, you can see the folks that have a ton of experience. They're either open to our answer or they're like, oh, I know the answer. Well, I know the answer means, you know, the answer of your past employer.

Not that you're going to be open to how we do it at ERC. So we do a lot of profiling in those interviews in just how receptive are you to people's questions, to our feedback, to our responses, and to our environment. So we like to read those facial expressions and you know, one of the problems with zoom is now I talk to my hands a lot.

It's the New Yorker in me. I can't help it. I always tell people to keep a distance. So I don't accidentally get to you. But some things you lose in zoom. So we always tell people, you know, we give them a zoom etiquette course before we do the interview. Sit back from your computer, don't have it right up on your face.

You know, we want it exactly, but we want it to be a good experience for everybody. We don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable. And that was one of the things and something I definitely recommend for employers to do for your recruiters. Don't assume everyone understands technology. As savvy is I'd like to pretend that I am, I was very new to zoom when we went into COVID. I was very used to, hey, meet me in the conference room. So I had to really educate myself on how to do a good zoom experience for my staff. And that's one of the things that we really had to sit down with the recruiters to say, how do you make it a good zoom experience for your candidates?

And, you know, you were talking earlier about some of the engagement activities. And I think so many people look at recruitment as being over once the job starts. And it's not, in my opinion, it's just starting. Our best applicant source are our staff. Refer is the key referrals, stickiness. They know what they're walking into, so you don't have that, or it's not what I expected turnover rate at play for referrals.

And it always tell everybody recruitment is a continuous effort. The employee that's been with the company for 20 years should be your best recruiter. They should be out there, you know, handing out cards. Here's, you know, we're hiring whatever the case may be. And we do a ton of engagement efforts.

We did a lip sync challenge the other day on zoom. And we brought everybody in and just did some lipsync battles. We've played charades via zoom. We've done impersonations. You have to guess the person there's so many different things that we've been able to do on zoom. And I know that sounds weird.

It's used as a recruitment tool, but think about it. How many people get to say, like, I actually had fun at work today and yes, it's a grind and we work hard and it's exhausting. But at the end of the day, I played charades with an executive. That was pretty cool. And I don't know many companies that do that.

So you've got to continue to invest in your business to make sure that recruitment stays exciting.

Max: That is very creative. And my idea of creativity was we're going to send them sandwiches and beers at home, which probably works too. But this is good stuff. I am not looking forward to it, but I have a feeling that my Head of HR will organize some charades, unfortunately, all that.

Kim: It is super fun.

Max: Yeah. I can do that. Maybe with a beer ,if I can combine the two.

Kim: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. Send yourself, the sandwich and a beer and you're good.

Max: All right. Well, you've given a lot of great ideas to our thinkers. To close it out and thinking about that continuous improvement you were talking about I really think that, we’re really at the beginning of this transition.

Where do you see the next level of automation? What are some of the stuff that your recruiters are still working on that you feel is a little too time consuming and you wish you could take off their desk how are you I'm imagining the next few months or a few years of innovation?

Kim: The biggest thing that I see right now is finding a way to capture both the voice component of recruiting and the text or context component. Right? So there's a ton of vendors out there that do a lot with whether it's profiling the video assessment or taking speech and keywords and all of these other things.

And we have our Mars application, which is our homegrown application that we use for text analytics or excuse me, speech analytics and the speech analytics are super important in recruiting by listening to the conversation and giving feedback or training opportunities to our recruiters. But more importantly, and what we want to tie together as we continue to evolve, our tech solutions is taking all the texts that happens within the application process, right? The resume.

Yeah. If it's required, if not just what they fill in on the app and looking at our success stories internally and tying the two together, you know, putting in that, if this, then that logic, within the entire recruitment process, because what we see when we manually look at it, which is a super time consuming and archaic process is, Hey, this person had all these work gaps.

They were not successful. Okay. Well, how do you drop those work gaps or put them into a different bin for a different type of work treatment to find out why are those work gaps? Was it contract work? You know, there's other things where we find a great success rate in our customer service arm of folks that come from Chick-Filet.

Everyone that I strictly as a huge customer service backing and, and really invested a ton of time in that. And I know it's weird. Right. Okay. So someone who served fast food is successful at a BPO. Absolutely. Because again, BPO is customer service.

Max: Yeah. That doesn't shock me. I'm still trying to think how you can automate this, you know, when you do that group video group interview that you do, and you say you're, you're reading, people's faces to see, see how people react to what. I think the HireVues of the world do analytics around video, but I don't think anybody, maybe the Chinese government has figured out a way to analyze 12 faces set simultaneously and contextually.

But that is some next gen stuff should keep us busy for the next appointment.

Kim: At least. Right. And, and that's really where, you know, one of our biggest things is finding the right partner. That's trying to figure it out also, and let’s build it together. Right. That's because I don't think anyone's figured that out yet.

And I know it's coming and my goodness technology is advancing quicker than we can get through R and D with different vendors. So that's really where it's okay. Who's got the bandwidth, the savviness and the patience to deal with us in a partnership to build that. Because it's coming. And I look at the amount of time that my recruiters, I don't want to say waste because it's valuable, but right now, so much of recruitment is processing, not recruiting.

Yeah. And if you could find a way to automate those manual touch points, um, that are necessary to decide, do they get an interview or not? Using, you know, a data analytic tool on the resume using that data analytic tool on the conversation, now they can recruit.

Max: I cringe at the thought that people are going to take the current crisis as an opportunity to revert back to bad behaviors and treat, you know, stop treating candidates nicely.

I get the feeling that is not going to happen at ERC. And, I really want to thank you, Kim, for your inspiring words and sharing the story of the last few months with us. I wish you and ERC all the best.

Kim: Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.

Max: Thanks Kim. Talk soon.

Max: I had a lot of fun talking with Kim Howell, and you can see from her determination and attitude, how she managed to drive her career from working into collections all the way to Chief People Officer at ERC. That kind of leadership where an opportunity comes in the shape of a crisis to transform and move things around and where you have to start changing hats, putting on your logistics hats in order to facilitate hundreds of people staying at work and being able to continue, have structure in their lives through this pandemic. So great chat Kim. I hope you stay on for more Recruitment Hackers Podcast.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello everybody. And welcome back to The hacks from max, our recruitment podcast for recruitment hackers and people who’re interested in accelerating recruitment. Today we have a really exciting guest joining us who is not coming strictly from the world of recruitment and talent acquisition. But in fact, from the world of sales, Tito Borht is the founder and CEO of AltiSales, which is one of the leading sales development providers to the startup and tech world in the U.S. I met him in San Francisco a few years back, and I've been following him ever since on social media. Which he has turned into a hiring engine for his company.

Tito, welcome to the show.

Tito: Thanks Max. It's good to be here.

Max: Thanks for coming. So on this show we talk a lot to Talent Acquisition professionals and we present content for people who are hiring thousands and thousands of people.

And yesterday I was talking to somebody who hires 10,000 people a year. Your business is at the different end of the spectrum but I think that's what you've done at AltiSales can be really inspiring for companies of all sizes which is leveraging your voice on social media in order to attract exceptional talent. So that's where I'd like to take the conversation to. but first before we get going tell us a little bit about yourself. What is the AltiSales.

Tito: Cool. Yeah. Quick background here. So I started a sales development consulting and outsourcing company back in 2012. The idea came 2011 started really doing work 2012. And we’re a really fun company to work for. I mean, we are a distributed company. We have employees and I think at one point we had like nine countries, I think now we're like seven different countries. A lot of people work from home. We have cool things happening like the quarterly president's club.

So every, three months, everybody who's hit their goals for the company is flown over to a cool destination. We've done things like Cancun, Mexico, the Bahamas and places like that, we get the team together and we spend about a long weekend, with one another, just enjoying ourselves, getting to know the rest of the team and so on and so forth because the rest of things are just managed via Zoom. So we're really interacting, just via video conference.

Max: So with this pandemic in place, no more quarterly president's club. I Imagine

Tito: Yeah, we're punting the President’s Club for the future. So everybody who’s qualified in Q1 and now is qualifying in Q2 is going to join me the same one at some point and we’re going to make it bigger and better once we can travel. But yes, coronavirus has ruined a little bit of the fun, you know, I sometimes joke with the employees and I say, you know, maybe the way we will run this is we'll just do president's club like this.

Max: Ooh. Yeah. For those who are listening, Tito just switched on his zoom background with the Palm trees. Yeah, I think this is the closest, a lot of people have been to the beach, sad times. But you know, I mean, I don't want to talk about sales efficiency, but for Talkpush. We’re spending less time traveling and more time selling, actually. Maybe you've seen the same thing.

Tito: Yeah, that's right. I think companies that are commonly remote are doing so much better than the usual company. And then companies that are usually in house are struggling to figure it out. At the beginning it was figuring out their setup, meaning what do I need at home to be able to have the basic equipment so I can work.

But nowadays it's productivity, you know, it's not easy to transition from working at the office to working from home and not wanting to take a nap from noon to 3:00 PM, right. Or whatever it is.

Max: I already took mine. So we're good. Nothing wrong with taking a few naps, by the way. I mean, that can also be a productivity tip. but yeah, maybe not a two hour one. I do think if you want to accelerate your time to nap, a glass of wine at lunch really, does the trick. Tell us about AltiSales, the type of profiles that you're hiring for and maybe, you know, when you started this company how did you come up with a recruitment process that was gonna speak to your values? That was going to speak to the kind of people you want to work with?

Tito: Yeah. So it was funny because the company, the first thing we set up was based in LA Paz, Bolivia, and we hired half of our team in the U S and we offered them all expenses paid to Bolivia. This was back in 2012. And then we hired a few people locally in Bolivia, and we built a hybrid team, righ, of native Americans living in Bolivia for six months, doing some work and then some local people that would be more or stable throughout the years in terms of being able to work with us. Unless, because the visas get more complex the longer you want to keep people out of the country and working there.

So, I think at the beginning it was very much trying to figure it out. Where do we post in these different countries? What countries want to use websites like Indeed versus Craigslist versus local, even newspapers or stuff like that. Finding the people with the basic requirements, like for us, we're an English we're speaking company. Then our main, you know, language is going to be English across the board. But, then there are some teams that speak Spanish more than English. For example, we have a good amount of people in Latin America. So the early days I think it was more figuring it out and understanding where to post and what to post, in different places.

But then as years went by the strategy evolved and nowadays we actually find about 80% of our employees directly through social media. I mean, LinkedIn is probably the biggest place. They come inbound. So, I post something about us recruiting and we just started getting applications, which is awesome.

And then the other 20%, I think, comes from regionally sourced through current employees that understand their local countries and we know where to post. So we want to hire somebody in Colombia. We have somebody there that will tell us where to post. Somebody in Costa Rica, somebody in Bolivia, somebody in Argentina, we have all these different countries where we know what are the common places, where English speaking people, would be looking at.

Max: You know, the good job boards and marketplaces. You were talking about the sourcing strategy from a posting and then how it moved to social media. In a bigger company you have let's say 20 or 30 people working in recruitment. You'd have half the team doing sourcing the other half doing interviewing.

And then within the sourcing team, maybe you'd have a team that's dedicated to social media storytelling and answering questions. And if they're big enough, maybe they even have a chatbot, like the one we provide in order to handle these inquiries.

I guess your time has, over the years, you've shifted more of your time into social media and into storytelling because you realized that it was gonna save you money on advertising or was it more about changing the quality of the traffic? How did this come about?

Tito: Yeah I wish it was as strategic as you would make it seem. I think the way it worked is I just, I'm a very open and transparent person. So I started sharing a lot of things on social media, and I write blogs on LinkedIn and Sales Hacker about how to run a company, better everything from commission structures to, you know, whatever, like SDR to handles some things that are very specific to my industry. But, I also share a lot about company culture. Like how do you build promotion paths? And how do you compensate your people?And why you should do president's club and why SDRs matter and blah, blah, blah, and things like that.

And that's just attracted my audience, like the type of people that I hire align with those beliefs and they read my blogs and you know, my information online and they say, that's a company I’d love to work for. And then obviously it does have additional benefits. Like everybody working from home, you know, allows us to have a very broad market.

So I don't need to be trying to recruit somebody in San Francisco or somebody in Boston or somebody in Texas. You know, I can go and say, it doesn't matter where you work. It doesn't matter where you live. If you align with our mindset, apply. We hire everywhere and anywhere.

Max: Yeah, that's, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. This is especially applicable for a company that is open to hiring remote, because when you're doing social media, you're investing your time in building content. You can't really decide where it ends up. It might be consumed anywhere in the world.

And so you don't want that to be lost Did you find that, you said 80% of the traffic or your hires now come from LinkedIn and what is it Instagram? What other channels are you using?

Tito: Yeah. LinkedIn is maybe the place where we get the most sales development reps, just because of the following. We just got, god, I think 40 or 50 resumes from people in Latin America through just having our teams post on Instagram. I put a post, my employees, follow me on Instagram and share the post. And because they're regionally located and they have friends or friends of friends, they said we're recruiting. Help me spread the word. Here's what we need. Basic requirements ping me for a link to the job post. And then we got like 50 people in like two or three days and we wanted to hire two. We hired one very quickly. They had all the exact skills and requirements that we're looking for. It's an entry level position, but they were experienced already.

They knew more about the world of data research than we expected to find and they were great. So, yeah, for us, it works really, really well. The more you grow outside your main city, the more valuable social media recruitment becomes. Because, as you said, you can't pick where they’re going to read your content and therefore, the more open you are to hiring internationally or outside your HQ, the better

Max: There are a lot of companies right now, which as a response to the pandemic have decided, we're going to be working from home from now on, and this is how we're going to operate going forward. Even for positions that we thought were desk bound we've made the switch completely.

So I think they're going to have to look at, let's maybe switch off some of our span on the job boards and the CareerBuilder and Indeed and move some of that into investing, into creating quality content that people will share and reshare, et cetera — on LinkedIn.

Your content is super targeted to the sales development community and it's almost like, it's got a very distinct voice where you sound like you're an industry lobbyist; that you're fighting for the little guy. Which is a great way to get some, I guess, attract certain types of profiles. I Imagine this kind of strategy could be replicated well for companies that hire a particular professional, a particular type of professional. Could be for a company that's hiring lawyers or maybe a company that's hiring sales insurance professionals or recruiters. If you have a big staffing firm, we could replicate that and get inspired from from your content.

Do you think that would work?

Tito: I think so. I think that this is applicable to any company. And again, it depends. Who's writing the content? I think that if the content is coming from the CEO and it's a company wide kind of a mindset. It can apply to any company and it can apply to any position.

Right? The idea that we take care of our employees, like I tell my team, I say, you know, 20 years down the road, you're going to look back at your career. When you think what was my best career decision I've ever made, if that decision wasn't to join our company, then I failed as a leader. And I repeat that several times and we operate with a mindset of that being the case.

So we're really investing in coaching and training and helping our team do better and learn more and, you know, grow us as employees. They really appreciate it. I mean our employee turnover is almost nonexistent. I've only had, in the last three years, two employees leave our company voluntarily.

Got another two or three due to low performance, which you know, will happen. We tried training them forever and things didn't work. But well, truly, for a company with 25 employees having churn, I don't know, maybe six or seven employees in three years. it's something that we're proud of.

Max: That's pretty outstanding. Either you're doing something right or you're hiring the worst performers in the market, they can't find a job elsewhere. Just kidding. I've had a few departures myself over the last year. Which you know, was always disappointing, but mostly the people who left because they wanted to start their own company and they have a new startup, a new venture.

And, you know, I take a little bit of satisfaction in knowing that I helped them to learn the trade and gain the confidence to become entrepreneurs themselves. So that's the kind of attrition I'm okay with, I guess.

Tito: Yeah, that's right. I say that to my team all the time. I say if you're leaving, I actually just the one person where we recruited via social media recently, especially Instagram helped us a lot as our team shared.

She's moving to the nonprofit world. So. That was her passion. She worked, you know, in Washington, in DC for a nonprofit before and now her old boss contacted her saying, if you want to come back, we're hiring remote and I can hire you regardless of where you are. She's in South America, as she said, I'm taking that one also because the pay they were offering her was way higher than she was making Latin America. She was getting essentially a U.S salary in Latin America.

Max: So the nonprofit world, plus the salary. That's hard to beat. It’s hard to fight against that. Tell me about, how do you feel about how your recruitment work has evolved over the years? What are some of the remaining pain points? You've solved around the issue of sourcing and you've got a good pipeline of candidates coming in, and it sounds like you could probably scale it up.

I mean, I know you're still a relatively small business, but I would imagine that you could find potentially hundreds of sales reps to hire globally with a social media first strategy. I don't think that there's any limitations there because the universe is so big. but what are some of the limitations on your end where you feel like, wow, I wish this didn't take so much time? Or where do you think are still some of the opportunities or the pain points today?

Tito: Yeah, that's so funny. When you say pain points, I can say I smell your sales sweat. Only people who have done enough sales would ever talk about pain points. When I talk to my friends I don't talk in pain points. I talk in challenges or whatever, you know,

Max: I don’t use challenges. I use pain points.

Tito: Yeah. So like, hey, you know, team meeting! Okay, here are my pain points. What are the difficult parts? I mean, one of the things that we've done well is get way more strict on the process that we go through to make sure our candidate is qualified.

Like we're going to do both the culture fit and a skills test. The skills test for the SDRs is we actually give them a bunch of online resources. We say go watch these videos, go read these things and then come back and, build a sequence of phones and emails and show us that you can do the work and you can do it well.

And they need to pass that test in order to do well, so we're testing for both, their ability to learn quickly through only resources. And their ability to execute well, once they've learned something. So that that's helped us a lot. We do the same on our data research team. We have a few tasks, they gotta do an Excel, as part of the interview process and so on and so forth.

so those scale pretty well and then our team retention is so good that we don't need to hire a bunch of people. We're hiring five or six per year and we can get very strict on quality. It's kind of the opposite of how most people think. Most people think, what's the minimum amount of money I can pay my employees while still being competitive in the market?

And what's the minimum I can train them while they evolve their career? What's the minimum number of promotions I can give while they’ll still not leave? And I think about it the complete opposite way, I think what’s the maximum amount of effort I can put towards an employee while still making it profitable? And have that employee grow as much as possible within the company? How do I maximize the employee experience? So as a sales guy and a sales development person, my background is in psychology and I'm always thinking the opposite. I’m always thinking how do I maximize the experience of any other person interacting with us?

When you look internally. I think about it in the exact same way. How do I maximize the employee experience? How do we maximize the fact that after them being with us for three months, they say, holy cow, that onboarding was incredible. Their training is incredible. I'm being helped. Employees make mistakes, how you treat them, how you manage your team… This great book called Radical Candor helps with that employee communication. It talks about like rockstar mindset versus superstar mindset and being radically candid.

So we apply a lot of these principles to make sure, first, that our current employees are incredibly happy, and second, how do we find the people who will fit the skills that we're hiring for? And also fit the culture we are hiring for? If we hire the right person they're going to stick with us for many, many years.

So, that's the mindset behind our recruitment strategy.

Max: Well, it's lovely to be able to be so picky, Tito. And I think that your psychology background, that's what you said, that's what you studied in school?

Tito: Decision neuroscience.

Max: That sounds a little heavier than just psychology. Psychology is the most common major for people working in talent acquisition and HR, and they're very much focused on employee happiness. I think people who exercise that empathy muscle will have a bright future. I think that most of the challenge in recruitment and talent acquisition has moved away from how do we reduce the cost per lead as much as possible, because it's really easy to get volume, actually, today. I mean, you can always buy volume. Your system sounds like you spend more time optimizing around that initial assessment and figuring out that very hard thing, which is can, somebody research and be curious,and solve problems in the course of that recruitment process.

Is the interaction with the candidates happening over email, Skype? Or what are some of the tools you use?

Tito: It varies. I mean, when we've recruited internationally, number one is, do I have good enough English to be able to work on the team? So literally people send us a WhatsApp message. We ask them, you know, to do X, Y, Z, or introduce themselves or pitch something.

And, and we just want to gauge the quality of their English, which is important.

Max: Do you eliminate anybody who uses the word pain point?

Tito: Definitely, discarded, immediately. Forget about them. Joking aside, we do look at what are the basic skills that we need for the employee. And we've mostly recruited positions that are fairly entry-level and we grow our people.

So, our managers internally, we recruited one SDR manager and he's grown a lot within the company, has gotten so much better. And then everybody else has been promoted into their leadership positions. So we really hire from the ground up and evolve our people and make them better than keep them in the company.

So yeah, I really enjoy building it from the ground up. Increasing the loyalty rather than, like you said playing the game of lowering our cost per lead. What I want to do is maximize what I call ROTI and this I learned from a mentor of mine, Matt Cameron. This ROTI is return on time invested.

Max: I know Matt, I met him in San Diego, before the crisis.

Tito: Nice. He's amazing. All his trainings are great. But, the way you think about it is, how do you make sure that any employee joining your company or who’s already at your company — when they look at all the options they have, they can go work other places, or whatever else. How do we maximize a return on their time invested?

We're asking them to invest another two years. When I talk to an employee I'm like, why are you going to be here two years from now? What is this job giving you that makes it the best idea to be here for the next two years? And for some of them it's financial, Oh, I can make the most money here than anywhere else, because I'm going to work on my sales commissions, whatever, and our commissions are great. For other people, growth learning, the opportunities. For other people as a job, flexibility for other people it’s our management style, the lack of stress of the job, because we're very results oriented. Not, you know, time and effort oriented.

Max: Sorry, don't mean to interrupt. I was thinking that those questions are questions that we'd love to get honest answers to. But when you ask a question like that, sometimes the candidate will just tell you what they want you to hear. And you know, they'll come up with some sort of cookie cutter answer about, Oh, I'm trying to blah, blah, blah, help you help me. It's hard sometimes to get honest answers, maybe it's because your team has been trained on this radical candor communication that helps you to get more out of it. It's a little bit harder with candidates.

Tito: Yeah. You can't do it in the first interview. Right? You're not going to ask them, why do you want to join AltiSales? What’s your ROTI? But, once you've gone through a couple of interviews and you're about to offer the job, and this will happen, they say, I have another three job offers. And we say, okay, great. Why in the world would you join us? Why wouldn't you go somewhere else?

So, we're not saying justify the fact that you want to join us. I say justify the fact that you don't want to join anybody else. What makes us special? If we give you a job offer, would you take it? And why would you? I mean, isn't every job the same? And then what is funny is this is a little bit of reverse psychology, right? They'll do the opposite. It'll be like, Oh no, Tito, here are the three things I love about your company. I love that you're international. I love that I can work from home. I love this. I love that. And I really want to join you. And I say, are you sure? They're like, yes. I'm like, okay, so if I give you this job offer right now would you take it? They’re like I would, I'm like, you already have it. That's it. Sign here. Right?

And then with your employees you also want to be constantly talking about it. So like our managers to every employee, they ask him, what is your mindset? Are you in rockstar mindset or are you in superstar mindset? Superstar mindset means you want to work hard long hours. You want to get a promotion. You don't mind coming in early, leaving late. You're going to be assigned more responsibility.

You want to expand your responsibilities beyond your primary area of expertise. You want us to train you and coach you and guide you and help you grow. If you're in rockstar mindset you're the opposite. You just want to do your job really well. And some people are rockstar mindsets with orientation about money. You're a sales rep. You just want to sell as much as you can. You don't want to learn about sales management. You don't want to learn about marketing. You don't want to learn about any of these. I'm going to sell day in and day out and make my money.

And other people are rockstars oriented towards time off, they say, I'm just gonna come here, I'm going to do my work. I want to work six hours a day then I have to take care of my kids, or I love playing golf and go play golf twice a week. Or I want to do XYZ outside of my job. Dude, I'm getting married. I got to plan a wedding. I got stuff to do. I can't be working 10 hours a day, screw that.

So we understand how employees think, how they behave, what they're looking for. We try to optimize the manager's efforts to help them achieve in the next few months, whatever they want to achieve, or they can be rotating. So monster in some quarters, they're in a rockstar mindset, some quarters they're in superstar mindset, and then they can shift back and forth and the managers learn how to manage to those mindsets.

Max: Very good. Well, I don't know about the rest of the audience and our listeners, but personally, after, after hearing you. I kind of feel like applying for a job at AltiSales, just to see how I would fare in the recruitment process. I'd like you to try that reverse psychology on me in interview number three. And I think there was a lot to pick there not just for me, but for any company that wants to hire in sales. So thanks for sharing all those nuggets of wisdom, Tito.

Tito: Of course, man, my pleasure. Unfortunately, you wouldn't be qualified to join us because you said pain points.

Max: All right. Well then I won't or maybe, I'll use one of my aliases and see how far I can get through. Thanks Tito, and , looking forward to meeting in person again when traveling is permitted.

Tito: Well, let's make it happen. Thanks Max.

Max: Cheers.

Max: Awesome inspiring chat with Tito Bohrt Founder of CEO of AltiSales. Please check out AltiSales and add Tito to listen to his insights on how to build a sales development team. His content is the driving engine behind his recruitment. I think, a lesson for anybody who wants to build a large scale operation, large or small, especially if you're going to hire remote teams.

Thank you, Tito. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to hear more interviews with thought leaders in the recruitment space, subscribe to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, leave us a review and invite your friends.

Thank you. See you soon.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello everybody. This is Max for another episode of the Recruitment Hacks from Max and today on our show, we have a personal friend of mine who I've known for over a decade, Mr. Darcy Lalonde. Darcy, welcome to the party.

Darcy: Thanks max. Good to chat.

Max: Good to chat and I'm sure people will appreciate that from one entrepreneur to another entrepreneur, we have a lot of different hats to wear, but today I'm going to ask you to wear the hats of you as your Recruiter in Chief for most of your companies, even though your responsibilities have been much broader and wider than that. And we're talking about more than 20 years of experience in HR related roles, human capital, human capital technology and HR tech, and oftentimes in a leadership role at either the foundation, the start of a new company, or when that company was scaling, going from a few hundred to a few thousand people.

And so we'll try to find out how you build those engines to understand, for somebody who also wants to scale up, you know, maybe find some tricks and ideas on how to attract more and better talent. So, there's a lot to cover in that 20 year history, but perhaps tell us a little bit about what you are to now… and yeah, let's go back a little bit in time. Tell us about how you, how you started in HR and HR tech.

Darcy: Well, it’s interesting coming from a former ice hockey player, who became an accountant, got into IT and somehow got into human capital management, which I guess is a lesson learned for many of us, is that as a small child growing up, I had dreams of playing ice hockey. I never had dreams of being an executive in Human Capital. But it's funny how the different roads and I think one of the things that sport taught me was the importance of team, the importance of people, and one of the interesting things is that I've always found it to, you know, to often be the captain of the team and things like this as a kid.

But, what really makes things, I think rewarding is the people around you. And, I think that was one of the things as I got into my career, that the people and the teams and the folks that work with you are so important. I've been I must say, over the last 20, 30 years started up a number of companies of which, you know, I'm very proud to say from a lot of the people that have actually joined those companies after another but have been the times of our lives.

You know, I think that's part of creating the culture of your business and your ecosystem. Is that you know, you do have fun. You have a passion, you work hard, you play hard. You create loyalty. and you know, just one of the things that I very much enjoyed was the people aspect.

And you know, I came through as an accountant and ended up in IT. And I guess it was interesting that I used to be very critical of human capital and HR professionals as being relatively non-effective. Not at the board.

Max: I'm thinking about your introduction. This is very nice. And telling us about your story where you're talking about the competitive edge and your background in sports. And I guess the perception from the outside world is you know, HR and Talent Acquisition, Human Capital, all of that's not really for the competitive. Yeah. You know it's more of a support function where it's more about you know, making sure that everybody's taken care of as opposed to going out to win, is that what you're referring to when you were saying, I didn't think I'd end up in that space?

Darcy: Yeah. I guess, you know, one of my challenges that I've given many HR professionals over the last 20 years since you know, is really getting in the HR space in 2001, when I joined Arinso, you know, I'm a supply chain guy. I'm a finance guy. you know, we have supply chains and value chains and activity based costing and all these things that drive and show, you know, qualified and quantified benefits. HR people, they go for coffee. They chat with people, you know, and I'm being a little bit facetious here obviously, but I do believe that…

Max: That’s the perception for sure.

Darcy: It is the perception. And I don't think it needs to be, I think in today's world more than any time, the HR professionals have the opportunity to step up and really drive business and drive business benefits. Drive, you know, people, because you know, again— and I've been around a long time and, you know, people are our most important asset. That's been on everybody's webpage for about 10, 20 years now.

But, do you really have an executive at your boardroom table who is strategically driving the benefits that your people can bring to your business? And can you as an accountant quantify that? Can you actually show the benefits? And at the end of the day, the financial impacts on the bottom line, top line and ultimately sharing.

And I will say that's one of the things that I'm very, very big on is sharing the rewards of the company back to the employee. So that there's a direct correlation that says I make profit. I share it with you. I don't make them up. I can share it with you.

Max: This challenge you say, more important now than ever. I think that some of that is because we're looking for people who are competitive in a world where maybe there's a generational shift where people often criticize millennials as being… Asking too much and giving too little. At the risk of sounding very old, what do you think about this generational shift, do you think that it's true? Do you think that it becomes harder to find people who are willing to, you know, go to battle with you in this environment?

Darcy: Yeah. I guess I’m the edge of the baby boomers.

Max: I thought you were gen X.

Darcy: No, no, I just caught the end , but you know, it was interesting because I came into the business world when we were moving from mainframes to files, server computing, and I remember when I first came in as the young buck, they all found me very abrasive, very pushy, very millennial. I would say, you know, these crazy people that are going to work with, you know, local area networks and email and Microsoft products. You know I think at times it is a little bit oversold, the whole millennial concept and again, coming back max to recruiting and you really need a personal touch now to grab people, I mean, the attention span and the ability to be very smart and have access to Google. My kids are smarter than me. Right. And they're 12 years old because they out-Google me. That's I think one of the things that you have to now be able to digitally connect to your people. And is that some of your first time points are reaching out digitally, but then you're trying to bring them in and get that, a little bit, that you are special, you are somebody that I'm actually targeting and focusing with.

And I still believe people have the same inherent, you know, behaviors and needs

Max: It’s overblown. Basically. We think people make too much of a big deal of the generational gap. I tend to agree, but I also think that somehow, one of the reasons why you've been successful for 20 plus years is because you have found a way to attract a more competitive, more hungry group of professionals. You know, people who are just like in a hockey team they want to win. So, is that something that is built into the culture post on-boarding, or is that something that you figured out a way to do at the recruitment stage.

Darcy: Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think the first meeting is that first touch, that first moment is a very important moment. And I guess I've hired people that ended up being some of my most successful executives over the phone. Didn't see them. All I heard was a voice and this was, you know, we didn't have zoom back 10, 15 years ago. You know, and I would have somebody fly in from Sydney flying to Manila show up for their first day.

And it was really about, you know, having that feeling and just having somebody passionate and you know, talk about things. Like, look, I need somebody who just wants to get on a plane, do whatever it takes, but I'll tell you, when this thing takes off, then we're all going to have a heck of a rocket ship ride.

And frankly, that was, in Asia, which was my second company Arinso. Starting up SAP, HR, in Southeast Asia in the year 1999 sounded like the craziest thing in the world to me. SAP, very expensive, you know, Southeast Asia, particularly not investing in certainly human capital solutions, they were more focused on at that point, supply chain, finance, procurement things like that.

And, you know, just going in and, having, my partner at the time, Josh ended up doing very well in life with our exit of Arinso. I guess it was 12 years later. But coming in to Asia

Max: So from, from zero to a 50 million revenue plus business, something like that.

Darcy: Yeah. I mean, it was funny because I was a Canadian living in Asia and between Singapore and Manila. And I say, this fondly, this crazy Belgian guy Josh Slice, kept phoning me up and saying, look, we need somebody to start up this, you know, Asia. And he called it the far East. We need this far East group to be started.

Max: For people who don't work in Asia, there is no such thing as the far East. It's not a real region, right?

Darcy: No, I was still looking for the far East.

Max: Yeah. We're talking about like 12 countries that speak 12 different languages with 12 different regulations and laws and so on. Starting North gate Arinso in Hong Kong and then into the Philippines, you had to hire across the far East as they call it in different countries. Recruitment was very different in different parts of Asia? Did you have to adapt your process or was it more, you know, company culture trumps everything and we'll worry about localizing later?

Darcy: Yeah I think back then it was really sponsored by SAP coming into the region, so I had very good connections with the SAP community and there's a guy by the name of Les Hayman. Who's the head of SAP APJ. And Les is no longer with us, but it was just a fantastic man. And again, a great leader and an inspirational leader. And I guess my point is that I do believe that kind of leadership is something that, you create.

I guess this was back when I had really long hair and I was even a bit more eccentric than I was even today. I went to Asia and got introduced to a few people and hired people. Frankly, those people still work for my companies today, a lot of them.

So, but I think in those days you could really, word of mouth, it was a bit less of a mature market, so the competition was less. And I would say SAP HCM professionals in Asia, pretty well, every single person I almost see with, with 10 years of experience have worked for one of my companies. So it's something I’m very proud of, but also very proud of that management group that I've created that, some of my best friends in the region. But I think it really was word of mouth and less digital. And this was 20 years ago. Now on the recruiting front, we were doing things like Taleo and you know, some of the big, enterprise stuff with Arinso. So that was really the infancy of it was the late 90s was really that whole targeted recruiting stuff was just coming in.

Max: It sounds like a lot of that is relationship based and, word of mouth and that perhaps even though you are a technologist and you did sell these technology platforms that in your case, you know, what really drove recruitment marketing and talent attraction, was more around executive hiring and more around finding people who are passionate and the human factor. Would you say that still holds true today that people, you know, we have vendors like Talkpush and others that make a big deal of the candidate experience, but the human elements is still King.

Darcy: Yeah. I mean certainly think you have to frame a storyboard that, you know, brings an edginess to it. Again, the millennials are looking for that maybe more than they were in my generation. You know, my kids will say, dad, you met Richard Branson. Yeah, I did meet Richard Branson. I mean, stuff like this, people want to work for some of these types of people and

Max: Right, you could put a picture of Richard Branson on your website and get a few more candidates perhaps.

Darcy: Yeah. Well, I have pictures beside Bill McDermott and Jen Morgan and all these kinds of people, I think Les Hayman over the days, Hasso Plattner... I've been very blessed to…

Max: I kind of know those names, but I don't think that millennials will care so much.

I mean, it might help you attract a couple of executives. But, thinking about your time at Shore Solutions, where you went from 200 to 2000 call center agents in a period of two years. Those names would not have meant anything to those guys.Tell us about that strategy, how you did the ramp up there and the cool factor that you were able to build in order, to multiply the size of your business by 10 and in a short period of time.

Darcy: Yeah. And I guess that's an example too, of having moved from professional services with SAP and consulting and, exiting that business. And then really I lived in Manila. So, if you're in Manila and you need something to do, you know what makes sense to do? Well, you do a call center. so that was you know, one of my objectives.

And again, I think in terms of focus and target, obviously the call center industry is another completely different industry. I think it was very, really interesting for myself from a Human Capital Management Executive who had all the answers to all the best practices and processes. And now to take that from a more enterprise view into a contact center or BPO. Which is all your recruiting particularly highly competitive market. Everybody's stealing from everybody and very much again, how do you create that vibe that creates the loyalty? You know, and, to be honest, I guess my people formula is what I like to call more of a waterfall, which is, getting those top managers in your leadership team, they have to be also the ones that create that vibe down to the next level and the next level and the next level.

And, you know, we were, I think lucky enough, in the short that, you know, had a kind of, and I think I've framed him. He's this big Australian guy, John L. Smith, and kind of a rugby, big guy. So you got him and me and the hockey…

Max: They sounds scary. Yeah, it sounds like they would scare the candidates away, not attract them.

Darcy: Well, you'd be surprised. There's this we're gonna, hang with these guys. And I shouldn't say guys, cause I, you know, Shore was another one of the companies where I created I think one of my strongest management teams and I think you've met many of them, you know, the Tanya's and Lenny's and, and Jerry. We had just a phenomenal group of people and not only were we hugely successful, but we had a ton of fun. We did stuff that, you know, and again, Shore was also, you know, I think one of the best blends, cause it was two years, 200 to 2000.

Max: So the fact that he had a ton of fun, for our audience, mainly Talent Acquisition people. Were you able to put that into words or images in a way that it would attract people, how do you convey the message? You put pictures of your parties on the wall?

Darcy: Yeah. I mean, I think we did have you know Tanya, who was my marketing lady at the time, did a great job of creating these sound bytes and clips. But it's also again, when they have those interviews and they have those touch points that you've got the right lead in, that, you know, you grab them quickly. Reputation then quickly takes over. And the reality is I don't like to overpay people, but I certainly like to pay people what they're worth. So it's another concept where, you know, I want people to have good lives, so I don't want to have the lowest salaries in the business. I want to have people that can build and grow and certainly the Philippines. Again, that's one of the most rewarding aspects. I think of being an executive there is, now with my 20 years of being there, I can count thousands of people that have changed their lives. And some of them from the poorest situations, They work hard, they got passion. It's not always about which college they're from. I liked the underdog. I liked the people that never got a chance. Yeah, and again, I think maybe from a sporting side, but what you want to do is maximize people's strengths, minimize their weaknesses, build on… You know, a team can’t have all superstars.

you need to respect the plotting accounts payable clerk, you know, it's okay to be a plotting accounts..

Max: Give everybody some love, pay them well, hope that the word of mouth and the positive sort of company culture resonates. And that generates some positive word of mouth, some referrals, and it sounds pretty simple when you say like that.

Darcy: Yeah, it does.

Max: There's no secret sauce. I feel the same way that it's better to pay a little bit over market rates and reduce attrition. And, then focus on everything else. And well, you don't have to promise the moon to anybody, you just build a good environment and hope that positive word of mouth carries you. Because really, if you get 20 or 30% of your hires through referrals, employer referral, that means you're doing a good job, right?

Darcy: Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, the call center, you know, human capital market is you know, again, I think where you do need to some degree focus on the nicheness of the marketplace. So you can't have one style fits all. When I'm recruiting an executive, it's going to be different than a volume recruitment. But, I guess the story should still be the same, right? The vibe of the company, because that's, you know, again, I think the challenge of trying to get it and you know, back 20 years ago I was much more involved with the operational side.

So I was at the parties. I was at the coffee. I was at the lunches. I was in the middle of it… as I guess I've taken on more entrepreneurial and chairman roles and less operational, I need my team to be able to take that passion and, it can’t be that you know, we're all disappointed because Darcy didn't come to the meeting. You can build that out in, and that could perhaps be a, you know, there's a certain size of business that I frankly don't enjoy as much as you know, I, I love them when we've got 10 people. A hundred people, a thousand people, when you get to 10,000, somebody else should buy my business and take it. And they should really get rid of me because I'm unmanageable. It's time to move to the next level. And, and, you know, I don't think I guess I don't take offense to that whole concept. I'm a bit proud of it. I guess that's my rebel side that says, you know, I'm good to a certain point. And then I can let some of these big, more corporate enterprise folks who are much smarter than me, take it over and take it to the next level.

Max: Well, there’s so many different definitions to intelligence. I don't know if they're smarter than you, but maybe they're a little bit more political. Talking about the ideal number for a team. I've been doing some research on, you know, what would be happy. And I think that 2000 is already way beyond where I could foresee myself in the sense that I can not remember 2000 people's names. There was research done on the cognitive limits on the number of people that one can remember and be friends with in the community it's called Dunbar's number and numbers like around 150 to 200. I could see myself, you know, working with that, but it's different for everybody, for sure.

But I think, some great advice there Darcy about enabling each of your leaders to become the engine for recruitment, rather than try to put it into a formula. Every team needs to have an inspiring leader that wants to create a fun environment in each o their teams and it’s something that everybody can take away from our conversation.

What's in store for you in the future? I'm going to continue to, by the way for the listeners, Darcy was kind enough to give us a chance because he loves the outsiders so much that he decided to be my first customer at Talkpush some six years ago. And will continue to advise Talkpush in its next phase of growth.

What are you working on next? What are you working on now?

Darcy: Well, I guess as you know, Max, I, was sure we had a small SAP group, which when I sold that to an Australian company and then we took the SAP piece, that share piece into something called Synchrony, which was again a company that about a year ago I sold to Rising, which is a big U.S partner. So, you know, put in a good year. I had a nice transition. I’m very proud to see that, you know, we became number one in Asia for SAP success factor partners. Within 12 months, we were named the number one partner in the region, which I couldn't be more proud of. And now they will become and they are probably the biggest global partner in the world. And that's what I set out to do. And I’m happy that you know, Rising will take it to the next level. So I guess I'm settling in the whole Corona thing, I guess COVID stuff is... Certainly created a challenge for all of us, which is just another challenge on the road. It's a tough one and when we go back max to the millennial discussions and things that, you know, I think we could argue, this generation was fairly entitled with very little resistance to their success. I think now ...

Max: Think this will teach them a few lessons?

Darcy: Well, I think I didn't have World War II. I didn't have a lot of the tough stuff that you know, our generations before us had. And boy, now we've got our World War III, literally, that we’re going to have to deal with, I'm looking forward to as we go through ….

Max: So Darcy, thank you for sharing these cool insights and to wrap up our conversation, would you have any practical tips for employers today on how to stand out in a crowded group? You were competing for talent in some of the most crowded markets for talent across the BPO sector in particular in the Philippines and in Asia.

How did you manage to stand out? And what tips do you have for talent acquisition professionals to build a different brand that doesn't look and sound like everyone else?

Darcy: Well, I think number one from my perspective is to have a passion, love what you do, have the passion, the drive. I think, you know, again in today's world, you have to digitize that. So again, it's to create the edge, you know. I build businesses, I start businesses. One of the things that I have learned over the last 10 years, particularly , and that was a great example was Shore was that you have to digitize that cool factor. And you know, as an entrepreneur, I think that is really the, absolute key is to lead by example, have the passion have the drive, bring in people that share that, then be able to digitize that because that is really how you can scale yourself and move yourself.

And get the attention that, you know, in the old days might've been, you could do that in events and whatnot. You know, frankly now you do this digitally. But , you know, one of the things, is a warning that I have is don't digital spam. Because I see companies right now. Gosh if, If I see another one of their LinkedIns they’re spamming everywhere.

Max: LinkedIn is the worst. It is the absolute worst when it comes to spam. I mean, I don't know how they manage to do that, but it is mayhem out there. Absolutely. So, digitalization, we didn't spend too much time on, but obviously that's been a core theme running through your career is first build a great management team that's going to communicate the employer value proposition and then digitize it so that you're not overly dependent on individuals, I guess, to get the message out.

Dacy: Yup. Yup. I think in today's world again you know, I've always been able to manage multiple countries without being in them. At one time I managed 15 countries with the Arinso Middle East, Asia, Canada, delivery centers, and you know, I used to call it management by email. Because I, you know, again, that was the digital side 10 to 20 years ago. If you've got the right on the ground, what I always found was that at least with an email, the same message came at the same time to the same people.

I'm not a big believer on conference calls and having calls for the sake of calls, because I've often found that my management team went away and they all took a different message out of it. Somehow. Probably tailored a little bit to their own benefit to a certain degree.

Max: Yeah, you pick and choose. When it's black and white, there’s less room for confusion. Saves a lot of time with calls. I've been trying to do more written asynchronous communication, which is another fancy way of saying email and spending less time on calls myself. That's a very powerful. Yeah. Alright, well, we're about done on time.

Thank you Darcy for spending this time with me and with our listeners and looking forward to seeing what's next in store for you for the next entrepreneurial adventure.

And thanks for all your advice throughout the years.

Darcy: Okay, thanks max. And looking forward to seeing Talkpugh get to that next level. Keep up the good work buddy.

That was Darcy Lalonde, friend of Talkpush, serial entrepreneur, who told us about how important it is to build a core executive team that's going to help to drive recruitment and share the fun of your company culture.

Thank you, Darcy. Hope you enjoyed the interview. If you want to hear more about recruitment and how it drives business, please listen to some of our other episodes.

If you liked it, leave us a review and subscribe to this channel. Hope to see you soon.

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Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Hello, Recruitment Hackers. This is max from Talkpush. And today I'd like to ask a question. I'd like to start a conversation on the topic of what should you be using when selecting, when shortlisting candidates? Should you be using AI technology? Or RPA technology? So, without getting too technical, what I mean by that is, AI is the softwares makes the decision for you by doing candidate matching and matching the person to the job.

RPA, the recruiter makes the decision, by creating a list of rules that will eliminate the candidates based on criteria. ABC. Both technologies — doing really well, just beginning to have their glory days. Both technologies also have their implications and, you know, their risks and benefits.

I, for one, believe that, RPA is the way to go because it puts the recruiter at the center of the process where they decide, who gets shortlisted, who gets rejected, who gets moved to a different campaign. As opposed to an AI solution, which is, of course more scalable because you could do an infinite number of campaigns, theoretically with AI and just say, AI, please make the decision for me.

But we know that the world is changing so fast, and if only from a regulatory standpoint, you have countries now where they're saying you're not allowed to use AI. So, there's regulatory change, change in the behaviors of the candidates, changes in the jobs that you and the qualities that you're looking for in your jobs.

How is an AI supposed to do all of that? I don't think that's conceivable. so I think it's much better to challenge your recruiters to say, yes, I want you to use automation, but, and I want you to get rid of 90% of candidates in an automated manner, but don't use AI. Don't just hope that the button will score and give you the end result, ask yourself what is it that you want out of your candidates, and eliminate them.

Those are my thoughts on the AI versus RPA applied to recruitment. If you're interested in the topic, I really recommend the new book by Matt Ridley, how innovation works, which drives home the point that true innovation is through incremental change and not big ideas and not a big science.

I think it's in the hands of each and every one of us to make true innovation and true progress and drive productivity increases by tinkering and constantly improving things. And I think RPA supports that better than another approach. Please subscribe to the podcast for more.

We'll be publishing here every week, share with your friends and looking forward to see you again on the Recruitment Hackers podcast. Over and out.

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Max: Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, a show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Hello everybody. And welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast with Max. Today. I'm pleased to welcome Elaine Davis, Chief Human Resources Officer at Continuum who is going to tell us about her 25 years of experience in the industry. And we'll focus a little bit on the recent crisis we've been through and how it's affected the talent acquisition team at Continuum, and her experience working with some of the largest high volume employers in the world.

Elaine has worked with Conduit, Xerox, JSK, and has vast experience in sourcing, and the art of sourcing at scale —, which is how we started our, email exchange, Elaine. So to kick things off, welcome to the show, Elaine. Great to have you here.

Elaine: Thank you, max. Appreciate it.

Max: So, would you mind starting off by telling us a little bit about Continuum? (your current company).

Elaine: Oh , yeah. So continuum began life as a carve out from a larger company called Conduent. And, Continuum has been standing on its own, since February, 2019. It's primarily the customer care business from the Conduent company. Conduent had been a carve out from Xerox, a huge company.

And I was with Xerox at that time. And with Conduent. I left Conduent right after it actually became a standalone company itself in 2017 and took a couple of years off. Did some work in venture capital and got interested in HR...

Yeah, well, the HR, well… I enjoyed the venture capital space. I was sort of the firm’s expert in HR technology, the HR technology space, where there's a lot of really interesting things happening, particularly in talent acquisition

And then I got a call from the folks that were carving out Continuum and they asked if I'd come back into a more standard corporate role and set up the HR timekeeping, payroll and communications functions for Continuum. So I said, yes.

Max: Timekeeping, payroll and Talent Acquisition.

Elaine: And all of HR.

And, Oh, I also run communications, which is the fun part of my job.

Max: Great. Well, I'm happy that you got to experience basically, kind of like, can we say that you went from a bigger, to a smaller, to a smaller company? Are you, are you feeling that, you're moving towards the more human sized organizations over the last 20 years?

Elaine: You know, the problems and the issues and the things that need to be solved for are the same, no matter what size the company is. You know. It's all human behavior related and it's all revenue related. So what I would say is fun about being in a smaller company and we're about, 15 to 16 thousand people or so, about a half a billion in revenue.

It’'s fun to sort of own a big piece of that. So, I mentioned various planks in my world. Right? It's a lot, but it's manageable, for me. And, I get to impact a whole, a pretty big swath of daily operations in the company, and that's fun. And some of my previous experiences with big companies, I had great jobs and was working with great people. But, boy, it's hard to turn a big ship around.

Max: Well, 15,000 it’s pretty massive already. That's what you said, 15 to 16 K was this headcount and Continuum today?

Elaine: Yeah, we, we go up and down seasonally. We have some pretty big healthcare clients and there's a portion of their year where they're doing healthcare open enrollment.

And so we increase our head count to support them on a seasonal basis so we can get up to 18,000 depending on the client and the time of the year.

But to me, it feels small because when I was at Xerox, it was over a hundred thousand then, at Glaxo Smith Kline. we were over a hundred thousand, so 15 to 18 seems very small to me.

Max: Okay. Well, one day I hope Talkpush can... I don't know if we want 15,000 employees, but if we could have 15,000 users, that'll be a good start, you know, at least two years before we get there.

Well for our listeners who aren't familiar with the concept of a carve out, this is when a company’s shareholders decide they’re going to take a piece of the business and it's going to run better on its own than it does as part of the mothership.

And you’re part of two carve-outs, but within the same group. So that's pretty unique experience in itself. Can you share with me, what do you think is, you know, maybe the specifics are deal by deal, but what do you think is the motivation behind a carve out? Is it a size question where you think you run better and faster at 15 K, then you run at 50?

Elaine: I really can't pretend to understand the motivation of the carve-outs other than it's financially driven. And I think it has more to do with stripping out underperforming assets. So that the company left behind can, focus on it's, I guess I use an old nineties word, you know, core competencies, in the Conduit, Continuum carve-out, Customer Care business was not performing and Conduit wanted to strip it out and let it stand on its own.

It's actually been a great business on its own and not weighed down by the larger infrastructure of a big company. You know, you're right. I've been part of some interesting transactions. When I was first at Glaxo, in the United States, we did a hostile acquisition of a company called Burroughs Wellcome company, also a British pharmaceutical. That was quite a ride. And then Glaxo merged with SmithKline Beecham. That was a wild ride. Massive, pharmaceutical engines coming together to try to build research pipelines and get drugs on market, faster deal with the patent expirations, which were financially devastating for a lot of the pharmaceutical companies.

So I've been involved in some interesting transactions. Almost always in an HR tech and HR technology role, sometimes in a commercial role. I've done Commercial Strategy and Marketing for businesses as well. So through all of it, I mean, I've had great opportunities to understand the levers of profitability.

And big or small, I mean, in the end, you're trying to solve the same problems and that's even true in Talent Acquisition. Big or, small, you know, you have to make your way in a crowded field of employers and figure out a way to differentiate yourself, attract the best people and make their onboarding as gentle as possible, and to get them as productive as possible. And particularly in the call center business, that is super important because after you've hired people, you're training them. And that entire time that you've got people that you've hired, onboarded and you're training them, you're not generating any revenue off of that.

That's an expense that a call center company has. It has to shoulder until you can get that person on the phone or on a chat or whatever, to start driving, to start building revenue.

Max: I heard somebody told me that if the new hire, the agent, in a call center environment stays there for three months, that's long enough to pay for the hire. Anything beyond that is where the margin starts to be generated.

Elaine: That's probably about right. Actually. But I will say that, I have been very focused on driving down cost per hire. I actually had to laugh the other day because at first I thought it was a joke, but somebody... I get a lot of... everybody, all your listeners and you get a lot of marketing emails right?

And I got one from a company that wanted to tell me that they could help me hire a call center agents at the low, low price of a thousand dollars per hire. And I actually thought it was funny because I can hire — my metrics are under a $100 dollars per hire. So yeah. So, because everybody counts things differently.

Max: Yeah. I need to make sure we're counting the same thing here because a hundred dollars… Are we talking marketing cost per hire or total cost per hire?

Elaine: I am talking, marketing and assessment and background investigation per hire. Yeah.

Max: Amazing. Which geography?

Elaine: This is U.S.

Max: Wow.

Elaine: Yeah, it can actually be more expensive, not in U.S dollars, but it can be a little pricier on a cost per hire basis than some of the international markets, because some of the backgrounding is more extensive and much more expensive to actually run.

Max: Well, I think that's a great metric. It seems that, you know, given that we're entering a recession or in the middle of a recession, that people will take another look at cost as a driver for decision. But of course, bringing the cost down also means that you can hire from a broader pool and you can be a little bit more picky, perhaps. It's a lever to increase quality, eventually, and retention, which as you were saying is the real cost of the business, because you've got high turnover. So if you bring the cost down, then, you know, a wider funnel means the whole journey benefits from it.

Elaine: So you're absolutely right. That's insightful. You understand what I'm doing. I have a huge funnel. The other day.... and we're not in a rapid, robust hiring phase right now, today. We will be ramping up shortly, but right now we've come through the pivot. Out of the brick and mortar to people's homes and establishing our work at home model and trying to keep things reasonably stable. So we haven't been doing a lot of hiring, I think in June, we need to hire just in the United States, around 6 or 700 people.

That's not a lot for us. I checked into our lead flow and we have 14,000 leads. So, That's a lot to hire 5 or 600 people. Right. So the funnel is wide open. And you're right. That is what helps me get to— there's goalposts or gates along the way. Right. If you're going to talk, you know, we're going to make it super easy to connect with us. Super, super simple. Whereas, you know, we have quick apply. We're scraping an XML feed. We are contacting you within seconds of you showing interest in us. Literally. I have a very, very rapid response. And then there's some gate posts, right? You got to schedule an interview with us and you gotta show up for the interview. And then assuming you get through that and it's not terribly difficult to get through it, to be honest.

You've got to go through our assessment process.

So people start to self select out. They don't want to do those things. It's not as easy as they thought it was going to be, they maybe don't want to take an assessment. So people start to self select out. But if I'm doing all those things right, and I have enough at the top of the funnel, I'm going to end up with, you know, I overfill classes every week.

So in call center, you're hiring training classes, right? So you might have a training class, I think we have one starting on July 6th. We have 400 people starting, so I'll hire 480. I'll actually hire and onboard that many because, you know, the final gate post is, or mile marker, or whatever we call it is people actually showing up for the training, right.

They actually need to show up, pass their drug screen, pass the background and they have to show up. So there's a lot of ways that people can fall out along the way. So I absolutely have to have that funnel wide open with a big pool of people. So I can end up with the people that I need at the very end.

Max: Yeah. you can, you know, get mad and scream yourself, mute, at candidates for not showing up and dropping out. But, you can also accept the fact that, well, I mean, these are positions, which are not necessarily, you know, long term career plans and it's okay to get some dropout. You got to build around that. So completely agree with you.

I'm still trying to digest your $100 dollars cost per hire. I remember seeing those studies that said that even for call center employees, a $1000 dollars cost per hire was the industry norm just a few years ago. And obviously being in a in a buyer's market, if you're an employer where there's going to be a lot more job seekers out there in this market today we’re, you know, in the middle of a global recession. But, then of course there were all these other factors.

So where do you think you got to, how did you, I mean, first of all, was a thousand dollars per hire, ever a number that was reasonable to you, at some point in your 25 year history in talent acquisition?

Elaine: I can tell you that when I was with Xerox. When Xerox owned what became Conduent, Xerox had about 140,000 people in the company.

This is a short several years ago, right. And 100,000 of those were BPO people. And the other 30,000 were the traditional document technology business, right, that we all think of. When we think about Xerox, we think about the machine, right. And the paper. But, a 100,000 of that was a very big BPO company.

And I ran a lot of the HR business for that company and I ran Talent Acquisition. And we processed a million candidates in a 12 month period, candidates, applicants to end up with about 85,000 hires. And we were probably spending more than a thousand dollars per hire. It was such an overwhelming huge business and I was running it, so I can say this, we weren't doing it well. We didn't have control of our financials. We didn't know what we were spending. It was really super messy. Right? It was messy.

Max: You said 85,000 hires and a $1,000 dollars per hire. That's like $85 million dollars.

Elaine: Well, you know, it was geographic. So in the U S we were spending a thousand dollars to hire, but in other geographies, we were not spending that much. I mean, my budget wasn't quite 85 million, but it was very, very large and I never felt like I really had control of the process anywhere in the world.

It was messy. It was a huge company. And then of course, Xerox divested that. And then it was divested again. So, you know, it's hard to keep track of all of the numbers. That's maybe why the shareholders were not happy.

Max: Well, I've had many opportunities to sell to companies because Finance or Procurement was looking into TA and thinking “I don't know where the money is going.”

Elaine: It's a mess. And I'll say one of the things that I really appreciated about being part of a carve out. So we're, we're owned by a private equity firm in Los Angeles called Skyview Capital. And the people in that firm they're sort of industry and function agnostic.

They have a variety of companies that they either own, or they're heavily invested in from food processing to a cold brew coffee company, to our company, a security company. It's interesting. It's kind of all over the map. And what's been great about being part of that experience is that they're just trying to solve problems and make money.

So when I joined about a year ago, the company Continuum had been stood up for a couple of months, had been carved out and they were trying to get their arms around it and figure out what the business model was and how we were making money. Or if we were making money and how things were working. And the first thing they saw was that the recruiting engine was broken. And how they figured that out is because the revenue engine was sputtering.

And that's because in the call center business, if you don't have people in the center to answer the phone, you're not going to make any money. Recruiting drives everything.

Max: You get penalties. Penalties for being slow to hire.

Elaine: Oh, sure you do. Yeah. So recruiting is the revenue engine. You need the people in the seats answering the calls or you're not going to make any money. So they very quickly saw that when I joined, they were laser focused on how do you hire people in this environment? And they were not HR people. They weren't Talent Acquisition people. They were smart people, some with deep technology backgrounds and they just tore the thing apart and said, we're going to solve this problem one step at a time. And they did, and they helped us build a really phenomenal lead generation machine, an AI based machine that we use. And I think it's our competitive secret sauce I can hire faster and cheaper than any of my competitors.

Absolutely. Hands down every day, all day long.

Max: And something I've noticed as well. Some of my hardest, and I mean that in a complimentary manner, hardest customers to work with are those who do not come from an HR and TA background, but who come from Operations or Finance. Because they're like, everything's on the table, right? Why are we doing this assessment? Why are those two things not merged together? Do you really need to ask 10 questions, etc, etc. Why aren't we spending more time on this channel? That's more cost effective, but I guess it's the cost of like these relationships, right? When, if you're in one place for too long.

Elaine: You know I've spent a lot of hours at this company trying to reshape how we do business. And I thought I knew how to do transformations because as a veteran of big companies, you know, you're going to go through one or two transformations. And, I never felt like a lot got accomplished by any of them in the really big companies I was part of. They were just a lot of PowerPoint decks and consultants in the room.

And what's been interesting about this experience has been working with our owners, our private equity owners and people that they've brought in to help. Yeah, in the beginning they would say to me, well, I said, you know what?

This is an advertising problem. We have a recruitment marketing problems. So I'm going to go solve our recruiting issue with recruitment marketing tools and advertising. And I need to hire this advertising firm and that one. And they said, hold up. No, we're not convinced it's an advertising problem. You need to prove that to us.

So we went through a lot of exercises of me trying to prove what I believed because of my long background in Talent Acquisition and in HR. And I was wrong. They showed me how my thinking really was kind of mired in what my background was and what my belief system was.

And they showed me that just by walking through and solving problem by problem at a very detailed and basic level, I came to different conclusions. And that was hard.

Max: You just told us Elaine that you have a huge front of the funnel. And hence, naturally if advertising was not the secret sauce, the secret to making this, wide funnel work, where are you getting all those leads, for so cheap?

Elaine: Well, I think that we had advertising, but we weren't capturing. The game now — everybody knows how to generate leads. The game now is converting. It’s assessing and converting. So we now run contests as we've moved from using our recruiting engine in the U.S to our other markets, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Netherlands, Jamaica. We run games with our recruiters to show who can convert the most at quality.

So what we did was we simply moved the problem down the body of the snake, right. In the beginning, we weren't getting leads. So then we got a bunch of leads and then we had to figure out, okay, how do we convert them?

So we worked on converting them. And then we thought, oh gosh, we need to convert the right people. So we worked on assessment, so we just keep moving the problem further down our snake. You know, now we're kind of through, we've gotten through getting the right people. We've got great assessment metrics in place. We reshaped our backgrounding, to lower the barrier, but not the bar for us to bring people in.

One thing about the call center business and one of the reasons I like it is that it's a first opportunity for a lot of people to, you know, to put food on the table for their families all over the world. It's an entry level opportunity for people that don't have a lot of opportunities.

Max: it's not sexy for people who have been a few years in their career necessarily. Although you do have veteran call center agents as well. Yeah, but it's easy to forget, you know, what it's like to be a 20 year old coming out of school. I mean I was paralyzed at the thought of picking up the phone and talking to somebody just 15 years ago. It seems completely insane to me, but you know, I remember that.

Elaine: Yeah, and in some countries, it's the difference between what stands in front of them and, and starvation. I mean, it really is.

It's an opportunity for people in developing countries who don't have any opportunity, particularly women to put food on the table. And it's also a job that can be a second chance for somebody. And there's no shame in being an employer who can offer somebody a second chance.

it's not a glamorous sexy job, but we have some examples in the company of people that have gone from basic call center agents to Supervisors, Operations Managers, they switch over to training. They come into recruiting.

Max: I've loved it. I've been dealing with this industry for four or five years now.

And, I feel absolutely inspired by, you know, the fact that it drives the launch of so many careers and it helps so many families. So I love it. I love just the high volume space for that reason. It's just how many people can you impact.

And I wanted to ask you about the recent experience with the work from home transition, and how it's affected the morale of your team, of people who are not driving to work anymore, working from their PJ's shaving, et cetera. Are you starting to feel, you know, the weight of this lockdown affect the morale or if people are just finding it beautiful, the new normal?

Elaine: From a corporate standpoint, you know, my global HR, payroll, etc. teams we've almost always worked remotely. when Conduent released this company, when it was carved out, we didn't really have headquarters. And people just worked where they worked.

They left their office at Conduent and moved into their homes. So from an exempt perspective, we've all been home for quite a long time and we know how to work that way in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition. We're in a cloud.

My recruiters are all over the world and the model that I'm running is, if I have a lot of volume coming into the U.S, a lot of leads coming in, and my U.S team is asleep, then my Jamaican team will pick that up and do the interviews or my Philippines. So I'm running a kind of 24 hour global model for grabbing those leads and converting them. So we were very accustomed to that, but ...

When COVID hit us in early March in the U.S, so the leadership, most of the leadership is in the U.S. Initially we felt kind of paralyzed. We weren't sure what to do or what was going to happen, but we quickly realized that we needed to get everybody out of those centers and home before we were told to — all over the world, and we have 14 locations, Europe, Asia, etc, like our competitors do.

And everybody was sort of working that from a different angle. How much revenue can we save? How much, you know, what kind of profitability can we gain? What do we have to do with managing our clients? What are they thinking? And I was kind of focused on what do we have to do to make sure that these people can continue to put food on the table?

That was where I came from. I wanted to make sure — and I made sure people knew it. So when we told staff around the world, come to the center today and be prepared to walk out with your computer and, you know, whatever else they needed to be productive at home. I made sure that they understood that we're doing this because your health and safety and your ability to generate an income to take care of your family is the most important thing to this company. And if we do all those things right, and support you, the revenue and the profitability are going to come.

And you know what, I wasn't even sure I believed that myself in the beginning, because it was so chaotic and it was so hard in the Philippines, they were shutting everything down. We had to hire vans to get people out of the centers, with their computers. We had to send people out to people's homes. People were locked in their homes. It felt chaotic to me. But for me as an HR professional, I just kept focusing on what do I have to do to make sure these folks can buy what they need to feed their families?

And I made sure people knew it and I think it really helped coalesce our company around that feeling that, yes, it's not a cliche, we really are in this together and we're going to help you so that you can help our customers. And by doing that, we're all going to get through this one way or the other.

Max: I think it sounds like I went through the same thing you did. And for me it was really helpful that I was, you know, I was a professional when 2000 and 2009, the 2000-2001 crisis, and then 2008. As the world falls down around you, and we hadn't had a real crisis of this magnitude since 2008, then you can, you can be a rock, even if you don't a hundred percent believe in it as the walls are falling down.

Elaine: Yeah. I thought about, there's that sort of famous Ted talk by Anne Cuddy. Who's a Researcher. I think she's a linguist. I could be wrong, but I think she's a linguist and she uses that term, fake it till you make it.

So I just kept thinking, we're going to get through this. Everybody's going to keep a job. We're going to be able to meet payroll. We're going to be able to service our customers. And I just kept saying, this is where we’re going. You know, in a crisis, you got to pick a direction and march and just go and bring as many people with you as you can.

And then the other great saying is, of course, never let a good crisis go to waste. So we used the crisis to go back to our customers and say, look, we’re a work-at-home company now. And everything we do from now to the foreseeable future, which could be tomorrow, actually the way things are going, we're going to just be making that model more robust. And we're going to change how we hire and who we hire. Now we're looking for people who are perfectly happy to work at home, as opposed to people that are doing it because they have to.

So we just took that first mover position and said, we're a work-at-home company, and this is how we're going to do it. As opposed to, sometimes in call center, you kind of get told by your customer how you're going to do things, how you're going to hire — there's a lot of rules. It's a commoditized business. The providers don't have a lot of say, and we've had a little bit of opportunity to say, look, we pivoted faster than any of your other channel partners. And this is true. It's a true statement. We pivoted faster. So, we're moving down this road really quick and come with us and we'll be the better for it.

Max: Nice. I think that this crisis has also been an opportunity for us where some companies were waiting to do digital transformation, kind of sitting and waiting for a reason because you can only really take on one or two big transformation initiatives every year. And they were, you know, that gave them the extra nudge.

So we got, obviously things slowed down to almost a standard standstill in March and April. But since then, you know, we're having some good discussions.

One thing, I guess, how do you adapt your recruitment process to hire work-from-home agents? I guess you're looking for, you said, the more autonomous people. Maybe check their internet speed? Any other tips and advice on how to adapt the recruitment process for work from home.

Elaine: Well, you got to make decisions about — so just focusing on the United States, you know, where we had, I think, 13 or so locations, just in the U.S. So we were very limited to these geographic markets. And most of them are where our competitors are too.

So El Paso, big center for us, we have a thousand people, 1300 people in the center and all of our competitors are right down the road from us. So that drives a certain way of recruiting and a certain way of thinking about retention and a certain amount of kind of looking around the corner to see what your competitor’s doing and what kind of taco truck they're bringing in that day.

So in the beginning when we started to think about hiring, we thought, well, gosh, we should just still hire around those locations because what if we go back, we don't want to have people all over Texas, we want them near El Paso. And then we, pretty quickly, threw that out the window and said, forget it, we're a work-at-home company now.

So, you know, we went through a process of looking at the various states that had attractive labor markets, attractive tax implications. Like any company, we ran the gamut of where we want to hire, where we want to try to source candidates from and we came up with some pretty interesting things.

Max: So you went full, work from home.

Elaine: Pretty much. Yeah. But we're staying away from the coasts, you know, because those are expensive places to do business. And we have a lot of data about where the people are, the kind of people that we think would be happy working for us and want to stay with us. And we've got a lot of data on how they want to be paid and we're kind of playing with some of those models. And we're offering different money and incentives in different metro areas or in different rural areas. I mean, we're playing with a lot of information.

Max: I'd like to point you to, I'll send you the link. I'll put it for our listeners too, the link, the link to the salary grading. I mean, I think they phased it out, but there was a company called Buffer, which specialized in social media blasting and communication. They were work-from-home from inception and they had a salary grid that was per state. They would openly share to all of their employees, you know, for the same exact role, same exact expertise. Your salary is going to be 20% more because you’re based here.

And the transparency is something that is part of their core values. So it works for them, but basically they even, I think they still do to this day, publish the salaries of every one of their employees online.

Elaine: That's a bridge too far for me. I've always been in favor of salary transparency in terms of showing people what the range is, showing what the midpoint is showing what the geographic differential is. I've always said that companies should do this. But I've also always said that people shouldn't do performance ratings.

I've never believed in performance ratings and I still don't. Assigning a number to people based on how they perform is just not something I've ever been interested in. But that's a different discussion.

Max: Yes. Agreed it's a different discussion. I have already taken a good chunk of your time. And I really think we got a lot of great insights there about, BPO industry and thank you for sharing. I wanted to ask you one last question, which is if there's one area where you feel like there's still some automation left? I mean, it sounds like you've built such a great automated journey for your candidates. And you've talked about how you kind of started at the front of the funnel and then, you know, eventually tried to automate screening and then improve the quality of the people's screens so that you improve retention.

Now as you look through this entire end to end journey, is there still some pockets of opportunity? What's the next piece that you want to automate, or you want to accelerate?

Elaine: The part that I'm not doing yet is you know, the integration of the technical components of Talent Acquisition can always be improved. There's a lot of people out there building interesting stuff and trying to connect it to ATSs.

And that's all pretty interesting, but I'm kind of, I feel like I've kind of moved beyond that. What I need to do. And I think all Talent Acquisition professionals should be thinking about is, following that lead through conversion to trainee, to productive employee and tying. I can't really know. I shouldn't be tracking cost per hire if I'm doing this right.

What I should be tracking is value per hire. So how that person that I scraped off of an indeed quick apply site, how much value did that person bring to my company? That's what I should be tracking. I'm tracking the wrong thing. Because it's the easy thing to track. But if I'm doing all these things right, and I'm going to the right places to source my people, I'm training them effectively. I also have operational training, so all of those new hires come to me to be trained to answer phones for our customer service chat or whatever. I should be able to point to what's the value of that class that I started on July 6th, six months later, what value did they drive for my company?

And I should be able to prove that. So that's what I'm thinking about next. Right?

Max: We've got to find a name for this magical number.

Elaine: Yes.

Max: We have the CPH, CPL marketing CPH, MCPS. Now we need to have...

Elaine: Yeah, but isn't that the end? I mean, that’s the end game, right? What value did that lead that I converted bring to our company and how do I express that value? That's that's the name of the game. That's what I'm trying to do. We're trying to make money. We're trying to be profitable. So I have to distill that. And that will really tell me whether I've been successful with that front of the funnel or not.

I'm measuring it along the way, but the end game still hasn't been answered and I'd like to get there before the next crisis. I'd like to know the answer to that question soon.

Call me in a year.

Max: I will and I thank you. And I want to end it on this positive note and your contagious laughter. And thinking about, it's wonderful that you're already thinking about the next crisis, so thanks for your time. Thanks for sharing.

And we'll be in touch in a years time.

Elaine: Thanks, max. Good to see you.

Max: There you have it. That was Elaine Davis, Chief Human Resources Officer at Continuum with some awesome insights on how to build a recruitment marketing machine that delivers thousands of hires at less than a hundred dollars cost per hire in North America. What a performance. Thank you, Elaine, for all your insights.

And I hope you enjoyed the show. Please, if you didn’t, subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast for more of the similar content. Please leave a review. That will help us get the word out there. And, please listen to one of our other episodes. Thank you very much and hope to see you on the podcast soon.

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Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Hi there. I'm Max Armbruster, CEO of Talkpush. I'm a serial entrepreneur, a reader of science fiction, and now a podcast host. Welcome to the first episode of recruitment hackers podcast, where I will be talking with professionals from all walks of life. Entrepreneurs, talent acquisition professionals, thought leaders.

People who have figured out a way to make talent acquisition, a longterm competitive edge for their business. I'm not just looking for best practices. I'm looking for ways recruiters can help their companies win against competition. I personally got into this space because I thought that employers are making life way too complicated for candidates.

And sometimes for employers, it seems easier for them to make life miserable for candidates than to work on an optimized process. I will talk to people who took the time to make this investment into a better candidate experience and who were able to convert that into actual more revenue, more market share, and a competitive edge.

As I publish more episodes, you'll see a variety of formats from interviews, with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, technologists, people I've had a chance to meet over the years and I will add my occasional thought. And ramblings on some new tech or controversy, that is occupying the Talent Acquisition space.

My hope is that by having discussions on the candidate experience and the use of technology to improve it, I can help to pick up some ideas for my own business. And for you, the listener, perhaps also some practical tips on how you can improve your Talent Acquisition operation. Every company is different.

Every recruitment strategy should also be different. And it's all about picking and choosing the best ideas. I hope that you will find inspiration from these conversations and ideas that you can implement so that you can attract the right talent for your organization. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on the Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

So you don't miss the new episode talk soon, signing off for now.

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