The Talent Intelligence Podcast: Recent Episodes
Solutions Driven
Welcome to The Talent Intelligence podcast, hosted by Solutions Driven. On this podcast you'll find a mix of interviews from CEO's & Founders, to Talent Acquisition Leaders and employees playing a key role in their company shaping the conversation around diversity and inclusion, talent management, culture, and career growth.
In the latest episode of The Hiring Enablement Podcast, we are joined by Kat Steinmetz, Partner at Initialized Capital to dive deep into culture and leadership in the start-up world.
With a diverse background in Human Resources, Talent Development, and now in the Venture Capital field, Kat brings valuable insights into the role that HR and leaders play in shaping a company from the ground up.
Tune in as Kat sits down with Solutions Driven's Chief Growth Officer, Nicki Paterson, to talk about:
- The importance of embedding diversity in businesses as early as possible
- Why structure is freeing when done right
- The power of a compelling narrative backed with data
- Creating a sense of accountability through kindness and compassion
- How awareness in leaders help shape a company's culture
- The similarity of hiring an executive and investing in a founder
- Plus Kat's advice to start-up leadership groups
- And much much more!
In this episode of The Hiring Enablement Podcast join us as we talk to Conor Sweeney, Global Head of People Strategy / Interim Head of Global Corporate Real Estate at Weightwatchers, to dig into all things people and business strategy – and alignment.
With a background working in corporate real estate, talent development, and HR, Conor has seen it all in the business world. So, just weeks after we launched Hiring Enablement to help companies align their hiring strategies and improve their talent development, who better to have as a guest?
According to Conor, business goals and transformations don’t exist in a vacuum. Transformation of any facet of businss, from digital to HR, must align to the wider business goals.
Listen as Conor sits down with Solutions Head of Business Growth, Nicki Paterson, to discuss:
- The importance of building a people roadmap to execute hiring and development goals
- How a people strategy is a business strategy and vice versa
- Why, sometimes, the key to getting stakeholders on the same page is just sitting down and having a candid conversation
- What “quality of hire” actually means
- And much much more
It’s the first episode of the newly named Hiring Enablement podcast, and in this bonus episode, we have an exciting announcement to make!
We’re joined by Solutions Driven CEO Gavin Speirs to speak about Solutions Driven’s new concept: Hiring Enablement.
In this podcast, Gavin talks to host Claire Murray about the advent of sales enablement and the parallels between that and the recruitment industry’s need for hiring enablement. Like sales 20 years ago, hiring managers are doing more with less time every day and are struggling to keep on top of the rapidly changing hiring market.
Gavin explains how hiring teams no longer just need transactional relationships with their recruitment partners: they need a true partnership that guarantees the right hire, first time, every time, backed by indepth processes, resources, and intelligence.
We also look at Recruitment Process Intelligence – the processes that Solutions Driven use to make hires and how this works in synergy with Hiring Enablement to get the results companies need in this tough business world.
And most of all how this isn’t a hiring revolution – it's a hiring evolution that responds to current business needs and will continue to grow and evolve as hiring continues to change.
From banking, to HR, to talent, to retention, to author – there's very little Trent Cotton can’t do.
The Senior Global Director of Talent Acquisition and Retention and author of multiple business books got into the talent sphere after realising he could recruit better than his recruiters.
And after attending a seminar on AGILE methodology, he realised that his human-first recruitment philosophy could be made even better. Through putting sprints (a short, time-boxed period when a team works to complete a set amount of work.) into his process, Trent improved metrics across his whole talent team and instilled a framework for success.
On episode 20 of the Talent Intelligence Podcast, we sat down with Trent to discuss:
- How sprint recruiting has transformed how he works (and how he works out 💪🏼)
- The value of saying no in hiring
- What he hates about HR and how he’s worked to change it
- Setting his team up for success
- And much much more
With a variety of stories and anecdotes, Trent’s tale of sprint success is a fascinating one.
Listen as he discusses his current career and his upcoming book.
Listen to the full episode here
If you’ve ever been in the market for an ATS, you’ll have heard of Greenhouse. A powerhouse in the hiring software space, they’re used by huge names like Hubspot, Wayfair, and Squarespace to solve many of their talent challenges.
And Greenhouse are also a great place to work. They’ve been named as Inc Magazine’s Best Workplace for 5 years in a row, Glassdoor’s #1 Best Place to Work, and in Mogul’s Top 100 Workplaces for Diverse Representation (2022).
It’s fair to say they know the recruiting industry well...
So it was really exciting to welcome Seán Delea, Team Manager, Talent Acquisition, EMEA, on to The Talent Intelligence podcast.
A huge diversity champion, Seán sat down with Solutions Driven’s Head of Growth, Nicki Paterson, and Chief Diversity Officer, Salma El Wardany to discuss all things talent acquisition.
Listen as they dig into:
- The importance of company buy in on diversity
- How a data-led approach can help with achieving that
- Tailoring diversity strategies to the area and country
- Leveraging the whole team so everyone is a recruiter
- And much (much) more!
Want to hear more about Greenhouse? Listen to their Talent Makers Mindset podcast here.
How often do you go to a party, walk up to a stranger and say “hey, I’m Fred/Mary. I’m a really fast runner, I’m the best at baking, and I am brilliant at recruiting”.
That would be weird right? So why do we do it in our outreach?
Whether you’re a recruiter engaging candidates, a salesperson prospecting, or a party guest trying to make friends, most people don’t care about your “pitch”.
Or at least, that’s what ChallengerTM’s Jen Allen proposes in the latest episode of the Talent Intelligence Podcast.
Challenger is a global leader in training, technology, and consulting to win today’s complex sale. They unconventional thinking to unlock growth and enable customer experience – so Jen knows what she’s talking about.
In this episode of The Talent Intelligence Podcast, Jen challenges widely-held conceptions about outreach and discusses:
-
Why she’s been with the same company for 18 years
-
How to tap into candidate motivations
-
Thinking outside the box when it comes to “selling” in recruitment
-
Why there’s no such thing as a “sales expert”
-
And much much more...
Find out more about Challenger: https://www.challengerinc.com/
A few weeks ago, we held a round table with HR & TA leaders about the changes taking place in recruitment across the world.
The forum is private so because we can't broadcast it, we decided to get one of our incredible panelists, Beatriz Luca De Tena to join us on our podcast to talk about her experiences.
From studying psychology, working with Johnson & Johnson, being employed in almost every part of Spain and now leading up the TA department at Almirall, Beatriz has had a varied and indepth recruitment career. She's passionate about developing people and ensuring the people at Almirall are the best in the business.
About Almirall: Almirall are a pharmaceutical company committed to research and development of medicines for patients around the world. They believe in the power of research and development to change patients' worlds.
In episode 17 of The Talent Intelligence podcast, we discuss:
-
Using employer branding to compete against big pharma
-
How candidate behaviour has changed recently and whether Covid-19 is part of that change
-
Candidate ghosting 👻
-
Why Almirall have so many long-standing employees
-
The importance of team development
-
And much much more...
In episode 16 of The Talent Intelligence Podcast, Nicki Paterson talks to Megan Bowen, COO at Refine Labs.
Refine Labs have been blowing up the demand generation space for a while now so when Megan said she’d come on our podcast, we jumped at the chance.
Passionate about creating a successful culture at companies, Megan’s had an impressive career, working for the likes of Grubhub, Managed by Q, and Platterz.
In this episode, Nicki quizzes Megan on her people success = customer success = company success methodology, building a talent destination, and how to know when it’s time to move on.
Most people would probably be quite happy if they could turn water into beer. But in the case of Brewgooder, they want to do the exact opposite. Or at least, they used to…
On episode 15, we talk to Alan Mahon, Co-Founder of craft beer Brewgooder, a beer company founded on providing clean drinking water to developing companies through their beer sales. In the last year, Brewgooder have changed direction somewhat, pivoting to a people-focussed company, rather than just aiming to provide clean water.
They’ve also launched “Work In Progress” their programme to fight racial injustice, both within their organisation and within the beer industry. Holding themselves to account, they create a yearly report to look back on their progress and see where they could do better.
We spoke to Alan about:
- What drove him to start a craft beer company
- How he plans to triple the company’s team size in the next year
- What being “actively anti-racist” means
- How having a real purpose helps Brewgooder attract top talent
- And much much more…
Our latest guest on The Talent Intelligence podcast was the brilliant Laura Holcombe, Global Talent Acquisition Specialist at Reachdesk – a corporate gifting company taking customer and prospect engagement by storm. Working as an in-house recruiter, Laura knows all too well how tough recruitment is just now.
Which is why she hires like a BDR.
From brushing up on their hobbies and interests, to engaging them with a gift (Reachdesking them!), Laura discusses how candidate engagement is vital in this market.
Everyone talks about cold outreach in terms of sales. But you hardly hear anyone discussing how important it is for recruiters on the hunt for candidates.
Unless you talk to Lavender's Will Allred. If you haven't heard of Lavender, it's a tool that helps improve your emails, encouraging the right people to engage with you, whether you're in sales, marketing, or you're a recruiter reaching out to top prospects.
Working in all those spaces, we were delighted to have Lavender's Co-Founder, Will, on to discuss cold outreach, engaging candidates, and much more.
How many times have you heard people talking about their failure stories on LinkedIn? Or discussing how important hiring top talent is?
Well, if you're Gong's Wendy Harris, perhaps too many times. Because for Wendy, she'd much rather hear about people who have succeeded than failed. And she'd prefer to hire someone with less talent and a greater work ethic, than the other way round.
That's just one of the areas we covered when Wendy appeared on The Talent Intelligence podcast. As users (and superfans) of Gong, we were delighted when Wendy agreed to come on and talk to us about talent, her working life, future planning, and much more.
Think of 3D printing companies and Stratasys are usually high up on your list. So when their EMEA President Andreas Langfeld said he'd come on The Talent Intelligence Podcast, we were fairly excited.
After all, Stratasys are one of the founders of 3D printing, starting out in 1989 (!) and their product has been used to create designer couture that exhibited at The Met a car made with fully 3D-printed exterior panels.
Listen as Andreas talks culture, connectivity and what to do when Obama predicts your industry is about to explode (in a good way...)
Usually on The Talent Intelligence Podcast, we keep it pretty loose, chatting about culture, attitude, methods, and how to hire.
But when Kristina Finseth said she’d be a guest, we knew that wouldn’t work. Kristina’s an absolute fountain of knowledge on the subject of outreach in recruitment, and if we’d started chatting, we’d never have stopped.
So in this episode, we got Kristina to talk through her top outreach tips. Listen as she discusses:
👀 infiltrating recruitment with sales tactics
🤝 how to engage candidates,
🌍 where to find them,
📹 and she dissects and rewrites a whole email!
Should leaders be the best performers in their team? Not if you ask Anthony Parker, General Manager EMEA at Mindtickle. According to him, if he's better than his team, it diminishes his abilities as both a leader and a coach.
In episode 9 of The Talent Intelligence Podcast, Anthony sits down with our Head of Sales Anthony Parker to discuss:
- Growing and scaling
- Assessing talent
- The difference between working at large orgs and start-ups
- Proving yourself in leadership
- And much more...
You know when you have a call with someone and walk away with a sore neck after an hour of nodding in agreement?
That's what happened to our Head of Marketing, Claire Murray, and Head of Growth, Nicki Paterson, when they met with Ted Blosser, CEO of Workramp.
The Silicon Valley CEO ("Chief Enablement Officer" as he describes it) started Workramp with his co-founder Arsh Mand in 2015. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength by "empowering every professional to reach their full potential through learning".
We discussed:
Creating a culture of coaching
What you do with $17m in funding
Challenging an established industry
The 400 books Ted mentions...
The post-covid workplace with HR Professional Brian Almas
On episode 7 of The Talent Intelligence Podcast, we sat down with HR and Talent veteran, Brian Almas, to discuss the changes happening as a result of Covid-19.
Brian’s worked in the HR space for 20+ years heading up the Human Resources departments in companies like AOL, Flextronics, and now Rightway Healthcare. He’s seen plenty of fluctuations in the way we work in his career, but few as drastic as the ones we’re currently experiencing.
In this episode we discuss:
- The introduction of vaccine passports for work
- How to get women back into the workplace
- Whether flexible working is here to stay
- The difficulty of job hunting during Covid
In episode 6 of The Talent Intelligence podcast, Solutions Driven's Global Head of Business Growth Nicki Paterson sat down with Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach, soccer fanatic, and a man who feels his business in his bones.
From organising his elementary school football squad for success, to heading up cutting edge projects at Amazon, Manny has always known how to get the best from his teams.
Now, as funder and CEO at unicorn, Outreach, Manny is one of the leading figures in the SaaS business.
In this episode we discuss:
- The challenges of being a CEO when "no one looks like you"
- Finding great talent and winning the talent war
- The importance of a net-positive energy dynamic
- How his footballing background has set him up to build the Outreach team
And much (much) more. Both Nicki and Manny can talk...
In episode 5 of The Talent Intelligence Podcast, we sit down with Ida Matthieson, Head of Talent Acquisition at HBK.
Ida has had an interesting first year in her HBK career, joining the business just as the pandemic hit and quickly moving up the ranks while never meeting most of her co-workers (sound familiar anyone?)
While she’s been working on a holistic approach to HBK’s talent strategy, Ida has also brought her passion for DE&I to the fore, an interesting challenge in the male dominated industry they operate in. Ida has been an instrumental part of a team that has pushed for diversity not only internally but from the business’s suppliers and partners.
In this episode we discuss the impact of the pandemic on remote teams, how a fast-moving market has made talent departments more agile, what the future of diversity looks like, and much more.
And if that doesn’t peak your interest, tune in to hear about Ida’s mad dash from London to Denmark, leaving all of her belongings behind in the process - she’s not a fugitive, we swear.
For those of you who want to check out Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed that Ida mentions, it’s available here.
In episode 4 of the Talent Intelligence podcast, we’re joined by Nicky O’Brien, FCIPD and HR Dirctor at McCurrach Ltd. Nicky has worked in the HR and Talent space for over 20 years, and has been a continual champion of diversity.
While data on diversity is important to McCurrach and Nicky, they’re also focused on conversations around diversity, holding round tables, events, and mentoring programmes where participants are encouraged to be open and honest. They even have a “Diversity Taskforce” run by volunteer members of the team.
Here’s a snapshot of what we spoke about: How the pandemic has affected diversity at McCurrach, bringing men into the diversity conversation, how a majority female board affects the company’s performance, and the one strange thing Nicky does when she enters a supermarket...
Learn more about McCurrach here: https://www.mccurrach.co.uk/
In Episode 3 of The Talent Intelligence Podcast we are joined by the amazing Shirley Harrison from the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), based at The University of Sheffield.
For over 30 years now Shirley has been working in the male dominated industry of manufacturing and mechanical engineering. And in recent months has been given the added responsibility of being appointed the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion where she leads strategy development and implementation to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace, where everyone can be themselves and differences are recognised and respected.
Here's a quick glimpse at some of things we chatted about:
- Why AMRC created this new Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion position AND why Shirley wanted to take up this challenge...
- What story is the data and insights telling Shirley so far around the Gender Pay Gap...
- How Shirley plans to change the current recruitment processes through "systematic process change" to help create a more diverse and inclusive workplace...
We also chatted about how to write better job description ads to help attract more female candidates, her thoughts on a blind selection process and how to adapt interview panels...and much more.
Learn more about AMRC here https://www.amrc.co.uk/
A quick glance at the Comparably Awards for 2020 tells its own story. Winner of ‘Best CEO’. Winner of ‘Best CEO for Women’. And winner of ‘Best CEO for Diversity’. And that’s just the awards David Cancel won personally. How about Drift also being the winners of ‘Best Company for Diversity’, ‘Best Company Culture’ and ‘Best Work/Life Balance’ and several more? It’s for these reasons I’m excited to share this episode with you.
In Episode #2 of ‘The Talent Intelligence Podcast’, I sit down to learn more about David Cancel’s Latino upbringing, his challenges growing up as a kid in the Bronx not speaking any English, through to how he got started in tech and how this journey helped to shape what Drift looks like today growing to over 400 staff in only a few years.
We also chatted about Diversity & Inclusion to discover how Drift are creating a truly inclusive culture and how they’re continually measuring that. We also chatted about how to create and maintain a high performing company culture when your staff are all remote, how to recruit remotely, how to attract and retain staff, and what’s going on with the lack of VC funding for minority races.
And with Drift recently announcing they’ve become a ‘Digitally First’ company, we learn more about what that really means and why ‘Conversational Spaces’ are the future for Drift’s existing global offices.
Learn more about Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform at www.drift.com
Learn more about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Drift https://www.drift.com/about/diversity-equity-inclusion/
Keep in touch with David Cancel and his ‘The One Thing’ newsletter at www.drift.com/dc
Janet Onyia is a true inspiration. Growing up as a young black female in an area of Newcastle where there weren’t any other black families, Janet has faced many challenges and struggles along the way to landing her dream job in tech. Imagine being told by your new colleague that you only landed your prestigious graduate placement job because you were a Black Female.
Now working in tech as a Project & Programme Manager at Accenture in Scotland, she is still one of only 3 Black employees and the only Black Female, but she is on a mission to change that.
With 50% of women working in tech leaving by the age of 35, there’s clearly a huge problem to be solved. And Janet wants to be the driving force behind this change for women in tech and Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace.
In Episode #1 of ‘The Talent Intelligence Podcast’, I sit down with Janet to hear first-hand how she is raising awareness of the struggles and challenges faced by not just black females in tech, but women in tech full stop.
Inside this episode Janet spoke passionately about:
• How she really felt when one of her colleagues told her she only landed a prestigious graduate placement job because she was Black and why she never wants her daughter to ever feel the same as she did…
• Why there’s a huge disconnect between HR & female employees when it comes to the reasons why 50% of women are leaving the tech industry by the age of 35…
• The impact of recruiting women in tech in this new world of remote recruitment…
• Why employers need to be doing much more to attract a more diverse workforce, including a blind application recruitment process to remove unconscious bias…
• How to ensure black females in tech with traditionally poorer internal networks are not overlooked for internal promotions…
And so much more including Janet’s views on Kamala Harris being sworn in as the first woman, first Black person, and first person of South Asian descent to become the Vice President of the United States of America.
We are also joined in this episode by Claire Murray, Solutions Driven’s Marketing Operations lead.
You can connect with Janet Onyia on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdonyia/
Learn more about Girls Who Code at https://girlswhocode.com/en-uk